It is, you suspect, not the news that her record company was gasping to hear. Far from focusing on recording the follow-up to Back to Black, it seems that Amy Winehouse has decided to put something back into the profession that made her a star.

Last week, the singer announced that she would be launching Lioness Records, a new label whose first act would be her 13-year-old goddaughter Dionne Bromfield. Did she have any misgivings about exposing such a young soul to a profession that had wreaked so much instability on her own life? Seemingly not. “Dionne really is special,” Winehouse said. “She’s better than I was at her age.”

If nothing else, that accounts for the zeal with which she could be heard telling the cameraman (Pete Doherty) to “put it up”, when he shot Dionne performing Alicia Keys’s If I Ain’t Got You. Good as Aunt Amy’s intentions may have been, the resulting YouTube footage is compelling for all the wrong reasons. Bromfield seems sweet enough, but you barely notice that for the sight to her left. Concentrating on her guitar skills, the tattooed twiglet in a beehive and denim hotpants is unmistakeable.

That was last year. Since then, Winehouse has paid for Bromfield to attend an intensive singing course in Los Angeles. Early indications suggest she is to be no passive patron. Lady GaGa and Lemar have reportedly already been approached to guest on an album while, according to the Liverpool Fashion Week website, Winehouse’s protégée is due to sing and model at a charity gala in March. If we suspend the deafening din of alarm bells for a second, we should at least entertain the notion that this doesn’t have to end badly.

The precedents for successful artist-run labels exist. By introducing Mary Hopkin and James Taylor to the world, the Beatles’ Apple turned over a profit. Madonna’s Maverick got off to a flying start with 14 million sales of Alanis Morrissette’s Jagged Little Pill. Other acts have fared less well.

A little more than a year ago, Mike Skinner, of the Streets, finally laid his label the Beats to rest, after acts such as Example and Professor Green failed to convert critical acclaim into commercial success. Seemingly convinced that the Earth’s natural stocks of denim-clad trad-rockers were running perilously low, Noel Gallagher founded his own Sour Mash label. But, beyond an album by the passable Oldham plodders Proud Mary, the imprint yielded little.

Now 43, Tracie Young was just 17 when she answered an advert in Smash Hits inviting applicants to send demos for Paul Weller’s new Respond label. Weller was so taken by Young’s girl-next-door qualities that he launched Respond with her single The House that Jack Built. Despite her tender age, Young — now a DJ for Southend Radio 105.5 FM — says she soon realised the limitations of Respond’s set-up.

“The best and worst thing about it was Paul’s idealism,” she says. “He wanted it to be like Motown, this stable of artists that would share songs. The problem was that he wouldn’t relinquish control. And that was unworkable, because he wasn’t there a lot of the time. He had commitments with his own stuff.”

Understandably, Young deferred to Weller’s judgment on issues about which she had misgivings. “I’d had two hit singles, but he decided not to put them on my album,” she says, with amused incredulity more than sadness. “That seemed odd.”

Looking back at his time running the Beats, Mike Skinner says he was slow to appreciate that what worked best for his records — a relatively stripped-down DIY approach — wasn’t necessarily what worked best for other artists. The East End rapper Professor Green was a case in point. “We were interested in playing with the personality of rap music,” Skinner says, “but Green was more of a rappers’ rapper. And he disagreed with that. I should have let him decide that for himself.”

Skinner says he is now better able to understand the impulse that makes talent want to turn talent-spotter. “As a successful artist,” he explains, “you end up in a position where you’re mothered by everyone. You are the breadwinner and yet, at the same time, you have no real responsibility — so that’s what you end up craving.” He suggests that this might be the real motivation behind Winehouse’s decision to start an imprint — and urges caution. “Artists have been proven to make OK A&R people, but it doesn’t happen very often..

“What advice would I give her? I would say don’t start a label. If she wants to help her goddaughter, she should just help to manage her. Release her music through iTunes or just get a distribution deal and hold on to the creative bit and the money . . . If she decides to do it through her existing label, Universal, it’s what would be referred to as a vanity label. Right now, they would not expect to be doing anything other than making Amy Winehouse happy. Personally, I would suggest that she focuses all her creative energy on making an absolute firecracker of a third album.”

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010