Tag: record industry

What Is Going on with the Record Industry?

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Andy Doe - Analysis, Articles

Image via Big Stock

Over the last ten years, I have been responsible for the sale of about half a billion dollars worth of art music, including classical music, new music, and contemporary jazz. I now have a successful business helping people to get the most out of their recordings and other media activities. I read a lot of commentary about the modern music business, and I’m guessing you do, too. It drives me slightly crazy.

Here are ten things I wish people said more often. They don’t represent a blueprint for success or a complete explanation of what’s happening, but I hope they give you a clearer idea of what’s going on and what you might do about it. Here goes:

1) Almost everything you read about the state of the record industry is, at best, totally useless.

It’s tough to stay on top of the changing state of the record business. The more you read, the more confusing it gets. Contrary viewpoints seem equally convincing, and people recommend opposite courses of action to solve the same problems. Above all else, when it comes to earning cash money for recorded music in 2012, nobody seems to be able to answer the question, “Just how screwed are we, really?”

The roots of this confusion have more to do with the challenges facing journalists than those facing people who make (and try to sell) recordings.

It’s hard to write a story about a massive and complex industry undergoing numerous complex simultaneous changes without either getting boring, becoming defeatist, fussing over issues we cannot change, resorting to wild speculation, making sweeping generalizations based on weak statistical analysis, or reducing the whole vast ecosystem to a simple narrative:

It’s all about crowdfunding. Streaming is the answer. Streaming services will kill you and then themselves. Vinyl is the future. There’s no retail any more. Amazon is the enemy. Amazon is your friend. The labels are dead. Long live the labels. It’s all about distribution. We need a new format. Formats don’t matter any more.

All these things are probably true of (or for) somebody, but certainly not for everyone. If we’re going to read this stuff at all, we need to be careful: the most pernicious falsehoods in music business punditry aren’t the overt statements, but the assumptions hiding out between the lines.

If we read enough articles predicated on the assumption that we’re in trouble, we’ll come to accept it. Ditto for conversations about new models, new audiences, and speculation about the future. Any argument predicated on conventional wisdom is likely to be more conventional than it is wise, and while it’s easy to identify the facts and check them, the tone of an article is a pernicious thing that creeps into our subconscious, creating unhelpful biases while we’re not looking.

Does that mean you should stop reading this article now? Possibly. What follows is almost entirely opinion. I haven’t quoted a single statistic, report, study, or expert. If you’re going to read past this first point, I implore you to consider that I might be an idiot who mistakenly believes he has some degree of expertise after a series of lucky career moves put me in a position where I couldn’t fail. Plenty of lucky fools have done a lot better than me.

2) It does not matter how the market is doing. Stop asking.

The dumbest question—and the one seemingly most frequently asked—is: “How is the industry doing, as a whole?”

It seems important, because if the numbers are going down, they’re heading towards zero. The reasoning goes that if they’re heading towards zero, they might actually reach zero. If they do that, we’re definitely stuffed. The flaw in this line of thinking is that going down and reaching zero are not the same thing.

Even if they were, what would we do differently?

So. Unless you own the whole industry, this is the last thing you should worry about. An obsession with how everybody else is doing is unhealthy and unhelpful.

I’ll say it again: there is literally nobody for whom this is an important question. Customers should worry about getting what they want. Everybody else should be trying to outdo each other in getting it to them, and you won’t win that race by looking over your shoulder at the other guys.

The goal here is not to make a typical record or have average sales and average costs. The goal is to succeed. We have to define success, make a plan to achieve it, and then go out and do it. This isn’t macho posturing or the “you can do it” pseudo-wisdom of the inspirational seminar speaker. It’s just the sensible way of doing business in any field.

We don’t set out to create mediocre art; there’s no reason to aspire to mediocre commerce either.

Image via Big Stock

3) It’s not supposed to be easy.

The music market is always changing, but the last ten years have been a rollercoaster. We’ve lost some retailers and critics, but we’ve gained a huge number of new ways to communicate with (and sell to) our audience. It is cheaper to make and release a record than ever before, and as a result release schedules are more crowded than at any point in history. For the first time since the invention of the gramophone, there are retailers who carry every recording on the market, but there’s no one voice telling the consumer what to buy. New technology provides an ever-increasing number of competing distractions, but with this comes the unprecedented availability of information, ease of exploration, and chance for discovery.

Most of these changes are better news for the new music community than they are for the hit-obsessed world of popular music. If we aren’t turning it into a win, we should be, but that’s not going to happen without imagination, hard work, and the willingness to accept that some projects simply aren’t meant to be.

Any time it’s genuinely easy to make money doing something, a bubble ensues, and when that bubble bursts, lots of people lose their shirts. Everything else is hard work.

4) Every record is different.

If you’re looking for a convenient adjective to criticize the way music is recorded and sold, you need look no further than the clichéd panacea of music business analysis that is the word “formulaic.”

We use it to describe everything from the music itself to the marketing plan and even the album art.

Why?

Well, because a lot of records get released, and they can’t all be totally different. When you sit in an office, far removed from the composers, the artists, the fans, and the music, with 100 new releases each month to shove out the door, it’s all too easy to think of them as basically the same.

This is, though, fundamentally wrong. If a record isn’t unique, it shouldn’t have been made.

This uniqueness will inform the A&R, the marketing plan, and the business model you use to bring it to market. The more closely these can be tailored to the needs of your project, the closer it will come to achieving all of your goals.

5) Every genre’s market is basically the same shape.

I really wish I could find a large dataset in the public domain to illustrate this point, because it’s really cool. It’s easy to think of niche markets as being all about the long tail, but this isn’t true at all. Music sales follow a fractal distribution: you keep zooming in, and the picture looks the same.

What do I mean by this? Well, the sales curve in the pop chart is the same shape as the sales curve for country, classical, and new music. The hits make up a huge proportion of sales, and much of the catalog goes unsold for long periods.

Why is this important? Because it gets rid of another excuse, that “it’s a long tail business.” Rubbish. New music is shaped like old music and everything in between. The top sells well, the middle doesn’t, and you really don’t want to be at the bottom. Aim high, understanding that not everyone can win.

6) #1 doesn’t tell you much.

It’s hardly surprising that we obsess about chart positions. Most of the time, a record sells better in its first week than at any other time in its sales cycle. We want to know how we’re doing, so we log on to iTunes and Amazon, and see how our sales compare to the competition.

One of the most useful tools I’ve made for myself is a spreadsheet where I can look up how many copies an album is likely to sell in a week based on its position on the iTunes chart.

