How To: Set Up a Record Label

Andy Vine brings you the ultimate guide on how to set up a record label from his own experience.

When I graduated Uni in 2007, I had a seasonal job working at Asda in Radcliffe. I moved in with my then girlfriend to a flat in Stockport, so naturally I packed that job in. What followed were three months of unemployment. In between bouts of watching This Morning and making cups of tea, I started making music, mainly sample based electronica on my laptop.

 

I had previously been in a disastrous pop punk band called Serednycky in college (named after our tutor who looked like a cross between Carlos Santana and Captain Pugwash; a very strong look, I’m sure you’ll agree), although we had a drummer who couldn’t play drums and we never played a gig. We were booked for two gigs, a mate’s birthday party and our college’s battle of the bands competition, but my mate forgot to tell us when his birthday was and the battle of the bands was cancelled because we were the only band who sent a demo. The demo is still online somewhere, but I digress.

A couple of years ago the hard drive of my laptop packed in, as hard drives of laptops are want to do when they’ve been in constant use for five years. Fortunately, literally the day before I had backed up most of my stuff. Not the music I had been casually squirreling away though, so the only evidence I had of it were the tracks uploaded to Soundcloud. They were set for free download, so I downloaded my own back catalogue. No one had ever shown much interest in my music until last year when I was featured on a couple of podcasts. I had at various points in the last few years talked about starting another band but nothing had ever happened. No one seemed to take my requests seriously, which is fair enough considering the fact that I can barely remember how to play the three guitar chords I taught myself at 16 before starting a band. Not to mention the fact that I am a fairly ridiculous man.

Jim Carrey

At the beginning of this year, I found myself unemployed again and have been for around three months now. I moved house into my girlfriend’s flat, ostensibly to save money again but we’d been planning to anyway. I don’t know if it was the parallels with what happened when I graduated which planted the seed of this latest creative endeavor or if it was more to do with the fact that my telly’s not working properly and there are only so many X Files marathons one man can take, but they’re certainly worth drawing attention to. I have for a long time dreamed of starting a record label, inspired by micro labels run by friends and acquaintances. I felt like I was getting to a point with my own music where I wanted to clear the decks of my old stuff, especially the stuff from before my hard drive gave up the ghost. I’m still making my music using the same shed of a laptop, but I’ve got better ideas of how to bend the software to my iron will; I was feeling myself fall into lazy habits and using the same palette of sounds on tracks. It’s not that I didn’t like my old stuff, I just wanted a clean break from it. Especially considering that with the older stuff, as much as I still like them, I couldn’t edit them any further if I wanted to having lost the stems that made them up. So I decided to put an album together and release it on my own label.

 

This sounds much grander than the reality. I’m a big fan of the album format, for all the post-iPod Shuffle think pieces on how the album is dead. It’s a nice thing to put together a collection of your best tunes to date and give them a track-listing, a Name and some Artwork. The physical product is important to me as well. Being an entitled prick, I resent paying for MP3’s, especially having seen how easy it is to lose them just by not backing up your hard drive properly, but my (impractically large) collection of CDs and (much smaller) vinyl speaks for itself. I like holding things in my hands, the ritual of going to a record shop and, you know, buying a record. I’m old enough to remember being ripped off the best part of twenty quid for a new release I’d read about in NME or whatever only for it to be rubbish when I got it home. So I want to release something that’s actually A Thing as well as being downloadable. At the moment all my stuff’s available to download for free on Soundcloud anyway, so it needs to be a bit more special.

 

Special’s one thing, but I’ve no job or savings, so the budget is precisely zero. When I was moving house, I found a small box of cassettes that I had collected from my parents’ house a couple of years ago when my friends’ band were releasing an EP. There had been talk of doing a limited run of tapes, and I came up with an idea for the artwork. It involved taking all the inlays out and placing them next to each other on a board or something, and then painting the artwork in a large scale across all of them, so none of the individual tapes had the full artwork on. If I remember correctly, it’s an idea I stole from one of the Ting Tings’ early singles, but they did it with 7″ record sleeves that people brought to gigs and no one remembers them nowadays anyway, so it’s an idea I can steal at will, providing I don’t draw anyone’s attention to the fact. Bugger. Whatever, what’s that Oscar Wilde quote, “talent borrows, genius steals”, right? Not that I’m calling myself a genius of course, that’s not my place to say…

 

So I put the tracklisting together for the record and it’s sequenced to work well over two sides. I can’t afford any outlay on making the physical copies, so I decided to tape over these cassettes I’ve found. There’s 13 of them, and if you’re going to do a super limited run of your record (if only because you’re pretty sure no one will want to buy it) then 13 is a good number, right? That or 69, dudes! My parents are pretty devout Christians and my mum loves pop music, so it’s a weird mix of stuff like the first Spice Girls album and weird Christian kiddy pop. Don’t worry, I’ve since joined Michael Stipe and lost my religion but now I’ve said too much. There’s something delightfully perverse about taping over 13 copies of Christian pop music with my weird shit electronica. Someone once said that I had invented noise funk. I find it difficult to label my own stuff, and anyway us pioneers don’t have time to think about that sort of thing. It’s like the Wild West out here, give me a break.

 

I sourced a tape deck after a Facebook appeal from a former colleague who likes to spend his spare time building life size Daleks (this is a Very Cool Thing to do, one of them has appeared on actual Doctor Who, shut up). All I need to do now is figure out how to hook my laptop up to my amp to make recording the cassettes possible, sort out the artwork and the Bandcamp page and then actually get the debut album by Autoflag, Doggerel, released on Dead Pheasant Recordings to the world. I think this is the first place I’ve actually mentioned the name so that’s an exclusive for you right there. At least I’ve still got some time off before I start my new job, I don’t think my girlfriend would appreciate me playing the record through 13 times. Although she did tell me the other day that she actually likes some of my music. Only some of it though, some of it she called “unlistenable noise shit”.

Read more from Andy at: dead-pheasant.blogspot.co.uk/ or his Twitter via @deadpheasant

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