James Blake is “the freest [he’s] ever felt,” he says Advertising sign on a recent Zoom call.
After about a dozen years signed to Polydor Records, the producer/singer is now independent and experimenting with new ways to release his music to “match the speed of the internet,” he says.
On the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, Blake released “Thrown Around,” his first single since leaving Polydor. “I know it was an anarchist move… Sunday is a terrible day to release music, but I thought it was fun to try now that I can,” he laughs.
Part of Blake's new post-recording experiment involves paying creative partners both upfront (where applicable) and in “points,” or a percentage of master recording rights, so that everyone is “incentivized to promote the song and win together,” he says. Master credits are usually only awarded to the producers of a record, but Blake goes further by offering credits to non-producer songwriters and his creative director, Crowns & Owls.
To pull it all off, Blake turned to Indify, a music label that lives by the motto “artists are founders” and could benefit from raising funds for their releases similar to how startups do. Instead of traditional label deals, Indify is a “marketplace of services” for artists to meet strategic angel investors on a song-by-song basis, CEO/co-founder says Sav Garg. Interesting acts are selected from an online angel leaderboard – including music businesses such as Thrice Cooked Media, Golden Kids Group and ATG and Silicon Valley executives such as Alexis Ohanian – build their partner pool based on success metrics and investor resumes.
Artists using Indify give away a percentage of the streaming rights for a particular song until investors recoup their initial funding and support. (Indify takes a 15% cut of the investor's profit share after redemption, and no investor is allowed to hold 50% or more of the streaming rights after redemption).
Founded in 2015, Indify is seen as a tool to “add gas to the fire,” as Garg puts it, to viral moments from independent artists. The company has had success stories like Armani White, Pink Sweat$ and Anees, but Blake is by far the biggest artist to use the platform so far. “We've proven so far that Indify can help artists go from 20 to 70, but one of our goals was to take an artist from 70 to 100, like major labels do,” says Garg. “I can tell that James is willing and ready to lead the next generation of artists and take the leap by trying something like this first.”
Blake and Garg first bonded at a US Open tournament several years ago and reconnected through Blake's management when Blake began to speak openly about his independence and desire to handle his career differently in the future. Prior to the release of “Thrown Around,” Blake's indie experiment included a partnership with superfan app Vault.FM to provide fans with unreleased demos for a monthly subscription. Garg and Blake aligned on the idea that “in a company, your music subsidizes a million segments,” says Blake. “It's a huge moving ship to run and it's a bloated business with crazy overhead. I don't want to pay for the CEO's mansion in the Cayman Islands.”
Blake also felt there was a “lack of transparency” about how money was spent on his behalf while he was signed to a company, and that he didn't have “many options” to choose his team inside the building, even if his they were assigned “I didn't really seem to understand” his work.
After going back and forth over which single to release as his debut with Indify, Blake made “Thrown Around” and it immediately felt like the right introduction to this new phase of his career. It's easy to see why. The song (released May 26) and its video portray Blake as an artist desperate to make his music go viral by any means necessary. By the end of the video, Blake is bloodied and bruised from all the ways he's dangerously tried to feed the algorithm, and finally learns that none of it was enough to save his art.
“James signed up online and used Indify like anyone else would,” says Garg. Blake ultimately chose to team up with a combination of Good Boy Records and Stellar Trigger Marketing to form his team for “Thrown Around” after finding them on the Indify leaderboard. Good Boy co-founder John Zamora says that “before the song came out, we had already reneged on the deal we made with James. We secured quite a bit of timing, though I can't say more than that.” Good Boy specialized in film/TV licensing (or “sync”) opportunities for Blake, but the company also connected with him over a shared interest in providing better compensation to songwriters.
In recent years, songwriters' declining payouts in the streaming economy have made headlines, and some indie labels have stepped in with a proposed solution to offer “points” for songwriters who, unlike producers, typically don't make money on the major record side. . As Advertising sign reported in December, this new group of labels includes Good Boy, The Other Songs, Facet Records and Nvak Collective. Some producers, like the co-founder of Good Boy Eli Rizk and Tre Jean Marie, have also gifted some of their points to their songwriting partners. Now, with “Thrown Around,” Blake joins the movement.
Stellar Trigger was included in Blake's Indify deal to help with digital marketing. “Things have changed since I started,” says Blake. “Back then, it was very easy to be mysterious. I mean, you have a whole generation of producers wearing masks. I think it's very hard to maintain that now and get your music out there. That's not the way it works anymore.”
Although Blake stopped wearing a mask, his early career characterized him as a mysterious musical genius with a “sad” disposition – an image he has come under fire for in recent years. In a recent Instagram Reel, Blake wrote that he's been “practicing looking sad for those who want me to be sad so I can make sad music forever,” in a cheeky dig at his fans.
“This is the most connected I've ever felt to the way my music is being promoted,” says Blake Advertising sign. To think, he was in constant communication with the co-founder of Stellar Trigger Ryan Peterson to build the multimedia narrative of “Thrown Around”. “We wanted it to make sense. There's a lot of storytelling here, with James leaving the major label and going independent,” says Peterson. “I'm constantly bouncing ideas off him.”
The story told in the “Thrown Around” music video was teased, piece by piece, in social media meta-posts about how artists should post on social media. Whether the song will ever reach the Billboard Hot 100 is unclear, but Blake maintains that “Thrown Around” is still “more successful than any previous single campaign” of his career.
Most importantly, it serves as proof that digital storytelling, low budgets, equity incentives, and the freedom to choose collaborators on a per-song basis can lead to creative and financial success in today's market. Now, he is in talks with his team to work together again for a follow-up single.
“I feel we have done something groundbreaking [with ‘Thrown Around’]says Blake. “I'm excited for the future.”
from our partners at https://www.billboard.com/pro/james-blake-campaign-thrown-around-first-single-indie-artist/