My Own Way: producing independent music

Kate Brockhurst: I’m Kate Brockhurst. Welcome to the Creative° Choices podcast. In this edition, I talk to music mangers Billy Grant and his colleagues Rob Stuart and Ashley Milton. Billy and Rob founded 2Point9 in 2003 and later launched record label ‘Jayded Ents’. They’re responsible for the internationally successful artist Jay Sean, who recently had a number one single in America.

[except from ‘Down’ by Jay Sean]

Voice Over: You’re online with Creative° Choices.

Kate Brockhurst: You launched 2Point2 in 2003 with business partner Rob Stuart. What made you go independent?

Billy Grant: At the time we were working at Telstar Records, and we had a reasonable amount of success there. We were working on Craig David, working on Mis-Teeq, we were doing pretty well. But then we realised – we got into doing the second album for both Craig and Mis-Teeq – and creatively, it wasn’t going the way that I wanted it to.

Myself and Rob had been working on the Craig David project from the inception. We’d done a lot of stuff setting it up, and they just took it off in a different direction. It made us realise that, when you’re working for somebody, no matter how good you may be, at one minute the rug could be pulled from underneath your feet.

And so we thought that the only way that we could actually control this, is if we actually left and set up our own company, and actually did things the way we wanted to do it.

Kate Brockhurst: Would you have made the same decision today to set up on your own, considering the financial problems the music industry’s currently in?

Billy Grant: Yes, I think we would have, because we just decided that we had to go off and do it. The one thing that we mention all the time is the fact that we went out there when the industry was pretty much on its knees, so we never knew anything but this era.

Whereas if we’d set up four years earlier, at the time when I was at A&R, and we look at the amount of money and cheques that were banded around at that time. In a way, we were thinking if we had what we had now, and set that up four years earlier, we’d probably be retired now! But it’s just one of them things.

Kate Brockhurst: What kid of advice and opportunities are available to people wanting to work in the international market?

Billy Grant: The first thing that you just need to do is: you need to go out there, do a bit of research, have a very open mind, okay. Because the thing about it is that, I think the problem with the UK is that we’re a great market, a very creative market, but also it can be quite a difficult market to work in.

So if you take the negativities that you get here, you think that you’re going to get that around the rest of the world, then you’ll actually never get anywhere. But you’ll find that there’s a lot of territories which are very, very open to actually working with you. So what you need to do is maybe to go out there and start making some contacts to see if you can actually get your music placed in different territories from whichever way possible.

The research is the biggest thing. I’m really into this whole idea of just finding out different countries, radio stations, record labels. Once you find the people that want to embrace you and your music, then you kind of use them to try and get in a little bit more.

Kate Brockhurst: You were also recently elected onto the board for AIM. How can AIM help if you’re thinking of setting up on your own, or if you already run your own independent label?

Billy Grant: AIM is the Association of Independent [Music] record labels. And the best way to think about it that obviously you’ve got the major record labels, which everybody knows: Sony, EMI, Warners and stuff, and they do their thing, and they’re very big and they’ve got a lot of power.

And then you’ve got the Association of Independent [Music] record labels, which is an accumulation of, I think, about 800 independent record labels, and these can be anything from a one-man band, to bigger labels like Beggars, who’ve got a lot of big artists and very successful artists. And what they do is they join together as a big collective to help each other. It could be advisory. It could be to make decisions. And it could be also to lobby, to try and get certain decisions made in certain particular areas.

There might be other, not smaller things, but things which may be very much related to record labels themselves. Like them holding an independent media day. So what you’ll do is you’ll turn up and meet people from the media, people from radio. You could meet these people face-to-face, you can maybe show them your stuff, you can actually swap email addresses, they’ll tell you exactly how they work. These things are very positive so for me, AIM can help independent labels as much, or as little, as they’d like to. Because they are a body which has got a lot of power, a lot of contacts, a lot of influence and stuff like that.

And if you need help literally you can pick up the phone to anybody at AIM and say: ‘look, I want to release my record in Russia, does anybody know a decent Russian label that I can release it to?’. And what they’ll do is they’ll send a little note around and they’ll say: ‘don’t send it to this label, because they stole all the money. These ones are very good. These ones are doing flamenco hip-hop.’ and all this kind of stuff, which is very helpful.

Kate Brockhurst: We’re no going to introduce Rob Stuart, co-MD with Billy at 2Point9, and Ashley Milton, who deals with live bookings and general marketing.

What would you say that the highs and lows of being an independent label are, in today’s music industry?

Rob Stuart: Obviously we’ve been going seven, eight years now. When you’re spending your own money, and your own time, there’s a lot of risk involved and that can affect a lot of other parts of your life.

You’ve really got to be prepared to put everything into it. If you’re going to start up an independent, you’ve really got to be doing for other reasons than the money. If the money comes, then that’s great, but you can’t hide with an independent. With such a small set-up, everybody needs to be accountable for what they’re doing.

Kate Brockhurst: Ashley, what was is like for you joining mid-way through a small team like this?

Ashley Milton: Initially when I joined, I knew the guys from the label we worked at previously. I came in mid-stream in the Jay Sean project, and Juggy D as well. I got thrown into the deep end, as it were, on a scene I didn’t know too much about. But you pick things up quickly, or hopefully you do. I just took it from there, learnt a lot from the guys and then we build relationships with people in the area in which you’re working.

In this industry, it’s all about relationships and I think if you’ve got that skill, you can work in dance, or rock, or R&B, whatever it may be.

