Music Business Worldwide
Music Business Worldwide (MBW) is the leading information and jobs service for the global music industry. It publishes two podcasts: The weekly series, Talking Trends – which dives behind the biggest headlines in the music industry – as well as The MBW Podcast, which sees us interview some of the leading figures in the global business.
Music Business Worldwide
This indie artist has over a billion streams on Spotify. 10 years ago, a record label told him his music was 'unreleasable'
Welcome to the Music Business Worldwide podcast supported by Voly Music.
How big can an independent artist get without help from a major record label?
It’s been a fierce source of debate at this point for 20 years ever since the likes of TuneCore launched in the early to mid-noughties.
These days, though, we have the receipts to answer the question.
Take Bruno Major, a fully independent artist and our guest on this episode of the MBW Podcast.
Major, who released his music via AWAL and owns his own recordings, has comfortably more than a billion streams on Spotify, with two of his tracks – Nothing and Easily – racking up over quarter of a billion streams each.
He recently released his latest singles, We Were Never Really Friends and Columbo, ahead of his third studio album – also called Columbo – which will be out later this summer.
Major is a successful live act, with a tour of Asia, Europe and North America recently confirmed. He's previously toured arenas with Sam Smith.
He has a particularly interesting history with the record business: Major started out in the music industry by signing (and then leaving) a major label deal with Virgin Records, then owned by EMI, in Los Angeles.
On this podcast, Major discusses his experience of being signed to that major record company as a young man, how that experience has help fuel his career ambitions ever since, and how he keeps himself creatively motivated as an independent artist…