Ok, I’ll kick off by telling you a brief history of time as I understand it. If cartoons have taught me anything, it’s that music started in the olden days when cavemen hit the amazingly-in-tune-ribs of dinosaur skeletons for the general amusement of their tribes, and to pass the time in between sleeping and eating and inventing fire. Everyone enjoyed a good old wail and music was born.

Later came the days of sophistication, and instruments which didn’t use rib cages were invented along with proper songs that people wanted to hear. The ‘best’ musicians could also get their music heard by more people than their local village, as there was a distribution system – roads! Troubadours would go from town to town singing their songs to whoever would pay them money – as Troubadours have to eat – but you could also make a pretty penny from the landed gentry.

Skip forward loads more and you start to get the first instances of recording music, and playing it back. The technology evolved and music became a lot more accessible, but there were overheads of printing pressing and marketing. I can’t imagine the logistics of being one of the early companies selling 78s as production costs would have been massively high and relatively few people could play it back! Headache.

Skip forward again to the late 70’s and early 80s (I did tell you it would be brief AND I’ve missed the bit that goes on about The Beatles) and technology gets cheaper still. Some vital things happened to music here. Firstly, it becomes cheaper and feasible for anyone to press up a load of vinyl and start a record label – Spiral Scratch is a great example of how the process of starting a record label was massively demystified and secondly, a bigger use of fanzines allowed music fans to talk to each other without having to go through the established media.

Ok, well this deliberately selective history brings us up to now. The starting up cost for a record label is as low as it’s ever been since the invention of CD Burners! More and more I find myself getting EPs from bands on CD-Rs at gigs.

But it goes further than that; we’re starting to see the CD-R label becoming a part of the landscape and I genuinely hope that this is the latest iteration of the burning DIY ethos. Some examples for you –

Cloudberry Records. A wonderful label based in Miami which specialises in jangly indiepop on 3” CD-Rs, the releases are limited to 100 and I daresay they send them to the four corners of the world. Popkids of the World Unite! The ethos is on the front page – Cloudberry believes in; unrequited love, systems of resistance, sense of community, DIY ethics and international socialism. You can get loads of free MP3s from their site too.

Asaurus Records. They say it’s alright to refer to them as the Wal-Mart of CD-R labels, and they have put out a large number of amazing bands. It’s run by musicians for musicians.

WeePOP Records. Back to the world of 3” CD-Rs, these come lovingly hand made and assembled in lovely brown paper bags. Look at their latest news and the pop-up sleeve and tell me that it isn’t something special.

And that’s just it, they’re something special. I’d rather have a CD-R in a lovingly hand made cover (the same care should be taken over the packaging as it is the music, unless you want your CD to look like everyone elses) than another proper CD with a printed top in a jewell case which is at least three times more expensive. I’ve used this blog to rave on to you about the fold-out-pirate-map Jesmond Villas CD-R cover, and the WeePOP-UP CD-R above is a good example too. I also got a lovely Wave Machines CD-R recently where the CD-R fits perfectly flush into a 5” circle cut in some cardboard. There are loads of ways to make your CD-Rs special.

There’s loads more examples well outside of indiepop too. I was browsing through the racks at Mono a few months ago to see that some noise bands in Glasgow such as Kylie Minoise are using CD-Rs too. Even Radiohead are doing it.

So there you go. Music has brought us here, to a place where you can ‘manufacture’ CD-Rs, hand-make-them-lovely, and pop them up on a website where it can be seen by everyone with internet access, and post them off to people round the world. You can build a community by starting a CD-R label of your band, and putting out stuff by bands you like too, who share an ethos or a sound. It’s now easier and cheaper to own a label now than it ever has been before in the history of music. Get one.

Here’s 100 CD-Rs. Now Start a Record Label.

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