Hot Seat: Making It In The Music Industry… with Dan Nevin, AIR

TMNhas revived Hot Seat to offer our young industry subscribers an insight into what it takes to make it in the music business.

In just under a month, theAustralian Independent RecordLabels Association (AIR) will hold its10thannual Carlton Dry Independent Music Awards in Melbourne. This year also marks the 20th anniversary of AIR, an indie body which has successfully advocated against unbalanaced policies and legislation, and created a nurturing platform for emerging and independent artists.

In November AIR's CEO Dan Nevin will have been in the role for one year; Nevin chats to TMN about what he's been up to since taking over from Nick O'Byrne, what he sees as his biggest challenge increatinga fair market, and whether there will come a point when indies won'tcall on the Big Three.

You’re coming up to your one-year anniversary as CEO of AIR in November, how has it been?
Extremely busy. Challenging. Rewarding. It all kicked off with Face The Music, EMC and the ARIA Awards all happening within my first month. I also spent a lot of time in the early months introducing myself or reacquainting with a number of our members. 2015 so far has been inconceivably busy. Being a small organisation, there has been a load of ongoing operational stuff to tend to. We’ve had staff and board changes, we’ve led a delegation of labels to Indie Week in New York, we’ve been involved with online copyright law reform, we’ve built a new website, we’ve represented the independents at interstate and international conferences and that’s just to name a few things that I’ve been up to.

You’ve personally been at the forefront of streaming since your time as digital music manager at JB Hi-Fi, what moves have you made within AIR that relate to streaming?
Generally speaking, I’ve just made sure that we are regularly in contact with the streaming services, discussing opportunities for the independent sector and staying abreast of the ongoing movement in this area. More specifically, as part of the Worldwide Independent Network, we made sure that our voice was heard, expressing our members’ concerns proceeding the launch of Apple Music. Thankfully the service was launched with royalties being paid during the free trial period, as anything less would have been catastrophic for many independent labels and artists.

What’s been your biggest battle in advocating for fair market access since taking up the role?
A big challenge for us in this area has been a lack of real data to support our advocacy and lobbying activity. We know anecdotally that the independent market share in Australia is estimated at 35% but to be truly heard, real data is required. We are about to commence a data research project that will provide real numbers and we expect we may find the independent share to be higher than has been estimated. Another challenge for us is having government give contemporary music the just recognition that it deserves. Specifically the cultural and economic impact that independent artists and labels make in Australia. With the recent changes at a Federal government level, we’re hopeful that it will bring with it an increased recognition for Australian contemporary music. That said, we’ll continue to work on building the independent sector’s profile at all levels.

Many independent labels and artists take advantage of major labels for their services arms, do you think there will come a point when indies won’t call on the Big Three?
Distribution and services options are ever evolving. The options range from doing it yourself through to major labels and I expect this will continue to be the case. With regards to indies partnering with majors, for the most part it tends to be for physical distribution. Physical music will still be around for some time to come but as the numbers decrease, distribution may become more manageable for indies to do it themselves or partner with specialist distributors. From a digital perspective, many independent labels either self-distribute or use a specialist digital distributor. If the independent label is aligned with Merlin (the global digital rights agency), their deal with services will be on par with the majors, so they won’t necessarily need to look elsewhere.

How has it been filling Nick O’Byrne’s role for the AIR Awards’ milestone 10th year?
I don’t think anyone could ever fill a role that Nick has left. Nick has been an amazing advocate for independent music for so long and continues to be. The Awards have gone from strength to strength under Nick’s guidance and the general consensus is that last year’s Awards were the best yet. Pulling the Awards together is a huge task but we’ve got some good people assisting, so hopefully we can continue building on the great work that Nick, and Stu Watters before him, has done.

How much do you personally have your finger on the pulse of which bands are gaining traction locally each week?
I love checking out our Independent Music Charts that we publish on our website weekly. Particularly the radio chart, which is where you’ll see many of the bands that are starting to gain traction. For the same reason, I also love checking out the AMRAP Charts. We are also fortunate to constantly hear about loads of new bands from PR companies and our members. This year, there have been so many independent bands building momentum, way too many to mention them all and it wouldn’t be fair if I just mentioned a few.

How was the response from the industry to voting compared to previous years?
Response to Awards voting from industry was as strong as ever this year. Being my first year with the Awards and voting, I’ve been able to see how we might be able to improve parts of the process next year. Although ultimately it’s the industry and our members that decide on the nominees and winners and this won’t change moving forward.

The Best Label category has been running since 2012, how is the winner decided?
The Best Independent Label nominees and winner are chosen by our members. The long list of nominees includes labels that have had artists and releases nominated for Awards this year and it is from this list that our members cast their votes. It’s a really important Award as there are so many independent labels working tirelessly behind the scenes to make things happen for so many independent artists. We think they all deserve awards but we haven’t quite worked out how we could facilitate that.