Hard to Label

In the past two years, a trend emerged among Louisville musicians ambitious for bigger things beyond the city limits. After playing shows, building a small fan base and self-financing an album, they would show up on the roster of SonaBlast Records.

Bands and artists like The Pass, Cheyenne Marie Mize, Lucky Pineapple and, most recently, The Broken Spurs, all have found their way to the small music label owned by Louisville entrepreneur Gill Holland.

Founded in New York in 2002, SonaBlast has been run from Louisville since Holland relocated three years ago after marrying his wife, Augusta Brown, and moving to her hometown of Louisville.

The label jumped into the local scene warily, not wanting to appear as an encroaching outsider, Holland said. SonaBlast put out the Jamie Barnes album “The Recalibrated Heart” in 2007 and Ben Sollee's “Learning to Bend” in 2008, but has ratcheted things up of late. The roster now includes little-known groups like The Instruction and established acts like The Broken Spurs.

Holland said SonaBlast's mission is to sign the best and brightest musicians coming out of Louisville, and he is confident this region will produce another big act on par with My Morning Jacket — with a SonaBlast logo on the album cover, he adds.

Some might consider it a suicide mission. Already grappling with Internet file-sharing and changing consumer habits, the record industry all but collapsed in the Great Recession. Anyone who dares to start a record label these days must first contemplate what that even means anymore.

For SonaBlast, that means embracing revenue streams like television song placement, dabbling in music publishing and emphasizing digital music. It's not churning out big profits — and what money it does make is folded right back into the label — but SonaBlast is making money, unlike many other small U.S. labels, Holland said.

The money comes from unlikely sources. Band videos posted to YouTube, for example, generate revenue from the ads that the Google-owned website places alongside them.

“We get pennies from YouTube, but those pennies add up over a quarter,” said Amber Garvey, who assists Holland in running SonaBlast.

One advantage that Holland touts to bands he's trying to sign is SonaBlast's connections to the television and film industries. Holland also leads The Group Entertainment, a New York-based indie film production company and a talent management firm. He's used his relationships to land SonaBlast music on TV shows like the CW's “Vampire Diaries” and the “My Super Sweet 16” franchise on MTV.

The placements pay off in both notoriety and in revenue, Roberts said. “That's everything you could ask for from a small label in Louisville, Kentucky,” Roberts said.

Will Roberts, whose band The Pass released its debut full-length “Burst” last year on SonaBlast, said coming to the label represented a major upgrade.

The band's debut EP, “Colors,” was a self-financed project with blurry cover art and halfway decent sound. Their follow-up full-length album, “Burst,” is a more professional production that was mixed by Alex Aldi, a New York producer who has worked with Passion Pit and Tokyo Police Club, and mastered at London's famous Abbey Road Studios — all thanks to SonaBlast.

“They've been super-awesome,” Roberts said

Still lacking an anchor act, SonaBlast hasn't risen high in record industry prestige, and while Sollee and Mize have garnered some national press, no one on the SonaBlast roster has truly risen to the next level.

Moreover, the label's recent penchant for signing rising acts without regard to genre or style makes SonaBlast difficult to describe.

Fans of Fat Possum Records, for one, can always rely on that label for boozy rock; devotees of Touch& Go Records knew it was the place to go for post-rock.

SonaBlast is all over the map, with singer-songwriters (Sollee, Mize), experimental rock (Lucky Pineapple), dance-pop (The Pass) and now hard rock (The Broken Spurs).

Holland began the label with royalty money for his work on the short-lived Fox sitcom “Greg the Bunny.” Its first albums were by Irish singer-songwriter Mark Geary, who also happened to be one of Holland's favorite bartenders in New York City.

Nearly a decade later, SonaBlast is still a small-scale label, one that depends more on things like TV placements and less on physical album sales than its predecessors did.

But at its core, SonaBlast harbors the same ambitions that iconic indie labels like IRS, SubPop and Merge all had — to discover the next great band and thrust it onto a larger stage.

“In a perfect world, we would be a ‘trampoline label,'” Holland said. “They would bounce off me on the way to the top.”