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Over his three-decade career, Rob Stevenson has racked up an impressive track record as an A&R executive: the Killers, Fall Out Boy, 30 Seconds to Mars, Sum-41, the final Beastie Boys album, teaming up with Tyler Arnold to sign Post Malone. Yet after he left Warner Music two years ago, following that company’s acquisition of 300, he wasn’t sure that another one was the move.
“That feeling lasted a week or two,” he tells Variety, “then I decided I wanted to get back into it — but only if we could solve some of the problems with these bigger systems.” After his long stints in leadership roles at 300, Republic, Island and Virgin, Stevenson certainly knew the ropes. So he and fellow 300 vet Matt Signore, along with their gradually growing team, “mapped out the process of making a record like we were making a car, and looked at every step. Then we built a cloud-based delivery system so that everybody is sort of singing from the same hymn sheet.”
The end result of that process is their beta of a different kind of record company: Alter Music, “an independent record label dedicated to providing artists with the freedom, transparency, and resources needed to develop in a modern world,” according to the announcement. Founded by Stevenson and Signore, the label’s initial roster includes British singer-songwriter-actress Naomi Scott (who stars in “Smile 2”); Belfast-based electronic duo Chalk; Berlin-based Chinese-German artist Lia Lia; indie-pop singer-songwriter Gus Dapperton; alt-rock genre-bending San Diego skater-turned-artist Brent de la Cruz. All have music in the pipeline for the coming months.
The label is a joint venture with the music company Firebird, which was founded by Gibson guitars chairman Nat Zilkha and former Ticketmaster/ Twitter exec Nathan Hubbard, and that partnership follows a different model as well.
The announcement continues, “The label seeks to challenge accepted industry norms and ‘alter’ what no longer serves artists’ needs. Retooling the traditional record label approach, Alter Music is committed to creating powerful alliances with artists resulting in bold creative development, transparent revenue sharing, and story-driven marketing built around albums.”
That’s all very well, but how is it going to work? Variety spent an hour on Zoom this week getting into the weeds with Stevenson — an edited version of that conversation follows below.
What makes you want to start a label in 2025? The whole model is in a kind of existential crisis.
When I left Warner, I was like, “I’m not really sure where the business is going, it’s been a great run … Maybe this is it?” That lasted a week or two, and I decided I wanted to get back into it — but only if we could solve some of the problems with these bigger systems. So I called Matt Signore and said, “Let’s do this a bit differently.” I really wanted to see if we could figure out the issues with the label systems that are supposed to support artists and their teams, and make them more efficient.
We dissected all of the delivery systems for a record; that’s where we started. I noticed that a lot of the process of delivering a record was forensic and backward-looking. It was almost like the A&R department — or the artists and the manager and the producer — were making a record, turning it in, and then the label’s A&R administration departments had to go backwards to figure out everything that had happened: what the deals looked like, what was promised.
So we sort of mapped out making a record like we were making a car, and looked at every step and where we saw choke points. Then we built a cloud-based delivery system so that everybody is sort of singing from the same hymn sheet, looking at the same things, approving the same things, and the system tries to anticipate through push notifications when deadlines are approaching and what an ideal delivery schedule would look like.
We’ve built a system that we feel actually follows creativity as it evolves. That way, we have an audit trail of everything that happened during the making of the record: The less we have to look backwards, the more we can look forward, and the more creative [everyone] can be.
Have you made records using that process yet?
We are making five right now.
Does it ever feel like you’re trying to impose structure on something that defies structure?
Yes and no. Obviously, if you want to get a record out, there is a structure that has to happen. But this system forces a conversation about expectations at the start — we don’t have to solve it before we go in, but it at least the conversation is happening in real time. We want to be as transparent as possible up front. We’ve tried very hard to come up something we believe is fair for all parties.
It says in the announcement that you offer “transparent revenue sharing.” How does that work?
I was getting very tired of having so many arguments with managers — and a lot of these managers are my friends — over [who should pay for what], when we should be having arguments over a mix or artwork; those kinds of creative arguments are not a problem. So there’s no recoupability in our deals, and there are certain costs that are [designated as] artist costs simply because we don’t participate in those businesses — like tour support, that’s an artist cost because we don’t participate in touring. Legal — that’s their cost, because if we get involved in their legal representation, I think there’s a conflict. But everything else is off the top.
The goal is that we are true partners, and we both walk into profitability on the same day. Artists can go onto their phone, look on the app and they can see exactly what their A&R or marketing budget is, where it’s allocated and what’s been spent. You know where you are, and that should unload some of the concern from their minds and they can focus on being creative.
How do the promotion and marketing budgets work? Are they 50/50?
