Face-to-Face with A&T RECORDS // by Giulia Alberini

A&T Records, founded in London in 2022, is making strides in the UK scene while simultaneously building a bridge for international talents. The talented network of directors, managers, producers and collaborators has found solace in their shared vision. I recently had the opportunity to peek into this vision and speak with Anoush Sefatzadeh (Co-Founder and CEO),  Alessio Antonangeli (Co-Founder and Director) and Ben ‘Leo’ Green Smith (Producer). 

Anoush, Vegas Jones, Andry the Hitmaker, Leo and Not3s in the studio in Milan

Anoush

A&T Records. is an abbreviation for Abstract and Timeless Records…It's not just about the music, it's even in a business sense. We're just trying to make what we want  happen and not really care about what others tell us or want us to do, despite our age and short experience.  At the moment, we're building the foundations of a record label. We provide talent management, marketing, music and video production. We have the best of the best, like our visual director Luke Philippou who’s worked on RAYE’s Escapism. We're trying to give him a push just like the rest of the talents that we're supporting, such as Leo, AndryTheHitmaker, LeaveTheClub and obviously Patrick ‘Wave’ Carinci, one of the best in the world in terms of  mix and mastering. Supporting these talents whether it’s complete management or project-sourcing is a big stepping point for us. As any new business, we're exploring our options for the future ahead of us by consulting with our networks in order to continue our rapid expansion, such as building and tightening relations with the UK majors, distributors, publishers and others.  We're trying to do what we can first ourselves to build A&T into a known and strong platform where talents, partners and the team feel proud to be a part of. I also want to address something that we get questioned about all the time: are we signing artists and not only producers? Yes we are, but we are taking care and time in signing our first artist due to many reasons. You’ll hear more very soon.

Giulia

How did you meet everyone?  How has this all come about? What synergies have you found? 

Anoush

It started with a friend who is a producer who asked me to manage an artist from Rome and through that I had to send an email to Wave. I kept that relationship with Wave even though I wasn't speaking to him much. After like a year, I hit him up and he wanted to get involved to make his name global. We got introduced to Vegas Jones and Andry and the same thing happened with them. We went out to Milan for the first time in January and I ran into Vincenzo (1 of 2 from LeaveTheClub) at Vegas’ penthouse studio. He was finishing a track “Il Mio Dawg” which recently came out and I thought this guy's crazy. He played me some other stuff, and we spent nearly every day of our Milan trip with him and Giovanni at their studio. From that first interaction, I believed we can definitely grow their name internationally simultaneously with ours - fortunately, we’re pushing to make this happen more and more day by day. The way I met Leo was we had mutual friends at a spot in Central London, and Leo was going there to work unpaid. Leo was trying to make something happen out of his situation. I was there as well trying to network. I met Leo and I hit him up one time to come to my apartment early 2022. After that, we needed someone to help with the sessions and he came through and yeah, he just started like that and we’ve grown from nothing to something since starting A & T at the end of 2022. 

Giulia

How was the process of finding your competitive edge?  In terms of navigating the industry and positioning yourself. 

Anoush

How I like to deal with business is I look at where I want us to be, I reverse engineer and use the knowledge and resources around me to form a vision that can be tackled step by step. At the start of everything, having no knowledge and experience made me numb to failure and gave me the drive I needed to keep trying. For example, I learnt the fact that the success rate of hitting people up and expecting it to work perfectly is a dream rather than reality. So now every time I'm just thinking, let's try and hit it from every possible angle until we make it happen at the right time. When it came to us setting up a label, I looked at the best labels in the world. Atlantic Records was one of the main ones we looked at, as well as NQ from Manchester, who manage Aitch, because they started from nothing as well as us. They were a good business model to look at. We were looking at what resources they have and how they use them to push their competitive edge. We managed to find ours when we, as a team, were talking about the international links that we have. From there it was  pretty clear. OK, we have Wave, Andry, Vince, Gio, Vegas… We have these guys, that's our biggest selling point. As an example, we took multi-platinum selling UK artist Not3s to Milan but if we didn't have those relationships, it wouldn't have been possible. We would have never advanced our relationship with him as well as the people in Italy, because we brought them something of value. Now it's more about us giving to people because we've already taken more than enough in terms of networks and we're getting to a point where we're starting to deliver big time because we made big promises over the last few months.

