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By the time Other Music closed last June, it had become more than a record store—it was a creative hub for independent music in New York City. So when the folks who program the eclectic Sunday Sessions at the Museum of Modern Art’s PS1 outpost were looking to create a music version of their annual art book fair, they could think of no better partner than the Other Music crew. Called Come Together and held this past Sunday, the event combined performances, films, workshops, and panels with a label fair that sought to channel the spirit of the record shop, down to its blue and orange color scheme.
“We had that place for 20 years and we were selling records,” says Other Music’s Josh Madell, “but the real energy was about the community in there—the artists hanging out, people from all the different labels, and people from all over the world passing through every day.”
At Come Together, there were workshops on sustainability, zine making, and virtual reality meditation; panels on the state of DIY in NYC and internet radio, and a live broadcast on-site with Know Wave Radio. But the heart of the event was the label fair, a pop-up market featuring some of independent music’s most forward-thinking labels, all packed into a room on PS1’s second floor, hawking their wares and communing with friends. As Titus Andronicus’ Patrick Stickles talked shop with Superchunk’s Laura Ballance at the Merge table, two kids grinned with glee at the next table, poring through records from Lio Kanine’s personal collection.
Finding ourselves amid what felt like the beating heart of the indie record business, we surveyed some label reps to take the pulse of the industry. Here’s what they had to say.
Laura Ballance // Co-founder, Merge Records
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Hometown: Durham, North Carolina
First album ever purchased: Black Stallion Soundtrack
Last album purchased: A Tribe Called Quest’s We Got it From Here…Thank You 4 Your Service (streamed)
Your label’s best-selling record of 2016: I really don't know.
Of all time: Arcade Fire, The Suburbs
How important is vinyl to your business? Cassettes?
All the formats are important in terms of percentage of sales, but vinyl takes a lot of our time and energy, and you have to pay a lot of attention to it. It helps put a record on the map, kind of. It has to look good, people notice it. We do some cassettes with some of our artists but not all of them. With the younger, hipper artists it seems like a good thing to do, but we wouldn't do a Mark Eitzel cassette, probably. I personally don't totally understand the cassette thing. Where are these people listening to these cassettes?
Do your customers care about hi-res audio?
Some but not all. We offer FLAC files on our web store. Most people don't know the difference. A lot of people accidentally buy FLAC files and they're like what the hell?!
Has streaming's dominance changed the way you approach your business?
It means we're making less money off of records, period. What it means is you have to be highly adaptable and strategic, and try to figure out how to promote records without spending money—sort of follow the wave or whatever. Honestly, I can't complain about streaming. Technology in the music industry—it changes all the time and it’s gonna keep changing. This is a phase, and we'll see where it goes from here.
Lio Kanine // Owner + President of Kanine Records
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Hometown: Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York
First album ever purchased: Echo & the Bunnymen, Crocodiles. I just fell in love with them day one when I was a kid.
Last album purchased: I just purchased Sneaks [It’s a Myth] across the hall at Merge.
Your label’s best-selling record of 2016: Probably the Fear of Men record [Fall Forever]
Of all time: I would have to say Surfer Blood, Astro Coast. That's already surpassed 20,000 copies on vinyl alone. We did the first Grizzly Bear record [Horn of Plenty] and got like half of that. But that Surfer Blood record just constantly still sells, and I'm about to press another 5,000. People like the classics.
How important is vinyl to your business?
It's everything. A lot of people I talk to who run labels are like, “Man, physical is like retarded, it's all about digital,” and they’re wrong. Because whether people are spending tons of money on physical product, there still is discovery, from coming to a store or fair, or people wanting to have something to collect and hold in their hand. If I was a band and someone said, “I’m only putting out your record digitally,” I would feel cheated a little that I worked this hard in my life and no one's gonna invest enough to put my art on a piece of plastic, you know? It's a form of identity.
Cassettes?
We do all formats for our bands—you should let the customer dictate to you what they want instead of you dictating to them. And they're telling me they want cassettes so I'm gonna make cassettes for them. I think it’s great, it's another music discovery tool where you can charge cheaper. Young kids don't have $20 bucks to buy a brand new vinyl, but maybe they have $20 bucks to buy four new cassettes—and they will. It's just another nostalgic thing for them to have, and it's cool.
Do your customers care about hi-res audio?
Not really. As long as it’s clean and fine.
Has streaming’s dominance changed the way you approach your business?
