About
Convincing a band like the Prodigy to sign to your record label is not done overnight. Martin Goldschmidt founder and MD of Cooking Vinyl remembers reaching a stage in the negotiations with the world’s biggest techno-rock act when he realized the competition he was up against. “I got a call from the Prodigy’s manager saying there was two problems with our contract: Universal and Warners,” Goldschmidt says with a wry smile.
The fact that the Prodigy did eventually sign to Cooking Vinyl, despite the best attempts of those major labels to lure them away, speaks volumes about the commitment and tenacity of Goldschmidt and the reputation of Cooking Vinyl, one of Britain’s most successful, and still truly independent, record labels.
“We hung in there,” Goldschmidt says. “We gave the Prodigy the contractual control and the flexibility that they wanted. They are one of the most important acts of the last 15 years. They changed all the rules. And I felt passionately that we had to have them.”
As far as Prodigy mainman Liam Howlett is concerned the feeling was mutual. “We have always had an inbuilt dislike for the way major labels operate,” he says. “And having met most of them, we did not want to become just part of their machine. Our aim was always to set up our own label imprint [Ragged Flag Records] and Cooking Vinyl have backed us fully. Staying independent was the most important thing.”
Staying independent is what Cooking Vinyl is all about. The company has, after all, achieved remarkable success, entirely on its own terms, ever since it started trading in 1986. Back then, recorded music was bought and sold primarily through the medium of the vinyl disc. Hence the cool name. And in those days the only practical way of copying a recording or listening to music on the move, was by means of a tape cassette. The CD was in its infancy, while the broader ramifications of the newly emerging digital technology were, by and large, unimaginable.
The music industry has since changed beyond recognition. The CD is ubiquitous. Music is bought, sold and shared online, and burnt offline. Many great independent record companies have either merged, splintered been swallowed up by the majors or died. For an entirely independent label to have survived intact over a period of such intense upheaval is impressive. But to have thrived, as Cooking Vinyl has, and to now be enjoying the biggest success in its history, is an achievement that defies all the odds. Even the name is cooler than ever!
The label was set up by former manager and booking agent Goldschmidt and distribution manager Pete Lawrence, who initially ran the business as a part-time venture out of a spare room in Goldschmidt’s council house in Stockwell, South London. In 1986, Cooking Vinyl famously recorded an impromptu live performance around a campfire at a folk festival by the singer Michelle Shocked on a portable cassette machine with fading batteries. The label released the recording as The Campfire Tapes, and it sold 250,000 copies worldwide.
Today Cooking Vinyl employs twelve people full time and has its headquarters in Acton, West London. The company runs a flourishing mail order operation, and does its own press, marketing, online marketing and sales, in house. It has a fully developed international network in place and its own Cooking Vinyl companies in America and Germany. It currently has more records licensed in China than any other independent label. And if the hardcore electronica of the Prodigy seems a long way removed from the homespun folk roots of Michelle Shocked, think again.
“The Prodigy are a classic Cooking Vinyl band,” Goldschmidt says. “We’ve always tried to do stuff that we loved, and that had an edge to it. They’ve got a very sharp edge to them, but they are not going to get trapped in any ghetto. They cross over into the mainstream because what they do musically, is so strong. Michelle Shocked was in a very similar position. She could easily have got stuck in the folk ghetto, but what she did was so strong that it transcended that and made it on to the main stage. We have a tradition of working with acts like Billy Bragg, Frank Black, Echo and the Bunnymen, Cowboy Junkies, Ryan Adams, Ziggy Marley, Richard Thompson and many others who have got total credibility in their field, but have not got stuck in a particular ghetto.”
However, none of the label’s previous signings has had quite the same commercial clout as the Prodigy, whose landmark album, Fat Of The Land, was a global, multi-million selling hit and who were courted by every major and independent label in the country before opting to sign with Cooking Vinyl. It is a big roll of the dice for both band and label.
“It is the start of a new era for Cooking Vinyl,” Goldschmidt says. “Our ambitions have gone up.” Key to the company’s enduring success, is their willingness to approach the business of selling music with open ears and open minds. One of their recent notable successes, has been Hayseed Dixie, the band which began life in 2000 as “a hillbilly tribute to AC/DC”.
