Hannah Cornwell, one of Native Tongue's founders.

Native Tongue, New Zealand's first contemporary music publisher, recently received a $100,000 boost when it won an inaugural CUBE Award.

The CUBE Awards are a joint initiative between the Arts Regional Trust, Creative New Zealand, the Community Employment Group and the Auckland, Waitakere, Manukau and North Shore City Councils.

The competition aims to develop ideas to help Auckland's arts and creative industries and attracted over 450 entrants. Sixteen finalists were selected with two commercial business ideas and two not-for-profit ideas chosen as winners.

Native Tongue won one of the commercial business prizes of $50,000 and ongoing business mentoring, equivalent to $50,000, at Auckland University's Icehouse.

The 16 finalists participated in an innovation workshop and month-long mentoring programme, the result of which was a business plan that was presented to a panel of judges.

Native Tongue was mentored by the managing director of Universal Music New Zealand, Adam Holt.

"His insight and support throughout the CUBE process was invaluable, but fun as well," says Native Tongue's Hannah Cornwell. "He was determined to kick arse, so it helped me to step up to the plate really and dive into the process."

Cornwell says Native Tongue's business plan focuses on "keeping New Zealand intellectual property owned and controlled by New Zealanders and returning a greater share of the publishers income to the New Zealand industry."

Native Tongue was founded in November 2003 by Cornwell, Chris Gough and Nicky Donoghue and its songwriter roster includes Don McGlashan, Philip Judd and Greg Johnson.

Cornwell says the company is the brainchild of Gough - a Melbourne-based ex-pat Kiwi - with the idea for a publishing company growing from a cup of tea and conversation over the kitchen table.

"We had listened to a lot of songwriters talking about not really knowing what their overseas publishers were up to, and how much attention their copyrights were getting. We wanted to offer personalised attention, not only for their copyrights but for their career development as well."

Native Tongue was not the only finalist with a music-based idea.

The founding Chief Executive of Mai FM, Taura Eruera, submitted Melodease, an export targeted software programme to assist songwriters and composers in creating melodies. The software would enable anyone to compose melody.

Mark Kneebone put forward Isaac Promotions, a publicity and marketing service for musicians and independent labels which helps them break into the radio market.

Cornwell thinks Native Tongue's advantage over some of the other finalists was that they were already up and running and earning income.

Native Tongue has a strategic relationship with Mana Music, which operates a music supervision service and composer agency in Australasia in addition to having sub-publishers based in the UK, USA, Asia, Eastern Europe, Germany and South Africa - to name a few. All are established independents with a long term track record of working within their own territory

"Native Tongue also has its own relationships with a number of the major US, UK, Canadian and German music supervisors and can submit clients' works for use in a wide range of programmes, series and films around the world," says Cornwell.

Cornwell is the former director of Loop Recordings, and is currently helping Loop develop its own publishing catalogue, which Native Tongue will administer.

Cornwell reinforces that Native Tongue's vision is not to create a monopoly, but to: "offer support to other independent publishers - especially companies who are already relatively proficient at developing talent, but lack the infrastructure and systems to market the copyrights and process the income both at home and abroad."

"Native Tongue will basically add another string to the bow of the New Zealand music industry. Having an administration system such as ours in place will hopefully encourage others in New Zealand to develop their own publishing catalogues."

www.nativetongue.co.nz