Already this year, Yungblud’s list of achievements include a third UK No.1 album, the second edition of his Bludfest festival and a starring role in the final Black Sabbath concert at Villa Park.
Yet, according to Tommas Arnby, CEO of Special Projects Music Co, which manages Yungblud, the singer and his team “always feel like we’re fighting against something”.
Speaking to Music Week in the middle of a sold out run of dates in the USA and Canada for Yungblud (real name Dominic Harrison), Arnby said that the team have “always been the underdog”.
“We’ve built this global community, but we never feel successful, really, in that traditional sense,” said Arnby. “I think we were guilty for a minute of being mistaken for being an influencer because he came through with Gen Z. The internet exploded for him and sometimes people’s perception of him online took over from the actual music.”
Yet, three consecutive No.1 albums, the latest of which was Idol, which debuted at the summit with 25,947 sales, a successful – and revolutionary – festival and the latest of many blockbuster tours suggest that Yungblud’s success is well established. As Arnby explains, Yungblud’s spot on the bill for Black Sabbath’s farewell show – which has been accompanied by various moving tributes from Harrison to Ozzy Osbourne, who passed away in the same month – has proved a landmark moment.
In his latest sit down with Music Week, the executive – who steers Yungblud’s career alongside Adam Wood – looks back on that pivotal performance, reflects further on Yungblud’s story so far and reveals his plan to revolutionise music publishing…
Yungblud covered Changes at Black Sabbath’s final show. Did you have any idea that it would get the attention it has?
“There was a lot of back and forth with finding the right song for him to play, and Dom has always stepped up. He’s our driver as well. I think the acceptance of him in the genre has been something that’s been playing on his mind. He’d love to get validation from the rock community and the older demographic. Honestly, I always thought it was a matter of time because he’s that good. He is the best young rock voice on the planet. There is no one that can compete with him vocally, he’s an insane musician. He’s just one of those rare artists, in the moment, he’s always ready. I think he looks at failure in the eyes and he goes, ‘Bring it on. I’m going to have a go at you.’ This was one of those moments. He has a very strong bond with the Osbourne family [Ozzy and Sharon are in his 2022 video for Funeral]. They had asked him to perform. It was important to Dom and to me that if he was going to be the youngest performer, then it was a song where he could stand out.”
Yungblud is the best young rock voice on the planet
Tommas Arnby, Special Projects
How was the process of putting it together?
“I was going back and forth with Tom Morello, their musical director. We ended up [deciding that] it was going to be Changes as a duet with Fred Durst. Dom and Fred became friends a couple of years ago when he was asked to perform Break Stuff with Limp Bizkit at Rock Am Ring in Germany. They had a lot of fun and that performance went viral. They struck a bond and we’re actually touring with Limp Bizkit in Latin America at the end of this year. Once we agreed on Changes, it sat really well, it’s very soulful. It worked really well with the album that we just released. It was just one of those things where Fred did not pitch up for whatever reason and Dom just looked at me like, ‘I’ve got this.’ We were flying to Belgium the same night to headline Rock Werchter, which was a huge festival, 78,000 people. I was there the night before they were doing the rehearsal. They were getting the arrangement of the song together and when he stepped in, there was no one in the stadium. He started singing and I looked at the promoter thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is going to be special.’ Everyone knew that Ozzy was ill. It was the last show ever. It would be very emotional. Honestly, I couldn’t have planned it. It was incredible to see him nail that, and then obviously the a cappella bit at the end was just him on the spot going, ‘I’m not done yet.’ We could see how it resonated, that’s just a real rock star.”
Yungblud in the crowd at Bludfest this summer
You’ve also had the second edition of Bludfest this year, how did that go?
“We absolutely nailed it this year. I was so proud of the team. It was just in the spirit of creating an event that was as much about the community as it was about the line-up.”
Do you have plans to expand it?
