24 Music Week 05.10.12 PROFILECHERRYREDRECORDS CHERRY PICKING
The past, present and future of an indie label with fingers in many pies - and which regularly releases more than 40 albums each month
“There is a positive side to Spotify. The way people use it for catalogue compared to new material is completely different. I think people that buy catalogue tend to have the mindset that music has to be paid for at some point”
IAIN McNAY, CHERRY RED
had an agreement with a satellite channel. We got a lot of programmes on there, mainly footage of bands playing live because we acquired the rights to a lot of audio visual material over the years. Niche music DVD was quite a good part of our business at one point. It’s just on the internet now. We’d love to get it back on TV but it’s very
LABELS BY TOM PAKINKIS
A
s a label that specialises in catalogue, with staunch support for physical product, you might be tempted to see Cherry Red as
one of a dying breed. But while the core of Cherry Red’s output is
music of the past, its outlook on the music industry is keenly cutting edge. Cherry Red has never been afraid to spread its operation into disruptive territory: it was the first indie label to spawn its own publishing company in Cherry Red Music, its own TV channel in Cherry Red TV, its own DVD division – which has put out hundreds of products to date – and its own book division. It was also the first label to take football song compilations seriously and reaped the rewards by partnering with club shops rather than the High Street. Cherry Red founder Iain McNay and MD Adam
Velasco tell Music Week that the label’s goal has never changed - to see opportunity within areas that few others have thought to explore...
How did Cherry Red’s focus on catalogue
releases come about? Iain McNay: For the first 12 years of Cherry Red it was very much new bands and then, around 1990, a lot of the bigger companies started their own boutique labels through independent distributors. The independent chart was suddenly full of records from bands actually signed to major labels. It became harder and more expensive. Catalogue presented itself through labels that
we acquired the rights to with interesting releases that weren’t available anymore. We could put them out on CD in a fresh way. It was from that we went into phase two and bought labels like
“We’ve been going for 35 years and we’ll hopefully be here for another 35” ADAM VELASCO, CHERRY RED
ABOVE Teaming up: A collaborative album project between two legends of progressive rock – Chris Squire (Yes) and Steve Hackett (Genesis) – Squackett is a front-line release on Cherry Red’s latest progressive rock label Esoteric Antenna
ABOVE RIGHT Ersatz G.B., The Fall's 29th offering and their first album for Cherry Red Records
Flicknife, No Future, Midnight Music and a couple of others. We started things like the Punk Collectors Series and Psychobilly Collectors Series in 1993. We were the first independent
label to really do catalogue properly. Adam Velasco: At first it was just the Cherry Red collections and then we started to branch out and bring RPM Records into the fold in 1999. From there we started having different labels for different genres of music. I would say we now have over 20 active labels where we release a good number of records each year. Some are catalogue but more recently we’ve started signing new studio albums.
How do you adapt that core of catalogue in an
increasingly digital - and streaming - world? IM: There is a positive side to Spotify. The way people use it for catalogue compared to new material is completely different. I think people that buy catalogue tend to have the mindset that music has to be paid for at some point and will check something out on a streaming service
before going out to buy it. AV: We held off Spotify for a number of years because we weren’t happy with the margins and felt it enhanced the idea that music is for free. But recently, as income from streams has become higher, we have started putting catalogue on there. We came to it quite late and we will see if it
cannibalises our iTunes sales, for example. As yet, it’s too early to say whether that’s happening or not. Ideally, if people see something on Spotify and like it then they’ll download it or buy it on physical. It’s too early to draw any conclusions.
What was the idea behind Cherry Red TV and
what’s the ambition for it going forward? IM: We started it about four years ago when we
difficult. I know Simon Raymonde has taken the challenge [of his own TV show] on, but with terrestrial TV, you’ve got to have several million viewers or it isn’t worth it, which means you have to have high-profile acts.
There’s the perception that TV companies are shunning music but perhaps it’s just that the
medium of choice is changing… IM: I think it’s a bit of both really: the TV companies could probably be more imaginative; put together shows of well-known acts with newer acts like they used to. But for record companies to finance that is actually not so easy when the exposure is pretty limited.
What’s the ambition for the label as a whole? AV: We’ve been going for 35 years and we’ll
hopefully be here for another 35. We’re always looking for new opportunities – whether that’s on the catalogue side or the new studio recording side, which has grown over the years. We enjoy working with the artists and we’ve made it work, so that’s another side that we want to grow. We’re always interested in people with
catalogue, people with new albums and also people with label ideas. We’re always looking to expand. We have a music publishing side. We control around 13,000 songs and we’ve done recent deals with writers and catalogues, so we’re always looking to sign new writers.
Are you confident the physical market will stay
strong enough to support your core products? AV: When it comes to physical, we’re a little bit different than the rest of the market because we sell to an older fanbase. Our customers are 35+ and grew up with physical. Our experience is that
they want physical for a good number of years. IM: For me, as an oldie, the adventure is the way in which things have changed over the years. I think the trick is to see what’s good from the old and balancing it with the new.
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