Rob Stuart: Travel’s been a massive high. I think all of us were quite lucky with the Asian scene, where we started off with some success with the artists we had. They were global and we did a lot of travelling in the first five years, which was great.

Ashley Milton: I did a two-week US tour within a month of joining the company. It wasn’t as glamorous as it sounds, but it beat being in Perry Vale.

Kate Brockhurst: How did it feel to get a number one in the states?

Rob Stuart: It’s a bit strange. And the reason why is because, in your wildest dreams, you just don’t expect it to happen. And also the other thing is, with the Jay thing, when the Jay thing started off, he would tell you, no-one else expected it to happen. We just wanted to get it in the marketplace and build it from there. Slowly and slowly and slowly, and then it started building.

The early stages, to be quite honest with you, was interesting because it responded very well in iTunes initially. And I think that was down to the fanbase that we’d helped to build up in the states – where they’d gone out initially, we’d blasted them, and then bosch! They went out and bought the record and it went in the top 40 in iTunes in the very first week. Very first day, actually. And I think the record label was a bit shocked by that, they thought ‘what’s going on here? This is very strange’.

Then it built and it built, and eventually it kept on getting added to radio, and it kept on building slowly over a number of weeks. And then it got to number two and it held there for quite a few weeks. And we thought: ‘that’s great’, and every week it was number two, and then we saw there were other releases coming – Jay Z was coming, and about three or four other big releases was coming – and we just said: ‘it’s not going to happen, this number one.’ It’s cool. We weren’t complaining, we were number two!

And then I remember we were in Choice FM, doing an interview. Jay was over for the week, we got him over for the week and he was doing an interview in Choice. And all of a sudden, somebody just went through the window: ‘number one’, and we just went, everyone went mental, jumping up and down. ‘Oh my God, we’re number one! That’s just great.’ It’s a great feeling, but it’s also a bit weird.

Ashley Milton: It definitely felt a bit weird for all of us because you spend seven years on a project and you think when something like that happens – it’s different implications, obviously, if an album goes number one – still, it’s a number one. After seven years you expect the heavens to open or something to happen. And it’s just like: ‘right, you know, that’s it. Let’s get on with it.’ You have an hour, you have a beer and you’re off again looking for other new things and it is a bit of an anticlimax! [laughs] Because you’ve still got the problems, times ten!

Rob Stuart: Also, I don’t think we’re the kind of people that pat ourselves on the back. You just move on and do what you’re doing next, rather than dwell on it. And maybe we should do more often. But I said to Billy a while ago, it’s one of those things that no-one can ever take away from us, whatever we may do in the future.

Kate Brockhurst: At what point did you plan to go to the USA? Or have you always been international?

Billy Grant: You’ve got to think broader now. You definitely got to think broader, and you’ve also got to realise that the UK’s a great market, but the thing about the UK is that the UK is a really hard market to break. It’s very expensive. And what’s really annoying is that most people abroad – mainly Europe and South-East Asia – they wait for somebody to break the UK, then they start jumping on your record.

America is one market that we were looking at from day one. I went out there a number of times and presented to different labels out there, to different distribution companies, and the reason why is that we actually had evidence that we were doing something. Sometimes you’ll go there cold and you’ll say: ‘would you sign my artist?’, and they say: ‘just come back in six month’s time when there’s something happening’. But we physically had something going on with Jay Sean. He was going out there, he was doing gigs.

Ashley Milton: In America, it appear it’s come out of the blue, but we’ve been there for the last four years doing live tours. And he was probably doing, each year from 2005, he’s done a 20-date tour throughout the summer at a load of universities. So there was a definite groundswell of support growing for him within his community, and that has all added to his internet presence and the amount of exposure that he has online, all led to the success he had towards the end of this year.

Kate Brockhurst: Final question was going to be: just to give us some advice to anyone thinking of setting up on their own.

Billy Grant: Keep your costs down. Don’t go too mad. Putting records out doesn’t necessarily have to cost a lot of money, especially nowadays. A few years ago, you had to go out there, you had to press up CDs, which meant you had to have capital investment, stuff like that. But nowadays you don’t, you can actually do things digitally.

Just because you do things digitally, don’t expect to sell millions of units now, because it’s actually very hard. The difficult thing is now - obviously anyone can get into a digital shop, but the difficult thing is that people have to find it, so it’s about being creative about how people are going to find your music. So you have to be really good at marketing and working it.

I think the thing that you need to do, is that you need to concentrate on your music, making sure that your production’s really good, making sure your songwriting’s really good. And the thing about it is, you’ve got to set the bar high enough that the music’s good enough. Sometimes you might have to spend a bit of time and you’ll go out there and you’ll do it, and maybe you’ll get your artists to go out there and perform it, to actually see how it works live.

Presentation is very important. How you present it to whatever gatekeeper you’re trying to get to. You’ve got to package it in a right way, which will actually make them think: ‘oh wow. This has made me feel better today. That’s really great, I’m really glad that I opened that mp3 and listened to this.’

Ashley Milton: I think for us, what we’ve found it it’s so key. There’s loads of talented kids out there. Attitude is massively important that you’re going to work to get there because there’s so many people that are may be more talented that other kids, but you’ve just to have that determination. And that for me, with talent, is right up there.

Because we’re a management company and a record label, you’re working so close to the artists on every level, that you’ve got to have the same mentality.

Kate Brockhurst: Our thanks to Billy, Rob and Ashley for taking the time to talk to us. For more information on 2Point9 and Jayded, visit www.2point9.com

To listen to other podcasts from the series, visit the website http://www.creative-choices.co.uk