Fuck, I managed to go an entire week without writing in this thing, probably because I’ve been so incredibly swamped with label business that I haven’t had a moment to think about it.

After my last post I finally sent an email to my distro list about the Logic Problem 7″, and as expected I was completely bombarded with wholesale orders, but mostly trade offers. I was kind of hoping that I would get more cash orders since I’m trying to get liquid in order to put out the Devour 12″, but I’ll take what I can get. At the end of the day it’s about getting the records into as many places as possible, so if I have to sit on some trades for a couple of months in order to make sure my records are easily available in the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden then so be it. I think I have a problem with my eyes being bigger than my stomach (or rather, my enthusiasm for distro stock exceeds my ability to sell said stock) when I do trades, but at least so far it has worked out most of the time. My only policy is that I only trade for records that I like, and since I only carry good records in my distro they will eventually sell, because of course all good records do sell, even if it’s only a few years down the line. Storing, transporting and generally dealing with records while waiting for the rest of the world to get to hip to them is an arduous and thankless task, but it’s easier to do that than to keep up with the ridiculous flurry of micro-releases that are always coming out.

Did some screen-printing last night… after the disaster that was my first attempt at the Logic Problem t-shirts I swore off of screen printing forever, which lasted just over 1 month. This time I did something I knew I could handle… just the Sorry State logo (a very simple design) on an 11×14″ screen. It turned out perfectly and I made a bunch of the canvas bags I mentioned earlier as well as a few t-shirts. I ran out of red ink after just about 10 bags, so I looked around at what ink I had left and I decided to mix blue and yellow. On the first few of each batch they’re a pretty clear fade (sort of like the proper Logic Problem shirts), but eventually it all bleeds together into a pretty cool, almost iridescent green. I have no idea if anyone will want the bags or the t-shirts, but I think they look pretty cool.

I also ran into some issues finalizing the artwork for the limited version of the Devour 12″. I had put some type of halftone pattern in the artwork (which I often do, sometimes just because it looks cool and sometimes for things that aren’t as high-resolution as I need them to be), but the printer rejected it because apparently halftone patterns and screen printing don’t really mix. After going back and forth a few times we finally settled on something that looks pretty cool, though not quite as cool as the halftoned version or the original artwork. i don’t think he’s dicking me around or being lazy, I think we’re just working against the constraints of the medium. Still haven’t finalized the regular sleeve, by the way.

During this week of dead time on the blog I had a 3 or 4 day run with not a single order on my webstore. This kind of freaked me out because, like a lot of small businesses, I rely on an open-source shopping cart program to run my web site. This is great, except for when something with it breaks, and then I’m responsible for figuring out the answer with recourse only to the instruction manual (which is of limited usefulness) and the support forums, which for zen cart thankfully tend to be pretty good. The worst part, though, is that often there is no sign that there is a problem… often I’ll stop getting orders for a few days and I won’t notice anything is wrong until someone emails to tell me their order didn’t go through or their shipping didn’t get calculated correctly or whatever. Fortunately nothing was amiss this time… just a weird little lull in orders. I’ve had several over the past few days, thankfully, so I’m not too worried about cashflow. And I’ve actually been liquidating a (comparatively) fair bit of my backstock of CDs through my ebay store, so that’s a welcome development.

Yesterday I was caught up with all label mailing for a period of approximately two hours. I packed up boxes for five straight hours, finishing less than 5 minutes before Kelly and I left to see a movie. By the time I got back I was back in the hole at least an hour or two. Ouch!

Logic Problem is going to Atlanta for a show this weekend, and there are two important items on the to-do list before I leave Friday morning: heat-set all of the t-shirts and bags I printed and put together and price the boxes of distro stuff I’m taking to the show. We’re playing with some pretty hot bands, so I hope that I can blow through some distro stuff in Atlanta. It’s especially nice to bring distro stuff to my shows since what sells in person is often staggeringly different from what sells at shows. My webstore will blow through 15 Sex Vid 7″s in a day, but at shows people will still pull Caustic Christ and Career Suicide LPs out of the box even though I’ve been sitting on those for close to 2 years now.

