CEO
Seeker Music
Years with Company: 4
Address: Frogtown, Los Angeles, CA
Web: seekermusic.com
Email: [email protected]
Publicity: Hannah Schwartz, Shore Fire Media - [email protected]
Clients: Christopher Cross, John Ryan, Phil Plested, Charlotte Caffey, Run the Jewels, Jon Bellion
BACKGROUND
Evan Bogart has held many roles in the music industry, among them producer, A&R scout, manager and award-winning songwriter. With Seeker Music, he used all those experiences to create a unique record company that includes publishing, label services, and a song catalog with around 14,000 copyrights and master recordings.
Destination Seeker
These investors from the U.K. were looking to get into the music industry. They had spent about a year hiring consultants to make recommendations. And one of the ways they decided to get in is start an independent music company. They thought, “That makes sense for us.” Catalogs they understand, because there are some apples to apples there with what they’ve done in real estate and other things. But they didn’t understand the music industry. And they were looking for someone creative to align with.
I got introduced to them by happenstance. They said, “If you were going to start a company from scratch, how would you do it?” I told them and, after three or four months of talking, they were like, “We’d love to sketch out a company with you.” That was January 2020.
Investing With Heart
COVID happened, and the creative side of our business was paused. It was hard to get a lot of creative stuff done. I was kind of forced to focus on the finance side of publishing and the catalog side.
My partners surrounded me with some of the smartest people in the biz and crash coursed me on catalog acquisition, valuation, the finance side of publishing that largely I hadn’t been exposed to. We started buying catalogs. I focused on catalogs of songs I wish I wrote and projects I wish I’d worked on. I invested with my heart before I invested with their money.
Artists and Music Are Number One
In everything we do, we think about the creator and songs first. How does this benefit the creator? How does this celebrate the song? And as a songwriter myself, [I think about] how I want to be treated as a songwriter or want my songs celebrated. That’s the prism for how we look at everything.
Seeker Family Values
I would never offer someone a deal that I wouldn’t sign myself. We’ve done a lot of catalog acquisitions where I’ve encouraged people to hang onto certain rights. Let’s be partners. We want to be creative with you. We want to elevate your legacy and your brand. I want you to feel like you’re winning when we’re winning. I want you to be incentivized to collaborate with us. Even people who have sold us all their rights stay engaged, because we’ve come to them with creative plans.
A Songwriter’s Dream
We just had a retreat with our songwriting team. It was our first. We’re going to do it at the beginning of every year. We brought in experts from the A&R field and the sync fields. We brought in mental health experts and did guided meditation. We did sound baths. We taught people about the balance between work and life. And then we brought in experts to teach how to write for different things. I want to create the company that I wish I’d been signed to at any point in my career.
Working Catalog
We released all of Christopher Cross’s music, including his first albums. Those are on Seeker Music now. Same thing with Run the Jewels. We work closely with Killer Mike, El-P and their team. We did a lot around their anniversary last year.
Letting Music Be Fun
Within Seeker, we have a label called music is fun. And everybody we’ve signed is pure fun. We signed this artist, Carr. She’s basically Katy Perry with guitars. She’s starting to make some noise. We signed this band out of Scotland called Dead Pony. The BBC is all over them. And there are a few other ones we’re rolling out this year.
Development Mode
I’m not out there to sign Paramore. I’m trying to build the new one. Dead Pony’s the next Paramore. I’m an artist development guy. It’s in my blood. That goes back to A&R for Eminem’s first album or helping manage Maroon 5 when they got signed or getting OneRepublic their first deal when I was an agent. I’ve always been in artist development mode.
Artists Seeking Evan
Contact us through seekermusic.com. I’m always checking my DMs on Instagram, so DM me music. When I have down time, I love discovering stuff. So does my A&R team. We’re all ambitious about checking stuff out.
I’m looking for someone that understands who they are as an artist and brings their own perspective. I don’t care about being huge on TikTok. Sure, the analytics are cool. But for me, I go back to the gut. I look for something unique.
A.I. Fears
I’m largely A.I. positive. There are valid and warranted concerns that need to be regulated. But I don’t want that to deter people. In my conversations with people in The Recording Academy, there was all this fear. And I was like, “There’s got to be something positive about this.” So I threw myself into all the different A.I. programs for music creation. I realized most of them stink and have a way to go. And the ones I love utilize human-created sounds.
Songwriters Are Human
We’ve been using A.I. for years. There are A.I. elements in all the DAWs [digital audio workstations] and programs we’ve been utilizing. People are, in some ways, making much ado about nothing. I understand there are certain jobs that are more at risk than others. But there’s a human element to composing. I don’t think a computer can write “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” or “Beautiful” or “Halo.” There’s something cosmic about songwriting. Melody is intangible. And it’s hard to replicate that unless you have some connection to the universe.
Somebody tweeted something that stuck with me—“A.I. isn’t going to take your job; someone who knows how to use A.I. is going to take your job.” You can look at A.I. as your enemy, or you can say, “What parts of this are useful to me?” A.I. might come up with something you wouldn’t have thought of on your own.
Party Time
We do celebration campaigns around songs and albums. We created a podcast where we engage music creators to tell the stories behind the songs. We’ve created a sample platform called Samplemoose that has resulted in some incredible releases, including a single from Coco Jones, which was nominated for Best New Artist. We’re doing stuff around the sync world. We’re doing themed camps. We make it fun. We make it celebratory.
And we get a lot of engagement from that. I think through the prism of how a songwriter would want to be engaged. So we try to create events and it’s yielded incredible results.
