Jim Carroll: When it comes to getting a deal, the power of the song is still king

Over the past few weeks, reps from numerous UK record labels have flown to Dublin to watch a certain Irish act perform in a rehearsal studio. You can understand why the labels are over to see the band because they have fantastic songs and a lot of rough, raw potential.

There’s nothing new about this. A&R scouts and managers have spent a lot of time in studios deciding if it’s worth spending their cash on the act in question. Many air miles have been earned over the years on the London to Dublin hop to see bands in studios.

I’m sure Lyor Cohen has spent his fair share of time in rehearsal studios too. The one-time Def Jam, Island and Warner Music chief, who played a big role in developing the 360-deal paradigm, came to prominence at a time when operating a talent-scouting operation was a fairly binary experience. A source tipped you off about a new act, you checked them out and, if you were interested, you schmoozed them until they signed on the dotted line.

But Cohen is doing things a little differently with his new 300 Entertainment label. This time, he's hoping that it will be data that will produce hits. He's already had a result with Fetty Wap and Trap Queen and he's hoping for more.

Cohen isn't alone in that regard. When he talked about 300's "dashboard" monitoring likes, tweets and shares in a recent interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, you can be sure every single A&R department is doing something along similar lines.

A seasoned record label acquaintance of mine recently pointed to a bunch of people in his office tracking Twitter, Facebook, Soundcloud, Bandcamp and what-have-you in his office as the company’s new A&R team.

Numbers, and what you do with them
Data may be king but it doesn't necessarily guarantee you a competitive advantage because everyone else has access to the same stats and metrics. Data is only valuable when you see something in, or do something with, the numbers that no one else has seen or done.

Cohen wasn't the only one who saw the one-eyed Wap was creating serious heat with Trap Queen in 2014, but he was the one who closed the deal with the New Jersey rapper. The company worked with Wap on development, like an old-fashioned label would, and the result is a hit song and album.

Cohen himself acknowledges in the Businessweek interview that data alone is not enough: "You could come up with an algorithm, but somebody still has to show up and say, 'yeah, I feel that'." That means more time in rehearsal rooms, more time listening to rough drafts, more time trusting your gut instinct.

Which brings us back to the act in the first paragraph. What’s brought the A&R folks to Dublin is not tweets or Facebook likes, but a very good song and the promise of more like it. In the A&R game, distracted and disrupted by data and other concerns, it still comes down to the power of that song.