What is the point of an independent record label in 2025?

In search of smartdumb: beekeepers; gigs in abandoned party supply stores; the bigboxing of small labels; the solo debut of Sarah Register.

sarah register - ‘right’ b/w ‘does it hurt?’

(29)

I’ve been releasing other people’s music on my record labels for over 20 years now. As I wonder aloud why anybody would do this in 2025 — start an independent label with any semblance of a profit motive! — I’ve tried to remember why I did it so many times in the past.

My first label was called Beekeeper Records, which I started in 2004 with my close friend Matt Lemay. It was named after “Beekeeper’s Maxim,” a song by the band Brainiac. We were both music writers and musicians, and Matt had already begun recording, mixing, performing, and touring in bands of his own. I won’t put words in Matt’s mouth, but suspect he’d agree with the following: We wanted to start a label because we felt like freeloaders and wanted to have some skin in the game.

Our first and only release was Kyoshu Nostalgia, a mini-LP by a Tokyo-based artist named Marxy, who is now better known as the cultural critic W. David Marx. The music was a brilliant homespun mashup of 60s changes and vocal harmonies and the digital chirpiness of 80s and 90s J-pop. We didn’t offer a royalty advance or a recording budget beyond mastering. It was a 50/50 deal after our costs for manufacturing and press mailers.

But our label’s “sell” was that we had unique access to the press. We thought we could help get the music in front of the right writers and publications — that would be our first step, and we’d respond and react from there. It made perfect sense to us! So it was a rude awakening when we realized that our very status as music writers actually made us suspect to other music writers at the time. “I love this, but I can’t write about it because… well, you know,” was a pretty typical response. Marxy’s music was thoroughly unique, which was what we loved about it — it was the dense, referential kind of record Matt and I would both love as music critics. But culturally it was at odds with the sounds and trends of that moment — it was incredible music but hermetically sealed to our pockets of the press. It spoke to no broader context.

Our label’s biggest weakness (among many!) was infrastructure: we had no distribution partner, aka a larger entity that would help get our CDs in brick-and-mortar record stores. We pieced together distro through Carrottop and others I’m forgetting, but the broad scale of our work was truly DIY: calling record stores around the country and trying to get them to buy a few copies of Kyoshu Nostalgia on consignment. Other Music was responsible for easily 80% of the sales of Kyoshu Nostalgia, which was an amazing feeling for two people who had spent quite a bit of money in Other Music. But 80% of the records still ended up underneath my childhood bedframe in the Philadelphia suburbs, and Matt and I slowly but surely drifted away from Beekeeper as we became more involved in other projects.

My next label began five or so years later. I was in a rock band called Mr. Dream with two of my best friends. Candidly, we couldn’t get any label to take interest in us. At the same time, there was something still icky about “self-released” – it meant that nobody in the business of making money off music thought your music would make any money. Even for more experimental music, a cosign of some commercial viability is meaningful.

So we invented a label. It was called Godmode, after a song Adam Moerder had written about a man he had seen on Youtube who had built a killdozer-style tank and gone ‘godmode’ on a small town, knocking over buildings and resisting arrest for several hours. In interviews, we complained about the “fatcats at Godmode Records” and all the nefarious Noah’s Arcade-like things they were trying to get us to do to take it to “the next level.” The band toured nationally with Sleigh Bells, Cloud Nothings, and Archers of Loaf and released three albums and three EPs. Inexplicably, this music — which was directly opposed to what the press was actually covering — was also rewarded by my old brethren of music critics. Writers were quick to note that Adam and I had been music writers in the past, but hey! “Rest assured! The music doesn’t suck!”

One of the odd things about starting a vanity label is that everybody slowly realizes it’s a vanity label, and somehow that ends up being worse than self-releasing music. The best thing I thought we could do for the band, from a credibility standpoint, was to build out the label. We already had a community of bands we enjoyed playing shows with, who themselves were self-releasing and understood the curatorial value of being associated with a label. I didn’t have money for advances, so my sell was that I would record and mix and produce the music for free, as well as put it through the same press pipes that had helped my own band achieve some level of notability. If there was any money made after expenses, we’d split it 50/50, which was considered the “standard indie deal,” as understood by people who had never actually entered into standard indie deals.

