Finding out what’s going on inside record labels is notoriously difficult. This has always been the way, especially inside the majors. So when Raye recently went on a Twitter rampage against her former record label Polydor, it wasn’t surprising when the label initially responded with silence.
A few weeks later, she was told she was officially being allowed out of her contract – the terms being kept confidential, of course. Hence Raye gets to tell everyone she’s an independent artist whilst praising Polydor, the label that was supposedly so bad to her, to the high heavens.
One can only wonder what the people inside Polydor and Universal more widely were thinking at the time. Well, we now have a clue. Sian Anderson, when she isn’t being a DJ at 1Xtra for three days a week, is part of both A&R and marketing at Parlophone Records. Oh, and she also runs her own label called Saint Music. Busy lady indeed.
She revealed in a series of tweets that things are not what they seem.
Artists get away with saying the maddest stuff about the labels they’re signed too, knowing no one from the label is gonna get online and reply, but if they actually replied and broke down what was realllllyyyy happening bts it’s actually long for the artist 💆🏾♀️
— elijahs mum (@SianAnderson) August 19, 2021
For example, one tweet reads “An artist will come online and scream their label isn’t giving them budget for their videos and miss out on the part where the label already spent £200k in their previous videos creative ideas that didn’t work”.
Or another reads “I blame poor management a lot of the time tbh, half the time the artists don’t have a clue what’s going on and are going by what their uninformed managers tell them”.
I strongly suspect that very soon, majors are going to get sick and tired of artists who try and pull these kinds of stunts – and decide to respond to their temper tantrums with their own robust defences. It’s going to be fun when one of them does – not just for mischievous bloggers like me, but by the looks of it, for the majors themselves too…