Michael Hargreaves has always wanted his own music label, but he didn’t want the label to operate as a formal business.
Instead, he wanted his organization to be musician-owned and musician-led.
“Underneath it all, I didn’t really want it to be a predatory thing where we took advantage of artists that are already not making a lot of money,” he said. “It’s just makes no sense, and so I think it’s actually wrong.”
So rather than starting a formal music label, Hargreaves — along with his wife, solo musician Crissi Cochrane — started the Soul City Music Co-op.
“It’s a group of entrepreneurs working together to empower each other’s careers without taking a percentage of ownership from each other,” said Hargreaves.
“I run the co-op and oversee everything, put the final stamp on things before they go out, but apart from that, each individual artist runs their own careers.”
The goal, according to Hargreaves, is to ensure that “everyone stays independent,” while also helping artists avoid difficult lessons he and Cochrane had to learn the over the years.
And though individual acts will be able to maintain their independence, Cochrane said she’s excited to help musicians with the business side of music, “like grant-writing and preparing materials for the web, how to take advantage of social media and all the tools that are available for do-it-yourself musicians.”
“It’s a lot of stuff that we’ve learned the hard way, and I really just enjoy doing this stuff,” said Cochrane.
The Soul City Music Co-op formally launched on Jan. 1, and the organization already has six associated acts, including Cochrane and the Family Soul soul band led by Hargreaves.
Also associated with Soul City Music are the Windsor-based Bishop Boys, as well as singer-songwriters Madeline Doornaert and Dane Roberts.
Hargreaves said the Soul City Music Co-op will welcome artists of all genres, though he said the acts associated with the organization are currently focused on “roots and traditional styles of music, like blues, jazz, soul [and] folk.”
“There’s nothing too fusion-y or psychedelic on the label yet, but it’s just a lot of traditional sorts of styles of music right now,” he said.
He added that he doesn’t want the label to grow too quickly, though he said there are a few artists “we have our eyes on that we’d love to involve.”
Listen to Michael Hargreaves and Crissi Cochrane talk about the Soul City Music Co-op with Windsor Morning host Tony Doucette:
As for long-term goals, Hargreaves said he has a feeling some of the artists connected to the label “will be successful and leave us in the dust, which is fine too.”
“There’s a lot of new creative ideas that we hadn’t thought of before that we can use to cross promote each artist.”