Leo and @R14beats  in the London studio

Giulia

Do you have any advice for entrepreneurship? On the logistics of how you go about things? 

Leo

I feel as a producer the game for producers is quite different because it's all based on raw talent but that doesn't mean you don't work at it as well.  A lot of people think they have some good beats they put out on YouTube and  might get a couple good placements, but then they rest on that and they think that that's all they need to do. You have to chase constantly, you have to be striving for more because otherwise you're not going to get anywhere.  When I started in 2020, I was not getting placements and that's just because I was chilling. As soon as I started working at it, we started building and now we're getting to a place where it’s starting to be healthy again  in regards to music. It's literally just about chasing it,  because you can have all the time in the world but if you're not working, it's not going to happen. 

Anoush

If they're a solo producer, like a solo entrepreneur , they have to be hitting people up for sessions, doing the follow-ups. Making sure the legal side is cool. That's why having a team that takes care of you first is the most important thing. 

Leo

Yeah, even if it's just like your friend or someone that looks out for you, if you have someone that you can go to that actually understands music as well and not just a random friend. . 

Anoush

Yeah, it's mainly about the network.  The knowledge that you gain from people is quicker, more efficient and more applied to your business than if you're just reading. I've read so many books and  I've put so much money into courses and none of them have helped me at all compared to me  being in a session, hitting up a manager or talking with these labels. What I'm looking for and how I need to deal with it is not a book about some guy who was in the music industry 60 years ago. You know, it makes no sense. I think networking is probably the main thing just to start getting the knowledge you need. 

Giulia

What are some upcoming plans? If you can share anything. 

Anoush

We're focusing a lot on the image of the company, building the external reputation  because we want  people when they see us and our name and our talents to have a good image, to know that we're different compared to other labels, where we actually care about the talent.. Money is always the main topic, but for us, if we don't take care of the people around us, the money's not going to come. That's something we wanna show the industry through content like behind the scenes of the studio and questions. A big goal for us is to chart this year and with the opportunities that we have, it's possible. We're working with a lot of the biggest artists in the UK this year, but I can’t mention them by name. 

Anoush in the London Studio

Giulia

Tell me about your backgrounds… How did they affect who you are today?

Anoush

I'm Persian, I was born in Iran but moved to the UK at a very young age. The culture change from moving  really opened my mind and allowed me to be a new person, a sort of blank slate…The artists we are going to  work with I used to listen to when I was younger so it's very inspiring. In terms of business, I started with reselling Supreme when I was around 14. I borrowed money from my dad and flipped a profit every month.  It  showed me the importance of networking because you have to be outside the store a lot of the time and I’d speak to the guys who would do backdoor deals and try to learn what I could even if I wasn't necessarily looking to do the same - at least I had some insight. I learned the transactional side of things like talking to customers, building up a page, an image for it as well, and having a good reputation. I learned the basics through that I would say and then obviously we have to apply it to music and like 100x  it because this is different. 

Leo

I'm from Sheffield here in the UK. I had a pretty normal childhood and started realizing I wanted to do music when I got to secondary school. Everyone knew me as the person that liked music, played guitar, and played drums. When I  got kicked out of  high school it struck me that my life can either go, one way or the other. So, focusing  on the music I  realized that it’s actually my life’s  goal, my passion and I want to pursue it properly. 

Alessio

I come from a family of self made businessmen who have always pushed me to pursue entrepreneurship. I have never lacked the opportunities to find my vocation but it is passion and working with young hungry people that have made me fall in love with our project. Growing up as a kid with strong Chinese roots in Italy, I have found myself around people from different backgrounds and it inadvertently pushed me towards hip hop at a very young age,  as I could not easily fit in with the Italian or Chinese kids. What started as a simple love for a culture born on the other side of the world has shaped me to embrace it as something that represents me today.

Giulia

As a CEO,  do you think you would ever consider going back to school? or do you feel as though you're learning  it all on the job? 

