We had a good deal in Australia when Festival records was around, though to be fair, it was originally negotiated with WEA. In our experience though, the record companies do little to promote folk type music as they don't know how and are usually not in the right markets anyway. Most of what we achieved was done by producing our own masters and licencing the distribution. That way we got to control the costs and the way thye music was presented and were able to get a 16% of 95% deal. We still made most of our money, such as it was, by selling at gigs and if I had it over, I wouldn't bother with the big companies at all.