How to Start a Cassette Record Label on Next to No Money

by Christina Gubala of Complicated Dance Steps

It felt like neither George nor I ever had any money. From our competitive vinyl purchasing to our penchant for gourmet pastrami sandwiches in the late afternoons, we always found a way to keep our collective financial situation “paycheck to paycheck”. I was working as the receptionist at the majorist of major record labels, while he worked at the Hydra Head-owned Vacation Vinyl in Silver Lake, and in the evenings he’d listen to me vent about how much I resented the so-called music being peddled to the masses via my company. It was endlessly frustrating to watch the industry throw stupid marketing ideas at the wall to see what stuck, while those of us with the chuztpah to call bullshit on both the methods and the products were relegated to service positions (i.e. the reception desk). I can’t tell you how many times George and I daydreamed (most psychedelically) of our eventual record label, but the constant lack of funds made it seem like the most esoteric of dreams. George’s band, Sneaky Snake, had been recording in our garage for a few months, and while their work was undeniably serene, there was no avenue through which it could travel into the public arena, aside from a few scattered shows in the strangest corners of Los Angeles (I attended Sneaky Snake shows inside a teepees overlooking Downtown LA, a pyramid constructed from pallets, and a pea-soup-foggy living room, just to name a few). Something had to give.

My disgruntledness at work was boiling to a fever pitch, while George’s sanguine demeanor had earned him friendly relationships with all kinds of inspirational denizens of the town. On September 27, 2010, the day after my 26th birthday, I walked into work with one mission: to give them, in no uncertain terms, the business end of my middle finger. I quit without a plan, without securing another source of income or having saved anything, but it didn’t matter. The promise of unregulated existence was enough of a future for me. After I quit, we found that entertaining ourselves was becoming more and more creative, as we were pointedly more broke than before. Sneaky Snake had a quiver full of excellent tracks ready for the publication, and all around us it seemed like our musically-inclined friends were experimenting with their own recordings. George’s coworker, Pete Majors, and his band Harassor had recently recorded a few doom metal synth tracks with Bobb Bruno of Best Coast at the production helm. Our friend Tim Phillips of LA’s dreamy local band Young Hunting had been cogitating over his solo project, Tenstairs, for a solid year and a half and was finally feeling finished. Son Fish, who wishes to maintain anonymity, met George at the record store one lonely afternoon after having just relocated from Central California to the city of Angels, and they became friends after he confessed his precision with a Kaoscillator. The stars were aligning around us, and though I was thoroughly disgusted with the business practices of my former employer, I still burned with the desire to work in and around music.

“Complicated Dance Steps” is a lyric from the Tindersticks’ song “Marbles”, and for about four years, it had been the name of George’s music blog (www.complicateddancesteps.blogspot.com). The nomenclature was almost a pseudonym for him, so naming our cassette label was effortless. We toyed with logos and typefaces, settling on a vaguely Warholian image and the immaculate Helvetica. We purchased a domain and after countless arguments over the website, agreed on a working model, and all of a sudden, our daydream-concieved cassette label was, to some capacity, real! At this point, the only money we had spent was on the domain, so we kept going. Our friends at Pour Le Corps Records, the Denton, TX-based indie label, recommended National Audio Company (NAC) to us (they had experience with them and knew of their expedience and tendency to throw in “thank you” bonuses like special chrome tape and reduced shipping costs). We requested a quote for the Sneaky Snake cassette, agreeing that we would have them pressed through NAC and print, cut and insert all the artwork ourselves. The quote for a run of 100 24-minute cassettes was around $90, far less than we had anticipated. We requested quotes for Harassor, Son Fish, and Tenstairs, and met the same delightful result; to press 100 cassettes of each of the albums, the total was under $500, including art and cassette imprinting. We were manufacturing! So far, we began to examine how we wanted to conduct our business. We wanted to be fair to our artists, maintain our integrity, and minimize any unnecessary drama or complication with the process. I had recently been lent a typewriter, and one evening George and I sat down with it and began composing our manifesto as a label.

Our business model was simple: we press 100 tapes, give 50 to the artist with which they may do as they please, and sell/distribute the remaining 50 to recoup the cost of the pressing. We rejected ownership of the rights to the music — our artists maintain complete creative control — and encouraged them to establish Bandcamp pages through which they could sell the digital tracks and receive 100 percent of the profit (after Bandcamp took it’s chunk, of course). We requested that each of our artists sign a page acknowledging their relationship with us (for “CYA” reasons), and asked that if they choose to go elsewhere with their music, that they inform us personally, so that we could adjust our budget. It was really coming along, and we still hadn’t spent more than $600 total (though I did splurge a little on business cards, out of vanity).

With all of our releases set to arrive mid-December, we figured it would be an excellent opportunity to debut our little label to the world right before everyone broke for the holidays. After asking a few venues about their rental fees, my spirits were somewhat dashed. I had my heart set on an opium-den-cum-brothel-cum-artspace for our coming out party, but they asked $2000 for the night (I spit my drink out onto the computer upon receiving that dreadful email). It seemed like a show was a bit out of our financial league, and I’ll admit to letting it fetter me briefly. In retrospect, I’m a little chagrined at the time it took us to realize the solution to our problem. In a moment of clarity, we remembered that George worked at the sweetest record store in all of Los Angeles, which happened to host in-stores almost weekly. He asked his boss if they wouldn’t mind providing our modest endeavor a forum, and they agreed without thinking twice. It was a stoke of luck, but we had a free venue and essentially free promotion through the store and their web presence for our little label showcase. I spent the week prior flyering around town, Facebooking up a storm, and entreating our loved ones to come check it out. The night of our showcase, however, it started raining in Los Angeles. For those of you unfamiliar with the culture here, rain might as well be hot lava. People have no idea how to accommodate it, be they driving, shopping, walking with umbrellas, or trying to motivate to get out of the house in the morning. Rain in LA throws a wrench into all of our operations to a noticeable degree, and we figured our attendance rates were doomed. Son Fish, Tenstairs and Sneaky Snake were going to be playing to just me, alone in the dark on a gloomy night at Vacation Vinyl.

Folks, let me give you a piece of advice. Don’t underestimate the goodwill of the people who love you. In spite of the shitty weather, friend after friend silently sneaked in the door and took their place among the record bins to behold our maiden showcase. Hell, my mom and dad braved 3 hours of traffic from Orange County to come out and buy some tapes (in spite of the fact that I had taken their only cassette player as my own)! All three bands played concise yet moving sets, and at the end of the night, we had sold over $100 worth of cassettes (at $5 each). I was teary-eyed and George was glowing with pride. We had made back 1/6 of the total cost of our operation in a single night, and we didn’t even have a distribution apparatus in place yet!

In the weeks following the showcase, we retreated into the holiday mindset and let the label rest on its modest laurels for a while. Tapes were selling at Vacation at a clip I found hard to believe, but it was nice to relax a little and just watch it marinate. March 18th marks the release date of our second batch of tape, and they’re doozies. Expect to see cassettes from Eyes, Wings and Many Other Things (EWAMOT, affectionately), Shade Brigade (Showtime’s Next Stop For Charlie’s Erik Adolphson), Center Divider, Xander Harris and Sneaky Snake’s Ian James on www.complicateddancesteps.com, as well as in indie record stores all over California and Texas. This always seemed so impossible, to live a dream like this, but, to paraphrase the Minutemen, “our [label] could be your life!”