During the Covid-19 pandemic, Will Van Dyke returned to school to get a master’s degree in music business. Van Dyke, a Broadway musician and conductor for 15 years, has also served as an arranger, orchestrator, music director and supervisor; but outside the Main Stem, Van Dyke has written and recorded his own music. For his master’s thesis, Van Dyke investigated, as he put it, “this idea that when theater artists go to record an album that maybe isn’t necessarily for theater, they don’t get themselves in the right lane.”
“I’ll use myself as an example,” he continued. “I always just sort of thought: I’m going to record an album. I’ll put it up on iTunes and then everybody will listen to it. And that is the mindset that a lot of people have about recorded music, and it’s so much more than that. When I’m saying ‘set up the lane,’ I’m talking about setting up an artist for success to highlight the other things that we often don’t think about outside of just the recording of music.”
Van Dyke shared his thoughts with Brian Usifer, another multi-hyphenate of Broadway music departments. Usifer came to New York to be in the music business, not the theater one, at first, but fell in love with the variety of genres musical scores encapsulated. Still, the music business appealed to Usifer and he resonated with Van Dyke’s points about theater artists and their independent music. So Usifer asked for the opinion of his colleague Sonny Paladino — another of the keyboardist/arranger/music director variety. Turns out Paladino and recording engineer/music producer Ian Kagey had identified the same issue for individual artists as well as a need for the composer-lyricists of musicals to make more effective demo recordings.
After years of conversations, Van Dyke, Usifer, Paladino and Kagey teamed up to establish their own music label: Joy Machine Records.
The label offers the recording, producing, marketing and distributing of cast albums, original music and covers by established artists, demos for new work, singles and EPs as well as emerging artist development (the idea that first sparked Van Dyke).
Joy Machine has already released the Broadway cast album for “The Heart of Rock and Roll” and is preparing to release the original cast recording of Broadway’s “Swept Away” having already dropped multiple singles from the recently shuttered Avett Brothers musical. On Jan. 17, the label released the digital concept album “The Shape of Things: Songs from ‘Joy the Musical.’”
Of course, Joy Machine isn’t the first label to cater to theatrical artists. Ghostlight Records was founded specifically to cater to the unique needs of Broadway cast recordings — and its parent label, Sh-K-Boom, specialized in recording solo albums by theater artists. Broadway Records and Center Stage Records also concentrate in this genre.
In the cast recording and solo album arena, Joy Machine simply offers another option. “There are many different labels that do this, and we are not trying to squeeze them out of this at all,” Usifer told Broadway News. “But we are our own voice and we are our own creative people.”
But additional offerings distinguish Joy Machine from other labels — theatrical and mainstream. Joy Machine aims to build a relationship with artists from the earliest stages of their careers and projects that can carry through to full albums.