Yesterday was a BIG order day… I had a stack of packages over two feet tall. It was one of those days where the people at the Post Office visibly try to avoid helping me… when I was next in line two cashiers mysteriously had to vanish for several minutes until I had been helped by someone else. You’d think they would be nicer to those of us who keep them in business, but I guess I understand where they’re coming from.

Still haven’t sent out the distro email, mostly because I want to get on top of the Devour release before I get swamped with packing up distro orders and trades. Today I finalized the artwork for the CD face and finally put together the master CD, which was a little more difficult this time because the last track is a 50-minute bonus track full of outtakes, practice tapes, an entire live set recorded from the soundboard and a few other oddities. I still have to give the CD a thorough listen to make sure that it doesn’t skip or do anything else weird, but it’s good to have that off my plate. I also have to design the back cover of the LP jacket, but I’m waiting to see if any good photos come out of Friday’s show. I was thinking that if it takes too long to get those covers I can do 100 screen-printed covers with an alternate design and that would make for a good limited edition. I was going through a bunch of my drawings from high school the other day and found one that would be perfect, I just have to figure out the logistics of having it printed up. Not only would that help us to have something to sell by my goal of August 22 (when we’re playing a show with the Reprobates from Canada), but also that would be a good way to recoup my expenses quickly since I would sell all of those for full retail price.

I also had an ebay coupon that was about to expire so I ordered some canvas bags, which I’m going to screen the Sorry State logo onto. I’ve seen a lot of businesses do this, but no record labels just yet. I think I’m going to sell them for $5 or give them away with distro purchases of $75 or more… perhaps that’ll encourage people to throw a few old releases in their cart to put them over that threshold. Either that or I’ll still be putting groceries in them when I’m a senior citizen. We’ll see.

Finally, I managed to send out promos! My promo list is only about 8 entries long, but I sent the newest releases out to all of them. I’ve always been good about getting my releases to MRR since a review there is so important, and Al Quint gets most of them pretty quickly, but I think I really dropped the ball by not giving more attention to Razorcake. That’s a big magazine that could introduce my releases to a whole different scene, but I just never sent or followed up on promos out of sheer laziness. Being the cool guys that they are, Razorcake even contacted ME about getting copies of the Crossed Eyes single just because they liked it so much. I’ve always felt a little dirty doing publicity work, so I guess that’s why I have such trouble putting real effort into it.

Hours spent on the label in the past two days: about 8

I managed to get out of town for the weekend, so there wasn’t too much label work. The orders piled up while I was away, so today will be a long day of packing and shipping records, but it’s hard to complain about that. This week I will definitely send out the distro email about the Logic Problem records, but first I may try and send out promos. Gotta build the hype…

I got the Logic Problem t-shirts and they look great! They’ve been added to the webstore… usually I don’t sell too many t-shirts in the webstore, but since these cost me a little more than usual I wanted to try and make my money back on them a bit more quickly. When I picked up the shirts the guy at the Merch said “make sure to use us again next time… we can do anything you want your name on.” I was just like “uh… no thanks.” I hit up some of my label- and band-running friends and found out where the good places to print are. I’m always struggling between whether I should support the local community or the punk community with my business, but the punk community is almost alwasy far cheaper, cooler and just as high-quality if not even better.

I haven’t posted here for the past few days, but that’s not because of lack of work… the Double Negative vinyl finally arrived yesterday afternoon, so for the first time in a while I have all of my major releases in stock and no orders are being held. This has made that mythical state of being “caught up” seem within my reach, though things had gotten so far behind waiting on those Double Negative 7″s that it’s going to take a few days of hard work get back to feeling comfortable. I already spent about 3 hours packing up orders this morning, and before I’m caught up I’ll have to assemble about 300 more Double Negative records, add a few records to the webstore (this seems like it would be a straightforward process, but I find things sell much better when I listen to the record closely and write an honest, original description), design a new ad for MRR and a few other zines featuring my new releases, send out promos to a select few lucky zines, and finish the Devour master CD and LP artwork. My wife and I are going out of town this weekend so I doubt I’ll get all that done before Monday. There are also a few overdue tasks that I’d like to accomplish, like updating the visual discography on the website with the latest limited editions and fancying up the label’s myspace page, but realistically those probably won’t happen until late next week at the earliest. Still, I’m feeling better about where I’m at right now.

