We encourage you to check out Six Inch Records, a new music label started by Radiohead artist, Stanley Donwood. Yes, that’s right, Stanley is a CEO of his own record label.
What is this all about, you ask? We’ll let Stanley fill you in:
‘SIX INCH RECORDS’ is a project that may take a little explaining.
The story begins around the time of Christmas 2006, when I drunkenly decided to become a record label boss. Every man needs a hobby, or so the cliché has it, and if I was going to make a late-stage attempt at normality then that was one of the things that I should do. So, still reeling from red wine, I typed out a email to three musicians that I knew, suggesting that I release their music on my as-yet-unnamed record label. I have no record of what I wrote in that fateful email, and I had no recollection of it the following morning, when I awoke with a hangover.
Forgive me, for I knew not what I had done. The three musicians replied to my email with alacrity and enthusiasm, promising to send me music, and, perhaps surprisingly, not telling me that setting up a record label at the precise historical point that record labels large and small were going to the wall was probably a really stupid idea.
Never mind, never mind. I started to work out how my ‘hobby’ was going to work. It was true that the musicians I had contacted made music I liked, and I was fairly sure that other people would like it too. I liked music, but during the period that I had been designing record covers I had come to detest the compact disc. The CD, I had decided, was simply too small.
I began to muse on numbers, thinking about the twelve inch record, the speed of thirty-three and a third revolutions, and so on. Eventually I realised that releasing three six-inch records in editions of three hundred and thirty-three and charging six pounds sixty-six pence for each one was the only was to do this.
There would be nine hundred and ninety-nine records in total. Half the profits would go to the musicians and half would go to me. I was going to do this properly. I drew up a contract, which I mailed out to ‘my’ musicians and got them to sign it. SIX INCH RECORDS was born.
Read the rest at the Six Inch Records Blog….
(thanks to Rex)