I really think it hasn't changed it drastically like everyone says. It's just another music discovery platform, and I try to keep all platforms even so that everyone has a chance to choose on their own. With Spotify, you can put it up early before you have the physical, and it can help you gauge how much physical product you should press. If I'm only getting 1,000 streams on a record that's been out two weeks, it might tell me there's not a large demand for this band so maybe only press 500 to start. If I'm getting hundreds of thousands of streams, you might press a couple thousand vinyl. The digital realm you can break down by territory and you can see where the band's more popular, so it can help a band decide where to tour heavier and spend more money on marketing in that area. When it was only physical, you couldn't do that until six months later, when you got the sheets from the stores that told you how much sold in each area.
Phil Tortoroli // Co-founder, Styles Upon Styles + Label Manager, RVNG Intl.
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Hometown: Queens, New York
First album ever purchased: Will Smith, Big Willie Style
Last album purchased:Jan Jelinek, the loop record [Loop-finding-jazz-records]
Your label’s best selling record of 2016: Zach Cooper'sThe Sentence (for Styles Upon Styles)
Of all time:Gabriel Garzón-Montano's debut EP [Bishouné: Alma del Huila]. It's very tight, it's a timeless record. Definitely our best seller, and keeps selling.
How important is vinyl to your business?
They're very important, not necessarily financially. They're important more to feel like an established label in the tradition of record labels—to be able to put forth something that keeps you within this longer narrative that involves labels from 1900s to now.
Do your customers care about hi-res audio?
Our customers who are DJs do, but the layman customer, I don't think so. For all of the stickers on our vinyl, we say if you want digital, to hit up a generic email and if people do, we just send them WAVs. We don't do download cards anymore, it's just extra waste. I'd rather have that communication with a fan and deliver it.
Has streaming's dominance changed the way you approach your business?
It's definitely a large part of our revenue now. We incorporate streaming into all of our marketing strategies, both pre-release and post-release. We spend as much time pitching Spotify curators as we do press. It's the equivalent of pitching radio 20 years ago.
What's the payola game like over there?
I'm trying to figure it out, I dunno. Who do I gotta pay?
Bri Aab // Radio Promotions Director, Beggars Group
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Hometown: Wilmington, North Carolina
First album ever purchased: Lou Bega’sMambo No. 5, whatever that one is [A Little Bit of Mambo]. And that is the only good song on that record, FYI.
Last album purchased: Probably Sneaks, Gymnastics. I tried to purchase that Arca 12-inch with hand-sewn fishnet stockings around it [“Reverie / Saunter”], and it sold out in a moment. I was at work and I was like, "This is on XL [a Beggars label]!" The people in the office who got it cheered and the people who didn't get it they were like, "fuck off!"
Your label’s best-selling record of 2016: It was probably Radiohead [A Moon Shaped Pool]
Of all time: I'll have to check Nielsen, but the ones that are up there are Queens of the Stone Age’s …Like Clockwork, Interpol, Vampire Weekend, the xx, Grimes
How important is vinyl to your business?
Super important. We didn't bring any CDs to this Matador table—you can kinda feel out a situation where you know you're gonna have a lot of vinyl purchasers. We have Matador Direct, our own distro team exclusively dedicated to retail, and that's primarily vinyl. We do a lot with indie retail, contests, giving them tickets and exclusive color vinyl, things like that.
Cassettes?
It depends on the band. For Car Seat Headrest, you release a billion albums on Bandcamp, you're a DIY kind of band, you're gonna have tapes. For some bands it doesn't make sense to have tapes, especially electronic bands. I think it doesn't sound great.
Do your customers care about hi-res audio?
Yeah. If I send out something that isn't a FLAC or a WAV, I catch shit for it immediately. It's a pretty intense scene. People aren't just listening on their laptops anymore.
Dre Skull // Owner, Mixpak
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Hometown: Cleveland, Ohio
First album ever purchased: A Michael Jackson record. It was a parent-directed purchase as a child, so I can’t even say definitively.
Last album purchased: Something that I used to have: I picked up a Congos record to introduce the music to my son.
Your label’s best-selling record of 2016: Either Popcaan’s Where We Come From or Palmistry’s Pagan.
Of all time: I don't have the numbers in front of me, but it's definitely either VYBZ Kartel’s Kingston Story or Popcaan’s Where We Come From.
How important is vinyl to your business? Cassettes?
