You should start a CD-R label
The well of nostalgia for cassette tapes appears to be bottomless. Rarely a day goes by where I don’t see an Instagram reel about tape loops or Portastudio tips and tricks. I get it, of course. I hate (and remain hopelessly dependent on) being online as much as anyone, and there is something about playing around with magnetic tape that feels like some kind of old world magic.
That was just as much the case 12 or 13 years ago, when I was doing my best to run a tape label out of my high school bedroom. Though I was burning CDs constantly to listen to in my car, they did not have the same revived cultural cache they are enjoying today. Back then, I was able to afford and dub a batch of 50 tapes without much difficulty working 20 hours a week at Sears. The tech required to make it happen could still reliably be found at thrift stores and garage sales.
I think about this often when I engage in the practice today. Everything’s more expensive, duh, but releasing a small run of tapes and doing a small run of replicated CDs are quickly equalizing in price, when the former was once dramatically cheaper. This stuff used to be the domain of wage slaves! How does one keep a DIY operation going when you’re looking at spending thousands of dollars on cassette decks, materials and repairs?
Increasingly, I wonder if the answer can be found in CD-Rs. Experimental musicians and local metal bands have had plenty of fun with the format for years, even in spite of the concerns many have about the format, like the potential for disc rot and the association with family Christmas mix CDs.
CD replication tech has improved enough that disc rot is less of a concern than when it was still nascent, and options for creatively getting art on a disc have expanded beyond laserjet printing low-quality images. But perhaps most importantly, CDs currently occupy the place cassettes held a generation ago — just getting their footing as a nostalgia fix.
We know, both as observers of trends and as a retail business that deals in this stuff, that there is a stronger desire for physical manifestations of music than there has been in some time. We’re all feeling the effects of what it’s like to engage with music via exclusively streaming long-term. If you’re a musician, the time has never been better to be doing your own bespoke physical releases. CD-Rs present a simple path toward making that happen.
And frankly, if you have narrow taste in a specific genre, it’s never been better to buy a few external CD burners and a big stack of blank CD-Rs. Even the worst external CD drive from Amazon can burn about one CD every three minutes. That’s a hell of a lot easier than sitting around for 30 minutes waiting for 5 tapes to finish dubbing only to find that your deck ate one of them. Release your friends’ mixtapes, demos, collections of Soundcloud tracks, whatever; have fun with packaging and branding your label!
It is my firm belief that the tactics of underground experimental musicians can be broadly applied to any style of music, to the benefit of the artform writ large. Present circumstances have made adding an authorial stamp to your work more important than ever; why not own every element of it?
