In the second part of our new series on the financial infrastructure of British Christian music, Tony Cummings interviews Alliance Music's Marketing Director Dave Withers.

Dave Withers

Alliance Music is the biggest Christian music record company in Europe. Among its roster of UK artists are Graham Kendrick, Iona, the World Wide Message Tribe and Adrian Snell while its representation of the major American CCM catalogues such as ForeFront (DC Talk, Audio Adrenalin), Sparrow (Steven Curtis Chapman, BeBe and CeCe Winans), Warner Alliance (Caedmon's Call, Andrae Crouch), re:think (Charlie Peacock, Sarah Masen), Star Song (Newsboys) and others give it a second-to-none place in European Christian music. Now distributed by EMI Holland, it's set up offices in Holland and new Germany. In 1996 it launched the Alliance Festival, the highest-attendance one day regular Christian music event in Europe. I spoke to Alliance's Marketing Director Dave Withers, at his Milton Keynes office.

Tony: Can you give me a brief background to the company's history?

Dave: "Alliance Music has been going for three years and three months, started by Ian Hamilton, Dave Bruce and me. All three of us have shareholdings in the company. We own all but five per cent of the company, an accountant owns the other five per cent. So it's an independently owned British company. The three of us were formerly three of the four directors of Word UK. We were always music specialists and Word over the years had become more and more a general products company. Particularly during its ownership by Nelson it was changing in its nature greatly. We felt that the time had come for us to get back to specialising in music and with the support of principally the EMI group of companies and the Warner Bros Christian company we set it up in March '94."

Tony: You've undergone pretty spectacular growth.

Dave: "It's been a push but it has been in profit. In the first year from memory we turned over 1.3 or 1.4 million pounds and in the financial year just gone we turned over about 2.3 million."

Tony: How does this compare with the old Word company?

Dave: "As far as the music side of the business is concerned, it's hard to know how it is now, but the indications we have are that probably we are about equal size or bigger now. They do books as well so overall they are bigger, but obviously they still sell our products through their Premier mail order operation so there is a bit of double count in that"

Tony: When you began it seemed to an outside observer that you were relying very heavily on American product for your turnover.

Dave: "It was like that, yes. But a big proportion now, 40 per cent of our turnover is UK product. That's for the last 12 months, up to the end of March. Acts like lona. the Tribe, Graham Kendrick have largely achieved that."

Tony: As a market, is Christian music in Britain expanding?

Dave: "I've always been a bit of a conservative but in recent months I think there is a lot more interest and excitement about Christian music than there's ever been before. Even last Sunday there was a half page article in the Independent with a great big picture of dba and DC Talk. That just reflects the fact that the media is saying 'what is this, what is going on? This week Bob Carlisle is number one in the Billboard charts in America; it knocked the Spice Girls off number one. So the British media is waking up to the fact that something is happening with Christian music. And of course, what Delirious? have achieved is incredible, particularly bearing in mind that they've done it themselves. There is a lot of potential for growth. Like the new World Wide Message Tribe album which comes out in the beginning of November, there are some fairly significant plans on that in partnership with EMI in London which I think will increase profile. It may not be a sales explosion because it's surprising how little you have to sell these days to get in the charts, but it will actually be very high profile."

Tony: A lot of people are astonished Delirious? are regularly making the charts.

Dave: "We always suspected it could happen. Interestingly, we released a Graham Kendrick record around the 20th of March called 'No More Walls' and before the end of March we had moved over 17,000 of them. EMI, who do all our distribution, said that if We had sold it in the right place, as they put it, meaning the regular shops, it would have been in the top five albums. So we know that the potential is there. Traditionally we sell through Christian bookshops, 90 per cent of our sales in the UK are through them, but they are not obviously observed by Gallup and therefore they don't count for the charts. So what we have to do is look at schemes, which is precisely what Delirious? did, because I think if you can move somewhere between five and 10 thousand units in any given week particularly this time of year you'll go top 20."

Tony: In the early days did Alliance approach Delirious?