State of the Union Volume 1

From time to time, I will share with you the inner workings of my crazy mind as it relates to Suburban Home Records, Life, and the Music Industry. These diatribes will come and go infrequently and since they will all be rather long, I have included a link below that you can click if you actually want to read what is going on in the life of me. If you make the commitment to read further, I promise that you will be rewarded with the latest dealings with regards to my businesses and I promise to talk about things you would never expect to hear from other label folks. Some of the things mentioned below could sabotage future endeavors, but if they are meant to be, they will happen. I hope you enjoy this first volume.

Let’s start with all of the happenings at Suburban Home. There are lots of things going on. I currently have an artist in the studio, Josh Small. Josh is in Tim Barry’s band and I met him while Tim and crew did some shows in Denver. On one particular night in Ft Collins, Tim, Josh, and Jon from Drag the River stayed up late just jamming and playing music. I felt like I was experiencing music for the first time and I considered myself one of the luckiest music fans on the planet to be witnessing this. The guys would trade off on singing songs and sharing ideas and I was absolutely floored by Josh’s talent. He is recording at the same studio that Tim recorded “Rivanna Junction” and Tim is lending some help in production. If you stop by his myspace page, realize that the songs on there are rougher recordings. Listen to “Say Hello” which is one of my favorites. I really think that the record will fit in with a lot of the releases we have been putting out and it could really appeal to fans of William Elliott Whitmore. Speaking of William, Tim Barry was offered 3 weeks of tour dates supporting him. I really pushed for this to happen and due to dates Tim already had booked for a June tour with Josh, the tour didn’t happen. I was disappointed to say the least, but Tim told me that he was speaking to William’s agent about doing a full U.S. fall tour with him which would be such an incredible thing.

Anyone that has followed Suburban Home through the years knows that I am not actively looking to sign a lot of new bands. Each artist I work with is quite a project and I honestly give all of myself to each act. It is important to me that every artist I work with is someone I can consider a friend as well as someone I work with. My hope with the roster is that it ends up being a big family. It is funny how certain things that you just would never expect sometimes happens. I recently contacted Jason Shevchuk of None More Black/Kid Dynamite fame to see what his plans were for his newest project, On Guard. I had read more than once that he was planning to record a full album and would be giving it away for free digitally as he had never seen a cent from his other bands. I wrote him through the On Guard Myspace page introducing who I was and that many years ago I had put his band Kid Dynamite on a comp that we did called No Borders. I continued that I would be really excited to put out the vinyl for his new project as I had heard that he would be giving it away digitally. To my surprise, he wrote me back really quickly and said that he knew who I was and that he had remembered us giving him promos of new releases when None More Black was on the road. He said that he would be stoked to do the vinyl with us. As we wrote back and forth more and more, I found out that he now had planned to sell his album digitally for $5.00 and give the proceeds to charity. I told him that since he was doing that maybe we could put out the CD, too, and figure out a way to give proceeds from the CD sales to the charity he wanted to involve. Again, to my surprise, he said that would be a rad idea. Although it isn’t completely official, it looks as though we will be putting out the first album from On Guard and I could not be more excited.

I had previously tried to get a series of releases together called “Under the Influence”. The idea was that certain bands would select songs that have influenced what they do and cover the songs. Their liner notes would mention how they selected those songs and the artwork would be our own renditions of the classic covers of the albums that the original songs appeared on. So far, I have only gotten Stereotyperider to do one. Their release is great. Most of the bands I have spoke to mention the difficulty of sitting down to do one of these when they must work on new albums and tour, tour, tour. Planes Mistaken for Stars, Mike Park, and Kane Hodder at one time all agreed to do one, but at this point, none are planned. So I thought why not do a compilation called Under the Influence as it would be so much easier to get acts to do 1 or 2 songs than an entire album full. My wish list for this first one includes the following acts: Lucero, Drag the River, Rocky Votolato, Tim Barry, William Elliott Whitmore, Ghost Buffalo, Chuck Ragan, Josh Small, Dustin Kensrue, Sundowner, Two Cow Garage, Limbeck, On Guard, Neko Case, and Jenny Lewis. Will I get all of the acts mentioned? Doubtful, but I hope I can get a good number of them. Wish me luck. I will post updates on future State of the Unions.

