Daniel Sokolovskiy’s Blog: posts tagged JOOF

Interview for LabelRadar

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 21:57:47 +0100

I had the privilege of giving a short interview from the label manager’s perspective to LabelRadar, a platform for streamlining demo submissions.

I like this question:

Question: How important is an artist’s image and branding in today’s music industry?

Daniel: I wish it’d be otherwise, but branding is important. Social media are still king, even though it pains me to say that. Establishing a good online presence and building a strong fanbase is equally, if not even more important than making good music in the first place. Modern technologies lowered the entry barriers so everyone can be a music producer or a DJ now, but at the same time it created a lot of “noise” and one has to break through in order to stand out. And sometimes, music alone is not enough for that.

Read the full interview on the LabelRadar’s blog:
blog.labelradar.com/interview-daniel-sokolovskiy-joof-recordings

Music listening routine

Fri, 16 Apr 2021 09:56:19 +0100

Tell me how you organize the process of listening to music: demos coming to the label and just new releases in different genres. Do you listen on the speakers or on headphones? Do you multitask it with other things (like replying to emails and doing social media stuff)? Do people around you complain about the constant “boom-boom”? How do you manage to stay focused on the music to listen to all the tracks thoroughly?

Nikolay Glazyrin

Thanks for asking. I honestly don’t know how it could be helpful to anyone, but I’d be happy to share.

Listening to demo recordings

First let me tell you about the demos. The demos come in an endless stream of about 30 to 100 emails a week to the label. To reply to all of them at once as they appear in the inbox means to be constantly distracted and waste attention, and I try to work in a concentrated way. Moreover, some tracks are so bad that I can’t listen to them just in the background :-) That’s why for some time I put emails into a special pile and then answer them all at once – it’s more productive that way.

Read about A&R duties

Speaking of email, I use HEY. There you can literally click “Reply Later” on emails and then respond to them all at once in “Focus & Reply” mode. It really helps. HEY is cool in general, maybe I’ll tell you more about it later.

Listening to music

Now about listening to music in general. I have two listening modes, as I call them: passive and active.

Passive mode is when I listen to music in the background, doing my own thing. I used to listen to Soundcloud, Apple podcasts, radio stations, and YouTube, but now 95% of my background listening happens on Spotify because everything is more convenient and there’s a better chance of finding something good.

Usually, I turn on some suggested playlist on Spotify or a “Song radio” based on a track I like and go about my business in comfort. I don’t concentrate on the music in any special way, which is exactly why I call this kind of listening mode “passive” – something is playing, and that’s fine.

As soon as I notice something cool playing, I press ⌥+space and <3 – this is the system-wide shortcut I made to automatically “like” tracks, i.e. to save them in my collection. And then it’s also broadcast to the Telegram channel. It’s faster than switching between applications and clicking on the tiny “heart” next to the track’s name.

A heart, kind of. Alfred app

The automation is set up with Alfred app and the Spotify Mini Player script. Alfred is fantastic, maybe someday I’ll tell you about it too.

This way I listen to music for about ten hours a day, so I happen to find quite a lot of interesting stuff. I usually play background music through my speakers.

Of course, not all music suits the background, especially if you need to work thoughtfully: for example, I find it hard to do with hard techno, but I’m okay with progressive house or chillout.

Active mode is when I’m purposefully looking for something: a track with the right tempo and key, a new release from a particular artist or other releases from a particular label. It’s important to hear the details, so I often listen with headphones while actively searching.

I used to use the Beatport Pro desktop app for this, but since the beginning of 2021, it has been discontinued. Now I use the Beatport website, even though it is much slower and more limited than the app, plus old-good Spotify.

I only need to listen to a track for about five seconds to know if it’s a good fit. This is a very highly concentrated listening mode in terms of the amount of new musical information per unit of time, so I can’t listen like that for a long time – two or three hours at the most. It’s important to take breaks, otherwise, my ears get soaked and I might miss something interesting. During the breaks, I either go back to background listening or get away from the computer altogether and switch to something else: running (also with music, of course), eating or sleeping.

