Modern Sky: the record label taking artists to China as the UK music industry faces challenges at home

While Brexit and venue closures are weighing on the UK music industry, one label is building links with China

Red Rum Club signed with Modern Sky UK in 2018

It was the summer of 2015 and Joe Corby had just finished his music degree. One night he was drinking in the Crosby, a pub with the same name as the town just outside Liverpool, wondering what he was going to do next. “You have to stick with music,” his friend urged him over a pint. No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a chance encounter would change the course of Corby’s life.

Michael McDermott and Simon Hepworth were feeling similarly disheartened in the Crosby that night. They had just had a meeting with the manager of their band Red Rum Club. He had told them they needed something a bit different to make them stand out, like a brass section. Corby spotted them drinking over the other side of the bar and, on hearing this, reminded them that he played trumpet. Moments later he was invited to try out for the band.

“It was the best decision I ever made,” Corby says down the phone from Liverpool, where Red Rum Club just played the Cavern, the famous Beatles venue, as part of the BBC 6 Music Festival. Last year, Red Rum Club signed with Modern Sky UK, a label founded through a partnership with Sound City, a Liverpool music festival, and Modern Sky Entertainment, a Chinese record label established by entertainment magnate Shen Li Hui in 1996.

Modern Sky UK is offering artists like Red Rum Club unprecedented access to Asia, exploring new markets for young acts grappling with challenges at home. British music is a lucrative export, valued at £400m in 2018, according to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), a trade association. But while the numbers are very big at the top – Glastonbury’s six-figure attendances, Ed Sheeran’s record-breaking tour sales – the industry is facing huge changes at the bottom.

New acts have fewer places to hone their live set as gentrification, higher business rates and rising property prices force small venues across the UK to close. Recorded music revenues have been savaged by streaming services, while ticket resale platforms have taken a slice of live music revenues. And that’s before Brexit, which could make it more difficult for acts to tour or to export merchandise in Europe.

While young acts like Red Rum Club owe much to hard work and talent, maintaining access to strong markets is just as important to their success. “It’s so much like a business, being in a band,” Corby says. “You’ve got to cut your losses the first year, hope you’ll break even the second and try to get some stability in the third.” Red Rum Club have just finished a sold-out tour in small venues across the UK. In March, they will headline the Modern Sky stage at Sound City festival, less than a year after they signed.

Becky Ayres, the managing director of Sound City, says Modern Sky Entertainment invested in Sound City to help them bring UK artists to China and vice versa. “Shen Li Hui liked the Factory Records ethos of being in the north,” Ayres says. Factory Records, started by Tony Wilson in Manchester 1978, established a label identity around acts including Joy Division and New Order and went on to define the Madchester scene. Modern Sky UK is creating an identity by developing 10 acts from the north of England each year, including Slow Readers Club, which had a top-10 album last year, and the Liverpool hip hop act Beyond Average.

“There is an infrastructure developing in the North of England,” Ayres says. “People are beginning to stay. There is a sense that graduates can come and stay in Liverpool.”

Sound City started in Liverpool in 2007 as a multi-venue festival championing emerging talent in music, including artists and business people, across the live and recorded industry. It has supported some of the UK’s biggest acts, such as Ed Sheeran and the 1975, and global companies like the music publisher Sentric and online distribution company Ditto, when they were in their infancy. For the 12th Sound City in May, Liverpool will welcome 80 music industry people from 40 different countries, with speakers including Chrissie Hynde from the Pretenders and Erin Tonkon, the engineer behind David Bowie’s Blackstar.

Corby says Sound City was always a festival that the band looked up to. “It’s the festival you wanted to be on at,” he says. “It’s very much a Liverpool thing. It gets loads of independent venues involved.”

Ayres says that small venues, including the ones they work with, have come under increasing pressure from a double whammy of developers and authorities cracking down on music they consider to be antisocial. “An artist we have worked with has been unable to put on shows because the venues won’t accept him,” she says. “At the same time there is more money in the music industry but it’s not trickling down and small venues are struggling.”

In March, a live music inquiry by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee noted that despite measures to prevent the targeting of urban acts, prejudice still exists. It recommended the creation of music boards to advocate for the live music sector in planning and policy disputes, to stem the tide of venue closures, which have been happening at a rate unprecedented in other cultural sectors for more than 10 years. The report said: “The full impact of these closures may not be felt immediately; however, there is a real threat that without access to spaces to hone their live craft, the next generation of musicians will struggle to maintain the UK’s position at the forefront of the industry.”

Ayres says working in international markets can address some of these issues by expanding the scope of where music can go: “Rather than confining artists to the UK, China is such a rapidly expanding market. There’s a huge population of young people who don’t have any preconceptions or a chronology of music because they had their own culture until several years ago when western artists started going over there.”

Slow Readers Club, which signed to Modern Sky UK in 2017, went to China to play two shows in Beijing and Hangzhou last year. “Both were big reputable festivals with huge crowds, what more could a band ask for,” says Aaron Starkie from the band. “We’re interested in playing anywhere and everywhere in the world; so the more open the world is for artists, the better.”

In October, Red Rum Club were invited to take part in the Zandari festival in South Korea. Corby says the band made valuable links with other acts from France, the UK and Hungary: “They had a central hub for it where you could meet other bands. Everyone brought their own stickers and posted them everywhere.”

Modern Sky has had such success taking British acts to South Korea, it has encouraged the Department for International Trade and the BPI to start a music mission to the country. While Sound City has strong links with Europe through the Europe Festival Network, Ayres says Brexit and the challenges of the UK market have made it even more important to look further afield.

“It’s our belief that Europe is a really important market for music,” she says. “But in the face of what’s going on politically, it’s important to look to other markets as well, so you’re not dependent on it. We’re keen on furthering the links between the UK and China – it opens up huge opportunities.”