Refinement Records opened its doors on April 26 to help musicians of all genres and ages make it big in the music industry.
Refinement Records — located in Draper — is comparable to a paid consulting firm with packages for every budget. The label puts together an individual plan for each band to fit its needs and further its business.
Adam Reader, the company’s president, spent 16 years as a sales and marketing professional and knows what it takes to develop artists. He said an artist’s music must be good, but sales and marketing can take the sound and deliver it to audiences everywhere.
The company focuses its 360-degree approach on developing what Reader calls “five-tool talent”: voice, interpretation, performance, image and marketing to help artists become well-rounded in every aspect of the industry.
“A lot of artists know how to write, but they don’t know how to market themselves,” Reader said. “They don’t know the whole game. We want to teach younger people how to do it, like the record labels used to do back in the day, where they developed and scouted artists and allowed them to flourish.”
The record label focuses on helping musicians of all ages, unlike other labels in the industry. Reader explained that most record labels are owned by corporations that focus on artists in the 13-17 age range because they have a higher fan base to buy more merchandise, yielding higher quarterly profits.
“We wanted to start an artist-development company where the music comes first,” Reader said. “It’s all about the music.”
Patrick Coffin, the company’s head of production, emphasized that Refinement Records works with bands to develop their music. He spent the past six years writing and mixing music professionally. Coffin helps bands in the beginning stages of the process write, record and mix their sounds.
“The idea is to celebrate the diversity of Utah musicians,” Coffin said. “There is a lot of stuff (in Utah) that you don’t hear elsewhere.”
Sam Schultz, vice president of artist management, oversees the one-on-one instruction that Refinement provides its clients, such as teaching them about stage presence and self-management.
“We have anything a band might need to put themselves together,” Schultz said.
Refinement Records has state-of-the-art facilities for their clients including an in-house performance venue, a film studio with green-screen technology and recording studios. The company also works with professionals from Los Angeles and Nashville to teach workshops and to establish an advisory board of chart-topping songwriters, Grammy winners, Oscar winners and Emmy winners to open doors for its clients.
“We don’t sell dreams,” Schultz concluded. “We sell reality.”