Luckily, I don’t cause any trouble for the surrounding people, not anymore :-)

A new studio!

Fellow readers, where and how do you listen to music?

My A&R duties

Tue, 16 Jan 2018 17:15:40 +0100

“Please tell us about your duties in the position you have at the label: is your pay fixed, do you get paid a lot, how do you combine it with other things and how do you do it remotely, and how did you get the job? Maybe you can tell something else interesting that I didn’t ask?”

Konstantin Karpachev

About the label

The label I work for is called JOOF, an acronym of its founder, John ‘00’ Fleming. The label was founded in 1998 (celebrating its 20th anniversary this year!) and today is highly respected among fans of underground trance music.

JOOF consists of three sub-labels: JOOF Recordings, JOOF Mantra and JOOF Aura. Each one has its own style. I’ll throw a couple of examples below to make it clear what we are talking about.

On JOOF Recordings we release progressive, trance, sometimes a little bit of techno:

Eeemus – Dunes Of Kaatrah

Facade – Vuohi

On JOOF Mantra we have psytrance with a non-mainstream sound (secretly, Mantra will have a little rebranding, I’ll write more later):

Amygdala – Soaring Flux

Robert Elster – Recrystallization

On JOOF Aura we have progressive house:

Tim Penner – So Far From Here

Rick Pier O’Neil – Throaty

My role

My position at the label is formally called A&R-manager, and I’m in charge of artists and repertoire.

Since the label is quite famous, a lot of artists want to release music here and send us their demos – a hundred emails a week. My main task is to listen to all the incoming demos and decide what fits and what doesn’t.

If the track fits our labels, I add it to Trello and we discuss it with the team there. The final decision on each track is made by the boss, John Fleming. In this sense, I act as a “filter”, first passing everything through myself, and only putting the best demos up for discussion. From my experience, it’s about 1 out of 200~300 demos.

Managing a record label duties with Trello

In addition to that, I also communicate with the artists on the label and help with internal communication. In a nutshell, that’s it.

How I got the job

I got the job almost by chance: I just received an invitation letter and I took it. I hadn’t even thought about such a job before.

I had already released a few of my own releases on JOOF Recordings, so I had a trusting relationship with the label. I don’t know what criteria I was qualified for the position, but later the general manager said that he liked my writing and blogging.

I won’t tell you about the pay – that’s confidential information between me and the label, which I’m not going to disclose. And as for the how to manage everything, that a whole another topic.

How I use to-do lists

In the end, I will share an experience about what all this has given me. Working as an A&R allowed me to look at the industry “on the other side of the border”, gain new experience, reputation, and acquire hundreds of new contacts. If you are a musician and have an opportunity to work for a record label, I recommend you to take this chance.

All in all, I don’t know how such stories can be useful to anyone, but if you are interested in anything else about labels or the music industry, feel free to comment below and I’ll do my best to answer.

Insights on sending a demo to a record label. Part 2

Wed, 17 May 2017 15:58:47 +0100

It’s safe to say that my previous advice on sending a demo is one of the most popular articles on this blog: there are thousand of upcoming producers looking for a proper way to reach out record labels, and I hope these insights helped to shed some light.

Today, I would like to continue that topic and share five more short tips on sending a demo to record labels based on my experience of A&R.

“Void — A Sector To Avoid” art by Kuldar Leement. So as this artwork title suggests, in this blog, we’ll talk about things to avoid

Send only finished track

People often say something like this: “here is a 15-seconds draft of my new track, I’ll finish if it fit your label”. What? How can label approve something that doesn’t exist yet? What if this 15-seconds snippet is fine, but then you will suddenly come up with something entirely different than not suits the label?

Demo is a demonstration of your best skills. So show a finished track, not a half-assed product.

Double-check your links

You’ll be surprised how many broken links labels see in their inboxes! From my experience, roughly every third link is broken due to incorrect privacy settings of the track or just because of copy-pasting a wrong URL.

