My name is Cattski Espina and I work for 22 Tango Records and Room Eleven Recording Studio.
I think I would want them to know about the work that we do here. We produce, develop, manufacture, promote and license local Cebuano music.
I got to a point after this was after my third album I think. I got to a point where I was blown away by the massive talent that was going that was around me at that time and I saw a band called Undercover Grasshoppers. I saw myself in them. They were a female-fronted band. That used to be me. That’s my setup as an artist. I really like them. So I decided maybe I should work with them. And the only way to do that is to come up with a record label and sign them as my artists
The artists are actually more or less the people who motivated me to go this way. I feel like they need someone to represent them, or to champion for them, or to guide them and develop them. I didn’t feel like, just you know they needed help ‘coz they were young and I don’t want them to make the same mistakes as I have.
Business defining moment, okay. I have to say I went to this music conference in Austin Texas. It’s the biggest music conference in the world. It’s called South by Southwest. So I attended that and there was something that clicked. We do have or we do share the same dream of maybe one day making Cebu into a destination for music.
It’s cliché but we can say that 22 Tango Records is an organic thing. Literally we grew from one small thing to now we have 11 artists and about 200 songs in our catalogue. It used to be just 9 or 30 songs in our catalogue. Now we have almost 200.
So we’ve had a couple of bad experiences in corporate or in corporate scene or other things, but I don’t really remember them. I just put them at the back of my head. They don’t matter. What matters is we keep on growing.
I think resilience is important. I think that not going you know. There are no shortcuts. Learn the hard way is always what I recommend. Mostly, the kids these days like you know the one that want instant gratification. That’s really counterproductive in the end. So it might you know so I would recommend that they learn the hard way or to the right way or things like that. The process is important.