By James Flint
Wolves Football Club announced in 2021 that they were the first football club to create a record label ‘Wolves Records’. They announced the project with local artist S-X, who had just appeared on the song ‘Down Like That’ by influencer KSI and features American rappers Rick Ross and Lil Baby, with a music video shot at Molineux stadium. Whilst also announcing that Peter Rudge, who had previously managed The Who and The Rolling Stones, as a managing consultant. However, has the left field idea from the football club actually worked or has it started to backfire.
When Wolves announced the project, the head of label, Ricky Hill said: “There is so much talent in the local area that Wolves Records is perfectly positioned and hungry to back.
“However, this is not just about supporting local artists, but a genuine and authentic move by a football club with a vast audience to penetrate the music industry and develop new and emerging talent across the world. By partnering with Warner Music and ADA (Alternative Distribution Alliance), we are also able to plug into some of the best distribution available and have support from their team experts when it comes to releasing music.”
When it comes to local talent, Wolves Records have only one out of the four artists they have signed to the label that are from Wolverhampton which is grime artist Reepa and another being from Birmingham, Sophia Saffarian who is actually based in London.
Reepa who is actually the smallest artist on the label, in terms of most streams on spotify, started his career in 2015 and joined the label in 2022 and is popular in the city of Wolverhampton and appeared in Wolves FC’s kit launch last season, with his song ‘The Pack’, which has Wolves references but he says is it is not completely based around the football club, the song has almost 50,000 streams on Spotify.
Sophia Saffarian is also a smaller artist, but has only just started her career in 2022, who’s genre is R&B and Soul.
The label’s other two artists are both from the South of England, Ben Kidson who is from London and Split the Dealer from Reading.
Ben Kidson who is an alternative pop artist joined the label in March last year, he has had songs featured on shows such as Amex Unsigned on Amazon Prime, Killing Eve on the BBC and ITV’s Sticks and Stones.
Split the Dealer is by far the label’s biggest artist with an average of 14,200 monthly listeners on spotify, with his biggest song ‘Chinchilla’ having nearly 1.5 million listens on spotify. He is in the pop-rock genre.
However, looking at Hill’s comments before, the label has failed to grow local artists so far, the only case they have is Reepa’s ‘The Pack’ song where the club have had him perform the song at halftime of games and have had the kit launch video. As well as this, he appeared with S-X on BBC three’s ‘MOTDX’ show to talk about the label. But these have all been last season, Reepa’s numbers have dropped to what they were before the song and with Reepa being the first artist to join the label, I would have expected a bigger rise for the artist that has been there since the beginning, then he has had right now.
Whilst the other artists have started to grow, especially Sophia Saffarian, the label has failed to use the football club to help grow these artists. All of these artists have only performed at Molineux at a halftime show once. In fact in Saffarian’s case it can be argued that ‘BBC’s Introducing’ has done more for her as she has featured on the radio multiple times and has performed during The Hundred cricket tournament at Edgbaston.
So where does the label go from here? In my opinion, they need to sign more local artists, it may not have to be directly from Wolverhampton, but from the Black Country or the West Midlands at least. The whole reason as to why the club wanted to create this project is to give more local artists a bigger platform so that they can become more successful. If they can’t get the platform to perform and show their talents, what is the point of having a record label associated with you?
You can directly relate this into footballing terms, it’s like a football club having an academy but not graduating any of the stars in that academy into the first team. There isn’t a point of having an academy at that point.
Likewise with having the aspirations of having global artists, that can’t start if they are not successful, the label needs artists to start growing before other artists or even bigger musicians to believe in the project.
The idea of having a record label associated with a club in my opinion is amazing and I think that more clubs should be doing it, but Wolves in my opinion need to invest more into the label. This won’t be successful unless the club invests more money and effort into it.
Yes, I get that it has only been three years since they started, but think how many things have been able to grow in the space of three years.
(Featured image courtesy of Bex Walton – Molineux Stadium in the golden light, Wolverhampton Wanderers vs Manchester United, 29/8/21. Link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/bexwalton/51414239159)