Burn County · artist development
Unsigned,
and moving.
That is the whole filter. If people are finding you and nobody owns your records yet, there is a version of this that works — and there are three of them, because the money has to come from somewhere and it is not always yours.
Twenty-seven years of records out of North Myrtle Beach. A gold plaque on the wall, nine Billboard top tens, and a habit of putting real money behind artists nobody had heard of yet.
Sources: the RIAA database, Billboard chart histories, Muso.AI and platform data. Credits and stream totals are for records Ty Weathers wrote, produced or engineered.
Who this is for
Nobody owns you yet
No label, no production deal already signed. If somebody else has a claim on your masters this becomes a different, longer conversation.
Something is actually moving
Streams climbing, rooms filling, merch selling — one of them. Not a huge number. A real one.
You sound like yourself
“Right now, everybody sounds the same.” The artists worth betting on are the ones who are a category of one, and they are usually the odd ones.
Three ways this gets paid for
Being broke is not disqualifying. Pretending not to be is. Every one of these is a deal Burn County has actually done, and which one you land on is a conversation, not a form.
You fund the record
You have a budget and you want it made properly.
You pay the production costs — recording, mixing, mastering — and Burn County produces it. The ownership split is negotiated on top of that, not instead of it. Ty’s own framing: “I’d rather pay $20,000, let you produce the album.”
Sliding scale
You have some money, and something worth backing.
You front part of the production. Burn County carries the marketing spend and takes a percentage of the master that moves as you grow. This is the deal on the table for Naylor Stone right now — production shared, $15,000 of marketing behind it.
Burn County funds it and owns the masters
You are broke, touring, and you sell out of merch every night.
Burn County pays for the record, the vinyl, the CDs and the press-ups, owns the majority of the masters, and recoups at your shows and online. It is the deal done with a punk band sleeping in their car — and the reason the question about what you sell at a show is on this form.
“It is a sit-down evaluation, brand evaluation, and monetary real expectations to where nobody is getting bent over the table. They are still able to make money and grow bigger, and we are able to turn a profit. So everybody wins.”
The evaluation
Nine questions. They are the ones Ty asks anyway, so answering them here means the first conversation starts at the deal instead of the questionnaire.
What happens next
It reaches him, not an inbox
The application lands on Ty's phone with your answers attached — the record, the shows, the merch, the budget.
He decides whether to take it
Evaluations run Tuesdays and Thursdays, and every booking is a request he approves. He does not commit to a day he might want back.
You get real numbers
What it costs, what it returns, who owns what. Written down, before anybody starts.