Editor’s Note: This article includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.
In his column “Mainstream & Margins,” Rishi Jeyamurthy ’28 tackles high-profile events in the music industry and the overlooked stories reshaping it.
The past few years have been promising for independent artists and niche music fandoms. But what exactly is “indie music,” and why does it exist?
“Indie” is an abbreviation of independent music and describes artists who are not signed to a record label. While indie artists may operate on their own, they’re still part of a larger industry shaped by institutions and legislation. The music business functions behind a web of record labels, copyright law and independent artistry that shapes how music is made, shared and monetized. As either a consumer or creator — or both! — of music, it’s become increasingly helpful to understand the gears turning behind the scenes. Let’s break it down.
Record labels are companies that work to develop, promote and sell music created by artists signed to their roster. There are hundreds of established record labels musicians sign to, and the vast, vast majority of them are subsidiaries of Universal Music Group, Sony Music or Warner Music Group — a trio referred to as “The Big Three.” Musicians sign contracts to these labels that can be symbiotic or really quite nefarious. To make that distinction, however, we must understand the copyright law behind these contracts.
Publishing rights and recording rights are the two main distinctions of creative rights. Publishing rights are the rights to the composition of a musical piece: the musical ideas that include the lyrics and melodies. Recording rights (also known as “masters”) are the rights to the recording of the song itself — the file that you download on iTunes or stream on Spotify.
Both rights generate revenue in their own respect. Recording rights generate money any time the released song file is played. When a record is sampled in another song, played on the radio, streamed on Spotify, sold in a store or placed in movies or TV shows, it generates recording royalties.
Alternatively, publishing rights generate mechanical royalties any time the song’s composition is reproduced. Mechanical royalties typically translate to money from covers, interpolations and — importantly — concerts. When an artist performs their songs on tour, their live performances are technically considered covers because they (hopefully) aren’t just playing the file you hear on Spotify. They’re reproducing the material they wrote and therefore generating money from owning the publishing rights.
There are various agreements that artists and labels can come to, but the most common arrangement in a contract is for a label to take 70-80% of the masters while artists retain 20-30% as an advance payment — a loan that can be up to millions of dollars — along with any portion of publishing agreed upon with a publishing company.
The more successful an artist is before they sign a deal, the more negotiating power they have and the better their split will be when they re-negotiate after a few years. Because artists usually own such a small portion of their recording rights, they often rely on their publishing rights and other revenue sources to make a living, like ticket and merchandise sales. In a “360 deal,” where the label is involved in nearly every revenue source for an artist, the label can eat this money up too and give artists a much larger advance in return (it’s speculated Drake’s deal with Republic Records in 2021 was worth a whopping $400 million).
If the artist rarely keeps a majority of their rights, why would they sign to a label in the first place? Artists often agree to such egregious splits because labels have the potential to provide immense resources and support in growing the artist. If a label cares enough to truly invest in an artist, they can help them build a team with agents, attorneys, accountants, business managers, tour managers, publicists — the list goes on. Labels also handle a combination of the artist’s marketing, merchandising, touring and facilitate the creation of music by connecting artists with studios, producers and writers. Before digital distributions like TuneCore and DistroKid, labels also controlled distribution and were the only way an artist’s music could be played on the radio or placed in stores.
In a successful record deal, this exchange of rights for resources wins the artist broader exposure. However, all that concentrated power means a label can also shelf an artist, meaning they stop investing in them, effectively putting their career on pause.
However, this doesn’t mean record contracts are futile. At the time of writing this, there are only five artists — Bad Bunny, BigXthaPlug, Imogen Heap, Tito Double P and Zach Top — on the Billboard Hot 100 who are fully independent or are signed to smaller “indie” labels without support of the Big Three. BigXthaPlug is the only artist on the Hot 100 who uses a fully independent distribution service like the ones we discussed earlier: in this case, UnitedMasters.
Institutional record labels have long held the cards when it comes to manufacturing large marketing campaigns and playing a song on the radio so much that your pet could sing along. That’s why most of the world’s biggest artists like Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande are signed to the Big Three; they have machines working behind them. However, as the barrier to entry for music creation and promotion continues to fall, I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future we see a career-long independent artist become a household name.
