16 minute read
Solomon Adesiyan Trust It Entertainment
L-R: Austin Daboh (Atlantic), Solomon Adesiyan (Trust It), Rich Castillo (Atlantic)
Solomon Adesiyan is a new champion of Irish music, with his sights set on global success. He discusses the rise of Trust It Entertainment, why he signed a JV with Atlantic and the importance of being honest with artists...
One of the greatest things about young executives working in music is often their bombastic ambition. Not yet jaded by the failure and disappointment that inevitably accompanies any level of success, they bound into the business, bright-eyed, with cups always half-full, and confidently plant their flags as leaders of the future. Trust It Entertainment’s Solomon Adesiyan does not disappoint.
After signing a JV deal for his Irish label with Atlantic Records UK, he’s got world domination in his sights. Firstly, he wants to have 10-15 artists at the same level as the Dua Lipa and Ed Sheerans of the world. Then he’s planning on becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. “I feel like I’m going to be in the top 1% of richest people in the world, God willing, by offering value, not just finessing,” he tells us. You heard it here first.
Adesiyan, who has Nigerian parents, was born in the UK and moved to Ireland when he was two years old. He grew up in a small town in County Clare, later moving to Dublin to study drums and music at BIMM.
Adesiyan’s interest in music stems from his mum’s musician side of the family, but his chosen career path was still a tough sell. “In Africa, music is not a career, it’s a hobby and my parents are very traditional. I’m male and the first-born so [was expected to be] a doctor, lawyer or engineer. It took a lot to convince my parents.”
At college, he fell in love with the business side of music and at the same time opened a studio and started helping his fellow musicians with production and recording, filling a much-needed gap. “Before I got to Dublin, I thought the industry would be so cool, and when I got here I found that we had no community for black people and our music, which was crazy to me.”
Eventually, what he was doing evolved into a label and management company and Trust It officially launched in 2016. Since then, the label has released music by local rap, hip-hop and drill artists, including A92, Andre Fazaz, Offica, AV9, Alicia Raye, BoyW1DR, Chuks, Evans Junior and J.B2.
In 2017, Adesiyan and his friend, artist Sequence, also launched Ireland’s answer to Link Up TV, Dearfach TV. The channel’s first viral moment came courtesy of a performance by J.92, which blew up even further thanks to a collaboration with Russ Millions
and Chuks on Link Up, which currently has over 9m views on YouTube. The success caught the attention of Spotify and Adesiyan was tasked with creating the playlist Rap IE, which is how he met the now EVP of Atlantic UK, Austin Daboh (who was then at the streaming company). It was Universal that first offered Adesiyan a JV deal, he says, but he ultimately chose Atlantic because of his relationship with Daboh and Warner’s ambition. “Even though Universal had more money to offer me, I was more about the team and using less money to create bigger results and [Atlantic offered] what I felt like I needed to push the Irish scene,” he says. Discussing the motivation to get involved in Trust It from his side, Daboh says: “Solomon has been the main driving force behind the black music scene in Ireland, and, along with his Trust It team, has been leading the “If you’re loyal to me way for the culture to evolve and grow. He has an entrepreneurial from day one, I will mind, is ingrained in the culture and is respected and admired by always remember artists and peers – and that’s exactly you.” the type of person we want to work with at Atlantic.” Here, Adesiyan discusses his big ambitions, company ethos, and what he thinks music could learn from sport.
What are your company principles? Do you have any rules that you always stick by?
I’m against the whole ‘knock somebody down to get up’. I’ve grown up in a Christian family and have a lot of morals so I’m loyal to my people. If you’re loyal to me from day one, I will always remember you. With the Warner deal, I could have gotten more money if I’d gone with Universal but the fact that Austin gave me such a great opportunity at Spotify, for no reason, meant I did the deal with him. Instead of me taking new artists who I now have the leverage to work with, I want to use my budget to develop the artists that put their trust in me five years ago and are still with me now. I feel like collaboration and togetherness is the way forward. Unfortunately, we live in a kind of negative world where a lot of people want quick results, but if you’re looking for longevity, it’s better to have long-lasting relationships and be loyal to people. That approach is how I’ve been able to run Trust It — there are
other labels in Ireland that have more money than me but what has helped me from day one is the fact that I was friends with everybody so I was always able to ask for favours, even when I didn’t have the money.
How do you approach artist development?
I’m not a yes man. If your music is not good, in my opinion, I will not say it’s good. The majority of people are yes men who will tell you that your music is great and artists will just go through their careers not succeeding and getting frustrated [as a result].
Because of the fine line between music being a passion and the music industry being a business, people don’t really want to go into detail. But I take the music for what it is because I came from an intellectual background with music — gospel is one of the most intellectual [genres] in the world, as well as maybe jazz and classical.
