Major Label is a new record
label that works in tandem with clothing brand General Pants Co
to release singles from unsigned bands and push their music into new
markets, all while giving the artists complete creative control and
100% of the royalties from their online store. I spoke to Henry Roberts
of Peer Group, the music and media company that is managing the
project, to talk about their unique approach to releasing music, how
it ties in with General Pants Co and the rapidly changing music
industry at large.  

Major Label has quite a unique approach
to releasing music. Can you explain how it works and where General Pants
Co fits into it?

Basically Major label is trying to
emulate what is happening in the UK with ‘singles club’ labels like
Moshi Moshi, Young Turks, labels like that. [They’re] releasing bands
like The Drums and The XX and the top sort of alternative bands that
are coming out at the moment by releasing singles into the market and
getting a lot of press from it, getting a lot of hype, getting talked
about as “2010 bands to watch out for” and stuff like that. Basically
Major Label is the first take on that concept in Australia and so we
release 3 singles every 3 months now from new unsigned bands who haven’t
got their song yet on iTunes or anything like that. We basically service
their song to radio and put their song up on iTunes for the digital
release and push that single for them for a 2 month period.

General Pants are leading retailers
in Australia at the moment, and they’ve always had a big connection
with music with their relationship with Modular and The Presets and
The Klaxons and these kind of bands in the past. For them it was a natural
move into ‘lifestyle’, and music was the first step for them to
take into that. We thought that General Pants would be the perfect face
for the label because they’ve got 700 cool hip guys and girls [working
in their stores] that love music and are passionate about music, and
will help us out with finding new acts. They’re basically the back-end
that help us at Major Label find new acts and discover new talent.  

The
music industry is in a state of flux at the moment and record companies
and artists are looking for new ways to make money and release music.
Do you think that corporate branding and association with bands has
become accepted these days, as opposed to the very anti-corporate attitudes
in say the early 90s?

Well basically, trying to make money
in music these days, as everyone’s found out, is a tough gig. It’s
not like the old days where it was all about selling records and making
money off that and getting a jet plane and flying round the world on
tour. So the music industry has been trying to find the grand plan to
beat the system and still make those big bucks, but in reality it’s
not going to happen. So for Major Label, we’re willing to give away
free music and put the music out there. We just want the bands to be
noticed, and to do that, we can’t do that by holding back and just
releasing a single and having it for sale and hoping that people will
buy a million copies of that and living off it. What we do, we don’t
have any third party connection. They sign a non-exclusive contract
where they’re free to be signed by anyone else. If their song happens
to get picked up by an ad or a commercial, and that’s what we hope
will happen for these bands, we don’t take any profit from that. We
basically just give them a heads up and push them to the market as best
as we can. There’s no catch where we’re gonna try to go behind the
artists back and make money from it.  

Jethro Lyons, the brand manager
of General Pants Co, was quoted as saying



“Major
Label is about discovering up and coming hot new Australian acts and
throwing them a lifeline.” Does this suggest that Major Label
is intended as a stepping stone for artists to get signed to a more
traditional label?

Yeah, that’s exactly
right. I mean, we don’t really have the tools or the budget to act
as an EMI or act as a Warner Bros and be that for an artist, and we
spell that out for them. We’re not going to give them any money, we
don’t have the power to do that. What we have the power to do is to
use everything that General Pants has at its’ disposal, which happens
to be that they’ve got 700 staff that are all into music, they’ve
got 48 stores around Australia, 30,000 people go through their stores
each month. We’re using them as a face, and then Peer Group, which
is a music company through-and-through, is managing the project and
giving it the direction that it needs, and giving the direction to the
artists that we sign. We just want to give them an opportunity where
we find the fresh new single on Myspace or Triple J Unearthed of an
upcoming band that’s doing well, and we want to go bang, we think
these guys have what it takes to go a step further in their careers
so we’re gonna service their single and just push it to the market
as best as we can. Then hopefully that gives them a jet into the music
industry.  

So there’s no advances involved
with Major Label, it’s just for singles that have already been recorded?

