I’m exercising these days.  I get up at 6:30 every morning, which I hate, and pedal on an exercise bike for 50 minutes, which I kind of hate, while reading, which I like and takes my mind off clock watching and the pain in my leg muscles, which I (of course) hate.  I have, however learned to love sweating.  Most folks know me as somewhat, um, burly as I have slowly put on weight since, er, I was born.  Plateaus last a few years before more pounds gradually appear.  My father said to me last month that I’m destined to become him.  He’s not waddlingly, morbidly obese, but he is fairly big, struggling on diets for as long as I can remember.  This year it’s Jenny Craig.  A few years back, it was Atkins.  He doesn’t exercise much.  I never exercised.  Two weeks ago, I shaved my beard of three years to see how much weight I’d put on in the interim.  Crap.  I started husky and, well, I got fat.  I don’t know about you, but when I look in the mirror and become disgusted with myself, it’s time for change. 

That’s sort of how I’ve been feeling professionally.  We’ve been struggling and simultaneously trying to pay down debt that, under normal market conditions (say, our first 8 years), should be gone by now.  Newsflash, fatty, market conditions are not normal.  Nobody’s going to buy out the label so you can settle your debts and you can’t bank on that lottery ticket.  We’re at the point where no single record is going to turn things around.  I think about the future of the label as well as this industry at all hours of the day. It can take a toll, brother.  The debt is the worst.  It’s far worse to owe money than to be broke.  I kept waiting for change, some fabulous technological breakthrough or government plan to stop the erosion into all out piracy.  In the headlines of some, there’s no stopping it.  The music industry is dying, they say.  The label is dead, they say.  We’re all waiting for change. Ha!

I read a book called Switch: How To Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip & Dan Heath.  These guys write a monthly column for Fast Company magazine in which a chapter of the book was excerpted.  I may be very out about my geekiness of all things music, food and comic books, but my dirty little secret is that I read Fast Company cover to cover every month for the last four or five years.  The book is great, an easy read that focuses on how to make change in yourself, your company and even your country, as is the case in the aforementioned excerpted chapter where a man named Jerry Sternin traveled to Vietnam to help defeat the rampant malnutrition among children there.  Sternin had no budget and six months to make change before the Vietnamese government pulled the plug.  Most experts, when looking at the problem, assumed these were massive infrastructural issues - clean water supply, poverty, lack of medicine, insufficient food, poor sanitation - that couldn’t be solved without a massive overhaul and millions of dollars in investment (at least).  These problems were real, but millions of children couldn’t wait for them to be addressed.  Sternin went to a small village and inquired as to whether there were any larger, healthier children there.  There were and, as the Heaths put it, “The mere existence of healthy kids provided hope for a practical, short-term solution.” He found differences in how their parents fed them (4 smaller meals a day rather than 2 large ones) and what they fed them (atypical kid food like sweet potato greens as well as shrimp and crabs from the rice paddies). Armed with this knowledge, did Sternin set about educating or enforcing a new code?

“The community designed a program in which 50 malnourished families, in groups of 10, would meet at a hut each day and prepare food together. The families were required to bring shrimp, crabs, and sweet-potato greens. The mothers washed their hands with soap and cooked the meal together. Sternin said that the moms were “acting their way into a new way of thinking.” Most important, it was their change, something that arose from the local wisdom of the village. Sternin’s role was only to help them see that they could do it, that they could conquer malnutrition on their own.”  The program eventually reached 2.2 million people. 65% of malnourished children became healthier and stayed that way and the new approach became customary.

The lesson learned, as proposed by the Heaths, is to find a bright spot and duplicate it.  I launched I Buy Music and ibuymusic.net and our Facebook page and our Twitter account to do just that, to find the people in this country who spent $9 billion on music last year, give them a sense of identity by drawing a line between their purchases and feeding actual musicians and empower them into a place of pride.  In less than two weeks, we’re at nearly 500 fans on our Facebook page.  I’ve been interviewed here and here and here.  Rather than engage in debates over copyright infringement, links to our site are already becoming shorthand for “You’re not even in the right ballpark and I can no longer get sucked in to your silliness.  This is how I feel.” on web forums and message boards.  But I Buy Music is not the cure.  It’s only the sweet potato greens and shrimp and crabs from the rice paddies.  The music industry (especially musicians, labels and retailers) and the fans need to decide if they’ll adopt it, if this change in attitude and approach will be theirs.  Hell, is it yours?  If you’re reading this, I’m talking to you.  Does that simple statement  - I buy music - which says, “I buy music because I love music” adequately expresses everything you’ve been feeling for the last few years without an ounce of judgment or a single wagged finger?  You need to decide if buying 100 or 1000 stickers, one for every person who buys a new CD or LP from you or whether to include our logo in every online receipt for every download or on your websites.  Change is hard and I hate the pain in my legs when I cycle, but it’s change or keep getting sicker.  The logo is free, the sticker and shirts are not.  Right now, I’m paying for this because I believe in this.  What do you believe in?  Please spread the word.

BTW, I’m down 10 pounds so far.  It’s slow and it hurts, but it’s progress.

Great men and women blaze trails – it’s a sad but true reality that most of us have little choice in how history will remember our names and actions, and the mark of a great man or woman is that they write their own history through the things that they do, things so significant or important that they will in the end have created not only a life but a legacy. As for myself, I fear that I will go down in the hearts and minds of the people as “that guy who spilled all the coffee at the record fair.”

Seriously, though, it was a lot of coffee.

