Pop star Dami Im on leaving Sony: ‘I’m just glad I’m out of there’
The industry cliché for an artist and a label parting ways is ‘creative differences’. Here, the truth goes much deeper. After biting her tongue, Dami Im is ready to talk.
The 116-year-old red brick church dwarfed by office towers in the centre of Brisbane is booming with the sound of an emotive pop song played loudly on repeat. Ornate religious figures trapped in stained glass survey the scene from on high as one of the nation’s most distinctive performers sits at a piano and runs through take after take of her powerful new single. Dami Im wrote this song, Pray, as a prompt to take a few moments each day to engage in the act of prayer, rather than letting her mind zigzag from one distraction to the next. And now she’s here on a spring afternoon at St Andrew’s Uniting Church to shoot the music video for the track from her upcoming sixth album that is, in effect, the beginning of the third verse of her career.
The first verse was sung in obscurity when the trained pianist and singer could scarcely get a gig outside her church community in Daisy Hill, a suburb of Logan, 24km south of the Queensland capital. Almost nobody knew her then, and almost nobody heard Dream, the album she self-released in 2011 while completing her masters of music studies at the Queensland Conservatorium, having emigrated from South Korea at the age of nine.
The second verse began in 2013 when she entered the fifth series of talent show The X Factor. When Im won, she said on live TV, “God has given me this talent and I want to use it for his glory. I want to use it to help people like me who are not so cool, and really daggy losers… I want to tell them they can do it too, if they go for it.” This win was unusually popular for a format built on manufacturing conflict. In the wake of the finale – watched by 2.43 million people – one critic pondered: “Is Dami Im the least annoying winner in Australian reality TV history?”
Her prize was a recording contract with Sony Music, which led to what looked like the powerhouse chorus of her career: the beginnings of the “Dami Army” – her core fanbase, four ARIA top 10 albums, and the opportunity to represent Australia at the Eurovision Song Contest in Stockholm in 2016, where she was runner-up – the highest ranking achieved by an Australian artist since we joined in 2015.
The third verse of her career is the one she’s singing right now, after a break to refuel with strawberries and a costume change from white to red. Video director Roy Nien sets up yet another handheld pan across the stage. Backed by a choir dressed in black, Im, 33, is staring down the lens, mouth open and eyes wide, trying to keep it fresh and spontaneous with each and every take. Are you hiding? Sick of fighting? / ‘Cause nobody seems to care, she sings. Everything will be OK / It’s time for us to pray…
This third verse of her life is the one where she decided to leave Sony Music to sign with a smaller competitor, ABC Music. The industry cliché for two parties parting ways is “creative differences”. Here, the truth behind that shopworn phrase is much deeper and more complicated. Having bitten her tongue in public since making the label shift in August last year, Im is now ready to talk.
The process of filming music videos can be tedious to the point of tears. Think of your favourite song and its visual accompaniment, then picture all the people behind the camera who’ve heard that song so many times that sparkling piano notes and melismatic vocal runs gradually lose their sheen and become, well, dull. Most of the time, nobody involved in such a production knows what sort of video they’re working on, especially when they’re in the thick of it. Timeless or out-of-time? It’s out of their hands. This is an essential and central thrill of the creative process: giant hit or middling shit, they both require more or less the same effort.
Happily for all involved, the four-minute track Pray continues to shine even after hours of repeated play. The shoot wraps in the late afternoon, but there’s little time to rest for the star’s small team, which includes her husband, Noah Kim, who has been capturing behind-the-scenes footage with a second camera.
“This one was really different from all the other clips because I’ve arranged everything myself, rather than the director choosing everything and I just turn up,” Im says, pausing briefly to sit at the front pew. “I left Sony because I wanted control, and to be my own boss. This time, everything was in my control, and on me, from hiring the location to the choir. It felt more fun, because I knew what I wanted from today. It’s not someone else’s vision.”
With a budget of about $13,000 funded by Im herself as a business investment, rather than by her record label, the video doesn’t come cheap: these days, most by Australian artists are shot for between $5000 and $10,000. “I tried to minimise it; there’s no fat in it, and everything mattered, but it’s still so bloody expensive,” she says with a laugh. “I guess if I left it up to somebody to take care of, it would have been $30,000 or $50,000, easily. We’re carrying all the gear and packing up, and I’d rather do this a thousand times than a video that someone else wanted me to do.”
Beneath the white pipes of the church organ, there are a few words in gold letters that have stood sentinel behind Im all day. Sing rejoice and give thanks, they read. Sing unto the lord a new song.
It was a new song that Im performed as a guest at the Eurovision: Australia Decides event on the Gold Coast in February 2019. For an artist whose career in the public eye had been established on covers, hearing her sing original material was something of a novelty. She sat at a piano before a crowd of thousands and shared something deep, true and subversive in its intent. Sick of feeling like a cute little bird stuck in a cage on display / With only one song to sing every night and day, she sang in its first verse. I’m not a puppet who moves with your hand / I’m not that woman who begs for command.
