COLLEGE PARK, Maryland — Nick Arnold’s earliest childhood memory is of him trying to form a band in the first grade. His mother refused to let him play drums, so he received years of guitar lessons instead. And when he didn’t get accepted to the University of California, Berkeley for guitar, Arnold realized playing music wasn’t the only way to enter the industry.
In spring of 2016, Arnold showed up to the first sound engineers meeting of the semester at WMUC — the campus radio station — simply to help. At the time, Arnold was drawing up plans to launch a grassroots record label with a friend.
They began to search for a concert venue to book their artists in, but the search dissipated. Arnold approached Mike Houser, the studio manager of WMUC at the time, with his ambitions. Houser suggested bringing his idea for a record label to the Student Government Association, which could help him form a club.
“Without Mike, sure I might have been able to start it, but he’s the one who really knew who to talk to, knew people at the studio to get us connections,” Arnold said.
The club, known as Terrapin Record Label, held its first meeting in October of 2016, and gained SGA recognition the following spring. The club functions more like a co-op, according to Arnold, and club members and executive board members meet every other Wednesday to collectively work on their projects. Student status at the University of Maryland, College Park is the only requirement to participate.
Each semester, the record label selects a featured artist. The executive board reviews submissions at a private listening party at the beginning of each semester, then invites the five best artists to perform in a live show in front of the entire club. The executive board votes are then cast to determine the next featured artist.
That artist becomes the main focus of the club for their selected semester, and the club members volunteer to do whatever is necessary — like contributing studio instrumental music, doing engineering work, and securing production space — for the featured artist to create a four-song extended play, or EP, by the end of the semester.
Members who are not featured artists have opportunities to stay involved with the club, which works to book them for shows and events, too.
“If you release singles or want to record a vocal track, the idea is that we’ll be able to help you do that,” Arnold said. “[We want] to give people the tools they need to do what they do.”
When it comes to selecting a featured artist, genre is not a factor. The executive board gives equal consideration to punk rock, hip-hop, even electronic dance music (or EDM) artists.
“The artist that we pick defines the genre we’ll be working on for that semester,” Arnold said. “For the future of Terrapin Record Label, I really want us to expand past the punk rock genre that we already have [worked on].”
Since the featured artist project just began in spring of this year, the label has only featured one, a four-piece alternative band, called jacket.. The members at the time were Jackson Knight (vocals, guitar), Cosimo Tauraso (lead guitar), Bryce Watson (bass, vocals), and Nick Belski (drums).
With the help of Terrapin Record Label members, jacket. put out their first four-song EP, entitled “jacket.,” last July. According to Arnold, the EP took roughly 200 hours to create. Members of the club set up a Spotify artist page for jacket. and uploaded their EP to the music streaming site.
When it comes to credits of the music, the record label isn’t guaranteed anything and the artist decides if they wish to add any member of the club to the credits for their individual work. No royalties are received on the work, as SGA guidelines prohibit clubs from collecting profit.
The club does most recording sessions in the WMUC station, but the club is looking into booking new spaces.
“I just got notified by The Clarice [Smith Performing Arts Center] that they have access to a recording studio in Savage, Maryland and it’s really high quality,” Arnold said. “WMUC is home, though.”
This semester, the executive board was equally split between two artists, and decided to bring both Ana Galeli, a singer-songwriter, and RMS (Rohan Sridharan), a hip-hop artist, on as the new featured artists.
Arnold is hoping that the two artists can put together a collaborative work, but details of that are not yet finalized.
Aside from the possibility of a collaboration, big things are coming for the label.
Tommy Joyner, founder of MilkBoy Studio, a Philadelphia company that collaborated with the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center to create MilkBoy ArtHouse, agreed to help produce the EP that the featured artists will make this semester. Joyner has worked with artists such as Miley Cyrus, Trey Songz and Florence + The Machine.
Arnold also does lighting for some MilkBoy ArtHouse events. The record label also hosts events at MilkBoy. At the start of the semester, the record label held its first professional event called MESH (Music and Entertainment Starts Here), a collaborative event with the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center and Maryland Music Business Society, on the second story of the venue.
“Professionals come in to talk about whatever their field of entertainment or music may be, followed by a performance after,” Arnold said. “We bring in people who can say things like, ‘You don’t have to be super technically skilled or the best of the best to be creative or make it in this industry. You just have to want it.’”
Although the club has plans for more MESH talks, as well as spring auditions and a possible stage at Maryland Day, a degree of the initial uncertainty of Terrapin Record Label remains today. Arnold, who got a full-time job offer from a laser engineering company, is doing as much as he can for the label before he graduates in the spring.
“It makes me want to stay an extra year,” Arnold said. “We still don’t know where Terrapin Record Label can go because it seems like we’re just getting started.”
Check out some of the Terrapin Record Label artists’ work in the playlist below.
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