Getting Signed: A Cautionary Tale

For all unsigned musicians and singers, the glittering prize is, and always has been, The Record Deal. From Cliff Richard in the film Expresso Bongo to that small crying boy from last year's The X Factor, signing on the dotted line that says: "you'll never have to do real work again" is the ultimate dream; the reward for all those nights spent travelling back from gigs sat on the wheel arch of a hire van eating cold Ginsters.

 

 

For many years it was something most bands could only wish for, but with the current clamour for new music – and with so many new artists discovered online – it's now a very achievable goal.

 

But it's vital to realise that a recording contract is not the end of the struggle. It isn't even, to borrow from Winston Churchill's favourite chat up line, the beginning of the end.

 

Once the celebratory champagne bubbles are flat you are embarking on nothing more than your first day at work in a job where you are statistically more likely to fail than succeed. We can't help you with that, but we can point out the hazards, pitfalls and teeth-grindingly frustrating obstacles you're likely to encounter on your way.

 

If you're a budding musician, the chances are that you're broke. So when you're finally discovered and presented with a deal worth several hundred thousand pounds it's all too easy to take this as your cue to run into the street shouting: "I'm rich beyond my wildest dreams". But here's the most important thing to remember: no matter how much your first record contract is worth – you haven't actually earned any money at all.

 

The money you get is just a loan, and while it's a loan that doesn't incur interest and won't ever be demanded back by an aggressive ape wearing sovereign rings – it's still got to be repaid before you enjoy any of the trappings of chart success. It's called an advance because it's an advance on your wages – and you'll have to live off that advance until you pay it back with record sales.

Let's imagine you've been signed for £200,000. Brilliant! But only a percentage of that will be given to you there and then, the rest will be reserved for recording costs and promotion. You're most likely to get £50,000 of it. Still pretty impressive.

 

Only, there's five of you in the band so that's ten grand each. And the album takes six months to record and another six months to be released. You're not even making minimum wage!

 

Of course, if you're lucky, you'll have bagged a publishing deal too. And that may have given you all an extra £10,000 each. You're still not exactly rolling in it. And if all this seems obvious, you'd be surprised how many bands have come a cropper at this stage. We know of one Britpop-era singer who took his entire publishing advance and blew it all on a childhood-dream Ferrari. Despite appearing on Top of the Pops he soon found he couldn't pay the rent on his flat and ended up having to sleep in the car – and it wasn't exactly spacious.

 

It's also important to be aware that having a hit record doesn't start the cash flowing either. Almost all signed musicians have encountered the dreaded Catch-22 of cross-collateralization. Put as simply as possible, this means that even if your first album is profitable, the royalties take so long to arrive that you'll need to take yet another big advance from the label in order to make a second record. Meaning you now have to recoup even more in sales to pay them back.

 

And if, as is often the case, your second album doesn't sell so well, the label will soak up its losses with the profits from the first. So even five years down the line, you may still not have earned any actual royalties from all the thousands of discs you've sold. And it's very difficult to claim Income Support when your face is on the front cover of the NME!

 

The life-saver here is PRS. Any radio or TV airplay you receive not only earns you money directly but also grants you a percentage of the cash collected from those who pay a license to the Performing Rights Society to play music publicly (shops, bars, cinemas etc). A Top 40 hit can generate a healthy extra income (though this also takes quite a while to arrive, by which time you've already resorted to eating out of bins.)

 

Does anyone care about the charts anymore?

 

How else can we moisten your fireworks? Well, the other common mistake made by the newly signed is to expect the record label to be sympathetic to your art. No matter what they claim, the music industry is an industry and functions just like any other. You may well possess a voice one critic described as: "like Jeff Buckley reincarnated as a sexy dolphin", but if the label don't think anyone will actually buy your music then they're not going to waste time trying to persuade people otherwise.

 

Why should they? Time is money, and it's more than the Press Officer's job's worth to spend their day trying secure a feature in Bass Player magazine, where you discuss your favourite string width, when they've a hundred other acts whose publicity is of far higher priority – on account of them being far more popular, i.e. profitable.

 

But most record companies are so organised as to make such decisions invisible. Your A&R - the person who facilitated the deal and nurtures your career (until they get bored or sacked) may regale you with talk of 60 ft high posters across London declaring your genius, and a video starring the nation's supermodels in the buff. But at some point during a meeting you're not invited to, the Head of Radio will point out that your debut single hasn't been added to Radio One's all-important playlist, on account of how Jo Whiley reckons she saw you in the Hawley Arms one night, giving her a "funny look", and that it'd probably be good business sense to drop your wailing, miserable arse from the label as soon as the contract allows.

 

And if you think that by signing a five-album-deal that can't happen then you'd better get a solicitor to explain the small print. Only the artist is bound by that particular stipulation. The label actually only agrees to release the first album, after that it's purely up to them if they want to pay for you to make another or not (known as 'options'). You, on the other hand, are stuck with the hopeless, couldn't-sell-ice-lollies-in-hell, pony-tail-sporting gits until you've delivered all five albums, if they so decide.

 

Should we be proud of Leona?

When musicians go bad

 

So why, you may ask, would they sign you at all, if they're going to invest so little care and attention in your career? What they really want from their investment is a word-of-mouth, overnight sensation; the kind of act who goes to number one on the strength of their music alone, without the need for any promotional campaigns, expensive support tours or, really, any input from the record company at all.

 

Because they know, deep down, they're clueless as to what makes a hit record, and the majority of artists they sign never recoup their initial advance.

 

But the small percentage who do succeed make them very rich indeed – and continue to do so. That's the gamble and that's who they're hoping you are, and they're not going to give a second thought to dropping you if you're not.

 

We've often wondered why no one receiving a Brit award ever says: "I'd like to thank my record company for making every step of this journey a living nightmare of cocaine-addled judgments, tortoise-slow decision making, petty internal politics, financial underhandedness, soul-destroying compromise and general sack-able incompetence. I look forward to working with you for another ten years." But perhaps that's why we don't have a record deal. Good luck. You'll need it.