Label Look: How John Summit Built Experts Only Into an Indie That Thinks Like a Major

In his earliest days as a dance producer, John Summit spent many hours on his computer making music, then emailing it to indie dance labels he hoped might sign his demos.

He received a lot of rejections, but eventually gained traction when he signed his Touch Me EP to the Atlanta-based Psycho Disco! in 2018. A flurry of subsequent tracks were signed by Lee Foss’ Repopulate Mars, Gene Farris’ Farris Wheel Recordings and other artist-led labels. Summit pinballed from imprint to imprint as his profile rose to apex status. Now, he’s the one combing through the submissions inbox.

“I always knew I wanted to make my own label and have a home for the next generation of artists,” Summit tells Billboard. “I never expected it to grow and blow up as fast as it did.”

Like seemingly all things attached to his name, Summit’s Experts Only is a runaway success and a new powerhouse in the dance label landscape. Launched in 2022 and distributed by Darkroom Records since early 2025, Experts Only maintains the nimbleness of an indie while also functioning like a major, because it’s run by execs with major label experience. Toby Andrews, the former president of Astralwerks, is label manager, and Jack David, who spent six years as head of electronic music, international at UMG in London, is head of marketing.

The core team is rounded out by Will Weston, who comes from throwing underground parties in New York and now manages Experts Only events — including the buzzy namesake shows Summit and his signees play across the U.S. and beyond. Named for Summit’s love of skiing, Experts Only events have taken place on the slopes of Lake Tahoe and Vail, along with more traditional dance circuit destinations.

Summit is, of course, the label’s de facto leader, working on everything from curation to marketing while also barreling through global clubs, festivals and large-scale venues (last weekend he headlined London’s O2 arena), and playing label music for tens of thousands of fans. His managers, Holt Harmon and Parker Cohen of Metatone, also oversee Experts Only alongside other core elements of Summit’s sprawling business.

“My approach is to bring together the hungriest people who bring their unique combination of experience and specialization to contribute to the team,” Harmon says. “The team is made up of people we’d crossed paths with over time who naturally felt like a fit for bringing our big visions for Experts Only to life.”

Over the past three years, those “big visions” have generated a slew of hits, a No. 1 ranking on Beatport’s label chart and a sprawling crew of affiliated artists whose work has helped define the Experts Only sound, identity and ecosystem, and whose careers outside the label have been boosted by their connection to it.

“Being on a major is maybe one of the hardest places to be in dance music right now,” says Andrews. “The curated, artist-led labels — us and the people around us like Gorgon City’s Realm, Fisher’s Catch and Release and Chris Lake’s Black Book — I think we’re people who are having a lot of fun at the moment, because people obviously admire the artists who run these labels, and everyone’s curating their own sound, their own group of artists and their own vision. I’m not sure how to do that from a major perspective in 2025.”

This weekend (Sept. 20-21), the vision expands with the debut Experts Only festival at Randall’s Island in New York City. Co-produced by Medium Rare and Relentless Beats, the two-day fest will feature a pair of headlining sets from Summit, along with label artists like Roddy Lima, Tini Gessler and Layton Giordani. Joining them are artists who’ve been influential to the label and scene at large (“he’s the best selector of our generation,” Summit says of Experts Only NYC artist and revered curator Pete Tong) and artists whom Summit simply likes.

“The obvious next step is throwing a festival to showcase everyone,” he says. “I’ve grown close friendships with everyone, too, so it’s going to feel like a family affair and not a big corporate festival where we just tried booking DJs that would sell as many tickets as possible.

Summit is perfectly aware, however, that being one of the biggest DJs in the world helps fuel the label and the festival. “If I’m being honest,” he continues about this weekend’s event, “what does help is that I’m kind of the one that really pushes ticket sales, so from there I can just pick every act that I love.”

In a time when a lot of dance artists and labels struggle to break through the noise, this rising-tide-lifts-all-ships mentality is helping make Experts Only genuinely impactful.

Experts Only launched in 2022 with its first release, “In Chicago,” a tech house track by Summit. At the time, the imprint was called Off The Grid, although this name was changed in 2023 after an underground events company in California also named Off the Grid threatened legal action. (Summit calls the situation “a huge business lesson on my end, because it made me realize that I can’t literally do everything I want. Like, there are rules.”)

The first record after the name change was Odd Mob’s and Omnom’s “Losing Control,” a September 2023 release that Summit feels sums up the label’s sound and ethos. “It has big, commanding synths and a strong vocal hook that’s catchy and memorable. You can play it at Sound in LA, but you can also play it on the mainstage at EDC, and it works really well in either place. That’s the goal of Experts Only — versatile records that can’t be pigeonholed.”

Meanwhile, Summit’s own career had gone stratospheric following the March 2023 release of “Where You Are,” his collaboration with British vocalist Hayla, a record Andrews says “we obviously tried to sign” when he was still at Astralwerks.

