People hear "record label" and picture something glamorous. Leather jackets. Tour buses. Someone snorting something off something. Let us correct that image immediately: it's us, at 11pm, reconciling a distributor spreadsheet, trying to figure out why a 53-year-old pop-punk drummer with two teenage kids and a mortgage is owed $11.40 for a repress of a record he made when Clinton was president.

That's the business. Let's talk numbers.

Quick housekeeping before we dive in: I run the label. The bands are my partners, not my employees, not my content, not line items — partners, in the actual sense of the word. So when this reads as "we," that's not corporate royal-we nonsense. That's me and the bands, in it together, on the same 60/40 math, hoping the same twelve people show up.

First, Some Context: Nobody Involved Is Famous
This is not the Mötley Crüe economy. Nobody on this label is buying a yacht, crashing a yacht, or recording a Netflix docuseries about the yacht. These are bands who were active thirty years ago, in some cases genuinely great, occasionally influential, and now — like everyone else who was 22 in 1994 — they have families. Careers. Orthodontist appointments for their kids. One of them is, statistically, someone's soccer coach right now.

And we're not just guessing at this — we track the data. Order after order, statement after statement, the demographic comes back the same: our fanbase skews 35 to 65. This isn't a label selling to teenagers discovering a genre for the first time. It's a label selling to people who discovered it the first time around and never fully let go.

The fanbase has aged right alongside them, which means the addressable market for any given reissue is measured not in thousands, but in a number you could seat in a diner. A generous count on some of these releases nets you an audience in the dozens — and being honest with ourselves, a meaningful percentage of the original fans are no longer in a position to purchase anything, vinyl or otherwise, on account of being dead. This is a genre where "core demographic" and "actuarial table" are starting to overlap.

So no, we are not doing this for the money. We are doing this because someone has to, and also because we apparently enjoy financial self-harm.

The Royalty Model Isn't What You Think
I pay bands 60% of net profit — not gross, not "off the top," actual net, after every pressing cost, mechanical royalty, and design fee is recouped. And it's a hard, fast 60/40 for everyone. No sliding scale, no "well for you we'll do 65," no special treatment because your band was on a compilation once. Sixty to the band, forty to the label, across the board. If the record hasn't paid for itself, the band doesn't owe me anything; the shortfall just carries forward like a bar tab nobody's rushing to collect on. And dammit, one day I might actually see that 40% myself — between the cash lag and the recouping and the twelve-person addressable market, the label's cut is often more theoretical than actual. Given that we're often talking about pressing runs whose total lifetime audience could fit in a Honda Odyssey, "recouping" can take a while.

The Real Villain: Cash Lag
Nobody warns you about this part. You don't get paid when the record sells. You get paid months later, when the distributor finally settles up, in a statement that distinguishes between units "shipped" and units "paid" — two numbers that are not the same thing and are absolutely not additive. We learned this the hard way by adding them together like fools and briefly believing a 30-year-old pop-punk record was suddenly having a moment. It was not having a moment. It was an accounting error.

Meanwhile you've already paid for the pressing, the mechanicals, the packaging, all up front, for an audience that peaks at "everyone who still has a working turntable and a functioning cardiovascular system."

Credit where it's due, though: our distributor, ILD, pays out monthly like clockwork. We lLD so much. In an industry built on feels, delays, and the honor system, that's basically a miracle. I know because I've lived the alternative. A previous label I ran had a distributor who took four fucking years to pay us a single dime, and when I finally made enough noise about it, they gave me a thank you check and a kick in the dick. I then went to another distributor, Lumberjack, on the recommendation of a friend, only to have them go bankrupt and sell off all the product I'd given them. That's the industry standard, apparently: labels operate on trust with companies that have none. ILD just... sends the statement, sends the check, every month, no drama. It's the one part of this business that behaves like a normal business, and I genuinely don't know what I'd do without it.

Pressing Runs Are a Bet on Velocity, Not Volume
We modeled a reissue at 500 units financed at 9% interest, hoping the math would tell us something encouraging. It did not. It told us that interest alone would eat roughly 9% of the total pressing cost just for the crime of the inventory sitting around waiting for 50-somethings to remember it exists. Cut the sell-through time in half, the drag shrinks with it. Velocity and financing cost are the same lever, which is a fancy way of saying: press small, sell fast, don't let 400 copies of anything gather dust in a room you're also paying rent on.

So now the strategy is deliberately tiny. Press lean, generate a little FOMO, and let the remaining sliver of people who still care buy in before they, too, age out of the market in the most permanent way possible.

Consistency Is the Whole Point
Every release runs the same math: 60/40, net profit, no exceptions, no favorites. It would honestly be easier to negotiate case by case — offer a lower cut here, a sweetener there, depending on who's asking and how loud they are about it. We don't. Multiply a single flat rate across a back catalog spanning a decade and at least the accounting stays simple, even when the outcomes don't. Every release is still its own tiny, barely-profitable universe — it just runs on the same rules as all the others.

