A friend from home is in an up and coming band. He recently reached out to me to get my thoughts on if his band should sign a deal with a label. Here is my response:

Hey dude,

Thanks for reaching out, and i’m sorry it has taken me a few days to get back to you. I think you asked a very smart question. I certainly don’t have all the answers but I’ll give you my opinion. Labels have gotten a bad reputation from bands who have been “screwed over” by their label. Although there are some labels who are shady (Victory Records) the majority are not inherently bad. They are businesses, and like any business they are trying to make money.

Think about how a label works in the most basic terms. A band has their shit together but doesn’t have the funding or connections to take the next step. The label swoops in and says “hey guys, we’ll pay for you to record a full length and we’ll buy you on to a sweet tour. We’ll drop $15,000 on you. We’ll take 25% of your merch money/guarantees, and we’ll keep all album royalties. Once we make $20,000 back, we’ll still take the 25%, but you get the album royalties. Lets sign a 5 year contract.”

Is this a good deal? Probably not. The label is essentially giving you a loan on which you’re paying over 30% interest, plus 25% of merch for 5 years. How quickly do you think it will take the band to sell $20k in songs. If it’s less than a year, why not take out a loan from the bank and pay only 15% interest. If it’s more than 5 years, the band won’t make a dime off the record and being broke is detrimental for a band.

I’ve seen bands let their label drop $100,000 on their record, and then get pissed that they’re broke and haven’t made a dime off the record. They essentially took out a loan that they can’t pay back. It’s all business.

So what exactly am I saying? Your band is a business, run it like one. Don’t get starstruck by big names and numbers to the point where you sign off to something that will screw you. Not every label is out to screw you, but every label is out to make money. Know every intricacy of a deal before you sign it and only sign a deal that will benefit both you and the label.

Your band is a business. RUN IT LIKE ONE.

Stay strong; rock on.

Nick.

The last real show I played was on June 21st, 2008. That night reserved itself a small place in my heart. In the grand scheme of things, the reach Parade The Day had on the world was minimal. In the grand scheme of things, the impact that Parade The Day had on the 5 of us was huge, a game-changer. It changed my perspective on the way the world worked. It made me realize that I never had to do a single thing in life that I didn’t want to do. It was all my choice. Being creative is a choice.

I didn’t look at an instrument or even listen to much music during the summer of 2008, and I worked in a factory. Those 2 thoughts seem disconnected, but I assure you they are not. I was lost. By the fall I was found, but it’s not quite that simple. Nick and I started playing music again. We wrote some songs, even played a few awkward acoustic shows up the East Coast under the name Clouds and Cities. We saw fans that associated us with Parade The Day. Any news or music we released, we did so with the disclaimer that we were members of Parade The Day. It was all we knew, it was all you knew. We released an EP because it felt like the right thing to do. We changed our name to Late Night Habit because it rolled off the tongue better than Clouds and Cities. Nick moved to Philadelphia, I moved to Blacksburg, we didn’t talk for months at a time. Nick moved to Richmond, I stayed in Blacksburg. We only talked every few months. The dream never died, but at times that light was really fucking dim. I had plenty of thoughts that my music career was done. Maybe I’d play an acoustic show or 2, but I would never let myself turn into that old guy on the street corner playing covers for no one. Not my style. I digress. Here’s what the point of this paragraph is: The last few years have been a damn journey.

Over the summer, I took a leap of faith. Confident that I wasn’t confident, I moved to Richmond. For the first time in close to 4 years, we were creating on a regular basis. It felt good. It felt like we were back in my parents basement, only cooler cuz it was our own place. We were older, fragments of a percent wiser, and filled with knowledge of what the past few years had taught us. We’ve spent the past few months working on new music. I’ve felt more inspired than I have at any other time since I started writing music. It comes and goes, but it’s here more often then not. However that’s not the point of this note.

I hadn’t felt so alive since that fateful night in 2008, until last night. I’ve just given you a way way way high-level overview to try and paint a picture that the past few years have been a ride. I wanted to lay out a little bit of that journey, so you could see that we were lost, and found, and lost, and found. It took a long time for us to feel confident that we’d actually found ourselves. We had our first full Late Night Habit band practice last night, and it felt good. I’m lying. It felt great. It felt like a weight was lifted off of us. For the first time in a long time, we were playing music again that the 2 of us created, with people we enjoyed playing it with. We were picky about the people we brought into our inner circle but I only made 1 rule when choosing who we would play music with: Whatever we did, it needed to be fun, and we needed to be friends. It sounds simple, but it makes a big difference. Playing those songs made them come alive, for the first time. It inspired me. The rest of my thoughts and feelings are still being created, but I wanted to let you all know where we’re at.

I’m excited to get out and play some new music, with some of the best people I know, for you.

Create cool shit with people you love. The rest will fall into place. Promise.

-Matt

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