When analyzing a label, I am aware to have a big prejudice: I prefer entities with few, well-selected releases, privileging the so-called “Quality Over Quantity” approach. I’m speaking about Rave Culture or Intensity Recordings (1 song each week), where there is a clear project and strategy behind every choice.
Speaking about a different situation, I assisted to the change in Revealed schedule: from the Golden Age with a single weekly release, then 2, then now, with 7 songs a week (including sublabels). Quality definitively suffered, as we assisted to a long sequence of issues: unworthy names, stolen FLPs, genres that don’t fit the nature of the label…
This is brought to the extreme by giants like Spinnin’ or Armada, where we are used to see dozens of new songs published, usually just to see what sticks to the wall.
My favoritism towards smaller paces is obvious: the labels have time to focus on each tune, continuing their strategy, but one has also to consider how big the “bigs” are. They have several people in the staff, often with decades of experience, working on the release and they surely invest more money in promoting and valorizing their catalogue.
If the mechanism is well-oiled, a label with modern tools can easily work on both 1 or 5-10 singles each week, increasing revenues and conseguently the budget for its future (thus helping the artists in their roster) by scaling its resources.
My paradox is that I like smaller catalogue, with every song having its own story, but I’m forgetting that it’s just the initial phase of a label. Without exceeding into “supermarket labels”, it’s the nature of a company to grow and expand. This include expanding the catalogue and the release schedule.
Personally, I would like a reality with a couple of well-chosen tunes a week and, in case a couple of independent sublabels, but one can’t force good companies to slow down.
What do you think?
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