And for the record, on the rare occasion a run actually clears its costs and turns a profit, we're talking a label margin somewhere around 17.5%. Not 40%. Not the "40%" from the split, which is a share of net profit, not a margin on revenue — two very different numbers that get confused constantly. 17.5% is what's left after the pressing, the mechanicals, the packaging, and the freight all take their cut, on a good run, with a target we don't always hit. That's the actual economics of this business when everything goes right: single digits away from "barely worth doing," on a genre whose fans might not all make it to the next pressing.

Sometimes the Tape Itself Hates You
Not every reissue is just "press more of the same file." Some of these masters are thirty years old, recorded on a four-track in someone's basement by a guy who is now, statistically, an insurance adjuster. Tape degrades. Formats die. Sometimes what we get back from the vault is less "master recording" and more "here's what's left of it, good luck." Restoration, remastering, tracking down a usable copy when the original tape has physically started to flake apart — that work is real, it's specialized, and it is not cheap.

Every so often the amount of work required is so staggering that I nearly spit out my malt liquor reading the bill. You budget for a pressing. You do not budget for "baking a decaying analog tape in a food dehydrator just to get one clean pass through the heads before it crumbles, so we can finally transfer it to something that won't disintegrate in a decade." And yet, here we are, paying it, because the alternative is letting a genuinely good record just disappear because nobody could be bothered thirty years ago to store the tape somewhere that wasn't a garage.

​So Why Do This?
We do hold out a little hope that some of these fans are cool parents now, quietly slipping their kids a copy of something we pressed and hoping it takes. Realistically, it's a coin flip at best. If my parents had been the ones curating my music taste via pop punk and power pop, I probably would have rebelled hard in the opposite direction and become a devoted fan of Tibetan throat singing out of pure spite. Teenagers can smell "your dad's cool record" from a mile away, and nothing kills a genre's edge faster than a parent's enthusiastic endorsement.

Because somebody has to keep this stuff in print for the twelve people who still want it, and because there's something genuinely funny about running discounted cash flow models on a genre whose target demographic is aging out in real time. The numbers don't say "hopeless." They say "niche, thin-margin, and shrinking by attrition" — which, if you squint, is just a more honest version of every record label that ever existed.

Press lean. Watch the cash lag. Don't count on Q4 sales from anyone who might not make it to Q4.
And I'd do all of this again in a heartbeat. None of the above is a sob story — it's just reality, the actual mechanics of what this business looks like when you're honest about it instead of dressing it up. I do this because I love making records, I love the bands, and I love the people who still show up for them. Full stop. Everything else is just the spreadsheet.

It has been a while since I’ve written anything here, or even used this feature on the website, so I wanted to give everyone a real update about what has been going on with Sounds Rad, what we have coming up, and what we are hoping to do next.
First, we have some really exciting releases on the way — the kind that take a ridiculous amount of time, work, emails, waiting, more emails, and a little bit of stubbornness to finally make happen.

The first is Sweet Baby’s It’s a Girl, which we are especially excited about because it represents the culmination of about four years of work. That meant tracking down the original masters, working with Dallas and Matt from Sweet Baby, reworking the artwork with our illustrator-at-large Dominic Arce, and going back and forth with Warner Bros. / Ruby over the rights to the Slash and Ruby recordings.

It has been a long road, but it really has been a labor of love. This is one of those records that deserves to be back out in the world, and I’m really proud that Sounds Rad gets to be part of making that happen.

We are also finishing up the third of the three Pansy Division reissues we agreed to do: Pansy Division’s Pile Up. It is a fantastic compilation of rarities, and we are very excited to finally get it cut onto vinyl. Both It’s a Girl and Pile Up are slated for October release, and preorders are up now, including some really good bundle deals.
That brings me to what comes next.

Now that this round of records is finally moving across the finish line, we are getting ready to move on to additional reissues. People keep asking about more Mr. T Experience records, and yes — we are excited to get those going. They have just taken an inordinate amount of work. Some of the upcoming reissues require more than just remastering. They will require remixing, rebuilding artwork, sorting out concepts, and making sure everything is done the right way. The requirements are extensive, but I’m excited to keep working with Dr. Frank and to move those forward.

That said, Sounds Rad is, in reality, a company of one.  With extensive support from the bands and buds like Domo, Chris @ Hit Points Media, Justin @ Mystery Room Mastering ... and Rachel E at Burg Bookkeeping. There is no giant staff behind the curtain. It is mostly me doing the best I can to keep things moving, answer emails, pack orders, work with bands, coordinate artwork, deal with manufacturing, manage delays, fix mistakes, and keep the website from falling apart.

Speaking of the website: over the summer, I’m going to be rebuilding it. The goal is simple: make it easier to use and, frankly, less crappy. I’ve done my best to keep the current site updated, but over time it has gotten messy. The ordering and inventory system has also been frustrating. There have been times when people ordered something that appeared to be in stock, only for the inventory not to match what the site showed. That is not good enough, and I know how disappointing that can be.