It’s quick and simple to use from anywhere. I can check the sales of a product from somebody else’s computer or my phone. When a promotion causes a sales spike, I can make fairly good estimates of how many copies that email, broadcast, advert, or viral video actually sold. This sort of immediate feedback helps to work out what’s working.

It’s pretty reliable, until an album reaches the top of the chart. Here’s why:

All the albums in the top 100 are outliers. In the classical chart, they are the best-selling 0.1% of all albums. Nobody really breaks out new music into a convincing separate genre-specific chart, but the outliers will show up here.

Something happens to propel these albums into the charts: advertising campaigns, media exposure, touring, even the death of an artist. Sometimes you get lucky, or very unlucky, and lots of people buy your album.

There are limits, though. We can’t all be on the cover of a popular music magazine. Gramophone doesn’t make everything Editor’s Choice. It’s a good week when one composer appears on prime-time TV, but they need to save at least some time for reality shows and procedural crime drama.

Because of this, we never seem to all have an exceptional week at the same time. We have to wait our turn. This means that the 100th best-selling album in any chart sells almost exactly the same number of copies from week to week, with a small seasonal variation due to labels saving their best records for the holidays, and a corresponding quiet period in the New Year, when we’re listening to all the music we were just given.

Things are pretty boring for the top 0.1%. The #1 album, though, is the most outlying of outliers: over a specific time period, it has sold more than all the others. It’s the 0.0001%.

To get here, something really exceptional had to happen, and, as a result, the weekly variation is pretty big. We know it’s selling more than everything else, but not by how much.

Now, it tends to be that the #1 classical album will be somewhere in the overall top 200 and, so long as it isn’t #1 in that, too, we can make some pretty useful guesses about how it’s doing. Sometimes we need to sell a lot of music to recoup. For many of my projects, I’ve known that anything but #1 on a specialist chart will be a financial failure. It’s a good target, but once you’ve got there it doesn’t tell you much.

7) There are many reasons to make a record.

It’s tempting to say there are two reasons to make a record: to make money and to look good.

In truth, there are lots.

If we want people to buy it, then we must be able to answer the following question: Why did this recording need to exist? There are as many answers to this question as there are records that need to exist.

As for our motivations in releasing it, I’ve heard plenty of different stories from artists:

“I want to be associated with a prestigious label.”
“I want somebody else to invest in marketing my work.”
“I want to get paid at some point.”
“I want to get paid now.”
“I want as many people to hear this as possible.”
“I want reviews.”
“I want something to sell at gigs.”
“I want proof that I once played this.”
“I want to reach people outside my immediate geographical area.”
“I want to emulate more successful musicians.”
“I want to see my face on the cover.”
“I want something to give to presenters.”
“I want something to give my mother.”
“I want to be on iTunes, really.”
“I want to stick it to my old label.”

Now, I’m not here to judge, so let’s say these are all equally valid reasons. For many artists, their motivation will be a complex combination of some of the above, plus other reasons of their own.

So what do you do?

You look at all your options…

Image via Big Stock

8) Your choice of business model depends upon your goals and your resources.

– You can make your record and start your own label to release it.

You don’t have to be a control freak to do this, but it certainly helps. You get to decide exactly how your record reaches the market, but you have to pay for everything. You can pursue a deal with physical and digital distributors, or you can do it all yourself.

If you’re more interested in making lovely things than making money or selling a lot of CDs, this is certainly the way to go. You can start off on a relatively small scale, so the investment needn’t be huge. A combination of digital downloads for the worldwide market and direct CD sales at gigs will give you high margins and relatively little risk on stock. On the downside, it can be a lot of work and you might end up with an attic full of unsold CDs.

– You can make your record and give it to somebody else to release.

This is a popular option because, while you won’t make any money back, your risk is limited to the production costs, and you have some assurance the label will spend money promoting it, and, as a result, you.

The obvious downside is that you’re giving away something you paid to make, and you’ll never own it again, no matter how popular it turns out to be. If it doesn’t do well, the label may delete it: your recording won’t be available, and there’s not much you can do about it.

If this fits the level of risk you’re comfortable with, it’s worth considering some other options too:

If your primary goal is to get your album heard by the largest possible audience, and you’re willing to give it away in order to achieve this goal, why are you giving it to a label? Why not simply give downloads away on your website? You can still make a nice PDF of the booklet, you get to control the way it looks, and you could even ask for their email addresses in return for the music. If you want a few CDs, you can usually cover the cost of a short run if you sell around 15% of the stock yourself.

– You can make your record and pay somebody else to release it.

Much like the above, except that if you’re paying for it, you may have a lot more control over both how big the marketing budget is, and how it gets spent.

– You can make your record and sell it to somebody else to release.

In general, the more they pay you, the more they’ll spend marketing your record. The bad news is they own it now. If you want to sell copies at gigs, you have to buy them. If you work hard promoting it, you won’t see a penny of the cash they make.

– You can make your record and sell a license to somebody else to release it.

The same as the last one, except you get it back one day.

– You can make your record and do a royalty deal.

You make the initial investment, and you get a share of the return. There are many variations on this type of deal. Sometimes you get an advance against future royalties, sometimes you’re asked to contribute towards marketing costs. The upside is you have an incentive to promote the thing.

All the options so far involve you finding the funding to make your record. This might be from your own bank account, a wealthy donor, a crowd-funding campaign, or a bank loan. If it’s your money, make sure it’s money you can afford to lose. If a donor has the money to fund your project, they may also have the skills to help you make (and stick to) a sensible budget. Kickstarter campaigns are very fashionable, but they’re also a minefield of untested precedents: What happens if you’re not able to deliver the promised rewards? Is it really okay to ask your fans to pay you to create something that will be given to a profit-making entity? What degree of financial transparency is appropriate? A bit of miscommunication can bite you in the ass – just ask Amanda Palmer, who encountered a whole world of trouble after using volunteer musicians on a tour funded with a $1m Kickstarter campaign.

Finally, if you’re thinking about getting a bank loan to make a recording, my one word of advice is: Don’t.

The remaining options cover getting a label to pay for your record. This is the way it works with a major label, and plenty has been written about this elsewhere.

There are two main variations on the deal:

– The label gives you a budget and you spend it.

This can give you more control, but if you take the money, you owe them a record. If you don’t have a record by the time the money runs out, you can’t record for anybody else until they get their pound of flesh.

– The label makes the record.

Safer, but you lose some control.

Either way, you’re going to trade risk for control and ownership, and you probably won’t see any royalties until all the costs have been recovered.

9) Making a record doesn’t have to be expensive.

The most expensive record I’ve ever made cost $80,000. It sounds great, and we somehow managed to stop before it became a vain exercise in soulless perfectionism. The least expensive used borrowed equipment and recycled tape in a friend’s living room, and cost just $12. It doesn’t sound quite so great, but it does justice to its content, and we only needed to sell three copies to break even.

