“I actually got an email yesterday from a guy who I met at a festival in Singapore in 2006. A kid came up to and said, ‘You’re my idol.’ That was 10 years ago and he emailed me just the other day,” Jaddan Commerford recounts with a genuine tone of surprise and excitement.
Barely out of high school, Commerford, now CEO of one of Australia’s leading music companies (“Technically, I’m the CEO, but I don’t use that very often, there’s not much need to,” he says), started his own record label, inspired by legendary punk label Epitaph.
“I literally started Boomtown as a kid finishing high school going in to starting university,” Commerford says. “And usually when people ask how do you start a record label, I say the only difference between someone who has a record label and someone who doesn’t is someone just saying they have one.”
“I just started putting out friends’ bands and records. We had success in 2005 with a band called Behind Crimson Eyes, who sold quite a lot of records. But it was still just me and from that I hired my first staff member, Luke Logemann, who still works for me 10 years later.”
But it all started with Epitaph, more specifically the logo. “Epitaph changed my life when I was 10 years old,” says Commerford. “My brother bought me Smash by The Offspring and I’ll never forget seeing that Epitaph logo on the back.”
Whilst some might hear Smash, still one of the biggest selling independent records of all time, and get inspired to pick up a guitar, Commerford had already set his sights on the business side of music, an ambition his parents encouraged.
“I just love building things and working with people and building a vision, but what’s even more exciting than that is building a brand,” he says. “When I was a kid I could go to a record store and pick up a record and see an Epitaph logo or Fueled By Ramen or locally Trial and Error or Resist and just buy it because I could and that’s exciting.”
“Obviously now people consume music differently, but that’s something we strive to achieve with our labels.” Commerford has certainly built a brand, with UNIFIED boasting a record label, a management company, a merchandising arm, a music festival, and a newly minted touring company.
Of course, it wasn’t just Commerford. The man many call Australia’s new Michael Gudinski had some help. “We have a great staff. One of the best things that’s happened from me being overseas is it’s allowed other people in the company to really grow and allowed other leaders to emerge from the company,” says the New York-based Commerford.
Commerford with Illy and Nick Yates
“So like we have Luke Logemann, who runs the label and he established the UNIFY Festival and the touring company. We have Nick Yates, who runs the management company, working with Violent Soho and Illy. We have Matthew Rogers, who runs the company from a business management point of view. And we have a bunch of other great staff.”
And what brings them all together? Well, much like Steve Jobs, Commerford believes in rallying his workers around a single common vision. “The mission statement of UNIFIED is the soundtrack of good people working together to achieve extraordinary results,” he states confidently.
“The original vision for UNIFIED was to be a full-service music company, to provide an artist with the ability to come to us and we provide everything, we totally streamline their business through one company,” he elaborates.
“The aim was to be multi-genre. It’s evolved since then, in a really good way. People often say Apple didn’t launch with the iPod, they launched with some of the least cool computers of all time and now they’re the coolest company in the world.”
“We’ve found our place and in a lot of ways gone back to what Boomtown actually was, whilst having one of the most diverse management companies in Australia, with Amity Affliction, Vance Joy, Illy, Nina Las Vegas, it couldn’t be more diverse.”
Indeed, business schools and music industry courses will likely one day include a unit on the ‘UNIFIED Model’, in which an organisation isn’t a record label or a stable of managers with various clients, but simply a music company.
“We don’t work with every artist across every facet of their careers,” Commerford explains. “For example, we just manage Violent Soho, whereas they’re signed to a different label and have different relationships.”
“So we don’t have any kind of gun to the head philosophy with artists, to the point where Amity Affliction were signed to Boomtown Records and we signed them on to Roadrunner before their contract was up because it was the best thing to do for the band, and we still operate in that way.”
The one-stop-shop, put the artist first approach has worked well for Commerford and his company. But as he’ll tell you, there was a lot of trial error involved in getting UNIFIED to the point where it now stands as one of Australia’s most iconic music companies.
One experience dealing with a successful band who broke up at the peak of their popularity and later returned to a less enthusiastic reception from listeners taught Commerford that “you can’t just assume that a fan base that was there two to three years ago will stick around. Things change.”
Commerford extracts the lesson from everything, but his focus is laser-beaming on the future, and he has a very clear idea of what that future looks like. “The future is global, in all senses of the word… expanding our footprint around the world.”
Commerford may also have a helping hand in expanding the world’s footprint to Australia. Asked about rumours the UNFD-Live Nation partnership may be involved in bringing Download Festival Down Under, he simply says that Aussie heavy music fans should be hopeful. “That’s all I can say,” he says.
As for the Gudinski comparisons: “Michael’s someone that I’ve always admired. In the last few years I’ve been lucky enough to get to know him and call him a friend. I have nothing but massive respect for what he’s done… he built the Australian music industry, so to be compared to him is overwhelming.”
Jaddan Commerford will be giving a keynote address at BIGSOUND on Wednesday, 7th September at The Judith Wright Centre as part of the annual BIGSOUND Conference. For more information or to get your BIGSOUND tickets, head to the official website here.