“Everyone thought they were really funny,” Goldschmidt says. “But there’s a reason why everyone likes them so much. They are actually amazing musicians.” With album sales now totalling 80,000 copies in the UK alone, Hayseed Dixie have become the most successful bluegrass group in Britain, a “joke” which has certainly kept both the band and the record company laughing.
Another inspired, if apparently unlikely signing has been Hanson, the brotherly pop trio, whose single Penny & Me gave Cooking Vinyl its first Top Ten hit. “You find out what you’re competing against,” says Rob Collins, who joined Cooking Vinyl as head of A&R in 1999. “For a band like that on a major label it’s second nature to spend a load of money on postering, or extra ads on radio to boost their position in the midweeks. We spent a lot too, but we also worked really hard in a hands-on way, motivating the fan base, pushing the distributor. We can’t afford to lose money the way bigger labels can, which basically means we have to get it right.”
For Collins and Goldschmidt the work ethic and attention to detail extends right across the board whether repositioning a teen band that has grown into a credible rock group or servicing the biggest electronica act in the world. The label’s recent campaigns have embraced artists as exciting and diverse as the one-man, mix-tape phenomenon Mexican Institute Of Sound – whose album Pinata, promises an infectious mixture of electronica, dub, cha cha, spoken word and other musical surprises – and celtic-rock legends the Dropkick Murphys from Boston, whose album, The Meanest of Times, offers an explosive blend of oi!, Irish music and hardcore punk.
“It’s a very exciting time,” Collins says. “The way that people are consuming music is changing all the time. The challenge is for everyone to stay afloat and make sure people get paid properly for their music. It’s not all about selling CDs over the counter any more.” Cooking Vinyl has consistently been in the vanguard of the digital revolution. It was the first European label to do a deal with the MP3 download site eMusic and the first to enter negotiations with the peer to peer file-sharing company Kazaa. Later on, Cooking Vinyl set up its own online distribution company, Uploader, which was recently sold to the Independent Online Distribution Alliance (IODA), one of the best online distributors in the world.
Goldschmidt sees the MySpace revolution and the current vogue for bands to take the DIY route as a mixed blessing. “MySpace is a great information source and a great way of marketing bands,” he says. “It’s very democratic in terms of providing exposure, and thankfully Billy Bragg has now forced them to change their terms of business so that they don’t automatically steal everybody’s copyright. But it is an artist’s job to create music and our job is to sell it. A lot of people don’t understand that. Some artists can be their own record company and do it brilliantly, but most of them don’t want to. Most of them want to make great music rather than be record companies whose job is to sell it. That’s where we come in.”
Although it is true that Cooking Vinyl has been able to respond more quickly and flexibly to recent developments than other, much bigger labels, Goldschmidt is quick to point out that the major labels are still incredibly successful. “They sell most of what people buy,” he says. “The problem for them at the moment is that they can’t meet their shareholders’ expectations and they can’t get their heads round the Internet. We don’t have shareholders. And one of the things we can do that they can’t, is take an artist that sells let’s say 20,000 records, do a great marketing campaign and make good money out of it. The major labels simply can’t work on that scale.”
When Goldschmidt started Cooking Vinyl, his primary motivation was trying to switch other people on to the music that he loved. And while 21 years of working at the coalface have made him only too aware of the financial imperatives involved in running a successful business, Cooking Vinyl is not primarily, for him, about selling truckloads (or even ipod-loads) of recordings. “That’s the boring side of what we do,” he says. “The exciting side is putting out great records. Artists are always proud of albums with no filler tracks. That’s how we try to run the label, to have a busy release schedule with no filler albums on it.” Another key to the label’s longevity is Cooking Vinyl’s enviable reputation as an artist-friendly label. Frank Black has released 14 albums (several of them double-CDs) on the label. Jackie Leven has released 15 albums. Billy Bragg has been a fixture since the early 1990s.
“Billy is one of my all-time heroes,” Goldschmidt says. “Signing him to the label was like dying and going to heaven.” Not surprisingly, most acts who sign to the label stay for several years and several albums. “We tell them on the way in what to expect from us,” Goldschmidt says. “We don’t say we’ll spend a fortune and then disappoint them. We are honest from the beginning and then we try to meet or exceed those expectations. We don’t like waving around big advances, but we love paying out big royalty cheques. That means the record has sold. The more we send out in royalty cheques, the happier we are. That’s the secret of our business model.”
While Cooking Vinyl is a company with a proud history, clearly an even prouder future beckons.
September 2007
