Razor & Tie’s Cliff Chenfeld & Craig Balsam – HuffPost 8.16.10

[Note: This is an excerpt from my interview with Razor & Tie owners Cliff Chenfeld and Craig Balsam and is presented here because its content is informative from the perspective of their being label executives.]

Mike Ragogna: Since you have Sony distribution, you’ve been able to set up deals with labels and artists that aren’t necessarily signed to Razor & Tie.

Craig Balsam: That’s correct. All in all, A&R–which is “artist and repertoire,” the way record labels find bands–has always been left on the shoulders of one or two people in each music company, and it’s our view that that’s not really the right way to go. We have a great A&R staff here, and they bring us a lot of music to sell and release, but we also look to other people to do that. One of the ways is by distributing smaller record labels whose owners have a real vision for what kind of music they want to bring to the marketplace. Then, when we have success together, we try to ratchet it up and venture the project and put some more bucks behind it to help it build and grow.

Cliff Chenfeld: We’ve got relationships with all kinds of people now. We have distribution relationships that allowed us to amp up certain projects. For instance, we did a deal with a label called Prosthetic which had a band called All That Remains. We distributed them, and we were able to upstream them. We’ve now put out three records and each have sold two-hundred fifty thousand copies. They had the expertise in that kind of music, and we had the distribution and marketing capacity to really help them, so it was a win-win for everybody. And, we’ve been doing more and more of that. At the same time, we’ve become a bit more aggressive in terms of signing new artists like Dave Barnes and others who’ve had success.