The curse of the vanity label: for every Communion there are a dozen Lily Allens

http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/nov/21/vanity-label-communion-lily-allen

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So farewell, then, ITNO records. You know, ITNO records? Yeah you do – it stood for “In The Name Of”. Come on, it was Lily Allen’s label. Yeah, Lily Allen had a label, it started in 2011 … Jeez, well anyway, ITNO records is no longer around. And that means the label that brought you the distinctive sounds of Tom Odell, Cults and, er … OK, just Tom Odell and Cults, will no longer be making its indelible mark on the pop cultural landscape. But should we surprised that Lily’s label has been terminated by Sony because of, according to reports, a lack of signing new talent?

Not really. Pop star imprints often fail to run as smoothly as the idealistic ideas behind them. Julian Casablancas, for instance, recently admitted his Cult Records was losing money, despite the fact it boasts critical darlings Karen O and Cerebral Ballzy on the roster. Mike Skinner’s The Beats sounded like a great idea on paper but failed to find artists whose quality matched that of the man running the operation: true, he launched the career of Professor Green, but that would have to be offset at the end of each financial year by the knowledge that The Beats had also inflicted Example on an unprepared public.

Given the headaches involved with running a label, the main question is why pop stars would want to run one when they already have the rather more glamorous job of prancing around onstage to be getting on with? Led Zeppelin’s manager Peter Grant once poetically described vanity labels as “a lube job for the ego”, and he would know: Swan Song, the label Led Zep launched in 1974 to put out the likes of Bad Company and the Pretty Things, was pretty much left to him to take care of when the band lost interest.

Looking at the kind of acts that pop stars like to sign, usually pale facsimiles of the artist in charge, you’d have to admit Grant had a point. Noel Gallagher’s Sour Mash, for example, announced its arrival with Proud Mary, a bunch of trad rockers from Manchester whose only major difference to Oasis was the fact they were completely rubbish. Earlier this month, Ed Sheeran chilled the very marrow of the nation’s bones by announcing his own label thusly: “I’ve got my first signing in mind. I’m looking at people like me …”

But whereas everybody wants to have a big desk that they can put their feet on after rolling around the office on something vaguely ergonomic, there surely has to be more to starting up a label than ego alone. Most pop stars – believe it or not – quite like pop music, and so it makes sense that they might want to help the careers of other artists whose music they like. After all, you can reasonably assume most of them must be pretty good at things like spotting a tune, or leaping on a trend. And they certainly have the knowledge of how to make things more artist-friendly, in order to improve creativity.

In the case of Communion – which was set up by Mumford & Sons’s Ben Lovett – that meant enabling their folkie roster to jam with each other and collaborate like it was the 1970s and they all lived in Laurel Canyon. Whereas Ben Howard and Michael Kiwanuka – or indeed Mumford & Sons – might not be everyone’s musical cup of tea, it’s hard to deny the label/community is a success story.

But this idealistic image of running a label doesn’t frequently chime with success. It’s perhaps telling that the first imprint set up by a big star to support the music he loved and give artists creative freedom – Frank Sinatra’s Reprise, established in 1960 – was sold to Warner in 1963, at which point most of the acts he signed were promptly dropped. Great label bosses and A&R folk make their money not simply by allowing artists infinite creative expression but by telling them to stop dicking around over the middle eight and to take all of that slap bass off the chorus immediately. They also like to make sure things run to budgets and arrive at a time to maximise promotional impact - not necessarily skills your common or garden musician is particularly adept at. And not necessarily things that you can just dip into if demands on your time are high.

“It was extremely difficult to be a manager and run a label,” Grant told the New York Times in 1992. “Managing Led Zeppelin was a 24-hour job. You can’t be a one-man empire builder. It was a mistake; there weren’t enough hours to do it all.”

Given that ITNO ran out of steam almost exactly a year after Lily Allen returned to the rather all-encompassing job of being a full-time pop star, she’d probably have to agree with him.