The answer is not simple although we would say in the first place that it is almost never a good idea today, even though we speak from the point of view of a record label.
Many young talents are excited and see after signing a contract with a record label a tremendous possibility of being the next Martin Garrix. However and unfortunately in most cases that will never happen. Nowadays record labels no longer work as before and if they are serious they will only sign with artists who already show potential. In other words, they are already very present on social networks and have a lot of organic (real) following/listeners/fans or have already been able to generate some business around their music.
Signing even a song with a medium or small record label is even a pretty bad idea. Since in principle many record companies today even make their business of newcomers or unexperiemented artists. For example they make them pay to listen to their demos (There are hundreds of submission sites you need to pay for, if you want some A&R people listening to your demo). They sell them courses telling them that their music is not good enough etc. It may sound very depressing, but that’s how most record labels work. They even take advantage of new artists by making them enter contests to remix songs. It doesn’t cost anything for the label to make the song and suddenly they have all the rights to it, if it’s a success the record label makes a lot of money. Otherwise, the investment does not cost you anything.
Another typical strategy is to sign just about any half-decent song that comes their way. Some of them sign even 25 songs or more a week. You can do the calculations, these labels publish about 1200 songs a year. They invest absolutely nothing in the artists or their promotion other than posting a post on Instagram or Facebook and adding the songs to Playlists on Spotify that don’t even have any real listeners or followers. If again some of these artists are lucky or by their own merits they are successful and they generate money with the song the label wins (and you can believe us of 1200 songs a year with 10 that work well you can generate a lot of money without having invested anything).
That is why our recommendation. If you are just starting out and still don’t have much experience, better invest your money and time in your own music, learn and even promotion on different social networks, even paying for advertising out of your pocket. In the long run you will win and you will always keep all the rights to do whatever you want with your songs.
If you are starting it is always better to publish the songs yourself through platforms like Distrokid. If you have been producing music for a while, you know that your music is good, you already have a presence on social networks and your music has on platforms like Spotify about 1000 listeners per month on average and you want to work with a serious record label to help you try to reach it to the next level. Then feel free to send us your demo so we can take a look.
What makes us different from the rest? We do not work with many artists, but with a reduced selection and if we listen to your song and we like it and we want to bet on the artist, we will be involved from the beginning to try to take your music to the next level even investing real money in its promotion through the different usual channels. You can go to our Artists section to see who we are currently working with.
