You are more likely to discover broken pint glasses than a revolutionary music business model on the spittle-flecked floor of Camden’s Barfly venue.

However, eight years after their first gig promotion, the co-founders of the Mama Group have created a live venue and artist management business that is attracting envious glances from record companies undergoing painful surgery.

AIM-listed Mama now manages 18 UK venues after spending £20 million acquiring the Hammersmith Apollo, London Forum and six venues from the Mean Fiddler Music Group, including the Jazz Café and the potentially lucrative GAY brand.

The company occupies a middle-ground niche behind concert giants Live Nation and Anschutz Entertainment Group, operator of the revamped O2 Arena.

Its artist management business guides top bands including Kaiser Chiefs, Franz Ferdinand and the Cribs as well as a stable of in-demand producers and songwriters.

Revenues rose 43.5 per cent to £5.48 million according to the latest half-year figures, on the back of a live music boom and there is about £7 million available for more acquisitions.

So is this the famous “360 degree” music model that the Sanctuary Music Group once boasted, before collapsing under the weight of its ambitions?

“We are the closest to a proper 360 model but we do not have Sanctuary’s flaws,” Dean James, joint chief executive of the company, says.

“Live music underpins everything we do. You cannot replicate the live experience no matter what happens to the recorded market.”

Where Sanctuary’s roots lay in heavy metal management, Mr James, a former Ernst & Young consultant with an obligatory MBA, and his business parter Adam Driscoll, created the Mama model from a forensic analysis of the music industry.

Mr Driscoll promoted gigs at the Barfly and watched the bands, landlord, brewers, agents, T-shirt sellers and record company talent scouts all take value out of the live concert, leaving the promoter struggling with a small slice of the ticket proceeds.

“We didn’t actually make any money from it,” he says, adding that Mama then tried to ensure that it took control of the ancillary revenues too.

“We could see that digital technology would smash the value chain of the record industry. We are in the growth area. Fans want to get their music live and artists want to establish a direct relationship with fans through gigs and digital technology,” Mr James says.

Mama now owns ten Barfly venues, where talent scouts congregate nightly.

Bands that sell the most beer and build the biggest followings are swiftly signed up by its Supervision Management wing.

The company, which is 50 per cent owned by institutional investors including Goldman Sachs, also plans to roll out a number of Jazz Cafés to complement the original North London venue.

GAY, a Saturday night West End club, will host its first music awards, televised by Sky One. A revamped website will host a dating and social network and sell branded merchandise.

The company owns Campus Group, a collection of media and marketing agencies, which targets students. The final stage of the Mama plan is the “digital ordering and delivery of the live ticket, track and T-shirt.”

Although Mintel forecasts that the live music market will be worth £836 million by 2009, Mama’s ambitions rest on the gig-going appetite not being sated by a surfeit of festivals and rising ticket prices.

With Madonna shifting over to a radical new deal with Live Nation — Mama’s far larger rival — the live-orientated business model feels like an idea whose time has come, or given that Live Nation is paying $120 million to sign Madonna, an idea that may be at a peak.

For now, Messrs Driscoll and James are happy for their artists to steal the headlines – they declined to be photographed for this article.

However, they have attracted enough attention of their own already — and it may well be tough to maintain the company’s hard-fought independence in an industry prone to consolidation.

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