Trevor Horn and the label where “nothing sells”: The video star who failed to kill the music industry

Posted On August 30, 2025August 30, 2025

What, exactly, is the point of record labels?

While most acknowledge that their main benefit is to offer support to artists, providing them with a platform through which to release their music and giving them a network of assistance in promoting their material, others would argue that it’s a model that is simply designed with capitalist greed in mind, and that the main prerogative of those in charge is to exploit the talents of the artists for financial gain.

Of course, this is more often the case when you look further up the food chain of the music industry, and the smaller, independent labels are less driven by a thirst for cold hard cash, and care more about the art that they fund, create and distribute. Again, this isn’t always the case, and many grass-roots artists have found themselves on the receiving end of exploitative and avaricious malpractices, but as a general rule, the smaller names in the industry tend to be the most honest.

But why can’t an artist do all of this themselves? For starters, the amount of organisation that goes into running a record label involves plenty of heavy lifting in the administrative department, something that musicians who are constantly touring and recording usually don’t have the energy or business-savvy mind to approach without external assistance. In addition to this, there’s the fact that being a musician or performer is, frankly, cooler than having a job that involves crunching numbers.

Hang on, though, because running a record label is something of a major flex, and if you were to explain to people at parties that you had such a profession, then surely people are going to start flocking towards you as the most interesting person in the kitchen. Not only do you have the power and potential to distribute the music you love to the world, but you can also create a sense of community, whereby your roster can become a close-knit group of like-minded individuals and share their creative practices.

In the case of Trevor Horn, the man behind ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ hitmakers The Buggles and a former Yes and Art of Noise member, his decision to create the record label ZTT in 1983 was purely driven by this idea, plus the fact that he wanted to own all of the music that he had made, rather than let it fall into the hands of industry fatcats.

However, in a 2013 interview with The Guardian to celebrate the label’s 30th anniversary, he revealed that running a record company wasn’t really all it was cracked up to be. “I also had delusions that it would be like a hub of creativity, where musicians would hang out and have a great time,” he told the outlet. “It wasn’t. Then again, why would it be? Because if nothing sells, no one complains – and it doesn’t last for long. But a successful label with successful artists is very hard to keep together. I think it’s probably all down to what artists expect from a record label.”

In addition to releasing Horn’s own music, ZTT Records also put out material from the likes of Seal, Grace Jones, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood, all of whom brought the label success, but beyond the 1990s, there was much less to celebrate in terms of mainstream success. Running a label was not the dream that Horn had envisioned when he started out, but more of a necessity – something that had to be created as a means of disrupting the music industry and bringing a sense of control and importance back to the artist. 

All in all, it was a valiant effort, and one that worked remarkably well until it was acquired in 2017 by Universal Music Group, which goes against everything that the label set out to do in the first place. Going up against the big guns requires you to be staunchly against their monopoly on the industry, rather than holding hands with them, and it’s a sad indictment of where things have gone when something that survived on its honesty and support of the underdog for over 30 years has to buckle under the weight of corporate pressure to survive.