Xelon’s Dance Dance Revolution

xelon-300x300_2015Around the halls of Play MPE®, we love a success story- especially one from a new client!  Recently, our own Frank Varrasso (music biz mogul extraordinaire to Australia and beyond) connected Xelon Entertainment Australia with the wonders of Play MPE®, and all that the service offers artists and labels in terms of distribution, reach, and visibility. With a particular foothold in EDM and specifically trance, Xelon Entertainment is known as Australia’s premiere digital distributor, encompassing the labels 405 Recordings, Drumb, Micropope, and Velcro, while serving many, many more.

Initially cautious in partnering up with another service, the folks at Xelon have quickly become the shining, glowing example of a happy Play MPE® client. And why is that? Simply put, their initial sign-on and first send with Play MPE® resulted in a near instant boomerang of investment returned.  And what better way to measure and demonstrate that return than with artist royalties from airplay? Yep, just days after they were sent out through Play MPE®’s easy peazy system, the songs could be heard in radio programming offices and across FM frequencies alike, all with royalty checks just around the corner.

“Every year gets busier and busier,” Xelon’s Label Manager Jimmy MacKay reflected when we caught up with him recently.  “It’s always better to be overworked than underworked. Xelon’s essentially the largest independent distributor in Australia. We focus mainly on dance and electronic music, probably about 80% of our business. And the other 20 is singer-songwriters, rock & roll bands, children’s stuff, ringtones and all kinds of other stuff. We also look after about 160 labels in total; some are more active than others. We handle 40-60 releases per week.  Some will send 3 or 4 releases per week and others might do 3 or 4 a year. It’s good, it’s varied.”  Whew!

One can hear the air of contentment as Jimmy reflects on the organic nature of his career path that led him to label manager at Xelon.  A music guy from way back, MacKay had worked at a music shop selling instruments and stereo equipment, and subsequently took a part time gig at Xelon which led him to producing new compilations, selecting tracks from their vast back catalog. “That was cool, and a couple of months down the line, something else needed attention, and I put my hand up and you just sort of carve your own sort of job there. And three years later I’m now sort of label manager, making sure all the labels are happy and everything’s done on time so that’s cool.” A true music fan’s career arc if ever there was one!

Assessing some of the keys to Xelon’s success, MacKay shared “We’re very hands on. It’s a very personal service. All the labels know that we’re a phone call away. If they’ve got a problem or a question they can just call up. So that’s good. And some distributors are online only; they don’t have that personal connection. I think that’s a bit of the key to our success.”  Xelon is clearly also constantly innovating, identifying opportunities and needs in the market. “We’ve spent the first half of this year gearing up to launch a new product, if you will. We’re developing a part of the business called Noise Hive which is sort of a distribution service to singer- songwriters, not labels as such. People that have their home studio, record a song, and want to get it up on iTunes or Spotify or any of the other platforms.  We’re opening an avenue to allow them to. That’s an exciting thing too, you know. We’re growing every day.”

One couldn’t help but note the synergy between Xelon’s mission and that of Play MPE®. “Yah and it’s very easy. A label will say ‘We wanna get our music on radio. What’s the best way to get it in music directors’ hands?’  Most of the time, we’ll be a proxy for them and we’ll say, “There’s Play MPE®.  You just upload, you fill in the form, and the rest is done for you.  And you get a report. A lot of the times when we use Play MPE® it’s not actually been for our own stuff. It’s been on behalf of the labels.  We do that for them and then we get a nice report every week or every fortnight and we can pass it on to the labels and they can say ‘Ok well this radio station downloaded the track. They must like it. Let’s see their playlist or let’s listen to their station to see how many times they play it. It’s a good set up.’” That sort of one-stop shopping has been an asset for mutual client Varrasso PR.  “It’s a service that we use and a number one radio plugger in Australia. He uses the service probably more than we do- it’s the go to system,” MacKay shared. We couldn’t agree more, Jimmy!

Alongside Sweat It Out, Loophole Recordings, and Medium Rare, Xelon’s largest client is Onelove, based in Australia. “They’re a big dance music label and they’ve got a lot of records out at radio. They use Varrasso PR too and it all goes through Play MPE® and I know they’ve been happy with the results.” MacKay continued, “And it’s good for us. The more tracks we can get into the current chart the better.  It’s good looking at the weekly charts because you can say ‘That’s one of ours. Before you realize it, you’re at the top of the tree for more tracks on the chart than anyone else.’ ” MacKay chuckled as he shared the following: “Spotify put together a playlist called Hot Club Tracks and I went through this the other week and I think there’s probably about 60 tracks on the playlist all together and I’d say probably about 60% of those tracks are from our distributed labels. And that was really good to see. We nicknamed it the Xelon Club Chart.”

We asked McKay for his take on the changing climate of dance music, and its growth since the 90s. “EDM is a double-edged sword. It’s got a stigma against it and there are people out there who are die-hard fanatics or hate it. But you gotta take it for what it is and what it’s done. It’s opened the door. I think outside of the U.S., the rest of the world joked amongst themselves that the U.S. didn’t really ‘get’ dance music.  Which isn’t true of course, ‘cause a lot of the best house and techno DJ’s came from Detroit and Chicago. But as a whole as a populace, Americans didn’t ‘really’ get it. It took those DJ’s getting popular overseas before it sort of went back home. And now that’s completely changed. And EDM has opened that door. It’s opened a lot more people up to the genre. You may hear the standard EDM and they think “Yeah, this is cool, and then delve a little deeper and find some of the better stuff out there. It’s a good door opener for discovering other music. The gateway.” And that means growth for Xelon and more, to say the least. “Looking forward that’s potentially 300 million people more that are interested in dance music so it’s a big number and we’ve started seeing an increase in sales in the U.S. over the last 2-3 years. It’s suddenly getting higher and higher.”  Cheers to that, Jimmy!

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