UNIFIED expands, rebrands as Unified Music Group: “Artist-friendly should just be the way we all work”

UNIFIED have announced today that the company is rebranding as UNIFIEDMusic Group, bringing their sprawling stable of management, recording, touring and merch businesses under one name.

The changes announced today see UNIFIED’s structure shift to a four-pillar model, incorporating Unified Management, Unified Recorded Music, Unified Touring & Events and Unified Merchandise services.

“I’m really excited for the announcement of UNIFIED Music Group,” founder Jaddan Comerford tells TMN. “The other way we are referring to it is UNIFIED 2.0. For a company I started and has been through so many changes, the chance to draw lines in the sand is really powerful and clarifying. I feel very clear on where our business is going and our new brand and subsequent restructure that has happened really allows us to go to the next level.”

What started in 2002 as Comerford’s label, Boomtown Records, is now one of the Australian industry’s not-so-secret heavyweights, going from a one-man operation to employing 35 people across a range of services.

Here’s how the new struture breaks down:

• The Recorded Music pillar includes flagship labelUNFD, as well asONETWO, NLV Records and Exist. Recordings – all of which were founded with Unified’s management clients. It also includeslabel services for US labelHopeless Records, and REMI &Sensible J-owned label House Of Beige.
• The Artist Management arm folds in the UNIFIEDMusic Group stable, which includesAmy Shark,Illy, In Hearts Wake,Nina Las Vegas,Northlane, The Amity Affliction,Vance JoyandViolent Soho.
• Unified Touring & Events takes in heavy music festival UNIFY, as well as the touring arm UNIFY PRESENTS (in conjunction with Live Nation).
• The merch services pillar is already enjoying a new warehouse space, shipping thousands of orders a week, on behalf of in-house operations24Hundred and The Vinyl Store, as well as forSony Australia (The Music Vault), Warner Music Australia (Maniacs Online, Warner Music Australia), and STL Tones.

UNIFIEDexpansion to the US is in full swing, with an LA office (where Comerford is based) now in operation, and a slate of promotions and new titles also announced today:

• Jaddan Comerford– CEO and Founder
• Matthew Rogers– Chief Operating Officer
• Luke Logemann– Chief Creative Officer (General Manager of Recorded Musicand Touring & Events)
• Rachael Comerford – Co-Owner and General Manager, Business Development
• Nick Yates– General Manager, UNIFIED Artist Management
• Graham Muir– General Manager, UNIFIED Merchandise Services
• Maya Janeska– General Manager,UNFD
• Conrad Lloyd– General Manager, UNIFIED Label Services
• Ben Patashnik– UNFD Label Manager, UK and Europe
• Oliver Mitchell– UNFD Label Manager, North America

The company has also moved to a new office space – “basically sharing a wall with the Corner Hotel carpark in Richmond,” laughsnewly minted COOLuke Logemann, who was Boomtown’s first employee and has been with the company through its various incarnations since 2006. “Which means that we are five minutes closer to our favourite pub in the world.

“It’s actually pretty crazy to see this building fill up with people to the point that we are all sitting on each other and then now to be going to a new space that’s so massive and well planned is great.”

To mark the company’s relaunch announcement, TMN spoke exclusively to Logemann about Unified’s success, breaking downthe adversarial norms of the music industry, and the future of Australian heavy music.

TMN: Why do you think Unifiedhas been so successful? What does it come down to, in your eyes?

LL: I think that Jaddan, for one, is an absolutely an incredible leader, and he has been able to instil a culture amongst the company of being hungry, being respectful and being just really dedicated and there is definitely a certain type of person we employ. Over the years we have actually employed a lot of my best friends, knowing that they do fit the kind of culture and personality here.

A lot of what we have done has just come from everybody just working together and having a really distinct vision and really well planned out goal setting and that kind of thing.

The mission statement is ’to improve the lives of artists’. Is that supposed to distinguish you from the other guys?

It’s funny isn’t it? Artist-friendly should just be the way we all work, because how are you meant to run a music business without the people that make the music you know? It should go without saying but we feel the need to mention that and that’s because it’s something that definitely resonates within this group of people and what we set out to do.

More and more companies are either spinning off management arms from labels or vice versa and bringing more things in-house. Why do you think that is?

I can’t really speak for other people but I think for a long time there was a music industry culture of record labels versus managers, versus agents, everyone sort of working against each other.

One of the reasons you needed all these different people involved was because that kind of friction was how you could make sure you got the best results but I think that we have just gone through a period, I guess, of downturn in certain parts of the industry. Just the way the economy has worked is that I think somewhere along the line people have realised that working together to achieve a great result that is actually better than working apart, everybody trying to push against each other.

