The new guard in Nashville: With major labels faltering, new kids arise on the block  

It is a grand understatement to say that the face of the recording industry has changed considerably over the past 20 years. The shift away from vinyl albums and singles to the digital domain of compact discs and downloadable sound files, the changes in radio playlists and sales charting mechanisms and the wide-ranging effects of the internet as a delivery vehicle for the music of professional and amateur alike have all had a tremendous impact on artists, labels and consumers.

One of the most significant changes in the industry is simultaneously one of its oldest traditions and one of its newer developments.

The industry's recent spate of corporate mergers and acquisitions has created a handful of megalabels, giving rise to a mushrooming number of small, independent labels that are benefiting from the major labels' need to pare down their rosters along with their newly immense overheads.

In recent months, for example, Asylum, Giant and Atlantic were gobbled up by parent Warner Nashville.

The result has been a surge in the number of established artists winding up on small, untested labels plus an increase in the number of such labels from which artists can choose.

The new kids label-wise in Nashville include Audium, Broken Bow, DualTone, Music City, Relentless, VFR and WE.

Just 20 years ago, releasing an album on an independent label was almost the kiss of death. Without the cach� of major label status to carry an artist to the print and broadcast media, independent artists were lucky just to get their packages on the desks of programmers and critics, let alone have their albums played or reviewed.

Putting out a record on a small label, or, even worse, self-releasing an album often carried with it the stigma of lesser quality, a stereotype that was all too often true. Poor sound quality, amateurish graphics, and diminished songwriting and musicianship were generally the hallmarks of the smaller scaled release.

That paradigm has changed with the recent trend toward corporate buyouts of major labels and the record company mergers that have resulted in the terminated contracts of dozens of well-established country music stars - George Jones, Randy Travis, Merle Haggard, etc., etc. - whose only transgression was the inability to move platinum-sized units (one million in sales) up the charts.

A number of sharp entrepreneurs, some of them former label executives displaced in the downsizing caused by major label mergers, sensed the need for a label presence somewhere between the ridiculous extremes of companies too large to subsidize a mid-level career artist and too small to be professionally inclined.

With astonishing rapidity, a number of smaller, more adaptable mainly Nashville-based labels have formed to fill the vacuum created when major labels expanded too fast.

"With all the mergers of labels and corporations, the labels are owned by a handful of conglomerates, and the radio stations are owned by a handful of conglomerates," says Jim Hester, president of VFR Records, whose roster includes Mark McGuinn and Trent Summar.

"That doesn't reward innovation and entrepreneurship, it rewards mass sales. What happens is that the major labels and the radio stations are all looking for big numbers.They heavily re-search stuff, and they only want name artists that they know they can sell a bunch of records on. The concept of artist development goes by the wayside. We can't compete with the majors. Given the same act, they'll beat us every day of the week. The only way we have a chance to compete is by coming up with innovative and fresh music, stuff they may not take a chance on. We take the chance, and that's how we become competitive."

VFR is certainly one of the big indie success stories. Their first relative success came last year with their debut release from Summar and the New Row Mob, which climbed to the top of the Americana charts with support from Country Music Television and radio stations not reporting to outfits running the charts.

VFR's success this year comes at both the esoteric and commercial levels with the release of the niche-marketed "In the Beginning: A Songwriter's Tribute to Garth Brooks," a collection of tunes performed by the songwriters that provided the songs to Brooks in the first place, and the surprise chart hit "Mrs. Steven Rudy" by McGuinn, whose eponymous debut comes out May 8.

There are a number of different levels of involvement in the indie country label community, from true independents to small labels owned by larger music or entertainment conglomerates.

Relentless, for example, is a division of the Madacy Entertainment Group, one of the largest retail music distributors in the world, which is, in turn, owned by the Handleman Co. After doing so much mass marketing of licensed compilations and TV-offered products, Madacy began looking at the possibilities of a label atmosphere last year.

"We felt there was an opportunity for us to get in the frontline business when we realized so many artists were dropping like flies from the labels in Nashville," says Dave Roy, president of Relentless.