It started as a couple of guys hanging out talking about hip-hop. A year later, it has morphed into three budding music careers and a record label delivering tunes to a music player near you.
Caleb Krohn ’20 didn’t plan to start a record label. It was love of hip-hop that drew Krohn to musician Kwaku “Mansa K” Amponsah ’19, who’d recently taken an expensive leap to arrange his residence hall room for recording.
“I put all the equipment on my credit card and thought, ‘If I’m going to mess up my credit for this, I have to really do it,’ ” Amponsah says. Then he met Krohn, “and that’s when everything started happening.”
Krohn, who is from Scarsdale, N.Y., had just scored a summer spot in Columbia Records’ Big Red Program, an elite team of interns assigned to find solutions to real problems in the music industry.
“That was an incredible experience,” says Krohn. “I started learning about the industry and meeting cool people. It showed me different career paths. It really solidified that this is what I want to do.”
Krohn returned to Bucknell, where Amponsah introduced him to collaborator Miles “Yung Miles” LeAndre ’21. Krohn believed in their music and wanted to get it out there, and he was eager to try out what he learned in the Arts Entrepreneurship class taught by Kathryn Maguet, executive director of the Weis Center for the Performing Arts. He figured out a way to do both and pitched it to the artists.
At Bison Records, LeAndre, of South Orange, N.J., and Amponsah, a Boston Posse Scholar, are the creative side; Krohn is the business side. The label’s first investment was underwriting the mix and master of Amponsah and LeAndre’s newest single, “Frozen,” available at Bison-Records.com. Now they’re all hoping to hit pay dirt.
“I have faith that Caleb’s going to do something special with this,” LeAndre says. “He brings out the best in me as an artist. It can go as far as we want to take it, and the sky’s the limit.” The trio feels they already have the tools for success.
Says Amponsah, a markets, innovation & design major, “We’re doing this with the hope that when we’re out on our own, we can do it seriously. Bison Records could well be our lifeline to that.”