Every successful artist, at some point or another, has had to lock horns with his/her music label. The music labels are often seen as the Machiavellian greedy giants and the artist as a slobbering genius bordering starvation. This scenario has painted a rather bleakly unfair picture of the music industry. While the industry flourishes, it’s unfortunate to see that it could be so very broken on the inside. For years, artists and music lovers have kept alive the flame of resistance, and joining that list is 20-year-old Rowe Rowe. His approach, however, is more about bringing transparency to the artist-label equation. Here’s why he thinks it’s important.
Rowe has been involved with music since he was 12 years old. As far as he can remember, he has been recording music, promoting himself, and connecting with the who’s who of the music industry. As he navigated his path, he too experienced the great divide between labels and musicians. He saw it as an utter waste of time and instead of fuelling the fire, he decided to champion the cause of building technology that would facilitate transparency between record labels and the creators.
For Rowe, transparency will “give record labels a sense of accountability in terms of their choices and decisions while empowering the artist with information on how their music meets the market. It will make room for dialogue based on facts rather than suppositions and such transparency is incredibly useful to run a business not just successfully but smoothly as well.”
As Rowe puts his energy behind technologies that can enable such transparency to enter the label-artist negotiations, it’ll be interesting to see what kind of change, if any, it would bring to the overall culture of the music industry.
