22 Music Week 14.12.12 www.musicweek.com

PROFILE RSK

Label services is a phrase that seems to begrowing in popularity these days as musiccompanies and artists big and small look for

more flexible ways to work across territories.It’s also a phrase that makes RSK

Entertainment’s joint managing directors SimonCarver and Rashmi Patani smile. “Everything you’dtick off the list for label services is what we weredoing in 1995,” Carver tells Music Week.Emerging from Koch UK, RSK is this year

celebrating a decade of providing foreign labelswith feet on the ground in the UK and independentlocal expertise for its partners.The word ‘partner’ is important, because, despite

having come from the giant that was Koch – theGerman-owned firm was once the third biggestindependent record company in the world – Carverand Patani have established a very personal business.RSK’s offices are a departure from the norm in

themselves. Rather than being sandwiched in atower somewhere above the London smog, Carverand Patani have made a home in the country atWelford’s aptly named Home Farm. The exposedbeams of the barn conversion offices frame clean,green views out of the window - a relieving contrastto the high-pressure concrete maze of the capital. A diverse range of clients has seen the music

marketing and distribution company offer bespokeservices and full release solutions for labels in everygenre from rock and blues to jazz and classical. It has done so with consistent success: Music

Week sat down with Carver and Patani afterGramophonemagazine awarded its Record OfThe Year Award to Heinrich Schutz’sMusicalische Exequien by Vox Luminis andLionel Meunier on Belgium’s Ricercar label –represented in the UK by RSK.

How did RSK emerge back in 2002?Rashmi Patani: We started at Koch where I helpedset them up in the UK. They were huge inGermany, Austria and Switzerland. Soon after Ijoined I brought Simon in and between us weshaped Koch UK. We never towed the Europeanline, we always did what we thought best.Simon Carver: When the US came to fruition andKoch Entertainment was born, we sat between bothhouses – we were German-owned but had a closeaffiliation and a cultural tie with the US. As such wewere always kind of the stranger at the table.

Whenever the European A&R meetings wouldhappen, Koch’s ethos was ‘own label, own artists’and what was challenging in the UK was that 99%of the repertoire was completely unsuitable for thismarketplace. So we evolved as a third-party concernas opposed to a label, which was in contrast to theEuropean setup. That was where we developed this

It was that which saw us help reinventMotorhead, for example, rechart Whitesnake, dorecords with Jimmy Page and The Black Crowes.RP: If you fast-forward, those clients were still withus all the way through to 2002. At the end of 2001the European group of Koch was sold to Universaland all those clients basically told me and Simon toget on with buying [Koch UK]. So, on December20, 2002, we acquired the company and all of ourclients at that stage looked forward to the newventure and supported the pair of us. It was theirsupport that we’d already enjoyed for the past five to10 years that continued.

You’ve said your business is about makinginternational labels successful in the UK…SC: To quantify the ‘make international labelssuccessful’ tag, when we took on SPV, Motorhead’sprevious album Sacrifice sold 1,500 units in the UKand they couldn’t sell-out The Forum. The very firstalbum we worked with sold 18,000 in the UK andit was at that point that Motorhead began thatone/two-year tour cycle you see them do [now].

The last significant record we worked on behalfof SPV was Whitesnake and we put that into theTop 10 at No.7. That was the bar, to be genuinelysuccessful with international labels and generally inareas, certainly in those days, which weren’tnecessarily so widely understood, one would argue.By that I mean the heritage and classic rock circuit– Classic Rock magazine didn’t exist, for example, thenatural outputs for classic rock then were morelimited or less accepted than they are now, it wasthe strange cousin of the contemporary. That’swhat we marketed against extremely effectively.

Whitesnake’s a good example because anyonewho was around in 1979 knew that Whitesnakewas the girl’s band. All the guys would buy anythingfrom Genesis to Rush to Judas Priest, girls boughtWhitesnake, who were incredibly palatable. So weremarketed Whitesnake to that contemporaryaudience, which is why you saw David Coverdale onLoose Women and daytime TV.

