www.musicweek.com PROFILEWHITE LABEL PRODUCTIONS LABELLED WITH LOVE
It is almost exactly 10 years since the establishment of White Label Productions, the creative services agency that specialises in classical music. It is celebrating with cake, Champagne and, first, a chat with Music Week
SERVICES BY DAVE ROBERTS
L
ike many companies and the entrepreneurs behind them, the success of White Label Productions and its founder, Cheryl Grant, is
down to a mixture of good timing, good contacts, skill and hard work. If you asked Grant, she’d probably put the stress
on timing and self-deprecatingly try to throw luck into the mix. If you asked her extremely loyal clients, they’d almost certainly promote skill and hard work to the top of the list. A 10-year track record of growth - plus a recent promotion to COO of Target, the group of which WLP has been part since 2007 - would back them up. Just over 10 years ago, Grant was working at
Decca, a company she joined in 1989. She wanted to start her own business – and her desire dovetailed with Decca’s need to restructure, stripping back some of its in-house team and opting to extend its reliance on an outsource solution. Grant left with 13 of her team and set up
White Label, with Decca as its first client. Twelve months later EMI was on board, followed by Warner and Sony. In each case, in-house personnel were assimilated into White Label, meaning the companies could continue to tap into a significant resource, without being troubled by a burdensome overhead. “Large in-house marketing services teams are a
luxury and a massive fixed cost,” explains Grant. “Couple that with the fact that releases can peak and dip, and a static resource doesn’t make much sense compared to an outsource model. “Taking their teams and blending them into our
group meant there was no loss of direction or continuity. It was completely seamless. And there was no step backwards in terms of priority or commitment. We run standalone teams who really care about their label, their product and their artists. “It works because we’ve got the expertise and the
passion. I would like to think that a lot of our clients see us as an extension of the label – we’re as committed to the product, and delivering it properly, as they are.” As well as working on a pretty much permanent
basis with all four majors, White Label also has relationships with a number of the leading independent classical labels plus a range of venues, orchestras and artists. “The industry’s been very supportive”, says
Grant. “We’ve got some fantastic clients and we work with people who are as creative and passionate as we are. We’re very lucky.” And what do these clients get? Well, the simple
answer is, pretty much whatever they need. White Label is a 360 agency and can take a project from repertoire selection to media buying, via packaging and website design. One growing area of the business is packaging – specifically luxury packaging. Grant says: “We have
ABOVE Cheryl Grant: Founder says she hopes clients see White Label as an “extension” of their own business
A recently added strand is the Music3Sixty
produced some beautiful items in conjunction with our clients lately and we think that’s something that will continue to expand, not just with classical and jazz, but also in other areas.” Recent examples include the Decca Sound
box set (pictured); the Mercury Living Presence collection; the Classical Clubhouse series (including hardback books) for children and the Time Traveller tins, both for EMI; and the Complete Bach Edition for Warner. All of them boast high production values sprinkled with touches of innovation which appeal to consumers who see classical music as an investment: the opposite of disposable. Another growth area is White Label’s digital
marketing services – a division that, whilst fully integrated into the company, also operates as something of a standalone unit, working with a wide variety of clients, offering specialist skills and winning more and more business (traditionally it’s accounted for around 10 per cent of revenues, but that figure is building). “They already do much more than classical”, says
Grant. “They work with more indie pop stuff – and they did the website for the Steps reunion. There’s definitely more growth for us there.” Certainly no- one would use the word ‘classic’ in conjunction with Steps. Point proved.
ABOVE High quality: Luxury packaging is a growing area of White Label’s business, whilst magazine inserts have been placed in national press
magazine, produced in-house by White Label for and about its clients and their products. The first issue came out in February, with a print run of 600,000, inserted into The Guardian, The Independent and theDaily Mail (left). The plan now is to publish quarterly, driving readers direct to clients’ websites. Grant says it’s a “great way of reaching a mainstream audience via very accessible editorial”. The magazine is a perfect encapsulation of White Label’s ethos and strengths: it was created for and in conjunction with clients, the expertise and passion is evident, it reaches out to new consumers and it is of conspicuously good quality.
White Label may have been born out of the
major labels’ reticence (or inability) to sustain sprawling in-house teams – but it is also a reflection of their desire to maintain a commitment to classical music. Grant is adamant that rather than indicating any downgrading of priority, it signifies a recognition of the genre’s importance: “It means they are able to call on a bigger and more experienced team, when needed, one far more substantial than anything they would ever be able to maintain in- house. And what’s more it’s a team that is as dedicated to the genre, the product and the artists as any staffer could be.” White Label is expanding, and is already operating
within other genres, but it remains a company that specialises in classical music; a company that exists because of classical music. As with proponents of many specialist genres, be that rock, country or classical, Grant mentions the word ‘passion’ quite a lot. It’s not a word that sits naturally alongside the more dour sounding term ‘outsourcing’, but in White Label’s case, it’s entirely appropriate.
“It works because we’ve got
the expertise and the passion ... we’re as committed to the product, and delivering it properly, as clients are” CHERYL GRANT, WHITE LABEL
20.04.12 MusicWeek 27
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