Landing a record contract requires a curious
mixture of talent, reputation, networking
ability and luck. At the most basic level,
your job is to get the label interested in your
work. There are no hard-and-fast rules and
no silver bullets, but there’s a lot of common
sense involved.
You may have dreams of a rise to stardom
in which you’re approached by a label rep in a
smoky back room, but realistically, the most
crucial thing you can do to raise your chances
of being signed is to go after the deal
yourself.
Modern musicians have advantages
in the huge number of independent labels
that exist today and unprecedented and
instant access to them via the Internet.
However well-made your music is, it’ll
never hit the target if you don’t point it
towards the right kind of label.
Seek out some
of the major vendors for your genre and see
if you can find tracks that sit nicely alongside
yours. Do they have similar sounds, BPM and
overall vibe? There’s no point sending your
progressive monster to a Deep House label or
your latest EDM banger to a Techno label.
At
best they’ll ignore it; at worst you’ll undermine
your reputation. More unclassifiable and
esoteric material may be harder to find an
appropriate label for, but the sheer volume of
labels out there will make up for this.
Once you’ve noted down a few appropriate
candidates who could be interested, find
their websites and look to see if they have an
email address to send demos (‘release
quality’ demos, naturally).
Finding a named
contact is important, too, and a creative
Google, LinkedIn or even Facebook search
could shed some light on who’s who.
When choosing a label, it’s tempting to
think that bigger is better: that the more
releases they have, the more established
they are. But how successful have those
releases been? Track down a label’s releases
on sites like Beatport or Traxsource to get an
idea of their average highest chart positions.
A label whose three releases have reached
the Top 10 is better than a label whose 30
releases haven’t even broken the Top 100, but
the former may hold its artists to higher
standards that you’ll have to meet.
Important: When submitting your tracks, always
include a brief bio (50-100 words is plenty)
and don’t send links to AIFF or WAV files –
anything larger than a 320kbps MP3 will
most likely be ignored. Some people prefer
SoundCloud links, so cover the spread by
sending both. Two or three tracks should be
enough!
Top 10 Techno Record Labels
Drumcode
Yin Yang
IAMT
Tronic
Phobiq
Octopus Recordings
Yellow Recordings
Respekt Recordings
Turbo Recordings
Sleaze Records
Labels: Information
