College Students Get AEMMP'ed Up on Indie Music

With the music industry undergoing a major sea change caused by decreased sales, its no surprise record labels are searching for ways to make a profit. The Arts Entertainment Media Management Program at Columbia College Chicago is no exception. The student-run record label has rebranded. For WBEZ, Althea Legaspi has the story.

It's three weeks to D-Day for the students of AEMMP - the senior-only, student-run Columbia College label. These students, who had to pass rigorous criteria to participate in the program, are debating what bands to play during an upcoming in-studio interview at Q101.

ambi from class

The year long class culminates with their final project, a showcase featuring the bands they've signed. It was a long year, and these students started from scratch. Lauren Harris has been with AEMMP the longest. She says the program has changed dramatically.

HARRIS: This time they let us make our own decisions, but they bring real world knowledge and really... (student: question us) Yeah, they question us. Even if it's we already made a decision and it's the right decision, they're still gonna play devil's advocate so that we have to think about it from every side, and really engage in the conversations, as opposed to just kind of sitting their going 'I think we should do it this way...'

The impetus for these changes landed on new AEMMP instructors David Lewis and Martin Atkins. Lewis was a music publicist and Atkins owns Invisible Records. Together they brought a different kind of spirit to the classroom.

LEWIS: Martin and I both come out of a fairly DIY background and I think that that kind of point of view on a record label, as it's been taught here in the last 27 years, hadn't really happened in this sort of punk DIY sense, so I think that Martin, I don't want to speak for you, but I certainly came from that sort of “You do it all, you figure it out.” You get your hands dirty, you get in there.” And it wasn't as segmented certainly in the world that I came up in. And therefore with working with students, we all have roles, but I think we're all aware of what we're doing, so it's not you do A&R and you do this and you do that. Instead it became: what is our mission? And what's our, what do we care about? What's valuable about a record label in 2009?

They re-launched AEMMP by learning from the past. They interviewed former students, who shared that during their AEMMP first semesters they'd battle about what band to sign, and Lewis says by second semester those classes had completely fractured. A former artist of the label shared that the students were initially excited, but weren't even in touch by the end of the year.

Rachele Guastella, a former Columbia student and a current AEMMP artist who performs as Rachele Eve says the label was very supportive this year. She was considered for a past AEMMP release, and she says there was not much communication. This time was different.

GUASTELLA: A lot of the students showed this enthusiasm not only for the product they were gonna build, but even towards me personally as an artist and what I could contribute.

Some past AEMMP classes were unable to deliver a final product. And while this year the class indeed delivered, they were not exempt from arguments. As Nick Terry explains, with seven creative student minds, some ideas led to fights.

TERRY: Coming up with something that actually made sense and would work in today's music industry, we kind of fell apart a little bit. And it was a little bit chaotic to begin with.

Like former AEMMP students, everyone wanted to sign an artist - that supposed glamour that comes with being in A&R, or artists & repertoire, the people responsible for signing bands to a label. Instead, Zak Jablow says, their class discussions led to something more rewarding.

JABLOW: After a little coaxing from Martin Atkins and the real world slap-in-the-face that you know nobody buys albums and compilations a smart way to go through the back door, and expose 21 bands instead of one band, it all started to click for us.

Each student had the chance to submit bands they wanted on the compilation. In other words, they all functioned as A&R for the label. To narrow down the many band possibilities, the students employed a modern technique. Jablow explains.

JABLOW: A lot of the disputes were settled by numbers. We actually tried to keep it really fair and really democratic and just do what was going to be best, based on fact. So, we utilized Google docs, and that allowed each one of the seven class members to put their band that they were pushing for, put the number of Myspace hits, put facts that made them unique in their market, what they could benefit for the album and then we used that to relay – if like let's say Nick and I were butting heads on one artist, we could say 'Well, my artist has more of a push in the Midwest, where your artist has more of a push outside of the Chicago area. Let's use this artist.'

That wasn't the only modern marketing tool they added to their repertoire. They offered several ways to purchase the music, from T-shirts with sewn in dropcards to physical CDs. And Matt Baker says a whole new way to promote and inspire emerged.

BAKER: We also started thinking well OK how does this stand out from any other compilation and that's why we've got digital dropcards involved and that's why we started researching into these different digital properties like Twitter and Facebook and you know getting a blog up, because seeing the way things work today, record-label wise as opposed to 27 years ago when AEMMP first started record-label wise, I mean it's, to say the least, a completely different world.

Co-owner of Flameshovel Records James Kenler says finding new and economical ways to promote and deliver product is important in today's market.

KENLER: With the rise of blogs and digital downloads and with the usefulness of social networking, it may actually be in some ways undercutting traditional ways of marketing product you know through traditional press and radio especially. So definitely it's advantageous that these kids are on the cutting edge and thinking outside the box…

With a mere $18,000 budget, the students say AEMMP functions as a real company with real problems. As Vincent Dawkins explains, they had to run lean, which mirrors true-to-life label situations.

DAWKINS: A lot of record labels are running on kind of these skeleton crews, likw you gotta look at Touch and Go for example, they just cut about 25 staff members and they're running as a catalog label…and we have seven of us here that are you know we're basically not relying on any outsource work…All of us are kinda bringing all the skills that we have together and communicating with each other, and doing so effectively.

One full year of playing “record label” and ironically enough only one student, Zach Jablow, says he would consider working at one after graduation. Most feel the real life model is unrealistic. One thing they all agree upon, however, is that they learned invaluable life skills. As Mark Kucera shares.

KUCERA: They didn't, you know, say, 'this has to be a record label, we have to work as a record label.' What we did more is like learn how to solve problems and learn how to deal with artists and learn how to deal with publishers and managers, and anybody, not just in the music business, but in business. Period.

Sound lessons for the real world.