Frame Artists co-founders Becci Abbott Black and Sophie Kennard have opened up on the strategy that propelled Chase & Status to a BRIT Award and their first No.1 single.
The drum & bass "kings" claimed their maiden chart-topper in the summer with their Stormzy collaboration Backbone, which has 443,500 sales to date, according to the Official Charts Company.
The duo also won Producer Of The Year at the 2024 BRIT Awards, having become the first artists since 2010 to have four singles simultaneously in the UK Top 40: Baddadan, Liquor + Cigarettes, Selecta and Disconnect, as well as picking up a BRIT Billion Award for one billion UK streams.
Speaking in the December issue of Music Week, Kennard explained how the management company constructed such a formidable campaign.
“We have built super fandom by regularly doing pop-up events, fan activations and interesting marketing plays over the past three albums," said Kennard. "This super-serves new fans with the rich history of their catalogue and creates a sense of FOMO, demand and cultural heat on everything they do.
"Working with Stormzy allowed us to dream big. We identified a few specific events, which he was able to attend before release: Chase & Status headline DJ sets at Coachella in April and Ushuaia in Ibiza in June. We knew we could create huge numbers of UGC creations from these events and used a brilliant marketing platform called Co:brand to spread the hype.
"A very intense campaign resulted in 20,000 UGC creations and 40 million views alone over a period of about 10 days around the release. Last year, our plan was to cement them as the ‘kings’ of drum & bass, now we want them to spearhead the genre to a more global fanbase, places that are just discovering it on a commercial level.”
It’s nice for us now because major labels, with their investment, are all looking at electronic music in a big way
Sophie Kennard
Abbot Black noted that the band also sold out 45,000 tickets for their August headline gig at Milton Keynes Bowl.
“They sold out in a couple of hours, their biggest ever show," added Kennard. "They sold 45,000 tickets, and then the arena tour went on sale. They sold out The O2 in the fastest ever time for an electronic act, under four hours, which is incredible to be doing at this point in their career.”
Chase & Status have released three Top 5 albums and seven UK Top 10 singles so far, with their chart successes spanning 15 years. But rather than taking credit for bringing electronic music back into the mainstream, Kennard insisted it had never truly gone away.
"It’s nice for us now because major labels, with their investment, are all looking at electronic music in a big way," she said. "But what I love about electronic music is that there are all sorts of artists that have millions of followers, that sell millions of tickets, that have never crossed the desk of some of the biggest execs in the industry, and they have very profitable businesses. But because they are not charting in certain territories, it kind of flies under the radar."
Kennard, who will be jointly honoured alongside Chase & Status as Artist & Manager Team Of The Year at this week's Artist & Manager Awards, previously ran the pair's label MTA Records and co-founded Frame Artists with Abbott Black in April 2020.
"Drum & bass is a burgeoning part of the industry that youth culture has cottoned on to as an energetic way to fuel what they do on social media and in live spaces," said Kennard. "But that’s also happening in house and techno and we could reel off some of our other clients and their contemporaries who are doing 30,000 tickets in Madrid and Travis Scott is popping up with them at Paris Fashion Week.
"All sorts of incredible things are happening. It’s cycles of urgent rediscovery. Again, that goes back to the data platforms. Companies we work with are all about finding little subpockets and noticing that there are 40 people in Bristol posting about an Eats Everything gig. You can do that with electronic music, because the DJs and the artists perform much more regularly.”
We love raving, and that’s ultimately the foundation of what this company is about
Becci Abbott Black
Abbott Black pointed to this year's Glastonbury as evidence, "with the late-night gigs and events all proving extremely popular and very well-attended".
"Perhaps they had underestimated the power of electronic music," she said. "They’ve got to take note that they need a bigger space to perform in. It’s all ages wanting to go, from 13-year-olds, up to people in their 50s and 60s.”
Frame's burgeoning roster also includes acts such as Eats Everything, Patrick Topping, Arielle Free, Ewan McVicar, Melé, Mozey and Storm Mollison.
“We straddle the underground, too," finished Abbott Black. "We’ve just signed DJ Boring and Effy and they’re bubbling in the underground. We don’t underestimate that and it’s where we came from. We love raving, and that’s ultimately the foundation of what this company is about.”
Subscribers can read the full interview with Abbott Black and Kennard in the latest issue of Music Week.
