How Better Noise is expanding beyond music – to help its artists, and recovering addicts

Traditionally, independent labels have tended to focus solely on music – perhaps one genre of music – in just one or two markets. Better Noise is not that kind of independent label.

With offices in offices in New York, Los Angeles, London, Berlin, Toronto and Sydney, the firm – founded by Allen Kovac as Eleven Seven Music in 2006 – has a notably global outlook. It’s also much more than a record label.

Dubbing Better Noise “a content company”, Kovac has diversified his fully-owned firm far beyond recorded music, into books, movies, TV series, documentaries, touring and theater productions.

The company’s Better Noise Films division today (September 29) releases Sno Babies, a deliberately tough-to-watch drama reflecting the devastating impact of opioid addiction on parts of suburban America. The movie is raising money for the Global Recovery Initiatives Foundation (GRI) and the Amy Winehouse Foundation, to help fund critical support services for those in recovery.

“This movie is a wakeup call to the entertainment industry that we can’t lose more brilliant artists like Prince, Tom Petty, Juice Wrld, Mac Miller, Lil Peep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, or River Phoenix.”

Allen Kovac, Better Noise

Says Kovac: “Studio heads, agents and managers know there is nothing sadder than when an artist or actor you’ve worked with passes away through misadventure.

“This movie is a wakeup call to the entertainment industry that we can’t lose more brilliant artists like Prince, Tom Petty, Juice Wrld, Mac Miller, Lil Peep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, or River Phoenix.”

Kovac, as the long-term manager of Mötley Crüe, well knows the perils and fallout that addiction can cause. Indeed, Better Noise is connected to a theater musical based on the autobiography of band member Nikki Sixx, The Heroin Diaries, which is currently in production and set for launch next year.

Better Noise’s heartland, though, remains recorded music and artists. The firm’s roster includes the billion-streaming AWOLNATION – whose recent collaboration with Alice Merton has increased their European streaming footprint – in addition to Mötley Crüe, Cory Marks, Five Finger Death Punch (an arena-selling act with over 10bn career streams), Bad Wolves, Papa Roach, Tommy Lee and The Hu.

Better Noise has found uncommon success in the rock genre on radio and streaming, something Kovac largely puts down to his company’s strategy of “unlearning” the music industry paradigm of “going for the biggest playlists too early [which] only means you move down the playlist pyramid faster”.

Instead, he says: “[Better Noise] goes to radio and streaming with data, comparing our artists’ audience engagement to others on the charts. Radio and streaming platforms will reward you for engagement.”

To marshal Better Noise’s activity in the UK and Europe, the company relies on Dan Waite – a veteran of the international music and media industries, and a board member of indie body IMPALA. Waite was formerly Head Of Talent at Time Inc in the UK, and Commercial Talent Manager, Global for BBC Studios. Today, he is Better Noise MD for Europe.

Here, Waite talks MBW through Better Noise’s international strategy – and explains why Kovac and his team refuse to settle for just being a ‘US record label’….

Better Noise is already set up in a number of countries outside the US. Is further expansion on the cards and if so where in the world is exciting you right now?

Russia has just opened with Spotify launching so that’s definitely somewhere we’re keeping an eye on. After Spotify’s launch in Russia we saw a large jump in streaming consumption across the Russian Federation for a number of artists. We immediately extrapolated Spotify’s first-week streaming data in Russia out to a full year, and instantly identified that Russia is going to be a top 10 market for Better Noise Music artists.

That streaming data tells us that we could open a Moscow office soon. I believe this will open up Russia to greater music investment and will usher in a Golden Era for music in Russia. I worked at Virgin Records and Universal Records back in the day, and I remember Russia being a market in which it was really difficult to compete with the pirates, to make any money, really – those days are now thankfully long gone.

“We immediately extrapolated Spotify’s first-week streaming data in Russia out to a full year, and instantly identified that Russia is going to be a top 10 market for Better Noise Music artists.”

Dan Waite, Better Noise

Elsewhere in the world we’re obviously always monitoring China and India, amongst other territories, as the global landscape for music continues to grow and change. In China, we’re part of the Merlin agreement [with local DSPs] and we’re distributed by FUGA. We’re determined to find the right people on the ground in China to keep engaging with the DSPs, especially when it comes to internationally known acts like Mötley Crüe, Five Finger Death Punch and Papa Roach.

