Why I started a record label (and other people should, too)

"Well, only do it if you hate making money."

An independent record label owner said this to me when I told him I'm launching an independent record label this year. The label, Mainline Records, will be a direct offshoot from the Atlanta-based independent magazine of the same name that I founded in 2019. For the past seven years, we have chronicled the Atlanta music scene lovingly, critically, and diligently; now, it's time for us to up the ante. We're not reinventing the wheel here. For us, we are very much following in the Sub Pop tradition and making our way through the zine-to-label pipeline, as true punks-turned-journalists would.

The man who jokingly discouraged me owns and runs a label too, and has been doing the deal longer than I've known who Nirvana is. (I was five years old when Kurt Cobain died.) I felt like the character William Miller in Almost Famous when Lester Bangs, flawlessly portrayed by the late Philip Seymour-Hoffman, looked him dead in the eyes and said, "It's a shame you missed out on rock 'n' roll. It's over."

It's more or less been the same narrative since I began my career, starting as a music section intern at the renowned Atlanta alt-weekly staple Creative Loafing in 2017. That year, there were massive staff layoffs. Only three staffers remained while everyone else dwelt in freelance or intern limbo, working for wages far too low for any of us to make a living in our rapidly gentrifying city. Again, I felt like William Miller.

"But you got here just in time for the death rattle," says Bangs to the young, doe-eyed Miller, based on a young Cameron Crowe, who began his career at Rolling Stone at the peak of its countercultural ascension in the 1970s. "Last gasp. Last grope."

Bangs' pessimistic attitude in Almost Famous, for me, painfully symbolizes the sort of deadbeat pessimism that is indicative of the old vanguard. In the movie, Bangs ironically stakes his claim that rock 'n' roll is dead before the explosion of Led Zeppelin—a historical moment in music history most people would argue is the beginning of rock 'n' roll (which, to be clear, it was not; but for many, it was). When I started Mainline magazine, I was met with the same type of discouragement: "Don't even bother. The train has already left the tracks. It's over."

In response to Bangs, Miller replies, "Well, at least I'm here for that." My version of it is something along the lines of, "I'm just stoked to be here." And it's true—because Mainline and our label are basically my long-running autonomy art project. I have simply built systems to support my ability to write and make art, with the hope that it could also house other voices normally marginalized by the mainstream media. And we have. I'm very proud.

The discouraging, repetitive response to the label soon seemed unavoidable, and parallel to the same advice I got before launching the magazine (which has been running successfully for over eight years; I guess they were all wrong). I began to question the source of this narrative. I started to notice who was discouraging me. It's always coming from some guy (#notallmen, but always a man, right?), usually straight, always white. Oftentimes, they'd be men sitting in the seats I coveted: ones with decision-making power, at the helm of all the resources, possessing that inherent sense of worthiness one only has if their environment never once told them they did not matter—a societal privilege exclusive to straight white men in this country. Nothing ever felt right about these conversations. Why would someone take the time to have coffee with me to discuss my new business venture, only to dissuade me or make it seem like a lost cause, rather than offer any help or meaningful advice? And if everything was so doomed, why were we even talking? And if it was all so bad, why were they even in the business of doing it?

It took several years into Mainline's existence and my career to heal enough of my internalized misogyny to fully grasp the dynamics of what was going on between my male peers and me in the media industry. Now, those microaggressions disguised as words of advice from men roll off like Teflon, because their words are completely weightless. Nearly 10 years into my career, I now have a pretty strong track record of proving a lot of people wrong when it comes to "The Way Things Are" and "How Things Should Be Done" (said in my deep man voice). Further, and more importantly, the deadbeat narrative doesn't actually line up with current reality, or the long lineage of pioneers who started independent labels as a form of resistance to the status quo: white supremacy, patriarchy, and racialized capitalism.

The long lineage of DIY, independent labels, and Black resistance

Listen. Get a room of music journalists together and ask when DIY, or "Do It Yourself," culture started, and you're going to get a bunch of different answers. I'm here to clear all that up.

The acronym DIY was first used in print in the early 1950s, with the specific phrase "do it yourself" encouraging homeowners to paint their own homes rather than hiring professionals in Suburban Life magazine in 1912. Later, the term gained widespread usage during the 1950s following WWII, with rising labor costs, increased leisure time, and suburban homeownership trends all birthing the do-it-yourself home repairs and hobby projects movement.

Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, DIY evolved from a home improvement term to the countercultural ethos we understand today. During the punk era, bands and indie zines adopted DIY as a term to describe their culture of recording music, booking venues, and publishing music, articles, and artwork independently of major corporations. This is generally the access point for most people when it comes to how the DIY ethos fueled the rise of independent, artist-run record labels. Some of the most renowned DIY labels that got their start at that time include the aforementioned Sub Pop (which began as a zine in 1980 and launched its label function in 1988), New Hormones (formed by the Buzzcocks in the UK in 1977), SST (formed by Greg Ginn of Black Flag in 1978), Dischord Records (founded by Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi in 1980), Blackheart Records (founded by Joan Jett and her producer Kenny Laguna in 1980 after they'd been rejected by 23 major labels), and many more.

The problem with that history lesson—one that has become the normalized story about DIY music cultural ethos and its rise—is that it's all attributed to white people, mostly male. And the truth is that white people have never started anything, except for colonialism, genocide, patriarchy, capitalism, and the invention of whiteness itself. Beyond that, anything white culture claims as "theirs" can be traced back to the appropriation of another culture. (So the reader knows, I'm a white mixed Colombiana femme person.)

While DIY music culture has typically been credited as being pioneered by the white- and male-dominated punk and later hardcore scenes of the 1970s and 1980s, independent (or DIY) labels have been historic markers in the fight for creative and financial independence for artists of all genres—particularly Black artists—since as early as the 1920s. America's first-ever Black-owned label, Black Swan Records, launched in 1921 and explicitly worked against Black stereotypes in music during a time in which white-owned record companies exploited and stereotyped Black artists to make profits. Other independently-owned Black record labels got their start shortly after, with Sunshine Records in Los Angeles and Black Patti Records in Chicago. Black Swan folded after three years, and Black Patti did the same within seven months, but the impact of these early labels transcended their operating time. Black Swan put out more than 180 recordings between 1921 and 1922, and Black Patti released nearly 60 records in its seven-month lifetime. Additionally, Black Swan achieved national distribution while operating under Jim Crow laws, which were specifically designed to deny Black folks basic human rights and hinder them from achieving material success.

Fast forward to the 1950s: Jazz pioneer Sun Ra and "King of Soul" Sam Cooke started their own labels and publishing companies (Saturn Records and SAR Records/KAGS Music, respectively), which coalesced with the meteoric rise of Motown Records. Motown Records, also known as Hitsville, U.S.A., was founded by Berry Gordy, Jr., in Detroit in 1959. After a failed business venture in a record store, a young Berry Gordy, Jr., took a job at the Ford Motor Company during the automobile industry boom that surged Michigan's economy in the 1950s and 1960s. There, Gordy was exposed to the assembly line model, which became the special ingredient that made the signature "Motown Sound" and its seamless, high-quality production possible. Gordy launched the label when he was 29 years old with an $800 loan from his family (worth roughly $9,155 today) and opened Motown's headquarters, Hitsville, U.S.A. In 1988, the label's estimated net worth was $61 million (which equates to $172M today) and was sold to MCA. Now owned by Universal Music Group, Motown Records is renowned for its vital role in racial integration of popular music and is considered the most successful soul music label in U.S. history. Gordy's net worth is estimated at around $400M.

In the 1960s, during Motown Records' first decade of business, Black Americans were fighting for basic rights during the Civil Rights Movement and to dismantle the Jim Crow laws that for decades had enforced strict racial segregation and disenfranchisement, particularly across the South. During this time, record labels continued to serve as vehicles for commercial success and platforms for Black resistance, serving up civil rights messaging and protest music that was being funneled into the mainstream due to its crossover appeal. In addition to Motown, the decade saw the rise of Stax Records in Memphis, Vee-Jay Records in Chicago, Ray Charles' Tangerine Records, and many more. Later, in the '70s and '80s, the punk scene further shaped the DIY music scene and made the practice more widespread within the genre—which was heavily influenced by Caribbean and Black British dub, ska, and reggae sounds, and pioneered by Black bands like Bad Brains, Death, Pure Hell, Poly Styrene/X-Ray Spex, et al.

It was the early hip-hop scene of the 1970s that cranked the pure DIY ingenuity into the air that others would pull inspiration from. The births of hip-hop and disco genres in the 1970s were watershed moments, forged in the direct response to systemic violence against and neglect of repressed Black and brown communities, perhaps embodying the most metaphysical expression of DIY: creating new entire genres based on joy, resistance, and self-determination.

