What Kyndred Makes
Part 4: Music
Music is one of our oldest art forms. By some estimates, it emerged around the same time our ancient caveman ancestors started drawing on their walls. Which means despite all the consternation over the business of music, the art form isn’t going anywhere. It’s ingrained in us as a species, and has been one of the major ways we’ve shared our stories throughout our history. It also acts as a sense memory. Like a certain smell, sound, or visual, there are songs tied to our core memories and the specific moments we heard them. A song will play, and instantly we’re taken back to those moments throughout our lives. It’s why it’s so important to include it in Kyndred’s mission of delivering an all-encompassing narrative studio.
I grew up with music. It’s one of the favorite parts of my childhood memories. Not in a, my-family-was-made-up-of-a-bunch-of-musicians way (might be a little jealous of you guys), but in a my-dad-grew-up-in-the-60s-and-often-played-his-record-collection-at-full-blast-as-I-was-growing-up-in-the-80s kinda way. So yeah, music filled the air. The Beatles, Otis Redding, Simon and Garfunkel, the Stones, the Beach Boys, the Platters, the soundtrack to The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and even Richard Harris from time to time (you might think of him as the first Dumbledore). 33s and 45s (the B-sides! My kingdom for a good B-side…) on a turntable that had probably been around longer than I had. The whole physicality of it. The sound of the needle drop followed by the crackle of the run-in groove before the album started. The cover art big enough to qualify as wall art. The liner notes. It all added up and helped me understand that music was a thing you could hold physically and emotionally.
My kids are growing up the same way...sort of. No, the first album they bought on vinyl at Kmart with their own money in 1986 wasn’t Slippery When Wet (I don’t know who that was), BUT they have the Beatles in heavy rotation because that one is non-negotiable in our house.
They also have Weezer, Radiohead, the Smashing Pumpkins, Tribe and Nirvana. Some of the music my wife and I listened to on repeat in high school, and somehow none of it feels dated to them. Of course, they’re getting a steady diet of more recent artists like Wet Leg, Car Seat Headrest, Noname, Deep Sea Diver, Jay Som, and Indigo De Souza that have worked their way into heavy rotation, but they’ve also got their own music, much of it based on video games they’re obsessed with. (Piano practice sometimes makes whatever is going on in the house at that moment feel like a high-stakes adventure!)
One of the first modern albums we all agreed on was the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse soundtrack. That album bonded us and was on repeat so much in the car that it became the second most-played album in my entire library, right behind a Beatles anthology. (We’re not going to talk about what Sesame Street did to my algorithm). It’s one of the great cases where the music fit perfectly inside the film and was allowed to live as a real album, with its own commercial life, rather than feeling like a marketing afterthought. It showcased what cross-medium music can do when it’s used effectively.
Soundtracks were always a way in for me, too. Juice. Pulp Fiction. Trainspotting. Garden State. Almost Famous...anything Wes Anderson has ever touched. I spent a lot of my youth going deeper into artists’ catalogs that I first heard during a single needle drop in a movie. The right song in the right scene can rewire how an audience feels about a story, and it can also rewire how they feel about the artist who made the song.
That’s the kind of music Kyndred Music will exist to support.
We’re building this vertical for all kinds of artists. Composers, songwriters and recording artists who fit naturally inside the Kyndred film, television, podcast and book worlds creating original scores, soundtracks, companion albums, and collaborations across the slate. But also independent musicians and recording artists who want to make a record on their own terms with real production support, with an audience that will be living inside the platform, and a deal structure that doesn’t ask them to give up ownership of their work to access the industry.
The math has not been kind to artists for a long time. Three companies control more than eighty percent of recorded music. Most major label deals still ask artists to hand over their masters. Recoupment structures are punishing enough that a record can earn millions while the artist still owes money. Streaming pays fractions of a cent per play, and the accounting behind those fractions is opaque by design. Most artists also don’t get meaningful access to the listener data that would help them understand who their audience is or how to reach them directly.
The independent side has its own version of the problem. Bandcamp gives artists a real shot at direct sales and a model that respects ownership, and a lot of musicians have built meaningful careers there. SoundCloud was the launchpad for an entire generation. Patreon has kept ongoing income flowing for artists who otherwise could not sustain a working life from their music. Places like DistroKid and TuneCore have made it possible for anyone to put a record on streamers without a label. These tools matter and they’ve done a lot of good.
What none of them do on their own is fund production at scale or provide full infrastructure. They work best for artists who already have marketing savvy, strong email lists, and enough time to handle audience-building on top of actually making music. It gets even harder if the goal is to place that work inside a wider ecosystem of films, books, podcasts, live events, or touring. Most artists on self-distribution platforms are doing every job at once, and many of them are exhausted.
Kyndred Music is meant to sit alongside those tools, not replace them. An artist can have a Bandcamp page and a Patreon and still make a record with us, and the rights they hold elsewhere stay theirs. The participation model that applies to our films, books and podcasts applies here too. Same transparency, same quarterly reporting, same published methodology. One system, applied consistently across every format.
I’m not a recording artist, and I’m not going to pretend to be one. But I do know the specific feeling of finishing something you care deeply about and not having a place for it that feels right. Of putting work onto the internet and then grinding endlessly to help it find an audience among thousands of other things sitting on the same platforms asking for the same attention.
Kyndred Music is meant to be a place for the artists we work with and for the fans who want to support records that otherwise might not exist, or that deserve a larger audience than they have been able to find on their own.
If we get this right, artists keep making original music, and someone hears a song on a Kyndred record twenty years from now that takes them right back to where they were the first time they heard it...and maybe they share it with their kids too.
Kyndred Studios. The Studio for Everyone.
Your Turn
What are the songs that take you back? What are the moments you keep revisiting? What artist or band is your guilty pleasure? What’s your favorite soundtrack? And maybe most importantly, what’s your go to karaoke song?
Tell me in the comments. Kyndred is building a slate with its community and this is part of where that conversation begins.
Next up: podcasts.
Thanks for reading.
-Lauer