Labels

The artist we produced a music video is from a hip hop genre
Through my own research of other British hip-hop artists

Island Records UK (devlin..tinchy stryder..ndubz..lil wayne)
lowkey -independent record label lowkey productions
shady records: american hip hop record label founded by eminem and his manager Paul Rosenberg
interscope records: american record label owned by UMG

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_hip_hop

british hip hop labels : back bone labels (dj supreme)
cash cow records

We researched a variety of different record labels to choose one label that our artist could potentially be signed to. We created a criteria that the chosen record label had to have. This included the ability to attract to a wide an audience as possible and to be able to have the links and connections to other corporations and companies to be able to achieve this.

We explored the music industry to search for the best possible record label that could cater for the needs of our artist. We came across London Records which were originally marketing in US, Canada and Latin America but their headquarters are situated in the United Kingdom. They were formed in 1947 and are still active today. However they are now a semi-independent label.

They used the UK market to release American labels since the British branch of Decca Records and the American branch together formed London Records. They released the first 2 UK releases from Motown. However, the label was best known as the American imprint of the newly formed The Rolling Stones in 1971.

British Decca the company who first formed London Records were acquired by PolyGram in 1979, therefore it gave them an opportunity to obtain several subsiary and accosicated label. This gives London Records the ability to carry out cross-media promotion of their artists using a variety of methods that they can now afford. This cross-media ownership of many subsidiary companies that are also labels and specialised in the music business gives them the chance to promote their artist maybe in different territories or to a different target audience. Examples of label corporations that they now have acquired or are associated with now are Colonial, Monument, Parrot, Garpax, Deram, Phase 4 Stereo, Systematic Records etc. This is a major reason why we have chosen this particular record label as it was a part of the previous criteria that we came up with.

Universal Group the owner of American Decca acquired PolyGram in 1998 as well as the British Decca that they acquired before, that jointly formed London Records. Universal is a part of the ‘Little 3’ along with Columbia which are part of the Hollywood greats formed in 1920. This means it has several subsidiaries and has cross-media ownership of other corporations. This gives it a huge opportunity to obtain cross-media promotion. Universal Group also specialise in music therefore have a lot of knowledge about how to promote or support an upcoming new artist. Universal group is part of Vivendi-Universal and the

Vivendi corporation is a French media corporation that consists of television, music, film, publishing. This merging of enormous corporations that have several subsidiary company have the prospect of promoting each others work and dividing the profits equally by beating out the competition to acquire maximum income. There are a variety of lots of different acts that Universal music group acquire some are very well-known others not. Examples of which have broken through are Cheryl Cole who is very successful in the UK and trying to soon dominate the States too. N-Dubz too are artists signed to Universal Music group label who target the same sort of target audince we are trying to target, which are teenagers aged 11 to 19. The recently formed 2000 and since then they have had 8 top 40 hits and several awards including 2 MOBO awards. This proves that Universal can successfully market artists so that they get maximum publicity.