CRUD CRUD
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| by Bodie Plecas |
CRUD CRUD is a tour through the stacks of records, demo tapes, etc. that surround me. No recycled MP3s, CD tracks, or reissues here. Average price paid for the records below is $3. Very few I have spent more than $5 on. I present to you some of my favorites. It keeps the guilt of hording this crud distant.
6.20.2012
The Ethics of This Stuff
Besides doing this blog, I also run a couple small record labels. Over the years, sales have gone from pretty damn good to not very damn good, almost pretty damn bad. Meanwhile, the music I put out has gotten more and more popular. Many people listen to it, but they don't pay for it. One of the Nothing People found a torrent site that tracked the number of times a file had been downloaded. He looked up their (then) most recent album Soft Crash and found that it had been downloaded 40,000 times. How many of those people listened to it is unknown, perhaps half of the downloaders are hoarders. But let's say half of the people who downloaded it listened to it, that an audience of 20,000 got the album for free. Now consider how many copies of Soft Crash my label sold. I pressed 1000 copies on vinyl. The band was compensated with 200 copies. About 50 copies were sent out as promos to radio stations, magazines, and blogs. Of the 750 remaining copy, I have sold 650. I will assume that the Nothing People held on to 50 copies and sold the rest. So that is a grand total of 800 copies of Soft Crash sold vs at least 20,000 downloaded off one torrent site and listened to. The 800 copies that the Nothing People and I sold were paid for. The 20,000 "copies" off of that torrent site were not. I've know about this for a few years and it still bugs the shit out of me. However, I have still done this blog.
The Perfect American DIY 7"
Our Favorite Band! s/t 7" (Praxis, 1981)
Here is another one I bought blind. I'm in a thrift store for battered women, digging through the records and checking out the chicks (no no no no no give me a god damn break. It was just too horrible of a joke to pass up). I find this little thing in a tattered cover. Look at the cover and see two guys sitting in a car. Look at the back, two guys are still sitting in a car, and they have kinda long hair, and there is a little state of Louisiana circled below. Label says 1982. Record is beat to shit. Awww what the hell. At the very worst it will be a bad spend of a buck. I walk to the counter, lay my dollar down and tell the girl, "There's more where that came from..." and slither out the door.
I go home and slap this puppy on the turntable. Oh my god! Distorted guitar and stand up bass, no drums and it is a raw, smoking rockabilly tune worthy of Cramps/Hasil worship. Second song is a slow one and damn it if this couldn't be the Gibson Brothers. Look at the label again. 1982. Shit, this predates the Gibs by five or so years. Flip it over and weirdness crawls out of the groove. Some kinda reverb flooded, bell soaked creepiness about the Atlanta Child Murders oozes out of the speakers! Now I am really excited. Really really excited. And the ep ends with some kinda Modern Lovers meets the Only Ones meets Alex "Flies on Sherbert" Chilton power popper.
Baton Rouge's Our Favorite Band! made the perfect American DIY 7"! There is not a god damn thing wrong with it and the only reason it is an unknown is because of the heavy Killed By Death bias among punk collectors, which is doubly dumb because one of these guys was in Toxin III!
# posted by Scott Soriano : 19:21 5 comments
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About Me
- Name: Scott Soriano
I write, I eat, I read, I have no impulse control when I walk into a record store. I am a four dimensional man.
Because we believe that an artist should have say-so in how his or her work is used and whether or not it should be given away without their compensation, we attempt to contact every artist to obtain their permission to post their music. This is much simpler than you'd assume it is. Once we have their permission, we post their music. However, there are a couple exceptions: If the artist is dead and the work is out of print, we feel that asking permission from a corpse is a waste of time. In fact, we'd be frightened if we got an answer. Second, if we cannot track down an artist or a label, and have good reason to think that they are not among us, we will post something. There are also countries in which records were made that no longer exist. This makes it near impossible to track anyone down responsible for that kind of record. Records that were produced anonymously or without crediting the artist are also free game, as far as we are concern. But, please, note that in all cases we have attempted to contact the artist, not because we feel we are legally obligated to do so, but we feel that it is the ethical and respectful way of going about things. Do unto others....
# posted by Scott Soriano : 11:26 6 comments
maury