The Etownian >> Campus Life
Milkboy Recording promotes bands
Thursday December 04 2008
In case of you haven’t removed your headphones since the 90s, the music and recording industry has changed. iTunes sales now determine the Billboard charts. This year, the cover of Rolling Stone featured the cast of “The Hills” in their underwear. The centerpiece for MTV’s winter season is a dating show starring twin bisexuals. For independent artists, accumulating a million hits on MySpace and YouTube is now the equivalent of hearing their song on the radio for the first time. Record companies used to be the invisible bridge that connected the record store with the band. Now, because of online music services and other variables, the label only serves as an automated teller machine.
To combat and evolve with this veer in the music and recording industry, music retailers have adopted download purchase capabilities and record companies now market their artists on all mediums available, including cell phones and video games. However, Milkboy Recording Facilities has launched the first “label” as an ally for unsigned artists hoping to adapt to and conquer the transforming music and recording industry.
The Unlabel, founded and developed by Milkboy Recording in Ardmore, Pa. is a service that provides recording, marketing, production, design, distribution and management expertise for unsigned independent artists or bands without a contract.
The Unlabel serves as and provides all the services that a professional record label can offer without commitment or dictating the band’s musical direction and image.
Although Milkboy Recordings has long been regarded as one of Philadelphia’s premier recording studios, their staff was highly aware of the changing nature of the recording industry. After two years of modifying and perfecting the service, The Unlabel was unveiled Nov. 14.
With the inspiration of once being a young struggling musician himself, the Unlabel director Tom Laskas’s goal was to direct and educate Milkboy’s current clientele.
“We saw the bands that recorded with us didn’t have a place to go and didn’t know what to do after we gave them their finished product [a CD],” Laskas said in The Miami Student, the Miami University newspaper. “The idea for the Unlabel started out informally to help out our clients. Bands wouldn’t do anything with (their new record) and it would fall apart. So we decided to make it a more formal process.”
The first artist that “signed” to The Unlabel was Sleeping Naked. The duo is the collaboration between high school friends who now attend UCLA and Vanderbilt.
With the combination of dedication to academics and participating in varsity sports, both members’ schedules leave little time for touring and promoting their band. However, by trusting in The Unlabel, Sleeping Naked has over 5,000 friends on MySpace and has sold hundreds of downloads on iTunes in only a few months. The Unlabel delivered these quick results by developing a campaign with a custom template and goal that suited Sleeping Naked.
Besides MySpace and Facebook, the marketing team at The Unlabel posted Sleeping Naked songs, videos and even interactive contests on ten other social networking systems in order to extend the band’s reach.
In addition to Sleeping Naked, The Unlabel serves between 25 to 30 bands, all of whom receive equal focus and are assigned an individual campaign to meet their needs.
While the music and recording industry is still in the process of a digital shift, The Unlabel’s mission statement is established according to Milkboy and The Unlabel partner, Jamie Lokoff. “Most young bands don’t know what they’re doing. They know how to make music, not how to promote themselves. They do the music and we do the rest.”
The Etownian >> Campus Life