Cooking Vinyl opens new frontiers in France and Germany

UK independent group Cooking Vinyl is expanding its international reach with the launch of two new operations in France and Germany.

Cooking Vinyl Group France and Cooking Vinyl Group Germany comes about one year after Cooking Vinyl Australia started business in September 2013. A subsidiary of the CV Group, Cooking Vinyl also has a US publishing operation.

The new French and German divisions will support Cooking Vinyl and its label-services sister company Essential Music & Marketing on continental Europe. Additionally, they will work with Cooking Vinyl’s exclusive distribution partners Indigo in Germany and [PIAS] France, plus Essential’s network of distributors.

The experience of newly appointed label manager France, Zineb Benomar, includes eight years at French independent Naïve Records, where she was product manager. Among the high-profile artists she worked with are singer-songwriter Benjamin Biolay on his double-platinum album La Superbe, Carla Bruni, and Marianne Faithfull.

The background of Cooking Vinyl’s new label manager Germany Hilke Dethleff (pictured) includes roles as a label and product manager for clients such as Universal Music, Sony Music, Columbia Records and Real World Records. She spent ten years at Sony Music as senior product manager international marketing.

“With Cooking Vinyl Australia having had such an amazing first year, we’ve once again looked at expanding our business – this time a little closer to home,” says Martin Goldschmidt, managing director of Cooking Vinyl, in a statement. “France and Germany are by no means strangers to us, but working with Zineb and Hilke, who possess a wealth of experience in their respective markets, will enable us to serve our artists even better.”

[Juliana Koranteng]