For most people in the new music world, the path to happiness will lie somewhere between these extremes, but it is useful to remember where they are.

10) Please make a budget.

Almost every artist-led recording failure I’ve ever encountered has gone wrong because nobody made a proper budget at the outset. There are two ways of going about this:

(a) You can work out what it will cost to make what you want, and then figure out how many copies you need to sell to pay it off later

(b) You can work out how many copies you might sell of the thing you want to make, and then figure out how much you can spend making it.

I see a lot of (a). I recommend (b), as it’s the only approach that will stop you betting the farm on a project destined to fail.

This is still a gamble, and sales projections aren’t 100% reliable, but the sales director at a label or distributor should be able to give you a rough idea of how your album is likely to sell.

If you don’t have a distributor and plan to make all your sales directly, you’re in a good position to conduct some research yourself. You know your audience better than anybody. Talking to them about your plans is a good way to make your fans feel involved in the process, and you’ll get a clearer idea if this is really going to work for you. If you can’t ask people if they’ll buy your record, you certainly can’t ask them to buy it.

Anyway, those are my ten things.

However you approach bringing a recording to the public, unless you make all your sales before the red light comes on (which, with Kickstarter, it’s just about possible to do), there is always an element of risk.

It is attempts to eliminate this risk that have led so many labels down the “derivative” and “formulaic” route that we so readily (and often rightly) scorn.

Most truly great records disobeyed what had, up until that time, been accepted wisdom. Imagine somebody explaining the concept of Thriller in a marketing meeting, or pitching Kind of Blue to a room full of people who, if they know anything about the jazz business, it’s that frenetic bebop sells. Just about everything seems like a bad idea until it is done well.

If we’re going to create something wonderful, we must prepare where we can, make sure our shoelaces are tied and check that we can afford to fail, but at some point we have to take a leap of faith.

Good luck.

***

This article has since been translated into French with permission. It is available at Cordes & Ames.

***

Andy Doe

Andy Doe is one of the pioneers of the digital music industry, running iTunes’ classical business as it grew from an informal experiment to become the biggest music store in the world. He joined Naxos as chief operating officer in 2010, and founded Proper Discord Ltd in 2012. He now helps artists, labels, and other organisations to sell more music. You can read about his past projects at andydoe.com, read his far less serious blog at properdiscord.com, or find him on twitter @andy_doe.

On Record – An Overview of the State of Contemporary Music Recording (Part 3): The Digital Domain

Posted on July 15, 2009 by Joseph Dalton - Analysis, Articles

[Ed. Note: This article is the third and final installment in a three-part series exploring the state of contemporary music recordings. Part one is a survey of U.S.-based labels who still regularly release CD recordings featuring new American music; part two examines the current economic realities of the business.]

Is the CD format dead? Not at all, according to the label managers contacted for this story. It’s not even on life support, they said. Still, nobody is ignoring the increasingly important realm of digital downloads.

Contrary to some perceptions, new technologies don’t frighten record companies, at least not the little ones. Certainly the internet has become a lifeline for the business of selling CDs of contemporary music. Websites allow customers to search out obscure composers and browse deep catalog in a way never before possible, even when big record stores were still around. And email has tremendously eased communication with foreign distributors.

Without exception each label manager contacted for this story has some or all of his or her catalog available for download, often at a number of different sites. The plethora of online venues out there—iTunes, eMusic, and Amazon are just the beginning—has led to a new middleman in the business. Digital distributors sign record labels and provide their recordings to websites, where they can be sold for download, in the same way that old-fashioned retail distributors are the go-between for labels to reach retailers. Probably the leading digital distributor is IODA, the Independent Online Distribution Alliance, which provides tracks to several dozen sites, including Classical.com, Rhapsody, Zune, and Verizon Wireless, to name but a few.

If the final days of the CD are not eagerly anticipated by label managers, it’s still a topic for contemplation and ongoing discussion.

Earlier this year, James Ginsberg of Cedille was asked to speak on a panel about the future of recorded media at a Chicago conference of the Music Library Association. There was nothing particularly bold or newsworthy when Ginsberg said to the group, “In the next decade, the CD will become to downloading what the LP became to the CD in the 1980s.” But he hastened to add, “Our production practices won’t change at all. We’ll continue to produce recordings of the highest quality of which we are capable.”

Such statements may be self-evident at this point, but a lot of details remain unsettled. Ginsberg’s colleagues express a wide variety of insights and concerns about the current importance of downloading and what needs to happen before it becomes the dominant or exclusive vehicle for sales and distribution of contemporary music.

The website for Mode Records is as graphically compelling as their CD covers, but the site’s merchandise remains physical CDs.

Brian Brandt at Mode says that downloads have grown but “are not quite making up the slack in CD sales” brought about from the disappearance of stores. Al Margolis, who manages Pogus, XI, Deep Listening and Mutable Music, agrees and says, “Early on digital was extra money, but now (those funds) are needed.”

Margolis says he has artists who swear by downloads but also insist upon having a physical CD of their music. While expressing a bit of nostalgia himself, Margolis looks forward to how downloading will alleviate the difficulty of maintaining inventories of slow-selling product and also solve the regularly occurring dilemma of whether or not to repress older titles when stock gets depleted. “What do you do with titles that are 10, 11, 12, or 15 years old and finally selling out? Do you let them go out of print or make another 1,000 pieces?”

“Two things still have to happen” for digital downloads to become the norm, says Susan Bush of Albany. The first, she says, is greater acceptance of the technology. “There are people who don’t know how or don’t want to know how to use a computer. But that’s almost always a function of age and will decrease over time. The other thing is that downloads must improve in sound quality and speed. That will make the shift to digital complete. But we’ll probably still do some CDs, just one at a time.”

Becky Starobin at Bridge also notes the continued need for hard product and expresses concern about sound degradation.

“CDs are still very important, not only because of the actual physical sales which are holding steady, but also because it’s useful for composers and performers to have physical product available at concerts,” she says. “And it’s important for people to hear, especially in particularly complex music, a format that gives the full palette of sound. It works against the music to hear it in the diminished quality that you get by lower resolution and listening with ear buds.”

It’s the loss of liner notes and photos that concerns Charles Amirkhanian of Other Minds. “We need to find a way to have booklets and other printed materials downloadable and easily printed. It’s no fun to sit around and download and print these materials (the way it is now). It’s cheaper and easier to buy them as a kit. I think that’s an age thing and an intellectual thing,” he says. “Everything on my label is available on digital download and the income from that goes up each year, but it’s still not substantial. There may not be many brick-and-mortar stores, but people are still buying CDs all over the world.”

