When Loreena McKennitt founded her quinlan road label in 1985, it was because she didn’t think anyone else would bankroll the kind of music she wanted to make. “It was less a career move than it was I’d fallen madly in love with this Celtic music,” says the Stratford, Ontario, singer and composer. So, armed with a copy of Diane Rapaport’s How to Make & Sell Your Own Recording: The Complete Guide to Independent Recording, she laid down tracks for her debut album, Elemental, and started a one-woman company to produce a small run of cassettes to sell to family and friends and any interested passersby who saw her busking at Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market.

Almost 20 years and seven full-length albums later, McKennitt continues to record for Quinlan Road, eschewing the lure of the country’s major labels. Although she is one of the few indie artists who could pique their interest, having sold almost 13 million albums worldwide, she prefers to run her own show, despite the work involved.

One of the biggest challenges, McKennitt says, especially in the early days, was merchandising and distribution. For many years, she processed mail orders herself, until her growing success allowed her to hire permanent office staff to look after orders that came in via the company’s website and mail order catalogue. For the past year, however, all her orders have been fulfilled by MapleMusic.com, a sort of online clearing house for Canadian music. McKennitt says having such a service 20 years ago would have made running her own label a lot easier. “If you’re an artist who either doesn’t have the inclination or has not developed the infrastructure,” she says, “to have a service like MapleMusic is really quite invaluable.”

While MapleMusic launched in 2000 as a one-stop source for fans of Canadian music, it has taken on particular importance for indie artists. It allows them to promote and sell their merchandise to fans in Canada and around the world with none of the exclusivity contracts or punishing royalty schedules common in an industry that, to borrow a line from Joni Mitchell, was raised on robbery. The website is making it easier for indie artists, especially new acts in the process of building an audience, to survive and even flourish without a major label. What’s more, by treating artists as partners instead of chattel, Grant Dexter, the president of MapleMusic, is redefining the industry model for label-artist relationships.

“I think what’s happened in the music industry is people have become indoctrinated by a certain way of thinking, so Grant is a welcome change,” says McKennitt. “He could almost be selling any kind of widget, and he’d be deploying the same critical thinking and discipline he learned in e-commerce that he’s now applying to the music business.”

It is readily apparent why artists including McKennitt find Dexter so refreshing. Only 33, the president, co-founder and CEO of MapleCore Ltd., the company that owns MapleMusic.com, is candid about his disdain for the way the music business operates today and how he wants to change it. Of medium height and a stocky build, dressed in a rumpled polo shirt, khakis and a pair of sandals, his demeanor is more laidback frat boy than high-powered record executive. He calls things as he sees them, which is what musicians like about his style and vision for the industry. “I don’t think artists understand what a proper business is because all their interactions have been with slimeballs who are basically screwing them,” he says.

Dexter’s music moguldom began a few years ago when, working as an information technology consultant for Fortune 1000 companies, he found himself at a corporate party where the Skydiggers were playing. He chatted them up after their performance and listened to them lament the state of the music industry—how a handful of major international labels controlled more than 80 percent of the domestic market yet none had more than 10 or 12 Canadian bands on its roster, and how small, independent record labels didn’t have the infrastructure or know-how to promote their acts effectively. To Dexter, who knew nothing about the music industry but a lot about business, the solution seemed obvious—build an online portal to let indie acts distribute and promote their music without having to sign with a big label. “So, I decided to take some vacation time and build a website,” he says.

From the outset, Dexter wanted to create a system that was fair to artists, which was unheard of in an industry where major labels regularly sign acts to exclusive 15-year contracts and send out royalty cheques once every two years. So he enlisted the help of Andy Maize (who also happens to be a singer and guitarist with the Skydiggers); Patrick Sambrook (Sarah Harmer’s manager); and Michael Timmins (producer and songwriter for the Cowboy Junkies) to help craft what he calls MapleMusic’s corporate DNA.

It was perfect timing for Timmins, as the Junkies had recently ended their contract with Geffen Records in favour of reviving their independent label, Latent Records. “My frustration with big labels is they never listen to artists. Every artist is treated the same, and the same thing is expected of every artist,” says Timmins. But that system wasn’t part of Dexter’s experience. “I was never raised in the industry, I was taught by artists,” he says. “All these acts taught me how [the industry] could be or how it should be, and then I used my business experience to meld the two together.”

Ottawa singer-songwriter Ember Swift founded her own label, Few’ll Ignite Sound, as a launch pad for her second album, InsectInside, in 1997. “My choice to start a label was entirely about having a career at all,” she recalls. “A lot of artists spend years trying to get the labels to notice them and trying to get a deal—rather than pursuing their music.” Given the political and feminist leanings of much of her folk-funk rock, she would have been waiting a long time.

What makes Swift happy is spending less time running her label and more time writing songs. Back in the early days, when it was achievement enough to have a website and e-commerce wasn’t an affordable option, she handled merchandise orders herself at the kitchen table. And while she liked putting the personal touch on each order, it was hardly efficient, given that she’s on the road much of the year and weeks would go by before she was home and able to process orders.

