How are artist/bands signed

 Today we had a workshop about how artist and bands are signed to record labels. 

We learnt about the role of the A&R executive and what they look for when signing a new artist. A&R executives usually look at sound charts and chart metric to look at the commodity of the an artist the sound chart shows them how the trends of artists are doing, what is popular and how well they will do. A&Rs usually buy the commodities when they are not worth much and then sell them when their value increases. This is an example of the data on chart metric:

These types of chart would be very useful to an A&R executive in predicting what kind of music would do will in the industry and therefore which ones to sign. They can also find artists who are starting to go on an upward trend and quickly sign them as they start this peak, before they are worth lots. They can use all the charts to predict how they will do over the next few years. 

A&Rs are usually looking for a uniqueness in the artist they sign, so even if they are not very good musically, if they have a unique charisma or something like that, they are a lot more likely to get signed and therefore do well in the industry. They try and look at what is special about the people rather than their music.

Our task was to create a character sheet for an artist which we think would sell well, and also to look for some music which has either not been signed yet or has just not reached peak popularity yet. 

I looked on the website 'band camp' where you can find songs like this and explore new artists.

This is my character sheet: