The Promise of a 50/50 Partnership: tinyOGRE
The vision and core values of senior players in the record industry can hardly stand out in the recent history of mergers, chronic restructuring, changes in executive staff, and, above all, the overriding need to preserve outdated business models. As the Big Four become increasingly more rudderless, there is an ever-growing disparity between the services they offer and the needs of the individual artist. tinyOGRE, a new label, seeks to fill some of this void offering a value-based partnership model for artists.
Its CEO, Steve Lerner, spent four-year doing his own introspection about the business, after leaving Wind-Up Records’ chief executive office in March of 2007. He had witnessed the dissatisfaction of artists and the financial shortcomings of a major. He decided he would realign his focus on what he considered to be the core asset of a music business –the art itself. He built the new label on the principles of trust, transparency, and steady alignment (of interests) between the label and its artists.
In fact, tinyOGRE works on a much more intimate level with its clientele. It forms separate corporate entities with each artist–usually in the form of a Delaware-registered LLC. These are actual business partnerships that are structured as a 50/50 split, giving the option to the artist of buying back, at the end of the contract, the tinyOGRE half of master recording, as well as the publishing rights . “We are really partners with the artist,” says Jim Cooperman, COO/General Counsel at tinyOGRE. “We’re business partners, and we’re partners on virtually everything the artist does in the entertainment industry.”
tinyOGRE has partnered with four artists, including the Klaxons and Ian Axel, whose debut albums Surfing the Void and This is the New Year were released, on January 18th and February 15th respectively. Ian Axel has already secured placement of his title track on MTV’s latest reality show, I Used to be Fat. More recent signees, Motopony and The Wilderness of Manitoba are scheduled for releases later this year.
The tinyOGRE model represents a paradigm shift back to a more wholesome and meaningful motivation for selling music. The company pairs management services with artists that are relatively undeveloped. “In our model, the manager is a quarterback, and we work together to build a team,” Cooperman says. “We pull together these teams looking for the best-of-breed on a project-by-project basis.” With that in mind, the approach becomes somewhat reminiscent of the 1960’s, a time when the record company and A&R reps sided with artists for long term partnerships that aimed to strategically build lucrative and sustainable careers…The notion is [that we] want to pursue avenues of entertainment and creativity with our artists beyond the traditional recording, publishing, or merchandising sense. We want to use our network of contacts to give [artists] opportunities,” says Cooperman.
For the time being, tinyOGRE has no plans to push for any sort of expansion past the small-sized startup that it currently is- -and for a good reason. While overhead budgets are tight, Lerner’s believes, again, in his original mission; i.e. the building of long-term trust with the artist, the offer of more accountability and transparency, and the recognition of an interest shared in common. Revenue growth, for the moment, is taking a backseat. The philosophy is well suited to develop talent too. “We’re not in a position where we want to sign an [established] bidding-war artist,” he says. “We want to find great, talented career artists…get to them early” and build them.
Given the uncertain future of the traditional record industry, along with the recent surge of online music career-building do-it-yourselfers, the idea of a management partnership service like tinyOGRE seems to fill a logical void. As the Internet continues to enable worldwide promotional exposure to independent artists, demand for professional services on career planning, strategy, organization, and finance will become higher than ever. tinyOGRE may demonstrate over time that artists and business professionals can work side-by-side to produce a truly meaningful and valuable music product.
By Evan Kramer