When or if CDs disappear, there will still be a need for record labels, according to Paul Tai of New World. “Anybody can set up a shop on the web and hock their stuff,” he says. “But there’s hundreds or thousands doing that already, so how do you make yourself heard? Labels provide the platform. We still have a certain authority and people will pay attention if you’re on New World or Bridge or Mode or Albany.”

Perhaps the largest platform for recordings of American music is the Naxos American Classics line. But it’s a relatively minor subset within the 22-year-old company founded by German-born Klaus Heymann, who lives in Hong Kong. A multi-million dollar behemoth, Naxos is nevertheless known as a “budget” label, since its sales price is $8.99 for CDs (or $5.99 for album-length downloads at iTunes).

The Naxos Music Library makes available to subscribers more than 492,600 tracks of music culled from over 34,610 CDs, with 500 new CDs added every month.

Composer Sean Hickey is the national sales and business development manager for Naxos’s U.S. operations. Working out of his home in Brooklyn, he supervises a sophisticated online marketing apparatus for new releases and is part of an international committee that decides what’s to be released on the American Classics imprint. Begun 12 years ago, the series features about 300 titles, including big orchestral recordings of Adams, Glass, and Corigliano, as well as Harris, Ives, and Thomson. But there are also discs of chamber and solo music by Paul Moravec, Roberto Sierra, and Leon Kirchner, plus band music of Sousa, piano works of MacDowell, and on and on.

“We look for things that will sell and things that will augment the catalog in a meaningful way,” says Hickey of the American Classics line. “We also want relationships with ensembles or composers or artists who are able to help spread the message of the release. We develop a ton of marketing materials, none more so than with the American Classics.” These include the weekly Naxos podcast, which Hickey says is the most popular classical music podcast, plus “interactive e-cards,” basically emails about new titles with links to streaming videos, sound samples, and the like.

Besides having a variety of in-house series, like American Classics, Naxos is a distributor in both retail and digital realms, and it maintains the Naxos Music Library. The latter provides subscribers with access to more than 450,000 tracks of music from more than 30,000 CDs, the majority on Naxos but also from other independent labels as well. (The tracks are available for streaming, which in contrast to downloading prevents the user from saving the recording on a hard drive or burning it to a CD.)

According to Hickey, The Naxos Music Library has a subscriber base of more than 1,200 institutions, most of them colleges and universities. Students from these schools are allowed full access to the library—bringing the total individual users to around 100,000. Frequently professors provide playlists as part of the curriculum for music courses. Such penetration to young listeners has meant that Naxos’s reputation as an online provider has largely overtaken its once dominant presence in stores.

“I’ve been in this business 16 or 17 years now and came to know Naxos through record stores and those seas of white covers,” says Hickey. “But now people in their 20s don’t have that reference. At this year’s American Library Association convention, the Naxos Music Library manager had a display of compact discs and three different people come up and said, ‘I didn’t know you did CDs.'”

DRAM, a subscription service available only to institutions, offers tracks from 2,300 albums from 15 independent labels.

A corollary to the Naxos library that began with an exclusively American music focus is DRAM. (Originally an acronym for Database of Recorded American Music, its purview of material has expanded beyond the United States since its founding in 2001, and so the name is simply DRAM.) It is administered by New World Records and subscriptions are available to institutions only, whereas the Naxos library also makes subscriptions available to individuals.

Comprised of 2,300 albums, DRAM includes the full catalogs of New World, CRI, and a dozen or so other independent labels. In April, DRAM added to its holdings for the first time a complete archive of one composer’s music—that of electronic music composer Jon Appleton, through an agreement with Dartmouth College.

As the DRAM website states, the idea of a streaming library of digital recordings allows institutions “to free up storage space, reduce collection costs and labor, ensure against damage or loss and increase accessibility to materials.” These are benefits that surely will appeal to an increasing number of consumers over time.

Net labels—record labels with no records, so to speak—actually already exist in profusion in the realm of ambient/electronic music. It’s a natural place for such a movement to start, since electronic music doesn’t require costly recording sessions with pesky live musicians. The composer is the performer, and the composition and the master are the same.

Disquiet is an online portal for electronic music disseminated via mp3s.

Marc Weidenbaum, a San Francisco writer and editor is an avid follower of this cyber scene, which he chronicles on his blog Disquiet.com. “Net labels are an amazing expression of enthusiasm for making content and sharing what you do,” he says.

According to Weidenbaum, some net labels do charge for downloads but streaming music for free is the norm. “With mp3 files you have to put them on a device, but now I can stream things on my iPhone or on the Android Phone, so the difference has become moot,” says Weidenbaum. “A lot of record labels have essentially become radio stations because you go to their websites and they’re streaming audio of their hits. They think of it as marketing, but at some point they may realize it’s providing an experience.”

The “cover art” for the album Drone Level Orange by improvising ensemble Glissando Bin Laden, which has been released only as mp3 downloads made available to listeners with or without a donation on Carrier Records.

Weidenbaum’s thinking goes even further, but his vision of completely free access to music may provide little solace to composers or label managers. “Truly outward bound artistic expression is usually not financially rewarding,” he says. “People learn that the music they love does not lead to fortune. Once you take money off the table, it becomes a more open opportunity.”

“I interviewed John Zorn when he left Nonesuch, about 17 years ago,” continues Weidenbaum, “and he said there’s a difference between loving music and loving records.”

That’s a distinction that all of us will soon be confronting.

***

Joseph Dalton
Photo by Timothy Cahill

Joseph Dalton has been covering the arts scene in New York’s Capital Region since 2002, primarily writing for the Albany Times Union. Many of these essays have been collected in the book Artists & Activists: Making Culture in New York’s Capital Region, published in 2008. Dalton is the former executive director of Composers Recordings, Inc. (CRI), where he produced about 300 recordings of contemporary music. He was also director of a research project on the effects of AIDS on American music which was published in an online report by the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS.

On Record – An Overview of the State of Contemporary Music Recording (Part 2): Not-Profit Even If Not By Design

Posted on July 13, 2009 by Joseph Dalton - Analysis, Articles

[Ed. Note: This article is the second in a three-part series exploring the state of contemporary music recordings which concludes with an exploration of online distribution and dissemination. Part One focuses on labels which still issue physical CDs]

Given that thousands of new CD titles are produced every year across the span of musical genres, it’s not hard to surmise that most discs don’t earn back enough funds to recoup the costs of recording and manufacturing. In other words, it can’t be just classical and contemporary music projects that have modest sales.