Yeah, it’s a one [album] plus two [options] deal, profits are split, and all costs are off the top. The reason we did that is because in Western culture, I think people understand a four-year commitment, right? High school, college; you know what you’re signing up for. Artists can be through a three-album deal in four or five years. I didn’t want to put a time limit on it, because that creates a weird dynamic and pressure on the creative, or a manager being like “Let’s wait [until the deal expires] and not deliver that album,” and then the label says, “I need that record now!”
Are you doing advances?
Yes, and because it’s all off the top, we can have conversations with the manager and the artists: “What do you reasonably need?” It becomes much more collaborative, and even when we disagree, it’s not personal. All this may sound idealistic, but so far it’s been great.
I even had a conversation with a manager the other day and we started slipping into that old manager-label dynamic over a marketing budget, and I said, “Time out — we didn’t set it up to be this way. You, as a partner in this venture, know that 100% of this marketing money is at risk. You can’t ask me for more than what we agreed,” and the manager said, “You’re right, point taken. All good.”
Starting a company is extremely difficult, right? I have a completely new understanding of all of this stuff, and there are these moments where we starting to see this new model shine and it’s really exciting.
Do artists own their masters?
That’s really on a case-by-case basis — and to be honest with you, we haven’t totally figured that out yet. I don’t necessarily believe that shorter deals are always the best way forward — they put artificial pressure on a quick return, and breaking an artist has never taken longer than it does now. And I’m not sure that reversions [of ownership] are a great idea. But I do think if we were going to talk about [ownership in] perpetuity, that I’m not necessarily convinced we need 50% — maybe it’s less. The deals we’ve done so far have all different kinds of terms, and if the best way forward — not just for Alter but for our artist partners, is to do licenses — we will. I believe there’s a combination out there that nobody’s really tested yet that is the best way forward. We’ve always equated licenses and shorter terms and reversions with financial freedom and flexibility, and I think there may be something that might work better.
Who are your investors?
A couple of friends-and-family investors, and then we met the Firebird guys, and they have a novel approach: The partnership is in the artist deals, it’s not in the company — this is actually a venture between Alter and Firebird with regard to the artist deals. They don’t own a piece of Alter.
Tell me about the artists you’ve signed and the kind of profile you want the label to have — the name “Alter” would seem to be a clue?
When I was first thinking about this, I thought of Sire Records in particular because when I was young, they had the Pretenders, the Ramones and the Cure and so many others — but the most punk-rock of them all was Madonna, because she was the biggest but also challenged the establishment the most. So I decided, OK, we want to go after alternative as a mindset, not as an aesthetic.
So it’s more about the artists’ motivations and mindset — what are they trying to accomplish? If that’s changing and challenging the norm, then I think that fits with the team that we’ve built.
What do your artists look like genre wise? Would you sign, say, rappers or Latin artists?
We would 100% sign both. In fact, there’s an artist from Puerto Rico we’re looking at that’s a punk band — disruptive, exactly what I’m looking for. The artist Leah Leah, who we signed from Berlin, is German-Chinese, and I feel that because she grew up with these two disparate cultures in her family, that gives her an alternate viewpoint to what all of us are seeing. She speaks seven languages and she’ll flip languages in a song, there’s one where it’s English in the verse, German in the pre chorus and then English in the chorus; she’s using it almost like an instrument because when she flips to German, it creates tension that is released by flipping back to English.
There’s also a band from Belfast [Northern Ireland] called Chalk that will be nostalgic for [older listeners] but for kids, it’s brand new — one song is like Underworld meets Ministry. And an artist who is vastly different sonically from those two is Naomi Scott, who comes from the Disney platform but made this record with almost has an alt0R&B vibe — what she wants for herself and what she wants to put out there is very different [from traditional Disney artists].
I just feel sometimes that A&R has become a lost art. I learned from some really great people who taught me a lot about how to make records, and one of the best things you can learn is when to be quiet and follow the artist and support them, and just stay out of the way. Somewhere along the line that got lost — people think “Ohh, I’m the A&R person, I found it” or “I signed it,” and actually, making those records with the artist and helping that artist develop is the most crucial part of the whole process.
Who are some of those mentors you mentioned?
Well, obviously I learned a lot from every artist I worked with. But one executive in particular is Steve Greenberg [Hanson, Baha Men, Jonas Brothers, AJR], who has a very particular way of looking at music — all of his successes are very unique. I learned a lot from him about trusting your gut and your own instincts and then following the artist, and knowing when to lead and when to follow. And [former Def Jam, 300 and Warner Music chief] Lyor Cohen was another one — I’ll never forget asking him, early in my career, what he looks for in an artist. He said first and foremost, charisma, that x-factor — do they change the temperature in the room? That is something that can’t be taught and it’s extremely rare. Second is instincts and work ethic, and third is songwriting ability — because if you have the first two, you can get the third.
As a young A&R, I thought that was really counter to everything that we should be looking for, but he was right because everybody that I worked with who ended up becoming big, if I track back to those first days that I met them, there was something different from the jump.
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