Martyn Deykers is a Dutch DJ, producer, writer, and label owner currently based in the Washington, D.C. area. He has been making various strands of bass music since the middle of the 1990s; in 2007, he co-founded the label 3024. The artist additionally runs an artist mentoring program on Patreon and a Substack. 

Over the last two decades, almost everything about the music industry has changed. Modes of distribution, discovery, and career building have all gone through radical transformations. However, the role of the label has been mostly reactive to these changes, not proactive. There’s a lot of room for improvement in how both labels and artists maintain their catalogs and find new audiences. This requires work and a change of mindset from both parties.

RELEASE CYCLES

Artists have always explored novel ways of releasing their music. In recent years, maintaining some sort of control and handling the question of ownership have become more important components of that process. The crypto space has seen several experiments, and so has the more offline, physical DIY scene; oftentimes, they were born out of a desire to bypass the idea of the record label altogether. Drum & bass producer and creative coach Krust has said that the dream of signing to a label belongs in the music industry of 2004, not 2024. 

Even so, in my mentoring work with younger artists, a topic that’s often discussed is how to get music signed to record labels. I’ve noticed that a lot of musicians see their music getting signed as not just an individual accomplishment but also as an “end station” to the creative process. As a recording artist with over twenty years of experience myself, I understand. The music is done, and the label takes over from there. They bring the release to your audience and help you raise your profile—great! But another thing that twenty years of experience has taught me is that very often labels lose interest once the music is out. For an artist, feeling that initial enthusiasm be dampened by a lukewarm continuation can be very frustrating.

This is why continuously promoting and supporting your artists, even when they are not actively releasing new music, can be a way for a label to foment growth outside of the standard release cycle churn. Too often do I see labels solely promoting artists that have music forthcoming, but not the ones whose music was released on the label in the past. By featuring those artists, listeners are automatically led to their back catalog. Label nights are an excellent way of bringing old and new artists into the label’s fold. My label runs a mix series on SoundCloud and on an Apple Music Curator page called 3024 TAPES. It features a nice mix of new exciting talent as well as long-time affiliates of the label. Particularly on Apple Music, you can directly link to the related release.

DISTRIBUTION 

The number of ways listeners engage with music online is ever-expanding, yet most underground record labels only put their music on Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, and a few other streaming platforms. As part of a release strategy, labels and artists should actively service outlets where actual discovery, in the non-algorithmic sense of the word, takes place—individual curators with premiering platforms on SoundCloud, for instance, or YouTube channels that focus on compiling mixes. Financially, these channels may not bring in much for the music, but the “exposure” will bring new listeners to the artist’s other endeavors—shows, merch, and Bandcamp releases. My label 3024 recently had a track picked up by a very large YouTube channel (something along the lines of “smooth house tracks”). It wouldn’t be the first outlet I would personally go to and discover music, but millions of people do, so why not service that demographic?

BACK CATALOG - LABELS

Over the last ten years, the way we discover and engage with art and culture has changed dramatically. In his book Filterworld, Kyle Chayka eloquently describes how algorithms on both audio and video streaming platforms accelerate popular culture to become more popular and obscure art to become more obscure. After all, algorithms are built to give you more of what you already like—they recommend a lot of things but never incentivize you to actively go and discover new music. For a lot of underground music, which often doesn’t thrive on algorithmic recommendation or playlisting, this is a big problem. New releases may still enjoy the advantage of novelty and a publicity campaign, both of which help the music to be brought to a potential listener’s attention. Older music, often part of a label’s back catalog, does not. This dynamic requires a more proactive approach. Labels need to point people towards older work, so it doesn’t just sit there and waste data center space. 

My label has existed for more than 17 years. It’s easy to forget that most of today’s listeners following us have not been along for the duration. In fact, the majority of listeners have probably caught on in the past five years, so there’s a lot of music they may have never heard. Listener profiles are changing constantly—people discover music through alternate channels or are much less clued into what’s released every week than we think. Adding “back catalog strategies” to a label’s prerogative can build a solid foundational audience for the long term. It benefits current as well as future releases.

BACK CATALOG - ARTISTS

A common misconception amongst artists is that when a record is signed and an agreement has been made, the label “owns” your music. Labels don’t own music per se but “lease” it for a certain period of time (often 5 to 10 years). During that period, a label can release and promote the music as it sees fit, and unless specified, it is often up to their discretion how much energy and money is spent on it. Once that term has passed, the agreement often extends indefinitely. These things vary wildly in contracts, so it’s good to go over clauses referring to these rights before signing them.

Whatever the contracts say, musicians often find themselves more focused on new music and touring and forget about all of the above. But once the term is up, the original artist can reclaim not just their rights but also the responsibility of bringing older work to people’s attention. During the past few years of DJing, I’ve started to notice that quite a lot of my own older tracks still get a great crowd reaction. When I looked the tunes up on Spotify later that night, I found them sitting in some forgotten corner of the platform, accumulating hardly any streams. So me and my team spent a few years “retrieving” these tracks and bringing them under the umbrella of my own music company, 3024 Music. Together with my crew at 3024, we created a project called Through Lines, which became a compilation of some of my older work made between 2005 and 2015 that had been lying dormant in the streaming space. Besides releasing the music on Bandcamp and streamers, the collection was also remastered and pressed to vinyl. The project explored how the concept of “ownership” and re-contextualization can spur fresh ideas and expand an artist’s reach. The music started to feel new to me again.