With £5,000 of the Guardian's money, Will Hodgkinson has been charged with setting up his own record label. This is the first in a series of regular updates on his progress
I would say this, having just started one, but the future of music lies in small record labels. After issuing its second profits warning in less than a month EMI, Britain's biggest major, were considering a takeover bid by archrivals Warner Music Group on Tuesday. EMI blames poor US CD sales for its decline. Out of 1.8 million copies of Not Too Late by Norah Jones, 629,000 have shifted. This, apparently, is a disaster.
I may be showing a lack of sophistication here, but 629,000 sounds like a big number to me. I can't even count that high. For the average independent label, shifting a thousand copies is good going, and that's a much more realistic proposition in the current climate. With the days of the mega-selling CD on the wane, the purpose of a label that has to shift a million copies to survive is being called into question.
Since starting Big Bertha Records I've taken guidance from tiny cottage industry labels, mostly sole trader operations, which are run by people who simply love music and want to share it with the world. Trunk Records put out albums like Music For Biscuits (a collection of radio and television recordings from the early 60s) and Fuzzy Felt Folk (mostly whimsical children's songs) that are guaranteed to sell, well, not very much at all.
Trunk's new release features recordings by the late Basil Kirchin, a totally obscure jazz drummer with the tiniest of cult followings. Trunk will be lucky to break even on the Kirchin album, so why do it at all? "Because he was so good," says Benton-Hughes. That seems as good a reason as any.
Of course, every independent label wants a hit. After 15 years of struggle Domino Records made it big with Franz Ferdinand and The Arctic Monkeys, but Domino's Lawrence Bell signed those bands because he loved their music, not because they would help avoid a profits warning.
As I'm beginning to discover, it's a huge amount of work getting behind an artist with a record label. You can only do it if you fully believe in that artist. The first single on Big Bertha, set for release on April 10, is by a young blues-tinged loner from Chatham called Pete Molinari. I can't believe how talented Molinari is - he has a voice somewhere between Nina Simone and Woody Guthrie and a knack of writing songs that sound like they have always existed - and I want the world to know about him. But if we manage to shift just 1,000 copies of his debut single, we'll be able to hold off that hostile takeover bid from, say, Trunk Records just yet.
