Overview for Interested Artists

 

Our Goal

Our goal is to create sustainable careers for artists.


Great. What does this actually mean? 


It means helping artists get to the point where they can earn a basic living salary from income generated through their artist activities alone. Income that doesn’t rely on external players (such as Spotify, radio, or a sync library) but is based solely on the strength of a fanbase that invests directly in the artist.


We want to help you get to the point where , even if the entire music industry landscape changed tomorrow, you would still have a viable career.


Our Areas of Work

To achieve our goal of creating sustainable careers for artists, we work closely and individually with every artist we take on.

Our work spans areas typically covered by the roles of “the studio” and “the label”. But since we do everything together, under one roof, as a team working towards the same goal, we prefer to not think about our work in these separate roles.

Instead we use the following 3 categories to describe how we work with artists.

  • We’re not talking here about your singing voice. Instead, this is an idea similar to your “artist identity” or brand - only we take it deeper.

    We have found that many artists are pretty good at writing songs, but don’t have a clear idea of who they are as an artist and what will make people listen to them and latch on to them.

    When asked “what are you trying to do with your music?” or “who are you as an artist?” people simply say they’re trying to make music that they like.

    This is a perfectly good start, but we believe that for truly great artists there are more layers to their artistic identity. By helping artists figure out the answers to questions such as: “What makes you unique as an artist?” and “What are you able to communicate through your music that others can’t?” we begin the process of clarifying and developing this identity for each artist.

    Everything you do as an artist is informed by this identity - choices you make with music, visuals, how you interact with your fans and the type of things your community does. Once your Artist Voice begins to be clarified, audiences will be able to connect with you in a far more authentic way.

    A key thing to remember is that this is not separate from you or your music - and it’s not about reinventing yourself. All your present and past music feeds into figuring this out, and once your Artist Voice is articulated it acts as a guide for navigating all kinds of artistic choices on your journey. It can be difficult to do this on your own, and that’s why we’ve developed tools to support you through it. Safe to say, this is something that’s never ‘done’ - your Artist Voice will continue to grow and develop throughout your career, and we’re here to help you kick off that process.

  • Alongside our work on Artist Voice, we help artists take their songs from conception to finished product. There are many stages in this process and we help with all.

    • Songwriting - you are the songwriter, we won’t change that. But are your songs the best they can be? We want to help you take them from A to A+, so we provide feedback and advice in order to help you do this. What’s more, we want to help artists become better writers themselves (not just improve songs in a one off capacity) and so our whole process is geared to facilitate this development.

    • Production - We have a recording studio in south-west London where we produce our artist’s songs. Since we are involved in the whole artist career, we are placed to produce your tracks in a way that serves you much better than ad hoc producers would be able to do.

    • Arrangement, recording, mixing, mastering - though primarily handled by our core team, where something really specialist is required we have people in our network we can call upon to fill in gaps that our core team lack.

    We never want to take control of your music, and all the things we are able to do are intended to augment the skills you already have and are developing. If you have written and arranged an entire song and there are no weak spots - great!

  • We believe that the best way for an artist to build a sustainable career at the start is to focus on building a core base of dedicated fans who are willing to invest their money directly into the artist.

    Investing directly means things such as:

    • Paying for gig tickets (and bringing their friends)

    • Buying merch

    • Paying for exclusive fan benefits - fan clubs, Q&A/online hangouts/direct access to artist in chatrooms, one off merch items, exclusive audio and video content

    • Buying physical copies of your music

    We want every artist to get to the point of having 1000 of these “investing fans”.

    This is our focus, and every other label service we undertake is purely to achieve this end. It may sound extreme, but if getting your music on Spotify didn’t serve to increase your base of investing fans, we likely wouldn’t be interested in doing it.

    Many services traditionally performed by a label are covered by this. However, we will always be asking ourselves whether a particular service is really necessary and the best way to increase your base of investing fans. In particular, we only engage in things such as PR campaigns, playlisting campaigns and radio plugging insofar as they are necessary and cost effective methods to develop this core fanbase.

    This may not be what you initially expect, and might sound very different to what a lot of labels do.

    We have thought a lot about this and if you would like to discuss it with us, let us know! We’d be happy to chat.

In order to undertake all of this we use a combination of:

  • our skills and expertise

  • our experience working with multiple artists

  • financial investment

  • consultation with 3rd parties

Though every artist is different and we do not have a cookie-cutter approach, we also do not offer a menu of services to choose from. When we work with an artist, we partner fully with them. This means we are invested in all aspects of their career and are very committed to giving a lot of support wherever it is needed.

We feel the idea of partnering fully goes both ways, and given our work should benefit the artist for a very long time, we do not take someone on for just a single release, nor do we offer partial services.

This does not mean that when you work with us you are signing your life away! We understand it can feel scary, and especially in music you should be careful about who you work with. Working relationships need to have a foundation of trust before a large commitment can be made. We have thought carefully about how to approach all this and are very happy to discuss in detail with you in person, or over email.

Our Ethos

To give you a sense of what we are like as an organisation and as individuals, here are some principle that we believe in strongly, and that form the basis for how we work.

TRANSPARENCY AND FAIRNESS

Our guiding principle is to be fair, transparent, and to put artist interest first as much as possible. We are, first and foremost, looking to help. 

Given we are a business, we do need to make a certain amount of money to keep ourselves going. But our goal is not to make a large profit for ourselves. Just enough to allow us to keep working with artists.

One way this principle of fairness and transparency shows up is in our contracts. We have contracts with all our artists and these focus on recording rights and what happens with finances. These sort of contracts can sometimes be approached from a place of confrontation or sneakily trying to get away with as much as you can without the other side noticing. We haven’t done this, and have tried to ensure that our contracts are very reasonable and as fair to artists as possible, whilst also allowing us to sustain what we do.

SELF-IMPROVEMENT

We have a big focus on everyone working to better themselves and improve their craft. This applies to us too!

This means we would hope artists welcome the following:

  • Feedback on their songs (not the “I don’t like it kind” but the “I don’t think this is doing what you want it to do” kind)

  • Learning about and trying out different methods of writing - even just as an exercise or creative challenge

  • Utilising what we can offer to improve the music they make

If someone thinks they have arrived fully formed and don’t have any room to get better, it’s going to be difficult for us to work together.  

We are always working on ways to be better at what we do (as musicians and as an organisation), and we want to work with artists who are similarly open minded and want to push themselves to improve.

COMMUNITY

We believe that community and collaboration are key to anyone being successful, and that they make everything we do more worthwhile. Every person has a lot to offer, and we want to help facilitate people supporting one another.


One way this shows up is that we want our artists to support one another both as fans, and as part of the Abubilla community - if we can hire one of our artists who is great at social media to help another who is struggling, that would be a wonderful thing!

FinanCes

Though there is a lot to talk about when it comes to contracts, finances, and commitments, one thing worth saying from the start is that we do not ask for any payments for our services up front.

We operate on a percentage basis that is at its most extreme 50/50. In many cases it is more favourable to the artist.

We work like this because we think we should only succeed if the artist succeeds and is happy - anything else just seems unfair!