We’ve floundered a little bit in getting this whole thing going but recently we’ve rallied the troops somewhat and are actually getting organised. On the 19th of February, 2005 we held a meeting on some outdoor furniture at my house, now known as Pith Headquarters.

Joe kept ‘minutes’ of the meeting, excerpt as follows:

Pith Records Meeting #01.
Date: 19/02/05
Time: 1400hours.
Minutes: Joe.
Attendance: Patrick, Chris, Will, Bea, Rac, Davd, Gaz, Joe, Gibbon.
- Meeting starting late.
- “Oh Crap” – Will Dayble, boss.
- “The minutes have started” – Gaz, followed by a bad joke from Gibbon.
- “Already Patrick is becoming a problem” – Observation.
- Will is late, we are all waiting.
- Gibbon is very good at public transport.
- Rac offered to take the minutes, I declined.
- Bea is here, Will is now the only LATE person. Absolutely fucking typical.
- Gaz wants to form a union.

… and more in that vain.

Fun aside it seems actually getting together in person made things a lot easier to work through, we had a kind of round table discussion of what needed to be done, and how we would do it.
Before the meeting I put together a run down of what we needed to do to function as a record label and split it all into categories, each of which small enough to be managed by one or two people. They are as follows:

- Publishing:
The main ‘product’ we have to ’sell’ is the band itself, and the music they create. When properly organised, some of the greatest revenue streams come from liscensing - everything from having music played on telivision to payments from APRA and all that kind of stuff.

- Production:
This includes recording, mixing, mastering, audio and - when we finally get round to it - visuals. Bar the bands themselves, this is pretty much the main ‘product’ we’re gunna be pimping. Funnily enough, for the purposes of organisation this stuff actually fits pretty neatly in the category of ‘merch’, along with novelty mugs and fancy t-shirts. I will however seperate the two at the moment, consider ‘production’ to be making the audio (studio stuff), and merch… merch, as they’ll involve slightly different focuses.

- Merch:
As above, this is the material product of the artist. Physical stuff we can sell. Tees, CDs, stickers, badges, all the usual stuff.

- Promotion / Marketing:
To pimp said bands and product we need to have an awareness for them. This includes street press, radio, zines, online etc. I know ‘marketing’ is a yucky word, but it’s annoyingly the best way to describe this stuff. Finding the ‘market’ for our guys and gaining a share of it.

- Artist Activity:
This actually ties rather closely in with ‘promo’ but for our purposes this is basically gigs. Gigs, interview, touring, pretty much keeping the bands busy with stuff to do. This is the area that a popular, un-organised, or very busy band would pass onto a booking agent.

- Distribution:
We need our physical shit in stores. We’ll most likely be simply doing it consingment-style with smaller record stores around Australia, we’re not yet moving enough units for it to be worth getting a distribution deal.

Plus the two following kinda ’supplemental’ areas that will need to be figured:
- Street Team: This is basically a bolt-on of sorts to good promo, merch, etc…
- Funding: This is annoyingly involved, I’ll get to it later.

We sat around and everyone decided what areas they preffered and thought they’d be ‘best at’, and then figured out what needed to be done for each area.
By posting a new thread for each area in our private World Domination forum we now have a way to keep track of what each ‘department’ is doing in a way that means everyone involved can see what’s going on.

It seems to be working so far, we’re finalising artwork for both the bands Sacre Bleu! and Innocent Cabbage, and we’ve bought a bunch of (non-sweatshop!) t-shirts upon which we’re going to be printing designs ourselves with stencils and fabric paint.

We’re getting things together information-wise as well with Gibbon (who’s managing ‘artist activity’ along with Joe) getting together a more organised list of bands we will eventually have play at mentalfest and gig with the Pith bands in the future.

We had the amazing luck of having a mututal friend by the name of Rac join the ranks - he happens to be working at an accounting firm and knows his way around money a hell of a lot better than the rest of us, so he’s helping to source funding and let us know what we need as far as putting together grant applications and stuff.

By delegating all these jobs out and being a bit more organised it means we’re all doing a small section of the overall workload much more efficiently than one person (i.e. me) could do on their own. This also frees up a lot of time for me to get on with other stuff we need to do to get some money for all of this stuff.

It seems money really is a big obstacle. We want to press CDs but it costs money, we want to buy merch but it costs money… everything costs money and it’s a pain in the arse. Yet again I’m maxing out my credit card to pay the rent but hopefully with everyone else at Pith managing stuff I can spend more time doing web design and make some money, not just to pay bills but have some startup capital for all the stuff at Pith.

Mentalfest

Just to finish off this entry a quick word about a festival it seems we’re organising… It’s grown to warrant it’s own forum which is over here, and it’s basically a festival looking at mental health and young people.
This festival will work for us in many ways - not only is it a chance for us to do something really good for the community but it will give all of us some real tangeble experience in organising a large-scale event, and the connections with bands and community groups is excellent as it’s in line with all the other stuff we’re trying to do.
You can read more about Mentalfest at it’s little sub-site here.

This entry was posted by Will Dayble on Monday, March 7th, 2005 at 8:57 pm and is filed under Start an Independent Record Label. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.