Emancipation: An Essay By Du Blonde
In 2021, I founded the record label Daemon T.V, an independent imprint that provides artists with physical formats of their music at no cost while allowing them to keep their master rights and 100% of their digital income. Alongside Bradley Kulisic, Pippa Morgan, and my mum, Christine Jeans, we release cassette tapes, CDs, vinyl, and zines for independent artists we love.
Much of my childhood was spent collecting vinyl, listening to my mum’s stack of cassette mix tapes (with carefully handwritten tracklists), collecting zines and the free copies of Vice magazine you could pick up in local record stores. My first experience with vinyl was a copy of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Ladies of the Canyon’ on gatefold 12″, the inner sleeves adorned with Mitchell’s handwritten lyrics. I’d stare for a long time into the grooves as voices of people long passed rang from the speakers, wondering how on earth something so magical could be possible. I’d spend hours reading the liner notes of records of ’60s West Coast artists, creating points on a spider web in my mind every time I found the name of a musician I’d learned about lending their talents to the record of a peer. A Frank Zappa fan since hearing ‘Camarillo Brillo’ at thirteen, I was led down a rabbit hole of his seemingly endless creativity and efforts to record and release music for himself and others in a way that served the music, not the company. His late ’60s record labels Bizarre and Straight, releasing albums by avant-garde acts such as Captain Beefheart, Wild Man Fischer, The GTOs, and the less avant-garde but still weird Alice Cooper, showed me the joyful possibilities of releasing art untouched by large companies. Many record labels at the time would have run a mile from acts like this, yet we’re still talking about them today, while the record labels in question fight to stay above water as streaming takes over the musical landscape.
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During my teens, I became further enamoured with the independent D.I.Y scene, consuming films, magazine articles, books, and obscure D.I.Y documentaries on YouTube. I signed my first contract in 2008 at the age of 18, but with the 2010 documentary ‘New Garage Explosion: In Love With These Times’ – a film exploring different characters from the garage rock community at the time – I saw an alternative to the corporate path I’d previously thought of as my only option. In the film, Ty Segall and John Dwyer speak to the camera about their love of the D.I.Y scene, Vivian Girls glue the covers of their own 12″ records in their living room, The Dirtbombs play a show in a bowling alley, Toody and Fred Cole of Dead Moon discuss the benefits of selling your own merch, and Fred shows off his Presto 88 lathe cutting machine – something he’d always wanted. Having sent off tapes to manufacturers with specific orders to push the volume during pressing, he frequently received ‘washed out’ audio in return, the manufacturers insisting that any more volume would create unwanted distortion. ”Make it as hot as you want it; I don’t give a shit about distortion,” he snarls at the camera. With the machinery needed to make the vinyl now in his own home, this is something he no longer needed to worry about.
So, while I was already fighting label executives for the right to even ‘try’ my own ideas in the studio, these musicians were having the time of their lives creating their art, their way. All of this informed what I wanted to do creatively with Daemon T.V. Along with providing artists with access to physical formats of their work without fear of debt, I also wanted to provide products for people like myself to collect, keep, and engage with beyond just sticking on a record in the background. I wanted to recreate that experience of not only holding a piece of work in your hand but also exploring the record and the artist’s personality outside of just the audio.
Because of this, every release at Daemon T.V comes with a free zine created for or by the artist. These are often lyric zines but can also include photographs, illustrations, or even articles about subjects the artists are interested in. Two of my favourites being the zine we created with Cadet A for his release ‘Apollo Zero’: the accompanying zine ‘Dispatches from the La La Underground’, taking a look into the Los Angeles psych scene, underground venues, and Vapor Wave; and the zine Mr Bruce created for his release ‘Race to Nowhere’ which included thoughts on climate change, stills from his music videos and a tiny piece of tinfoil from the stop motion animation he created for his track, ‘I Am Disaster’.
Being a northeast label, many of our artists are from in and around the area. We’ve worked with Sunderland-based bubble grunge powerhouses bigfatbig on two of their EPs, releasing an anthology of their work on vinyl earlier this year (the band will also be joining me on my UK tour in January). Experimental garage band Pink Poison are also a personal favourite (listen to ‘Coolest Man in Greggs’ if you like Beefheart and Wild Man Fischer), and more recently, Newcastle-based artist Melanie Baker on her incredible EP ‘Burnout Baby’. Along with other artists, nationally and internationally, whose work we love and want to see made physical.
This brings me to another defining factor in the label’s creation: frustration with the music industry as it stands today. Having been signed to labels myself for 15 years, my list of grievances is a long one. Historically, record labels have presented themselves as gatekeepers, promising access to resources that could catapult an artist to stardom or, at the very least, allow them the financial freedom to create work they’re proud of while worrying less about the logistics of making and marketing an album. When I signed my first contract at 18 years old, I was under the impression that doing so would benefit my career. What better endorsement of your work than that of a record label? Not to mention the perceived financial support and access to a team of people whose job it is to promote your music.
Up until that point, I had been happily producing EPs and singles, burning them to CD and selling them at shows. I was touring extensively, had already found myself an agent, and had begun receiving local and national radio play (shoutout to Marc Riley, who gave me my first radio play in my teens after I passed him a hand-burned CD in a pub in Manchester). But I had bigger dreams. I wanted to release a full-length album, have my music pressed to vinyl, and embark on bigger tours. Like many others, I was under the impression that the only way to achieve this would be to sign the rights to my music over to the ‘professionals.’