It’s a given: money has to come from somewhere before discs get released. It’s just that the need for dough is more on the surface in all realms of the always-struggling little realm of contemporary American music.

At New Amsterdam Records, the ambitious young proprietors may be forging new ground by releasing discs of music that blends popular and classical styles in fresh ways. But during our interview when they addressed finances—making statements like “We don’t want to create a situation where the success of one project supports another one” and “We contribute a minimal amount of funding and are very wary of functioning like a bank” and “We’re not assuming the costs”—they gave the impression of viewing themselves as boldly operating counter to industry standards. Compared to popular music labels that may well be the case.

Yet scraping together the money to produce each new title and more often than not looking to the artists to help with that process—whether from family wealth, university research grants, or credit card debt—is standard operating procedure at almost every independent contemporary music label. On one level, at least, New Amsterdam does acknowledge this, since the company is in the process of becoming a nonprofit organization, which will allow it to receive grants and contributions.

Where the Discs Are

The following labels maintain an active release schedule which includes CD recordings of contemporary American music:

Albany Records
Arabesque Recordings
ArpaViva
Arsis Audio
Azica Records
BMOP Sound
Brassland Records
Bridge Records
Cambria Music
Cantaloupe
Cedille Records
Centaur Records
Cold Blue Music
Crystal Records
Crytogramophone
Deep Listening
Delos Music
Ears & Eyes Records
Einstein Records
EMF Media
ERM Media
Furious Artisans
GM Recordings
Image Recordings
Innova
Koch International Classics
Koss Classics
Lovely Music, Ltd.
Mode Records
MSR
Musica Omnia
Mutable Music
Navona Records
Naxos
Neuma Records
New Albion Records
New Amsterdam Records
New Focus Recordings
New World Records
Newport Classics
North South Records
OgreOgress Productions
Orange Mountain
Other Minds
Peacock Recordings
Phoenix
Pierian
Pogus Productions
Present Sounds
Quiet Design
Skirl Records
Starkland
Summit Records
3Sixteen Records
Table of the Elements
Tzadik
XI Records

“Aren’t we all non-profit?” jokes Susan Napodano DelGiorno of Koch International Classics, which is based on Long Island. Actually her operation is among the labels with a long-term commitment to new music that’s not non-profit, at least strictly speaking. A boutique within the larger media corporation of E1 Entertainment, which purchased Koch Records last year, the classical imprint is in the process of being rechristened E1 Classics.

According to DelGiorno, the label put out 31 new titles in 2007, 21 titles in 2008, and will release 23 projects this year. Roughly half the releases are contemporary music, of one sort or another. Practically speaking, DelGiorno is a sole proprietor. She decides on projects, produces the sessions, edits the masters, and supervises the packaging, even while working with the company’s larger marketing and distribution wings. Recent releases include flute music of Jennifer Higdon and orchestral music of George Tsontakis with the Albany Symphony Orchestra. In the works, among other things, is a disc with the young classical/jazz improvisation trio known as Time for Three.

A recent Koch International Classics release featuring music from Barber to DBR

DelGiorno hesitated to give a direct answer to the question of whether or not her operation was expected to be self-supporting. She did say, “Other divisions bolster what I do, but I still have the responsibility to make wise decisions, and we approach each project with the idea of making a small profit. We’d like to think of making a million dollars, but we all know that doesn’t happen.”

Fifty miles north of New York City in the small town of Chester, Al Margolis is a one-man record conglomerate. (Yes, that’s a grand distinction, but we’re talking about avant-garde music here.)

Margolis is the label manager for four little independents: Pogus, which he established in 1988; XI Records, founded by composer Phill Niblock in 1990; Deep Listening, launched by composer Pauline Oliveros in 1995; and Mutable Music, started by baritone Thomas Buckner in 2000 (who also ran 1750 Arch during the LP era). Each label is curated by its founder, but once masters are completed Margolis supervises the production process, and also manages the websites and does the shipping. He also distributes product of at least two other labels, the defunct O.O. Discs and the inactive Nonsequitur, curated by Steve Peters.

Pogus’s 3-CD re-issue of recordings originally published in Source magazine was years in the making.

Asked why there are so darned many labels in the field, Margolis explains, “Every label is a reflection of who’s running it. It’s not egotistical, but it’s their own little space to say, ‘This is what I do.'”

A veteran of the business, Margolis had an eight-year tenure at New World Records, where he rose from shipping clerk to production manager to director of artists and repertoire before leaving in 2001. Though today he has to juggle myriad tasks, he doesn’t miss the two-hour commute to Manhattan and now has time to devote to his own work as a sound artist.

Despite his rather rural location, Margolis is hardly isolated from the trends and economics of the industry. “It’s gotten tougher and tougher, but we’re hanging in there. This section of the business isn’t ready to give up yet,” he says.

Perhaps it’s his time out of the city, but Margolis has a laid-back approach to sales. “I’ve found I make more money the less I try to sell recordings, going crazy with advertisements and lots of promotions. Those don’t sell records anymore. You can have the best review and it doesn’t move ’em at all. It’s an organic thing that continues at its own pace. For the records that are going to sell, you don’t have to do a damn thing.”

As for the pace of new titles, it depends upon the success of in-house fundraising and initiatives from artists. “We manage to get some grants occasionally. Some money comes from the artists,” says Margolis matter-of-factly.

Another relatively recent transplant to the Hudson Valley is Foster Reed, founder of New Albion Records. Established in 1984 in San Francisco, New Albion often projected a kind of West Coast mystique with early releases of Lou Harrison, John Adams, and Somei Satoh. But also along the way were discs of East Coast denizens like Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros, and even Virgil Thomson. A native of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Reed says that he never intended to stay in the Bay Area for the 30 years that he did and about five years ago he finally picked up and moved his family to rural Duchess County.

Last summer New Albion made something of a splash in its new environs by producing a festival of ten concerts as part of the Summerscape series at Bard College. The line-up was a veritable retrospective of important repertoire on the label and included performances by pianists Sarah Cahill and Margaret Leng-Tan, soprano Joan LaBarbara and the Able-Steinberg-Winant Trio, as well as an installation/performance by Ellen Fullman and her “long stringed instruments” in the lobby of the Frank Gehry-designed Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. An early celebration of the label’s 25th anniversary, the events may have also been a kind of farewell because last summer, New Albion released what may be its final disc (piano music of Leo Ornstein played by Cahill).

No new New Albion titles have been issued since Sarah Cahill’s premiere recordings of later Leo Ornstein works was released last year.