“I hadn’t really done much work in trying to find other avenues for selling my records, and it wasn’t a really smart decision,” she says. That’s when her management company pointed her to MapleMusic and suggested she get on board as a way to simplify merchandising, expand her distribution and promote her to new fans. Today, as she tours the continent with her eighth independently produced album, Disarming, she realizes the importance of MapleMusic more than ever. “I enjoy business and I’ve got a good head for it, but I had to step back and think, I can really stay on top of the quality of mail ordering, or I can really stay on top of the quality of my songs.” It was a no-brainer.

That was part of Dexter’s plan, too. He wanted the economics of working with MapleMusic to appeal to artists as much as its philosophy. With about 300 acts signed up so far, he says the economies of scale mean that MapleMusic can process and ship orders more cheaply and efficiently than any individual artist could. According to Dexter, artists have nothing to lose by joining. They sign no exclusivity deals with MapleMusic, remain free to sell their CDs and merchandise through any other avenues and can end their relationship with the site at any time. (That hasn’t been an issue so far—as Dexter proudly points out, not one act has broken ranks yet. What’s more, many of the site’s current partners came as referrals from artists who had already joined.) One of MapleMusic’s prime benefits is its ability to sell to audiences outside Canada. Although it has never paid for advertising, Dexter says the site gets about 120,000 visitors a month, and 70 percent of all orders are from outside Canada. Of those, more than half come from the US.

There is no denying the appeal of doing business with MapleMusic on a cost basis. Artists pay no start-up fees when they sign up; instead, MapleMusic provides each artist with an online store and accompanying biography and discography pages free of charge. Instead of sending royalty cheques to artists once every couple of years, MapleMusic sends them out on the 20th of every month. “It’s shared risk, shared reward,” says Dexter. “When they start selling stuff, we make money and they make money. That’s it.”

MapleMusic charges artists a fee for each item sold through the site, but its cut is far less than those charged by the major players in the industry. “A typical retailer will take a 30-percent margin,” explains Dexter. “So, as a record label, if I sell a retailer a CD for $12, they’ll mark it up $4. We’re cheaper than that for sure.” The fee varies according to the artist and the volume sold, but indie artists like Timmins say it’s a much better deal than his band is used to. While the amount of money the Cowboy Junkies make from their online store pales in comparison with in-store sales, Timmins says the web gives the band a venue to sell less commercial albums, such as cover collections and concert bootlegs. While those albums don’t bring in a ton of money, Timmins says the margins are such that they don’t need to sell a lot of them to make them worthwhile. “These records are fun, there’s no pressure on them, they’re just ideas we have and want to do,” he says. “We usually release them between [new studio] records to keep our audience interested and keep them coming back to our website.”

Helping artists build and retain an audience is part of the MapleMusic philosophy, although Dexter admits it’s an area that needs improvement. “I think we can do a better job of bringing new acts on the site,” he says. Still, he is particular about the type of acts that are approved to join. As outlined on its site, MapleMusic wants to work with acts that are serious about their careers. Dexter wants artists who are committed to touring and building their audience through online mailing lists and websites. “We always just say the music is one piece, but your attitude and work ethic toward your career [are equally important],” he says. “That’s the way we judge anything that comes into us: are people putting as much effort [into their careers] as we’re putting into the site?”

Singer-songwriter Chris Brown sees MapleMusic’s success as a sign of a changing music industry. Raised in Toronto and now based in New York City, Brown has recorded albums with his musical partner, Kate Fenner, on their b-music label since 1997. He says having their own label grew naturally from the pair’s early days of dubbing tapes for fans, and today it allows them great freedom in terms of the music they make. For example, they recently released Go On, an EP of anti-war songs headlined by the pair’s “Resist War,” written in late 2002 as the threat of a US invasion of Iraq loomed. Were he signed to a major label, Brown says he probably wouldn’t have been able to release the song, let alone make it available for free downloading and encourage other artists to record it and spread the word.

“The independent distribution through MapleMusic really takes the pressure off the necessities of a record deal and helps a musician say, ‘What’s a record company really going to give me?’” he says. “It’s a very liberated time to make music. Downloading has disrupted the paradigm of these major record companies, and they feel very threatened, so it’s great to see people take initiative and offer musicians a middle ground.”

The middle ground is exactly where Dexter wants to be. Although MapleCore Ltd., MapleMusic’s parent company, has branched out into a retail distribution network and small record label (signing alt-country darling Kathleen Edwards and rocker Sam Roberts), he says it’s the website where he sees the most potential. Already, he’s looking at recording concert bootlegs and exploring digital music on the site. He’s convinced there’s a way to make it all work—and the key is better label-artist relations.

“It horrifies me to treat someone badly, and this is one of the only industries where this shit happens,” he says. “I mean, in manufacturing, if your vendors and suppliers aren’t working together, the vendors get shit-canned. It’s only [in the music industry], because we have this parent-child relationship between the label and the artist, that the artist is locked in for 15 years and you get lazy.”

But Dexter is determined not to get lazy, and promises to keep putting the same amount of energy into MapleMusic as he expects from his artists. Like them, he may never become a billionaire, but independent music has never been primarily about the money—it’s about the music.