It has been a remarkable year for Naxos, the super-budget CD label that celebrated its twentieth anniversary in the early summer. At one time derided and dismissed, it is now regarded as an influential market leader, as I observed at the time of its anniversary in an interview with Klaus Heymann, founder of the company.

Observing the label's progress, month on month, through its product, I have found myself revising that opinion. This is going a bit out on a limb, but I'm beginning to think that, in several respects, Naxos is now actually a world leader. (We don't need to go over the prices again: it's universally established now that Heymann's determination to smash through the shocking pricing strategies of other recording companies has been a worldwide success and is massively influential.) Incidentally, The Herald has an established track record of reporting on the rise and rise of Naxos. It is now 15 years since Heymann outlined his visionary master plan for the fledgling record company to an ambitious young reporter on the Glasgow Herald (as this paper was then) named Benedict Brogan, now the esteemed political editor of the Daily Mail.

Anyway, back to Naxos and its leadership. One critical, though less acknowledged, strand in its activities flows from Heymann's maximisation policy: get absolutely the most out of what you've got. This has given Naxos an unrivalled breadth. Earlier this year I was approached by a group of music lovers who wanted to get into Wagner but found themselves with a three-fold reaction: they were warily circling the subject, unwilling to go in at the deep end with, say, Decca's legendary but pricey version of the Ring; they were simultaneously bamboozled by the range of choices and intimidated by costs; and unanimously, they requested "help and guidance".

Naxos to the rescue. The company has a wealth of recordings of Wagner operas. They do not feature the biggest names in the business, but they are good enough for all but snobby, stuffy elitists and purists who tend to associate quality with the "bigness" of the artist. Naxos has fashioned two superbly useful products out of all this. Both feature the writer and broadcaster Stephen Johnson, who, for many, is the authoritative British voice of classical music (pace James Naughtie and Charles Hazlewood).

For Naxos Books, Johnson has produced a superb, broad introduction to Wagner that has a readable contemporary relevance, covers all the operas, touches on all the raw spots where this most controversial of composers is concerned, and comes equipped not only with two packed CDs drawing on the full Wagner output but also with a link to a dedicated website that contains myriad tributaries of music and information. It's at once comprehensive and wholly accessible to the lay Wagnerian.

If, on the other hand, The Ring is your target of interest, and you're happy for other people to do as much for you as possible, then Johnson has also written, and reads in his distinctive, chocolatey voice, An Introduction to the Ring of the Nibelung. This is a double CD in the series of Naxos Audio Books, which does great business.

If you want an altogether different (and wacky) approach to Wagner, Naxos's recent single CD of Leopold Stokowski's grandiose arrangements for orchestra of Wagnerian chunks - entitled Symphonic Syntheses - will give you the full, Technicolor over-the-top experience. Put all of these together and, simply, nobody else is doing anything quite like it.

Then there is the question of artists used. All record companies like to find house artists, then trumpet their names via glam marketing. Naxos just gets on with it, and the calibre of musician keen to be associated with the label steadily rises. Stephane Deneve, as we know, records for Naxos with the RSNO. The big London orchestras can be found on Naxos. Famously, conductor Marin Alsop has been fantastically productive for the company with a range of orchestras, not least the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.

Naxos has just signed up Vasily Petrenko, new principal conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, to record with them (first issue next year will be Tchaikovsky's still-neglected Manfred Symphony). The company recently brought into the family the stunning violinist Madeleine Mitchell (ex Fires of London). For the first batch of releases in 2008 they have snapped up the flavour-of-the-month soprano Elin Manahan Thomas, who will join the long line of Naxos artists championing the totally neglected music of English composer William Alwyn.

Which brings us to the issue of repertoire. And it's here, perhaps more than anywhere else, that Naxos leads the world. For all that Heymann and his team have spiralled off into the vanguard of the digital music industry, the heart and soul of the Naxos empire remains its unrivalled approach to repertoire for CD production.

Bluntly, Naxos will go where others fear to tread. The practical philosophy of making and selling records of classical music is this: if it's obscure, nobody plays it. If nobody plays it, nobody gets to know it. If nobody knows it, do not record it because it's uneconomical and you won't be able to sell it.

Unless your name happens to be Klaus Heymann and your company is Naxos. Heymann and his team have made an art form out of unearthing the neglected, getting it recorded and getting it out there. Glance through their new releases over just the last seven months to grasp the scale of the enterprise. May saw the release of Malcolm Arnold's wind music, along with a revelatory issue of his two string quartets played by the Maggini Quartet.

In July, pianists Ashley Wass (a Naxos regular) and Martin Roscoe released two-piano music by Arnold Bax, and Madeleine Mitchell and her group issued some deeply impressive chamber music pieces by William Alwyn. The same month saw releases in the complete Martinu piano music series, and a broad survey of Stanford's music, along with Penderecki's Te Deum (the great Polish composer has long been championed by Naxos).

In August Marin Alsop completed her Brahms symphony cycle, while the Royal Liverpool Phil turned its attention to Sir Arthur Sullivan through his Irish Symphony and Sir Charles Mackerras's arrangement of Pineapple Poll.

In October there was more Stanford with the second and fifth symphonies, more Arnold with offbeat, left-field piano concertos from the Ulster Orchestra, and a ravishing set of Canteloube's Auvergne Songs from the Orchestre National de Lille.

Last month Marin Alsop's powerful account of Bartok's opera Bluebeard's Castle was released (and reviewed here sharpish). I noticed somebody in a music magazine slamming the recording for its boomy acoustic. D'oh; that's point, dumbo. Castle. Boomy, cavernous acoustic. Mystery. Scary stuff. Geddit?

This month saw another in the unmissable Robert Craft series - Stravinsky's later ballet scores, featuring a glittering array of orchestras; volume three in Nigel North's unimpeachable Dowland lute music series; the Maggini Quartet's compete edition of Lennox Berkeley's three string quartets; and volume one in a survey of the piano music of William Alwyn by Ashley Wass.

See what I mean? Who else is doing anything remotely like this? The Hyperion label has its own famous Romantic concerto series, but the Naxos breadth is incomparable.

Obviously not everything is top-drawer. But we can't, for example, use the words "ignored", "forgotten" or "obscure" about William Alwyn for much longer. There's some good music here. And now it's out there.

And it will continue into next year. January will bring the world premiere recording of Shostakovich's music for the 1931 film Odna (with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra), Penderecki's Eighth Symphony, the next volume in Naxos's fabled American Classics series, and Elin Manahan Thomas, accompanied by Iain Burnside and guests, performing four song cycles by Alwyn.

The Naxos saga continues