Months after rumors first began surfacing, Veritas Music Entertainment is now a legal reality. The new country music record label is headed by chairman/CEO Roy Wunsch and president Bud Schaetzle. From 1990-94, Wunsch was president of Sony Music Nashville; Schaetzle is a founder and owner of High Five Entertainment, a multimedia production company.
As reported here earlier, Bob Woodruff is the label’s first signing. He was formally introduced to the media at a party at Wunsch’s home on Aug. 24. (Veritas is reportedly negotiating to sign singer-songwriter Gretchen Peters, although neither Wunsch nor Schaetzle will confirm this information.) Also at the party were Tracy Gershon and Connie Baer, whose appointments as heads of the label’s A&R and marketing departments are expected to be announced soon. Gershon was a longtime song plugger for Sony Tree, while Baer was, until a few weeks ago, vice president of marketing and artist development at Sony Nashville’s Epic Records division.
It will be a while before Veritas releases its first records. Woodruff says he is still amassing songs and looking for a producer. The former Asylum Records artist showcased some of his newer material at the gathering, including songs he had cowritten with Gary Nicholson, Matraca Berg and Vince Melamed.
Financed by publicly traded stock, Veritas opens its doors with a treasury of approximately $7 million, according to Wunsch, as well as “some options on how to expand on that.” Wunsch says he hopes to have three artists signed by the end of the label’s first year. “We’re never going to expand beyond 10 or 13 acts—tops—five years or so down the road,” he contends. “Our passion about doing this is ensconced in the ability to embrace a real small number of acts and not to clone anyone else. Taste-wise, we’re probably a little left of center.... If we can’t put all our resources and the executive talent we’re bringing in behind a small number of acts, we’re going to be like everyone else.”
Wunsch is emphatic about Veritas’ musical orientation: “We’re country. I guess we never want to say never [about the possibility of signing a non-country act], but that’s certainly not in any of our thinking at all in putting together this plan.”
Equally clear is the label’s preference for developing acts that write their own songs. “I guess our attraction to the artists we’ve looked at is that they happen to have a great source of material,” Wunsch says. “But it’s not like we feel we have to use all of their own material on their albums. We’re certainly open to outside songs.... We just feel that artists who write their own material have so much more depth.” Adds Schaetzle, “I think a lot of it has to do with our long-term goal of building careers instead of making a splash. And it just so happens that people who can conceive of an idea, figure out a way to write it, figure out a way to perform it, and then put it on tape tend to have a better shot at that.”
Wunsch says the label is open to signing groups as well as solo acts: “We don’t feel any particular restriction to any category of artist.” As for album budgets, he continues, “They’d be the same as for anyone else’s on Music Row. I can’t tell you what the average cost would be right now. But if it’s $100,000 or $150,000, [we’ll spend] whatever it takes to get the record done with high-quality people and producers.”
Because distribution is so crucial to a label’s success, Wunsch and Schaetzle are taking their time to shop around. “We’re not worried about it for at least 60 days,” Wunsch explains. “We’re being romanced, as it were, by one major company. It seems like that arena has had an entirely new landscape during the past two years. Two or three or four national independent distributors have really developed muscle power in the marketplace with some real aggressive people in key positions. So that’s also attractive to us. We’re going to survey it real well. We’d like to be in a position to play our music before we finally nail that down.”
Veritas aims to build in-house departments for marketing, A&R, finance and promotion. “We saw our partnership as a marriage of many different industries kind of ‘colliding’ under one roof,” says Schaetzle. “Clearly, we’ll be looking for adventurous, state-of-the-art opportunities to advance artists’ careers, to help image them and to help deliver the message. Television, new technologies, sophisticated staging presentations are all tent-poles for us.” Veritas has no publishing company under the tent, but both executives say they are looking toward establishing one—separate from the label—after the label itself gets a firm footing.
Since Veritas is a new operation, it has no catalog of its own to generate income. But Wunsch says he will consider releasing certain projects that have already been recorded; he has already been approached about one such “interesting” prospect. “It’s safe to say,” Schaetzle notes, “that anything that’s got some guts and class and excitement—something that’s probing and has a chance to touch an audience—we’re interested in. We’re recognizing more every day that there are tons of options out there.”
Schaetzle says he’s “phasing back” his day-to-day involvement with High Five, which he has developed into one of the industry’s top music video companies. He says he expects music videos to be a big part of Veritas’ artist-development process, but he has few kind words for the state of country videos today: “It seems as if everyone feels they have apprehended the basic formulae for making music videos—a little performance, a girl in a car out in the desert, that kind of thing. I’m bored silly by the bulk of work that’s going on out there. But I think it’s a really vibrant and powerful tool, and whatever its next incarnation is, we plan to be in the thick of it.”
Wunsch estimates that Veritas reasonably can be expected to turn a profit within “two-and-a-half years or something like that.” But, he adds brightly, “We could get lucky.”
