Following a panel including Beggars Group’s Martin Mills and Kill Rock Star’s Portia Sabin, we’re looking at artists on their rosters and asking, “What makes them two of indie music’s longest lasting labels?”
Mission
Good morning, it’s Jason here at Chartmetric with your 3-minute Data Dump where we upload charts, artists, and playlists into your brain so you can stay up on the latest in the music data world.
Date
This is your Data Dump for Friday, June 21, 2019.
A2IM Indie Week, Day 4
Several Indie icons closed out A2IM’s Indie Week in New York City yesterday, two of them being the legendary Martin Mills and Dr. Portia Sabin sharing what’s helped them make Beggars Group and Kill Rock Stars, respectively, some of indie music’s longest lasting labels.
Beggars Group is the parent company of 4AD, Rough Trade Records, Matador, XL Recordings and Young Turks.
Mills started it in London in 1977, and his many labels have gone on to sign everyone from Adele to Radiohead.
The album’s streaming success is no joke either, as it’s maintained a 70-80 Spotify Popularity Index score over the last three years, and has been included on upwards of 12.5K Spotify playlists.
That kind of success under XL’s guidance gave Adele the leverage to be able to sign an enormous and unprecedented £90 million deal with Sony in May 2016.
No doubt the industry will be keen to check her next album from one of the industry’s biggest major labels.
Now entering the underground, since 2006, Sabin has run Pacific Northwest-based indie label Kill Rock Stars, which has been a home to riot grrrl legends Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney, the late singer-songwriter Elliott Smith, and folk rockers the Decemberists.
Sabin’s roster is more niche than Mills’, but Kill Rock Stars’ ability to navigate catalog digitization and promotion has allowed their artists to prosper.
Smith, for instance, maintains some 1.4M monthly listeners on Spotify, despite the fact that he passed away tragically in 2003.
In March 2017, Kill Rock Stars released an expanded edition of his 1997 album Either/Or, which helped increase Smith’s Spotify followers by around 70 percent to 430K and spiked his monthly listenership by an estimated 250K.
Whether by keen artist development or catalog revitalization, Beggars Group and Kill Rock Stars have each found a way to not only survive longer than most indie labels, but to also thrive while doing so.
Outro
That’s it for Indie Week and your Daily Data Dump for Friday, June 21, 2019. This is Jason from Chartmetric.