Ken Krongard is an A&R rep par excellence. His specialty—honed over decades of working with artists from Def Leppard to Avril Lavigne—is “to find superstars who can sell a lot of records.” Since 2001, Krongard has been taking an entrepreneur’s approach to making the most of this particular gift through the company he founded and now runs, Major Label Scout. Through Major Label Scout, Krongard maintains a network of 200 well-trained and dedicated talent scouts across North America, all scouring the basements and backstreets for the next big thing and queueing the best of the best for presentation to major label executives. And before those scouts hit the bricks in search of talent, they all go through an intensive training program run by Berkleemusic.
| Multi-platinum artist Avril Lavigne and MLS Founder Ken Krongard |
Krongard first hatched the idea for Major Label Scout in 2000 (before MySpace, before bittorrent), when he was working as an A&R rep at Arista Records. A contact outside Arista made him aware of a 17-year-old Canadian singer named Avril Lavigne. As Krongard tells it, “Avril was a girl in Napanee, Ontario, a town of 3000, who’d never played a real show, never had an album, never had a song on the radio. The only way to find her was by finding someone who knew her.” Krongard brought Lavigne to New York, where she impressed Arista head L.A. Reid into immediately signing her to a three-album deal.
The experience left Krongard convinced that unknown talent existed in other tiny towns across North America, and when he left Arista in 2001, he founded Major Label Scout to try and turn his idea into a sustainable business venture.
“[Major Label Scout] was an idea for a scouting network,” explains Krongard, “that was kind of a combination of an A&R community and a means of tapping into the talent of tastemaking young people who were looking for the next big thing, and who wanted to learn the A&R business from a mainstream major-label perspective. “I’m looking for a scout who knows everything that’s going on in his hometown,” explains Krongard. “And I want to know about the kid down the street in his basement with a ProTools rig who is a genius and who nobody knows about.”
This talent is discovered in a process that works like so: every scout must submit two songs by an unknown artist each review cycle (a period of about six weeks). An automated system then randomizes the tracks, and sends them to ten other scouts. These scouts listen to each track once anonymously, and then are given information about the artist so they can research further. Based on their findings and their opinion, the listeners then rate the tracks. These findings are aggregated into a chart which is then reviewed by senior staff The top-charting artists are then considered for management or publishing agreement with Major Label Scout itself, and shopped to the A&R departments of the major record companies.
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| MLS Recording Artist Joe Brooks (Lava/Universal), MLS Founder Ken Krongard and MLS Recording Artist Jason Reeves (Warner Bros.) |
As it turns out, Krongard was right about where unknown talent was to be found. As with Avril Lavigne, Krongard’s goal was to find the talent anywhere, “even,” as he put it to a colleague, “in Iowa.” And on the very first chart report his scouts produced, the #2 artist was Jason Reeves, an Iowa musician who has gone on to multiplatinum success with his own records and as a songwriter for Colbie Caillat and others, as well as a record deal with Warner Bros. where he was signed by American Idol judge Kara Dioguardi.
Krongard is also sure to lavish as much attention on his scouts as they do on the music they champion. Many music companies are content to hire eager and inexperienced warm bodies and then wring every ounce of effort they can out of them, investing relatively little in the individual’s career growth and long-term prospects. By contrast, to become a Major Label Scout, applicants must submit an exhaustive six-page application and pass a grueling round of interviews, all designed to ensure that new hires have the drive, talent, and mindset to tirelessly seek out new mainstream talent. And before a new scout can hit the streets, they are sent through a training and orientation process that includes course content provided by Berkleemusic.
“I’ve done a lot of internships in my life,” explains Krongard, “and the best internships I’ve ever had were where I really learned something, so we wanted to make sure we gave our scouts a positive learning experience. We try to structure it so our scouts have access to something they don’t get anywhere else, and Berklee was part of that.”
“We thought about who these people are—the music executives of tomorrow—and felt it’s important that we give them guidance and information on the music business. So, where better to go than the #1 online music program? Fortunately, Berklee was very receptive to us and gave us some great content to build out the training system. That has been hugely helpful and the partnership just makes sense. A huge number of our scouts have gone on to take Berkleemusic classes, and it’s been a classic win-win.”
In fact, Krongard is quick to acknowledge that many of his scouts remain with Berkleemusic long past the required orientation phase. “Some of our scouts are really interested in A&R, but some people are just curious about the music business in general,” he says. “Berkleemusic exposes them to a number of different areas; after the introductory lessons… they can branch out and take classes on their own in the areas that benefit them most.”
| Multi-platinum recording artist Colbie Caillat and MLS Founder Ken Krongard |
In recent years, Major Label Scout has begun directly publishing and/or managing some of their finds, thereby diversifying their business from being a pass-through company funneling talent to labels, to being a revenue participant in some artists’ career. When asked why he chose to diversify, Krongard replies that “all the major companies, whether labels, management companies, live entertainment companies, are all morphing into all-around full-service companies. Whether the major labels in the future will still be called major labels or… just music companies, some are going to be bigger and more successful than others, and some are going to be smaller and make very fine livings at it.”
As for whether there will still be major labels in a few years for MLS to shop talent to, Krongard muses, “clearly the ascendency the major label has been over for a long time, but the ones that survive are the ones getting into other areas. One thing we’re all watching very carefully is how this 360-degree model plays out, where labels acquire all assets, not just recorded music assets but they now have revenue streams from publishing, merchandise, and touring and anything else. So in a sense the [major labels] are not really record companies anymore, because they’re not just about records, but about commissioning revenue from 360 degrees [of an artist’s output]. The ones that succeed are the ones that hire the right people, move into the right areas, and learn those areas the quickest. The ones that don’t do this will be gone.”
When asked where a company like Major Label Scouts fits into the future of the business, Krongard muses, “great talent is great talent—it just needs to be discovered. And I think that’s true now more than ever, since there’s a glut of artists; there are seven million bands on MySpace at last count. Someone’s got to go through them all and find the diamonds in the rough, and I still think the ability to perceive something special is a skill you can learn. There will always be a place for people that can discern talent, period. “
Moreover, says Krongard, it always makes good business sense to see out what millions of people want to buy, and remaining focused on that fact might just give Major Label Scouts an edge. “There seems to be this attitude in the music business where everyone tries to be cool,” he says, “where everyone tries to find the hippest band on Pitchfork on this week. But those bands come and go, and the people that love these artists tend to be on the poles of taste, and on the coasts. And there’s a huge market of people between the coasts who buy their music at Wal-Mart and think Nickelback is a great band. And you know what? Who are we to say that they’re wrong? Nickelback have sold millions and millions of albums.”
| MLS Founder Ken Krongard, Chad Kroeger of Nickelback, MLS Recording Artist Joe Brooks (Lava/Universal) |
“It’s music, and music is subjective, and I reject the argument that one person’s opinion is better than another person’s opinion. At the end of the day, Nickelback have sold a hell of a lot more records than name-your-hipster-band. As an A&R guy, my job has been to find artists that will sell. Whether or not people think they’re cool is not a problem for me. Everyone should fall in love with the music that reaches them, but in terms of the business itself, our approach is to find superstars who can sell a lot of records. And obviously in the new model, it’s not all about records, but we need to find superstars who are going to appeal to a massive audience.”
For the foreseeable future, the world will need large music companies, and Ken Krongard is betting that those companies will continue to need the services of Major Label Scout. By selecting the right people, and training them using Berkleemusic’s award-winning course materials, he hopes to give his scouts the edge they need to make that bet a certainty.
- John Owen
(Photo credit: Essdras M. Suarez / Boston Globe Staff)
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