“Right now the label doesn’t seem to have the necessity for being that it used to,” says Reed. “Other labels are covering the same kind of territory I was involved in and doing a very credible job. When I started New Albion there was little peer activity. So I’m just not making new records. That used to be a huge activity and so involving, but we are doing occasional productions and actively licensing.” These ancillary activities include a Terry Riley weekend planned for October at Bard and some Hollywood soundtrack deals that are in the early stages of talks. Reed also says he’s “still learning the ropes of the new world,” referring to the vast online universe.

“If music is to be heard and the point of a record label is to help more people hear it, then things have never been more successful. Because of the streaming libraries, there are phenomenal amounts of people listening today. But the business dynamic is worse than ever,” continues Reed. New Albion was started with some family money and Reed emphasizes that in the best of times it barely supported itself. Still, he’s not about to close up shop. Concludes Reed, “The doors are still open and if things change, I wouldn’t be averse to making new recordings. We sell records to whomever wants to buy them still and the licensing is pretty good. And if one of the big publishers wanted to buy us for a million dollars I’d sell it.”

Whether or not a label has non-profit documentation is not in itself a barrier to receiving outside support for projects. Artists can channel personal funds to a label and consider it a business expense, or a label can, in effect, co-produce a project with an ensemble, which can raise grant funding and contributions.

A few foundations have come around to understanding the importance of recordings to the field of contemporary music. Starting in the late 1980s, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust ran a program specifically for recordings of New York-based ensembles, with most of the funds going toward contemporary music endeavors. Some years back, the Cary’s recording program and a concurrent commissioning program were rolled into one umbrella program for contemporary music projects. According to tax filings, in 2008 the Cary Trusts gave $1.6 million to 60 music organizations based in New York City. Sadly the Cary Trust, after some 40 years of operation, shut down on June 30, 2009. The fund has liquidated its portfolio of investment holdings and made final awards—larger than normal sums to long-term grantees—which have been posted on Cary’s website. [Ed. note: One of these grants endows a recording component of the American Music Center’s Composer Assistance Program (CAP), but it will take a year or two for the endowment to yield sufficient investment proceeds to launch; further details have yet to be announced.]

Over the past five years the Argosy Foundation of Milwaukee has become a major supporter of contemporary music activities nationwide. The fund was established in 1997 by John Abele, an entrepreneur who co-founded Boston Scientific, a manufacturer of medical devices like heart stents and catheters. In 2008 Forbes Magazine named Abele one of the 400 richest Americans. His son, Alexander Abele, is a 40-year-old composer based in Burlington, Vermont. As he is one of only five Argosy trustees (all are members of the Argosy family), it seems reasonable to conclude that Alex Abele was responsible for the launch of the foundation’s grant making for commissions and training, performances, and recordings of new American music.

Argosy’s annual reports do not break down the total giving by area of support (there are seven broad programmatic areas, including education, health, and the environment, in addition to the arts) and while lists of grantees are provided, award amounts are not. But the aggregate is still impressive. In 2006, Argosy made 263 grants totaling about $24.5 million and of these 69 grants were for contemporary music projects. In 2007, the total giving declined slightly to $20.2 million while the total number of grants rose to 346, with 158 grants to orchestras and chamber ensembles, festivals, and record labels.

The contemporary music program operates with semi-annual deadlines and the restriction that recipient organizations are limited to grants every other year. It is the only area where the foundation accepts unsolicited applications; awards can range from $1,000 to $25,000. A foundation officer said that approximately 42 percent of all grants made toward contemporary music to date have included recordings as at least an aspect of the supported project.

The past year’s decline in the stock market seems to have hit the Argosy Foundation particularly hard, and Boston Scientific has also had some struggles with lawsuits and expensive acquisitions of other companies. As a result, the spring 2009 grant cycle for contemporary music programs was canceled and, according to the foundation’s website, the status of the fall program is uncertain but will be announced by late summer. A program officer declined to elaborate further.

Given the permanent departure of the Cary Trust and the at-least temporary absence of the Argosy Foundation, there’s concern in the field regarding the status of the Aaron Copland Fund for Music—the mothership of contemporary music grant makers. Established in 1992 by the estate of the late composer, the Copland Fund supports American music through three separate granting programs: one each for performing organizations, recording projects, and service organizations. Annual giving has been in the range of $2 million. Support for recordings in recent years has been relatively steady, with $500,000 going to 51 projects in 2006; $321,750 to 40 projects in 2007; and $419,800 to 39 projects in 2008. And it is not just nonprofits that can apply to the Copland Fund’s recording program. Just last year Nonesuch Records, part of the Warner Music Group, received two of the largest grants ($20,000 each) for recordings of Steve Reich and John Adams.

According to Foundation president John Harbison, the 2009 recording awards will be be announced soon and the total of grants will continue in the range of recent years. Harbison was reticent, however, to make predictions about the future giving potential of the Fund, saying that the amount dedicated to each program is determined annually by the trustees.

But the vagaries of Wall Street probably aren’t having the same dire effect on the Copland Fund’s ability to make grants in the near future as they have at other foundations. This is because Aaron Copland’s will left the majority of his copyrights to the foundation. According to tax returns for 2006 and 2007, roughly $2 million in royalties was received each year—a sum roughly equal to the amount of grants made. Contrast this to how most foundations operate, which is by divvying up grants from the earnings on investments. Nevertheless, the Copland Fund does also have investments, which were valued at about $20 million at the end of 2007.

Thus, when label managers put on their fundraiser hats, they can take heart that the Copland Fund should be continuing apace with its support for recordings. Harbison, by the way, added, “the reason that the average amounts of grants may have gone down somewhat is because the number of applications have increased. We’re always quite administratively pressed to respond to the volume of requests.” While he was probably speaking of all the Fund’s programs, this still underscores the point that there remains in the field a strong desire to produce recordings.

The kind of endowments held by cultural behemoths like the Metropolitan Opera and some major orchestras are unheard of among record labels as well as within the entire realm of contemporary music, for that matter. But three well-established labels, each in a different region of the country, have reliable internal or closely aligned sources of support that serve as hedges against changes in the economic environment and shifting trends in the marketplace.

In 2002, the American Composers Forum received a $1 million gift from the McKnight Foundation as a permanent endowment for innova Recordings. According to innova’s Philip Blackburn, every recording project still needs outside support, but the associated costs for administration are covered by income from the endowment.

Margaret Lancaster’s collection of maverick flute music is hot off the presses from New World Records.

Founded in 1976, New World Records had for many years as its chairman of the board Francis Goelet, a real estate heir and treasured friend to American composers. Goelet died in 1998, but the label still places Goelet’s name at the top of its list of trustees and the funding credits for nearly every New World disc include the Francis W. Goelet Lead Charitable Trust. According to New World’s Paul Tai, support from the Goelet Fund is the final cap that makes many new releases possible.

