Arista Records, an imprint of Sony Music Nashville, has closed its doors. The label, home to Old Dominion, Brooks & Dunn, Ryan Hurd, Seaforth, Morgan Wade, Adam Doleac and Megan Moroney, is no longer in operation. Fortunately, it seems that all of the artists that were on Arista are being moved to other Sony Music Nashville imprints, and none of the artists on Arista will lose their record deal.
The move comes as SMN focuses their attention more on radio and airplay for all of their artists.
“RCA, Columbia and Arista are really imprint names that we use for three different promotion teams because that gives you multiple calendars,” Sony Music Nashville CEO and Chairman, Randy Goodman, tells Billboard. “We’re now targeting our approach to radio to be more strategic.”
The move, according to Goodman, will allow the label to be more aggressive and proactive in getting more of all of their artists’ songs played at radio.
“What we said to radio is, ‘Give us dayparts immediately,’ and if it works, great,” Goodman explains. “If it doesn’t, then we’ll move on because we’re going to be moving on things quicker in the DSP [Digistal Service Provider] landscape as well. So based upon our more targeted approach, we just felt like this was a more efficient way to do it.”
Goodman has previously spoken out about his frustration with the amount of time it can take for a song to reach the top of the charts, with some songs taking a full year. He hopes this new model will eliminate at least some of that time lapse.
“That’s not a model that is an efficient or effective artist development model and so we thought, ‘How do we approach this with a better model in mind?’” Goodman reflects. “Let’s not go to radio until we know we’ve got something that we can go to the major chains with, and show them there is momentum and there is a reason other than us just saying, ‘We want you to play it.’”
The label head believes that both new and established artists will benefit by the restructuring.
“Our job is artist development, our job is to break new artists, our job is to expand careers of the artists that have already broken through,” Goodman says. “And so, in this new world as things continue to change, we’re constantly evaluating what’s the best way to do that.”