Apparently, I’m not alone with this. Here is what Basil O’Glue, a manager of Saturate Audio, wrote on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/BasilOGlue/status/774167314556071936

Producers! Please, double-check your links, be sure another person can open it.

Simplify your signature

Have you ever received an email with a signature that includes full sender’s address with ZIP code, fifteen links to all of his social pages, several international phone numbers, fax (who the hell still use fax nowadays?), and a huge wall of text of “dont-print-this-email-save-the-trees” and other bullshit? If so, you probably know this feeling: it’s annoying.

Such signature is nothing but a visual noise, it takes extra effort to scan the email searching for some meaningful text. Please, don’t do that. Keep it simple, your name and one link to your website are totally fine.

Don’t brag too much

Ah, this is my favourite: listing the entire discography, every single DJ’s support, and all chart appearances. Why, just why are you doing that? What the logic behind it? Every time I receive an email like this, I imagine two label managers having this conversation in my mind:

— A quite mediocre demo, not for us...
— Yeah indeed, not good enough...
— Hold on, he said his previous track has been supported by David Buretta!
— Seriously? Sign him up!!!

Jokes asides, please don’t show off all that stuff unless it’s relevant to the label or that particular track, it’s not cool.

“Please suggest some label where it might fit”

Sometimes, when I say that the demo doesn’t fit the label, some smart guys come back asking “can you suggest some labels where it might fit?”. This question sounds harmless at first sight but just think about it for a second. Imagine if you would fail a job interview and then ask: “do you know other companies that might be interesting in hiring me?”. Sounds, erm... not quite appropriate, don’t you think?

if you don’t make any attempts to learn the industry by yourself, how are you going to work in this field? This is where we came back to what Part 1 begins with: do your research first.

The benefits of “no”

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 09:19:59 +0100

Success story: Tim Bourne’s behind the scenes on reaching out goal through rejections

“Per aspera ad astra”, 1894

One of my daily duties as an A&R at JOOF Recordings is listening to incoming demos we receive on a regular basis. And whether I like it or not, I have to say a “no” as an answer very often. Artists react to rejection differently: some of them never reply back, some others get angry. Well, no surprise: getting a “no” answer is tough, I know it myself perfectly.

But one guy stood out: every time I told him “no”, he came back with the updated track asking for new feedback. Four months later, he managed to make an amazing track that I was happy to sign on the label.

The guy I’m talking about is Tim Bourne, a 22-year-old aspiring music producer from Indonesia. I invited Tim to share his progression in this blog and I hope other up-and-coming producers will find his experience useful and motivating.

From there, Tim tells:

“To me, this drive of wanting to get accepted into JOOF started two and a half years ago when my friend introduced me to the label, ever since then my perception towards electronic music completely changed (in the best way possible). Since that it was something that I had to do, it was more than just a goal for me to make a track that lives up to the standards of the label.

I wanted to know where I sit when it comes to producing, am I really making something that is up to par — quality wise — or am i just making tracks that only sound good to my own ears, even then, my ears wasn’t really catching the small details of music production, I was missing out on so many essential parts of production.

I knew that it was going to be very tough because in my country there is very limited access to production courses or even Psytrance producers, so I had no one to really guide me on what to do technically or musically.

I would have never evolved with my music production if it wasn’t for no’s and rejections.

I started sending out demos to the label since 2015 — 20 years old by that time — and it was just no’s after no’s after no’s. In total, I’ve probably sent over ten tracks and one of the tracks I had to re-do and re-edit over five times due to song length, sound design, not enough variations, you name it... and it was still a big ‘no’. It actually got to a point where I was so pessimistic about myself and my music that after a couple of days after sending ‘The Wounded Healer’ I emailed to Daniel again and assumed that the track got rejected.

