21-year-old Rory Felton started whit know-how and ended up with a record label.
By Peter Celauro
A&E Editor
To most music fans, the term “record label owner” conjures images of a portly, cigar-smoking man in an expensive suit, barking orders at employees and stealing royalties from defenseless garage bands.
To 21-year-old Rory Felton, it’s just the title on his business card.
As co-owner of The Militia Group, a Southern California-based label, Felton represents nine bands of varying styles and record circulations. Though their music ranges from punk rock to acoustic guitar to solo keyboard tunes, Felton tries to offer all the bands the same thing: a personal, beneficial relationship.
“When we first hear music we like, we try to contact the band or their manager and find out about them,” Felton said of his label. “What are their goals, their plans? We try to build a relationship with them, see if what they really want as a band matches with what we can do for them as a label. We’ll do anything we can to help make their band grow into a full-time career.”
For Felton, maintaining relationships with the bands comes naturally; he’s been doing it since he was in high school. At 16 he started Arise Records, a small label that he maintained as a hobby. Before he was 18, Felton had already dealt with such bands as the Juliana Theory and Legends of Rodeo.
Meanwhile, the Militia Group was in full swing as a booking agency. Running out of a small office in Huntington Beach, its creator, Chad Pearson, was booking national tours for such local bands as Slick Shoes and Dogwood when he and Felton, at the time a freshman at the University of Southern California, had an idea.
“I moved out to California from Kansas City in 2000 to study Music Industry at USC,” Felton said. “I saw all these great local acts and wondered why nobody was signing them. So I got together with my buddy Chad, who used to book shows under the moniker The Militia Group. We talked, and after a month, we signed our first bank loan.”
The label was up and running by January 2001, and six months later they released their first record. Since then, 80,000 copies of Rufio’s “Perhaps, I Suppose…” have been shipped to various record stores. Because music stores won’t request records from labels unless they know they can sell them, the number is staggering even to Felton.
“When you consider our original goal of 5,000, it’s pretty insane,” he said. “It led to me leaving school [after sophomore year] to pursue the label full time. Now we have a full staff of eight in Anaheim, and we’ve done 15 or 16 albums. We’ve definitely been really blessed.”
Those 15 or 16 albums have come from nine different groups, some of which are based less than two hours from Pepperdine: Copeland, The Beautiful Mistake, The Lyndsay Diaries, Noise Ratchet, Acceptance, The Rocket Summer, Rufio, Tora! Tora! Torrance!, and Big Collapse. Though the label receives a lot of demo CDs by mail, for the most part, bands like these find their way to The Militia Group through word of mouth.
“If we hear their name from several different people, we’ll go listen to them,” Felton said. “When they’re local it’s a lot easier, but sometimes when a band from somewhere else has a lot of buzz around here, we’ll fly out to see them. It’s important to meet with the actual musicians, to find out what they’re about.”
Is Felton surprised at the success he’s had?
“Oh, of course,” he said. “I knew it wouldn’t be a full-time job right away, but I wanted it to eventually be full-time. And because of the circumstances, it ended up happening quicker than we originally planned.”
And it’s still happening. The Militia Group’s first quarter sales alone have already matched last year’s total sales, and Felton has plans to eventually put out a record approximately once a month, diversifying the label’s roster.
For the young record executive and his crew, that means a lot more work, but he doesn’t mind.
“We want to grow slow and steady. When someone lets us know that they’ve met with other labels but can see that we do things differently, more artist-oriented, it’s really encouraging,” he said. “That’s what makes this job so great. On one side it’s a business, but on the other hand you’re in touch with all these artists and great people. If I’m here 30 years from now, still doing this, I’ll be happy.”
For more information on The Militia Group and its bands, see www.themilitiagroup.com, or call (714) 666-2700.
September 18, 2003