RACHEL HOLDER

Curb Records Recording Artist:  RACHEL HOLDER

The Single: "You Only Call Me When You're Drunk" The song You Only Call Me When You're Drunk written by master hit maker David Lee Murphy and singer/songwriter Rachel Farley and was hand picked personally by legendary song man and label founder Mike Curb. Rachel is also set to announce that she will be joining a major national tour that will run through the end of 2017. In a town full of attractive talented country stars, its take a lot for a young female singer to stand out and gain the attention of Nashville’s music industry crown.  Twenty-Two Year Old Rachel Holder is up to the challenge.  “I’ve already learned that it takes more than a few good songs to make it in Nashville,” says Holder. “These days, I don’t think that there’s any one formula for success, necessarily, but I know you have to have faith in yourself, passing for the music and a serious will to succeed. And AMAZING songs! “ She emphasizes.  Throughout her teens to her young adult years, Rachel’s talent as an artist matured fairly quickly. As a child performer, Rachel split time between attending school in Chattanooga and performing theater shows in Pigeon Forge, one of Tennessee’s most popular tourist destinations. By the time she was old enough to drive, she had added more than 800 Broadway-style shows to her resume, often performing two or three shows a day to packed houses. With the experience she gained on the small stages of Pigeon Forge, the teen singer-songwriter decided it was time to make the jump to the big stages of Music City.  When she was only 15, Rachel attended an intimate Vince Gill concert in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with her parents. In between songs, the aspiring singer raised her hand and boldly (yet politely) asked to join the superstar on stage to sing a duet. Vince, surprised and somewhat amused, agreed, and only moments later the two were bringing down the house with a version of “Oklahoma Swing.” (Search for it on YouTube and see for yourself). Then there’s the story of Rachel successfully booking herself to sing the national anthem at several events such as the  Los Angeles Lakers basketball game and the Dallas Cowboys  Football game at only 14-years-old.  Rachel Holder is, in a word, fearless.  Signed with Curb at 18 years old,  she’s been unstoppable ever since. With a debut single “In Your Arm’s” that touched many hearts and even got the attention of another country artist such as Miranda Lambert. “I heard this song by @rachelholder called “In Your Arms” on KKAJ. Gave me chills. What a great singer.” – Lambert tweeted.  Holder followed her single release with a 39 state radio tour and released her EP “Shining Now” at Walmart and on ITunes.  If there’s one thing that Rachel Holder conveys almost immediately in person, it’s her unflappable sense of confidence. She was simply born to be a songwriter, vocalist, and most of all entertainer and it shows. Still only 22 years old- this blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauty has come a long way from growing in up in Birchwood, TN, performing on stages near Dollywood,  and it looks like her new project is lookin’ mighty good!  Rachel is now is under new wings, Monte Willis and Barry Williams and is excited to have them as a part of her team. “I’m excited about my new management – I look forward to paving a journey with them”. In the last year, Holder has been writing and working hard on her newest project with Wilbur Rimes and Norman De Vasure.. “I’m super excited to show the fans what I’ve been doing and what I’ve been working on for them- I’m ready to get back out there” Holders project should be released late 2016, early 2017.

The Bandcamp 2016 Year in Review

Everything is Terrific: The Bandcamp 2016 Year in Review

And now some genuinely great news in an otherwise unremarkable week: every aspect of Bandcamp’s business was up in 2016. Digital album sales grew 20%, tracks 23%, and merch 34%. Growth in physical sales was led by vinyl, which was up 48%, and further boosted by CDs (up 14%) and cassettes (up 58%). Every single one of these numbers represents an acceleration over last year’s growth. Hundreds of thousands of artists joined Bandcamp in 2016, more than 2,000 independent labels came on board (like Dischord, Merge, and Dualtone), and the rate of fan signups tripled. Fans have now paid artists nearly $200 million using Bandcamp, and they buy a record every three seconds, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
The record business overall did not fare as well. According to Nielsen, it grew 3% in the U.S. in 2016, while sales of digital albums fell 20%, tracks were down 25%, and physical albums dropped 14%. These declines are not at all surprising given the industry-wide push toward subscription music rental offerings, and indeed as the year came to a close, those services reached a combined 100 million paying subscribers. This milestone is being celebrated by some, but it is not good news for the vast majority of artists, and poses some serious problems for fans, labels, and music as an art form.
As more people subscribe to music rental services, the already paltry rates paid to artists are going down (and no, artists don’t necessarily make it up in volume). But it’s not only artists who are struggling. The companies built solely around subscription music rental continue to struggle as well. Some say the model is simply broken. The success of Netflix is often used as a counterargument, but the music business is not the movie business.
Longer term, if subscription music rental can’t work as a standalone business, then it will only exist as a service offered by corporate behemoths to draw customers into the parts of their businesses where they do make money, like selling phones, service plans, or merchandise. And when the distribution of an entire art form is controlled by just two or three nation-state-sized companies, artists and labels will have even less leverage than they do now to set fair rates, the music promoted to fans will be controlled by a small handful of gatekeepers, and more and more artists will be hit with the one-two punch of lower rates and less exposure. The net effect for music as a whole is worrisome.
Bandcamp provides an alternative to all of this because we feel strongly that an alternative needs to exist. The fact that we continue to grow, and that that growth is accelerating, tells us that many of you agree. We’ll therefore continue to build on a model that compensates artists fairly and puts them in control of their data, gives fans all the convenience of streaming plus the benefits of ownership and still allows them to directly support the artists they love, and works as a standalone business that’s 100% focused on music (we just had our 17th straight profitable quarter, while also increasing our staff by 43% last year). Impending thermonuclear apocalypse notwithstanding, we are incredibly enthusiastic about 2017. At least two of the half dozen things we’ll launch this year will astound you, and one may even cause you to make an unexpected vacation detour. We can’t wait. Thank you for being a part of it!
P.S. Don’t miss Bandcamp Daily’s Best of 2016.