A3 Music is a non-profit making collective (a company limited by guarantee and owned by its members) working from a complex of 30 secret recording studios, hidden away on the South Coast of England at the Music Department of Northbrook College.

A3 Aims and Objectives

A3 Music is committed to helping promote new talented musicians, composers, performers, technicians, and music lovers, who want to create and hear music that has value; music that has been created out of the love of it.

We aim to provide a secure jumping off point for artistes and other future music professionals, by gradually building up a viable long term alternative to the cynical short-termist, get-rich-quick mentality we see in what's left of the old music industry.

How A3 achieves its aims

We are doing this by:

• releasing records on the label
• running live events, and
• developing www.A3music.co.uk our website as a resource and communication point between music makers and other music lovers.
• and next, by releasing tracks for great value paid download from our soon-to-be-launched online shop www.a3tunes.com.
  

We started A3 on a financial shoestring, but the skills available from our membership more than made up for that. We are now attracting outside funding to continue our work.
Specifically we gratefully acknowledge funding in 2004 and 2006 from the PRS Foundation, who have contributed to support our live events programme.
We continue to attract committed music industry interns, and we also happen to be selling plenty of records and T-shirts.
We have now had over 342,000 unique visitors to the website, from all over the world, and normally get anywhere from 350 to 1,000 hits each day. We ran monthly events while we moved to Brighton's Polar Central, (now the Hope) in May 2004. After a change in management, the Hope decided to charge us for filling it with people on a Tuesday night, which left us unable to keep prices low for students yet still pay the musicians, and so we have left the Hope as of November 2006. We are still open for a replacement venue in Brighton, but we are very happy with our regular events at the Rest Bar just along the coast in Worthing. We have been promoting music both under the A3 banner, for the more electronic side or under our new sister label promoting Drum & Bass/Breaks/HipHop called Stem Cell Records, or our new indie band label A4.  Look out also for the new jump-up Drum & Bass label Resin8 Recordings, and metal label Athree Metal.

A3, artistes, work experience and money

The A3 directors all work unpaid for the label, which puts all profits back into the project for the future. The plan, though, is to provide real employment opportunities to young people in the music business, both as musicians and running the label and the club night. This has worked well for our club nights, where the artists , light and sound crew get paid before any other outgoings.

We are open to approaches from new entrants to the Music Industry, who would like to get work experience in the various processes involved in releasing records and promoting music. If you are interested in working with us, please contact us
An important principle for us is that the artistes - from whom all of this activity and fun originates - will always be paid an equal share royalties on income from the records. This means not using the artist's money to film expensive videos, to pay "packaging deductions" and other bogus expenses, or building up artist debt, which mean that the label makes money whether or not the artist gets paid. The music industry doesn't have to be like that.
Another important principle for us is that A3 Music doesn't seek to take our artistes' copyrights from them. We believe it is a fair and viable way of working, to non-exclusively license our artistes' music for release. This means the rights always remain with the artiste, and A3 just obtains non-exclusive permission to put out the tracks.
It means when our artistes become hugely successful, A3 won't get rich, but we will stay on the ground, promoting the next batch of talent.

Partners

We will work with anyone who positively works to promote and grow new music. We have joined the BPI, we have had funding support from the PRSFoundation, and we have links with many of the record labels and venues around Worthing and Brighton. We have contacts with the Making Music Organisation and organisations like Sound Sense. One of our most effective partners is our home, the Music Department at Northbrook College in Worthing, Sussex, on the South Coast of the UK, probably the largest Music Technology College of its kind in Europe. Many of the members of A3 Music are students, ex-students or lecturers at the College. 

Education

Many of the artistes and producers on A3 have come out of the Music Production, Performance and Composition courses at Northbrook College. These means that many of us have had a grounding in Music Business and the Music Industry. A3 music will be passing on the knowledge we have gained from these courses, and our own industry experiences via live meetings in our locality, and via the website www.A3music.co.uk to the rest of the music loving world. We recommend the articles on the BBC OneMusic Site on producing and putting out your own music effectively and without losing your copyrights, your soul or your shirt.

The Mood Lounge: Volume One

Our first release- a 16 track compilation of chilled downtempo grooves. 74 minutes of delicious music. As played on XFM and other cool radio and internet radio stations since January 2004. This is contemporary music with cutting edge production you will want to listen to all day and all night, not just for the dance floor.

This is the first of a series of downtempo compilations, chosen so we could unite music makers from different genres under one banner.
We won't only do downtempo, and already work is underway on Drum & Bass, Urban Soul, Breaks, HipHop, House and Rock sub-labels.

Watch this space...