THE DIFFERENT DEPARTMENTS WITHIN A RECORD COMPANY

A&R

A & R stands for ‘Artists and Repertoire’. These are the talent spotters, the first point of contact between band/artist and record company. They find the talent, they sign it up and they handle what music they record and release. This includes choosing the right studios and producers, negotiating their fees, booking any extra session singers, musicians or ‘guest stars’, and taking delivery of the master tapes and so on.

A junior position would be as a scout – going to dozens of gigs, listening to dozens of tapes, talking to dozens of contacts like promoters and journalists and then persuading your boss to check out the hot new act you’ve just discovered. Other entry-level jobs could be A & R assistant or department co-ordinator, both of which would be more administrative, office-based jobs.

The more senior members of the team would be, in ascending order, A & R administrators, A & R managers and eventually the A & R director who has the final say on who gets signed. A & R people may only sign between one and three new acts a year – and their reputation rests on how successful these acts turn out to be.

New artists or bands are paid an ‘advance’ ranging from £50,000 to £500,000 or even more, on signature of their contract with a record company. The contract usually stipulates the duration of the working relationship; it could be, say, a ‘two-album deal’. If the artist/band then fails to make enough money to recoup their advance they’ll more than likely be dropped. If they are phenomenally successful, however, and other labels start to woo them into signing with them when their initial contract expires, the A & R department’s job is to keep hold of them.

A & R is also about working with artists/bands and their managers for the duration of their career with a label – finding the best songwriters and producers for them, advising on which songs should become singles, working on their image and generally helping them make the right artistic and commercial decisions.

Marketing

Can you picture yourself talking about ‘shifting more units to the Dido demographic’? (It means selling more records to the sort of customers who buy one or two commercial, mainstream albums a year.) If so, marketing could be for you.

Marketing music is about working within an agreed budget to make customers aware of a record, and get it as high up the charts as possible. A high chart position in the week of release is vital because, for some reason, once thrown into the charts, albums act just like those sticky, rubber toy spiders you sometimes see being sold in shopping centres: you throw them as high as you can and then they crawl slowly back down again, never back up. And if they slither out of the Top 40 too quickly, albums can disappear off the public radar altogether.

Marketing also involves deciding on an artist/band’s image and sleeve design; striking deals with retailers regarding in-store displays and where an album sits on the racks; writing sales notes (see below); advertising in magazines and newspapers and on the radio and TV; plus producing ‘point-of–sale’ material like posters, display stands, leaflets, brochures and merchandise such as badges, t-shirts, etc. Online, or digital, marketing includes building artists’ websites, establishing online communities and PR.

Your compass is the ‘midweeks’: sneak weekday previews of Sunday’s Top 40 which tell the record company how many copies of a new album have been sold so far that

week and the projected likely chart position. Marketing and sales departments act quickly on this. If an album’s doing well, do they rush out some more posters to try and beat the competition to number one? If something’s

threatening not to enter the chart at all, should they hurriedly book more radio adverts? Or should all spend be cancelled? It’s a fast-paced world and you’ve got to be on the ball. The plan of action around a certain release is called a ‘campaign’.

A first role would likely be marketing assistant: this would invariably involve such tasks as photocopying, ordering couriers and arranging poster displays. From marketing assistant you might eventually advance to marketing executive, marketing manager and marketing director. As you progress up the scale the job becomes more cerebral – working out long-term strategies for an artist/band and so on. What demographic are they aiming at? What image do we want them to have? The marketing world’s trade magazine Campaign would be useful to read if you’re keen on reaching this level.

Press and promotions

The press department handles enquiries from newspapers, magazines, fanzines, radio and websites about a band/artist. This includes everything from making sure reviewers have got copies of new albums, to escorting bands to Radio 1 for interviews. You’d start off as a press assistant: fielding calls, doing mail-outs and so on. Radio and TV pluggers may also be found in this department. These jobs are often farmed out to independent PR and plugging companies (go to Chapter 6 for much more detail on this field of work).

Sales

This involves dealing with record shops and persuading them to place as large an order as possible. Record sales reps sell those products: independent labels will entrust this to an independent distributor whose briefcase will be crammed with CDs from all sorts of small labels. Sales personnel include reps and telesales staff and often work out of the distribution centre (see below). Sales reps work their way up from pounding the streets visiting small independent record stores in provincial towns and selling a couple of copies of each record, to wining and dining the head buyer of WHSmith and doing hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of business. Telesales staff hit the phones with information on new releases and try to get orders that way. Download sales may be the responsibility of an online trading manager.

Basic sales skills are essential here. As a junior rep you’ll need stamina and a thick skin, and be good at closing sales and building up a reputation for reliability. If you tell a retailer the new Splodges album will sell like hotcakes and it doesn’t, he’s less likely to believe you next time, even when you stroll in with the new Madonna CD. A delicate mixture of blarney and brute honesty is what you’ll need.

From telesales or sales rep you may, over years of hard work and lucrative results, rise to national account manager and ultimately sales director, liaising with all the big, important customers (i.e. clinking brandy glasses with Mr Woolworth at Claridges).

