The relevance of charting can be debatable. I’ve heard the 1975 album “The Best of Leonard Cohen” was “Leonard Cohen’s Greatest Hits” in Europe - over here, he apparently didn’t have any “hits”.
Typo or no typo, if “respunding” isn’t a word, it oughta be.
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The cost of production wasn’t the only difference. You could do smaller runs of cassettes, with the cost of equipment to produce them lower, production could also be done outside the normal supply chain. Fans producing their own tapes, and trading them, was also marketing for bands that could not make it onto a label. Not to mention the format was a much more convenient size to pass around, and as I remember, albums were loaned out a lot more sparingly. Clearly these factors count too.
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That wasn’t my point though… I was talking about how more independent minded artists employed cassette tapes for their own purposes.[quote=“null, post:63, topic:98368”]
Fans producing there own tapes, and trading them, was also marketing for bands that could not make it onto a label.
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This… couldn’t or didn’t want to. I’d wager that many punks found out about new bands via tape trading networks in the mail.
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Sure you didn’t have the mastering/plating setup costs costs like with vinyl, (which some smaller pressing companies would wave anyway) but in my experience, even forgoing any and all paper label printing, there wasn’t much savings to be had on <100 unit of cassette vs vinyl.
For a really short run of ~20 cassettes I just did the duplication myself.
If by “dupe enough to give out at shows or sell a few at one local shop” then yes. I did that and did indie label work as well.
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Or also, dupe enough to drop in the mail, where someone will make a copy and send it on to the next person…
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For a while in the late 80s I’d built up a fairly good mail order sales network. Always made enough to fund the next release.
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That’s awesome! These projects (from what I’ve seen, at least) often became self-sustaining, even if they didn’t make anyone rich.
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It isn’t international Talk Like Like A Pirate Day, but I just can’t help it.
install.package(“haRR”)
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and, a consideration of the big companies, they were easier to store and transport.
Too bad downloading killed that model. First it killed direct sales then distributors started shrinking their orders and no longer paying COD and eventually moving to “pay per unit sold after 90 days”. Considering that the sales window had long passed that meant either not getting paid at all or only getting paid a fraction of production costs. Moving to online digital sales never helped me get back to even recovering costs.
Ah! That’s an important point, I think, often overlooked in these discussions, epsecially from the pro-downloading side. The pro-downloading folks tend to say that it allowed artists, especially independent artists, to reach out to a larger audience and more people, with less costs. But as you noted here, it cut into not profitability, but sustainability of that particular model that evolved in the 1980s and early 90s. I think the question might be can independent artists find ways to exploit new modes of sharing music to make their work sustainable? I don’t know. It’s worked out for some, but they’ve passed that “1000 true fans” point well before filesharing or streaming music became the norm. It’s interesting to think about how this form of music distribution might be harmful to independent music production.
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That file sharing might actually not be good for developing & sustaining independent music however is an unpopular opinion.
Regarding this and the original topic, I’m looking forward to reading this book:
Ice Ice Baby has one of the great hooks though i have it on my workout playlist. It’s really a clever fun song. I think pop is a hard category to get right.
Agreed. I think it can or could be, but it depends on how it’s used. But it’s certainly not a sure bet.
That does look like an interesting book. Yet another book to add to my list of books I need to read!
Thank David Bowie and Queen! 
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