The Waveform #017: The Label in the Spare Room

Our bookkeeper asked me last week what a record label actually does, and I got three sentences in before I ran out of things that are still true. Pressing, distribution, promotion and the warehouse can all be rented by the week now, mostly from the same three suppliers. What is left is taste, a calendar, and somebody willing to answer the emails at eleven at night. She wrote that down as though it were a business model, and I suppose this week it is.

How Bedroom Labels Quietly Rebuilt the Music Industry

June Okafor spent two months with one and two-person labels who are beating the majors at logistics, which is not where anybody expected that fight to be won. Pressing slots booked eighteen months out, release dates moved by text message, five hundred mailers packed on a kitchen table the night before a deadline. The piece is also honest about what the arrangement costs the people running it, which is usually a job and a weekend.

Also this week

• The $80 Mic That Refuses to Die. Petra Lindqvist on the cheap dynamic that keeps ending up on records nobody expects, and why engineers refuse to retire it.
• 'Brutalist Lullabies' Is Exactly What It Says It Is. Concrete-hall reverb and nursery melodies, from a record about raising a child in a building nobody loves.

One more thing

We are building a list for the autumn: one-person labels, anywhere in the world, still actively shipping. Not the ones with a distributor and a press agent, but the ones where the person who approved the master is also the person queueing at the post office on a Saturday morning. Reply with a name, a link and how many releases in they are, and if it is your own label, say so rather than pretending to be a fan. I intend to read every single one, which is a promise I may come to regret.

Have a good week. Ada