At a dinner in New York, after Russ had sold out Air Canada Centre in Toronto and Barclays Center in Brooklyn, he said something that stopped the conversation at the table. If he had quit after nine years of trying, no one would have blamed him. Nine years is a long time. But if he had stopped, none of what was happening at that dinner would have existed.
The A&R executive listening to that story was Jacob Fain, a music professional with more than two decades across major and independent record companies and music publishing. He has worked with the Chainsmokers, Russ, and Bailey Zimmerman. His account of that dinner is not motivational filler. It is the clearest description he has of what separates artists who break through from the ones who stop.
Nine years is not failure, it is a build
Fain signed Russ when Russ was already starting to break, after years of independent work building catalog and audience with no label behind him. The persistence that got him there was not a strategy. It was a refusal to accept that time running out was a reason to quit.
Bailey Zimmerman had a faster runway. He broke fast and broke big. But Fain draws the same thread through both stories. Bailey refused to follow the accepted rules of what a new country artist was supposed to sound like. He was among the first into that space precisely because he was not trying to match what already existed. Two different timelines, the same underlying refusal to drift from who they were.
When those label conversations start, contracts follow quickly. Musilock generates bilingual music contracts and sends them for e-signature, so independent musicians are not improvising the paperwork at the moment things start moving.
What streaming numbers cannot tell an A&R executive
The industry spent roughly five years leaning hard into data. Fain describes a period when information became the catch-all word for how decisions got made, and dashboards started replacing ears. His read on where things stand now: data is one input among several, not the answer. The pendulum swung too far and has since adjusted.
What no dataset captures is whether an artist has something worth building a career around. Fain describes a recent meeting with a woman who answered a question and then went off on a tangent that had nothing to do with what was asked. That tangent was the entire point. She had something she needed to say, and she was going to say it whether the business got behind her or not. That quality does not appear in a streaming report.
The questions he asks when spending time with an artist, often across multiple meetings before any signing decision:
- What did the artist listen to growing up?
- What concert changed how they thought about music?
- What records do they want to make, and why?
There is no spreadsheet that gets you to the same place.
Your manager is part of what gets you signed
Fain is direct about this: he signs the artist and the team, not just the artist. A manager who knows how to move fast, think strategically, and make the right calls can accelerate what a good A&R relationship produces. A manager who is a poor fit, for whatever reason, can slow everything down even when the music is right.
He points to Core Management and their work with Bailey Zimmerman as an example of a team that knew how to operate when it counted. Bailey had the talent to succeed regardless. But the right team made the difference between a good outcome and an exceptional one.
For artists who have not yet had those A&R conversations, solving the management question early is worth the effort. The point is not that you need a well-known manager to get noticed. It is that the people around you determine how quickly things move once attention arrives. A signed management agreement signals that you are running a real operation. Musilock generates that contract and sends it for e-signature, so you are not writing one from scratch when someone says yes.
Work ethic is still the differentiator
What Fain sees hold most artists back is the assumption that success arrives on its own. Then there is the studio problem: not knowing when to stop. Every artist can run more mix passes, add another layer, chase one more take. At some point the right call is to let it go. The discipline to build for ten years and the judgment to stop refining are different skills, and both matter.
He returns often to a story about Kobe Bryant. At the start of a Lakers season, while teammates were walking into the locker room for the first practice of the day, Bryant was walking out of the shower, having already done a full session beforehand. That gap between being on the team and being Kobe Bryant is the same gap Fain observes between artists who plateau and artists who break.
He points to Beyoncé and Taylor Swift as the clearest examples of what that level of commitment looks like in music over time. The Beyoncé Coachella documentary, in particular, shows someone working at a level most people never see because they are not in those rooms. His point is not that every artist needs to match that output. It is that the artists at the top of the business are also some of its hardest workers. That is not a coincidence.
Success is not the same as commercial
Commercial performance is not the frame Fain uses when thinking about whether an artist is succeeding. His definition is closer to this: an artist who is driven to bring their art into the world regardless of who is or is not around them. The person who was journaling at eight years old and taught themselves three instruments and might become a professional someday. When you sit down with someone like that, the answer is already there.
Fans can tell the difference between an artist creating because they have to and one creating to get big.
That distinction is one of the most important signals Fain watches for in any signing conversation, and no data surfaces it. A meeting does. Keep the blinders on, stay true to who you are, and keep the intentions behind the work clear. Russ sat at that dinner after nine years and said he would do it all again.