Florian Janoske.

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Behind this success lies much more than music. With Küstenkind Records, the six musicians have established their own corporate structure, taking a step towards extensive business independence while also assuming the financial risks of releasing an album themselves.

It was by no means inevitable that Versengold would ever reach this point. When Florian Janoske first worked with the band in 2010, it was on the verge of breaking up. Following the departure of their singer Caro, the band lacked a female vocalist, and the original line-up no longer worked as it once had. The initial plan was to record one final concept album and then call it a day.

Instead, Florian Janoske and Daniel Gregory initially joined as guest musicians in the studio. What began as a temporary solution developed into a new group dynamic and eventually the line-up that would transform Versengold from a group of musicians making music together into a professional business.

A decisive moment came in 2013. At a band meeting, the musicians agreed to make Versengold their highest priority. Studies were put on hold, secure jobs were given up and other career paths were set aside. A contract with Sony followed in 2015. Today, what began as a relationship between an emerging band and a major label has evolved into a largely self-directed business arrangement in which Sony provides services.

I spoke with Florian Janoske about that journey: musical roles, business decisions, negotiations with a major label, six managing directors with equal voting rights and why a number-one album says surprisingly little about the financial success of a release.

That was in 2010, when we first started talking. The band was close to breaking up at the time because, after Caro left, they were missing a female voice and the remaining band members simply couldn’t find a suitable replacement. Back then, Malte wasn’t the sole frontman yet. Continuing without female vocals was almost a stopgap solution at first.

The original idea was actually to record one more concept album with a focus on robbers and bandits, and then disband for good.

So Dan and I initially joined only as short-term studio guests, contributing ideas and helping out here and there. But working together created a group dynamic that sparked a great deal of new energy and ultimately laid the foundation for the rest of our career.

I don’t think I actually had to “unlearn” anything. The education I was fortunate enough to receive from an early age, on various instruments, in singing, music theory and ear training, has always been a major strength that I’ve been happy to contribute.

Instead, I had to learn new things to find a role for the violin in a band like this that made sense and added something to the overall sound. The fact that, alongside my classical training, I also had some experience in folk and pop music helped me enormously.

But of course, every band is different. You have to adapt your role as a violinist accordingly. Ultimately, everything you do on your instrument has to serve the band as a whole and its sound.

If I can’t achieve that with the violin, I’m glad I can switch to other instruments. As a band musician, you should never consider yourself above doing that.

I don’t know how political science degrees are structured these days, but back in my time, it all seemed relatively chaotic and somewhat lacking in a clear concept. The subject is so vast and touches every area of life. That makes it difficult to define what should and shouldn’t be part of the curriculum.

I’ve always been very interested in geopolitics and political theory. Game theory in particular can teach you some extremely valuable things that can be very helpful when dealing with people who think and act strategically.

But even that only prepares you to a limited extent for what it’s actually like to sit in a room with experienced negotiators and put a deal together. Instinct, chemistry, gut feeling, personal rapport and, not least, experience all play a considerable role.

As someone who was thrown into the deep end rather dramatically, the only thing I could do was seek advice from experienced people in the music business. Even the best education is of little use if you don’t understand what options you have or how much room there is to negotiate.

We had a pretty memorable band meeting in 2013. At the end, we all looked each other in the eye and shook hands on a commitment that, from that moment onwards, making the band our main source of income would be our highest priority. We all saw enormous potential in the band, but we also took immense risks. From that point on, I put my studies on hold.

Pinto, Thomas Heuer, had a very lucrative sales job at the time, which he actually quit. Malte stopped pursuing his career in education. If I remember correctly, Alex quit his job too.

Looking back, that was the decisive moment that largely determined Versengold’s success over the years. You can have the greatest talents in a band, but if nobody has the time, a career in music simply isn’t going to happen.

So, in that sense, the question about a second profession isn’t quite right. From that point onwards, I always considered Versengold my only profession.

Küstenkind Records is our label, which we founded almost two years ago now. Until then, we’d worked with Hansa, which was still called RCA back then, as our label. RCA, or Hansa, is part of the Sony Group.

When we signed our contract with Sony in 2015, it was obviously a huge step for us. A major-label deal is the kind of milestone every band desperately wants to achieve.