Finally, there’s Cedille Recordings, founded in Chicago 20 years ago by James Ginsberg, who at the time was a 24-year-old law student. Within a few years, the organization became a non-profit under the name Chicago Classical Recording Foundation with the mission of “promoting the finest musicians, ensembles, and composers in the Chicago area” through high-quality recordings. “It seemed like all the labels were based in New York or the West Coast, and so the artists out here were being ignored.” Last year Cedille produced seven new discs and ten are slated for 2009. Ginsberg estimates that about half of the label’s catalog of nearly 120 discs are of contemporary music.

Cedille Records’ just released collection of David Diamond chamber music.

Cedille’s Chicago focus is broadly interpreted. For example, there are solo and ensemble performances by members of the Chicago Symphony and discs of the Grant Park Orchestra playing music of Aaron Jay Kernis and Robert Kurka. But Chicago conductor Paul Freeman also records for Cedille with European orchestras, and there’s a series of recordings of violinist Jennifer Koh, a Chicago native who lives in New York.

Besides drawing on musicians and composers of Chicago residency or origin, Cedille receives support from many local funders. But approximately one-third of the label’s annual budget of roughly $1 million comes from Ginsberg’s father, Martin D. Ginsberg. The senior Ginsberg is a tax attorney and co-author of an authoritative guide to mergers, acquisitions, and buyouts. A new and updated edition comes out annually and Ginsberg has assigned half his royalty income to Cedille. The mother of the family, by the way, is Ruth Bader Ginsberg, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. It’s said that Cedille recordings are regularly passed along the halls of the highest court. Now there’s a word of mouth network no other label can provide.

[Continue reading here.]

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Joseph Dalton
Photo by Timothy Cahill

On Record – An Overview of the State of Contemporary Music Recording (Part 1): Still Spinning

Posted on July 8, 2009 by Joseph Dalton - Analysis, Articles

[Ed. Note: This article, which is the first in a three-part series exploring the state of contemporary music recordings, surveys labels which are still issuing physical CDs. The second installment looks at the current economics for recording labels; and the third and final installment explores digital distribution and dissemination.]

“I am distressed about my CD sales, which have completely tanked. I talked to the head of my label about this, and he told me, ‘No one’s buying CDs.’ In effect, he said, ‘What makes you think you’re special?’ Everybody’s collapsing.”

—composer John Adams, Newsweek, February 5, 2009

“The recording industry is kaput.”

—violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Times Union (Albany, NY), February 8, 2007

You’ve heard the talk from lesser lights than these. It’s said over and again: recordings are over and done with… except for all those CDs that keep getting released every month. It’s similar to the even more familiar drone that nobody ever listens to contemporary music… except there’s so much of it around all the time.

Certainly record stores are almost a thing of the past, with Tower Records and Virgin Megastores shuttered. Oh sure, there’s still the music departments at Barnes & Noble and Borders, but just try to find much of a selection of contemporary music there. And the big multinational labels, which stars like Adams and Salerno-Sonnenberg once counted on, have indeed cut their artist rosters, slashed their recording budgets, and drastically curtailed their release schedules. Those operations, of course, are arms of corporations far more dependent upon mass sales of pop music to iPod-toting, file-sharing young people than on the always modest-sized audiences for symphonies, concertos, and string quartets, whether of new or old vintage.

A recent innova disc featuring solo piano works by 13 American composers

But in the less heady realm of small independent labels that are devoted exclusively or primarily to contemporary music, there are still plenty of new titles coming out every month, and still primarily on CDs. In fact, a characteristic sense of perseverance and sometimes even some guarded optimism came through in recent interviews with a dozen managers of these plucky outfits.

The sense of the field garnered from researching this story brought to mind some recent casual conversations with small business owners in upstate New York, where I’ve lived for the past eight years.

Where the Discs Are

The following labels maintain an active release schedule which includes CD recordings of contemporary American music:

Because the economic boom never really came to this rather removed territory, the bust isn’t being felt too strongly either. So it is with the recordings of new music.

“Business is booming and crackling,” says Philip Blackburn, the composer who runs Innova Recordings, the 25-year-old recording arm of the American Composers Forum, based in Minnesota. “My desk is covered in submissions and my spare time in and out of the office is spent listening to them as well as catching up on infrastructure things.”

Rather than looking to sales, Blackburn’s barometer for business is typical of many who run independent labels: the demand from artists who want to make recordings. Innova is actually one of the surprisingly few labels with nonprofit status. But whatever their legal structure, most labels dedicated to contemporary music have as their first business focus the regular production of new titles; the subsequent sales of those discs is a secondary concern. Thus, a continual flow of new projects and the obtaining of funding to make them happen are essential. At Innova, 28 new titles were released last year and 23 are in the works for 2009. And the sales? Iffy, as always.

“It’s a scramble to keep up with how things are changing,” continues Blackburn. “Getting reviews and radio play that will get people to buy something, that’s always been a long shot.”

“Business is going very well,” says Becky Starobin, who with her husband, the guitarist David Starobin, founded Bridge Records in 1981. “Orders are increasing, and our distribution network is expanding. We’re getting more inquiries from different countries, which is quite remarkable in this climate. In addition to the major markets, we are now entering into agreements with smaller countries.”

Starobin says that roughly 40 percent of Bridge titles are devoted to contemporary music, with the remainder consisting of baroque, classical, romantic, early 20th century, jazz, and world music. For 2009, there are 38 CDs slated for release. Just two years ago the annual release schedule was 30 titles.

The most recent installment of Bridge’s ongoing George Crumb series

“There has been a steady growth of interest,” says Starobin. “I don’t think we have experienced a boom since the late ’80s and early ’90s, but Bridge has certainly not experienced a bust. There are different avenues of distribution opening up, and it’s our goal to make the music available to more and more people.”

“We’re holding our own,” says Susan Bush of Albany Records, which was founded by Peter Kermani in 1987. Bush gets a palpable sense of the need to make recordings from artists, when eight to twelve submissions arrive just about every month. The label accepts about 60 percent of what comes in, she says. But that rate is nearly double what it was a few years ago because so many artists are returning to make second, third, and fourth projects with Albany. “We are working with people that we already know, who are sort of our stable of composers and performers,” explains Bush.

Of course not every label operating today is sure and steady in its operations. Many are sole proprietorships dependent upon occasional grants and contributions as well as on the founder’s continual infusions of time and interest.

