Catching up with our customers, this time we had a very pleasant conversation with Matt Allen, co-founder of "The Famous Company", a globally recognised boutique & music agency. Throughout this article, Matt shares with us an overview of their journey in the music industry and the work they do at their agency. He digs a little bit into their mission to help independent artists, managers, and labels to break into new markets. Get a quick recap on some dos and don'ts for a successful music career launching and learn about The Famous company's work with radio promotion and label services.
My name is Matt Allen, I am the co-founder of The Famous Company, a globally recognised, boutique, music services agency. Since first launching in 2010, we’ve built a team of award-winning industry professionals who offer a range of high-end services for labels, managers, and artists across the globe.
Our mission is to serve the independent music sector with high-quality creative, mentoring, and promotional services. As an established business, our mantra has always remained the same – to take great talent further and make great music.
Over the last 10 years, we have assisted artists, managers, and independent labels from London to Los Angeles, Sydney to Sheffield. Together, we have helped thousands of artists to launch a music career, secure airplay on international radio and TV stations, achieve millions of streams on Spotify, sign sync and licensing deals, and take the stage at high-profile events including the London 2012 Olympics.
Over the past years, we have used a number of radio monitoring tools. After seeing the distribution of the budget when it comes to airplay monitoring, we wanted to find a more modern, user-friendly, and intuitive way of tracking plays in real-time. It didn’t take too much research and shopping around before we found WARM back in 2018 - and since then we haven’t looked back!
The intuitive nature of WARM (even without knowing the ISRC number) is fantastic. Fingerprint and Music Recognition Technology are unique. I love seeing a campaign turn a corner. In that sense, seeing the airplay data in real-time means that we have the right information at our fingertips to scope the results of our work. From checking in with the radio stations that are playing the track to discover the support the track is getting from other radio stations that we haven't been working with necessarily.
Some radio stations don’t acknowledge a music submission - they play the track straightaway. Historically it might have taken a while to get this data, so WARM has really been a game-changer for us. We’re able to beat the station to it, to thank them for playing our songs and to come up with a proposal to schedule an interview or live session as a direct result. There are so many new releases each week, to be able to “strike whilst the iron is hot” with a radio station that has played a track means that we’re able to deliver a better overall result for the artist or label we are working with. Real-time data means real-time results!
In addition to the intuitive service that WARM provides, we also use Promoly to send a large number of our promotional mail outs. The ability to send glossy, fully designed mails which are not only on-brand with the artists’ release, but also with us as a company is really important.
Promoly also provides a unique way of tracking results of a campaign including submissions opened, tracks played and downloaded, comments, and even sends reminders automatically. To say it's a time saver would be an understatement - it's our number 1 go-to resource for a number of our campaigns.
What makes The Famous Company unique is our approach to artist development. As we mainly work with emerging artists and independent labels, we know that the budget is limited. This is why an element of mentoring or project management is so important with every new campaign.
In the past I have seen so many artists use their budget inefficiently on unnecessary promotion by signing up to work with a radio plugger who didn’t fully understand their project. We approach all new campaigns by first understanding the objectives of the artist or label with the release. Only then are we able to create a campaign that full fills these objectives as a cookie-cut; “one size fits all” approach is no longer appropriate in the 2020 music industry.
That’s why WARM is the perfect platform to monitor radio plays. They offer a set of bundles for a different number of songs at different periods of time starting from 1 month. With that said, we can easily work out a win-win deal for our artists, monitoring airplay for pre-agreed periods of time that suits them the best. Moreover, we are able to monitor multiple tracks at the same time when using bundles; the more we monitor, the more we save. Even though most of our campaigns last 8 weeks, we usually monitor the radio airplay for 3 months. At The Famous Company we'd rather keep an eye on the plays coming in once the plugging has ended, this practice helps us when planning our artists' next campaigns.
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Discover the WARM story of the Grammy Award-winning songwriter, Imogen Heap: here.
Discover the WARM story of South African urban artist, Mo-Nitta: here.