Better Noise works with The Hu, a really exciting rock band from Mongolia, and there’s obviously a close relationship between Mongolia and China so our hopes are high on that project in that part of the world.

You’ve opened new offices in Australia fairly recently. Can you paint a picture of your current international footprint?

In recent years Allen has really invested in the UK and Germany, which has resulted in increases in market share and a higher profile for the label – more on-the-ground marketing and radio support have been crucial in that. We’re now seeing real success in Australia with the likes of Cory Marks, a country artist who recently went to No.2 on the iTunes Country Chart in Oz.

There’s a lot of focus on South America right now, with thoughts of opening an office or finding the right [partner] to run our operations there. At the moment we’re using independent PR and promotion, which has been going well, but again, like Russia, we’ve seen that transformation of a ‘pirate market’ into a legitimate market, which means the flow of money coming through is becoming significant – and there’s a real love for rock music in that part of that world. Brazil, for example, is frequently in our Top 10 or Top 15 markets in terms of our big streaming releases.

Can you give us an update on Better Noise’s market share on rock radio?

In the States, we’ve been No.1 at Active Rock radio as a label for the last two years. And this year so far, we’re ahead [of 2019] by at least 20% already. I obviously don’t want to get too far ahead of myself, but we’ve had a very strong first half of the year, despite the pandemic and everything else. Bad Wolves had their fifth No.1 Active Rock record in a row earlier this year [with Sober], which I believe is a record for a new act.

It’s been a year filled with calls for social change, especially in the US. How does Better Noise and its artists see things in that regard?

I’m passionate about fairness and diversity and I have been working with Keith Harris OBE with Paul Pacifico AIM, Helen Smith and Kees van Weijen at IMPALA to implement practical change and suggestions in Europe in hiring in the indie sector. It’s great that Better Noise Music’s A&R is closely aligned with passionate staff and that’s reflected in diverse signings in the rock and metal genre.

Tommy Vext [frontman of Bad Wolves] and I spent three hours in a Wembley dressing room sharing life plans and ambitions which is how we got to the point for me to connect him with Dolores O’Riordan for her to feature on Bad Wolves’ Zombie. Elsewhere, AJ Channer [frontman for Fire From The Gods], has been very passionate about Black Lives Matter; AJ went to where George Floyd was killed 36 hours later to be part of the tribute and attend the funeral.

Fire From The Gods’ track Break The Cycle is resonating with many people due to the lyrics which were actually written a year prior to this year’s events. Meanwhile Hyro The Hero’s latest video [We Believe] dropped Friday with Disturbed’s David Draiman [in which] Hyro The Hero chose to perform with his neck on the floor.

From my MTV days, I know that simple videos like this can have a huge positive effect on society, and this video has extremely powerful imagery.

Another interesting story is Cory Marks: a country artist signed to Better Noise – a label best known for its rock music.

The Cory story is a testament to the way that Allen structures his company, where we start off focusing solely on building an artist’s audience.

During Covid quarantine a lot of that has obviously been about social media, about videos on YouTube, making sure the tracks and content keep coming – so when we do push at radio and the DSPs, there isn’t the resistance, the data is there and the [programmers/editors] don’t feel like they’re taking a punt because they can see the fan data and the engagement data.

That’s how we’ve built up Cory Marks, and we’ve had lots of support from the DSPs in particular. He ended up with a No.47 new entry on the global iTunes chart, and in his home country of Canada he was No.3 on iTunes Country and No.4 on the overall iTunes chart.

Now Cory’s going to have big featured songs in two Better Noise Films releases: Sno Babies and The Retaliators, which shows how we can use our own content creation to push forward the careers of artists signed on the label side.

Allen Kovac has experience making movies: he co-produced comedy-drama The Dirt, based on the life of Motley Crue, which became a Netflix hit last year. How did that lead to Better Noise Films and what’s the strategy there?

The Dirt became the No.1 film on Netflix, which was great, but what was perhaps even better was the way it impacted on the Mötley Crüe catalog. Netflix were 100% hands off on the marketing and the PR so we stepped in and filled that gap globally with our own messaging which gave us the opportunity to push the catalog, the soundtrack and plan a European Promo trip with Nikki Sixx hitting national TV news, radio and print.

