They should be helping them pick the right beats, structure, and build those connections." - Onyi Kokelu, Artist Development CMG Records I feel like an A&R should be able to help an artist put forth their best music. A lot of us sign acts before they blow up because we see they have star power or maybe their music relates to a certain audience.
#Artist and repertoire jobs full#
The job is to be able to see an artist who’s not at their full potential but has star power. "To me, the A&R is the person who serves as the liaison between the artist and the consumer. The Internet has shown us time and time again that any artist can be propelled into virality through social media platforms like TikTok and Twitter. As technological advances have continued in the past decade, changing the way people consume and discover music, the industry has been forced to enter its digital era at last. Specific tasks can include bringing talent to a record label, arranging recording sessions, and serving as a conduit between artists, producers, and other creatives. The responsibility of an A&R (short for artist and repertoire) is to be involved from start to finish-beginning with talent discovery and signing, through the creation of the music, to the marketing and promotion. “It really is a 24/7 commitment and job and you really have to be passionate about your artist, the company or label you work for, and all of those things.”
“Being an A&R is much more than signing talent. You’re not the person in the movies with sunglasses on and plaques on the wall in the studio,” Ashley Calhoun, SVP/head of creative at Pulse Music Group. The term seems to mean different things to different people, in recent years becoming a catch all term on social media and beyond for anything or anyone involving music curation and discovery. Stealing a CD would feel like real “stealing.” Stealing a digital file - something far less tangible and buried somewhere within a hard drive - just doesn’t carry the same moral weight to the consumer.One of the most misunderstood roles in the music industry is the A&R. A jewel case, liner notes, lyrics - all neatly packaged and presented as a wall decoration. But it used to be the case that when you purchased music - AKA a CD - you received something real and tangible. And to your point, having artists’ lavish lifestyles thrown in our faces doesn’t help. Stealing is wrong no matter how you cut it, but at the same time, when there’s no incremental cost to an artist or label for the reproduction of a digital file, it becomes harder to sympathize.
And for the younger folks who never really dealt with CDs in the first place, file-sharing and single track downloads are completely organic practices. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that consumers have so little sympathy for the industry as they take back that surplus in the form of piracy and single-track purchases. The recorded music biz captured virtually all of the consumer surplus for nearly half a century by forcing consumers to purchase an album’s worth of music when they were really only interested in 1-2 songs. And what sucks is that even world-class statisticians, researchers, and data miners haven’t been able to truly demonstrate whether P2P actually helps or hurts the industry.
Books have been written about this, and the debate rages on after nearly 13 years of P2P services.
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