Hawaii: Homegrown Product

The Aloha State offers everything—recording studios, record labels and distributors—to help area artists reach the local market and beyond.

There was a time when Hawaii's local recording industry didn't reach "beyond the reef," but in recent years local music has been branching out to America and the world on every front.

The largest Hawaii-based labels—Hula Records, the Mountain Apple Company and Punahele Productions—can handle everything from recording and talent management to worldwide distribution and marketing. Next come several tiers of well-established smaller labels: Some are several decades old and have extensive back catalogs, as well as new artists, while others of more recent origin are coming on strong with mixed catalogs of new artists.

Some labels represent a single well-established artist, such as Kapena on KDE Records, Na Leo on NLP Music or the late Israel "IZ" Kamakawiwo'ole on Big Boy. Countless others come into existence each year as vehicles for new artists; many don't survive past that first release.

A major shake-out occurred last year when Hawaii-based Olinda Road Distribution filed for bankruptcy and Navarre Distribution shut down its Hawaiian operations. That left two major independent distributors—Pacific Hawaiian Music Distribution and Aloha Music International (a division of Booklines Hawaii)—and several smaller companies to divide the local market along with the Mountain Apple Company, Hula Records' Kona-Kai Distributors, ADA and Quiet Storm Records/Distributors.

The steady increase in what are essentially DIY projects makes it difficult to determine how many titles are released each year, but there appears to have been about 11% fewer releases in 2002 than in 2001. As of the end of April this year, the number of new releases was 10% lower in 2003 than a year ago.

MORE EXPOSURE, SUCCESS

HanaOla Records and Dancing Cat are based in California but are significant for Hawaiian music. HanaOla specializes in leasing and electronically restoring recordings made by extinct Hawaiian labels from the late-1940s through the 1970s. Dancing Cat is steadily adding to its catalog of perfect ki ho'alu (slack- key guitar) albums.

Punahele Productions has long been known for the high quality of its recordings and has built a stable that includes high-profile refugees from other labels. Label spokesman Jim Linkner says the next step is breaking them nationally.

"At this point in time, performance is where a lot of the money is for the artists. Not only is it not downloadable or burnable, but I think people are more attracted than ever to seeing an actual performance," Linkner says. Punahele will be taking its top artists on