In better news, I found out that the Logic Problem t-shirts are finally printing tonight! The printing place I used is staffed by 2 people… one of them was on vacation last week and the other had to go out of town for 4 days for a funeral, so my order got heavily delayed. I’m not unsympathetic when things like that happen to small businesses, but their communication and demeanor were terrible during all this. I’m willing to overlook a lot in order to deal local, but these guys fucked up.

The next big event on my horizon is emailing my wholesale list to tell them that the Logic Problem EP is ready. Hopefully I’ll have a slew of orders and trades to fill when that happens, but I’ll probably wait until after this weekend so that I’m not barraged with email while I’m out of town. Once that email goes out there will probably be a few days of hell before I catch back up.

Hours spent on the label in the past 2 days: about 7

Stalling

Nothing much today except the usual packing up orders and responding to email. The logic problem 7″ is in the webstore but I haven’t announced it to myspace and the email list yet because I’m still waiting on those tshirts, which are now 2 days overdue and the company has not been answering their phone for the past two days. Thank god for companies like imprint and united because without them I would have given up long ago.

Hours spent on the label today: about 1.5

I guess it’s debatable whether I worked for the label very much today. I spent almost the entire day ripping about 50 CDs and listing them on Amazon.com, a process which I’ve been slowly doing with my entire CD collection over the past few weeks. While I’m sure every label has a different way of keeping track of expenses and different ways for the owners to pay him or herself, my solution is that I have one bank account for the record label, and I use that bank account to pay for anything music-related. Not only do I pay for the label’s releases, but I also pull from this fund for my band’s tour expenses, music equipment and (occasionally) records for my personal collection. Generally, though, for the past few years my record collection has funneled more money into my label than out of it, since I’ve been thinning down my collection of vinyl via ebay and my webstore and putting the proceeds right back into the label. Because I’ve chosen to put my entire obsession with punk rock, whether it be running the label, playing in bands or collecting records, under the same financial umbrella, all of those various activities are sort of grouped together in my head, and when I sell my own personal records I really feel like I’m doing work for the label. Honestly, I think that’s probably a better motivation than simple profit, as I’ve never been a person who is obsessed with money. However, when I know what that money is going toward–i.e. putting out future records–I can keep myself motivated to trudge through the mundanity of ebay, amazon and the other sites I use to peddle my wares.

This evening I also knocked another thing off my weekend to-do list by updating my list of distro contacts. I’ve attempted to do this about 10 different ways over the years (managing email lists via hosting providers, keeping everything in an Excel file, etc.), but nothing has been simple and intuitive enough that I kept it updated regularly. Thus, whenever I release a new record I find myself going through my last few months’ worth of emails looking for all the new contacts I’ve made since my last email. This time, however, I was pleased to see that Google has redesigned the contacts section of gmail in a very nice and simple manner. If I can inculcate the habit of adding new contacts to my distro group as soon as I email them for the first time then my life should be a whole lot easier and I should be able to do a much better job of getting a record out the door immediately upon its release. I’m sure that as this blog evolves I’ll write about a ton of these kinds of tools that make life as a small-business owner easier and more efficient.

Hours spent on the label today: about 0.5

Today I managed to successfully avoid record label business, with a few exceptions. Receiving all of those parts for Koro and Logic Problem EPs had turned my study/office/record room into a total wreck, so I packed up everything and managed to jam it all into the storage space. For about the last year I’ve been renting a small, walk-in-closet-sized, climate-controlled storage place that I use as a warehouse for the label’s backstock. It only costs $60 per month, an expense that I was nervous about at first but has ultimately proved negligible to my monthly operating costs. Thus far I’ve always had plenty of room in the storage space, but this last shipment of records has gotten me to the point where boxes are now stacked in front of one another and there are several boxes that are stacked behind other large boxes, which is obviously not an ideal situation for a warehouse that I visit at least once per week.

