Interview: Ladi6

With some people you just seem to click. And even though we have only talked a grand total of three times, I get that feeling from Ladi6. Maybe that’s because she felt sorry for me after the first time I interviewed her, outside the purple Radio BurgerFuel studio, and then commited the biggest radio sin by deleting the audio. So that chat went nowhere.

Ladi6 is that special type of artist that has attained legendary status in NZ, but done this independently. But Ladi has an important voice, one that’s demanding to be heard, and most importantly, has something of real value to say. And that’s probably why we started at Blockbuster and finished up brainstorming podcast ideas.

Before we talked this time, a post popped up on Ladi6's Instagram talking about music and money. Before we dive into that, a small tangent as she mentioned working at a video store, so I couldn't miss this opportunity to ask about that. 

"It was while we were making Automatic (her third album from 2013), and it's actually really crack up. I was in Snells Beach and I ended up working at Blockbuster Video there. The owner was just like a fan - we would just drink wine and just talk shit about everybody in our small community."

"It was literally on the precipice of when video stores became extinct. So she went out of business two weeks later. That's why she couldn't pay me. But I wore the uniform for a couple of weeks. We're still friends, just on social media though."

The other thing is when you were saying, ‘I don't really know how much I get from this and that and everything.’

It seems true of the music industry, that it's pretty opaque as to who owns what, how people get paid, and just how many places the money comes from (or not!). This is something Ladi addressed in her post, saying, "the minute you sign with anybody, they probably would tell you if you knew to ask. But nobody's saying ask. So you just don't. And you just hustle through going ‘I don't understand how I'm supposed to eat next week."

Ladi says it took a decade to get an understanding of all of this. And in her case it was only because, "things built up, my songs and catalogue built up and I'd start to see royalties come in that were actually significant rather than 1.1 cents for your 1000 streams. That's the only time I started to realise where things were coming from because you started to see a number that would make sense."

"It did make me think I needed to be more involved in it. It actually made me go, 'OK, what is all of this shit? Let me talk to someone who can tell me how this all works.' That's probably the first time that I talked with my manager about where does this money come from, and how come it comes from them? Who are these people?"

"She would tell me, I signed a deal with a publishing company in America, and that she's done all these side hustles for me. And that that was her job. I'm like, ‘oh, I thought your job was just to like, take me to gigs.' I didn't know that she was actually doing all this other stuff."

Be even armed with this knowledge, Ladi says she wouldn't have been able to cope with all of this earlier. "Not at the age I was when we first got together. It would have been way too much, and I wouldn't have had the capacity to also make the music. The hope is that your manager knows more than you and is helping you in rooms so you don't have to know what you don't know. But that's not always the case."

"It's one thing we kind of miss in New Zealand because we're such a small country there's no reason for us to have such strong infrastructure in terms of management. You can only tour three major cities and then you're all kind of done. And we just don't have the people power, even compared to Melbourne, or Aussie. It's a hard one."

We dig in deeper on why this hasn't changed a whole lot since she started out 25 years ago. Some musicians now see it as more of a business, but many are still caught in the thrall of creating.

"I was a Creative Director at Song Hubs (an APRA programme for upcoming songwriters), and I started talking because this is all that I give a shit about. I asked them, 'Who's helping you? Tell me your business. What's happening?' And they told me these horrific stories that were similar to stories when I first came in."

"And it's not that major labels are ripping them off, it’s their friends, but only accidentally. They have good intentions, but no ability to know what they're supposed to be doing. And then they're asking the musicians for percentages that are outrageous because they don't know what's standard and what you should be asking for."

"For example, someone said to me that when their management hooks them up with collaborations. Their management takes 80% and they get paid 20%. Why on Earth would that happen? You're doing all the work. You're the one that has to go in and write the damn song with whoever. Why would your manager take 80%?"

"I asked who is your manager? They saiid, 'oh, it's just my mate from music school'. I think they hope that if they give them that much that they might give them back all this work. It's also an over-saturated market, so it's really hard to actually get anyone to notice you amongst all the noise. They're hoping that Jay from music class can do it. How would they do it? Jay's the same age as you. And who does Jay know?"

It's obvious that this is a real passion, so I asked why she had started having conversations about it. Because talking about money is a generally been pretty off limits in NZ.

