Today we’d like to introduce you to Jimmy Freer.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Jimmy. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.

Audiophile was started in 2012 by myself and good friend Lane Mizrahi as an event company initially. We did one event together and it was an absolute disaster, simply due to us not knowing how much to offer an artist on top of all of our expenses. There’s no manual for anything in this industry so it was a trial and error process!

After our one event Lane went his way to work for a family owned business in clothing and I ended up taking the company in a different direction towards the recorded music side. We already had a logo, social media presence, and a registered business – it made the transition to being an electronic music label easy. Ideally, my dream was to be an artist, it just didn’t seem to be practical for my lifestyle. In 1996 my little brother Eddie contracted West Nile Virus here in Plano and it left him severely brain damaged on top of his autism. Later on, in life Audiophile was my way of vicariously living through artists while I could build something at the same time as helping my parents take care of Eddie. You could say that it was my motivation to make things work so I could run a business from anywhere necessary. Honestly, I almost see it as a blessing in disguise because I get to be with my family and dogs every day of my life, which is an ideal scenario.

Fast forward to 2019 and across the label chain we have landed over 500 million streams across various platforms, 100+ iTunes chartings, 200+ Beatport top 100’s, and many more accolades via online stores. Our label chain now consists of 6 record labels in different shades of electronic music with over 1000 releases and 2000 artists.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?

Besides my family situation, the hardest part of the struggle is how fast technology is making innovation move for music consumption. Just when I seem to get comfortable there is a massive industry shift that puts you on your toes. For me, it was the transition between downloadable music and streaming. Luckily it was pretty obvious that this was the direction that was going to disrupt music, however, it brought some problems such as extremely low royalty rates, and a playlist culture that doesn’t help people discover new artists. The whole industry is trying to work through this right now.

Please tell us about your business.

As of right now, we are a small operation of three people that handle different aspects of the business. I generally do all of the admin work, Scottie “DJ Red Eye” does quite a lot of the music selection, and Stefan Weise has been on the web development side which allows us to do a substantial work through some proprietary record label tools he has developed. Stefan and I have also added a new vinyl label to the Audiophile Music Group called ‘Science Cult’, which focuses on the electro genre (our cities claim to fame in the music world as we have some amazing electro artists).

I’m most known for being that “crazy” guy who constantly put himself into stressful situations, I always want to do less but end up doing more. Weirdly, I think stress drives me to work harder. My day to day includes work in graphics/video, distribution, publishing, promoting, marketing, and events.

My most proud achievement is the ability to be one of the few labels that can launch the artist’s careers. We have quite a large social media presence which has allowed us to run our label group substantially different than others who are relying on the talent’s name and status to sell music.

Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?

I would say work ethic and my ability to connect with people digitally. There is no substitute for putting hours into a field; people start to notice your ambition and it opens up doors that would otherwise stay closed. Also, being knowledgeable in multiple fields comes to handy when starting a new business so you can lower your overhead.

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