Rocking in a Free World

One of the Twin Cities’ longest-running labels is St. Paul folk-roots label Red House Records, which celebrates its 25th year in 2008. Bob Feldman founded Red House with one artist on his roster, Iowa troubadour Greg Brown, after Brown became a regular on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. Though Feldman passed away in 2006, the label has continued to flourish. Its top recordings sell approximately 75,000 units—which, company president Eric Peltoniemi points out, is “well above the industry average.”

“We have long been one of the few consistently profitable independent labels in the United States and Canada,” Peltoniemi asserts. “While illegal digital distribution has hurt us, legal digital distribution has provided us with a new and growing revenue stream that will eventually allow us to reduce the cost to the consumer, increase revenue to our artists, and maintain profitability for our business.”

Peltoniemi credits the label’s growth in the current market to the industry’s shift to a “low-overhead model based on the licensing and sale of intellectual property.” As digital distribution developments are critical to a label’s future, so are inventive promotional methods.

Because high-quality recording software is increasingly available to musicians, they no longer seek funds from labels to pay for studio time; they need man-hours more than they need money. This makes it easy for a savvy entrepreneur with a penchant for networking to start a label.

Perhaps the most ambitious local start-up label is Minneapolis’s 50 Entertainment. Founded in 2006 by CEO Deb Ward-Ingstad, an entrepreneur who owns several radio stations in the south, 50 Entertainment is using traditional distribution paired with innovative marketing to build fan base and drive record sales on its imprint, 50 Records. This includes touring, traditional and Internet media relations, traditional distribution, digital distribution on all popular Internet retailers, band merchandise, and what Ward-Ingstad calls “a comprehensive fan-relations plan” to sell the first 30,000 records.

With eight employees and 12 interns, 50 Records is the best-staffed label in town. It has perhaps the Twin Cities’ only full-time in-house talent scout, Drew Pearson (formerly with the Universal Music Group, which owns dozens of well-known labels), and it is actively recruiting new talent by researching on MySpace and having staffers see live concerts four to five nights a week. To date, 50 Records has signed and released records by two bands and is working with several others.