Friday, January 25, 2008

Anthology Records

This post is not about radio. I'm going to do a product endorsement. I'll state now that I receive no compensation for this post. I just think the idea was utterly bad ass.
I used to work at a record label, and I also was a radio promoter. The long slow painful demise of that industry has been painful to watch for me. The labels have been resistant to change and the few changes they have ranged from inept and ham-handed to blindly self-destructive. Basically we've seen an entire generation of moguls and music men degenerate into rabid dogs barking and crawling around on their hands and knees defiling the fine carpets of Rockefeller Plaza... So to see a genuine forward-thinking innovation has been uplifting. This is one of the few new ideas that has given me some hope for the future.

Keith Abrahamsson of Kemado records recently launched Anthology Recordings. It's an entirely new kind of label. He's acquiring the out of print back catalogs of the artists the music nerds and hipsters love to name drop and releasing them as digital downloads. Hallelujah brothers and sisters!

Get this. He actually pays them royalties. Considering the screw-jobs of yore, these are some of the first royalty checks these artists have ever seen in their entire careers. Sir Lord Baltimore, China Shop, Night Sun, The Stomach Mouths... It's like a strange naive idealistic dream I once had... www.anthologyrecordings.com

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