For the last 30 years, the A&R rep has been an enigma: What do they do? What don't they do?
Today, with the entire industry in flux, there are even more questions: Are they still relevant these days? Were they ever?
A&R reps are most certainly still relevant. What they do and don't do, however, is rapidly evolving.
As Gian Fiero points out in this posting for the blog Business Industry, A&R (which stands for “Artists and Repertoire") reps used to be songwriters who tried to match songwriters' works with other artists.
But when artists started writing their own material, A&R people reinvented themselves as malleable record label professionals who “did everything and nothing at the same time." This chameleon-like quality is part of what makes understanding A&R tough, and was a precursor to what Fiero views as the dawn of an entirely new profession: the independent A&R rep.
Fiero imagines a world in which reps work directly with artists, facilitating the commercial use of music and talent by entrepreneurs. Instead of working on behalf of a record company, Fiero sees A&R reps as horizontally minded, basing success on multiple streams of income. These new reps are essentially free agent managers (in the Kevin Kusatsu sense of the word), conduits connecting artists with revenue streams; essentially, their job will be to find and manufacture opportunities for artists that didn't exist before.
This shift is most likely a positive one for artists. Rather than worrying about keeping a position with a record label, independent A&R reps will be interested in finding ways to monetize their clients and the music they create. It's someone working for you, not the record label you are signed to.
In this new world, the new A&R reps are people like Shamita Carriman and Chris Cantalini, industry professionals who have a sense of their peers' needs. They might be harder to identify, but thanks to the Internet, it's also a lot easier for them to identify you.