Looking back, it was absolutely the right decision. However, the conditions surrounding our career have always been somewhat different from those in the “normal” pop-rock business. By the time we signed, we already had a loyal and relatively large fan base, and we’d independently sold albums that had reached the top 30 of the German album charts.

That gave us greater leverage from the outset, and we made use of it in negotiations.

We then took the final logical step by founding our own label. Ultimately, that gave us complete independence, but it also transferred all the financial risks to us.

The sums that have to be invested in producing and promoting an album are enormous. We simply couldn’t have taken those risks back in 2015. Now, in 2026, we’re in a position to do so, and we’ve specifically created a corporate structure that makes it possible.

What’s interesting is that Hansa, and therefore Sony, is still involved as our distributor. The boundaries between distribution and label services are actually quite fluid. For us, the essential difference is the financial risk.

We can still have Sony handle tasks where we value their expertise. But we decide for ourselves where that happens and where it doesn’t. And, of course, we ultimately have to pay for those services.

So our business relationship with Sony has changed. What used to be a relationship of dependency between an emerging band and its label has become a service relationship in which Sony carries out tasks that we commission.

In fact, we’ve reduced the management responsibilities of us band members as much as possible.

We have an excellent employee, Marcel, who holds commercial power of attorney for our companies and handles much of the preliminary decision-making in day-to-day operations.

Alongside financial independence, one of our priorities when creating the new corporate structure was to establish an organisation that would allow us to spend as much time as possible with our families and focus on our art.

At the same time, we didn’t want to achieve that through traditional artist management, because that would have created new dependencies.

That’s why ultimate decision-making authority rests with the six of us in the band. We’re happy to give Marcel room to make decisions, though, to reduce our own workload. As a permanent employee, he is bound by our instructions.

We usually meet every Wednesday for a video conference, where we discuss all important matters affecting both our companies and our artistic work.

On other days, we work on concepts and plans as needed, make studio recordings or give interviews like this one. And whenever something occurs to me, I generally pick up the phone. I work very closely with Marcel to keep the companies on a course that we’re happy with as a band.

So there’s really no such thing as a typical week. The tasks are different every day and depend mainly on the projects and goals we’ve set ourselves.

We mainly organise ourselves through our weekly conference call. Decisions are initiated there and made through a clearly democratic process. All six of us have equal voting rights.

For important decisions, we always try to achieve unanimity. If that’s absolutely impossible, we’ve agreed to respect a simple majority decision as well.

The album charts themselves aren’t actually a particularly meaningful metric. They merely show which artist generated the highest revenue from music during that particular chart week.

So you can achieve a high chart position even with relatively low sales if the competition is weak.

Chart position is therefore more a matter of prestige, giving you a small boost in visibility when dealing with the media.

Our financial risk, which runs into six figures for an album, depends primarily on the actual revenue generated, not on our revenue relative to other artists.

We therefore have to sell a certain number of physical records or fan boxes, or achieve a certain number of streams, to recoup our investment. If you fall short of expectations, things can become very painful very quickly.

Fortunately, we can rely on an incredibly dedicated and loyal fan base that supports us tremendously with every new album.

So, ultimately, we can put all the business talk aside: without fans, all of this would just be castles in the air.

Over the past few years, we’ve built very solid structures at Küstenkind, culminating in the number-one success of Eingenordet. That was an important first milestone for me before we could offer our expertise to other bands.

It’s difficult to convince other artists that we do good work if we don’t have the references to back it up. So this success was certainly crucial.

At the moment, all we’re really missing is the right opportunity.

It would have to be an act we genuinely believe in artistically and in which we, as a label, also see potential. Then the other circumstances would have to be right.

The band couldn’t already be under contract, would have to be interested in taking a new direction with a new label and, ultimately, would have to trust us to help realise their vision and goals.

That’s not something you find overnight. Fortunately, we’re not in a hurry, because Versengold already keeps us extremely busy.

I think we’re relatively open when it comes to musical style. However, it’s fair to say that we’ve gained most of our experience within our own musical scene, and that’s where we can best play to our strengths.

For example, I imagine a hip-hop act would be less interested in signing with Küstenkind because we simply don’t know that genre well enough.

Apart from artistic considerations, there are also questions of worldview that influence our decision about whether or not to sign a band.

One thing is certain: Küstenkind will definitely not become the next far-right rock label.

This interview was originally conducted in German and translated into English.

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