It’s a status especially sought in the world of rap, from Drake’s “started from the bottom” boasts, to the mogul status of Jay-Z, P Diddy, or Dr Dre. The ‘self-made’ narrative is a particularly attractive one. In the music business, authenticity – or at least the appearance of it – sells. There are cultural consequences to all of this.
Hu’s analysis suggests that the options available to artists wanting to operate outside of the major labels’ immediate orbit are becoming slimmer with each new acquisition. In January, Sony Music UK boss Jason Iley claimed during the DCMS inquiry into the economics of music streaming that “there are more avenues today than ever, than I’ve ever seen in my time doing this job.” A month later, Sony announced that it had snapped up indie distributor AWAL (an acronym for, ahem, Artists Without A Label), with Little Simz, Flohio and Deadmau5 on its roster, for a cool $430m – which seemingly undermined Iley’s claims. The majority is owned by major labels or tech companies. In her newsletter, Hu mapped out the current landscape and discovered that less than a third of the so-called independent distribution market is actually functioning independently. In the years since, the three major labels have established their own standalone distribution arms and label services offerings, and acquired a whole raft of formerly independent distributors to boot. In 2007, when the Top 40 welcomed its first digital-only single, it was Ditto Music, a distributor founded by brothers Lee and Matthew Parsons, who were behind the breakthrough – not a traditional label. Independent distributors (or ‘distros’) and so-called ‘label services companies’ such as TuneCore, The Orchard, Caroline and INgrooves posed a threat to the major labels, who had been slow to adapt to the prospect of digital listening.
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The early Noughties advent of digital music and the uptake of streaming in the 2010s brought with it a host of new companies claiming to cut out the middleman and give artists the ability to get their music into download stores and onto streaming services without a traditional label deal. Much of this is down to how music reaches fans’ ears in the modern age. Labour MP Kevin Brennan wondered aloud this week whether it’s a great look for Spotify founder Daniel Ek to be chucking a few million dollars into a hypothetical pot to buy Arsenal football club while some outwardly successful artists struggle to keep a roof over their heads. The debate around streaming incomes – focused by the lens of the recent DCMS inquiry into the economics of streaming – for example, has pitted artists against their industry patrons and brought questionable dealings on the label side of things in particular to the surface. With the upper echelons of the music industry taking a battering from all corners over the past year, it’s perhaps not surprising that many artists are keen to distance themselves from the current industry quagmire and assert their independent status. As journalist Cherie Hu noted in her Water & Music newsletter at the start of this month, “DIY has become a corporate commodity.” And the press has arguably been complicit, too: Time Out painted Skepta’s house as DIY merch warehouse in a 2016 profile Dirty Hit founder Jamie Oborne fronted a special “Indie Takeover” issue of Music Week in 2020. The fact that Spotify, the world’s most popular streaming service, mostly obscures record label attributions only helps to muddy the waters.
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