Caroline Hamilton boasts one of the most singular résumés imaginable: investment banker, film financier, polar explorer. The founder and managing director of a London-based investment fund management firm aptly called Icebreaker, Hamilton is applying her survival skills on the perilous trail of the music business.

"Yes, the industry is in a state of flux. But that creates opportunities for people like our investors," says Hamilton in a telephone interview. "It means that there are better products out there that [investors] can get involved with than in the glory days of the majors, when both big acts and bands wouldn't be available to people like us."

Icebreaker Management Services Ltd. offers what it and others believe to be a unique financing option that combines something akin to venture capital with many of the functions traditionally the domain of record labels. Hamilton's firm uses a British corporate structure called a limited liability partnership (which is different from an American LLP). Icebreaker groups together investors into an investment pool. Unlike limited partners in a typical venture capital or private equity fund, these partnerships, which tend to be in the vicinity of £10 million ($15.6 million) each, can opt into (or out of) individual projects.

Icebreaker itself partners with a Dublin-based firm, Shamrock Solutions Ltd., which acts as project manager. Shamrock is responsible for identifying artists, signing them to recording contracts and teaming up with production companies. ("We don't call them labels," says Shamrock director Chris Hutton.)

These production houses produce, market and sometimes distribute the albums. Shamrock bundles together typically three or four record projects in pools that Icebreaker can offer to its investment partnerships.

"If they like what we're doing, what we're preparing to do, they give us the funding and engage us to exploit the funding," said Hutton during a recent visit to New York. "We put a bunch of projects together that take into account risk-return ratios," he said, combining some surer bets and known names with new artists.

Conquering music may sound like a tough order. Hamilton puts that task in perspective. "It's very hard to push me," says Hamilton, who, along with a companion, is the first woman to ever walk/ski to both the North and South Poles in all-female expeditions.

Hamilton describes her last major expedition. In 2002, she and a mother of triplets successfully trekked to the North Pole. The 500-mile journey took 81 days, an agonizing and agonizingly slow undertaking. During one 37-day stretch, they traveled only 37 miles.

"We had a really tough time," she says. "We got caught in various storms, one of which was so bad, we couldn't get a tent up and we basically lay on the ice, wrapped in tent fabric, waiting to die. We came out of that. We came out of another storm. And another storm. One of my teammates had carbon monoxide poisoning. We all got frostbite. We all fell through the ice."

Frostbite in fact forced a third team member to drop out. After one particularly terrible stretch, Hamilton began to think that she might have to call it quits as well. "But I never wanted to give up," she says.

Hamilton wasn't a hard-core skier or an avid rock climber. She got the bug from a conversation with the polar explorer boyfriend of her friend. "I met him at a barbecue. He told me about his life. It was captivating," she recalls. "Basically, I thought, if he can do it, I said I could do it."

In 1997, Hamilton joined a North Pole relay. She led a four-woman team that anchored the relay and reached the pole. In 2000, she and four other women successfully trekked to the South Pole.

For Hamilton, that effort was a lesson in perseverance. "I think I took 30,200 steps a day," she recalls of the South Pole expedition. "These sort of calculations consumed me: If I can glide one inch, how many free miles am I getting out of this? I discovered determination I had no idea I had."

Hamilton declines to give her age, though older reports indicate she is in her mid-40s.

She is asked whether another expedition is in the wings. "Having set Icebreaker up, it's hard to take the time off," she begins, but veers back on course. "The friendships and the camaraderie, it's not like anything else. Being out, alone, being completely self-sufficient with really, really close friends is very compelling. I'd absolutely love to do it again. ... One day, the plan will evolve and we'll be off."

Meanwhile, she's focused on more pedestrian matters. A few months back, the prominent British independent music label Cooking Vinyl announced what it called a "unique partnership" with Icebreaker. The label's artists gain access to Icebreaker funds, which can underwrite what Cooking Vinyl said were "a number of high-profile signings."

In fact, these funds allow more expensive projects than normally possible for an indie like Cooking Vinyl. They provide an alternative to major-label deals, which a growing number of artists eschew. The first announced project is a new album by the glam rocker Marilyn Manson.

"They need cash. We can aid cash flow," Hutton says.

The structure Hamilton crafted is similar to film financing. That makes sense, considering her background. Beginning in the mid-'80s, she worked in structured finance with both what was then Samuel Montagu & Co. Ltd. and what was then Kleinwort Benson Ltd. and specialized in film and television. For a decade from 1993, Hamilton developed a kind of insurance for movie projects and advised insurance companies on risk assessment.

When she founded Icebreaker in 2004, film was her first option. It wasn't a huge success. "In [the U.K.], nobody can make any money on film. Film is just tired," Hamilton says. "The big breakthrough in our business came when we moved away from film."

In theory, Icebreaker can structure deals in any aspect of intellectual property related to creative industries. It has dabbled in software development and image rights. But it's music that has become a preferred niche.

Given music's sorry state, that sounds counterintuitive and, frankly, a bit daft.

Hamilton says investors in Britain continue to perceive music as an art form that can produce a return.

Hutton adds that the partnership arrangement allows investors to "take a flutter on music and learn about this new world," where major labels no longer have a stranglehold on the business.

According to Hutton, Shamrock has done approximately 120 music-related deals in the past five years, the "vast majority" in association with Icebreaker. "A large percentage have given back revenues to the partnerships," he says. In 2012, he expects to release 35 new albums, including a 50th anniversary Dionne Warwick issue.

Hutton has been working with Hamilton since she founded Icebreaker. In the first few years, he and his partner worked on rounding up LPs. Their common financial background helps. "We can speak her language," he says, calling their relationship "fantastic."

They can part ways. Hutton recalls asking Hamilton whether she was ready for a forthcoming vacation to Greenland. Hamilton replied that she was, save for the issue of how to deter unwanted polar bears. "Not my idea of a holiday," Hutton says.