Search options (Page 8 of 27)

This is superb.

Thanks a lot! Have you got a link to your music? Would love to check it out.

FWIW, I've actually sold a lot more of my releases when I've put them out on tape as opposed to digital only. People like to have something physical for their hard earned cash, especially when it's a limited run. It's really awesome to get orders in from folks in the US and Japan, who wouldn't have bought the download only copy otherwise.

All of what you are saying makes sense, or at least, it would if we were talking about somebody entering into a contract with a traditional for-profit corporation, rather than some member of the chip community who is DIY releasing 10-20 tapes at a time.

Let me spell it out really clearly:

I make music because I enjoy it, not because I have any lofty career aspirations. My friends and I work on different projects under different names, and release a lot of different material. After doing so for years, working on an album for months and then just sticking it up for download at the end of it felt really anti-climactic and deeply unsatisfying. As a result, I started making a handful of tapes to have some sort of tangible, physical thing to show for it at the end of the process.

It made sense to gather all of these releases under a single 'label' umbrella, and promote them together, rather than from disparate alias Bandcamp accounts. I realised there was a bunch of other folks similar to us who would like to have some kind of different physical component to their album release, and that's who I am on the lookout for. People can of course go and do this for themselves, and I'd encourage them to do so, just like I'd encourage people to modify their Game Boys themselves. Not everybody wants to spend the time or effort to source cassette decks and tapes and cases and labels and do the duplication themselves though, especially not for something they do as a side project in their spare time.

There are plenty of services out there who do tape printing, duplication, and the like - but charge a pretty penny for the pleasure. For the cost of materials, I am doing everything including hosting the tapes and dealing with postage, and then sending the proceeds to the artists once the merchant has taken their processing fees. When I have taken a 'small commission', it has literally just been rounding up the PayPal deduction to the nearest £. That is something like 30p per sale - so £3 on a release of 10 tapes - which goes towards the domain name costs, and buying stickers to include with every tape. Even taking any considerations of the time I've spent on the process out of the equation, the net result is that I actually lose cash on any release I put out, while the artist makes a bit of money back. So why bother? I do it because I want to help folk release their music in a slightly different way from just a digital download.

If it helps you to think of this as a collaboration, or a distribution service, or something else rather than a 'label', then cool. The bottom line is that I am making and selling tapes for a few fellow musicians like myself who won't be able to sell more than a handful of physical releases, and only asking that they cover the negligible initial cost of the materials. Trying to compare this to dealing with an actual commercial record label, or as some sort of money making scheme is laughable.

I'm not going to be responding to any further criticisms from folk who are dropping by to have a pop based on false comparisons. If people want to 'Google for 15 minutes' and do it themselves then awesome. I'm not sure what attacking me as if I am some sort of Richard Branson figure is meant to achieve. As it stands I currently have too many releases on the go to take anything more on anyway.

p.s. Dropped you a PM

This is pretty great, and the artwork is really awesome too. Who is the artist?

p.s. that kick is wild. Would love more of an idea on how you managed that.

That's some serious kick drum. Was it all on LSDJ?

Impressive stuff.

Still no reply.