For a long time people thought it was a conflict of interest to manage a band but also be a record label but I think that comes down to the situation. Everything can be a conflict of interest but if you have the right people around you and the right people working towards a common vision it doesn’t have to be that way and so that’s why I think a lot of people are getting involved in doing a lot of different things. They trust themselves to do all that kind of stuff. I am sure there’s more cynical ways people could read it but that is the way that I read it.

Do you see the potential for conflicts between the different arms of Unified or situations where they might be working at cross purposes?

Well one thing to be clear on is that we have never signed an artist and just gone ’You have to do all this.’ So we’ve got artists like Vance Joy and Amy Shark, where the only thing we do for them is management, and then we have artists that are just signed to the record label, like Allday.

So we don’t force anybody to do any of these things – if people want to be part of the label and then want to also be managed by us and then also would like to do publishing through us or all these different things we offer… It’s all a la carte – the idea is that it’s the artist’s choice [as to] which parts of these services they actually want to use.

In the way that resolves [potential] conflict? It’s not necessarily that it does, it just means people are choosing the way they want to work and they are choosing the people they want to work with. We’ll quite often start off with one service we do with an artist and then over time we will end up doing a little bit more stuff with them and I think that is because the trust relationship with them is built and we are able to integrate things properly.

I think that ’a la carte’ is a good way to phrase it.

Do you know what’s really funny about that? Is that word, like that phrase I actually got from our original press release I was going through everything since the company rebrand and stuff, I was working through everything and I was like I wanted to go back to our original press release and I saw that wording there and I was like, ‘Hey I really like that we haven’t really used that since.’ I just never thought of referring to it in that way. It also made me a little bit hungry when I said it.

“for a long time there was a music industry culture of record labels versus managers, versus agents, everyone sort of working against each other”

Could you have pictured it working like this a decade ago?

No, not necessarily – like you know there were plenty of times early on where you would be sitting around drinking beer talking about the way you want things to be but I didn’t think that I ever really … I think we surpassed my wildest expectations sometime around 2014/15 so everything from here is just pretty much new dreams and new visions.

In that time you’ve seen a lot of changes for the heavy music community in Australia. Do you feel like fans of heavy music are kind of underserved or underappreciated in the industry at the moment?

Ah, yes and no. I mean I think compared to where that world sort of was ten years ago no one really paid much attention to it, and even five years ago no one even really paid attention to a lot of the Australian artists unless they were named The Amity Affliction. We’ve got the increasing support of triple j; alot of news sites and websites, I don’t think a lot of those people were even aware of an underground kind of heavy scene ten years ago.

So I think it’s been growing and growing and growing – there’s going to be replacements for Soundwave, that’s all in the works. Those kids will get catered to. And the bands are still touring and there’s still shows on every week for people to go and see. I think they are actually going through a bit of a boom.

Still that said as well I think it will to continue to grow because there are so many incredible bands, so many bands touring overseas as well and dominating overseas – we had Northlane playing main stage at Hellfest and main stage at Download festival in the UK. Large headlines, huge shows. And you know Amity, Parkway [Drive] is still massive, there are just so many bands doing so well overseas, which is pretty exciting.

Our export rate on heavy bands is really impressive at the moment.

Oh man it’s insane. We were actually just doing the math and we’ve got 9.3 million streams so far on Northlane’s record, which came out three months ago I guess, and 6 million of those are coming from outside of Australia and that’s a lot you know. You know there are a lot of bands in the same boat – it’s pretty exciting.

MORE: Read TMN’s exclusive behind-the-scenes story on the campaign for Northlane’s surprise albumMesmer

That initial and continuing focus on that scene is really what you’ve been able to build this success on, isn’t it?

Yeah, I mean like the main people that have been in this company, which is myself, Jaddan, Matt Rogers and Nick Yates, we’ve been around for … you know all this for 8 years, and we all grew up listening to punk rock and hardcore and metal and that kind of thing and we’re all heavily involved in the DIY of that scene I think, which is the sort of reason I think is the reason we were able to build this company in this way.

I think that over time, different people grow and start listening to different music and stuff like that and I think that’s what a lot of the people here have kind of done. So that’s where the sort of growth has been – I’ve tended to stay working within that sort of heavy sphere and heavy music is a massive passion of mine and still to this day 90% of what I listen to fits within the metal or punk rock world.

That DIY spirit is what that scene is really famous for so I guess it’s been part of the companyethos as well.

It is. You just go do it, get something done, go do it.

This interview has been edited and condensed.