By Manny Frishberg, JTNews Correspondent
“I consider myself a music junkie. I’ve always loved music,” says Michael Tarlowe, the founder of Virt Records, a new independent label. “My first job in high school was at the local record store, and in college I was a DJ.”
An East Coast native, Tarlowe, his wife, and his record company moved across the country from Boston to Seattle last November.
Before taking the plunge into making and distributing music CDs, Tarlowe spent eight years an investment analyst in Boston for mutual-fund giant Fidelity Investments. His two main interests, finance and music, eventually converged when his job asked him to study and recommend media companies for the funds’ portfolios.
“For the last couple of years, my focus at that job was to analyze media and entertainment companies … whether it’s Disney or Viacom, that we should be investing in,” he says. But by the end of 2001 he started to become restless and thought about striking off in a new direction.
“An awakening happened when I was meeting with executives from Universal Music Group, the largest label,” Tarlowe says. “Instead of talking to them about what their revenue growth was looking like and their profit margins, and all the questions I was supposed to be asking, we just started trading stories about music and what albums were coming out. Before I knew it, my hour with them was up and I hadn’t gotten any of the information from them that I needed. But I had a great time and I was so excited. That was the point when it hit me that this is really what gets me going.”
The product of that realization is Tarlowe’s independent label, Virt Records, which he founded “at the beginning of last year.”
“It has a specialized focus of putting out music by singer-songwriters,” he says. “My criteria is [to find] artists who have something really unique to offer, something that stops you the moment you hear it. The commonality among artists that I’m looking for and music that I’m putting out is artists with intelligent lyrics and appealing to a 21-plus demographic — people that are really discriminating in their music tastes and really searching for smart new music.
“First of all, it’s the music that I’m really passionate about,” he says. “I always felt that an independent label should be putting out music that the founder and the people running the label are passionate about.”
Yet it’s not just passion. On a practical level, Tarlowe notes that other labels don’t particularly focusing on that genre, and it appeals to a buying public that is more likely to actually have cash to spend on music CDs.
“With all the downloading and the industry actually in a very bad slump, music like this is more resistant to that.”
He says — emphatically — that he is not looking for the next Britney Spears, and that Virt is not really going after the teenagers or kids. “People who are 30 years old and working and have some disposable income to spend are more likely to fork out $15 for a CD than, maybe, a 12-year-old sitting at home, downloading music.”
Having been in business for only a year, Tarlowe still considers Virt, which is staffed by himself “and a couple of interns” a start-up operation.
“My role is first and foremost, discovering the talent and finding the artists that will best represent Virt Records and that are unique and special,” he says. “Now a lot of my time is spent on coordinating all the marketing and promotional activities, all the things involved in getting radio play for these CDs; trying to get press to pay attention, trying to get them stocked in the retail outlets.”
Currently he has three artists on the label and he is in negotiations with a fourth. The first few all happen to be female singer-songwriters, he acknowledges, but says that is just by chance. “We’re not really focused on females,” he says.
Whether or not that was a conscious choice, his picks have worked out well so far. One singer on his label, San Francisco based Vienna Teng, was recently the subject of a profile on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” and made a guest appearance on “Late Night with David Letterman.”
Tarlowe says he made the decision to move west for a combination of reasons. He had a personal desire to make a change in where he was living, but he had also already spent so much time ensconced in Boston’s music scene. Geography doesn’t affect his choice of musicians, he says. “Even though the reach of the label is global, with one of the artists from Australia. I certainly want to be in a city with a vibrant music scene.”
Having just arrived in the Puget Sound area on November 1, and even with a full plate getting his record label off the ground, Tarlowe says it has been important for him to find ways to involve himself in the local Jewish community.
“Coming from a city like Boston with a much larger [Jewish] community and growing up in New York with, again, a much larger community, I’m trying to make even more of an effort to get involved. I have been volunteering for the Seattle Jewish Film Festival to help them with their campaign to bring in advertising dollars and sponsors,” he says.
“Also, I’m hoping to create a Seattle chapter of the national Jewish Democratic Council, which is in the absolute earliest early stages. It’s really just in the planning stages right now, but it’s something that I’m really excited about. I’d really love to get this off the ground.”
As for why he chose to set up shop in Seattle, as opposed to San Francisco or Los Angeles, cities that have both larger music scenes and Jewish communities, he says it was a strictly personal decision. Seattle, he says, “obviously has a vibrant music scene and a rich history and tradition. It’s a city that, on a personal level, intrigued me.”