Yeah that’s right. We do have a photographer
and an in store studio for General Pants. We just did a bunch of photos
for the next 3 acts that we’ve signed. So if they don’t have a good
enough press shot or they can’t afford a good photographer, we get
them down to the studio, take some press shots for them. We can help
them out with artwork by using another arm of General Pants called The
Bubble, which is a bunch of artists and graphic designers that are aspiring
and put all their artwork up on the General Pants website. Our artists
can have a look through them and use their artwork if they so wish.
In the end the artists have complete creative control for their whole
release, so anything they want done we’ll do it for them and we’ll
give them a little hand along the way if they need anything tweaked
or anything like that.  

The tactic of using General
Pants staff as talent scouts has quite a
‘democratic’ feel to it, with the General Pants blog providing an
avenue for the GP staff to alert Major Label to new acts. Do you think
this reflects a change in the industry where record companies are looking
more towards the audience to decide whose music is released, as opposed
to suited A&R guys?

Yeah well, we’ve got an online blogging
system where the General Pants staff can throw in all their ideas or
the gigs they’ve been to, or “check out this band, this bands really
hot, check out their Myspace,” and there’s basically a pool of information
that is there for us. But in the end, my role at Peer Group is to siphon
through all that, and also with my own suggestions and my own scouting
just to have a look to see which bands fit and the best of that bunch
of ideas that I’ve got from the staff. In the end, it’s not really
like 30 staff liked this track, so that one wins and that one’s gonna
be signed, it doesn’t really work like that. They are basically gonna
be there for that initial search process for the acts, giving me a bunch
of information that I can then look through. After we sign the bands,
they can also act as, you know, doing song requests on Triple J, hitting
their Myspace while at work, talking up the acts in store and basically
being on the street and talking up the acts that we sign. They’re
all in that sort of alternative community and going to see bands, in
that music street scene. [It’s about] having that many eyes in the
market pushing that single.  

Major Label gives
its artists full copyright control, full creative control and 100% of
sales royalties for the online sales. This is a great thing to see,
it seems like Major Label is giving artists and audiences some credit
by not trying to interfere or encroach on the artists’ creative process.
Do you think this reflects a change in thinking in the industry at large?

Yeah I think Major
Label is, like I said before, one of the first that’s not trying to
come up with this grand plan or grand scheme to try and make money in
the industry anymore. It’s basically saying, we love music, you can
have it for free, or you can buy it if you want. People get their music
for free now and we’re not going to try to change the way that they
are. That’s the way they are and that’s the way the industry is
at the moment. So Major Label is basically just giving people what they
want, giving the artists 100% of the royalties. We’re trying to push
their single to the market for them to do well, which then makes General
Pants look good, and that’s basically the whole cycle. So a “you
help me, we’ll help you” sort of vibe. That’s the thinking behind
the thing because we’re not paying the artists to be on our label,
so we can’t really take any money from them. If we pushed it out and
they’re successful, they can get 100% of the royalties, which brings
young eager kids in stores, bands in stores, there’ll be more a flow
and that kind of crowd that General Pants aches for will become more
present for them.  

Tell me about the
Major Label launch, and the bands that played;
Underlights, Guineafowl and Made in Japan.
Are they representative of what kind of bands Major Label will be signing?

Yeah, I mean, it’s
not stereotyped too much, but the sort of vibe of the bands that we
sign, sort of that indie/alternative scene. But we’re open to any
kind of bands that have good music that come our way or send us their
tracks or send us their links to their Myspace. We’ll check out every
genre of music. In the past General Pants have been tied down to a dance
sort of scene maybe, Ministry of Sound sort of vibe. But we also want
Major Label to stand apart from General Pants in a way. It’s connected,
but we want it to be a label of itself, with it’s own kind of music,
it’s own sort of vibe, it’s own kind of culture that’s not particularly
stamped by how General Pants is but also what kind of music’s coming
in. The launch party showed bands that you could say are similar in
style, but we also want to get a range of different artists, you know,
acoustic folk, indie, dance, whatever’s hot,  whatever’s good,
whatever suits the mood will all be accepted in the label.