Production

The people responsible for the physical creation of the album (from the fancy artwork on the sleeve to the actual casing) are the production team. They ensure the necessary raw materials, collectively known as ‘parts’, i.e master tapes plus a computer disk or email of artwork, or ‘films’ (transparent sheets containing the artwork separated into the four colours cyan (blue), yellow, magenta and black) are to everyone’s liking and make it to the manufacturing plant on schedule.

A production department will include administrators such as a production manager plus graphic designers (although sometimes record companies use freelancers working for an independent design studio).

As a junior designer, you’ll need the requisite training in graphics and a flair for art. A foundation art course is a must, and a degree in graphic design is also handy.

In an administrative role you’ll need organisation, a high degree of literacy and an unflappable personality. It’s also handy to know a bit about CD packaging – the difference between a jewel case (the clear plastic one) and a digipack (the card one) for example.

Look out for starter jobs like production assistant, junior designer or junior product manager. (In some companies the person is charge of production is known as product manager, although confusingly this can also be the same as marketing manager.)

Classics

Usually a microcosm of its parent company, the average classics division will include one person to look after each the aforementioned duties. This might be a boss, marketing manager (and perhaps an assistant), press officer (and perhaps a junior), product manager and PA/coordinator, with perhaps a couple of specialist sales reps. Other staff will be shared with the rest of the company. It’s no lie to say that classics people are generally several watts brighter than their pop/rock counterparts. They need to be. And as a potential junior member of staff you’ll need to know the difference between John Tavener and John Taverner and that a tenor is not something you withdraw from the cashpoint.

Admin and accounts

The least glamorous area of the music biz – with apologies to record company admin and accounts people everywhere. If you’re entering the music biz for fun and frolics don’t reply to an ad for a facilities assistant (you’ll spend all day phoning photocopy engineers and replacing lightbulbs), a post room worker (you’ll spend all day in a windowless room on a franking machine) or an accounts assistant (you’ll spend all day nagging people to fill in purchase order forms). Don’t make the mistake of thinking these jobs will necessarily be a foot-in–the-door. Not only can these jobs be very dull, they also virtually preclude you from ever being invited to exciting launches/parties/lunches or getting an interesting promotion into the real world of making records. (NB: Receptionists can and often do step up into more exciting roles within the company. For some reason, facilities/postroom/mainten-ance/accounts people tend to be laughed all the way to the bus stop if they try to. But maybe you can prove me wrong.)

Licensing and synchronisation (‘synch’)

Licensing means selling rights to use a recording to other record companies making compilations (‘Ibiza Snog Choons Vol. 574’ for example). As for synchronisation (or ‘synch’, pronounced ‘sink’), ever wondered how pop songs end up on car commercials?

Synchronisation is the selling of pieces of music for use on TV shows, films, adverts, computer games, corporate videos and the like. If the producer of one of these wants to use a certain recording they must secure a license from the record company (and one from the publisher too – more in Chapter 4), usually for a fee. Licensing and synchronisation personnel liaise between the makers of such requests and the artists (via their management usually) and are a crucial and often massively profit-making department. As a first job you’d be processing license requests, inputting data and doing general admin/grunt work.

Legal/business affairs

Record company lawyers oversee all the contracts between the record company and artists, producers, publishers and numerous other factions, as well as dealing with litigation involving breach of those contracts, or intellectual property matters (such as illegal sampling). They require serious legal training before they are let loose on this tricky business so unless you have the usual law background, i.e. a law degree or conversion course, plus a year’s legal practice plus a trainee period with a firm of solicitors (preferably in the entertainment division), this won’t be for you just yet.

Legal secretaries are also a valued asset, so if you have experience in this line of work do consider a record company as a fun alternative to a stodgy old law firm.

International departments

All of the above refers to UK practice. The majors, however, all have international divisions based in London and housing people who oversee affiliate operations across the world, e.g. engineering an artist’s break into the US or promotion across Europe, and keeping an eye on the activities of the company’s headquarters around the globe.

THE HIGHS AND LOWS OF WORKING FOR A RECORD COMPANY

Highs

Working for a record company is great if you like a fast-paced working environment, with snap decisions, lots of running about and few lunch breaks. For this reason it can be immensely exciting.

The music industry is one place where there is room for individuals: meek, conservative types will not succeed. Strong personalities with vision and passion will. So you’re an eccentric? People think you’re a little weird? Fantastic!

Few industries are as women friendly as this – high profile industry female figures prove this. You will encounter very little sexism or prejudicial attitudes as a woman.

Lows

On the downside, and this cannot be stressed enough, it is very hard work, and if you get a job with a record company you can forget ever making a 6 pm cinema date again. ‘They get their pound of flesh off you’ as one insider put it.

Whatever the department, the fast-moving slipstream of activity in a record company means the pressure is on all day long. To meet deadlines, to process information, to make decisions, to check and recheck things, to push, push, push . . . Tempers fray. People get fired. You have to keep your cool and get the job done, perfectly.

Naturally, as so many people dream of sashaying through the shiny revolving doors of a record company each morning, competition is fierce – not just at interview stage, but within the company itself. You are frequently reminded – both explicitly and subliminally – that in the outside world and within the building there are people who want your job.

One of the disadvantages will actually be a benefit for many: the unsocial hours. Even if you aren’t stuck behind your desk till gone 9 pm you’ll also have a duty to attend gigs, showcases and launches. Sometimes on weekends. So hobbies, sports, love-life, pets . . . something will have to give.