Local DIY labels run on love, not money
by Joe Tarr
With the demise of the V-roys, drummer Jeff Bills and guitar player Mic Harrison turned their attention to some old projects they had worked on. Harrison had an album of old material he'd recorded and wanted to put out, and Bills wanted to rerelease some of his earlier bands' albums on CD.
They knew there was no hope of finding a record label interested in releasing any of these CDs, but they also knew there were people out there who would want to buy them. So, they did what so many other musicians are doing these days—did it themselves. The former bandmates formed Lynn Point Records (lynnpoint.com) and have so far put out eight releases from seven bands—most recently the Westside Daredevils' all things small produce a spark.
"I had been involved with a label for five years and I learned a lot," Bills says of his V-roys years. "No one was going to be interested in putting out old-school Knoxville bands. You've got some huge labels and a few cool ones, and everybody else is doing it by themselves. More and more, instead of playing the major label game, people are doing it themselves."
When CDs first came out, some speculated they would spell the death of small independent labels. But exactly the opposite happened. Instead, the technology got cheaper and the Internet made it possible for artists to market their music to the world, without needing big promo budgets, airplay or a national tour.
Today, it's much easier to release and sell CDs on your own than it ever was to release vinyl.
And since so many people do it, it's hard to know how many local labels there are. Just what exactly is an "indie" label is hard to define. One of the larger Knoxville labels—Disgraceland Records (www.disgraceland.com)—is actually run out of Nashville by ex-Knoxvillians. Most of the local hip hop and rap is also self-produced, on labels probably impossible to count.
"There are bands that put out their own record and it becomes a label," says musician Todd Steed.
Many of the labels start with a band doing it themselves and then using their experience to help others. Bills has helped a number of bands, but he says there's no real trick to it. "It's a labor of love, just helping people out. After a while, they could do it all themselves."
Many small bands would probably prefer to do it on their own. "I found out that no one loves your baby more than you do," Steed says. "No one is going to understand or care about your music more than the person who creates it. There are exceptions to that. But I guess it gets down to being a control freak."
There's no set pricetag for what it costs to put out a CD because there are too many variables. It can be done on a shoestring or with heaps of cash you may never get back. How it gets recorded is one of the biggest factors. Do it in an expensive studio with a hired producer and engineer, and the costs will go through the roof. Record it in your living room on your own, and the price is a lot more manageable.
Something of a godfather to the local music scene, Steed rereleased two old Smoking Dave and the Premo Dopes records on his new label, Apeville (www.apeville.com). He's currently working on a record of songs all about Knoxville—with local musicians like R.B. Morris, Harrison, Bills, Scott Miller and Kat Brock singing or playing on various tracks. Eventually, he'd like to put out other Knoxville bands on his label.
Steed is lucky enough to have his own recording equipment, and the guest musicians have donated their time.
"At Apeville, we don't want to lose too much. So far all the records have broken even," Steed says. "There comes the issue of how much do you want to spend and how much can you justify. It's hard for me to justify going into a $60-an-hour studio. Can I make a decent sounding record at home? You be the judge of that."
Glenn Reynolds, a UT law professor, formed Wonderdog Records (wonderdogr.tripod.com) with his brother Jonathan and a friend, lawyer Doug Weinstein, in order to put out CDs by their band, Defenders of the Faith. But they've gone on to produce records by other artists, including Terry Hill, Hector Qirko, Balboa and Mobius Dick. "We discovered that we liked making CDs, but we also kind of liked selling them," Reynolds says. "We felt the Knoxville market was under-served and that there were a lot of things people weren't hearing."
They have their own studio, which keeps production costs down (although you certainly have to include the investment in equipment).
"It's really cheap," Reynolds says. "You could not have done this 10 years ago. Ten years ago we would have been able to put out one CD every two or three years."
The CD can be produced in one of two ways. The cheapest and easiest is by making CD-Rs, and this can be done on your own computer or by small companies that burn them cheaply. Wonderdog Records uses an Internet company that burns CDs to order. "They take out about $3 a CD, which is not bad, and very low effort for us," says Reynolds. Most of their sales are made via the Internet, and they've had people order them from places obscure as Reunion Island (off the coast of Madagascar), as well as Iraq and Iran.
"If we hear somebody we like a lot, we'll try to get it out so people will hear it," Reynolds says. "We're not organized to make money, and believe me we don't. We don't own the copyright, so it's a pretty good deal for the band. We've been able to run it at a break-even basis, which we've been able to do by being cheapskates and the fact that we own our studio. And it's getting so much cheaper to do this stuff."
But there are drawbacks to CD-Rs. For one thing, many record stores won't carry them because they're prone to have more defects and they can be a bit mercurial depending on the CD player.
The second option is to do a factory-produced glassmaster. These are CDs made just like the major labels do it, with a stamp created to press the CDs. The downside here is that it's hard to find any company that will manufacture less than 1,000 glassmaster CDs. So unless you can sell a lot of records, you're going to be left with a large bill and several boxes of CDs that you might as well use as coasters.
Bills says that unless a band plans to tour a lot, has some cash for promotion or has a big name locally, there's not much sense in making a glassmaster.
There's an old joke in the music business that the musicians are always the last people to get paid. Of course, it's an exaggeration. But except for big-selling artists, major labels don't have a lot of incentive to worry about making musicians happy.
"These guys [music industry people] make money," Bills says. "Everybody in the music industry makes money except the musicians. The music industry is populated by former musicians who said, 'I want to make some money.'"
Bills got to the see the workings of— if not a major—at least a label with some clout. The V-roys released two records on Steve Earle's E-Squared label, which had major label distribution and decent promotion.
"Our experiences there are still paying off to this day," Bills says. "Plus, we got to see behind the screen and see how the wizard really works. Most people don't have any idea how it really works. A lot of it has to do with contracts. This abstruse language. They're all legalese. [Bands] don't realize the amount of people involved. It's a hard business and there's a lot of competition. And it's geared toward people who have been doing it a long time. You're not going to run out of bands."
That ultimately motivated him to create his own label. He's not getting rich doing it. Lynn Point keeps costs as low as they can, and when they sink a lot of money into something, they expect to get it back. The upside is they have more control. "I wanted to be a little more proactive instead of sitting back and waiting and waiting," Bills says. "When you do it yourself, you know where it's at at every step of the process."
Reynolds says the control that artists are getting over their own music is something that could revolutionize the recording industry. "My belief is that a lot of the stuff you see the record industry doing against piracy is also against independent artists. They realize musicians can bypass them and do quite well.
"It opens up the game so anybody can play. Most of the artists I [listen to] now are independent. The future of the recording industry might just be with independents. That's going to be tough on the guys with fancy cars and cocaine habits, but I think it'll be good for the rest of us."
August 1, 2002 * Vol. 12, No. 31
© 2002 Metro Pulse
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