Those words in her song Dreamer were more heartfelt than her fans could have known, for at that time, Im was in the midst of negotiations to end her recording contract with her record label.
And the subject of that song? Her experience of working under senior executives at Sony Music Australia.
By this point in her career, Im had released four albums with Sony. Three of them were composed almost entirely of covers, with 2016’s Classic Carpenters devoted to her interpretations of songs by the famous US vocal duo. Even after her No.2 result at Eurovision in 2016, where her grand final performance of Sound of Silence was watched by an estimated 200 million people, her label insisted that Im’s future success lay in performing the work of others.
Creative director Paul Clarke took Im to Stockholm, and she struck him then as an eminently professional performer. “My impression is that she’s taken her own path to find her own voice,” says Clarke. “She’s sung other people’s songs for a long time, and I think that she’s become a mature artist in being able to write songs, and being able to express herself in a different way.”
Clarke says she was “quite straitjacketed in her role at [Sony]. It didn’t quite fit who she was, or what she could be as an artist. It just felt like an uncomfortable suit that she was wearing. But what we proved together – the record company, Dami and the whole Eurovision experience – was that she could really set the world on fire with the right song, and the right kind of look.”
Im’s final album with Sony, 2018’s I Hear A Song, featured 12 covers and two originals, including the title track and the album closer, Like a Cello. Marketing for this album foregrounded her skills as a pianist, and she enjoyed working with producer Rick Price in Nashville to conceive jazz-influenced new arrangements for classic standards such as Feeling Good, Come Away With Me and I Say A Little Prayer.
Those who have worked with Im since she negotiated her way out of the Sony contract view the notion of using her abundant talents chiefly as a covers artist as akin to commissioning Albert Namatjira to paint only indoor scenes. ABC Music’s label and A&R manager Peta Chew says: “When we began conversations with Dami about joining the label, we were thrilled to learn that she wanted to push her creativity to new levels which fans hadn’t seen to date. She just hadn’t had the opportunity. She’s a strong and independent artist with a vision, and we love that about her.”
Producer Andrew Burford, who records under the name One Above, worked with Im on two tracks for her new album My Reality. “I feel like there’s a renewed sense of creativity coming out of her,” he says. “I imagine it’s been quite difficult for her to feel that she hasn’t been able to tap into herself fully as a creative. That was evident to me when we started working together: she felt like she had held herself back from saying what she wanted to say.”
Singer, songwriter and producer Garrett Kato worked with Im on another new song named Alone. When she arrived at his home studio in Byron Bay for a writing session, he was surprised to see she had brought a keyboard. “My impression – maybe because of the marketing about her great voice – is that I didn’t even know she played keys,” he says. “Then she started playing keys so elegantly; she’s a master on that instrument, and more competent than most people I record. I thought to myself, ‘This isn’t just some pop star – this could be Australia’s Adele.
“Sony painted her into this corner… she couldn’t do what she wanted to do, simply because some fat dude in an office wanted to make money, and not nurture an artist. It’s a story you hear all the time, and it’s just bullshit: an artist should be nurtured like a flower in a garden, not like a f..king cow in a milk factory.”
No story written about a former Sony Music Australia artist can avoid the elephant in the room. After 50 years of working at the label, having climbed from the mail room to the CEO position, Denis Handlin was unceremoniously sacked on June 21. Having also held the role of chairman of ARIA’s board for 20 of the past 22 years, many in the industry thought Handlin was so enmeshed in power and status that he’d either be removed from Sony’s top job on his own terms, or in a body bag.
In the end, his dismissal came via the bloodless method of an all-staff email sent from the company’s global chief executive, Rob Stringer, from its New York headquarters. Handlin’s fall triggered an earthquake whose aftershocks are still being felt.
When I press the doorbell by the front door of Im’s home on Brisbane’s south side on a Tuesday in mid-October, it’s the morning after ABC-TV’s Four Corners aired its investigation into her former record label.
The program painted a damning portrait of Sony’s toxic corporate culture under Handlin as former employees dating back to the 1980s claimed Sony’s win-at-all-costs credo resulted in bullying, harassment and alcohol abuse. Im is not alleging any of the above but having seen parts of the machinery up close, she has some thoughts.
“It wasn’t shocking, because everybody who was signed to Sony or worked there, we all knew that was going on,” she says. “I was shocked very early on in my career rather than while watching it [on TV]. It’s good to see at least some of it come out, and people know more about that. Watching it made me feel a little bit heard and understood, because until last night, or more recently, none of us could really talk about it because no one would understand it. At least now, when I speak about my experience of those frustrating years in the company, people understand a bit more.”
In the past, talent shows such as The X Factor (which was a tie-in with Sony Music) were designed as an arranged marriage of sorts: if an artist won, they agreed to relinquish any pre-existing management, allowing the record label to control all aspects of their career, including artist development, marketing and distribution. This was the nature of the bargain: a distinct power imbalance at the business end, in exchange for the prize of becoming a famous recording artist and performer.
“I think because I was managed by Sony as well [as having a recording contract], that made the label feel like they owned me,” says Im. “They treated me like I was their worker, rather than an artist. An artist should have equal say to the company. I really wasn’t treated like an equal. My biggest issue was I didn’t have creative freedom or creative control. I’m somebody who’s really open to working with the company, and not just pushing against them for the sake of my ego; if they’re funding it, I’d like them to be happy with what I’m doing. But I always felt it wasn’t reciprocated; for some reason, even though my albums and singles were going platinum and gold, and I was doing very well, I just always felt really disrespected.”
Even after the peak experience of placing second in the Eurovision Song Contest, senior executives at Sony decided that the best path forward for Im was to do yet another covers album. At this point she was playing more than 50 shows a year, on sold-out theatre tours, but never saw her label boss Handlin at any of her concerts. “He seemed to think he knew what was best for me; he would always say, ‘I’ve got your back. I know what’s best for you. I’m protecting your brand.’ I’m like, ‘Well, how can you know my brand when you don’t come to my shows?’
“I was always questioning: ‘Is this because I don’t look like the other girls?’” she says. “It was like they just didn’t know what to do with me. Even though I was having all that success, I just wasn’t respected or favoured. Sometimes you can’t pinpoint what it is, but you just feel like they don’t like you. ‘Did I do something wrong?’”
Around this time, after Eurovision when she was still struggling for creative control, Im realised she couldn’t go on, and her new management negotiated her exit.
“That’s when I really thought, ‘I need to leave. Even if I don’t have a career after this, I’m going to leave and make music for my friends and family, and my church’,” she says. “Even if that’s the case, I’d rather do that and make my own music. Having no career at all is better than doing what they’re making me do.”
In response to questions from The Weekend Australian Magazine, Sony would not comment on Im’s claims; in relation to the issues raised in the Four Corners program, it said: “We take all allegations of bullying, harassment and other inappropriate behaviour from our employees very seriously and investigate them vigorously.”
My Reality is Im’s first true collection of original material to be released since we were introduced to her talents in 2013. This could be the work that sees her climb a few more rungs on the ladder, and plenty of eyes will be watching what happens next. She is now well established as a drawcard who can fill theatres, and no longer subject to some questionable marketing decisions – including a bizarrely muted underplay in the sizeable Asian market.
Even in this third verse of her career, though, her past is never too far away. In the room outside her recording studio, several large framed plaques hang on the wall marking career achievements such as gold and platinum record sales. All of them are addressed to the singer with prominent inscriptions that note they were gifted to her “from Denis Handlin AM and all your friends at Sony Music Entertainment Australia”.
At my request, Im opens Spotify and keys in a few letters in search of the live version of the little smart-bomb of a song that Sony released in 2019. It will go down as one of the greatest middle fingers from an artist to their record label in Australian music history. She listens back to the lyrics to Dreamer, which were written from a place of deep frustration – only now, she can laugh at some of those lines that once caused her such pain.
I’m not that stupid, don’t need your advice
And I have a vision and I know the price
If I had to battle I’d fight to the end
I know what I want, I know who I am
As the song moves into its second half, Im bounces in her seat and beams, mimicking the keyboard chords that drive its ear-grabbing chorus. When Sony executives asked her about the subject of the song, Im told them it was written about her father.
“I love my dad!” she says with a laugh. “He’s so supportive. But it’s so direct, and I’m really glad I put that out there. It’s like a bookmark in that chapter of my life. Otherwise maybe I’d forget, or maybe no one will believe me. But it was happening then. I wrote that song at the end of 2017, I reckon. It was bubbling up for so long. I’m just glad I’m out of there, and I’m able to talk about it like this.”
Now, Im is done talking about the past. She’s impatient to show me unreleased songs. Her right hand is poised, hovering over the space bar, growing mildly impatient at my incessant questioning about things that happened years ago. Finally I relent, and it’s only then that the transformation in her is truly complete. With her right middle finger, the master pianist manipulates her way into a nest of a computer files containing the art she’s been waiting years for the world to hear.
Im taps her finger twice to cue the file, then uses her left hand to crank up the volume on her stereo system. As a new song plays, she leans back in her chair and listens, and the look that settles on her face is a striking portrait of contentment and pride. At last, she is free.
My Reality is out now via ABC Music. Im will launch the album with a streamed concert on YouTube/Facebook (October 31), followed by Byron Bay Bluesfest (April 17).
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