When I got to BIMM, I put the theory behind what I was doing and could break down a song or a beat into specifics. So when I’m taking an artist, if I see potential, maybe with their look, voice, songwriting ability, flow or the way they interpret a story, I will focus on their strength while we work on their weaknesses to make them as strong as their strength. I do it in a way that they know I am not against them, I am for them. But if the content ends up bad, just know that I am going to be honest with you. In the past, it didn’t work out the best for me because people took offence to it but now people just know that’s how I am.
There’s a really strong black music scene here in the UK — what point of difference do the acts you’re working with in Ireland have?
There’s not really any competition, in my opinion. Hare Squead were the first black group ever to be signed to a major label from Ireland, in 2016, and they were a big deal.
They did the European tour with Dua Lipa, they had international success to the extent that GoldLink co-signed their song on his album, which became one of his biggest songs that year. If it wasn’t for Jessy Rose, who was having some mental health issues [and left the group in 2017], they would probably be as big as the top artists in the world right now.
When we dropped the J.B2 and Chuks’ Link Up song with Russ Millions, it blew up in the UK and when Russ performed that song, everyone thought it was from a UK artist. A92’s Plugged In session with Fumez The Engineer is the biggest freestyle session right now in the UK. If I played you this music, you would not tell me this is Irish music, you would tell me this is good music and it’s different.
The key to Irish success to me is how diverse we are at what we do. You cannot put any 10 Irish artists in a room and say, ‘This is going to sound like that’. In London, if I did it, I would nearly be able to because there’s a cohesive sound going through the UK. And the ones who are not cohesive are making bigger waves — in the UK’s top 20 [contemporary black music acts], you have maybe 15 artists who are drill but the top 5, like Stormzy, Dave, J Hus and Fredo, are not drill and they don’t sound like each other. For me, I think Ireland is going to break past the UK and become one of the top countries in the world for music because of how diverse and musical we are.
What would you change about the music industry and why?
It would be good if the music industry was more like the sports industry and had capitalised to make sure that everybody’s getting paid well. Even in the lowest football league in the UK, players are probably getting paid better than minimum wage. I wish that the music industry had more leverage or financial structures and less greed so that everybody could make more money and people can actually focus on it. I see really talented artists in Ireland having to work a part time job and that’s crazy because if this was an average
“My main aim is to football player, he’d be paid some sort of wage that he could live off. have 10-15 artists on It’s weird in music because unless you have companies behind you the same level as Ed collecting your royalties, you might not get paid. How are you going to Sheeran or Dua Lipa.” tell me that money that is mine and is owed to me, is just in the air, chilling? There are companies trying to attack money being lost in the music industry but it’s been a problem for way too long and it’s still an issue today. It doesn’t really make sense. Companies who have money, like Universal and Warner, should be investing into tech-style companies that solve music industry problems. Maybe they should stop trying to fight and compete with independent artists and each other and treat themselves as the Google, Amazon and Microsoft of the music industry and start investing in other labels and tech start-ups that solve problems. Warner doing this deal with me is helping to solve a problem in Ireland and maybe labels should do more of that. There are Sony and Universal [offices] in Ireland but they don’t sign acts, they are just marketing [international acts] into the territory. Music is only as big as the people at the top allow it to be.
What are your ultimate ambitions for Trust It Entertainment?
Music is just the entry for myself as an entrepreneur. Trust It is one of my babies that will grow and it’s a great company but it’s not the only one I’m involved in. My main aim is to have 10 to 15 artists on the same level as Ed Sheeran or Dua Lipa in the world, not just doing Ireland or UK numbers, but doing international numbers. That will set a standard for Ireland and push for other Solomons to do their own deals and push the music scene forward. It’s all about the legacy for myself, Trust It and Ireland and then I’ll go on to greater things. n
HIT-RATING A.I. ISN’T MEANT TO REPLACE A&R PEOPLE. IT’S FOR HUMANS TO USE AS A JUMPING OFF POINT
Artifical Intelligence-in-music specialist Musiio will open a UK office at Tileyard North next year. Here, the firm’s founder and CEO Hazel Savage talks about how she believes AI technology should – and shouldn’t – be used...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is still a relatively new technology to most people in the wider world – from a practical perspective and for the music industry as a whole.
As a non-coder I try to be the bridge between the latest in AI technology and the music industry – to demystify it to an extent, but also to be a steward for the use and application of such a technology – as best I can.
Musiio was founded in January 2018. I met my co-founder, Aron Pettersson, at a deep tech incubator in Singapore. Whilst at the incubator we were surrounded by companies building blockchain technology, crypto, quantum computing and even direct-to-consumer e-commerce plays. And in the middle of it all was Aron and myself building the first ever deep-tech music company in Singapore.
