Our Mission:
Owned by our artists,
for our artists
Adhyâropa Records is a 100% artist-owned record label & PR firm founded in 2021 by Joe Brent of 9 Horses. We wanted to create a home for artists to release and promote music that defied genre or description. Our label gives them not only the freedom to make the way they want, but to have artistic and financial agency over their music. By ensuring all artists own their masters and have ample support for promotion, we serve as a partner for our artists to thrive.
The Adhyâropa Story…
Adhyâropa started as a “boutique” label, releasing projects for the group 9 Horses and their peers. Purely through word of mouth, we rapidly attracted a large family of artists seeking a sustainable path forward in the modern music industry. Through our work, we help them navigate the rocky landscapes of our field and confront the biggest issues musicians face today:
The music industry has become financially untenable for middle-class working artists. We’ve done the math. It doesn’t work out for anyone but the big music industry corporations.
Musicians are not organized the way other artists are. Most other creative fields, like any other industry, have an organizing platform with which they have the power to collectively bargain on behalf of their rates and their rights. Without an industry-wide organizing platform, musicians are often powerless to fight back against corporate interests.
Independent musicians lack the promotional resources that major artists hold. Artists are often confronted with a quandary – a good PR campaign is the best way to expand your audience and increase the visibility of your release, but the cost of PR to too great a financial hurdle for anyone but artists who already have access to that level of financial resource.
Streaming has gutted musicians’ main revenue source, touring has become equally onerous, and corporations are conspiring to remove the last opportunities for artists to make a living with AI waiting around the corner to finish the job. Without an organizing platform to represent their interests, musicians are ill-prepared to combat corporate hegemony over the industry built by their work.
We wanted to be part of the solution.
Adhyâropa Records, LLC is an artist-owned, artist-forward label and PR firm that is dedicated to establishing a sustainable financial system and fostering a community for musicians. We firmly believe that organizing together creates the rising tide that lifts us all. We believe our work has just begun, but in this time our growth has been exponential; we’ve released hundreds of albums already and are now releasing more than an album per week, with a catalog featuring artists such as:
Darol Anger •
Lenny Pickett •
Jane Ira Bloom •
Vienna Teng •
Billy Martin •
Rachel Eckroth •
9 Horses •
Mr Sun •
Joe K. Walsh •
John Hadfield •
Bahar Movahed •
Wes Corbett •
Jacob Jolliff •
Ofri Nehemya •
Ian Coury •
Greg Garrison •
Meg Okura •
Brandon Ridenour •
Hilary Hawke •
Brian Shankar Adler •
Ethan Setiawan •
Yotam Ben-Or •
Darol Anger • Lenny Pickett • Jane Ira Bloom • Vienna Teng • Billy Martin • Rachel Eckroth • 9 Horses • Mr Sun • Joe K. Walsh • John Hadfield • Bahar Movahed • Wes Corbett • Jacob Jolliff • Ofri Nehemya • Ian Coury • Greg Garrison • Meg Okura • Brandon Ridenour • Hilary Hawke • Brian Shankar Adler • Ethan Setiawan • Yotam Ben-Or •
Our Team
Joe Brent
Joe Brent is the founder and managing director of Adhyâropa Records. In 2021, Joe founded Adhyâropa Records to be the “boutique” label for his band 9 Horses, but it quickly developed into a platform for the band’s ethos of egality, creative equity, and anti-corporate activism on behalf of artists of all genres. It continues to offer artist-forward distribution, label, and PR services and serve as a model for sustainability in the music industry.
Ron Zon
Ron started off as an intern, but their work and talent were so extraordinary that they quickly became indispensable and are now handling their own catalog of artists and leading the team in matters of digital marketing and PR. Ron does lots of things for us – some you hear about, some you don’t – but whatever they touch, they make better.
Rob Cope
Rob is the manager of Adhyâropa UK, which we founded to give us more reach into the UK market and to make sure that UK customers have a local shipping option. Rob is an accomplished musician and the host of The Jazz Podcast, The UK’s most popular podcast focused on jazz.
What does “Adhyâropa” mean, and how do you say it?
Adhyâropa is Sanskrit for “superimposition.” Guru Swami Sivananda Saraswati demonstrated that the world is a mere superimposition upon Brahman through the parable of the coil of rope in the road. You see a coil of rope, but because you are afraid of snakes, your mind imagines that the rope might be a snake, and you feel fear (hence the logo, designed by Emily Hope Price). But superimposition does not inherently carry a negative connotation; we superimpose a fair and sustainable artist-label relationship upon a music industry that has become neither fair nor sustainable. And as for the pronunciation, your best try is always good enough for us, but we say it as: