Website: http://www.cookingvinyl.com/

Cooking Vinyl is one of Britain's most successful independent record labels. The company has achieved remarkable success, entirely on its own terms, ever since it started trading in 1986. From humble beginnings, the label has not only survived but flourished, weathering all the changes and difficulties that have faced independent record labels in the last two decades.

Cooking Vinyl was set up by former manager and booking agent Martin Goldschmidt and distribution manager Pete Lawrence. In 1986, Cooking Vinyl famously recorded an impromptu live performance around a campfire at a folk festival by the singer Michelle Shocked on a portable cassette machine with fading batteries. The label released the recording as The Campfire Tapes. It went on to sell 250,000 copies worldwide.

Today Cooking Vinyl employs twelve people full time and has its headquarters in Acton, West London. The company runs a flourishing mail order operation, and does its own press, marketing, online marketing and sales in house. It has a fully developed international network in place and its own Cooking Vinyl companies in America and Germany.

The label's wonderfully diverse roster includes Billy Bragg, Frank Black, Echo and the Bunnymen, Cowboy Junkies, Ryan Adams, Ziggy Marley, The Prodigy and Richard Thompson.