All of these ventures and the development of their associated sonic genres were developed against the backdrop of multiple and concurrent chapters of extreme political strife, violence, and repression against Black Americans. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan's administration actively reduced federal social programs and scaled back civil rights enforcement. In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared a "war on drugs," the beginning of a decades-long policy era meant to criminalize Black people and manufacture public justification and consent for the reproduction of slavery via mass imprisonment. That year, the number of people incarcerated in American jails and prisons escalated from 300,000 to 2.3 million. 

As we evaluate our present circumstances and determine how to navigate into the future, it's vital to consult with history. In this case, history shows that not only is independent music production—that is authentic to the people making it, supports artists, and prioritizes people over profit—possible in times of political and economic upheaval, but is actually profitable and good for society. Imagine our world if Berry Gordy, Sun Ra, Sam Cooke, or any of your musical heroes listened to everyone else's "no." And for them, the no was loud and coming from every direction in the form of legal, economic, and physical barriers; in the form of Jim Crow laws, segregation, forced poverty, literal coup d'etats, mass incarceration, lynchings, rapes, state-sanctioned violence, terrorism by white people, and more.

So, what's our excuse? 

The changing tides and a new call to arms

While independent music has made immense, progressive strides for decades, the space is at present stagnating on many fronts. Men still basically control everything, and it's a problem. According to 2021 industry research, a staggering percentage of leadership positions are held by white men, with only 13.9% of CEOs, Chairmen, and Presidents across 70 major and independent music companies being women and only 4.2% being Black. Further, women make up only about 5.9% of popular producers while Black people make up only 8% of all working music producers.

While the struggle is real and we have a long way to go, I don't think we can argue our contemporary times are more difficult than those of our predecessors. Every generation has been faced with an apocalypse, and yet, the music has never stopped, and money has never stopped flowing. It's just all going into the wrong hands and being processed the wrong way. The issue isn't a shortage of artistry, drive, or creative capital; the problem is that the most powerful positions in the industry are being gatekept by a few super-wealthy executives and technofascists who want to exploit artists into oblivion and shove AI down our throats. (I am especially referring to the Swedish streaming app that is now officially on the BDS consumer boycott list that you are probably still giving money to. Leave Spotify already.) It's our duty to not only refuse to comply, but to build new systems away from them.

Although I understand how some might feel discouraged or pessimistic about the future of the music industry, I argue there's a lot for us to look forward to. Musicians and allied workers are unionizing and stacking notable gains. Longtime industry professionals are starting to predict the end of digital streaming platforms (DSPs), saying that DSPs like Spotify have a "ticking clock," while the pendulum swings in the other direction wherein artist ownership will be the "inevitable next era of music again." Artists within their local communities are starting to take the reins back on booking and promotion, moving their channels off mega social media platforms, and instead starting DIY websites like Ask A Punk Atlanta. Live Nation and Ticketmaster were just declared an illegal monopoly and are facing disruption, despite the Trump administration's efforts to halt the monopoly's demise. Olivia Rodrigo and her team just hosted the first Daisy Chain Fields fest last August in Southern California; the fest is essentially a modern-day Lilith Fair, a massive festival that ran throughout the 1990s, which featured women artists solely and debunked the myth that women artists couldn't sell records or concert tickets.

Whether or not Mainline would eventually start a label was never a question. The idea of running a label, for me, precedes Mainline's existence. I've visualized myself doing it since I was a child, fawning over record bins and old zines, getting lost in worlds that were built by people who, by all accounts, had no other choice but to do it. Like many people who fall in love with music, I did so because big pieces of my world were missing growing up, and music saved my life when nothing else possibly could. 

I was alone a lot growing up, and like Penny Lane—whose delusionally optimistic Be Here Now attitude serves as the antithesis to that of Bangs—says in Almost Famous, "If you ever get lonely, just go to the record stores and visit your friends." For kids my age, the proverbial record stores were MTV, VH1, bit-torrents, mix CDs, MySpace, and music blogs, but the sentiment was absolutely the same. Music kept and is still keeping me alive. For every problem I've ever faced, for every fear I've felt, for every ounce of grief my body holds, music has always been a process, a solution, and a balm to feel through all of it, survive, and persist. That right there is the universal language that music holds, across all identities and party lines, and that is worth inconveniencing ourselves for, whether that means finally deleting your Spotify account, buying music directly from artists, or going as far as starting a record label.

It's time we stop playing the Oppression Olympics with the past and instead start learning from it to inform our futures. While there have been exponentially rapid changes in the industry in the past decades due to technological advancements, the anatomy of the oppression remains the same. Further, so does our solution, which has reigned from the U.S. South, the cradle of the civil rights movement, and the cultural nexus of our country, for centuries: We do it ourselves, because we have to.

And what a joy that is.