Reggae label, Greensleeves, posted its first profit in years, providing comfort for an ailing reggae industry. Olivier Chastan, president of Greensleeves, said the company benefited from increased sales, through office consolidation; outsourcing its distribution network; and reissuing portions of its back catalogue.

"The main focus has been to improve sales and marketing. This has brought the company back to profitability since June (even though we have a lot of liabilities dating back to Zest to cover)," said Chastan in an exclusive interview with Splash.
The profit comes just five months after its rival VP Records acquired it from the UK-based Zest Group in February.
Greensleeves was so unprofitable for Zest that it lost £738,000 (J$84.9 million) in selling to VP: of that figure £104,000 (J$11.9 million) was a trading loss over six months and £634,000 (J$72.9 million) was the loss on disposal.

Greensleeves, based in Middlesex, UK has an established presence in a number of the specialist reggae markets such as the US, Japan, France, Germany, Benelux, Canada and Scandinavia. Chastan told Splash that it has consolidated its US and Japan offices with VP. This is essential as high administrative costs made it post losses under Zest ownership.

"We also made a few key operational improvements (upgrade of our sales/accounting systems, outsourcing of our distribution, consolidation of our US and Japan operations with VP, etc)," said Chastan.

VP acquired Greensleeves for £3.1 million (J$356.5 million), saving some £150,000 (J$17.2 million) on the Zest Group purchase price in 2006, even as the Greensleeves catalogue had grown. Geensleeves is the world's largest reggae publisher. Its back catalogue at 400 albums and 900 singles is larger than that of many record labels. Chastan intends to reissue as many as possible to induce new streams of revenue: "We invested in a major catalogue reissue programme to ensure that all of the back-catalogue is available for sale; we started putting out new products such as Fantan Mojah's new album or Sizzla's Best Of; monitoring sales/distribution more precisely; planning our marketing several months in advance; etc."

The company also signed new publishing deals with popular dancehall and reggae artistes including Busy Signal and Etana. This will also provide future revenue streams.

"Finally, we focused our efforts on improving Greensleeves Publishing division was dramatically under-performing. It will take a year or so to start seeing concrete results but the early signs are extremely positive. On the music publishing front, we signed a lot of writers to Greensleeves Publishing (Llamar Brown, Busy Signal, Etana, Shane Brown, Fantan Mojah, Demarco, to name a few), changed some of our administration deals internationally, invested heavily in marketing the catalogue and changed our internal computer/royalty management software to mention a few initiatives," he explained.

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