Karousel: Uncovering Buried Music
Karousel Music may seem like yet another entrant in the mad race for song catalogs, but a deeper dive reveals an interesting approach to a cut-throat music industry.
We write a daily newsletter on all things Music, and the Business and Tech behind it. If you’d like to get it directly in your inbox, subscribe now!
Hi Everyone,
While the music publishing industry races to bag copyrights of popular songs: something we wrote about in a previous edition of our Newsletter, founder of UK-based Karousel Music; Chris Sheehan believes that there lies an undiscovered sea of music that never got its commercial due.
As companies like Hipgnosis and Universal Music spend hundreds of millions of dollars and continue their search to buy song catalogs from artists and songwriters to give them control over the royalties from their music, Sheehan wants Karousel to follow this approach but in a unique manner.
With the launch of a new label “Buried Treasure”, Karousel aims to bring the undermined and underappreciated artists out of the shadows and into the spotlight for a new group of audience.
But why would people want to listen to old and under-the-radar songs? Surely they were unreleased for a reason, right? Sheehan clarifies this:
“There are so many incredible artists that exist outside the algorithmic matrix with all these untapped, largely unheard, brilliant records, but with no team to help them reach people who’d love them.
Frontline labels and investors are falling over themselves to find and create brilliant tracks and writers but they ignore the astonishing amount of sublime music that has already been made that ticks all these boxes.
Often, that means extraordinary artists trapped outside the wheel devoted to music, but not making enough money to exist. Some artists reach their peak after their moment in the spotlight has gone. Some make extraordinary records when the Zeitgeist had passed.”
Buried Treasure not only aims to use unreleased music but also old pictures, videos, notes, and art associated with that song or artist, in order to paint a picture. The idea is to bring these artists into the spotlight with the most powerful tool in the music industry: “Storytelling”.
The first release on Buried Treasure is the British artist Matt Deighton, who was the former frontman of the 90s Acid Jazz band Mother Earth and served as Noel Gallagher’s replacement in Oasis for a brief while in May 2000. As part of the story, Buried Treasure is releasing a documentary, Overshadowed, along with some of Deighton’s work to date. Check out the trailer to the documentary here 👇🏻
The film has received critical acclaim the past week across the British media including The Sunday Times, the Guardian, The Daily Mail, The Sun, The Observer, and The Telegraph.
According to Sheehan, the project’s emotional goal is to make people question “Why the hell do I not know about this band/artist?”
He believes that it will appeal to the hardcore fans of music that once had a blast listening to these tracks, and will be an opportunity for these artists to step foot into the modern era and reinvent their careers.
The new label venture will also allow artists to gain more control over their income by selling these catalogs to Buried Treasure. These deals are struck at 15x earnings multiples to ensure that artists get their fair share of revenue, a controversial topic in the music industry.
Our take on this?
Storytelling induces an emotional connection between the audience and the artists, and with this, Buried Treasures can create feel-good stories in the middle of a cynical streaming environment- something that we at Incentify talk about in our previous editions called Streaming Wars.
Traditional music streaming apps such as Spotify and Apple Music have converted songs into a utility rather than a luxury, but have so far failed to create the right social network around the discovery and sharing of music.
This is something that we at Incentify plan to solve, by building a platform that enables users to express themselves and create by sharing music and playlists, and discover new songs based on the consensus of other people with similar tastes, rather than a mechanical one-size-fits-all algorithm.
We can’t wait to bring the product to you, till then enjoy these newsletters on all things Music, and feel free to connect with us if you would be interested to know more about what we are building!
If you liked this newsletter from Incentify, why not share it with someone you like? Let’s build the community :)
P.S- Follow us on Twitter now!