Lewis Sinclair is the Founder and CEO of Cygnus Music, a leading electronic music distributor from the United Kingdom. Lewis talked in-depth about starting and growing Cygnus Music in 2009, running record labels, and pitching to Spotify to get in those needed playlists. If you're looking at starting a record label or music business, this episode is for you.
Here's a transcript teaser when Lewis arranged started setting up Cygnus: "We'll contact iTunes, and we'll say, "I'd like to set up an agreement with you. We're a distributor," and they'll say, "Great. Okay. How many record labels have you got?" I respond, "Well, just a one for myself," and they'll say, "all right, so you're not really a distributor. Come back when you've got some more labels." And so you'll go back with 10 labels, and they're like, "no, you, you need to have a hundred labels to get on board," - you go "Right. Okay." And then you build things up to a hundred labels. And then by that point, as the industry has grown, their criteria for what they will allow has grown, and they're like, "no, actually you need 500."