Another new idea for a release is one for Drag the River called “Best of the Boot Legs”. Not sure if you know, but there are a network of Drag fans that record their performances live on tour. I have like 10 different live shows and a lot of sound really rad. I plan to put out a notice asking for these “bootleggers” to get in touch as we plan to take songs from the various sessions and put out a limited run CD. We would most likely only sell the CD on our site and while the band is on tour. I think it will be a fun release though. We will also be re-issuing Tim Barry’s first CD which originally came out on a German label. We will be doing a small run and will not be offering it to chain stores. It will be available on our site, various indie shops, and from Tim on tour. I am stoked to do this as that was my first exposure to Tim’s solo stuff.

In Vinyl Collective news, we should be receiving the copies of the Fear Before the March of Flames and Limbeck vinyl over the next week or so. I can’t wait! The Portugal the Man stuff is being done, currently, too, and it should look super slick. I was pumped that they did all new artwork for the vinyl release. Now onto some possible future vinyl titles. I recently received quotes for doing super small runs on vinyl and will be doing 200 copy pressings for Tim Barry’s Demo CD, Josh Small’s upcoming album, Love Me Destroyer’s latest album, and maybe Ghost Buffalo’s s/t album. The retail price will be higher, but to get something so limited will truly be something special. Now onto the super top secret future releases. I have been talking to Ferret about doing the new Poison the Well album on vinyl. Carl at Ferret seems to be into it said that they have different artwork they could use and maybe a bonus track not on the CD. And now onto the super duper top secret stuff, we might be putting out the upcoming Minus the Bear album, “Planet of Ice”. We are negotiating the specifics, but it looks as though we will do a run of 2,000 copies as a double LP. I love Minus the Bear so much and was surprised to be contacted by Suicide Squeeze as I had previously written them about putting out the MTB remix album on vinyl, but they passed. I am really excited about all of the possible vinyl releases we may be doing and I think the only thing holding be back from putting out like 10 vinyl releases per month is the capital. If there are any wealthy investors out there that want to get involved, drop me a line!

This week in the Music Industry has been an interesting one. The big news this week is the report that CD sales are down 20% for the first quarter of 2007.  Soundscan came out with their own report trying to spin things to maybe not look so bad. Facts are facts, people are just not buying CDs. When was the last time you went to a record store to buy CDs? And even if you have gone recently, I am willing to bet you don’t go nearly as often as you used to. Record stores used to be social centers and I found myself going weekly if not a couple times a week. Times are tough and this isn’t only going to affect record labels. When labels are experiencing tough times, it is certain that they will advertise less that they will stop hiring college radio or publicity and that they will be less likely to go to a bigger studio. The trickle down will reach all aspects of the music industry and unless these companies adapt, many will be forced to close its doors. I recently sent out an email interview to John, owner of Deep Elm Records for IndieHQ. We spoke on the phone yesterday, too, and it was a very interesting conversation. John explained his decisions to withdraw from Lumberjack distribution and most brick and mortar distribution channels and also his decision to press only 1,000 copies for most of his future titles. When asked about the fact that his CDs won’t be carried in most stores, he said, “If people want to buy my records, they will find them.” He said that limiting the potential places for people to buy CDs will lead a lot of those people to his site where they can listen to and learn more about his label and other artists. He said that the current distribution model is broke what with return reserves, chains wanting lots of money for coops for CDs they will return anyways, and a lot of accounts just don’t care whether certain titles sell or not. He expressed his frustration when he sees stores selling promos in their used bin which is something I struggle with. He stopped sending promos to stores while I changed the kind of promos I send favoring instead to send CDr CDs in full packaged booklets. John is a very intelligent guy and I am excited to share his interview with everyone once I get it back.

Thinking about CD sales continuing to slip and thinking about my conversation with John, I know that my decision to move my operation back into my house and cut staff and expenses is a good one. I have thought about putting a slogan on our site and in our ads that says something like: Suburban Home Records, We Sell Things That You Get for Free! or We Sell Things That You Don’t Want to Buy. It is definitely a tough time in music retail. As I bought a breakfast burrito this morning from the burrito cart, I thought how well would this business do if you could download burritos on file-sharing sites? If my friends could make copies of their breakfast burrito and if they gave me one this morning, I certainly would not be buying one. I know that isn’t the best analogy, but how can you compete with free? I don’t think that music fans really think about how their music spending supports bands and labels. I actually don’t think that most music fans actually think about record labels anymore. When I first got into punk rock, the label meant everything. I supported anything on Lookout Records, Dr. Strange, and Fat Wreck. I loved the idea that when I bought a CD on one of those labels, I knew that it would go to help them continue what they were doing. And don’t even ask me about what we used to think of bands signing to majors. People just don’t think about that stuff anymore. Some of my favorite bands on the planet signed to majors and were chewed up and spit out. I still find it hard to support major label titles because of the way I learned to think of them in the mid 90’s.