The term AI or Artificial Intelligence can bring on the immediate assumption of AIgenerated music or an ‘AI that can write music’.
In the last five years there have been lots of companies building in this space, and AIgenerated music is certainly hugely interesting from a technical and academic point of view. But there haven’t been many successful implementations in the music industry to date, and at Musiio, we don’t operate in this space at all.
Instead, we play purely in the descriptive AI category. We use AI to generate metadata tags, or we use fingerprinting techniques on audio to search other audio files (think of it like Google Image Reverse Search for audio).
One of our latest technology advancements, which we are calling ‘Hit Potential’, works by giving a percentage score for likelihood of commercial success. What it is really doing is giving you a descriptor of whether a track contains similarity to other successes.
It isn’t meant to be used as an automated A&R person; it’s data for human beings to use as a jumping off point in a sea of the tens of thousands of tracks released every day.
My personal definition of whether an AI is valuable and needed in any industry – most specifically, in my case, to the music industry, is if the answer is yes to one or both of two questions:
Xxxx Ed Sheeran’s Bad Habits is the UK’s biggest hit single of the year so far. Could AI have forecast it was going to be a smash?
wants to do? 2. Is the AI performing a job that no human being can physically do?
I think descriptive AI fits this definition perfectly because manually tagging thousands of tracks is tedious and monotonous work, perfect for outsourcing to an AI. And when you start to get into volumes such as our client Beatstars, tagging 20,000 tracks a day, it wouldn’t be humanly possible to do.
This frees people up to spend more time on the creative aspects of their job, ones I personally believe should not be automated using AI.
As a company we have been working on an AI framework introduced by Rolls Royce called the Aletheia Framework, so keep an eye out for that full announcement later this year.
The exciting thing about AI technology is that it is only going to get better. It will be able to understand more genres, it will be more customisable and it will be more affordable.
I often compare it to websites. When websites first became a must-have, you needed to go to a developer and have them coded from scratch at great cost. Nowadays anyone can log onto Bandzoogle or Wix and get a site up and running with no code experience and very little outlay.
AI will likely take this same development path. At Musiio we already have drag and drop tools for people to use our AI. For example our selfservice Tag product is just seven cents (USD) to tag each track (no recurring costs). You just drag and drop the tracks in as easy as you would put something in Google Drive or Dropbox.
I am also excited about the new breed of AI companies emerging. I think Audioshake, based in the States, is a fascinating example of a technology becoming viable.
Source separation and stem creation tech has been around for years, but always with the trade-off being a huge loss in audio quality. Audioshake seems to have solved that issue: brilliant quality audio, true source separation for immediate instrumental versions.
Hazel Savage is the CEO and Co-Founder of Musiio, which will become one of the inaugural tenants at Tileyard North. Due to open in summer 2022, Tileyard North will be a 135,000 square foot creative industries hub, based at Rutland Mills. It will be the UK’s largest creative community outside of London. To find out more, go to tileyardnorth.co.uk
Every Picture Tells A Story
Date: May 1, 2013 Location: Capitol Studios, Los Angeles, USA
No matter where you go in the world, you’re bound to bump into the Irish.
It was 2013, my first ever trip to LA, and my first visit to the iconic Capitol Studios. The occasion was the BPI Sync Licensing Mission and I was Head of PR for the record label trade body at the time. Everything was going well – insightful panels, experienced speakers, the infamous pub quiz. And then Gary Lightbody arrived. He had agreed to speak about the impact to Snow Patrol’s career of Chasing Cars featuring in the second season finale of Grey’s Anatomy.
We were both standing in the Control Room of Studio A – home to recordings by Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and countless others. Gary’s Northern Irish antennae detected my accent, we said hello, and I got a photo ‘for my mum’.
Later that evening, at the annual Garden Party, I explained to him that I wanted to support the Northern Irish music sector more, and we discussed the work of the Oh Yeah Music Centre in Belfast, of which he is a co-founder and Honorary President.
Since that encounter with Gary, I’ve been on a journey with the music sector in our homeland. He and his business partner, Davy Matchett, recommended me for the board of Oh Yeah, and seven years later, I’m now the Vice Chair.
And then last year, Gary and Davy became the first client of my new company, The Fourth Pillar, helping them to develop the music sector in Northern Ireland. Together, we’ve lobbied government, launched Music Connections, and are looking for meaningful ways to support the amazing talent we have on our shores. Long may our partnership continue.
Formerly Head of Communications at the London-based music organisations PPL and BPI, Lynne Best is now Director of The Fourth Pillar, which offers strategic communications and policy advice to companies in the music and creative industries.