I think that a few hours of dedicated cleaning would get things back below the breaking point, but especially with the Devour 12″ looming on the horizon I’m going to have to make some big decisions about my storage space. Basically, I’m either going to have to upgrade to a larger space or start destroying backstock that hasn’t sold, mostly CDs. I have at least half of the pressing of 1,000 Rabies CDs sitting in my storage space almost 2 years after that record was released, and I don’t see those units getting shifted any time soon. It’s really hard to destroy something that I put so much time and effort into and that I’m still really proud of, but what’s the point of sitting on stock that probably will never sell? When you first start a label you’re determined always to save everything, but as your life fills up with more and more paper and vinyl and plastic you just want to wrestle some sense of an orderly, organized existence from the mess. I guess I’ll keep this space updated as I come to a decision on that.

Besides that, all I did was add the Logic Problem EP to the webstore, which felt like a momentous event. I haven’t received any orders for it, but I’m hoping that’s just because I haven’t announced it on myspace or any of my email lists yet… hopefully as soon as word spreads this will be another hot item from Sorry State.

Hours spent on the label today: 1

Another very full day of record label business.

I changed cell phones the other day after buying the new iPhone 3G, and when I checked my old phone I noticed I had a missed call from the Chapel Hill screen-printing place where I’m printing Logic Problem t-shirts. After getting sent to their answering machine twice I finally made it through to them, when I found out that the two people handling my order have gone on vacation for the entire week, so I guess no Logic Problem shirts this week. I mentioned in my last post that I like to deal locally, but this company is really doing their best to fuck that up. When I placed the order 2 weeks ago I asked if I could get the shirts in time for our show with Sex/Vid even though it was 7 days away and their quoted turnaround time is 10 days, but when I asked the guy on the phone he just kept repeating the mantra “turnaround time is 10 to 14 days.” Now I found out that they’re on vacation this entire week, which they clearly avoided telling me on purpose. I thought I’d use the place where (so it seems) Chapel Hill indie bands get their stuff printed, but those people are just royal assholes.

Spent part of the morning packing up orders, mostly from Amazon.com, where I’m selling my CD collection, partly to finance my new iPhone but I guess once that’s paid off I’ll funnel that money into the label. About 5 minutes after I finished packing orders and put all my shipping supplies away another order came in… you’d be surprised how often this happens. I was excited to see that it was from the ebay store, but it was just for a Double Negative 7″. I have a feeling I could trade those 7″s for human limbs and people would gladly rip off their fingers and hand them over to me.

I also spent part of the morning (probably too much) laboring over the description of the Logic Problem 7″. Judging by some of the descriptions out there, it seems like other labels don’t put much time into this aspect of the release, but I always find it very stressful. You’d be surprised how often that description will get replicated in other distros and stores, and even how many reviewers will refer to it when they write about the record. I’m always balancing like 10 things in these descriptions… trying to seem excited without being pushily self-promoting, trying to say what the record sounds like without lumping it in with soon-to-die trends or implying that it’s generic, and trying to give an indication of who will like it without being too verbose or obscure in my references. It’s a fine art for sure and one I have hardly mastered.

Sometime this afternoon I chucked doing any work on my actual job out the window and decided it would be way more fun to put together all 500 Logic Problem 7″s, which I did in a few hours while listening to records and chatting with Kelly. I’ve always liked the mind-wandering time provided by these simple repetitive tasks, but I wish I had a better table on which to assemble records because my back is extremely sore after putting together records all day.

After assembling all of the Logic Problem stuff I decided to pack up some of the orders I had been holding while I waited for more Koro 7″ covers to arrive. However, about 2 orders in I noticed that I was down to less than 10 copies of the Double Negative 7″, which is going to cause at least one of those orders to be held for even longer. I knew that I was low and had already ordered a restock of the Double Negative, but I didn’t think I was that close to running out completely. I emailed the pressing plant and they said they’d shipped 450 copies yesterday so hopefully they’ll be here early next week, but I find the whole situation very frustrating. With my limited cashflow, keeping popular records in print is always a juggling act… you can’t order more records until you’ve sold the ones you got, and one unpopular or heavily delayed record can disrupt that process very easily. Money wasn’t an issue with ordering the Double Negative repress, but it might mean the Devour 12″ will be pushed back a week or two while I build up money from the webstore and try to squeeze checks out of the distributors who owe me money.

