Business News Deals Labels & Publishers

300 + 1 = 300 and +1

By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 6 November 2014

Lyor Cohen’s ‘music content company’ 300 Entertainment has announced +1 Records as its official label partner. The New York independent was launched in 2008 as a division of management and marketing firm +1 Music, which was set up a few years earlier by Jonny Kaps and Nat Hays and over the years has worked with the likes of The Morning Benders, The Boy Least Likely To and The Heavy.

Announcing the news Cohen told Billboard: “Working with Jonny and Nat simply reinforces how important it is to surround us at 300 with incredibly tasteful people who are committed to the painstaking task of artist development. It’s a great pleasure and critical to our company’s success that we surround ourselves with entrepreneurs like them”.

Kaps added: “I felt like we were all hustle and no muscle [before this deal]. We would build a team for our artists and create the launching pad they needed. But when things would start to take off, we couldn’t capitalise in the ways we really wanted due to not having enough staff or resources”.

He went on: “This fact stared us in the face when The Heavy started to take off with ‘How You Like Me Now?’ We tried doing it completely ourselves and I am proud of all we accomplished, but when we were consistently selling 2500 albums and 7500 singles a week, we needed some muscle and resources in order to pour fuel on that fire. If we had our team at 300 back then, I truly believe that record would have gone through the roof”.

The first release under the 300+1 partnership has already come out, a single by producer Slaptop called ‘Sunrise, which you could say has ‘gone through the roof’. If the roof is placed at number 50 on the Billboard Dance/Electronic Singles Chart (it is at number 49 in that chart is what I’m saying).