THAT's THE SPIRIT

THREE YEARS AGO, Charles Cho Yu-chi launched his record label, A Good Day, from a back room in his wife's cafe in Taipei. Though it now boasts a catalogue of about a dozen quirkily packaged CDs, the company seems an unlikely competitor to Taiwan's music factories.

But in the era of downloads, small, independent labels are mushrooming while the majors struggle. Cho cites as an example the response to three CD singles by folk-pop singer-songwriter Cheer Chen Chi-cheng released on his label. 'Usually, you can't sell CD singles in Taiwan because they feature only one or two songs,' he says. 'But we've sold more than 10,000 of these - each.'

Last year, Magnificent Risk, the album Chen released under her own label, Cheergo, notched an impressive 50,000 copies in an unforgiving market where only eight albums sold more than a million copies. Indeed, album sales in Taiwan have plummeted from a peak of 47 million copies in 1997 to just over 10 million last year. These days, even marquee names such as Jay Chou Jie-lun only manage to shift about 220,000 albums compared to a routine million copies five years ago.

But the internet has given a timely boost to the independents, which had been largely ignored by mainstream media and couldn't match the majors' marketing heft.

Ma Shih-fang, chief executive of Music543.com, is among the beneficiaries. The indie label started as a website that Ma launched six years ago by corralling audiophile webmasters from universities across Taiwan into the island's first music-only internet bulletin board system.

'Some sites are more about worshipping pop stars, and people who visit them might find us boring,' Ma says. The focus at Music543 is a deeper one and more on music, he says, but it tapped into a well of young music lovers. 'Suddenly, we've got a bunch of kids having deep discussions about folk music. It's something you never think would have happened before.' The forums now attract 3,000 to 4,000 visitors daily, while Music543's newsletter has more than 80,000 subscribers.