Question: Why do you even want a record deal?

My band recently signed to a record label. The reasons we decided to go with them were basically promotions/PR, distribution, and funding.

As part of the contract they we had a budget with their in house PR guy for a small PR campaign which despite being minor was more than we would have been able to afford ourselves so we hoped that would help get us into the magazines etc that we'd been unable to get on our own with our previous releases. We were given a campaign plan, hit lists of radios and magazines, and it seemed pretty damn decent.

For distribution they were going to be printing far more copies than we'd ever have been able to and distributing them to shops worldwide. Again, something we wouldn't have been able to do and something we hoped would increase our reach.

Both of those link in to funding. All of us in the band are poor as shit and the band is only just about funding itself with very little profit to put back into funding future albums etc, so the prospect of getting CDs and vinyl printed AGAIN was pretty daunting. So the fact that the label were going to print the album on CD and vinyl for us was great, and we figured the cut they were taking wasn't too far above what we'd be paying ourselves back for if we printed it ourselves.

Additionally there's the... I guess prestige that comes with having a label and what we hoped that would do for us in opening doors for festivals, tours, gigs with bigger bands.

Unfortunately, a lot of this hasn't happened. The PR company didn't get anything they promised, either through incompetence or just not doing it, therefore the worldwide distribution has been somewhat of a bust since we've not had the push we'd hoped for. We've actually sold more / had more online plays on our own bandcamp page than all the multitude of sources the label got us on. As for the funding, we have the feeling that they're over-quoting us on the manufacturing costs and therefore over charging us on the recoup fees / forcing us to charge way more than we would want to for the vinyl. There's a whole bunch more stuff they're being shitty with but those are the main things.

So basically it hasn't worked out at all like we hoped. If we hadn't been told PR was sorted, we'd have been on it ourselves having learned lessons from our previous releases and got somewhere with it (most of the magazine reviews, interviews, radio play etc we've had from this album have been from our own contacts or got off our own backs after realising the label were doing nothing). As such we've not sold enough copies to reimburse ourselves for recording, artwork, or video production costs and are struggling somewhat.

Fortunately we've lost nothing other than momentum, which we can regain, thanks to the specifics of the contract and I've heard some horror stories about labels fucking over bands who then lose the rights to their own music. We have a plan going forward and are hoping that we can get back on our feet again.

Moral of the story, a label can have some benefits but only if they actually stick to their word.

/r/WeAreTheMusicMakers Thread