Prepare for Takeoff: Release Planning & Building A Team
With AWAL's VP of Community, Phil Loutsis and Byta founder, Marc Brown.
Tuesday 30th November: 5pm GMT
Free registration: https://byta.co/hwl-live-8-phil-loutsis (live online via Zoom)
Release planning, securing editorial support, building a team & marketing your music. Our next guest is AWAL’s VP of Community, Phil Loutsis. He focuses his energies on helping indie artists build their careers. Part of his role includes curating content to help creators and managers make the best use of their resources. He enables artists and their teams to better tell their stories. He wants you to think of digital distribution as the canvas for the campaign rather than a bolt on service.
AWAL is a disruptor, a British music distribution company founded in 1997, believing that no size fits all. Unlike major label deals, AWAL offers deal structures to artists and independent labels without them giving up ownership or control. The goal is to develop long-term music careers, with different deals for different stages. Phil Loutsis is a big part of building and sustaining those music careers - harnessing community with artists, creators and their teams.
This is a new monthly online event that will be presented in two parts:
A workshop: tips, advice and insights for tomorrow’s artists & music industry leaders
An interview with Phil Loutsis (with host Marc Brown), who will discuss some of the key elements musicians and their teams should be focused on when planning their next release.
About the Event
This series is designed to deliver the knowledge to enable tomorrow’s artists and industry leaders to better manoeuvre their way through the music ecosystem. Providing a fun and insightful Q&A along the way!
#HowWeListen Live: In Conversation will be hosted by Byta’s founder, Marc Brown, whose deep music business background and digital audio knowledge have helped him deliver unique insights to audiences from Tallinn to Toronto. Marc is a former label owner, A&R, manager and radio plugger.
Key takeaways:
Release planning: what should you do before, during and after release day?
Digital Distribution: wrestling with lead-times & delivering the goods
Measure the impact of your release campaign: achieving goals with your music
The digital landscape and global music communities
Metadata: the importance of correctly labelled music
Turn streams into insights: what can listener data tell you?
What you should look for when building a team around an artist
Event Format
#HowWeListen Live (part 1): The workshop will introduce industry insights that Marc has picked up from his work in A&R departments, running his own radio promotion company, plus years of experience managing artists and significant large scale projects. Some of the topics he will touch on include artists teams, timelines and connecting the web of the music industry. Plus, most importantly, tips on what you can do yourself to better increase the chances of your success.
#HowWeListen In Conversation (part 2): Each event will feature an in-depth one-to-one conversation. Philip Loutsis has been at AWAL since its early days, when it was getting attention for presenting a new way of doing business, a disruptor challenging the music industry’s standard practices. With a lot of hard work, focus on artist longevity and career building, AWAL made some noise. First acquired by Kobalt they most recently became a part of the Sony Music Family. Indie to Major, but still indie. What is it that AWAL does just right, and what insights will Phil impart?
About Byta
Byta (“Bee-tah”: the Swedish word for exchange) is unrivalled in taking advantage of the unique properties found in audio files – reading and writing file metadata, converting file formats and delivering fast yet secure streaming. Enabling everyone to send & receive digital audio in a clean, simple and secure way. Byta has also launched #HowWeListen, their not-for-profit, dedicated to providing musicians and their teams with the knowledge required to move their careers forward.
About Phil Loutsis
Phil Loutsis is the VP of the AWAL Community Team looking after the platform business and developing artists and labels. Having moved to London in 2016 to help develop what are now the Artist & Label Development teams for the company, his focus over the last few years has been AWAL's platform business where the company empowers artists with great support and tools.
About Marc Brown
Marc is the founder of Byta / byta.com. Run as a distributed team across 3 continents, Byta enables everyone to send & receive digital audio in a clean, simple and secure way. Built for everyone working with music today.
He has an extensive music business background and considerable digital audio knowledge which have helped him deliver unique insights to audiences from Tallinn to Toronto.
Marc got his start at murderecords, Canada’s premier artist owned label during the mid 90s. After working in A&R at the legendary London indie Creation Records, then at Alan McGee’s Poptones, Marc started his own boutique UK radio promotion company off the back of his success with The Hives. For over 10 years Marc worked with an impressive list of indie rock luminaries including Wilco, Bloc Party, Conor Oberst/Bright Eyes, Spoon and Refused as well as legends such as Tom Waits, Yoko Ono, Booker T and Mavis Staples.
Marc currently lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.