So here it is, the first post for the Reverse Spin Records blog! I'm Haley Brawner Label Director at Reverse Spin Entertainment (Label Director is code for I do anything and or everything here), which is the legendary NBA Hall of Famer Earl 'The Pearl' Monroe's record label, currently a pop, dance, hip hop and R&B label - but we are basically focused on CLUB MUSIC, since that's where music is really going. I started in January of '09 so I've been with the company just over a year now... and what a year it's been!

First, the experience of working for Earl has been class. Growing up in New York as a Knicks fan, you can imagine there's not much of a bigger thrill than working for one of the heroes of your sports team - I'm only 27 so I wasn't actually on this earth when he played, but some players transcend just the era they played in, and he is one of them. And he is as nice in person as you might think if you've ever seen him being inter viewed, so the experience has been a pleasure. And of course it is only made that much better that he is not the typical NBA person trying to get into music - he had a hit artist in the 80s with Curtis Hairston - and has once again had an eye for spotting talent, which has made my job easier, since it's obviously much easier to work with talented artists... duh.

So when I came on we had artists - dance/pop artist Ciara Corr and Hip Hop/R&B/Reggae artist ChinaBlak - and some good songs - but the path was basically wide open as to where we would go. Part of that of course, working with a small independent label, is finding ways to produce quality material more efficiently than a major would, and I'd say we've been able to do that. We've worked with talented producers such as Mark Wilson (Will Smith's Wild Wild West), John Morales (an absolute legend in the house music world), as well as director Alastair Christopher (aka Gee Lock) on music videos to our first two singles.

What are the singles? Well the first is Ciara Corr's 'Get My Way', a hard hitting techno/house club banger with mainstream pop appeal. The process of getting to the official first single is long and arduous, but fun... going through all the tracks you have, decide which are worth recording to, mixing em down, and deciding which one has the best chance of success for radio and with dance and pop music fans... and that's tough to do! But Get My Way was the choice and I think we have chosen well :)

So we shot a video:




This was fun... but it's also an intense process - we shot two videos in one weekend, so logistics (getting the vans, equipment, making sure dancers extras are there, and on time) and fitting everything into the time we have in the day (which we didn't - we all ended up getting about 10 hours of sleep total from Friday to Monday) was absolutely crazy. But worth it! Hope everyone else agrees...

And all of this has lead to now. We're running a national radio and video campaign, which started about 2 weeks ago and has already yielded some excellent results. Working with Joey Carvello with Upstream Music Group, an excellent radio promoter (worked projects like LMFAO, Pitbull etc.) we've already got Ciara Corr's 'Get My Way' in rotation at Jamz 96.3 FM in Albany, and have gotten some spins on B96 in Chicago and KKUU FM in Palm Springs, California. But this is just the beginning and hopefully there will be many more to mention soon! On the video side, in April the video will go into rotation at over 1200 Foot Locker's around America, which is pretty wicked.

Well that's it, a year's worth of activity encapsulated in one nice little short-ish blog. Hopefully there will be loads of new exciting announcements soon, stay tuned!