For Brent “Siddiq” Sayers, cofounding the Minneapolis hip-hop music label Rhymesayers Entertainment came out of necessity. “We assumed nobody was looking at Minneapolis for the next hip-hop sensation,” he says. “Being from here detaches you from the industry.” And with no major labels like Sony, Warner Brothers, or Universal right down the street to schmooze with, “it was a very natural DIY [do-it-yourself] mentality as opposed to being something planned out.”
In 1995, Sayers launched Rhymesayers with three friends—Sean “Slug” Daley, Anthony “Ant” Davis, and Musab “Beyond” S’ad—using mainly Sayers’ personal savings and credit cards. Within two years, Sayers had quit his job to work full time on the label. A year later, Slug—who’s also the rapper for Atmosphere, Rhymesayers’ highest-profile artist—stopped working at Minneapolis’s famed Electric Fetus record store.
Today, Rhymesayers has five full-time staff members, and three more employees who run the Fifth Element record store, located below Rhymesayers’ offices in Uptown. Everyone wears multiple hats, from booking to promotions to distribution. “There was a day when I did everything,” recalls the thin-framed, soft-spoken Sayers from his airy office above the store. Even today, he adds, “24-hour days are not uncommon.”
Rhymesayers is one of several locally based labels that could be considered the progeny of Twin/Tone, the granddaddy of independent Twin Cities record labels. From 1977 to 1994, Twin/Tone launched the careers of the Replacements, the Suburbs, the Jayhawks, Babes in Toyland, and Soul Asylum. At the time, the goal of many bands was to use a small label as a launching pad to land a record deal with a “major.” During its 17 years of activity, Twin/Tone signed 25 bands to major-label contracts.
In the current music industry climate, being signed to a major isn’t the big deal it used to be. With physical record sales as their primary revenue stream, the majors have resisted the move toward digital distribution. Independent labels, however, operate lean, which enables them to adapt their business models to grow with the trend of digital distribution, be extremely artist friendly, and pursue new marketing strategies. By signing with an indie, artists can craft better payment structures, have as much or as little control of their promotions and publicity as they desire, and—most important—retain the rights to their music.
