About Labels
Labels are both extremely common in the music industry, and extremely notorious to a degree. Labels are companies that proclaim to help music artists that are struggling to grow their audience, sometimes making good on that claim, more often than not they aren’t doing that. They tend to be extremely predatory, usually coercing artists into shady deals to sign away things like the rights to their own music, life insurance policies on said artists with huge debts, and work that can’t be exited out of.
Some of the labels, including the major ones like UMG (Universal Music Group - yes, that Universal) have pasts deeply rooted in connections to
the criminal underworld (a good way to launder money), followed by mysterious sudden deaths of artists, mafia leaders with major shares in
said companies, and mass theft from venue-goers. However, this is a largely obscure fact, and is becoming irrelevant to an extent. The
internet has changed the world, and has changed the passing of information (information as in a quantifiable message of data) with it, making
companies such as UMG far less involved in artists’ lives despite their insistence (i.e. investments in subscription services such as spotify
for a larger cut of subscription prices than individual artists or small groups), artists can get by without them now much more easily (not to
say they won’t be targeted by them anymore though).
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