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"New life for old brands" - Sanctuary profile in Management Today

posted by davidt on Thursday January 27 2005, @10:00AM
An anonymous person writes:

February's edition of Management Today (a UK business magazine), carries an aticle on successfully rebranding old and long-running products (like Lucozade, Ben Sherman etc).

However, a chunk of the article is about Sanctuary records and how the CEO, Andy Taylor, has helped revive certain brands, or rather bands and artists' careers, including none other than Morrissey's.

I do not have a scanner, but others may be able to scan the article in, but the relevant extract from the article is as follows:

"Caring for its acts has helped Sanctury through troubled times for the record industry. In the past six months it has made a profit of £6.9million on a turnover that rose 36% to £89million. Records constitute less than 40% of its turnover, but they’re still important. In recent years, it has revived the recording careers of people like Stevie Winwood, Alison Moyet, Kiss and Lynyrd Skynyrd, as well as doing well with younger acts such as The Strokes, The Libertines and British Sea Power through its Rough Trade joint venture. But its greatest coup has been bringing back the notoriously reclusive and difficult Morrissey.

The former Smiths singer hadn’t released an album since 1997. That one, for part of the huge Universal records empire, is said to have sold just 26,000 copies. Sanctuary put him back in the studio with a deal based on a sale of 500,000 copies. When 'You Are The Quarry' came out in May it sailed rapidly past that, thanks to the extraordinary visibility of the singer, who even popped up on BBC1 to exchange stilted banter with Jonathon Ross.

'A lot of people asked how we got Morrissey to do those things,' says Taylor [CEO of Sanctuary Group]. 'Our argument is it’s not that he’s difficult, but you have to understand what is acceptable to him and what isn’t.' The major labels, he adds, habitually use the 'difficulty' of artists to excuse their failures. They simply need to be handled with care: they need to feel they are promoting their record, not the record company."

There are also a couple of pictures of Moz (and a much improved, rather sensual photo of Alison Moyet) which accompanies the article - one of Moz circa 1987 and one from the YATQ photo shoots - god bless him.
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