Speech Debelle has announced that she is quitting her label, Ninja Tune subsidiary Big Dada, apparently because of the poor sales of her Mercury Prize-winning album 'Speech Therapy'. The rapper claims that the label failed to properly distribute the album, and failed to meet consumer demand after the Mercury win.

Despite winning the high profile music prize, the album peaked at number 65 in the UK charts, and is estimated to have sold just 10,000 copies in total, compared to the 300,000 copies shifted of the previous year's winner, Elbow's 'The Seldom Seen Kid'. The discrepancy, Debelle reckons, is partly because Big Dada didn't have enough physical copies of the album on the High Street at the crucial moment.

Comparing Debelle with Elbow doesn't really work, of course. 'The Seldom Seen Kid' was a widely acclaimed album, while Debelle's debut has had a mixed response despite the Mercury win. Elbow were also an established band making music that appeals to a large demographic. Their album also included a killer single that became the anthem of that summer. Basically, for Elbow, the Mercury was the icing on the cake, whereas for Debelle it was the sponge and jam as well. Still, the fact Elbow were signed to a major record company with large pockets and a big distribution network, and the fact Debelle was not, is not totally irrelevant.

Speaking to BBC 6music, Debelle said: "The Mercury Prize was on a Tuesday, and the Friday there were no more physical albums in the shops. So on the Mercury weekend, which would have been my biggest selling weekend, people couldn't get it".

She continued: "I wasn't disappointed that it didn't sell well, I was disappointed in the people I was working with. I wasn't on a big label and the machine wasn't there. So even though the album won the Mercury it was still only able to do what the label was capable of doing, which just means that I'm more prepared for next time".

She added that she is already speaking to a number of labels about releasing her second album, saying of her experience so far: "One thing I've learnt is that having bargaining power is important. It's important to walk into a record label and say 'This is what I have, and these are the kind of terms I want'".

Of course what Debelle has experienced is the main downside of working with a smaller indie label. They can't afford to press up thousands of extra copies of an album on the off chance it wins the Mercury Prize, especially when the album is a real outsider to win in the run up to the presentation of the award. Actually, in the current climate there's a chance not even the biggest major would have been able to take that risk, but it's true they could have staged an impromptu advertising campaign the week of the win directing people to sellers of the digital release, and paid HMV to put what physical product was available by the door.

But it's swings and roundabouts really, isn't it? For every indie-signed band with tales of the frustration of knowing your brilliant album isn't reaching record shops, or getting advertised or plugged to Radios 1 and 2, simply because your label doesn't have any cash, there are bands with horror stories of being signed to a major who spend two hundred thousand pounds on studio time, production and pressing fifty thousand CDs, only to fire your A&R contact and then almost forget they're releasing your record. That is to say, both majors and indies come with pros and cons.

The big pro of Big Dada for Speech Debelle prior to her Mercury win, presumably, was that none of the majors would probably have even considered signing her. Now she has a Mercury Prize in her hat, I suppose you can't blame her for trying to find a record label with bigger pockets.