A few have achieved more success than others due to their persistence and ability to find a unique niche in the market place. One of the most successful to date has been the American based company Putumayo. Named for a river in the Colombian interior, Putumayo began life as a gift boutique and clothing store in New York City in 1975. It was chancing upon a performance of the African band Kotoja in 1991 that started founder Dan Stroper on the road to becoming a record producer.
What started out as a desire to have more appropriate music for his clothing store and assembling his own compilation tapes for that purpose, resulted in the formation of Putumayo World Music. Stroper approached Richard Foos who was then president of Rhino Records and worked out an agreement where they would begin collaborating on creating and marketing world music collections. As a result Putumayo's first two CDs were released in April of 1993.
From such humble beginnings an empire was formed. 15 years from the earliest idea and thirteen since the first two releases, Putumayo is probably the most easily recognized World Music label in North America, and has now spread its wings to include Europe and even more impressively South America, Africa, and Asia where the majority of their music still originates.
Part of Putumayo's success can be laid at the feet of their realization to compete in the music industry you have to be visible and recognizable. In most cases they are marketing a style of music and not an individual artist, which makes label identity even more important. There is also the fact that except for the occasional specialty radio show, they will not receive any significant airtime with which to promote their product.
The first thing you need to do in this sort of situation is pick a target audience appropriate to what you're selling. No matter how you slice it Putumayo needed their audience to have money, be educated, and have enough leisure time to be interested in travel so they might have had exposure to other cultures.
Dan Stroper was in the unique position of already knowing the market; he had been catering to them with his clothing and gift stores. Who else is going to shopping for items others would consider exotica, than the exact people he's looking to sell music to. It couldn’t have taken much of a leap for him to realize he needed to sell his brand to the "boutique market".
Since the mid 1970's, when head shops decided they needed to become a little more respectable and broaden their client base by selling more than just rock t-shirts and drug paraphernalia, stores selling handicrafts from different areas of the world have started popping up all over the place. From little hole in the wall joints that were indeed no more than expanded head shops, to higher end establishments that had buyers in countries like Indonesia shipping back goods by the bale.
Article comments
1 - dj earball
Thanks for the thoughtful article! I have long appreciated Putumayo, and learned a few new things from this piece. When I first was digging into "world music" I thought Putumayo was amazing. Actually, I still think so, though I now know much more and have become acquainted with some of the other fish in the sea. Putumayo does a great job at introducing listeners to new artists, but you won't find a great deal of diverse sounds within any single compilation. It's a very different approach from, say, World Music Network, whose Rough Guides often take a wider variety of tunes falling under the umbrella of a nation or a musical style. Not that one is right or wrong; they're just different approaches, and will appeal to different listeners. The curious will find both to be great jumping off points for further explorations in global sounds.