The Sunset Recorder

The title is an abbreviation of artist and repertoire, and the two halves are literal. One half is finding and signing people. The other is deciding what those people record, with whom, at what cost, in what order, and by when. Most of the mythology attaches to the first half, which is the more romantic and the smaller part of the work. An A&R who signs well and develops badly produces a catalogue of promising first singles and very little else.

Scouting is not the same as developing, and conflating them is the most common misreading of the job. Finding is identification: noticing that a songwriter has an unusual sense of melody, that a performer holds a room of two hundred people in a way that will scale, or that an artist releasing from a bedroom has an audience whose behaviour suggests real attachment. Developing is the slower work that follows. It means working out what an artist is actually good at, which is often not what they believe they are good at, and building around that rather than around whatever is currently working for somebody else.

The repertoire half is largely matchmaking. An A&R spends a great deal of time deciding which producer suits a particular voice, which co-writer will push an artist without overwriting them, and which room will produce a usable performance. These are judgement calls with real consequences and no reliable formula, and a writer who is excellent in one configuration can be useless in another. Part of the skill is ending a session that is not working, which costs money in the moment and saves more later.

Budgets are the unglamorous centre of the job

Someone has to author the recording budget and then hold it, and at most labels that someone is the A&R. The budget covers studio time, producer fees and points, engineering and mixing, mastering, session musicians, travel, and the costs that arrive after the record is finished. Every one of those lines is negotiable and can run over. Recording costs are typically recoupable against the artist's income, so cost discipline is not only about protecting the label's cash. Money spent loosely is money the artist earns back before seeing any of their own.

Sequencing and song selection apply the same discipline to finished material. A project usually generates more recordings than it can use, and deciding which are released, which are held, which leads, and in what order they appear is a judgement about how a body of work reads rather than how one track performs. This is where an A&R is most likely to be unpopular and most likely to be useful, because the songs an artist is closest to are often the ones a listener should meet last.

Advocate in two directions

Inside a label, the A&R argues for the artist. Marketing, promotion, sync and international teams all have more projects than capacity, and the A&R makes the internal case for a release to receive attention and expenditure. Facing the artist, the same person represents the label: why a release date moved, why a song is not finished, why a budget will not stretch. An A&R who only ever advocates in one direction stops being useful to the other side.

The recurring structural problem is time. Artists work at the pace good material arrives, which is irregular and cannot be scheduled. Labels work against a release calendar built months ahead around marketing capacity, streaming commitments and competition for attention in a given window. The A&R sits at the seam between the two clocks, either protecting a creative process from a deadline or imposing one on a process that has stopped converging.

The job has changed in one significant way. Discovery used to be expensive and slow, requiring travel, relationships with regional promoters and a tolerance for empty rooms. Data made discovery cheap. An artist gathering an audience is visible to everyone reading the same dashboards at the same moment, so the scarce resource shifted from finding to winning. Competition for demonstrated traction is intense and terms move in the artist's favour, so the differentiator becomes conviction held earlier than the data supports it. The scouting advantage moved to the period before anything is measurable.

Accountability is narrower than the job's reputation suggests. An A&R is answerable for the quality and cost of what gets delivered and for whether the artists they signed still have careers in a few years. Chart outcomes depend on marketing, timing, competition and luck in proportions nobody can separate cleanly. What can be assessed is whether the records are good, whether they came in on budget, whether the artist grew, and whether the roster was worth building.

■  The Sunset Recorder