Keeping The Blues Alive

About Joe Bonamassa

As Joe Bonamassa approaches his 25th year as a professional musician, he continues to blaze a remarkably versatile artistic trail, and amass an authentic, innovative and soulful body of work. Bonamassa’s career began onstage opening for B.B. King in 1989, when he was only 12 years old. Today, he is hailed worldwide as one of the greatest guitar players of his generation, and is an ever-evolving singer-songwriter who has released 15 solo albums in the last 13 years, all on his own label, J&R Adventures. Bonamassa’s tour schedule consistently hovers at around 200 shows worldwide each year, and a heaping handful of markedly diverse side projects keep him thinking outside the box and flexing every musical muscle he’s got. He founded and oversees the non-profit Keeping The Blues Alive Foundation to promote the heritage of the blues to the next generation, fund music scholarships, and supplement the loss of music education in public schools. There’s a case to be made that Joe Bonamassa, like another star who shared the same initials, is the hardest working man in show business.

 

After Bonamassa’s weekly radio shows were canceled, first on Sirius Satellite Radio (Daily Cup of Joe) during the merger with XM, and more recently on UK’s Planet Rock, J&R Adventures, the label Bonamassa founded with longtime manager Roy Weisman, looked to other radio networks for a replacement. With over half a million direct fans, they discovered the size of Bonamassa’s social and fan network exceeded the outreach terrestrial radio could provide for them and decided instead to do the show in-house and release it independently.

Weisman explains, “Every time they said ‘no,’ we said ‘yes,’ which at the end of the day creates a bigger opportunity for the artist.”

This project is yet another example of how J&R Adventures, a record label with divisions in publishing, management, and memorabilia, is branding itself as a disruptive and independent entity in the music business. By vertically integrating its business to meet the needs of the artist and the fans, it gives control to the artist and its management directly, rather than to a handful of outside individuals. The result is the ability to release multiple projects year after year, from Bonamassa solo records, to side projects and collaborations, to non-profits, merchandising, fan clubs, and more. The company consistently devises new ways to stay nimble and compete in today’s vastly different music landscape.

Source: Best Blues Artists