Nevertheless, I think I can say with conviction that the inaugural “Ye Olde Record Label Faire” was a great success. And not only because I got to eat a delicious everything bagel, or because I got to cut said bagel with one of those little bagel guillotines. No, it was a success because everyone who came got to meet and have a good time with other like-minded music lovers, and on top of that there was some seriously awesome music going at ridiculous bargains. Plus, food! What more could you want? (Besides “massages”, which isn’t fair, because you always want those.)

I’ve only been working at Absolutely Kosher for a few weeks now, but in these few weeks I’ve developed a relationship with the AK bands’ music that I hadn’t expected. Not a motherly, “these-records-are-my-babies” relationship; it feels more like these records are awesome little secrets and I really want to tell everybody about them. Seeing someone buying a Chris Garneau record at the fair made me genuinely excited. It made me think about the beautifully, wrenchingly sad first song, the eerie strings in “Dirty Night Clowns” and the quiet sighs of his piano arrangements. I thought about all of these things that I loved and how someone else was going to get to experience them for the first time, and how I was glad to be working in a place where I could help, even if only in some small way, and even if I spilled a buttload of coffee, to bring somebody else some really good music. It’s like when you find out your old friend from school has never seen Jurassic Park so you start watching it with them and you keep thinking “ohhhhhhh, you’re sooo gonna dig the part where that little gila monster dude kills Newman!”

My only real regret with Ye Olde Record Label Faire was that it had to end before I could possibly check out all of the records that looked interesting or talk to all the really awesome label people, musicians, and music lovers. I looked at the stacks of CDs and the LPs on display and I saw a thousand more gila monster moments just waiting to happen. I felt a swell of strange jealousy for future generations who will grow up to find an untold bounty of really good old music out there, more than they could ever really listen to and appreciate – and realized that we’re already at that point, but as the years go on there will only be more and more awesome music, as long as there are people who care enough to release it and people who care enough to listen.

And as of last Sunday, there definitely are.

posted by Michael Frauenhofer, summer intern dynamo

We’re demo listening today.  I have likened this activity to watching an amateur ice skating competition.  In principle, you want to lend your support by watching.  The optimist inside you thinks there might be a beautiful performance of grace and style that might stay with you past that day.  The experienced pragmatist inside knows that you’d be lucky to get that, but you must steel your resolve because every misstep, awkward leap, unbalanced landing and heartbreaking fall chips a little bit at your heart.  Please demos, don’t suck.  Furthermore, please don’t suck in manufactured shrink-wrapped digi-paks (representing sucking x 1000 + horribly wasted carbon footprint). 

A few weeks ago, Maren tried to calculate what percentage of demos I’ve signed in the last 12 years.  Suffice to say, it’s less than 1%.  Bottom of the Hudson, Summer At Shatter Creek, The Affair, Pidgeon and most recently Laarks are the only bands I’ve ever signed from unsolicited demos (not including those from bands that were brought to us by folks on the label).   All great acts, only one of which is still making music (Laarks) though a few members are in other bands.  Eli Simon from Bottom of the Hudson is now working on the new Jukeboxer album with Noah Wall.  I’m pretty excited to hear that!

Today’s favorite demo who we will sadly not be signing but who you should check out is Shark Speed from Utah.  Reminds me a little of the Jam.  We also like Kronotsky from Pennsylvania.  Elaborate and sort of gothy.

Please, demos, don’t suck.

Comments are now enabled on this blog, so interact away! Isn’t the internet amazing?

-Carl, web-dude

Well, nobody can accuse us of being early adopters when it comes to blogging.  Yes, we have a newsletter (which focuses on our bands and releases) as well as the news section of the AKR site, a Twitter feed which also posts to our Facebook page and a MySpace page which predates everything but the newsletter. Still, I needed something a little more personal to get in touch with y’all, not just for me, but for the other incredible people who work here.  It’s nice to be the face of something, but getting to know the people I work with has always been an incredible part of the job and I’m glad to offer you the same privilege.  I’ve been needing an outlet to vocalize things we like as well as things we don’t.  Expect a lot of food and music writing for starters, but the sky’s the limit.  I’ve been writing more in my personal time lately, mostly fiction (comic book scripts, a novel, a couple of screenplay ideas), and this should be a good place to encourage the more non-fiction topics.

The label has been struggling lately, along with the rest of the industry, and it’s always felt a little off to share that in the course of our newsletters.  Our Kickstarter program several months ago was moderately successful, but barely nicked our overall obligations. A friend who works for a non-profit in fundraising recently told me that the number one reason people give money is because someone asks them to.  I’d much rather ask you to buy our records, but if anyone can lend a hand, we’d really appreciate the support.  We released a number of records last autumn including albums by Chet, the Rollercoaster Project, Laarks & 60 Watt Kid as well as Emily Rodgers and Hallelujah the Hills on Misra.  To say these records were underexposed in spite of our best efforts would be an understatement.  I’ll take my lumps, but they’re so good!!!  Why the lack of attention?  Perhaps I’ve alienated too many editors in defense of our bands.  Perhaps everything is cyclical and my aesthetic has either shifted away from what’s popular or what’s popular has simply eclipsed the efforts of our little label.  Maybe we need to move to Brooklyn.  (I’m joking.  Brooklyn is very nice, but it would take armed men or extraordinary circumstances to get me to leave the Bay Area.)  Still, it’s times like this that really make me focus on the parts of the business I enjoy and that includes interacting with the people who buy our records.  If I can turn the comments section on here, I will.  It’s also a great time to find fulfillment outside of work (well, anytime in one’s life is great for that, but now seems especially great for it).

My name is Cory Brown and I do more than run Absolutely Kosher Records.