What followed was 15 years of anxiety, stress, and heartbreak. Album delays, a reduction in tours, and, on the darker side, sexual harassment and gaslighting, all leading to a complete loss of confidence. In some cases, I was seeing no royalties at all while having to buy my own merchandise from the label at close to full retail price for an album I spent £7k of my own money to make. One label offered me a contract that would allow them to take a percentage of my earnings from my minimum-wage cafe job. By the time I realised what I had gotten into, it was too late. I no longer had (and still don’t have) the rights to any of the albums I made during that time, and have long given up on seeing royalties for the thousands of hours, and thousands of pounds, I put into them.
With the rise of 360 deals (In which the label takes a cut not only from record sales and streaming but touring, publishing, merchandise, and more) along with the reduction in advances (the money provided to the artist so they can afford to live while they make the work), many record deals have become downright offensive. All-too-often, artists are having their music withheld by labels, while legally being unable to release music outside of their contracts.
By 2021, I had finally come to the end of my last record contract. Something I’d dreamt of for over a decade. Having no ties to labels (aside from the £280k debt) was liberating. However, the psychological damage of having worked in the industry for so long had left me depressed, broke, and tired. I’d lost so much confidence in myself, lost so much faith in the industry, that a big part of me felt unable or unwilling to carry on, both as a musician and as a human. However, a small part of me wanted to make one last record. I felt I owed it to my younger self to finally make the album I’d been wanting to make since the beginning. An album untouched by the opinions and restrictions of record labels. ‘Homecoming‘ was going to be my last album. Finally, I had no expectations for how well an album would perform. The only thing that mattered was that, just once, I’d have made something I loved. I needed to be proud of something.
Fortuitously, at this very moment, I was contacted by Bradley Kulisic, founder of Singing Light (artist/label/campaign management) and current manager of pigs pigs pigs pigs pigs pigs pigs and Lambrini Girls. He’d watched my career since the beginning and, upon finding out I was going it alone, offered help and advice which in turn changed my life forever. Together we self-released ‘Homecoming’, and in the process Brad suggested I come up with a name for a fake label for the record – for fun more than anything else. Over the next few months, my mum and I packed up and shipped thousands of records from our living room, including a series of butt-prints I created for the Rough trade edition after the ‘galaxy effect’ vinyl came back looking more like someone had steamrollered my butt cheeks.
I entirely expected the album to flop or, at the very least, sell a few hundred vinyls to my most committed fans, but this didn’t matter. I’d made an album that I loved, and that still excites me to this day. Surprisingly though, what I thought would be an obscure release with very few sales became my best-selling record to date. Where, to this day, I am still unrecouped from even my first album in 2011, I recouped the cost of ‘Homecoming’ before it was even released and, because I own my masters, I’m still seeing income from sales and streaming from the album three years later.
This was due to several factors: one being a small but solid fan base that has supported me since the beginning, but the most significant factor being that, as I was finally in charge of my finances, I spent approximately £7k making the album. A lot of money, when you’re paying for it yourself, comes from savings from several freelance jobs, but it’s a pittance compared to the budget spent on my first album. Where labels were spending tens of thousands hiring producers and session musicians to record my albums in expensive studios, I recorded ‘Homecoming’ on a laptop in my childhood bedroom; engineering, performing, and producing the whole record myself. When you sign to a label, more often than not, you don’t have a say on how much money is spent on what, despite the fact that it’s you who is going to have to recoup the costs. I lost count of the amount of times labels and producers hired session musicians I didn’t need, to play instruments I could play myself, on parts I’d written. When I asked if I could play piano on my own record, one producer retorted, “Well, can you even play piano?” as the demo of the song, which I played piano on, faintly played in the background. The same producer later told me there was ‘no point’ in trying my creative ideas because “women always change their minds.” When I complained about this to the label, I was locked out of my own mixing sessions for being ‘too emotional’.
Instead of utilising my perfectly adequate and, more importantly, free capabilities, men were hired for thousands of pounds to play the parts I’d written while I sat quietly in the corner of the room. I fought for years to produce my own records, having begun producing at 16. I was never allowed. If I wanted my album released, it had to be produced by someone else, who always happened to be a man, some of whom had less production experience than I did.
With ‘Homecoming’, I did invest in outsourcing mixing and mastering but, even then, I was able to choose people for the job whose work I loved and who I trusted: Sam Grant of Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs is my go-to for mixing along with Chris McManus on drums. Self-releasing has taught me that you can make a decent album on a budget. In the days of social media, you can create a marketing campaign that works for you on a budget you can afford, even if that budget is £0. Mailing lists are your friend. Playing shows to real people creates real fans and interacting with your audience is wholesome all-around.
I syphoned the money made from ‘Homecoming’ into Daemon T.V. What began as a joke became something real – the type of record label I wish I’d had access to when I was starting out. Along with Brad, Pippa Morgan joined the team, taking over a large part of operations I didn’t have the time or the organisational skills to do myself. The three of us (along with my mum Christine, who has helped with everything from graphic design to packing and shipping) have released cassettes, CDs, vinyl, T-shirts, and zines for a host of talented artists who want to release their music without giving up their rights in the process.
I want younger artists to know that you don’t have to sign to a record label in order to have a fruitful, successful, and respected career. And if you do want to sign to a label, there’s no rush. You can self-release, find your voice and your values, and build a fan base on your own terms. Then, if you find a company that offers exactly what you want and who isn’t going to take you for a ride, you can do that in an informed way. But the resources are out there now more than ever. You can make a high quality album in your bedroom, upload it to streaming services and Bandcamp and distrokid. Run a preorder campaign for vinyl that brings in the money you need to pay for the manufacturing, all while keeping your masters and keeping 100% of the profits.
At Daemon T.V, we are not here to catapult anyone to stardom: we are here to help these artists build their own catapults, one that they have complete control over, financially and creatively.
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Du Blonde’s new album ‘Sniff More Gritty’ is out on November 15th via Daemon T.V.
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