That era of musicmaking – from about 2010 til the end of 2014 – was very special for me. I lost thousands and thousands of dollars and even more hours to other people’s music! But that was beside the point. A community had begun to emerge around the label. This was our CBGB moment of sorts. We threw shows in abandoned party supply stores. We recorded constantly. We explored new instruments, and we started splinter bands and released the music in short-run cassettes. My conception of a label was not unlike a cocktail party, where you want to have all different kinds of people who are surprisingly compatible with one another. That initial energy and sense of community is ultimately what attracted artists to the label from outside New York, and which led to other opportunities for me as a producer and artist developer. That year ended so beautifully: About ten of us toured Europe together one winter and played the final party of a music festival in Rennes, France, closed out with Lenny Kravitz’s “Are You Gonna Go My Way?”, which was the only remaining MP3 on my USB stick that I hadn’t played that night.

Let’s stop for a second and catalog what I thought an independent label could do up until then:

Independent labels were distributors. The label you signed with determined where your music was available (or wasn’t!).

Independent labels were interest-free banks. Labels paid for the recording and manufacturing of recorded music products, and in my case I did the recording and manufacturing myself, usually in exchange for permission to distribute and otherwise “exploit” (not my word, but wow) the master recordings for moneymaking purposes.

Independent labels were marketing companies. I helped craft a meaningful story about the music for an audience we thought would be most receptive to that music and that story. We tried to find fans for the music, usually by trying to find writers or publications whose own business interest was in breaking new artists.

Independent labels were creative studios. As an engineer, producer, and co-writer, I became intimately involved with the creation of the records I was supporting on the label. The goal was to make music that was more competitive — music that had a chance of standing out — and to give a front door of sorts to music that was a little more inpenetrable. In that way, I was developing artists, and helping them tell their story through the music.

Independent labels were curators. My label helped create a tight-knit social scene of like-minded musicians who supported one another’s work. The label at first only served artists from Brooklyn, and in that way curated a geography and a DIY sensibility within that geography, not unlike other labels might curate a genre (e.g. Rap-A-Lot) or a certain veneer of quality (e.g. Warp).

My question: Are any of these things true anymore?

Labels are not necessary for distribution — let’s start with an easy one. Every label’s music is in nearly every store. Bandcamp is an outlier; I’d also argue there is such a thing as “bandcamp music” in the way that “indie music” used to be a meaningful descriptor. Their relative looseness around copyright means you’ll encounter more edits and remixes and unauthorized materials too. But broadly: yesterday’s fault lines of a label’s distribution are nowhere to be seen. I’d argue distribution itself has become a commodity, especially as DSPs sideline more and more human editorial for the algorithm.

Labels are still banks, but one seismic shift is that major labels no longer demand to own the master recordings in perpetuity, and for the bigger deals most ‘major’ indies have similar royalty splits and options as the majors. Candidly, the bank-iness of majors is often a lot more attractive than the bank-iness of indie labels: Majors can afford to take a bigger risk on something ‘indie’-leaning because they know Ariana Grande has another album coming out in the fall, and if you don’t recoup they’ll likely let you out of your deal way more quickly. Majors are also co-owners of the biggest music store on the planet. Are you actually going to sign with an independent label for less money and worse placement on DSPs because you think the A&R who took you out for sushi “really understands your vision”? It seems like a much harder sell, from my vantage point.

Labels still have marketing departments and budgets, but another seismic shift, besides the well-documented demise of music publications, is the outsize expectation on artists to be their own CMO on socials. Part of that has to do with audience and platform fit. Right now, audiences just seem to react better to artists directly promoting their music in a lofi, vertical, casual, memetic way than traditional marketing like (horizontal) music videos, billboards, etc. “Portrait” versus “landscape” is meaningful. When so much of our lives are mediated through screens, the main attributes of “quality” are “reality” and “personality”. “Bedroom artists” are bullshit; artists in bedrooms are reality. Audiences trust the artist more as seen in their natural, un-artisty environment, become invested in their quirkiness, and pride themselves on being there from the beginning. The exceptions prove the rule: that’s just how it works most of the time now. The “quality” of the music is important insofar as it serves that fiction. It’s why the most financially successful labels are putting money behind artists who already are great CMOs for themselves. Artists come into label deals because they are good at marketing themselves.

