EMI GOLD 2006 10TH ANNIVERSARY: SETTING THE GOLD STANDARD IN CATALOGUE.

As EMI Gold celebrates its 10th anniversary, Music Week looks at the low-price label, its history and its prolific and successful output

Besides the frontline labels of the majors, how many British record companies have clocked up 25m domestic album sales in the past 10 years? Of those that have, how many can say they did so with virtually no marketing budget and a maximum dedicated staff of six, including a sales team?

That is the size of EMI Gold, those are its sales figures and that is its age. Over the course of a decade, kicking off with a slate of releases which included such unlikely label mates as Kim Wilde and Peter Tosh, EMI's low-price division has quietly delivered the kind of numbers which some other labels are surely envious of.

Armed only with its own imagination, a huge volume of catalogue and great tracts of material which has already made its way into millions of households at higher price points, EMI Gold has delivered a decade- long masterclass in catalogue alchemy, turning sometimes the basest of musical materials into, well, gold.

For most of that time, the company has held firm as the leader in its price point. "We've consistently been one of the top budget labels", says head of EMI Gold Steve Woof. "In the past 10 years we have always been one of the top three labels, spending the majority of that time at number one."

To flick through the company's 10-year anniversary catalogue, EMI's low- price powerhouse does not necessarily bear the hallmarks of a hit factory.

From Abbott & Costello to one Si Zentner, the A to Z of EMI Gold is an occasionally inauspicious thing. Even if it does stop off at Diana Ross, Cliff Richard, Frank Sinatra, Madness, Deep Purple and David Bowie along the way, it also takes in Bernard Cribbins, karaoke collections and an album of Wurlitzer classics. But, as repertoire manager Jon Wilson points out: "We can't be worried about being too cool."