The huge boost on streaming services was not a surprise, we saw the wave coming, started paddling early and surfed it to shore. It single-handedly changed the demographics of the band’s audience from a 30-to-60 age group to a streaming audience between 18 and 35. That in turn resulted in a $150m stadium tour being put together for the band in the US which unfortunately has been postponed to 2021 [due to the pandemic].

“We’re very deliberately building Better Noise as a multimedia company that has the power to market our artists across films, theater, books and other content. And we’re a socially conscious company, which obviously links to Sno Babies.”

Allen has now produced Sno Babies, about opioid addiction, and another Better Noise Films movie called The Retaliators which is a horror thriller film. The Retailiators is a particularly fun project because several bands from the label have cameos or parts in the film, including Five Finger Death Punch, Papa Roach, Craig [Mabbitt] from Escape The Fate and Tommy Lee [from Motley Crue].

So when The Retaliators is released [slated for Q1 2021] we’re going to have a rock audience that’s going to want to see their favourite band members in the movie, crossing over with fans of the horror and thriller genre in the movie world. The horror thriller audience is very open to rock star cameos, just think about Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper, Lemmy, Iggy Pop, Marilyn Manson, the list is long.

We’re very deliberately building Better Noise as a multimedia company that has the power to market our artists across films, theater, books and other content. And we’re a socially conscious company, which obviously links to Sno Babies. I know that the opioid crisis in America is personally of great concern to Allen, and that’s one of the special things about working with him as an individual and at an independent company like Better Noise – some of what we do really is about giving back and highlighting issues.

To give you an example of that, the day Dolores O’Riordan [of The Cranberries] passed away [January 15, 2018] she was actually due to be in the studio recording featured vocals for Bad Wolves [cover of Zombie, later nominated for Rock Song Of The Year by iHeartRadio]. In the end, Better Noise decided to release the track and donate the royalties to [O’Riordan’s] kids, which resulted in me on stage in New York with the band giving her kids a check for quarter of a million dollars last summer – an amount of money that could put them through college. We wanted to do the right thing by [O’Riordan] even though she didn’t end up featuring on the track, and that way of thinking comes from Allen himself.

I noticed that Bob Lefsetz gave a big plug to Sober by Bad Wolves back in June.

It’s funny, I think Bob Lefsetz and Allen have the same views on a few things: Allen’s been talking for a long time about how he feels the major labels are chasing quarterly billing to make their numbers, whereas the independent rock and alternative community are building lifetime value and relationships with fans.

I believe Bob picked up how meaningful the lyrics were in Sober. [Lefsetz also wrote: “What kind of crazy fucked-up world do we live in where a number one rock song has more melody than anything in the Spotify Top 50?”] And there is a real story there: Tommy Vext, the lead singer of Bad Wolves, is a sober coach and an activist for recovery, and is in very high-demand amongst celebrities for that work. Tommy has a very interesting back-story; his twin is actually serving 17 years in jail for attempting to kill him.

“it’s with great pride that Allen allowed me to start a conversation with Mitch Winehouse which resulted in our UK profits from Sno Babies movie and album sound track going to the Amy Winehouse Foundation.”

Sober is part of the Sno Babies, soundtrack and campaign, which is important: the opiate crisis was killing 80,000 Americans a year before Covid-19, and obviously the worry now is that things could get even worse. We’ve lost Tom Petty and Prince to it, to name but two, who were both self-medicating.

Plus in the UK we’ve lost several musicians to addiction and overdose: Gary Moore, Stuart Cable (Stereophonics) , Ronnie Scott, Phil Lynott (Thin Lizzy), Jon Bonham (Led Zeppelin), Keith Moon & John Entwistle (The Who), and of course Amy Winehouse. So it’s with great pride that Allen allowed me to start a conversation with Mitch Winehouse which resulted in our UK profits from Sno Babies movie and album sound track going to the Amy Winehouse Foundation.

With Sno Babies we’re aiming to destigmatize opiate addiction and to try and raise enough money to help thousands of people – people who some look upon as ‘junkies’ but who have actually been misdiagnosed. Or, and this is the sad reality, people who maybe haven’t been able to see their doctor due to Covid-19 and have taken it upon themselves to find other means to deal with their pain.

I’d encourage everyone reading this to go to iTunes, Apple TV and Amazon, and stream the movie – and visit their favourite DSP to listen to the soundtrack – to become part of the recovery process and help change a life.Music Business Worldwide