Secretly Canadian started out like most indie-rock labels: some “record-collecting nerds,” in this case a trio of them attending Indiana University in 1996, wanted to be involved with music in some greater way than simply buying it. The imprint, then as now based in Bloomington, Indiana, got off to a running start, releasing two dozen albums and singles in two years, but soon the owners hit the wall. They’d fallen in love with the act of putting out records–but they were still losing their shirts. “We realized we all wanted it to be a long-term thing,” says Jonathan Cargill, now 30. “To make it long-term we had to find a way to reduce expenses and to make money.”
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That’s a tough prescription to fill in the independent-music business, but in early 1999 Cargill and his partners, brothers Chris and Ben Swanson, found a way. At that time Secretly Canadian, like nearly every other small label in the country, was using brokers to get its CDs manufactured. All major pressing plants insist on minimum annual production figures of between 100,000 and 500,000 units–well beyond most indies’ capacities. Brokers consolidate orders from a number of smaller businesses to meet those minimums–or better yet to exceed them, bringing the price per unit down for everyone. So Cargill and the Swansons–along with Darius Van Arman, who’d just moved to Bloomington from Charlottesville, Virginia, with his own label, Jagjaguwar–decided to form their own CD brokerage, called Bellwether Manufacturing, to bring in extra income and lower their own pressing costs. Since then, all four have made a modest living making records.
By then, in perpetual search of the lowest price, Secretly Canadian had used six different CD brokers. They had also begun to subdistribute indie labels they felt an affinity with, including Jagjaguwar; expanding their offerings gave them yet more leverage with distributors, who were forced to pay outstanding bills in order to get the latest releases. But when one of their main distributors, the U.S. arm of Cargo Records, folded in 1998, they had to write off approximately $10,000 in merchandise that hadn’t been paid for. That’s when they decided to start Bellwether.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Yvette Marie Dostani.
