Musicians learned that Harris was true to his word the artist would come first whenever possible.įor example: “I generally don’t make albums available on Spotify because the artist payout is so low,” he said. However modest, the financial success of Shifting Paradigm is due to karma as well as perseverance. The label earns money, he said - “although I don’t want to think about what those earnings are on a per-hour basis,” estimating he devotes 10 to 20 hours per week keeping things functioning. But he acknowledges “it is pretty much me doing most of the day-to-day stuff.” “Even just recently we were sending out a huge press release for a batch of albums, and our Dropbox link broke - we scrambled for three hours getting in touch with different people, trying to get them a media kit.”īy “we,” Harris primarily means “I.” His wife, Samantha Baker, pitches in on publicity, and random duties are assigned to music students who do internships to pick up business credits. “For a while we encountered problems dealing with websites in a digital world,” he said. He wrestled with the ever-changing technology around streaming and downloading until he found a platform,, that combined sonic fidelity and reasonable prices. Inevitably, glitches presented themselves. The stakes were raised, but Harris persevered in his vision that Shifting Paradigm be an artist-friendly collective, with musicians responsible for artwork and significant decisions about distribution of their work, while he supplied the structural umbrella that helped shepherd it into the marketplace. ![]() “That was the turning point, when Zacc totally took the reins.” We have to check out for now,’ ” Nichols recalled with a laugh. had his own stuff going on, and we just had to say, ‘Omigod, this is becoming a real label. “I had just had my first kid, and another was on the way,” Nichols said. The ambition scared off two musicians who had been helping him, drummer J.T. He launched a website, trademarked the name and began planning for a rollout of new releases featuring original material by other artists. In 2014, he persuaded a few colleagues to rerelease some of their better past efforts on Shifting Paradigm, adding four titles to the catalog. At first he just affixed the Shifting Paradigm moniker to his own projects, starting in 2012 with a Zacc Harris Group album and, a year later, “Expansions” by the Atlantis Quartet, a more established ensemble that the Illinois native co-founded in 2005 shortly after moving to the Twin Cities. “I had my own experience working with other labels and talked to a lot of musicians about what they did and didn’t like.” “There was a heavy learning curve,” Harris said. And online distribution rights generally revert to the artist after five years.Īll these semi-sweetheart deals left little margin for miscues. ![]() They receive a much bigger cut of proceeds from discs they sell at concerts. Musicians receive at least 75 percent of the total sales revenue, a much larger share than the traditional label. But with more than 30 albums now available - and even more ambitious plans for 2019 - Shifting Paradigm has shown that an artist-friendly business model can succeed. The whole paradigm has shifted,” he said, speaking from his Minneapolis home, which doubles as the label’s headquarters.Īs its name suggests, launching the label required a high degree of trial and error. “Nowadays the idea of a label is to provide an umbrella for artists - not to tell them what music to make, or how to record. To acknowledge this fragmented landscape, reshaped by internet streaming and YouTube overnight successes, Harris called his label Shifting Paradigm Records. The record business had been radically altered from the days when imprints such as Motown, Blue Note and, locally, Twin/Tone were synonymous with entire subgenres of music, conjuring a vivid catalog greater than the sum of its individual artists. A dozen or so Twin Cities jazz musicians were brainstorming ways to increase their visibility when guitarist Zacc Harris first broached the idea of a small, resourceful, artist-driven record label.
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