WHAT'S A GOOD RECORD DEAL?

Superstars like Kanye West and Taylor Swift have bashed lopsided label deals — and a new generation of artists is vying to recalibrate music’s balance of power

- JON BLISTEIN

WHEN DORIS MUÑOZ MET CUCO, one of the first things she told him was that his art was pure and should never be exploited. “I said, ‘I want to advocate for you because I don’t want you to get Ritchie Valens’d,’ ” she recalls, referring to the Chicano rock & roller whose label owner, Bob Keane, kept Valens’ recording rights in perpetuity. Valens’ mother had to wait until 1987, 28 years after her son’s death in a plane crash, to take back his publishing.

Muñoz began managing Cuco in 2017, when labels were pulling out all the stops to sign the 18-year-old artist, whose bedroom productions were burning up SoundCloud and Bandcamp. The pair were flown out to New York and dazzled in meetings with label chairmen. “And we’re just these little Chicano kids, the kids of undocumented immigrants, that never thought these opportunities would present themselves in our lifetime,” Muñoz says.

So many record-industry horror stories start this way. But Muñoz and Cuco had done their research: They’d heard that labels regularly presented young artists of color with lopsided contracts that tilted ownership in their favor, put low royalty rates in fine print, or hid other exploitative clauses behind legalese and sky-high advances. These practices — default in the industry — could snuff out a career before it got a chance to take off, or constrain an artist if they got bigger later on.

Muñoz and Cuco turned down all his contract offers in 2017 and inked a distribution deal with AWAL instead. He spent the next year building momentum with his EP, Chiquito, and playing festival sets. In 2019, he finally signed a label contract, with Interscope, but made sure the deal let him own all of his original recordings.