Fading Ways Hits Fifty
Friday January 26, 2007 @ 06:30 PM
By: ChartAttack.com Staff

Neil Leyton

For most, turning 50 isn't an event to look forward to. But for one Toronto label, the number 50 means validation. Fading Ways Records is set to release its 50th disc, a milestone that label founder Neil Leyton sees as the imprint's biggest accomplishment.

"I think any indie label that survives 10 years and fifty releases in this business has accomplished enough," says Leyton via email from the label's U.K. office.

Fading Ways is currently home to more than 20 artists, including The Pariahs, Diamond Dogs and Red Orkestra. It started as a one-band project and has since opened branches in the U.K. and Finland.

"Fading Ways was originally the business front and music publishing company for my old band, The Conscience Pilate," explains Leyton. "After the break-up I expanded it into a proper independent label, both for my solo releases and for helping other friends put out their records."

From the start, Leyton and his colleagues decided that Fading Ways needed to be a different label than the norm. It was founded on the belief that artists should own and profit from their work, first and foremost. As a testament to this principle, the label's artists maintain control of their master recordings and publishing rights.

In addition, while more conventional labels have spent the last few years battling against a plague of downloading, Fading Ways has held firm in its conviction that home-taping, uploading and downloading are healthy and interactive promotional tools.

It's these opinions that have led Fading Ways to spearhead a number of initiatives, like Copyleft, that's revolutionary for the music industry. A fairly simple concept, Copyleft means that if a fan copies a Fading Ways disc to give to a friend, and even if they upload an MP3 and share it with other web users, they aren't breaking the law.

"Fading Ways, our artists, and our street teams of fans around the world will continue to fight for our rights, the rights of our fans, and the rights of the public in general to freely copy and share music they like," Leyton declares.

Fading Ways is also fully behind the licensing system known as Creative Commons. The Creative Commons classification makes it legal not only for a CD to be copied, but also for its songs to be used and manipulated in forms that differ from their original format. Red Orkestra's After The Wars became the first internationally distributed album to be released with a Creative Commons licence in 2004.

As if these initiatives weren't enough, Leyton and crew recently started a project called Artist Collective.

"The way forward for Fading Ways is the new Artist Collective, which takes us straight back to those principles of helping friends put out their records without wanting to own their masters or publishing... whereas in '97 [we] expanded rapidly in Toronto, the only thing that has changed is that now we are expanding globally, signing up bands to the Collective from around the world."

Some of these friends of the label — the Artist Collective bands — appear on the 50th album, which is aptly titled Fading Ways Fifty. The compilation features one CD of Fading Ways artists covering songs by other Fading Ways artists and a second disc of Artist Collective bands covering Fading Ways songs.

Fading Ways has a release party and 50th disc celebration planned for Saturday night at Toronto's El Mocambo. Red Orkestra, The Machines, Vaslav and Mike Farrell of the Pariahs will perform.

—Scott Bryson