“Yeah, 100%. It’s a five-year plan. We’re going international next year. These are the conversations: Germany, Belgium, Australia, Malta… Lots of plans. It was Dom’s vision to really give back to his community. It came from a conversation we were having. I used to go to loads of festivals when I was a kid and I see the way that the ticketing and concert market has been moving, it’s become like a once-a-year event for a lot of families because it’s so expensive. People are being priced out of the market; it’s becoming like theatre. You can go once, twice a year. And those festival experiences, meeting other young people in the real world, helped shape who you became as a grown-up. Now, a lot of my team are young people and I felt there was a responsibility to do better. It doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be a business, but in the music industry, it’s the difference between doing as much business as possible right now, or a lot of business over the long-term by being committed to the relationship between the artist and the fan and really treasuring and valuing that. And if you do that, and you put that at the core of your strategy, you can build amazing businesses. But you’ve got to do it over time. You’ve got to build that bond between the artist or the idea and an audience. And then once you connect with them emotionally, it’s a two-way street. They show up for you, the artist. Ozzy and Sharon did that with Ozzsfest. They’re the template for how you put your fanbase at the core. Slipknot started with Knotfest and Tyler, The Creator has done a brilliant job on Camp Flog Gnaw. We look to those festivals, as we can be that in wherever we sit, alternative culture or alternative music.”
Can it work as a viable business if you’re keeping the ticket prices low?
“It’s a process, you have to evolve. You need to invest as a starting point. You can’t cash out in your head when you do it for the first time. You’ve got to go, ‘We’re going to try this. We’re going to invest into it, the experience that we curate, the line-up, the way we treat all the artists.’ The business will reveal itself over time when people want to come back and you nail the experience and that’s never in year-one. So, it can absolutely be a business. We put up the price from year one to year two. We do spend a lot of time on price comparison. Based on what we deliver this year, where do we sit in the market? So, pricing is a big part of it. But you’ve also got other verticals to help, like brand partnerships. And if you have a very specific audience that you target, certain brands would be willing to pay a premium to be able to have access to that audience. It’s not like it has to be £50 every year because that may not be sustainable; it’s about the right price.”
When it comes to tickets for Yungblud’s own headline shows, how are you helping ensure fans get access to tickets?
“We are heavily invested in a company called Openstage, they are the ones who handled the Oasis presale. We are actually very proud partners of Openstage, both me and Dom. And we are building all of our CRM and D2C strategy with them. We’re building an incredibly exciting product for our community with them, which is beyond anything you’ve ever seen in terms of an artist resale. It has a lot of really cool shit to be revealed soon. The way we’ve tackled it in the past is that we’ve worked with our promoters to make sure that our $25 inventory that worked with BIV [biometrics identity verification] would link to the actual purchases. It’s very difficult in America; it’s such a massive problem. But the easiest thing, which is what Dom always does, is he goes, ‘If you didn’t get a ticket, don’t buy from the secondary ticket services. We’ve got more in the works.’”
Publishing is such an old-fashioned business that really does need to be reinvented
Tommas Arnby, Special Projects
How key is the way he interacts with fans to his success?
“It’s massive, that’s the crux of the whole idea. It was always about his desire to connect with people who felt like him. We started this thing, there was no marketing plan; there was no, ‘This is where we sit in the market.’ We are obsessed with music. Dom has the knowledge, even despite his age [28], he can out-compete anyone with the history of rock and roll. He’s been hanging out with a bunch of rock legends recently, as I’m sure you’re aware. The idea was, ‘I feel really misunderstood as a young person, let’s go out and see if other people feel like this.’ That’s where it grew from. The one thing I love about Dom is how he sees everybody. If he walks into a room and there’s a child there, he would go down to the level of the child, and he would talk to the child first. If he goes into a record label, he makes best friends with the receptionist, with the intern, with the person in the canteen, before he goes in to see [Interscope chairman & CEO] John Janick, or [Interscope vice chairman] Steve Berman, or [Capitol chairman & CEO] Tom March, or whoever it is.