I had lunch with a couple friends the other day. One of my friends, Jeff Merkel, owns the recording studio 8 Houses Down. He is currently getting a masters in audio engineering and mentioned sitting on a really interesting lecture by one of the guys who helped developed the technology that become MP3s. Then I thought how funny it would be to make a mini-movie where a few record label heads decide to go back in time ala Terminator to kill the developers of MP3 technology. If anyone rolls with this idea, please give me some credit! I could just see the movie ending with those label heads rolling around in a bed of cash laughing all the way to the bank.

We posted a t-shirt sale this week on our site and in our email newsletter. The sale was 10 t-shirts for $20 and was a way for us to clear out a few boxes. I figured the sale would do well, but the enthusiasm really took me off guard. We sold almost 1,000 t-shirts in about 8 hours. We sold out of every sale we posted and when they were no longer available, we were bombarded with emails from people excited about the sale. Absolutely nuts.

One of the things I am working on at Suburban Home is teaching myself to be more web-savvy. When our staff is pretty much just myself, I would like to be able to edit my webpage and add content without having to hire someone. I have learned a lot, but I still have a long ways to go. Take for example a listening station that my friend Sean Klassen developed. All I needed to do was edit the HTML code and the XML code and upload the mp3s and images, but somehow I f’ed things up. Sean is going to take a look at it this weekend and hopefully fix my mistakes. The listening station is kind of up right now so you can take a listen to most of the albums up there, but it will eventually become a place to listen to new and featured Suburban Home releases.

I set up my first Lens this week. What is a lens? A lens is an easy to make website on whatever topic you choose and can feature pretty much everything. This is all done on a site called Squidoo which is the brainchild of the marketing guru, Seth Godin. Check out the lens I made called “About Suburban Home”. It is a pretty simple lens that features all of the aspects of Suburban Home that I do. It has rss feeds for some of our sites, items we have for sales, pictures, videos, and more. I plan to make more lenses in the future and will definitely share them with you. If you make a Lens that gets a lot of traffic, you can make a few bucks in affiliate purchases, but I am more motivated by the fact that I can easily make a site about some of my favorite things.
I keep telling myself that I need to get all of my releases up on Last.fm for full album streaming. I don’t know why it has taken me so long as I have known the importance of having our music up there. Now more and more labels are making deals with last.fm and I really need to get my act together. There just are not enough hours in a day sometimes. Please take this as a reminder to put your titles up on last.fm if you haven’t done so.

I am working on another podcast. I have been throwing this around for a while and I think I have a pretty good gameplan for it. With the podcast, I plan to have a featured band and label that I will interview. I will have a section called “Betta Ask Somebody” where I ask a question of a zine editor, a blogger, a record store, or a music fan. I will play an incredible unsigned band as well as songs I am digging. I will have a section for music industry news and opinion. I will call a band on the road and ask them what records they are listening to on the road and try to share some stories. I think it can be a lot of fun and am going to be talking to my good buddy Chris Fogal (of the Gamits) to help me set this all up. Stay tuned!

I would like to close this first State of the Union address by thanking everyone for their support. Since announcing the news to downsize and move shop, I have received emails and calls from people all over as well as orders for our records to help us out. I am drawn to this crazy industry whether I like it or not so I hope to be able to do this for a long time to come. If you like what I do, please help me out by buying an item from one of our bands, or on one of our stores. Purchasing something from one of our businesses actually helps someone and not a CEO of some big conglomerate. Suburban Home will continue operations at our office until May 1st and at that point, things will be back in my house. We have been slowly moving things to a storage space, but we still have a lot of work to go. We will also be throwing a Garage Sale at our office on Saturday, April 28th. I plan to make some fliers and have more news about it, but if you live in town, please stop by.

And one more thing, Please go see Drag the River, Love Me Destroyer, and Tim Barry on tour. Say hi and buy them a beer. They would be so stoked!

Your friend through Music,

Virgil Dickerson