Which might be why I find that artists don’t want or need labels to be creative studios anymore either. So many well-meaning people, myself included, try to start labels in the mold of Motown: a label with a clear sound and sensibility, everything comes out of the same building, made with the same players on the same console, etc. Maybe this was just a necessity in the past — a wrinkle of geography. But to partake in a “label’s sound” is an active, not passive, choice — which is to say an artist would have to willingly cede certain decisions to the "artist” that is the label, from the sound of the records to the cover artwork. I find that fewer and fewer artists want that. They kinda just want you to give them money so they can pay the people they already work with or find a few proper nouns in LA to help them do what they’re already doing in a “slightly elevated” way. It’s not entirely ego-driven! By the time a modern musical artist has gotten on anyone’s radar, they likely will have developed a lot of their own sound on their own, and built an audience on their own. It’s already working in their mind — why change it up if they don’t have to?

That leaves curation. Labels were extremely important organizing principles 20 years ago, to the point that many record stores organized parts of their shelves by label! Labels were signifiers of quality, or sound, or sensibility — labels, in a way, were artists. With streaming, that role has been cut off at the knees. Labels are no longer consumer-facing. Sure you can follow a label’s playlist on Spotify, but the platform’s algorithm is the primary curator. And the platform is the artist.

I am shocked by how many talented artists I work with who have no historical understanding of independent label’s role as curator — artists who make dream-pop who have never heard of 4AD, artists who make “french house” but who have never heard of Crydamoure. No judgement, just something I’ve noticed. I still listen to anything Philip Sherburne releases on Balmat, anything Dein Bein releases on True Panther, anything Matt Werth releases on RVNG, but I increasingly find myself to be an outlier.

After 2015, what I found artists needed more than a label was a manager who could help them navigate the music industry, but who also was willing to spend some money on them at the beginning to get things started, so they can enter a bigger deal with more leverage. Good for the artist, good for the manager (who works on commission). Over time, we’ve seen that become more of a standard: the management company that also has a small label. The management’s label exists as a way to fund the beginnings of a project and get things going and have a clear path to recoupment, with the broader financial goal to ‘flip’ the deal to a larger label, i.e. to partner or be bought out of the original deal.

My sense is that most of these companies start with the best of intentions. But the things I’ve historically valued about labels – their curatorial spirit, the community-building, the creative collaboration – gets sidelined in this configuration. Labels in this configuration are strictly a financial instrument. They are small change venture capital. They are slot machines that play you.

Which may, in fact, be exactly what you need at a certain juncture of your career as an artist. And you certainly have your pick of them! I highly enjoyed this piece about the definition of quality, and how it has changed over time, and how businesses need to adapt to consumers’ expectations. So many people have optimized for the new reality of record labels: they are not curators in the artist development business, they are speculators in the audience development business. “We throw gasoline on the fire!” as so many execs out here might have put it before January.

But me?! I don’t know man. Throwing gasoline on fires? And usually you lose money? Except sometimes you don’t? Does this sound fun to you? It doesn’t sound fun to me!

So what is the point of an independent label in 2025? I thought I’d have an answer this far into the piece, but truthfully I can only speak on the point of mine moving forward. I like having skin in the game. I like making music with my friends. I like making music for my friends. I like music that feels like a secret language between people who have known each other for quite some time. I like music that feels a little like an inside joke. I like personalities. I like music that makes people say “I can’t believe somebody put this out.” As a label, it’s the only way I’ve ever had success.

Next week on smartdumb, I’m releasing my longtime friend and collaborator Sarah Register’s debut solo recordings. We started working on them in 2021 and returned to them this past December. One record reminds me of This Heat and Glenn Branca; the other is a rose between two thorns, a sweet ballad cased in guitar feedback. Sarah played in one of my favorite bands – Talk Normal – and currently serves as Kim Gordon’s guitarist. For many years, Sarah has been a second set of ears for me as my go-to mastering engineer, and she helped perfect the deep, amniotic low-end and ASMR atmospherics that defines the early Channel Tres and Yaeji records. That’s Sarah up above. I need to cook dinner otherwise I’d figured out a way to post some audio.

Update: Sarah Register’s “Right” b/w “Does It Hurt” are out now. Here’s the video for “Right”: