5/10/2016

Choosing A Canadian Record Label

By Linda Williams


By definition, a record label is universally known as the brand that does marketing of music recordings and videos for interested artists. Labels also do publishing of the music, they manage brands and trademarks for their artists and they enforce the copyrights of sound recordings and the videos that they have signed. Distribution is another role they play. The above listed duties are what a Canadian record label does for its artists.

An artist should be aware of the different types of labels that are available in the market. A successful artist can consult with legal counselor in order to make a more informed decision before dealing with one of them to market and distribute his or her work.

There exist three major categories of record brands. One of them is known as major, the second one is known as major-minor and the last is known as independent. A major label is associated with an international brand name, and there are four known such international labels. BMG, Universal Music Group, SONY and Warner Music Group are the big four labels that a major uses to distribute its products.

Mini-majors are medium sized companies which are co-owned by the major brands. Mini-majors distribute through the big four and are affiliated to them. Finally independent labels are small types of companies. They do their distribution on their own. They are not affiliated to any of the big international companies nor are they associated with the Mini-majors.

These signing companies and their artists have been colliding for a while due to differences in their priorities, maybe the company wants to market the art by all means and get the best deal out of it whereas the artist wants the originality of his or her work to remain intact, his signing company may need to change the title of a song which is not welcomed so well by artists. A signed agreement in form of a contract works well in solving this dispute, thus every artist should make sure that he or she has a contract that meets his needs.

Due to the rise in the many ways of using the internet, many of these artist signing companies have experienced their fair share of difficulties on the market. It has become easier to share files over the internet making it possible for artists to do their own marketing and selling through the web at a much lower cost.

New strategies have been put in place by the labels to ensure that they still have some role in the art industry. The returns or profit obtained by selling online are in most cases very little, thus though the artist can sell online, the profit is never satisfactory. Thus the labels sign the artist with new deals that meet the artists demand to their satisfaction.

Choosing a good brand name to record your music with is thus an important step for any artists successful career. This calls for good research on different existing labels in the market. Their reputation and their relationship with other artists are important to look at before fully committing to work with a given brand. An artist should feel convinced that working with that specific company will bring out the best results of the art work.




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