Sentric Music guest column: on independent music publishing

Sentric Music

The music industry. Isn’t it a whole barrel of fun? There are shedloads of sites that promise ‘to get your music heard by thousands of potential fans’ and whatnot, but how many of them are actually much use? Well that’s where the good people at Muso’s Guide come in; to separate the wheat from the chaff and that’s why I’d like to think they’ve asked me to write a few humble words about what we do over here at Sentric Music.

When someone asks me what my ‘average working day’ is I always have somewhat of a battle with my conscious regarding how honest I should be. Should I squeeze in every exciting thing has happened over the past couple of months into a barely believable nine hours? Or do I talk about that week where I did nothing but stare at various PDFs and Excel spreadsheets whilst doing accounting? Let’s go for a healthy mix of the two eh?

I’ve been at Sentric Music since we signed our first artist back in August 2006 (good old Clipe Sexo Amador, new material coming soon!) and I’m still here three years and a thousand artists or so later. Getting new artists on board can be incredibly easy or bafflingly difficult depending on whom you are speaking to. There are artists I’ve approached where I’ve informed them that if they “go and sign up on our site, which will take no more than fifteen minutes, we’ll be able to get hold of over a grand for you” and they refuse to do so for some inexplicable reason. “What’s the catch?” you might argue; well, that’d be our 20 per cent. Some artists on the other hand are happy to receive anything upwards of a fiver, or ‘beer tokens’ as they’ve been referred to before. … Continue Reading