I recently became involved with an interesting approach to creating a record label. I guess you would call it “niche” marketing or “lifestyle affiliation” marketing.

A veteran producer and musician, Randy Rigby, first outlined this concept to me a little over six months ago. In short the idea was to create “soundtracks” for wine tasting and wine related events. One month ago the new label, Harvest Road Music, debuted with their first release, “Uncorked - The Sounds of Wine Country.”

For those of you reading this from outside our area that are not wine drinkers, it’s a BIG industry in California. As in nearly $55 billion a year.

Harvest Road Music is located in San Luis Obispo, CA which is in the heart of California’s third largest and fastest growing wine region. The entire county has a population of about 257,000 and our wine industry generated just under $3 billion in 2006!

When I moved to the area in the 1970’s there were two to three wineries in the area.Today there are something like 250!

With the wineries came more wine related events (Paso Robles Wine Festival, Hospice du Rhone, World of Pinot Noir, Zinfandel Festival, Roll Out the Barrels, Harvest Festival), more good restaurants, hotels and, thusly, more gigs for our local musicians.

My band, The Cliffnotes (I’m a “weekend warrior”) has tripled our booking just in the last year.

Bearing all this in mind, and the fact that from Washington to the Mexican border, there are approximately 10,000 wine tasting rooms, doesn’t The Sounds of Wine Country sound like a good idea to you?

It did to me. That’s how I became the label’s resident, “Marketing Genius.” The reaction to the first CD has been overwhelmingly positive and besides the tasting rooms signing up to have our counter top retail display, several of them want to make bulk purchases so they can use the CD as a premium for their wine club members.

We also get to discover and showcase new artists (like the stunning Nataly Lola on the Uncorked CD) and assist wineries and their related events with handling their live music bookings.

To top it off, how many times do you get to sell 10,000 copies in one fell swoop? I’m gonna have to make myself a new belt.

Stay tuned, I’ll use this blog-o-sphere for updates on the Harvest Road to Wine Country.