To-do list for this weekend: somehow squeeze all of the newly-assembled records into my storage space, make some progress on the Devour artwork and CD master, and update my lists for promo copies (which is pretty out of date) and distributors and other labels with whom I trade (which is absurdly and perhaps hopelessly out of date).

Hours spent on the label today: about 9

Today was a pretty heavy label day. Since the Devour test presses came in yesterday I went to the copy shop to print the test press covers, and while I was there I did the lyric sheets for the Logic Problem record. This turned out to be a rather frustrating experience. I use a local copy shop because I like to support local businesses whenever possible, but sometimes I guess they just have different priorities than I do. I ran the 300 LP inserts very quickly since they were on the self-serve copy machine, but the Devour stuff took forever. Instead of making foldover paper covers like I usually do for test presses, I decided to basically make a bunch of cheap stickers and use them to decorate the plain white DJ jacket that the test presses came in. I had all the stickers printed on one 8.5×11 sheet, but the guy took forever to locate the sticker paper, then to find a copy machine that would run the sticker paper, then fiddling with the settings on the copy machine so that the image would print without melting the glue. I was in the shop for nearly an hour, though I suppose it was nice to chat with the owner’s WWII-veteran father-in-law who was killing time in the shop. I’m sure that this entire process would have been far, far quicker if I’d gone to Kinko’s, but I guess I should see these things as benefits rather than drawbacks to dealing local.

I finally got home an hour later than expected and starving for some lunch, but there were a shitload of boxes on my side porch so I decided to crack them open. Woohoo! Logic Problem EP covers, which look absolutely awesome, Logic Problem vinyl and more covers for the Koro 7″. I have several outstanding orders for the Koro record so it’s great to get those back in, but clearly the Logic Problem stuff is the focus of my attention, especially since I now have all the parts in stock, making the record officially “out!”

After wolfing down some panzanella leftovers from last night I got to work stickering the Devour jackets while watching an episode of The Colbert Report on hulu.com. I must say that the jackets look pretty darn good.

Later this evening I had about 45 minutes to kill before band practice, so I spent it entering CDs into the Sorry State Records ebay store. I really don’t like ebay because of the ridiculous fees they charge, but I have about four boxes of CDs that I just can’t seem to get rid of… no one buys CDs from my webstore. So, with minimal effort I listed them all on ebay and hopefully they’ll sell sooner or later and I’ll recoup at least part of the money I spent acquiring these useless pieces of plastic.

Had Devour practice from 11PM until about 1AM and while we were all feeling a little lethargic, everyone was STOKED on the test presses. I’m pretty sure that it’s the first time Cody and Dave have been on vinyl, so they were excited, as were 7″ vets Jamie and Matt. I tried to get in touch with Seth and Cam from LP since that 7″ is their first appearance on vinyl as well, but Cam is in the mountains somewhere visiting friends and decompressing. However, Seth drove out to Raleigh to pick up some copies and he seemed way stoked.

All in all, today was one of those days when running a record label is really a blast. I’ve been working on the LP and Devour records for months now, and I’m just starting to see all of my ideas and creativity reach some tangible form that I can present to the outside world and say “I did this.” Very cool.

Hours spent on the label today: about 4

Why This Blog Exists

My name is Daniel and I run Sorry State Records, an extremely small independent record label concentrating on hardcore and punk rock, mainly on vinyl. I spend a lot of time (probably too much) dealing with my label and the two bands I play in, and I’m starting this blog as a way to catalog and assess the time I spend on these endeavors. I’m not sure how this blog will evolve, but I imagine that it will be interesting for people interested in independent music or perhaps even independent businesses in general. If you want to get in touch please feel free to leave a comment or get in touch with my via one of the links in the sidebar.