Anoush

I'm learning so much, I've probably learned more in the first 6 months of business than any sort of education could ever provide me, even if I studied for like 15 years straight.  It’s because they’re personal experiences that can't be replicated. The reason people write books is because of their subjective experience which you can gain some sort of insight from. You need to apply it though. I think business is mainly intuition, which helps empower your decision making. The more times you fail and understand how to go around the curve blocks, the better your decision making. 

Giulia

As a producer,  how does a session with an artist usually go? how do you know when to do what the artist says or to try and push in another direction? 

Leo

It depends what level the artist is on. Some of the artists we work with are still experimenting. Other times we get those that come in, choose a beat and go in the booth and execute. They come out, listen  to it and and they're on to the next. A lot of the good rappers we work with  have this mindset of just getting straight to it, not messing about and treating it like work. Others come in and have a more relaxed approach. Those are fun sessions but when they come in with a goal set and an idea, I’ve found that's the best way people work. In terms of pushing, I kind of just gauge it when they walk in like how big they are as an artist, what their sound is and whether I think they know themselves well enough. Sometimes  I'm just the engineer, sometimes we ask the room for opinions, sometimes they're not open to ideas to begin with. 

Giulia

Being the only one still attending university, how do you balance your time? 

Alessio

You just need to make sacrifices. We hang out as a team in our free time too so we’re always in a productive and creative environment, whether i'm working on the business or school. 

Giulia

What have you found most fulfilling so far in doing this? 

Anoush

I think giving others an opportunity to fulfill themselves has always been like my main goal, just to make others find their potential.  Such as helping Leo understand where he can get to even in a short amount of time. It's the same thing with someone like Wave and all those guys, they want to leave Italy, so being able to be that bridge,  to provide that opportunity, I think that's the most fulfilling thing. 

Leo

Just listening back to a song that we've made and being really happy with it. I think that's the best feeling I can get out of making music. Having the song on repeat. Yeah, stuff that makes us feel proud musically , is the  most fulfilling. 

Alessio

Seeing how we’ve been progressing, meeting the artists we’ve been listening to as teenagers and when people in the industry show us appreciation.

Giulia

What is more challenging than you expected? 

Anoush 

As a CEO, the most challenging thing is finding the right people.  It's very difficult and it's something we're still developing because we haven't been in the music industry that long. You have to know how people move around the business. I bring a normal transactional business type of mentality to the table, that's why we work and we shape it to the  industry to make sure we’re ahead of those around us despite lacking those huge resources. Nevertheless, our month on month progress has been incredible and we’re keeping it consistent.

Leo

For me personally I think social interactions, like just being able to talk to everybody that comes into the studio and strike a conversation with them. We meet so many different types of people and not everybody's open to conversation and it's important that I have that skill because otherwise they're not gonna feel comfortable. So it's me trying to be an icebreaker in the studio.  Otherwise they’re not going to perform as well as we or they would like to and we always try to get the most out of people in sessions because even that makes us stand out in the industry. 

Alessio

It's a business so all the behind the scenes, the background work is long. Luckily, we have an amazing team that can take care of what we need and keep building out name

Giulia

What do you think is the biggest problem in the music industry today? 

Anoush 

I think the ego is one of the biggest things, not even exclusively to artists but even managers and producers. Sometimes that can really limit everyone, even those trying to even help. There's so many problems with managers and artists just because they both have an ego and don't listen to each other. There's so much fame and money attached to it, that's the main thing. 

Leo

I'm probably going to say the same as Anoush, I think it is the ego.  It blocks a lot of creativity and it kind of starts beef where it isn't needed. It even reflects on our business, because we can't bring certain people into the studio and have collaborative sessions just because we don't know if they're beefing. 

Alessio

I would say it might be the lack of organic relationships when you work with big labels, but this is what we do differently.

Giulia 

Any final remarks?

Leo

We're keeping it quiet for now. You'll figure it out soon. I feel like we're not gonna have to shout ourselves out pretty soon. We’ll keep it natural and let others shout us out. It’s already begun and makes us proud.

Follow their journey

@atrecordsuk

https://atrecords.co.uk/