Archive
Everything on the site, in one place
Timeline
- One Line, 1939 to NowThe record label as institution, compressed into a single annotated thread — from Blue Note's first session to streaming's current share of global revenue
- The Year the Business Stopped GrowingAmerican record sales fell in 1979 for the first time in years — and the industry chose the wrong explanation
- The Silver Disc and the Catalogue Reissue TradeWhen consumers replaced their record collections with compact discs, the industry sold them the same music twice — and the economics were transformational
- When the File Moved Faster Than the Label CouldThe Napster years didn't kill recorded music
- Vinyl Outsells the Compact Disc in the United StatesAfter three decades of CD dominance, RIAA data for 2022 showed vinyl revenue pulling ahead — the first time since 1987
Labels
- Alfred Lion Records Two Boogie-Woogie Pianists and Calls the Result Blue NoteHow a German émigré's obsession with jazz, a darkroom friendship, and one engineer's ear in New Jersey built the most coherent label catalogue in American music
- The Memphis Recording Service Opens at 706 Union AvenueSam Phillips rents a storefront in downtown Memphis, captures sounds the major labels had never bothered with, and builds the studio practice that will produce the Sun Records catalogue
- Stax Discovers What Its Distribution Contract Actually SaidHow a handshake deal with Atlantic left Memphis's greatest soul label without its own recordings
- Berry Gordy Borrows Eight Hundred Dollars and Buys a House on West Grand BoulevardThe production-line pop empire that Berry Gordy built from a Detroit bungalow changed what a record label could be
- A Manchester Label Gives Its First Catalogue Number to a PosterFactory Records assigned its FAC prefix to everything — posters, nightclubs, lawsuits, a coffin — because Tony Wilson never regarded the catalogue number as merely a filing tool
- Ahmet Ertegun, Jerry Wexler, and the Art of the Lease DealHow Atlantic structured its regional arrangements differently from Chess — and why that determined which masters it kept.
- Geoff Travis Opens a Shop on Kensington Park RoadA record shop that became a label, and a distribution network that became an alternative economy: Rough Trade, Notting Hill, from 1976.
- Chris Blackwell Presses the Records and Drives the Stock to the Shops HimselfAn English schoolboy in Jamaica builds a label that reinvents itself three times and sells for sixty million pounds
- Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin Run a Label from a Dormitory RoomDef Jam's first three years demonstrate how a production aesthetic, not a building, can be a label's primary asset
- Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman Press a Thousand Singles and Ship Them to Every College Radio Station in the United StatesHow a Seattle label turned regional identity into a business model — and nearly went broke doing it
- Manfred Eicher Asks for the Longest Possible Reverb TailHow ECM Records, founded in Munich by Manfred Eicher in 1969, turned silence, space and a photographic aesthetic into a recognisable identity.
Rooms
- From His Parents' Living Room in Hackensack to the Studio He Built in Englewood CliffsRudy Van Gelder recorded nearly every important Blue Note, Prestige, and Impulse! session between 1953 and the 1970s — first from a domestic room in New Jersey, then from a studio he designed himself
- What a Twenty-Foot Room Does to a RecordThe room as instrument, the address as sound
- Why Atlantic Kept Sending Its Artists to AlabamaA converted tobacco warehouse in a town of six thousand people produced some of the most commercially successful soul records of the 1960s and early 1970s — and the major labels kept booking it
Sleeves
- Reid Miles Starts Designing Blue Note CoversHow a graphic designer working from contact sheets and a tight budget built the most recognisable visual language in jazz — and possibly in recorded music
- Peter Saville and the Sleeve That Arrived After the Record Was Already in the ShopsTony Wilson gave Saville a brief and received a philosophy; the records shipped while the sleeves were still being argued over
- Vaughan Oliver Builds a Visual Language for a Label That Had No GenreDesign at 4AD was not illustration of music — it was a parallel sensibility, made from the same impulses
- The Paper Circle That Sold the RecordThe 45 rpm single's centre label was two inches of paper, but every major American label treated it as a design brief
- The Yellow Cartouche and What It PromisesDeutsche Grammophon's oval logo has outlasted every format it has appeared on — and keeps working precisely because it never explains itself
The Trade
- EMI Is Broken Up and the Majors Become ThreeA half-century of British recorded music history changed hands in 2012, when regulatory approvals confirmed that the global major-label sector would contract from four companies to three
- Gold at Five Hundred Thousand, Platinum at a Million — and When Those Numbers ChangedRIAA certification thresholds have shifted four times since 1958; a gold record on a 1974 album and a gold record on a 2016 release are not the same claim
- The Catalogue Becomes the AssetHow streaming turned a label's back catalogue from afterthought to primary collateral