"I only posted it because I had already seen an author do it. And I was like, yeah, this is the stuff that I want to talk about. I'm always trying to talk and probably boring the hell out of emerging artists because I'm not talking about music. I'm going. Who's looking after you? Who's promoting your next record."

"This is the stuff that I would have loved to have known when I started out. How are people really making their money so that I can get my head in the game on what I need to be thinking about. And how I need to be thinking about my future, Kiwisaver, and retirement. But how am I going to own a house, because it's a lot more difficult being self-employed. And then you have to pay yourself the Kiwisaver on top of that."

"It’s just so scary, what's gonna happen if we have no house, no savings. You can only keep touring touring if you build yourself up to be an artist that actually has the capacity to have an audience. I'm meeting younger musicians, that have full time jobs and do music. And actually, that probably would have been the better way to go for me to go back in the day. But I just never thought of it."

One thing Ladi6 had thought about was university, "I always wanted to go and study," she says. But for obvious musical reasons, this didn't happen straight out of high school. Or even at the next chance. "I got accepted into uni in 2016 for a psychology degree, but I had to go to Brazil and around Asia so I didn’t do it."

But then COVID hit, music basically shut down, and that presented an opportunity to scratch an itch. "Somebody told me that if you do a counselling degree, you can start work immediately after you graduate. So I started studying, and now I've just finished my second year."

"I've been at placement here in Grey Lynn at the Auckland Women’s Centre and it's been quite amazing to have this opportunity to realise that I have this whole other part of me that really loves and values that work and it's so starkly different to being a rocker."

"I didn't tell anyone at uni that I was Ladi6. And then slowly people there started to find out. And I didn’t know, but my boss is a real music fan. One day she said to me, so you're on tour?"

"I just want to help people, I'm all about it. But I’m also kind of shy. It's a weird thing for me to have that other life in this working space. And I hope to one day merge the two. Maybe like a mental health podcast? Maybe just sharing on social media similar to the money story? Who knows?"

To turn away from some of the seriousness we talk about life and what had been going on for Ladi6 since her last release - the 'Royal Blue' EP in 2017.

"It was a really funny time, my cousin passed away and the whole record was kind of rushed trying to finish it. Then my mum had had this massive heart attack at the same time. I had to shut down our whole house, and my sibling and I merged into this massive house that was warm and safe for mum and tried to give her some time to get better. And she ended up living with me for 3 years."

"And then she passed away during COVID while we were finishing off this next record. So it’s like every time I put a record out, someone in my family dies. So every time we go to write one, we're like who’s gonna die."

So yeah, that change of tack didn't work out. But with new music on the horizon, surely we can't go wrong. Ladi6's track 'Alofa' is due out at the start of November. All that most people have heard is a little looping clip on social media. But she did drop a first play on the MC Slave's LoggCabin radio show. Well allegedly...

When asked what it was like hearing it in public for the first time, Ladi replied, "I don't know. I didn't listen. The show was on a Sunday, and I'm a really massive UFC fan, and a fight was on that day. So I totally forgot until I got a text in the middle of watching at the pub."

"The preview loop of 'Alofa' has a lot going on musically, it's not sparse. "It's a full breakbeat kind of style", explains Ladi. "But, every single song is different from the others. That's been one of my biggest worries, that putting out singles like 'Alofa' isn't going to actually give you an indication of the record at all.

There's a bit of confusion over how many songs are on the as yet untitled record. We go from nine to ten, then her manager interjects with eleven. "One of them is Guru which was on Royal Blue", says Ladi. "We put that on this record because Royal Blue was rushed and we felt like it didn't have that proper collection of music to sit with. It felt like Guru belonged with this set of songs. I don't know if you're allowed to do that. But we did!"

"There's interludes between each song. So it ends up being really long. I have this brilliant, beautiful artist called Grace Iwashita-Taylor who is a poet. She and I collaborated on picking pieces that felt like they resonated with each song, and it really helped me build out the idea of honouring my mother. We’re also honouring each song by giving it this beautiful little intro to ease you into the next track."

"Because the tracks are so starkly different from each other, I was missing this connecting piece to make it really a proper album. So that's something you can look forward to hearing later on?"

And when will that be?

"Next year sometime. I'll leave it as general as that. I want it out in winter though, so I can do a winter tour."

In the meantime, Ladi has a tour to plan, along with huge summer shows at Electric Ave in Christchurch and Sythony in the Domain in Auckland. And I’m going to make sure that this interview is saved in multiple places.