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06.09.13 MusicWeek 21
LEFT My brother: Robbie Williams was one of the guest singers on The Justice Collective's He Ain't Heavy – both the video and the music were recorded at Metropolis. The group's label then issued and promoted the No.1 charity single
METROPOLIS’ LABEL AMBITIONS
It started as a comparatively small side project within Metropolis, but now its label is growing at a rapid pace. It can already boast its very own No.1 single, with the Justice Collective’s He Ain’t Heavy having pipped X Factor graduates to last year’s Official Christmas top spot. “It’s going really well - we’ve doubled the
forecast for this year,” says Brenchley. “We’re not looking at millions, but we’re up to hundreds of thousands [in revenue] from when it started three years ago. Consistently month- on-month we double what we’ve forecast the income to be. We’ve got some really good catalogue titles out there that continue to sell really well. “The Justice Collective was a great example
events and creative things with content online and TV.
What do you see as your advantages over Abbey Road? Is artist loyalty a big advantage over them? IB: Yes. But it’s comparing apples and pears. Let’s get this straight: Abbey Road is a fantastic, iconic facility - no-one can take that away from them. I wish our brand was as strong as Abbey Road, as a starting point. The bulk of their work is focused on orchestral scores. They’ve got the world’s biggest studio, we don’t do orchestral scores. We focus more on rock and pop. Of course, there’s a bit of crossover there, but I feel we’re the specialist in rock and pop - we do it better than anyone in Europe. There’s also crossover with mastering. They have
a good mastering department, but that’s one of our claims to fame - if you did a Top 10 league table of the world’s best mastering engineers, we’ve got four or five of the world’s best here and the rest are in the US, with one in Holland. It’s not like-for-like with Abbey Road. I’m sure Universal have an impetus to drive a lot of their catalogue through Abbey Road’s mastering now but we wouldn’t have that anyway - EMI would have sent it there and there’s no money in competing with their internal rates anyway. I don’t see Abbey Road as a threat. And then you’ve got to think about the
commercial market contracting so much: there were 96 commercial studios in London five years ago, there’s less than 30 now. We compete more with big name producers or artists setting up their own studios at home in their bedrooms or their sheds.
So no concern that Universal will encourage their artists to record in Abbey Road? IB:Nope. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had meetings with procurements departments at major labels looking to do bulk deals to drive volume at advantageous rates, and they’ve said: “We can, but I can’t tell an A&R guy where to place a work.” You can’t tell an artist, a producer or A&R where to go. CM: It’s very rare that you can tell someone where to place work, or at least that they’ll listen. We offer client service. We understand what labels want. IB:Clients come here for the service and expertise - and that’s where we’ll win. Everyone’s got decent technology now, with ProTools and laptops. You can’t download 25 years of experience. Or air; if you’re a rock band you still can’t record good drum
“I feel like we’re the specialist in rock and pop - we do it better than anyone in Europe. Plus one of our claims to fame is that we’ve got four or five of the world’s best mastering engineers here.” IAN BRENCHLEY, METROPOLIS
sounds on ProTools. You need a big space to do that. And the diversification here makes the market less threatening - recording isn’t all we’re doing.
What artists do you see coming back to Metropolis time and time again? IB: I guess the likes of Rihanna and
will.i.am have been the stalwarts over the last few years, but we’ve had Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page has been in here a lot this year - historically, a lot of West and East Coast rappers. It’s the Top 40 crowd. A recent push is Japanese artists. We’ve had
Utada Hikaru, who’s massive out there, we’ve had [Tomoyasu] Hotei, who’s kind of the Elton John or Brian May of Japanese rock music, if that’s not dismissive. He’s renting a room from us permanently now. We’ve tripled our work out of Japan in the past two years.
Do recent changes in the London recording landscape like Sarm going dormant as it modernises help you at all? IB: It’s always sad when iconic studios go away. I’m reading lots of different articles about other studios changing the way they’re working. Trevor Horn was recently quoted as saying Sarm was built 30 years ago and he’s looking to reinvent it. Hats off to him, I think that’s absolutely right. We’re looking to do similar things in the studios here. But it’s less about big competing studios. We saw it four or five years ago when mastering competitors fell by the wayside. Engineers wanted to continue working but there were no places at facilities - so they setup on their own at home and undercut us all on price. It’s really hurt us, we really took a dip at mastering at that point. But slowly and surely we’ve seen a lot of clients coming back because they can’t offer the service as a one-man-band that we can: delivering invoices and masters [on time], accounting or even do the job at a high quality in a shed. CM: The problem when the clients come back is
of what we’re capable of. It was a nice project that worked really well. We did a lot of the studio and mixing work, did the mastering, the video with Ramy’s audio/visual team, plus all the marketing through our label guys. Luke Armitage in our label team knocked it out of the park. It really showcased what we can do.”
QATAR STUDIO: METROPOLIS’ MIDDLE EASTERN EXPANSION
Metropolis will launch its very own studio in Qatar next year, which it hopes will give it another edge against competitors. The luxury complex is being funded by the
Qatari Government. Explains Brenchley: “We’re effectively a
franchise - they pay us a fee, we run it and advise on it. It should come online in January. It’s been three-and-a-half years in the making. It will be without a shadow of a doubt the world’s most expensive studio ever built - surpassing this one. Tens of millions have been spent on three studios. “It’s really versatile because Studio 1 is
basically a carbon copy size-wise of Studio 1 at Abbey Road. It has an orchestra on salary on site - normal rules don’t apply. We’ll be focusing on orchestral work; London quality but at a price that really appeals. We’ve got a queue of people who want to use it. Six-bedroom artist villa with a pool, a private beach and a 5,000-seater open air amphitheater. The stuff we can achieve there is enormous.”
that it dilutes the rate. People offer a rate lower than ours, but we don’t want to compete in that space and dilute our service. It’s a tricky landscape, but we argue that you get what we pay for. We won’t be drawn on people undercutting the market because it’s already a low margin business - where do you go from there? CM:Ramy and the productions department is really one to watch. It’s a very young department but in combination with our creative team it’s really starting to fly. Ramy’s really becoming in demand now as a director and the scope he’s covering at the money from corporate, to broadcast and his presence in the pop world in a short amount of time is really impressive. He started nine months ago and we’ve since grown to have four people in that department in that time.
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