Home to SYML, Paris Paloma, Wild RIvers and others, local label is developing music communities.
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Vancouver-based Nettwerk Music Group turned 40 last year. Co-founded by Terry McBride and Mark Jowett in 1984, the label is a rare Canadian independent music industry player.
Highlights of its four decades-long history includes breaking an unknown singer named Sarah McLachlan, making an Ontario pop outfit named Barenaked Ladies into international stars, managing a Sk8r girl named Avril Lavigne and being the first company to release a wee U.K. act named Coldplay in the U.S. The walls at head office are covered in platinum records received over the years.
Jowett, whose electropop outfit MOEV was an early Nettwerk act, says that was certainly the primary motivation for the label’s founding.
“Terry and I both worked at a record store called Odyssey Imports and it was a time when all of these fantastic bands were coming through town with records on these fantastic labels like Factory or Wax Tracks and, me as a musician and Terry as a Saturday DJ at Luv-A-Fair with great taste, felt inspired to do something for the great local scene,” said Jowett. “Skinny Puppy, Grapes of Wrath and so many other local acts didn’t have a label. So Nettwerk kind of grew out of that without any kind of master plan.”
Taking out a $5000 loan, Nettwerk launched with the self-titled debut EP by jangle pop crew the Grapes of Wrath. While the record was a minor success and followed by many others that gained international acclaim, McBride doesn’t mince words about the first decade in business.
“Mark and I would have done better in the first decade on the dole,” he said. “The first album to do well enough for us to finally drop our three or four other day jobs and take out something resembling a salary was Solace by Sarah McLachlan. We added management to our duties to address the need to get artists out on the road. That meant either going across Canada or going south, and we chose L.A., which was key to our initial success.”
Another key to success was recognizing the part that music plays in people’s lives is often more about community than artist or genre.
From Nettwerk’s early associations with the industrial electronic music scene to McLachlan, Nettwerk’s McBride and Dan Fraser and NYC agent Marty Diamond developing the all-female music festival Lilith Fair in 1997, understanding how audiences came together as much for an emotional release as an entertainment experience was a key to the company’s business. Combining those observations with mining data regarding artists and listeners, McBride hit upon a model for the music industry of the future in the early 2000s.
The contents became a blueprint for Nettwerk moving into the future. Pivoting away from management altogether by 2010, Nettwerk refocused on being a label.
Specifically, one known for bringing those whose love of music derived from emotional connections to greater global communities. McBride, Jowett, chief strategy officer Chris Norwood and president and COO Simon Mortimer-Lamb set about building the future of the company thinking about how artists and labels exist in a new industry ecosystem. Their model was a far cry from past industry approaches of marketing to fans in genre-specific silos, preferring to bring listeners together across wide swaths of sounds.
“By 2010-11, we had streaming coming into play, which really spoke to Terry’s paper,” said Mortimer-Lamb. “Our relationships to the services distributing our artists gave us access into the data to see how fans were accessing, acquiring, relating and consuming, asking ‘what is that audience out there and how does it engage with music?’ The challenge is how do you cut through all of the volume that’s available out there now, and Nettwerk’s understanding of how to do things that maybe don’t drive the dollar to us, but drive it to the artist makes us all successful.”
Norwood is the youngster on the executive team. He feels that the approach of putting the artist front and centre to create values for them which creates values for the company as something unique.
“A model of alignment and mutual benefit is extremely rare in the industry as a whole, and we have always had a great stable of artists who see the world in a similar capacity and fashion,” he said. “The insights we can glean from the information we have access to now lets us see which artists have overlapping audiences underneath them and how we can understand their communities and connect and expand them.”
“A&R (artists and repertoire) today is about signing communities and building them,” said McBride. “It’s no different than the scenes that got Mark and I into music in the first place, that came out of Seattle or New York. Now in a flat digital world, it’s a niche that can be composed of artists and listeners all over the world and it can become big enough to be a community that’s meaningful and it creates a movement.”
In 2025, this includes a roster of proven platinum-selling artists in widely diverse genres.
Top names include Ontario folk-pop trio Wild Rivers and Australian indie rockers the Paper Kites, as well as breakout English dark pop diva Paris Paloma. Her single Labour racked up over one million Spotify streams in under 24 hours and entered both U.K. and Billboard U.S. charts. Paloma’s debut album charted globally.
“Here is a 23-year-old female artist with a worldwide movement that is going to see billions of streams that are going to help a lot of people through really difficult and challenging times,” said McBride. “There are artists who aren’t household names streaming far more than household names and the reason you don’t know them is generational. Our team of 200 employees worldwide are experts at discovering and developing them.”
Everyone in the Nettwerk team admits that building those communities around their “tentpole” artists in different genres is never a sure thing. But the company has a three-point checklist that has proven to be a very good gauge of successful signings. Brand building in today’s music biz is largely strategic, but never guaranteed.
“If we don’t love the music, we won’t sign it; if we like the music, but don’t think we can add value, we won’t sign it; if the artists or their management are a–holes, we won’t sign it,” said McBride.
“Those are the three check marks, along with the emotion and passion that this artist is going to write great music that will make the world a better place. That is the DNA of this company.”