Las Vegas band Adelitas Way finds success after splitting from Virgin Records

Scoring a major label record contract is a bite of the golden apple that often results in little more than a mouthful of worm chunks.

Ninety-five percent of the acts that sign to a major fail to recoup costs and eventually get dropped.

What then?

Maybe the only thing harder than landing said deal is prospering on your own after it ends.

And yet, Rick DeJesus has found a way.

The Adelitas Way frontman is taking in the weather in front of a south-side eatery on a Tuesday afternoon, though he’s skipping lunch.

“I’m on a diet, dude,” the 33-year-old says. “I have to go on tour for eight weeks.”

If DeJesus needs to be in fighting shape these days, it’s not just to steel himself from the rigors of the road, his band’s latest trek beginning Thursday at Brooklyn Bowl.

After Adelitas Way split from Virgin Records in 2015, DeJesus has become bandleader, manager, label head and more. Adelitas Way had a solid three-album run with Virgin, with the group’s most successful album, 2011’s “Home School Valedictorian,” selling close to 150,000 copies and spawning a pair of No. 1 hits on active rock radio.

But when it came time for Virgin to pick up the option or pass on the band’s next record, DeJesus urged the label to do the latter.

“They were considering picking up the fourth record on us; I just didn’t want them to,” says DeJesus, an intensely high-energy presence with the athletic build of the major league baseball prospect he once was. “I was like, ‘I’m going to go for something crazy right now.’ ”

His plan: not to sign with another label, but keep everything in-house. Adelitas Way successfully crowdfunded its last album, 2015’s “Getaway,” and has self-financed its new record, “Notorious,” due out later this year.

Now, plenty of DIY acts pay for and release their own albums, but Adelitas Way is operating on an entirely different scale with entirely different goals. It’s a radio-friendly band that works with expensive, big-name producers and strives for hits, with the costs of taking songs to the airwaves being enormous.

The capital required to keep a band like this going is substantial and has, in the past, demanded major label backing or something close to it. DeJesus has wrangled with this firsthand.

“Every dollar that comes in from every record we sell I’m taking away from family and I’m investing it into what I know is the future,” he says. “You’re talking 30, 40, 50, 60 thousand dollars. You scrape by to pay your mortgage, but you’re paying 18 grand in radio bills. That’s the risk.”

And yet, the risk is paying off. The band scored a top 10 hit on rock radio with the “Getaway” single “Bad Reputation,” an almost-unheard-of feat for a band in Adelitas Way’s position. DeJesus owns the masters to everything he releases nowadays, a much more lucrative — and empowering — endeavor than getting 20 percent of any profits on a major label.

And so while the costs are high doing things this way, so are the rewards.

“Artists, we shoot ourselves in the foot a lot,” DeJesus says. “There should be a lot more ownership in this game right now than there is. It’s time to renegotiate everything in this business.”

Read more from Jason Bracelin at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com and follow @JasonBracelin on Twitter.