When you no longer had Koch as an internationalsafety net did you feel that absence at all?RP: We didn’t feel it at all because it was an excitingtime for us. We were just too busy diving in andgetting on with what we’d already created. We justchanged location from W5 to West Berkshire.SC: Technology allowed us to evolve out of WestLondon. That’s one of the most significant changesin our company: technology and the internet hasproved very beneficial because everyone who workshere has a life. But we’re still connected because wecan be in London in around an hour. Also losingthe wider corporate element [of Koch] was likehaving chains removed. It was empowering to beproperly in control of the company rather than semiin control against a wider corporate agenda.

Marketing and distribution company RSK is celebrating 10 years of representing foreign labels andartists on the ground in the UK. Joint MDs Simon Carver and Rashmi Patani talk about breaking awayfrom big beginnings and how their model of bespoke services has become an industry standard

diverse portfolio of third-party clients ranging fromlabels from Century Media to SPV.

We never went to compete head-on with thePinnacles of this world because the UKindependent market was pretty much sown up. Butwhat stood us in good stead long term was that wewere very much an international company and theskillset we evolved was to take global labels andmake them successful in the UK.

Wearing our rock wings, we took Noise fromPinnacle, we broke bands before they were acquiredby Century, we took Century Media out of PlasticHead, and we were Century Media before theywent into the EMI system. We were also SPVthrough all of their principle years of growth anddevelopment for a good decade and beyond.

RSK ASSURED

ABOVEDiversedistributors:Carver (left) andPatani (right) haveput out records byMeatLoaf, WilliamsShatner and AlterBridge in the UK

LABELSn BY TOM PAKINKIS

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When we talk about your ‘label services’, does itwork in the same way that the now very populardepartments of record companies work today?SC: Yeah. To define what RSK is, we are amarketing sales and distribution company, whichwas a record label – and quite a successful recordlabel – and was never just a distribution company.So we’ve actually been what our partners are.

On one end of the scale we will fully market, runand operate labels on others’ behalf – and notnecessarily through our own distribution pipeline:you’ll find 10th Street as an RSK partner, which werun through EMI Label Services, ironically.

In the middle of all of that you can have a fully-marketed, sold and distributed life with RSK on apan-European basis, or it can be a UK event, or youcan simply have sales and distribution if you want,and anything in between. So we can either assumethe mantles of being the label for you, or we can justbe your sales and distribution enterprise.

We also manage and oversee secondary incomestreams – we’ll manage manufacture, we’ll do P&Ddeals and all those publishing rights as well.

It seems that smaller companies are able to dobigger and bigger things because of outfits likeRSK who can do all the global legwork that theymight not have the manpower to do...RP: The artist has a choice now and can do theirown thing. They can go to a company like RSK andsay, “This is who I am, this is what I do, I’ve got thealbum ready to go. Help me.” From that position,through to the end, we’re basically hand-holdingand seeing the project through. So many artists havebeen burned in major companies. They can comeout with a so-called successful album and their bankaccount looks like it hasn’t felt it. SC: We live in a very different ecosystem now, thereare very few labels that can support theinfrastructures they used to support simply becauseof the diminished record market. Like never beforethe record, although still the primary marketingdriver, is almost a secondary income stream to mostartists. People are doing the marketing [of a record]without realising the sales volume that relates to it.

There’s a consolidation going on: You’ve got abunch of companies that are doing label service anda heap of labels that are geared down in terms ofinfrastructure and overhead who then tap,communally, those label services that are commonto them all but in no way detract A&R vision. Sothey maintain their individuality.

Is the common thread between your clients thatthey are established, heritage acts?SC: It depends which area of the business you lookat and it tends to be seasonal. As a snapshot, at theend of 2012 there’s a lot of heritage or re-establishment going on here generally. Probably ourcutting edge this year, however, has been more onthe classical side.

We are uniquely diverse. There isn’t anothercompany in the UK that matches our diversity andthat’s part of the old Koch heritage. Because Kochwas such a significant company, like any major, weused to do everything as long as it was good andhad a commercial life.

