Sweet release

Natalie Merchant is the latest artist to go it alone and set up her own label. Martin Longley reports on the stars who are escaping the clutches of the major record companies

As the diseased beast that we call the music industry lumbers onward, beset by downloading-mania, pirating mischief, falling sales and a resultant A&R conservatism, the artist-as-label-owner ideal has come back into fashion. The latest pop star to strip off the restricting shackles is Natalie Merchant. The former 10,000 Maniacs front woman has just released The House Carpenter's Daughter, a collection of distilled traditional songs, which is available via www. nataliemerchant.com. She has also revived her own Myth America Records, which was the band's original home, before they signed to Elektra.

This is a prime example of an artist using their own operation to promote a project that strays from the path of their familiar body of work. Here, Merchant is travelling back to the roots of her inspiration, covering vintage numbers that are the fruit of her researches on the US folk-song legacy. She has immersed herself in the field recordings of Alan Lomax, as well as taking a course in the history of American folk music at Bard College.

After 17 years, Merchant's contract with Elektra expired in 2002. Apparently, she made a deliberate choice to avoid a renewal, but there are artists who find themselves jettisoned once their cash-cow udders have dried up. This is particularly prevalent in the current climate, in which immediate success is an absolute requirement. If that debut album doesn't break an artist, they're not often, as in the talent-nurturing days of old, given a second chance.

The day-to-day operation of Myth America is handled by Natalie's manager, Gary Smith. By making a low-budget recording directed primarily at her existing fan-base, Merchant is trying to avoid any serious financial risk. With the new album, she retains her copyright but has to fund the recording-sessions and manufacturing costs herself. It's all about operating on a smaller, more manageable level, although that is a luxury arrived at only after years of conventional major-label promotion. The House Carpenter's Daughter needs to sell 50,000 copies to recoup its costs.

The whole process might now be viewed as a second-best alternative, but in the coming years, when the MP3 scenario levels out and becomes normality, artists will theoretically no longer be dependent on the major labels. The main drawback will be the permanent loss of a common entertainment platform. The lust for democratic diversity will be so strong that it will seem as though every single half-capable human being will be making and distributing their own music, parcelling it off to their insular peer group. Pop will become a huge cottage industry, if it isn't already.

Independent production within the music business is not a new phenomenon. Trawl back to 1956, and the other-worldly jazz bandleader Sun Ra was already releasing limited editions on his own El Saturn Research Records, named after his purported birth planet. In the late 1960s, Frank Zappa was acting as an A&R scout for the likes of Wild Man Fischer and The GTOs. You could argue that no label of sound commercial mind would consider signing up such outsider artists, and that only a fellow weirdo musician would support their perverted frivolities, via his Bizarre/Straight imprint.

The watershed for complete independence was, of course, the mid-1970s punky revolution, the very embodiment of the DIY ethic. Even though labels such as Rough Trade, Mute, 4AD and Beggars Banquet ultimately couldn't stop themselves becoming part of the mainstream, they still managed to remain largely uncompromising, often through the success of one or two flagship money-makers (The Smiths, Erasure and, perversely, The Fall).

True independence is almost impossible to sustain, as it always seems to reach a plateau, after which the establishment muscles in, taking over manufacturing and distribution, and dictating policy as it pumps in the ambition-fuelling dollars.

In recent times, it was Prince who caused the biggest uproar when bad blood developed between Warner Brothers and his Paisley Park posse. Significantly, a major issue in that disagreement was Prince's desire to air the fruits of his prolific nights spent in the studio. Warners was keen to pace his output, rationing the material to focus sales. Nowadays, Prince markets his product via the internet, although it could easily be argued that his level of importance has slipped markedly in the intervening years.

Bill Nelson, the leader of Be Bop Deluxe, managed to put out his Northern Dream debut way back in 1971, and Norman Cook set up Skint as a home for his Fatboy Slim persona in 1997. Chuck D and Public Enemy have taken a similar route, and among the even older guard, Robert Fripp and Peter Hammill have been running their own operations (Discipline Global Mobile and Fie!) for one and two decades, respectively. Fripp matches Prince when it comes to stored-up vitriol, but easily beats him verbally. His articulate manifesto details his distaste for copyright ownership by any record company, even his own. DGM refuses to "steal" the rights of its artists, and so, says Fripp, it has nothing to sell. It can't be bought up by a major, because it has no intellectual property to sell, but only its physical stock of plastic discs.

The act of self-promotion has become virtually essential within the UK jazz community, where the emphasis is on pushing units at gigs. The improvising guitarist Derek Bailey started Incus in 1970, with the saxophonist Evan Parker and the drummer Tony Oxley. His single-minded documentation of the spontaneous moment is now at its most prolific level. On the modern-dance front, the funky Norwegian Bugge Wesseltoft's Jazzland label was a risk-taking launch for the career of a rejected player, paying off to the point where Universal sniffed out his flowing cash and offered a tempting licensing deal. In the oddly danceable arena, the electro-samplist Matthew Herbert has now reclaimed the rights to his complete back-catalogue, his Accidental records shunning any attempt at merchandising, intent on trimming down to the essential act of audience communication.

Another recent self-help release is Blemish, by David Sylvian, on his new Samadhi Sound label. It's the kind of project that would have sent most majors scampering, featuring a set of collaborations with Derek Bailey and Christian Fennesz.

When artists become restless, feeling they've achieved everything, a popular pastime is to found a label for pet projects that they know won't stand a chance in the conventional marketplace. Damon Albarn of Blur set up Honest Jon's Records with his two partners, Mark Ainley and Alan Scholefield. They launched with Albarn's Mali Music project (its revenue donated to Oxfam), subsequently issuing specialist jazz-reggae-calypso compilations. The latest release marks the innovative return of Terry Hall, collaborating with Mushtaq, a former member of the radical Asian dance-stormers Fun-Da-Mental.

All too often, it's hard to gain complete independence, as such ventures are often in cahoots with a major label or, at the very least, an established distributor. The Natalie Merchant and David Sylvian albums are primarily geared up for internet sales, through either the artist's own website or outlets such as Barnes & Noble and Amazon. Simply Red's new label is even called simplyred.com. Selling through the web takes the artists a large step closer to full independence. Some may suspect, of course, that many of them are being forced into these realms after falling from commercial popularity. But maybe they're just tired of being ripped off, mismanaged and artistically stunted by their former providers...