This familiarity led to a conversation with Harmon and Cohen after Andrews left the label. “We knew we wanted Toby on board from the second we were able to speak about the possibility,” says Harmon.

Andrews brought a boots-on-the-ground understanding of the structure of a major-sized electronic imprint, which helped the team understand how they’d scale. To do it, they’d need a dedicated marketing person, so David was hired. “If it wasn’t John, and if it wasn’t Experts Only, I probably wouldn’t have considered it,” David says. “The fact that it was one of the biggest DJs on the planet, along with Holt and Parker, sold it to me. When those guys do something, they do it properly, and they wanted to go all in on the label.”

Summit maintains his position as the label’s chief A&R, creative guide and musical soothsayer. (He “doesn’t sit in the background and let us get on with it,” says David.) Summit declares he “genuinely loves marketing” and, crucially, is also behind the decks somewhere in the world every weekend playing releases and testing music.

“The key difference [between us and a major] is having a label figurehead who’s a live act and is out there able to support the records,” says Andrews. “On a promotional level, we don’t have to go chase for crowd reactions or proof that the records we’re signing are the right ones.” 

Summit’s touring schedule also demands that he constantly finds new music, which he says leads him to “dig through demos to see if I can get anything worth playing. If you think about a major label, their A&R is in some boardroom or whatever, my A&R room is literally playing to a crowd of 10,000 people and seeing if it works.”

The music that works is brought to the team, with the team also showing Summit music they think he might like. “Sometimes you send him something you think he’s going to like, and he’s not into it,” says Andrews. “Then you send him something unexpected, thinking it’s a shot in the dark, and he hears something in it. He’s very thoughtful and definitely does not react to something just because it’s shiny.”

This high level of curation means a slower release schedule than most dance imprints, with Experts Only dropping just two to four tracks a month. “We stay away from weekly, because I don’t think it gives everything a chance to breathe,” says Andrews. “We want people to notice [the music]. We don’t want it to become like ‘Here’s the weekly Experts Only email.’ We don’t want it to lose that glamour.”

The approach also allows David and Summit to make comprehensive marketing plans for each release — rollouts that can include multi-post social rollouts and David hand-selecting territories he thinks each track would work in.

“It’s not a case of just sending the record to our entire contact list and hoping someone picks it up,” he says. “When you do that over and over, people kind of switch off to you because you’re not tailoring anything.”

Instead, for example, David will take a new song he thinks is in line with what dance radio stations in Berlin or Amsterdam typically play and personally send it to his contacts there. “If they like it and start playing it and their audience reacts, you’re going to see it on the Shazam or Spotify viral chart,” says David. “Then you’ve got data, and you haven’t hit up anyone else yet, but you’ve slowly started lighting the fire in that market.”

David says this strategy worked well for Colorado-born producer Disco Lines, who released “Wide Open” on Experts Only this past January and for whom the metaphorical fires were subsequently lit when he released his global smash collab with Tinashe, “No Broke Boys,” in June.

All artists who release on Experts Only receive weekly reports with high-quality data on the track’s streams, market traction and more, with the aim being for every artist to have a rollout experience that better positions them in their career at large.

“We want to promote that family feel,” says David. “When you sign a record to this label, even though we’re only signing one, we don’t just work that song and say anything outside that isn’t our problem. We want artists to leave in a much stronger position than when they first released their record.”

The ability to better position artists is buoyed by the fact that they can be booked for Experts Only events. Rising Brazilian producer Roddy Lima released two records on the label in March and July of this year, was featured on a recent Experts Only compilation (special projects the label has done since its inception), made an episode for the Experts Only mix series, played the label’s Miami Music Week showcase and will play the festival this weekend.

Other artists whose names are linked with the label include Max Styler, Chris Avantgarde and Kevin DeVries. And it’s not just focused on rising artists, as the label has released music by legends and peers like Green Velvet, Gorgon City, Subtronics and Tape B. Summit’s solo releases also come out via the Experts Only/Darkroom Records partnership.

Experts Only ranked No. 1 on Beatport’s global label chart in 2024 and for much of 2025 so far. The achievement is evidence that, says Andrews, “we’re putting out records that are resonating with the core base of DJs, producers and club fans. We know we’re doing a good job servicing the right songs and marketing plans to them.”

He adds that the team is also “obviously proud of the gains the label has taken in terms of overall sales volume.”

Dance music is an extremely fast-paced genre where songs can come and go on TikTok in a flash. Andrews emphasizes that Experts Only isn’t chasing virality. “We’re not signing things because of momentum and then trying to retrofit that into an Expert Only release. John is much happier to release a song that he’s played, that he believes in, that’s by a producer that he wants to support, than me finding something on the internet and sending it to him. We’re not looking for one off moments — he wants to build the next generation of experts.”