One thing I immensely enjoy about blogging is that no one is constraining what I say. If I feel like writing about something, I don’t have to go through a team of editors first in order to get their approval. Provided it’s true, I can say pretty much what the hell I like – something I simply didn’t feel I could do when I was making my own music.
If you’re going to email me, you might want to make sure you’re squeaky clean. Because if I suspect something is off, I might well start looking into you. That’s the thing about blogs – they always need new content, and all this stuff in your favourite blog doesn’t write itself!
Which is why my instinct immediately told me something was off when I was contacted on Wednesday by a record label called Beige Music. Their CEO, someone called Percy Moore, was keen to tell me they “believe your specific sound has high potential and deserves to reach a wider audience”. Suspecting that Percy Moore uses that line on all the ladies, I could smell suspicion from the start.
For starters, the company calls itself Beige Records yet their logo clearly states Beige Music. Companies tend to refer to themselves using just the one name. Secondly, a quick online search of Percy Moore yields two results. One is for John Percy Moore, an American zoologist whose specialist area is leeches.
The other is Percy Moore Turner, an art dealer. It cannot be either man because the former died in 1965 and the latter died in 1950. If this Percy Moore exists, he’s an extremely hard character to find.
Next up, most record labels work on the basis that they sign your record, spend their own money on things like promotion and mastering and then they recoup their expenses before they start paying you royalties. Beige Music (or is it Records?) work by charging you a fee. They seem to be able to charge a fee per release or charge you a subscription of some $49 a month. Record labels pay their artists, not the other way round.
And finally for now, for a record label which claims it can help artists to break into the industry, some of their metrics are a tad low. Their Twitter page currently has 445 followers. Facebook has just over 1100, and Instagram has just under 4000. In comparison, house label Defected has 787,000 on Instagram, 216,000 on Twitter and almost 2 million followers on Facebook.
No disrespect to Beige Music, but if I was trying to break into house music, a deal with Defected sounds infinitely more tempting if exposure was my goal.
There might well be someone out there who has signed with Beige and is extremely happy. You’re more than welcome to contact me with your stories if any of you are reading this right now. But as for me? I’m going to need a lot more convincing…
