Corporate brand record labels

Happy Thursday!

As a way of offering you all a deeper window into my writing process, something I’m going to try to start doing more often on my Patreon page is sharing music-specific company databases that I compile for my own research purposes, and that are not available publicly elsewhere.

Most of these databases will revolve around a specific sector of the music business (e.g. ticketing, mixed reality, merchandise), and/or around a focused research question related to music or entertainment.

As an inaugural example: I’m working on an article at the moment about non-music brands that have started record labels over the past decade — such as Starbucks’ short-lived label Hear Music, W Hotels’ singles label W Records and J.J. Abrams’ label Loud Robot. Apparently even Build-A-Bear has a record label now, too.

I’m fascinated by the question not just of which brands are launching their own labels, but also why they’re doing it, how they’re running it (e.g. are they partnering with a major label on distribution or administration?) and whether said branded labels actually work in the long run.

In doing research online, however, I found that there was no comprehensive, central resource tracking this kind of brand activity in the music industry over time. Instead, there were only one-off articles about specific brands and label imprints, fragmented across several different publications. Hardly a helpful experience.

So, naturally, I decided to compile this central resource myself.

The final version of my article will analyze key patterns that I glean from this group of companies, and what I think they mean for the future of record labels, brand partnerships and the music business at large.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this database so far; it’s admittedly incomplete at the moment, but most of the blank fields will be filled in over time as I continue to do research.

I’m interested in learning about more historical examples of brands that have tried and/or failed to get their own labels off the ground since the 2000s or so. In particular, based on my database, there seems to have been a time period between 2008 and 2016 during which virtually no brand launched a label. While that kind of makes sense in terms of economic trends at that time, I still find the gap in activity hard to believe.

So in short, if any information is missing or inaccurate, please let me know and I’ll update the database accordingly. It’ll help my writing a ton!