Back in 1966 a young man named Serafino Perugino from Napoli, Italy, was involved in the music industry as a distributor for scores of melodic hard rock artists and Indie labels. After working for a while and garnering some much deserved attention and widespread reputation, Serafino started his own independent label, ‘Frontiers Music’. This independent label saw a very quick growth after it’s inception, and takes pride in boasting killer legendary artist line-up on their roster. Legendary true rock icons of today such as DEF LEPPARD, TOTO, WHITESNAKE, STRYPER, DOKKEN, YES, JOURNEY, SURVIVOR, SEBASTIAN BACH, STYX, ASIA and many more were proudly signed onto to this major label. Yes your yesteryear heroes were signed or worked with this amazing label. Frontiers over the years with a strong team across the globe and it’s headquarters from Napoli, Italy have become a formidable image of the sound of melodic, classic and hard rock across bands from many parts of the world.
The label kick started its journey back in 1998, with the first release of a double live album ‘Never Say Goodbye’ by the British hard rock group TEN. The Frontiers Music label not only looks after bands signing and records, it also has a terrific A&R team. Not to mention the sales regarding merch and music, contracts, business, licensing, promotion. The entire team works like a well oiled machinery, and thus allows this giant label to release and market each of their band’s releases into a wide array of fans. With Frontiers Music, the future of melodic, rock or hard rock seems to be in perfect and safe hands. One of the mainstays with helping Frontier function to it’s fullest is General Manager Nick Tieder, who is based in the U.S. and has a wide history of working with labels and is quite the music fan himself.
This week on Talk Toomey: The Metal Nexus Podcast host Joshua Toomey welcomes general manager of Frontiers Music Nick Tieder. Nick and Toomey talk about the early days of metal and Nick history with other labels like Roadrunner Records. He is an extremely knowledgeable metal head and also talks about some of the bands that got him into metal and his wide taste in music. The two also talk about Styper’s new album ‘God Damn Evil’ which Walmart has refused to sell in stores. Nick also talks about the future of music being streaming and that physical album sales in Walmart for most of the artists on Frontiers isn’t a big portion of their sales. He also adds “There is this false narrative that if you buy a CD you are somehow putting $8-10 directly right in artists pocket” and he talks about how sometimes the label getting the money back to the artist is the problem. You can hear the entire conversation below.