“I see so many artists going, ‘Oh, these are the people that can help me in my career.’ He’s very different from that. He’s always about people, always about love, and he sees everyone. It’s something that has fired me up over the years to keep creating the space for him to maintain that, as he became more and more successful because it gets challenging. You forget your core values. It’s like any business. Starbucks was an amazing boutique cafe in Seattle until it sucked and it lost its soul. I think that’s what happens when people scale.
“I feel like one of my biggest jobs as his manager over the years has been to maintain that space, and his ability to experiment creatively and be creatively fearless, and just be who he always was that brought these kids through the gate and wanted to be part of this community, which has got a lot bigger and is just about to get a fuckload bigger. It’s really crazy the growth we’re seeing at the moment.”
What’s the plan for America in the future?
“America is hugely important to us. It feels like rock’s caught up with us a bit, finally. The new album has just really resonated way wider than our community. Every single ticket for his American tour is sold out. We’re planning something much bigger, and he’s the hardest working man in showbiz, so we are going ham in the US. We’ve got some really cool things coming. Dom is transitioning; he’s a grown-up now. He’s not just that kid in 2019, selling out the Roxy and the Rainbow [in Los Angeles] or the Brixton Academy in London. He needed to have the chance to write the music where he could become a grown-up and an artist that he can now maintain and be for the next 20 years of his career. God knows we’ve got multi-platinum records. But that wasn’t the first thing that came through our minds. It was about identifying audiences, growing audiences and keeping audiences.I think that’s really where the whole industry is at.”
Away from Yungblud, Special Projects runs the Locomotion publishing arm, too. How are things progressing on that side of your business?
“The most important thing that we’re doing as a company is our publishing services business. I’ve always had a publishing company as a manager, it makes sense when you are developing artists. I’ve always felt the commissioning model is weird because when you work with artists you love, and you go through all of those small steps together to grow, it’s important that you’re aligned and there isn’t a timeline on it. The management model becomes very transactional, so publishing has always been something that I’ve combined with management. About two years ago, I was thinking about what I would love to have at my disposal as a manager, which would have made me do less traditional publishing deals. And that would be more of a service, almost like AWAL for publishing, where rights stay with the writers and the artists. It’s a short-term, rolling deal and if you do a great job, then people will stay. And then it’s like a lever, you can go, ‘You need an advance against a longer term, stay with the people that you like working with or do you need us just to administer and we’ve got global affiliations?’ So, we’ve built this matrix and that’s something that we’re going into the market with this year. I’m hoping it will inspire writers, artists and managers who are not ready to take that cheque against assigning their rights for many, many years, and work with people that are just really good at creative services and administration and pay through quicker.”
How exactly will it work?
“We just collect directly and that means if we are sub-published, then the money is coming in from many different sources, quicker. So, if you’re with PRS, then it gets paid over to PRS, then they pay it to your publisher, and then they pay the writer, whereas we collect from, say, France, we pay out straight to the writer. We’re not the only ones that do that, but once the work’s done, and you’ve got this matrix of direct affiliation, then you’ll shave off six months [from the process]. And because we are a service, we will live and die by the service that we provide our writers, not because we’ve got a massive minimum commitment of 10 100% songs that we’ve got the rights to for 10-plus years.
“It comes from management as well, it’s about getting those writers paid as soon as possible. We make money in the process because we take an admin fee, and then let’s just get the money collected and paid out to where it belongs.
“Publishing is such an old-fashioned business that really does need to be reinvented. It’s always about how much money and how long the retention period is for. I know from working with artists, everyone from superstars to hot new acts, they’re not in the business of corporations, they’re in the business of people. Now, some of my people are Interscope, Capitol, or Island, or CAA, Live Nation, or whoever, but if you have that trust and that intent with artists and you do a good job, they want to keep working with you. I think there’s a model there and a massive opportunity in the publishing space, and me and my team are going in all guns blazing.”
Read our Yungblud cover feature here.
PHOTO: Alanna Georgette