What I Learned From Three Years of Working For Major Labels

By Jon Tanners

A major label hired me to be an A&R when I was 24 years old. At that point, I’d been writing for P&P for seven months. I’d previously been an A&R intern during my final year of college. I’d made a lot of DJ Premier knock-off beats as a teenager. I’d watched a lot of VH1’s Behind the Music as a kid.

I thought I was prepared. When I was late to my first A&R meeting—which looked something like you might imagine: big conference table, a rundown of the status of every artist on the label, talk of albums soon to be delivered and those past their deadlines—I realized my training had been about as effective as handing a soldier a Nerf gun and sending him to the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. I was a young man who loved music and wanted to help bring music I liked into the world, left to navigate unfamiliar and unforgiving waters without a mentor.

My youthful observance of the music business had planted two thoughts in my head.

One—being an A&R seemed fucking awesome. Free concerts. Fancy dinners with unusual people. Hours in the studio with up-and-coming artists and mega-producers. Expense accounts. Constant travel. Rock stars feeding you drugs and making you pet a furry wall. All the good shit.

Two—in the words of the ever-quotable Q-Tip: “Record company people are shady.”

The reality falls somewhere in between.

This list isn't meant as a definitive guide to. Rather a collection of observation-based advice that I wished someone had given me before I jumped into the business with eager ears and naive eyes. It's not an endorsement of the major label system either as currently constituted—it's flawed and volatile, as anything in the modern entertainment business. Simply, I'm hoping to impart a better sense of what to expect and how best to navigate if you do find yourself engaged with major label machinery.

In bygone eras, scoring a record deal felt like the big prize for independent artists (even though experienced artists have long warned against the perils of the major label path).

That concept lies at the crux of 8 Mile. It’s part of the reason getting a Roc-A-Fella chain was so meaningful. It’s the central conceit that still tacitly propels the blogosphere’s lightspeed cycling of new music. Particularly in hip-hop, the “big deal” represented conquering the mountain, removing yourself from the bottom—whether a literal boost out of poverty, or an optical leap from the dungeons of rap.

You signed the deal. You made it.

The reality, of course, overlaps little with the fantastic vision. Signing a deal is just the beginning, particularly for an artist that has yet to develop a core fan base (when Morrissey signs to Capitol or Mac Miller signs to Warner Bros., it's not quite the same as Raury signing to Columbia on the wings of deafening buzz or Trinidad James signing to Def Jam with a hit single in his pocket).

The money can be immediately life-changing, but advances don’t last. For emerging artists, a record deal provides an injection of capital and enhanced resources, human and otherwise.

It also means that the artist must now focus even harder on perfecting his/her craft, on image and message, on consistently engaging fans, or conversely building a mystique that keeps the audience hooked and guessing. You sign a deal and very quickly come to realize that your public perception is a product, attached to financial projections and accompanied by certain expectations.

Many of these facets are secondary to creating great, lasting music. Still, they're realities of working within the context of a major label. If legends like David Bowie concerned themselves with more than just music, you can and should too—presentation matters and doesn’t mean you must become a plastic automaton.

You might blow up. You might get dropped. Keep on thing in mind: Signing on the dotted line isn't the end goal. It's part of the journey.

Once upon a time, signing to Def Jam really meant something. It was the home of hip-hop, the first dynastic label in the genre’s now nearly 40 year history. It wasn’t necessarily indicative of a sound (like Motown, for example), but it afforded a certain pedigree to its signings.

In the modern day, selective indie labels like XL Recordings, Sub Pop, Good Years, Hyperdub, and Greco Roman (to name but an unrepresentative few), still bear meaningful brands, but majors have largely become cross-genre entities with pop at their gooey cores. As such, the public doesn’t necessarily perceive the importance of signing to one label vs. another in the way it once might have.

A modern major label is a great place to accelerate something in motion, but not necessarily a machine equipped to help you find your identity. There are countless stories of artists who signed deal only to be over-A&R'd and churned through a ringer of bad marketing ideas, worse styling, and curious PR looks.

Just a few years ago, K’Naan took to the New York Times to discuss his experience passing through the music industry meat grinder. His attempts to make "pop" music resulted in the some realizations about his on-record identity:

“I could reach more people, it told me. Was it right to spit in the face of fortune, to not walk in rhythm with my new audience? Didn’t all good medicine need a little sugar before it could be swallowed?

So some songs became far more Top 40 friendly, but infinitely cheaper."

On the flip side, profiles in NPR and New York Magazine portray the high level pop business as a conveyor belt—one with creative cogs, but a conveyor belt nonetheless.

If you’re an artist planning on signing to a major, it feels as if you need to be one of two things: An empty vessel ready to be filled with hit singles, or an artist with a definitive perspective. If you’ve got a clear way of looking at the world and your art reflects that, it’s easier to deflect some of the bullshit.

