Music Business Worldwide [Feature]
This article originally appeared on Music Business Worldwide.
If you got in touch with Ditto Music a decade ago, you might have ended up with a bouncy castle. If you get in touch with Ditto Music today, you might end up with a global hit.
Today, following a year of accelerated worldwide expansion, the Birmingham-born, Liverpool-HQ’d Ditto is a truly independent British success story – and it’s still fully owned by the Parsons brothers.
The firm was recently named the No.48 fastest-growing company in the UK by The Sunday Times – while the same newspaper placed Ditto at No.26 in its league table of British SMEs with the fastest-growing international sales.
With 19 offices around the world – in addition to an A&R presence in hip-hop hotbed Atlanta – Ditto is now truly one of the premier independent distribution/services companies worldwide.
The firm runs three offices in the US alone – in New York, Nashville and Los Angeles. There have also been recent office openings in the Philippines, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, The Nordics, Mexico and India.
In its first five years, Ditto welcomed the early recordings from some huge names through its platform, including the likes of Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith and Royal Blood. All of these acts, however, then jumped to major label deals in order to take their careers to the next level.
Since then, Ditto has become more tenacious about encouraging artists to remain independent and stay the course within its system. That’s why the firm takes its expanding global presence quite so seriously – with an A&R force in every market in which it operates – and has recently bulked up the level of service it can offer artists.
“Good A&R means being first on everything, spending 99% of your time in the studio or at gigs. It’s not enough to follow data, you need to be there way before that. We listen to every single piece of music that comes through Ditto before it even gets on Spotify. And if something sounds really good the rest of the office will listen to it and we’ll discuss it. But most of our music still comes from managers and people who are recommending to us.” Lee Parsons – Ditto Music CEO
Read the full story on how Ditto is changing the landscape of independent music here at Music Business Worldwide.