Wiseman Gets Into The Label Game With 1111 Music House

Say you’re Craig Wiseman. You’re already one of Nashville’s top songwriters and independent publishers, written more than 100 charted singles and 14 No. 1 hits, been named writer of the year by NSAI and ASCAP (three times), started a successful administration company, expanded your Nashville publishing interests to a London office, and amassed a fierce collection of big, loud shirts. What do you do next?

No, not go to Disney World. If you guessed launch your own label, you’d be correct.

Except that if you use words like “launch” to describe the status of Wiseman’s new 1111 Music House (pronounced “eleven eleven,” after the company’s street address), you’ll get a hearty laugh from the man himself. The same happens if you ask pesky questions about things like, say, distribution plans. Such questions, Wiseman says, give him “the heebie jeebies because they are so associated with what everyone recognizes as a dying business model.”

The label’s debut is more of a soft launch and, as Wiseman will repeatedly note during an interview, what happens from there will be “organic,” and completely dictated by the music and what needs arise to give it a wider platform.

Big Loud Shirt COO Marc Driskill calls the decision to create a label “a move that was more creative than financial.”

While some existing staffers from Wiseman’s Big Loud Shirt Industries will have duties at 1111 Music House —most notably Driskill—thus far Wiseman’s hired just one staffer for the label, twenty something wunderkind Seth England, who officially starts in June and will have wide-ranging duties. In typical Wiseman fashion, England has no formal title, and his boss repeatedly refers to him (and his job description) simply as “label guy.”

England is a onetime Big Loud Shirt intern who has also worked at Vector Management and Melanie Howard Music. Wiseman says other staff will be added as needed.

The label’s flagship artist is Big Loud Shirt writer Clay Cumbie, who Wiseman describes as a cross between Alan Jackson and Keith Urban (“not as country as Alan and not as pop as Keith”).

Wiseman says Big Loud Shirt was having a hard time getting Cumbie signed despite what Wiseman describes as his “all American” sound, a frustration which finally inspired the DIY model. “We got tired of waiting for other people to ‘get it,’” he says.

Despite modest plans for the label, Wiseman and Driskill harbor a real hope that 1111 Music House could be the start of the new business model for publishers. And Wiseman pulls no punches in describing why such a model seems increasingly necessary.

Where publishing companies make a mistake, Wiseman says, is in finding and developing talent, working with them sometimes for years to get them ready for stardom, and then “taking their CD and throwing it over a fence to a label and saying ‘OK, see ya.’ That is so screwed up.

“You pass it off to a bunch of paranoid, ineffective people at a place that could be gone in six months…The idea of all that [publisher involvement] stopping at the point where a record goes out becomes more and more ludicrous.

“One of the problems with labels is they do all these things—put their act out there, [retail] distribution, pushing them to radio—and then it all falls apart,” Wiseman continues. “There are so many moving parts they can’t figure out what went wrong.”

His new label’s first step will be helping build a fan base for its acts. “We want to start organic, getting somebody out there…with live shows, and then maybe buy some radio promotions,” later adding other elements as needed, Wiseman says. “One thing begets the other.” But by front-loading all the elements, he thinks, “you end up eating yourself alive, creating such a domino effect with money.”

“Record labels are having to adjust their business model for today,” says Driskill. “Publishing companies are going to have to do the same thing.” He cites the increasing ease of “marketing and distributing music to the public directly” as a factor in the decision to start the label arm, and says he expects those direct avenues to open even more in the next three to five years.

By opening a label now, Driskill says, the company hopes to “try to get out ahead of the curve a little bit and start creating some interaction with music fans.” A key component of the label’s strategy, he says, will be to carefully cultivate “the relationship between the artist and the fan…That will be a big part of how we distribute music.”

“We don’t know what we’re doing, but we admit that,” Wiseman says of his new venture, “but I’m not sure that anybody else who supposedly knows what they’re doing does either.

“In the last 10 years I haven’t been overwhelmed with the sense that everybody that was supposed to be bright and in charge [really is],” he continues. “They get a lot of rugs pulled out from under them.

“So much of the music business right now is dictated by people who know nothing and care nothing about music,” Wiseman adds. “If we’re not up here offering some viable [alternative] models, how can we bitch about how things are going?”

Eventually, Wiseman and Driskill hope to have other artists on the 1111 roster. “Not every [artist] will fit this model, but Clay fits it perfectly,” says Driskill. “We’re excited to see what he can do, and what we can do.

“We’re just, honestly, learning as we go and trying to use the music as a guide to what the next steps should be,” Driskill adds. “We’re somewhat limited in the financial resources we’re putting behind it, but hopefully the creative resources will speak just as loud as the almighty dollar.”

Wiseman doesn’t expect the label to stick strictly with “the straight-up Nashville country thing.” In working with artists who may not fit that box, he says, “it forces us to do things a little different, which is a good template for the label. There is less for us to be tempted to imitate” from other Nashville labels. He and Driskill are hoping the label will create U.S. opportunities for some of their U.K. -based writers, and vice versa.

The label has recorded a 12-song acoustic album on Cumbie, thus far available only at his live shows and Web sites, but they’re attempting to create a viral interest by first giving away 1,000 copies of a five-song EP featuring music culled from the album.

The most liberating part of the decision to give away the EP, Wiseman notes, was “not having to get anyone’s permission” at a major label and deal with all the “fear, ass kissing and bullshit” that sometimes goes on there. “That, in itself, has been totally worth everything.”