Gahara Records Inks Deal With B Martin & Maggie Szabo For Major Single Release “Polaroid”
Gahara Records is adding to its dance catalog with “Polaroid,” a new single from Los Angeles artists Brendan Martin, known professionally as B Martin, and Maggie Szabo. The label, known for major releases across pop, dance, and house, has built a catalog with hundreds of millions of Spotify streams. Its newest signing brings together two established independent artists with Billboard chart histories, hundreds of thousands of followers across social media, and a track record of placing their music well beyond streaming platforms.
Together, Martin and Szabo have more than 500,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and generate over 25 million streams a year. Both have spent more than a decade on their craft, and the Gahara deal is the latest milestone in a partnership that keeps paying off.
“Polaroid” is a chill house pop record about a fleeting love. Dreamy production and Szabo’s incredible vocals carry a song that looks back on a relationship through the soft focus of time, and their songwriting gives the record its intimate center against the relaxed pulse of house.
The record deal matters because it is not every day that independent artists sign songs to labels, even after years of releasing music and building audiences. For Martin and Szabo, it is a real celebration, and it landed in a big week. The pair also secured a sync placement with Maybelline in the same stretch, taking their collaboration from a dance label deal to a major beauty brand campaign within days.
Their partnership began at a record label luncheon in Los Angeles, where the two met and decided to make music together. They have made only five or six songs as a duo, and every one has been signed to a label and landed sync placements. That is an unusual hit rate, built on a small set of songs that connect with labels and music supervisors alike.
For Szabo, that kind of opportunity is familiar territory. Born in Hamilton, Ontario, the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter is one of the city’s most active sync artists, with music on Criminal Minds and across Netflix, Disney, ABC, E! and NBC. In the first nine months of 2026 alone, she landed nearly 30 sync placements, including work for Adobe, Amex, Old Navy, Google and Microsoft. Jennifer Hudson picked her song “Love Is Free” on The Voice, she has been featured alongside dance artists Schiller and Madison Mars, and she works with many dance labels, which makes Gahara a natural home for her voice.
Martin brings a different but complementary background as a recording artist, songwriter and producer whose career runs from hip-hop to dance. He has charted in the Billboard Top 20, including the dance charts, and reached number two on the iTunes Dance chart. He has collaborated with T-Pain, Young Money and Futuristic, shared stages with Mac Miller, J. Cole, Lupe Fiasco and Steve Aoki, performed at Hot 97’s Summer Jam, and was named Best Hip Hop Artist in New York by Hot 97 at SXSW, and his own catalog as a writer and producer has passed 100 million streams. Every year he writes at songwriting camps during Amsterdam Dance Event and the International Music Summit, two of the biggest gatherings in dance music. Gahara is already a familiar name in that career: Martin has released a lot of music through the label, and his relationships with labels like it keep landing deals for his own records.
Martin doesn’t keep those doors to himself. Landing label deals for the artists he develops is a core part of his work as the founder of Purpose Driven Entertainment. He develops artists in Los Angeles and around the world, takes their songs to the same kinds of labels he signs with, and helps them land record deals of their own. To date, Brendan has helped over 100 artist sign record deals. The company pairs that label work with artist coaching and release marketing built on targeted playlisting, TikTok fan pages and Meta ads, and it has generated more than one billion streams for independent artists.
That approach comes from experience. Martin spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing companies that failed to move his music, then watched artists he was developing go through the same thing. He studied how major labels actually promote records and adapted those methods for independent musicians. His motivation is simple: independent artists deserve a fair shot in an industry that has too often taken advantage of them.
“Polaroid” brings both sides of his career together, an artist still signing his own songs while opening the same doors for others. We hope to see “Polaroid” sitting alongside artists like Kygo, Lost Frequencies and Robin Schulz on dance playlists, with more collaborations between Szabo and Martin to come. For anyone who loves dreamy house pop with a real story at its center, “Polaroid” is worth a listen.
Follow Maggie Szabo and B Martin on Instagram.