Star Serpent Records is an indie/alternative rock record label based in Southampton, started by Matt Clark. Matt Clark is a second-year BA (Hons) Management Student.
I spoke to Matt about Star Serpent Records and this is what he had to say…
The focus behind Star Serpent Records is to promote and get in touch with blogs, radios and influencers for the band. While also taking care of all of the administrative work behind the release of the song. The aim is to take everything that can be taken off the artist’s shoulders while they focus on their music. There is a nasty stigma behind labels and Star Serpent aims to be much more cooperative and fair to artists, while hopefully learning with new artists along the way in these early stages. To put everything I’ve learnt at Solent and more into action, and bring artists to a larger audience then they could on their own.
I started Star Serpent Records because while I love music in general, and enjoy live music a lot as well, my main love for music has always come from the recorded side of the industry instead. Both my parents are very musical. As a kid, I started learning to play the drums. The noise this made, and my mum being a music teacher meant we ended up getting a soundproof music room at the bottom of our garden. I then brought equipment to turn this into a studio. This led me down the path of the music business, as by now I had been playing a while. I wanted to make the most out of what I could make, by learning how the industry works.
The course at Solent has helped massively for a few reasons.
The knowledge from the course is great, whether it’s from books they suggest, or from the actual classes. The lecturers don’t just tell you about it and educate you, they encourage you to get out there and experience the industry yourself. They provide chances to network and build up contacts along the way. This encourages genuine life skills. I’m only in my second year and off the top of my head, I can think of three other people just from my year of the Music Management and Music Promotions courses who have already started up similar ventures. Even more of us have already gotten stuck into the Southampton music scene, working at venues and getting to know the local bands. A lot of this was achieved in the first year when we had the opportunity to get involved straight away.
The lecturers are extremely helpful, every lecturer has their own specialities, and are extremely knowledgeable within this. For me, our lecturer James Hannam has been incredibly helpful in setting the label up. Every time I’ve been unsure of something, or confused about how something is meant to work, he’s always ready for a chat. All in all, it’s a very supportive system.
I only have one band on our roster at the moment however, the label has a single lined up to be released very soon with another band I’ve picked up called Modern Motive. I’m really looking forward to this and it has a lot of potential. They’ve been working towards this for a while, as COVID restrictions stopped them from finishing the recording at an earlier date. While that was a frustrating experience, this really gave me time to coordinate with them how we were going to market this in detail, and is sure to give them the release it deserves. They are reminiscent of some old school rock such as Rush and Manic Street Preachers, mixed with a bit of Green Day. If you think you fancy the sound of that, then check out some of their old stuff, and if you like it then give us a follow!
The band that I’ve already worked with, The Last Sociables, have released their debut EP, ‘Popular Indoors’ in August 2020 with me. They were a completely new band with no releases officially. For their release, I got them a premiere for their single from the EP on a decent sized Canadian blog. We got over 1,000 Spotify streams on their single within the first month. The EP total being just over double that, which isn’t bad for either of us considering we had just started.