But alongside the no’s, Daniel was kind enough to actually give me very useful feedbacks, he gave me constructive criticism that was essential for my learning. And to be completely honest, I would have never evolved with my music production if it wasn’t for no’s and rejections. It was through this that I was able to learn and not just force any kind of sound into a track.

Here are some of the conversation we had on the track:

Of course, it was really hard to accept the fact that my music wasn’t quite cutting it, but either I stop and give up or just push through and make a track that I would have never imagined I’d be able to make a couple of years ago.

It started with this very flat sounding bassline loop with no melodies at all, just a pitched down FX:

0. Flat Bassline Loop

Then I played around with the sound, added a little bit of processing, added hats and a clap and i played around with the notes because my ears were so exhausted of hearing the same note playing over and over again. Came up with this kind of groovy bassline:

1. Groovy Baseline

As I was trying to fiddle around with the bass, I found a vocal sample that was perfect for creating anticipation for the groovy bassline. So I decided to add the vocal alongside a drum fill. I also added more processing to the kick and bass to make it sound thicker:

2. Vocal Entry

After creating what I thought was a strong body to the track, I know I have to accompany it with also a strong melody:

3. Rough Melody

But i was not pleased because it felt like it was forced and it didn’t go smoothly with the track, so I changed the sound and came up with these two melodies:

4. Better, Smooth Melody

Then comes the breakdown which I really enjoyed creating. I always have a thing for breakdowns, to me, it creates the emotion of a track. This was the very first version of the breakdown, very empty and the arp melody just didn’t feel right:

5. Empty Breakdown

So I decided to completely change the arp melody because turns out that it was the melody that made it sound a bit weird. I changed the arp melody, brought back the FX’s and i added some ethnic percussion which drew the breakdown more into the theme of the song:

6. Final Breakdown

I created this melody as a draft but It just didn’t sound right to my ears, I was okay with it but I wasn’t happy with it:

7. Draft Melody

I tweaked the notes of the melody a little bit, got rid of the acid and added more saw’ish sounding synths to layer. And this is what i came up with:

8. Final Melody

And alas, ‘The Wounded Healer’ was born:

9. The Wounded Healer (pre-master demo)

I want to say thank you to Daniel who has given me the opportunity to tell a little bit about my upcoming EP, The Wounded Healer and also the story of how I managed to pull through after so many ‘rejections’ and ‘no’s’. ”

Download the EP on Beatport

Insights on sending a demo to a record label

Wed, 09 Dec 2015 07:03:06 +0100

And how to increase chances for a response

Hi Daniel, as far as I know you are an A&R at JOOF. Can you share some insights on sending demo, how to increase chances for reply, what are common mistakes and how to avoid them?

Brian Timms

It’s almost a year now since I’ve joined JOOF Recordings as an A&R Manager. It’s not much yet, but enough to see the picture from both camps. Brian, I’ll be glad to share my experience and try to answer your questions.

A new role

Do research

Surprisingly, how often producers send non-format tracks that don’t match labels genre. it may sound obvious, but first of all, do a little research before submitting a demo, make sure it is totally suit to style and concept of the label.

Some producers use mass mailing in hope that at least some label will pick their track up, but I assure you, chances to get released on a decent label by mass mailing are very, very low. Unless you want to get picked by “some” label that probably doesn’t really care about your music.

Personalize

In addition to the previous point, I advise personalizing your submission. Rather than simply say “Hi, here is my demo”, which may indicate that you probably sent this demo to other labels as well, add that particular label name in the subject line, or in the track title, or in track description, or wherever.

This little trick instantly gives a feeling of personal demo sent specifically for this label. And this is important. If you don’t care on which label you want to be released, then most likely label won’t care much about you either.

Use official contact

Pretty much all the people in the music industry have public accounts: on Facebook, Twitter, SoundCloud, Google+, and other social media. But the fact that you know these accounts, and each has a “send a message” button, doesn’t mean that labels would be happy to receive your demos there. In fact, it might be quite the opposite.

