Dama Dama
Long-term creative direction across the full lifecycle of an independent record label
Co-founded and led creative direction for Dama Dama across an eight-year arc - from independent label launch in 2017, through a multi-year Ninja Tune subsidiary partnership, into a lifestyle brand with merchandise and events, and now into a curated cultural archive as the label completes its wind-down.
Brief
An independent label co-founded to support friends' musical projects
Dama Dama Records was co-founded in 2017 with Maribou State as an independent UK label, originally built to support a community of friends' musical projects and get their releases out into the world. The brief, in the beginning, was open: build a label that felt culturally specific, didn't behave like a major-label imprint, and gave artists creative ownership over how their music was released.
Strategic Insight
Independent labels weren't competing as distributors anymore. They were becoming cultural platforms.
Across the label's eight-year run, the music industry transformed structurally - streaming grew from 67% to 84% of US recorded music revenue between 2017 and 2025 (RIAA Year-End Report), the traditional sign-release-distribute model came under sustained pressure, and competing on catalogue alone stopped being viable for independent labels. The strategic move that shaped Dama Dama's longevity was to position the label as a cultural platform rather than a distributor, recognising that the audience valued community, taste, and curation over catalogue access. The insight that informed every brand decision: Dama Dama's value wasn't the music itself, it was the worldview around the music - the aesthetic, the community, the sense of being part of something culturally specific. That repositioning enabled the label to evolve well beyond traditional record label territory, into the multi-year Ninja Tune subsidiary partnership, a lifestyle and merchandise brand, events, and editorial content.
