Ditto Music Australia boss Sarah Hamilton on growth & new hires

After six years in the Australian market – first as a distributor and three years ago expanding its record label services – Ditto Music Australia is amping up its media and physical presence.

Headquartered in London with 24 offices around the world, Ditto’s approach is that it can offer a number of services as well as tapping into each of the international offices.

These include public relations, social media support, creative design, digital marketing, radio promotion, playlist pitching and even funding.

“What we want is for an artist to use our services at any stage, to use a different campaign depending on what the artist wants or needs,” Sarah Hamilton, Ditto Music’s regional manager ANZ tells TMN.

Last week Ditto announced two more services for Australian and New Zealand talent, with newly created roles.

Frank Varrasso is the new radio promotions manager based at the Melbourne office, and Jade Gould is the new publicity manager based in Sydney.

Later this year a marketing manager will come on board, and a digital marketer next year.

Lee Parsons, Ditto Music’s London-based CEO & founder says about the Australian appointments, “We’re very passionate about the Australian music scene and committed to breaking artists both locally and internationally.

“Frank and Jade have such an amazing reputation worldwide and this a huge boost to our growing label services team.”

Varasso started Varrasso PR in January 2009. Prior to this he was the senior director of national promotions and publicity at Sony Music.

Over the years, he has worked in promotions and publicity departments on both a state and national level for labels including Festival Mushroom, EMI and Warner Music.

Gould was most recently publicist at Revolutions Per Minute PR.

Her 15 years of experience includes various roles at Sony Music Entertainment including as director of promotions, and in the publicity department at BMG Music.

Globally, Ditto has 200,000 artists, the biggest artist being Chance The Rapper, and with Stormzy, Ed Sheeran and Sam Smith using them in the early stage of their careers.

The Australian artists make up 5,000.

These have included Tash Sultana, Baker Boy and Kian, who utilised Ditto as a launching pad, as well as Kaiit, Kwame and Louis Baker.

Hamilton emphasises that Ditto is about offering independent artists the option of creating their own journeys.

“That’s important for us,” she says. “We see ourselves as empowering the artist, and work with the international team to help with their pathway.

“Basically we just want to continue working with really good artists and really good labels and really good music, and helping them export outside of Australia and New Zealand..”

Ditto Music also offers innovative product Record Label in a Box, which provides all the tools budding music entrepreneurs need to start and run a successful label and has helped establish thousands of new independent labels all over the world.

In March, Ditto launched a stand-alone management company in the UK and is reportedly expanding into music publishing.