Mute (and other independent labels)

On Friday, someone put up a picture - an 'infographic' - showing a huge cloud of household products around the edge. Moving towards the centre, it showed the company that made the product, then the company that owned that company and so on, until, at the centre, there were just six organisations, including those nasty characters Nestlé.

This same situation exists in the music industry, where there are, ultimately, just a handful of uber-labels, like EMI. By coincidence, this week I received this through the post, which I opened today. I've put off buying it because it's a little pricey (but only a little) and I already owned a lot of the music that's included.

The early eighties - and, I expect, the seventies - was a time when a young man (or woman) could get properly excited by a record label, whether it was Factory, 4AD, Postcard or Mute. Curated by fellows such as Anthony H Wilson and, in Mute's case, Daniel Miller, you could buy a record put out by that label, confident that it would have some quality that justified paying for it, whether you knew the song or not. Indeed, you might not have heard of the band!

With Mute, my personal favourite label, it might be the synth-pop of Depeche Mode, the experimental but entertaining Wire, the pioneering industrialists Einstürzende Neubauten or the dark, leftfield Fad Gadget. Later, Mute would host Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds and even the mighty Kraftwerk. Hm, looking at that list, that's a significant proportion of the bands I love the most. Incredible.

The key word is curation. These independent labels - and there were many of them: Cherry Red, Rough Trade to name a couple more of the really successful ones - were about the music, concerned with getting it out there. Sure, it was great when they had a really successful artist because it enabled them to carry of putting out records, but it was the music that counted, not the cash. Unbelievable as it might seem now, Virgin started out as an independent record label, the first paving stone in Richard Branson's path to success and riches laid by Mike Oldfield's 'Tubular Bells'.

Back in those far off days, there was even a separate independent chart, a top 40, for music distributed on independent labels. To be top of the independent charts was a very cool thing indeed.

But most of those labels, even Tony Wilson's anti-establishment Factory, got soaked up by the major labels, the ones with their own distribution (which was the litmus test for whether or not a label was independent). I think they kept the independent chart going for a while but it had become meaningless. 'The Man' just didn't understand.

In the end even Mute sold out to EMI but then, in 2010, Daniel Miller negotiated with EMI to make it a separate entity once again. Take a look at their website: it's a thriving business that has art not commerce at its heart.

You know what I'm going to say: by mechanically buying from the big brands, we lose a little more diversity, creativity and colour from our lives. If you didn't ever get around to seeing 'The Moo Man', please do. It's a fascinating insight into just how capitalist our supermarkets are whilst showing the joy of independence (although you can also see that it's hard work at times!).