Brady Lahr
President, Kufala Recordings

"Brady Lahr is one of those rare individuals who understands that all genres of music are viable, artistic, and capable of making money. I truly appreciate his open mindedness." — Brian Haas, Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey

From banging on pots and pans at 10 months, to learning the drums at 10, to discovering his first U2 bootleg-Brady Lahr has always been an avid music fan. Eager to jump into the music business, at just 14 years old Brady enrolled in an audio engineering course at the University of Oregon. Once out of High School, his future position in the music industry began to take shape in January 1994, at the height of the 'grunge era', when Brady entered the Music and Video Program at the Art Institute of Seattle.

Brady credits two main factors as the reason for his initial step into the music business as an indie concert promoter. First off, was the massive frustration of being underage in a city dominated by music. There were bands playing everywhere, but being under 21, Brady had no access to them. The second factor, was witnessing many of the music program graduates failing to get engineering jobs because the market was so saturated. As Brady remembers, "At that time, everyone moved to Seattle to record bands or to be in one." Concerned with his future, Brady shifted his focus to a double major in Audio Engineering and Promotion. The latter being responsible for Brady's breakthrough into the world of music.

In 1995, Brady landed a job with independent concert promoter, Laurie Lafavor, who put on Punk and Rock shows for all ages. Easier said than done, however, as Seattle had a city ordinance in the mid-90's that prohibited more than 150 people under the age of 21 to gather at a venue where music was being performed. A seemingly ridiculous law which Brady helped fight full on. Seeing Brady's ambition and passion for the music industry, Laurie made him her right hand man for day of show production, and ultimately placed him in charge of all Street Promotion.

It was Brady's marketing creativity and massive success in street promotions that brought him one step closer to the musicians he aspired to work with. Word quickly spread about Brady's promoting abilities and soon every major concert promoter in Seattle, including Bill Graham Presents, Universal Concerts, and Double Tee Productions had Brady promoting their shows. As a result, Brady was granted access to all the shows and eventually met most of the bands. One step led to the next and "hello" turned to driving musicians around and bringing bands like Korn and Radiohead to local guitar shops.

The concert promoting was great but the money wasn't, so in 1998 Brady accepted a job at Muzak. He entered a division called Enso, which was focused on encoding digital sound clips for online retailers. Shortly after starting the job, Brady managed a crew that accumulated the most product encoding; which led Muzak reps to move him into sales. Six months later, Brady expanded Muzak's business more than 70% by signing up new clients to serve the clips.

This was all taking place during the early days of digital audio, and Liquid Audio quickly recruited Brady to head up their indie artist and label relations. In his four years at the company, Brady helped build Liquid Audio's catalog of downloadable tracks and albums pushing the companies offering of online music to be the largest in the country at the time. Brady was required to educate all the labels about digital distribution and helped pioneer the digital download space. A role that opened the doors to the digital music world; ultimately advancing technology to where it stands today.

In 2002, Brady resigned to start up Kufala Recordings. As one of the company's founding fathers, as well as the head of A&R, Brady oversees almost every aspect of the company. He is involved with sales, retail, international distribution deals, setting up releases, signing new artists, as well as designing the artwork that graces the covers of Kufala's unique packaging. Brady has produced three commercially distributed albums to date. He is currently located at Kufala Recordings West coast headquarters in Santa Monica, California.