6 Mistakes I Made When Starting Up My Record Label

Exploring any new venture comes with a long list of mistakes made, no matter how careful the planning. Sometimes the best way to start is to jump in with two feet and see where it takes you. It’s like riding a bull and just holding on tight to avoid getting thrown.

I created Big Community Records after finding the wonderful talent that is Kwazi Cort. I wanted to support him in his musical career and help him achieve what I knew he was capable of. That said, I had no experience at all in the music industry and walked in blind to everything that I needed to know to start up a successful label. Mistakes were inevitably made, and I expected and even wanted to make them.

If I was to share all my shortcomings this would be a very long article. I’ve selected a few from a pretty long list to help you avoid making simple errors, and to show how other mistakes are oftentimes necessary. Here, in no particular order, are six mistakes I made when starting up my record label:

Not doing the necessary groundwork

It’s really easy to get over excited when you find something great and to put all your energy into it. When I found Kwazi, I couldn’t wait to share his talent, and thought that the music would sell itself. However, great music is necessary but insufficient. The secret sauce to success in music is having a following and audience.

Music is a little bit like film production: it’s high risk speculation on whether a piece of content is going to pop; you can de-risk this by gaining an audience first and then investing in the content that you know they already like.

Starting from scratch makes it difficult to grab people’s attention because the music industry is a noisy place, with 40,000 tracks uploaded to Spotify every day.

Whilst reach is easy, attention is what matters, and attention is hard. It takes time, patience, perseverance, consistency and sometimes money to build. It’s important with any venture to build the audience first, to test it beforehand, and to build it even when your product/service/label hasn’t yet been released.

Lack of budget control

As with all of these mistakes, I would chalk my lack of budget control down to lack of knowledge about the expenses needed for the lofty venture. In the beginning, I wanted to defer as much as possible to the artist and the producers, because they had a vast amount more experience. It was necessary as I didn’t know what it took to rent a studio or pay for a producer, for example. In the beginning, I underestimated the cost of:

• Legal expenses
• Marketing
• Production
• Video production
• Video shoots
• Props
• Location

I really didn’t know what to expect, so instead it was a deliberate learning by bumping into things. Learning by doing is sometimes the only way, and now I am more informed by my previous mistakes, I can keep a closer eye on what we’re spending money on and not spending money on.

Leaving the ‘legal stuff’ too late

A word of warning with anything legal: it’s a lot easier to put contracts in place upfront, and much more expensive and messy agreeing rights arrangements and royalty flows after the event.

Kwazi is a great creator; he could wander in and grab somebody from the corridor to appear on a track. The track would be brilliant, but there would be zero paperwork. At times it felt like I was chasing in a legal ambulance and cleaning up the roadkill – there were a huge amount of ownership and royalty rights that weren’t being regulated and agreed, and that all needed fixing.

Over time we adjusted the protocols that existed.

Not having enough voices to contribute

To me there can never be too much diversity of thought. I constantly benefit from people’s knowledge and like to have a different person’s expertise for each facet of my ventures. If I were to go back and start up BCR again, I would get qualified people to advise much sooner. I left it longer than I should have to get some really good brains around the table. Even now, I’d like to continue adding more diversity to the BCR advisory board.

It’s necessary for any successful venture to have a collection of people who have different life experiences, backgrounds, and industrial experience. For example, we have YouTubers whose expertise is audience building, record people who grew up inside the music industry, successful established musicians and professional PR talent. With this wonderful bunch of people I have an interactive way of communicating over WhatsApp where I will get all of their opinions on certain topics, and a rifle shot approach, where I ask specific questions to specific people with the expertise to help me.

Not knowing what marketing works and doesn’t

There’s a huge difference between marketing for vanity metrics and marketing for real and authentic engagement. In the music industry, likes and comments are of zero value if your audience are not engaging and listening to the content. Real engagement leads people to buy and consume your work, and vanity metrics are good for the ego, but it doesn't affect anything in any meaningful way, and you often end up paying for it.

Now I have a much keener view on what works and doesn’t, I probably wouldn’t have wasted money and time on vanity metrics and would have doubled down on finding Kwazi’s authentic and engaged audience sooner.

Not utilising a horizontal reach strategy

There are some really interesting marketing tools out there, and in many cases marketing has never been easier. I've come to learn what each social platform and channel is good for. YouTube ads are highly effective for attentive reach and real engagement. I’ve seen that TikTok is a really interesting tool for virality and for a younger age group, Instagram is fantastic for building a visual brand image, and search is a great way to be discovered and drive people to Spotify for little cost.

Thinking through the wilderness of channels in social media platforms and having a horizontal strategy about how you use each is equally important to having just one that you go really deep and hard on. In Kwazi’s case it’s Instagram, which we then use to push people to YouTube and Spotify to engage with the content, but we would look to diversify a bit more with hindsight to use social media to our full advantage.

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Despite labelling these mistakes, they were part of the thrill and central to getting better, one step at a time.

It's important to be okay with making the mistakes – they are half the fun. I sort of masochistically enjoy the glorious failures along the way. When working your way through your first, second or third venture, it's also much easier to learn from experience than it is to read about it somewhere, or listen to it being told to you. It’s worth jumping in and seeing where it takes you because there’s no point in being afraid of failure, it will teach you a lesson for next time.

– Craig Fenton