Behind the revival of Butler University’s student-run label Indy Blue Entertainment
- tatimonty
- Jan 26, 2022
- 5 min read
INDIANAPOLIS - One day this summer, three Butler University students were hiking up to the Hollywood sign with Cutler Armstrong, Butler’s Music Industry professor.
They were in Los Angeles as part of the College of Communication’s LA Internship Program. Throughout the school year, Butler partners with Elon University to send students to Los Angeles for internships.
While Emily Schaller, Langford Lessenberry and Haley Morkert continued their hike up to the Hollywood sign with Armstrong that day, the conversation turned to Elon and, most importantly, the record label they have at their university.
“We were like ‘you know what, if these people can do it, we absolutely can. We need to start the record label,’” said Schaller. “And Cutler was like you know, we do have a little bit of infrastructure for that and so we just on our way up, talking about that.”
That was when Indy Blue Entertainment, Butler’s own label, was born. Well, reborn.
Originally, Indy Blue Entertainment was started in 2011 by Armstrong, Mark Harris, and two other members of Butler's faculty and staff who are no longer at the university: Ian Anderson and Dr. Ken Creech. It was created as a vehicle to give students the opportunity to do not only production, but also the promotional and marketing aspects of the music industry. There was a student club centered around it, as well as two capstone courses.
However, the label itself went dormant around 2017, causing Armstrong to fold the club and change the focus of the capstone course, dropping it to just one course instead of two.
As of this fall though, Indy Blue Entertainment is back with Schaller as the Chief Operations Officer, Lessenberry as the mixing engineer and social media director, Morkert as the Chief Engineer, and Griffin McPhail as, well, as a little bit of everything.
“All of a sudden we're like, oh, yeah, we were reviving the school's record label,” Morkert said. “It's funny how that happens. But it was just some joke. And then, here we are.”
Now, while Elon University’s label is more fleshed out, incorporating artist management and holding legitimate clients, Indy Blue Entertainment is restarting small with a sampler – or, as Schaller puts it, whatever they can get.
McPhail recorded a solo piece of his own with his voice and piano. He’s also put the label in contact with a friend of his from the music school who is part of an indie rock band called Sunset Sillies. The label is also set to record a jazz duo.
“Last one I did was like a folk type song. So, it's just whatever kind of student wants to come in and record,” Morkert said. “But yeah, anyone’s open to come in to record.”
The recordings that the label creates belong to Butler, but students or whoever is recorded can make new recordings of their songs at any time, plus they can, and are encouraged to, monetize the publishing side.
“That way, it is a clean deal where BU never owes students or former students or community members any money or accounting, but both sides can make money if these are ever played, downloaded, streamed, etc.,” explained Armstrong. “BU on the master side, whoever we recorded on the publishing side, through PROs, and the SoundExchange side as artists.”
The label’s goal is to get these artists and their songs published onto a sampler.
“What we're trying to do, if you go into the office in CCOM on the first floor, they have like their trophy case. And it has a bunch of the sampler CDs done in years past,” Schaller said. “And so, we're just trying to start it back up and create a bit more of a steady foundation so that students after us can keep going, because I think this is a really great way to get experience.”
The “head honchos,” as Lessenberry refers to them, often enlist the help of one of Armstrong’s classes, MI357 Experiential Application – which was created a few years ago, according to Armstrong, specifically so it could include Indy Blue Entertainment content, if students chose to.
Hailea Royce is one such student who started working with Indy Blue Entertainment through Armstrong’s course. She mainly helps with the social media aspect, taking photographs during recording sessions she’s available for.
She’s also extended help into the mixing process, despite not being a Music Industry major or minor at Butler, and has learned on the fly through experience, rather than a class.
If there’s anything she’s noticed about the people apart of the label, it’s the welcoming environment they’ve created. “Anyone is pretty much welcome to join,” Royce said, “as long as you're willing to learn and put in the effort, which is nice.”
Everyone at Indy Blue Entertainment is learning as they go, gaining experience that’s otherwise fairly difficult to gain in Indianapolis. It might not always be smooth sailing, as Morkert knows first-hand.
“My last session did not go very smoothly,” she said. It was her first time hooking up and recording a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) she had never used before. In theory, it was supposed to be simple. In practicality, however, not so much. In her recollection, the MIDI the artists brought in was hooked up to some other type of MIDI controller hooked up to a keyboard.
“It was not working. It was not going smoothly and everything just went wrong,” Morkert said. “And eventually, I was almost on the brink of tears. I was like ‘oh my gosh,’ but like we sorted it out, we got a recording going in. And its recording sounds good. So, you just gotta have a little faith that like when everything's going wrong. You can somehow pull it together.”
Morkert, while in Los Angeles this past summer, had an internship at a recording studio and there learned more about the studio environment and the soundboard. Despite that experience earning her the title of Chief Engineer for Indy Blue Entertainment, she is still fairly new to the whole studio recording thing, insisting she’s not an expert by any means, just the one who knows the most by technicalities.
“So, when something goes wrong, and people look to me, I'm like, I have no idea guys. Oh my god. There's a lot of troubleshooting. I mean, issues almost always come up in a session,” Morkert said. “What I learned in LA is like something always goes wrong. It's hardly ever that everything goes perfectly smooth, but like what makes you a good engineer is to be able to know how to fix it immediately and not waste time. So, I'm still working on that part.”
And she, as well as Schaller, insists that Armstrong has been a huge help in figuring things out: “I do call him a lot when he’s not around,” Morkert said.
Armstrong describes his own role as part of the label as flexible and dependent on what the students need help with.
“I find that, at a minimum, and more than students probably think at first,” Armstrong said, “I'm needed to help students learn and to get comfortable using the studio space and to be help them get to where they can be flexible and able to freelance in a way and work around problems in real time.”
Working around problems in real time is a big part of getting the label off the ground, according to Lessenberry.
“There are aspects of this that I wouldn't have foreseen, that I never knew existed, that I couldn't have accounted for,” he said. “And you can figure that out as you go, like once you find the problems, you can deal with it.”
The key, according to Morkert, is to be patient – both the engineers as they work to figure it out, and the artists.
“We need just a little bit of patience to sort things out at times,” she said. “It's not going to be like the smoothest professional session, but we're happy to help and we're gonna get you the best content we can.”
Armstrong, arguably most importantly, is also around to remind the students to not forget to have fun.
“Cutler says that all the time. He's like, ‘this should be fun for you guys,’” Schaller said. “‘Don't make it a chore. Make sure you're having fun.’”
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