MISCONCEPTIONS

Junae Brown is an American entrepreneur in the music industry known for her expertise in marketing. She is a former administrator at RCA, Columbia Records, and Sony Music. She is the founder and director of Browned 2 Perfection, a Creative Marketing Agency focused on helping creatives and companies become the best version of themselves. 

Junae has been a great friend over the years and during a recent discussion, I asked her, “What do you think is the biggest misconception about record labels?'' This week’s essay is a slightly edited and condensed version of her reply:

I guess there are a few. One is.. it's... and this is hard to say because I won’t say it's not about music, it is, but essentially, music is the product. You can’t forget that. 

Music is an essential force in our lives. It’s not going anywhere. But it doesn’t matter how dedicated to music the people in the building are, the labels are about selling a product.

Imagine if you worked at Coca-Cola corporate. Everything you’re doing is because they need a coke in somebody’s hand. Several cokes. Millions of cokes in millions of people’s hands every day. Not for a time, but every moment of every day. 

Somewhere right now, there are millions of cokes being cracked open. Everywhere. That’s the label. That’s what this business is. 

Think back to how labels even formed and started. Most of the people who started these things weren’t music people. Which makes sense, because it probably would have never got off the ground if it was only us in there, right? 

They had to have business people who saw an opportunity. Imagine them saying, people really like music, how can we make a lot of it? Then how can I get the biggest cut out of it, cut down the production cost as low as we can get it so we can mass produce these songs and be rich forever? 

Everybody that works at a label falls under that umbrella. That’s their goal: We need to make money.

I always say, instead of the music business, put the business in front of it. That’s how you got to think: It’s a business. As passionate as those of us who love it are, and as much as it matters, I never want to cheapen the meaning. Music is more important than any of this, right? But the business of music is the business of music. 

It's almost as if they could take music out and replace it with bananas instead. They wouldn’t change much. Not even the departments. A&Rs would be traveling all over the place to find the best fucking bananas. 

That, I think, is the biggest misconception about labels. It is not the music playground of your dreams. I mean, it is. But it's not. It’s a job. It’s a business. You can’t forget that. 

I hate it because, depending on the kind of person you are, either you can take it or you can not. Think about it. So many people want to be inside the building. And I get it. It's shiny. It represents something; it symbolizes something. But depending on the kind of person you are, what happens in that building might turn you off.

When people ask, as an agency, as a marketer, what makes you stand out? I tell them: I am the perfect bridge between corporate and culture. I understand cultural importance and the corporate bottom line. I know both. 

Come to me when you want a creative, an empath, or if you want to be talked about, I got you. But most companies are like: We need sales. I also got you. Because if we can’t have both impact and income, we’re wasting time, and I’m not into that.