So what you find in RSK is a distillation of all ofthat – you have a small company which isessentially a group skillset, where everyone has theirown taste and specialty in music. The diversity

keeps us fresh within those genres, so we’re not arock company trying to represent 600 different rockclients. It enables us to maintain our focus, whichhas always been our calling card. We have threemaybe four key partners in any given genre.RP: Grammophone is the classical bible magazineand they’ve given us Recording Of The Year for twoyears running. These albums are marketed by us inthe territory. We work with the artist all the waythrough, and it’s nice to see that recognition frommagazines like Gramophone.SC: We’ve been Record Of The Year for two yearsin a row, we’re an indie and it’s always been withsmaller European classical labels who have noperspective whatsoever in the UK. The UK is soimportant to the record world. It’s important forany global label to have a presence here, and weallow our partners to achieve that.

How have the impacts of the internet and thedecline of the High Street influenced RSK?SC: If you had to define the shift in, shall we say, apost-retail world, it’s really easy. The way theindustry used to work is it released a record andthen the market took the release – you used to draw

ABOVEClassical success:RSK’s classicaloutput hasincludedGrammophoneMagazine’s lasttwo Records OfThe Year

“There isn’t another company operating in the UK thatcan match our diversity - that comes from the old Kochheritage. RSK is a small company with a group skillset,everyone has their own speciality within the business”SIMON CARVER, RSK

attention to the shelves, understanding theenormous footfall that went past those shelves. Nowit’s a pre-release marketing scenario because you’remarketing to a date of availability rather than a dateof exposure.

The biggest challenge for the record industry isadequately marketing its wares to a consumer basethat is no longer physically engaged. Again, go back20 years and you had four TV channels, massentertainment TV and you could break artistssimply by having them on the right show at 7:30 inthe evening. In an age of hundreds of Sky channels,diminishing TV audiences and a culture thatchannel-hops, as well as a complete lack of mass-entertainment vehicles outside The X Factor, that’sno longer the case.

Now you’re at the 10-year point, what’s the plangoing forward?SC: To become more proactive in Europe, acrossdifferent genre areas. And to build on everythingwe’ve done in our role in terms of a marketer, orwhat people would call a ‘label services business’.Which we would call… What would we call it?RP: We wouldn’t, we’d just call it a partnership. Wetake on all our partners’ wishes and aspirations andhopefully try and realise them. That’s why ourpartners are so long-term because we do see themas ‘partners’ rather than ‘clients’.

And we can’t understate how important diversityis around here. You won’t find another company likeus that handles classical stuff as well as rock, jazz,blues and all the stuff in between.

You’ve had label experience in the traditional wayas well, is there ever any temptation to…SC: Yes. We’re talking about that now. We’llprobably have an imprint in the next 12 months.

It just seems that you’re almost a pop-up label forother labels so you may as well…RP: Absolutely. You are right, it’s just a case of onceyou start where do you stop? The other issue is, ofcourse, if our partners have a re-issue label, forexample, and we set up our own re-issue label in theUK we wouldn’t want our partners to feel like wewere competing with them in picking up licensesfrom the majors.

How do you avoid becoming a competitor?RP: You just have to tread through those waterscarefully. We’d look at the areas our partners areinvolved in and go in a direction that doesn’tencroach on that but also adds value to what we do.SC: Or you’d be talking about artist relationships.As you said earlier, artists are now looking forpeople who can and will help them.

And when it comes to Europe, you’ll need to openoffices there…SC: Europe’s quite an interesting one because wehave affiliations with parallel companies to RSKthroughout but I think what we will enhance is ourlocal focus beyond those partners.

What’s the final message to Music Week readers?What kind of people should be getting in touchwith RSK?RP: People who want focused attention without anyhidden agendas should come and see us. That’swhat’s seen us through and it will continue.

LEFTBlonde ambitions:RSK has been ableto take advantageof new genre-focused media, likeFuture Publishing’sfan collector packs

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