The Billboard Music Awards have never interested me much, because the magic combination of radio play and chart position results in awards always going to obvious choices. The Grammy Awards aren't much better, but occasionally the nation will discover a worthy like Norah Jones or Shelby Lynne via an unexpected Grammy win. This never happens at the Billboard Awards. Billboard's by-the-numbers approach is designed to award only success already achieved.
Like the few casinos that can afford to compete for whales, increasingly, only major labels can handle the expensive studio time, promotional budget and marketing power required to make an artist a Billboard winner. This year's big finalists—50 Cent, Linkin Park, Shania Twain—are no exception, mostly coming from the releases of the likes of Universal, Sony and Warner Brothers.
But with mergers, downloading and layoffs, these are hard times for those players, and in the past few years I've often written, gleefully, about the afflictions of the music industry and its inability to adjust to changing times. This year, new Billboard nominees are again garbage like Justin Timberlake and American Idol detritus, which once again demonstrates that the big labels have yet to change from a business model that uses a few marquee artists to pay the bills for dozens of crap releases whose creators find their careers mere fuel burnt to launch one in their midst into orbit as the next big star.
But look closely at the Billboard nominees these past few years, and there is one independent label that has managed to consistently buck every trend in the industry: Wind-Up Records. Most independent labels work niches the major labels choose to ignore, yet Wind-Up goes head to head with the big boys in breaking new artists (of course, picking its battles with care).
Wind-Up doesn't bid for big stars or chase the latest trends but specializes in signing and developing bands that make the sort of earnest hard rock—Creed, Seether, Drowning Pool—that can mean everything to a teenager. These are career artists, so Wind-Up keeps promoting and pushing releases long after another label would have called the disc dead. They also stick with acts that don't catch on instantly. A major would go broke this way, because the trick to this approach is in being selective—to use the old term, to have ears: to understand that Creed have a career and 3 Doors Down have a hit.
According to label vice president Steve Karas, "We don't put out that many records. Of the records we do put out, every single artist is given the best opportunity to have a career. Our success rate in building audiences is very high. We have been very fortunate. Seether is almost gold, Drowning Pool sold well over a million copies, and Creed is one of the biggest success stories of the last 10 years."
This year, the breakthrough band at Wind-Up has been Evanescence, which is up for a Billboard for New Artist of the Year. The story is typical for the label. "Evanescence was signed to the label a couple of years before there was any release. It is a perfect example of not rushing the record. That [wait] had a lot to do with the record that did get released, and a lot to do with them being ready for opportunities when they presented themselves."
Thanks to the single "Bring Me to Life," Evanescence's debut has sold millions of copies. "It is a testament to the fact that 'Bring Me to Life' struck a cord with a lot of people," Karas says. But there is more going on here. While no one can make people like a song, Wind-Up's attention to detail certainly has made a difference in terms of reaching the people. Take the Billboard show:
"Billboard has always been a show [at which] Wind-Up has attempted to do things very special. Usually the program does one act away from the MGM, and it's something we always hope to be able to secure. At the end of the day, it really tends to stand out. These are very large financial commitments. This is something where the show does not cover the full financial cost of this production. It is shared by the label. But there is nothing more important than presenting an artist as best you can and you have to be prepared to really commit."
This year Evanescence will be the remote performance (according to published reports, the location will be the neon-sign graveyard). And here is the advantage of outmaneuvering the newly budget-conscious major labels for the spot playing off the Grand Garden stage:
"The first Billboard, we did [the remote] 'Higher' from Creed—during the height of Human Clay—on the roof of the Rio. It had an enormous impact on the record itself. Every performance with every artist at different awards shows yields different results. With Creed doing the roof of the Rio, it was an enormous upside. The record the next week after that performance did something in excess of 500,000 copies. This was a record that was not new, but that had already sold millions of copies."
The success of Wind-Up certainly proves that a little care and a lot of effort can still result in a profitable label—if you have the ears.
Contributing editor Richard Abowitz covers entertainment for the Weekly.