Big Arena Records, an independent record company, was set up by musicians for musicians.
I’m a singer-songwriter and guitarist and I formed my first band twenty-something years ago. That band went on to sign a recording contract with an independent record company. Back then, in the context of the music industry at least, the word ‘independent’ had a slightly different meaning to the one it has now.
The label my band signed to, IRS Records - and others like them - were independent of the major record labels (although IRS were actually part of EMI at the time, as were many other ‘indie’ labels). The fact that many labels like IRS stood apart from the long-established music industry dinosaurs and had distributors that were not part of the major labels’ own networks made them independent in the eyes of the industry and provided them with a certain prestige in the eyes of the general record-buying public.
Being independent these days, however, is a much more all-encompassing prospect. Now, thanks in large part to the Internet and to the evolution of digital recording technology, artists, musicians and performers can release, distribute and market their recordings to the general public – globally, in fact – entirely independently of commercial record companies including both the majors and the indies.
With the development of DAW technology and its increasing capabilities and decreasing cost, the growth of home-based recording studios has meant that artists can now be fully self-sufficient, having no need to use any of the big, expensive recording facilities, and, as well as being able to market and promote themselves via social networking sites and via their own shop-front websites, this all adds up to a state of true independence for the artist or musician. The problem is, however, that they often do not know exactly what to do with all this freedom or how to best fully use it to their advantage. This is where Big Arena Records can help.
Big Arena was set up for musicians, artists and writers and is owned and run by musicians, artists and writers. We have musicians interests at heart because that is exactly what we are ourselves: musicians; but we also have the same structure and levels of experience and practical skills that a bona fide major record company has, with all the resources to hand – including promoters, video directors, a global distribution network, a state-of-the-art studio and a team of web designers and developers – that one would expect to find in such an organization.
We value what you create. We are here to guide you, to help you fashion your output and to distribute and sell it accordingly, putting the profits directly into your hands, not into those of some faceless executive or accountant from Warners or iTunes.
Music: it shouldn’t be free, it should be independent.
