A Story About a Band Controlling Their Own Music
In a fast-paced world of non-stop information, whether it be news, fake news, clickbait, or worse, there is surely nothing more depressing than a band being on the receiving end of a terrible PR stunt through no fault of their own, only to discover the ramifications of the stunt through the electronic grapevine.
The band that I’m referring to is The Domestics. Their former label in the process of publicizing the release of the band’s new album, Little Darkness, was responsible for the PR gaff and its racist overtones; the band had no knowledge of it until it broke on the internet. Here’s a link to a Paste article that is a good primer to the backstory. As you might imagine the story was shared far and wide and fell firmly, and unfairly, on the band’s shoulders.
If you have now read the Paste article, you might be feeling that this story ends in disaster for the band…but no, it does not. Their former label, taking responsibility for this snafu, was decent enough to cancel the contract between the two parties and return their interest in the record to The Domestics.
At least that is good news and there’s more.
My partner in North Music, Steve Rauner, invited Leo and Michael from The Domestics to sit down with us and Skylar Jessen, to focus and define what could happen moving forward. It became clear that the band wanted to take advantage of the opportunity and share the revenue from Little Darkness with an organization that does good, charitable work.
We created a record release partnership with The Southern Poverty Law Center and facilitated global distribution through Stem.
In addition to the revenue potential to support their good works, the SPLC will benefit in other ways. They have shared values with The Domestics’ young indie culture audience, but are not a well known organization to that community and have struggled to successfully engage with them.
To us, the logical next step was to develop a free online tool to support these kinds of partnerships which we call auxiliary. You can click on the link for more information, but simply put, we have created the ability for artists to upload their own music for digital distribution and build partnerships with featured organizations.
Hopefully, the moments created with these partnership opportunities through auxiliary will help deepen the relationships between the artists, organizations, and their mutual fans.
From the band:
“We are very excited to release Little Darkness and announce our work with North Music to develop our partnership with The Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that will receive 50% of the album’s revenue. With complete ownership of our album, we have the freedom to redirect the revenue that would have gone to a label into the hands of an organization dedicated to the ideals of equal justice and equal opportunity. It feels so great to finally put these songs out into the world, and we couldn’t ask for a better organization to call our partner.”
The auxiliary tool is currently in open beta, and freely available to all artists.
Dave Allen.
I invite you to follow me on Twitter.
