Recently Craig Morgan left Broken Bow Records for the greener pastures of major label SonyBMG and now platinum recording artists Little Big Town are doing the same thing with their move to Capital. What’s kind of surprising about their move is that they aren’t giving up on their current record “A Place To Land” but are in fact bringing it with them to Capital. From Capital’s standpoint this is a win-win for them. Since Little Big Town owned their master recordings for both “A Place To Land” and “The Road To Here,” Capital basically is a bigger distributor for their albums at this point. I do wonder if Little Big Town will retain the rights to both albums or if they recieved a ton of cash from Capital to sell the rights. Also, did Capital pay some money to Equity (a.k.a. Clint Black and Mike Kraski) to get the label rights.
Whatever the case, this probably spells the impending end of Equity as a full-service label. They’ll still probably serve as Clint Black’s label but Kevin Fowler, Laura Bryna, Carolyn Dawn Johnson, Mark Wills, and Carolina Rain might be right to worry a bit. Equity and Broken Bow both looked like new models for independent labels but both labels have taken big hits when their biggest artsts have left for traditional major label promotional muscle.
The Lost Highway 