Personal and business communication are different things, and not all people like to mix it together. I advise to respect the privacy and do not send demos in personal messages on social media.

Instant messengers vs. email for business communication

For instance, Facebook has a sort of protection mechanics, and once a person reached out a certain amount of friends, he no longer receives notifications about new messages and friends request. This said, sending a demo via Facebook is not only disrespectful in terms of business ethics, but also has a very high chance that your messages will not be visible, at all. Think about it.

I recommend using the label’s official contact for demo submission instead. Go to the label’s website or Facebook page, open contacts section, check the procedure. If they accept demos via the form on their website only, then send via the form. If they ask to send an email to a specific address — send an email to that address.

Send links, not files

Never ever attach audio files to the email message. Firstly, because some mail servers and filters have a limit on incoming file size, you risk that your message won’t be delivered at all. And secondly, well, it’s a question of business ethics.

I recommend uploading your files to one of the trusted and reliable platforms, such as SoundCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, or WeTransfer. Make sure to name files properly with artist name and track title, rather than something like “ID1.mp3”.

Personally, I prefer SoundCloud links most of all. But there are three things to keep in mind when sending over SoundCloud:

Turn on download option. Yes, listening online is super handy, but sometimes a person who makes a decision may want to download this track to listen in another environment, let’s say on the phone while flying on the plane.
Keep your uploads private. Labels want to get exclusive material that no one heard before, so public uploads significantly reduce your chances to get it signed.
Make sure you send a private link. This one is a common mistake: to get a private link, you have to click on the “Share” button, and then copy text from the “Private Share” line. Double-check it: the link should include some few random digits at the end. If you just copy-paste regular link from your browser, everyone but you will see this:

soundcloud-not-found.jpg

Send a brief, but specific message

It’s surprising how often I receive emails like this:

Hi,
I hope you’ll like my new track!
Sent from iPhone

Who is the sender, what’s his artist name? What a track he sent, and for what purpose? You can only guess! Most likely, eventually such message will be simply ignored in favor of other incoming messages in the queue. Remember, credible labels with good reputation receive a huge amount of demos, dozens on a daily basis! But please don’t write a huge wall of text either.

The best practice is to briefly introduce yourself, tell something about this track and why do you send it. It’s okay to mention some other tracks or artists you like from the label, this shows you as a fan of the label, which is always a good sign.

A good message may look like this:

This is an example of a clear, simple and polite message, and you can be sure, this one gets higher priority to listen and reply among all incoming queue.

Feel free to use this as a template: one short paragraph about yourself, one or two sentences about this demo, and signature with the main website link.

Be patient

Don’t expect to get a reply back instantaneously. Good manners and business ethics implies to wait for the response at least within a week, this is one of the main difference between online chatting with friends and business communication.

Instant messengers vs. email for business communication

Keep in mind that A&R Managers are often acting artists that have a busy schedule with music production and touring.

It is okay to send a reminder if you haven’t got a reply in 2-3 weeks. But don’t fall into a trap of false illusions: probably, you won’t hear back at all. In one thing you can be sure: if your track is really amazing, well produced and totally fits the label, you will get a reply for sure.

Learn to accept “No”

Being an acting artist myself, I perfectly know how frustrating it might be. But don’t be afraid of “no” as an answer. In fact, this is the only answer that helps you grow up as a producer.

Frustration. How to move forward

Here at JOOF, we give advice and do a sort of mentoring to those artists in who we feel a potential. I’m sure other labels do the same. This is how all together we make our beloved music scene better.

I hope it helps. Good luck with your submissions!

On cover image: astronomical radio telescope at the Atacama Desert. Sometimes sending a demo to label is like send a radio signal to outer space.

New role: A&R at JOOF Recordings

Wed, 28 Jan 2015 15:01:07 +0100

Besides all my projects and activities, from now on, I’m also officially joined JOOF Recordings as an A&R manager. I will listen to all incoming demos, scout new talents, and do internal communication.

John 00 Fleming welcomes me at JOOF Recordings