How To Dismantle The Traditional Gatekeeper Model In A&R

Some things just seem meant to be. Rachel Cragg is Director of A&R for the Nettwerk Music Group, the Vancouver-based music conglomerate which is widely recognised as one of the planet's most influential indie labels, but her career path was far from the norm. Growing up in a small Canadian town that didn't even have a record shop, at the tender age of 18 years old Cragg fell in love with a roadie from Red Hot Chili Peppers and followed her heart to LA. She soon started touring with bands selling merch, fell into tour managing and eventually into artist management, before being hand-chosen to join the prestigious Nettwerk team.

"I started a kind of democratic system of A&R which basically entailed me bringing a bunch of stuff to a meeting every month with everybody contributing."

"I've been at Nettwerk probably eight or nine years — a long time — and it started out doing day-to-day management with a lot of amazing artists including Sarah McLachlan, Dido, Stereophonics and other amazing groups," she explains. "Then I realised that I love discovering music — that's really what I'm into — and I love nurturing artists who are just starting their career. So I started managing some smaller artists and that expanded my role, then I started doing that more full-time and then about five years ago Terry McBride — who's our CEO of Nettwerk — asked me if I wanted to do A&R, and at first I basically said, 'No, I'm a manager. I don't want to do A&R.'

"Eventually we talked it out and my role progressed within Nettwerk and I started a kind of democratic system of A&R which basically entailed me bringing a bunch of stuff to a meeting every month with everybody contributing — so everyone from the CEO to interns can contribute music — and we basically sit in a room and talk about it every month. It's the first time that we'd done that —and the first time I've heard of it being done at a label — where we'd take this process which is usually left to one or two gatekeepers and instead actually ask the people working the record, 'What do you think from a marketing perspective?' or from a press angle, or from a radio angle, or from a digital sales angle. Checking what they think and whether they're excited about the music, and it opened up the conversation in a really interesting way that I didn't expect at the time. Now that's our process internally for the label — we run each artist through the democratic process."

Cragg explains that despite occasional difficulty in reaching consensus, her system has proved beneficial for the label's roster.

"It's definitely difficult because everyone has an opinion about music, it's completely subjective, but the system actually realigns a lot of things," she tells. "You can get more perspective as you get more information, which means that you're making a more educated signing. If something does get signed with Nettwerk you know that you have the support of all the different teams and we haven't overlooked any aspect of the artists — we've all conferred and decided that the artists ticks all the boxes, and the team's behind it and really excited about it."