It's not fundamentally important to our business in a financial sense, but obviously there's a market for it. It still has a powerful feeling to manufacture something, whether it’s for the artist to feel they've made something that's substantial in a physical form, or for us at the label to put all that energy—sometimes years of work—and to be able to hold it. But because we're reaching people all over this earth, if we were only working in physical formats, that would be holding us back. So we're definitely not trying to run from the digital consumption of music. I don't think we've done cassettes, but we would, and we probably will.
Do your customers care about hi-res audio?
We find that different artists in different genres are resonating in different consumption models. One of the most powerful places dancehall, for example, is consumed is on YouTube, and so clearly that's not about the quality of the audio—it's about the ease of access and the curation that happens there.
We deliver high-res audio through our distribution, so then it really becomes up to what stores are willing to sell and how it's gonna get priced. I've heard rumors that Apple is gonna get into the hi-res audio game, and we're happy to serve that market. I think there's different ways to listen to music, from a different point of view, and I want to serve those people if that's of interest. But also, I've had the best times and moving personal experiences listening to the worst quality mp3. It's the music, more than anything for me.
Has streaming's dominance changed the way you approach your business?
It's been really powerful and positive for our business. I think it's changing our future more so than changed what we've done so far, but it just gives us greater faith in investing and putting together big projects. Ultimately you're getting access to a global distribution platform, and you're not needing to push someone over that mental threshold of, "I’m ready to buy this." You just need to get them to, "I'm aware of this and I'm ready to listen to it." With streaming, the record industry as a whole is growing, but we see on a very personal level that the business is growing.
Bill Kouligas // Creative Director and Founder, PAN Image may be NSFW.
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Hometown: Berlin. I come from Athens originally.
First album ever purchased:Guns & Roses, Appetite for Destruction
Last album purchased: Visible Cloaks, Reassemblage by RVNG Intl.
Your label’s best-selling record of 2016: The last release we did by Yves Tumor [Serpent Music]. It crossed over into different worlds somehow.
Of all time: The Objekt album [Flatland] we did three years ago, plus all the Lee Gamble records sold really well. I don't really know who sold the most.
How important is vinyl to your business?
I wouldn't say it's really important, we just love vinyl and we're still romantic about it. But we've been doing a lot of different projects lately, using a lot of internet-based practices to present work. It could be websites themselves, or projects that expand over time online, or digital-only releases. So it's not that the vinyl is essential, it's just that a lot of music really translates well on the format.
Cassettes?
We've never done them.
Do your customers care about hi-res audio?
Some people do, but it's not too often. We sell in all formats anyway.
Has streaming's dominance changed the way you approach your business?
Of course, but it's a new era—it’s up to all labels and artists as well to create new ways to present music somehow. The digital era of things relies on technology that develops so fast every day, so even if you come up with something, in two months’ time, it will be old fashioned somehow. Which I think is also interesting because you can use it in a very creative way somehow, not just relying on a new way to do things and expect that to last for another 50 years or 100 years. Vinyl was crucial because it was a very advanced technology at the time that it happened, and it managed to last for so long. But when you're talking about digital ways to make music, it's a whole different scenario.
Adam Downey // Co-owner, Northern Spy Records
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Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
First album ever purchased: Meat Loaf, Bat Out of Hell
Last album purchased: Moor Mother, Fetish Bones
Your label’s best-selling record of 2016: Probably the Horse Lords record [Interventions] or Ravi Shankar’s In Hollywood, 1971, which is not a reissue. It had never been released.
Of all time: Maybe Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog. The album's called Your Turn. That or the Shilpa Ray’s Last Year's Savage.
How important is vinyl to your business? Cassettes?
Vinyl is hugely important, mostly because that's what my artists want, and that's what they sell on the road. For us, artists are the best-selling store now, just at the merch table after playing. Cassettes are also important. They're easy to transport and cheap to make, and if we want to try out a band we really dig that doesn't have a huge tour planned, it's easy to press a cassette, put it out there and see how people react.
Do your customers care about hi-res audio?
I would have said no a month ago, but recently I’ve been listening to our test press copies on a very hi-fi system, and when something's super compressed, it really comes through. When there's no space and depth to the sound, it's super obvious on a really beautiful system. I think some people care, and if some people care… our audience is small, everyone matters.
Has streaming's dominance changed the way you approach your business?
Oh fuck. It's crazy. It's something we just think about a lot now. We put out a cassette and digital release by this artist Odetta Hartman, and didn't think it would do anything, and all of a sudden it had a million streams on Spotify, and she was getting better gig offers. It was kind of an a-ha moment. Like holy crap, we can kind of take risks on small things and maybe they'll take off on Spotify. Spotify is just one of our biggest accounts now. It's a weird world.