Keeping an eye on new music recordings has always included watching the labels come and go. For a trip down memory lane, check out American Music Recordings: A Discography of 20th Century U.S. Composers, a nearly 400-page tome edited by Carol Oja and released in 1982 by the Institute for Studies in American Music (recently renamed The H. Wiley Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music). Along with numerous citations of recordings on Victor, RCA, Columbia, and MGM—ah, the glory days when major labels cared!—there are also some long departed smaller operations like Desto, Turnabout, and Orion.

The last decade has also seen its share of failures in the field, including the venerable Composers Recordings Inc., which had an honorable run from 1954 to 2003. (Full disclosure: I ran CRI from 1990 to 2000.) The catalog of CRI, including about 400 LPs and 300 CDs, is currently administered by New World Records. New World has thus far released eleven CD reissues of CRI titles, and the remainder of the CRI CD catalog is available through burn-on-demand CDs via the New World website.

Some labels born during the CD era have already come and gone. Composer Joseph Celli founded O.O. Discs in the mid-’90s and once maintained a rather active production schedule, but it was shuttered a number of years ago. And last year composer Richard Brooks brought to a close his Capstone Records, which he founded in 1985. In a brief recent email exchange, I asked Brooks whether his action was a retirement or just giving up. “A little of both,” he replied. The Capstone imprint and its back catalog have been picked up by Parma Recordings, which also has two others labels, Navano for classics and Soundbrush for jazz and world.

In preparing the list of labels that accompanies this article, email inquiries were sent to about 60 labels in order to ascertain their level of current activity. At least half the companies never responded. Overly stringent email filters and the busy and distracted lives of composer/performer/entrepreneurs are understandable, so if the label had a relatively current website, we included them on the list. Still, some companies seem to be missing in action or dormant. The Santa Fe Music Group, which was primarily devoted to reissuing on CD the analog era recordings of the Louisville Orchestra couldn’t be found. Opus One has a shell of a web site. And the “new” releases on Newport Classic’s site appear to be two to three years old, based on cross references to Amazon. So it goes.

The steadfastness, both emotional and financial, necessary to keep a label going may be hard won, but the artistic vision and ambition to start one are easily had. Likewise, the learning curve to produce presentable discs and booklets is not steep. Thus, the menu of labels continues to expand.

There have always been record collectors who, late in life, spend some of their savings to finally take their crack at being “record men.” And plenty of composers have set up shop over the years, including Gunther Schuller with GM Recordings in 1981, Max Lifchitz with North/South in 1992, and John Zorn with Tzadik in 1995.

Other Minds’ latest rediscovery: chamber music of Marc Blitzstein

Many of the latest entries into the field emerged from an existing music organization or emerging artistic scene. In San Francisco, Other Minds Records was launched in 1998 as an outgrowth of the then six-year-old Other Minds Festival. Composer Charles Amirkhanian uses an oft-repeated term when describing the value of recordings: “The CDs doubled as calling cards,” he says, adding that they were first used as premium gifts for donors. Beyond its use a promotional vehicle for the festival, Amikhanian’s rationale for the label is also a familiar refrain among those who decide to start their own shop: “We realized that a number of really interesting kinds of music were falling between the cracks and that no one else was going to release them.” While the Other Minds Festival presents living composers, often performing their own works, Other Minds Records, now with 17 titles, has hewed toward rare and out of print repertoire, such as recordings of the late George Antheil performing his own music, the player piano rolls of Conlon Nancarrow (reissued from 1750 Arch), and the most recent release featuring early works of Marc Blitzstein.

Last year conductor Gil Rose and his 12-year-old Boston Modern Orchestra Project decided it was time to strike out on their own after making some 20 recordings for other labels. “We were conceiving the CDs and raising the money, doing the rehearsing and performing, as well as the recording and post production, and then handing off the masters for nothing or very little compared to what the costs were in cash and blood, sweat, and tears,” says Rose. “The final straw came when we started doing the cover designs, which we asked to do because we were getting some unattractive covers.”

BMOP’s larger than usual CD packs offer more room for graphics and booklet notes

BMOP/sound already has 12 titles, each attractively presented in cardboard packaging, and each presenting the work of a single composer. They include music of Charles Fussell, Derek Bermel, Lee Hyla, and David Rakowski. And the label is committed to an on-going release schedule of one new disc per month. While Rose likes the comparison to the Louisville Orchestra’s trenchant recording work during the LP era, he concedes that not every project features big orchestral pieces, though the growing catalog already includes operas by John Harbison and Eric Sawyer. “[The label] mirrors the BMOP mission. I stuck this word ‘project’ in the name and I still get flack for it, but I wanted to convey that we’re fluid and flexible. At BMOP performances, sometimes there are 90 people on stage and sometimes 15, and sometimes that’s in the same concert. It’s a very chameleon-like ensemble,” explains Rose. “You can send CDs all over the world, but you can’t get everyone into Jordan Hall. The label has expanded our network and visibility in almost every way.”

From the latest generation of composer/performers in New York comes New Amsterdam Records, founded by William Brittelle, Judd Greenstein, and Sarah Kirkland Snider, all composers in their early 30s with advanced degrees in music. They’ve been busy, releasing 16 discs in less than two years. Some of the latest titles include Darcy James Argue’s Infernal Machines, featuring his 18-piece “steampunk big band” Secret Society, and Brittelle’s own Mohair Time Warp, with the composer singing above a hyperactive mix of amplified chamber ensemble and wailing electric guitars.

One of New Amsterdam’s “alt-classical” releases

“The idea to start a cool record label mainly grew out of this developing genre of music that was coming from people with great educations in composition but who were also influenced by pop music and jazz and didn’t fit into any strict marketplace,” explains Greenstein. “The music industry is a place where you’re either popular or classical. Everything forces you to one side or the other. We want to stay in the middle.”

Greenstein recalls telling composer Michael Gordon, co-founder of Bang on a Can, which has its own label, Cantaloupe Music, of the plan to start New Amsterdam. “He tried to convince me it was a terrible idea, that it would take a lot of time from composing,” says Greenstein. “He was coming from a positive place and he was right. Our careers have suffered because of much less time to write music. But the (industry) system we’re operating in is broken from our perspective. It doesn’t meet our needs.”

“I thought there was more risk not [to start the label],” says Brittelle. “When I got out of school, I wanted to spend all day writing music and anything else was a distraction. But coming into the office every day, even on my flexible schedule, has been great for me as a composer. It keeps me in touch and bombarded by great ideas. And there’s a healthy sense of competition because you’ll hear a great record by a friend and it helps you stay in reality, and to know what it takes to really get something out there in the market place. You’ve got to pack up a van [for a gig] but also pack up recordings and mail them.”

[Continue reading here.]

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Joseph Dalton
Photo by Timothy Cahill

Joseph Dalton

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