You wouldn’t expect the former chairman of a labels body to say anything else, but Tony Wadsworth’s argument for why labels remain important in the era of Chance the Rapper is still worth reading. “Because so many people do make their own music, that is why you still need record labels. Because most of that is rubbish. Not everybody can be talented,” he wrote for website The Question. “What record labels do is provide the filter – the ultimate filter. There are filters all the way through the music business and managers are probably the filter that comes before the record labels. There are all these filters and the big record labels are the final filters.” Wadsworth also suggested that streaming’s glut of choice also fuels this role for labels. “The next service they provide is, amid this morass of 40m tracks on Spotify, being able to use marketing techniques to highlight their products which, because it has been filtered, it is more likely that it is something that you like – if they are doing their job right.”
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…