This sounds simple enough—because of prestige, because you want a check, because you want a machine capable of blowing up songs on the radio—but it seems to end up a stumbling block for many artists and teams who either misjudge their reasons for signing or simply don’t have clear reasons in the first place.

You have to ask yourself: what does a label add to your team and your ability to execute your vision? Money? Resources? Reputation? Team? Some combination of all the above? Is the inevitable inertia of bureaucracy, potential creative meddling, and financially-minded indecision enough to prevent you from signing, or are these storms worth weathering on the road to your ultimate goal? Knowing why you're signing goes hand in hand with knowing who you are as an artist.

In the modern context, record labels are great at amplification (most notoriously and particularly throw the force-fed diet of terrestrial radio); most traditional artist development now happens outside of the label system, left to managers, music publishers, and crews of intrepid artists.

To be clear: If you’re an artist, be an artist. Compromise for no one. Make what you want to make. Speak truth to power—more importantly, speak your truth. That’s art. That’s what moves people and inspires future generations.

If you sign to a major label and you don’t have the leverage to carve out the creative control that a Beyonce, Adele, Kanye, or Rihanna has, you must remember that you are both artist and a product. Depressing as this realization is, you’re probably going to have to make concessions in order to get your album out into the world. Labels are getting smarter. Many are signing more self-sufficient acts or artists that might be considered "left of center." Still, anyone signing to one of the majors should know going in that they're likely to be asked to make sacrifices in order for their music to make it to market. If that's not acceptable, then simply stay away from the majors.

Record deals and publishing deals are like loans: A lender gives you a sum of money that you must pay back.

If you want to even begin to think about getting out of or renegotiating most modern deals, you’ll have to pay back the advance given to you. Simple logic: The bigger the advance, the more money you need to pay back.

While a big deal might seem like a grand prize, it’s often smarter to take deals that have smaller advances and more flexible terms, or that re-allocate that in-pocket advance for marketing and radio promotion.

The music business is changing rapidly and, as technology evolves, unpredictably. Certain aspects are settling (major labels still seem to be at war with streaming services, but landmark deals have been reached in the last few months that point to a path of lesser antagonism if not complete symbiosis), but many issues remain to be resolved. What should be clear to most music creators in the present: Streaming is not a passing fancy. Its implications on the ability of artists, songwriters, producers, and the ecosystems existing around them to make money still rest on unsettled ground. If you're negotiating a deal with a major, make sure your team is cognizant of the changing nature of the business and is crafting a sensible deal that accounts as much as possible for current as well as future realities.

People get fired from labels all the time. People jump to new labels for better opportunities. Volatility and constant shifting—it's the nature of business, music and otherwise. There aren't many ways to safeguard against these kinds of changes (as you'll find in many negotiations, it's difficult to get what's called a "key man clause" written into your agreement that links you to your A&R even if she leaves the company); all you can do is be aware.

Regardless, you shouldn't go to a company because of the company's name or reputation. Go for the people. If there's a team at a major label that's passionate about what you're doing and you believe they can execute and, more importantly, defend your vision, go with those people. Company reputation matters, but the efforts and dedication of driven people at that company matter far more.

This one's directed at the aspiring managers (and A&R's, for that matter). When you make an album, you're in control of the process, but you have a lot of people to answer to: producers, songwriters, mixers, mastering engineers, studios, graphic designers, video directors, stylists, PR people, and any other number of creative partners.

These people typically have one thing in common—they get paid by the label. If you want to keep your team, core and peripheral, happy, make friends with the administrative people at labels that can move money around.

Ultimately, there's someone above them approving budgets, but if you've engendered ill will towards the people actually paying invoices, you're probably going to have some unhappy creatives asking you where their money's at.

Kanye West can change his release date and album title multiple times, revise his album after its release, and decide to only release it on one platform because he's Kanye Fucking West. He's sold over 20 million albums in his career. He's played a hand in a laundry list of hit singles. He's played arenas. He's a superstar.

I hope you become a superstar. Chances are you're not currently a superstar. The creative process is messy and unpredictable, but it pays to have a clear plan and try to stick to deadlines as closely as possible. If you're delivering things on time and relying on the label for its resources and help, your punctuality increases the likelihood that the label can actually execute its end of bargain as well.

The characterization of the label as a demonic monolith—a single-minded, money hungry organism devouring young talent and spitting out bones for profit—comes from a well-documented history of restrictive deals, murky accounting, and abusive treatment.

As with any such depiction, the industry’s infamous side often obscures the more nuanced reality: Namely that record labels are populated by real, breathing human beings—many of whom actually love music.