So we are moving to a new platform where the website, store, inventory, and point-of-sale system are integrated properly. The hope is that everything will be cleaner, easier, more accurate, and less likely to leave anyone disappointed.
I also want to say something directly: sometimes I get things wrong. Sometimes shipping is slower than I want it to be. Sometimes the website creates problems. Sometimes I get overwhelmed. And when that happens, it genuinely bums me out.

Sounds Rad really is a labor of love. I care about these records, I care about the bands, and I care about the people who support what we do. If something goes wrong with your order, please email me. I will do my best to make it right. I’ll fix it, discount it, replace it, sort it out — whatever I can reasonably do. I try to treat our customers like friends, because that is honestly how I think about this whole thing.

I know not everyone who orders from us knows me personally, but hey reach out! I love chewing the fat. If you came through Maryland and hit me up, I’d be happy to sit down, have a beer, and talk about punk rock, power pop, pop punk, Lookout-era records, and all the music that made us care about this stuff in the first place.

Part of the reason things sometimes move slowly is that I also have a whole life outside of Sounds Rad. I’m finishing a PhD, managing work, family, and all the normal human things that sometimes pile up. I’m a scholar, a punk rocker, a dad, a teacher, and a record nerd trying to keep all the plates spinning. Sometimes I pull it off. Sometimes I don’t. But I’m always trying.

Looking ahead, we also want to expand the distro side of Sounds Rad. The goal is to carry more records from bands and labels around the world and make the site a one-stop shop for music I love and want to share. Our markups are not huge, and we try to keep prices fair — especially when people bundle records together with flat shipping. Ideally, buying from us should be cheaper than most record stores, and that is something I want to keep committing to.

So that is the update. New records are coming. More reissues are in the works. The website is getting rebuilt. The distro side will grow. And I’m going to keep trying to make Sounds Rad better, more reliable, and more useful for the people who care about this music.

Thank you for sticking with us, supporting the releases, sending kind notes, asking about future projects, and being patient when things take longer than expected.
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Here’s to a great coming year — and probably more diatribes soon.
— Chris/ Sounds Rad

This is what we are doing with MTX--combining physical apparel with digital music. We are tying everything together in the hope that we can take what has become soulless and disembodied media and turn it into an experience again--buying music should always be an experience. 

Our goal is to give you an experience through the mail. Imagine this: You order a custom shirt, hoodie, etc., and receive an instant download of the album that it represents. In a short time (depending on production) you get a custom box filled to the brim with killer apparel and swag. 

Every item we sell is packed and shipped in a custom box. We take pride in our packaging. 
​
BEHOLD THE BOX! And try to imagine your delight at getting something amazing in the mail.  This month we think we kind of outdid ourselves. We created a special holiday box for our orders shipping after Dec 4th. Not only does it look AWESOME but we think it's a pretty rad vessel to tell the world that the holidays don't necessarily have to suck.​

3. Sackcloth and Ashes
Just me, a good song, a double tracked Les Paul Jr., and the tremolo knob on a Sears Silvertone amp. I wanted to record a whole album like this. Still do.

4. Whistle Bait
This Collins Kids cover is one of two songs we recorded with Jim Tierney at Fishtraks in Portsmouth, NH for the Joe King-produced compilation More Bounce to the Ounce. (It was later included on the ...and the Women Who Love Them CD comp.) Not much more to say about it, except: those were good times, and that p-90 sounds great.

5. Itching Powder in the Sleeping Bags (Live)
I'm a little fuzzy on the precise source of this track, but it was recorded live on the radio, probably on KFJC, and probably around 1994 (Joel/Jim line-up.) It appeared as "Bonus Mystery Live Track" on the CD single version of the MTX / Goober Patrol split from 1995.

6. Boredom Zone
The song itself dates back to my high school days. This version was recorded in 1988 by Greg Freeman at Lowdown Studios in San Francisco as part of a lengthy demo tape, and it first appeared on the Lookout Records compilation The Thing that Ate Floyd. It was later included as a bonus track on the Lookout CD re-issue of the Night Shift album. Not, perhaps, my finest hour as a songwriter, but I still like the drone/jangle guitar.

7. Fill in the Blank
Not A-list material by any means, but still kind of a fun track. Recorded at Sound and Vision in San Francisco during the second wave of Making Things with Light sessions, this song originally appeared on the 1991 Flipside compilation The Big One, and was included on the Big Black Bugs CD re-issue comp in 1997.

8. Unpack Your Adjectives
This cover of the Schoolhouse Rock tune was one of five songs we recorded at Sound and Vision in '94 or '95, the first recording session to feature Joel Reader on bass and backup vox, and the last thing we ever did at Sound and Vision. The other songs were "Alternative Is Here to Stay", "New Girlfriend," "You Today," and "Semi-OK." My original plan was to do them all as a self-released e.p., but Larry Livermore talked me into doing a single with Lookout instead. The die was cast. We stayed on Lookout. (This song, under the title "Adjective," appeared on the 1995 Lookout Records comp. A Slice of Lemon.)

9. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah
This surf-y song with nonsense lyrics somewhat inexplicably appeared on a 1997 compilation somewhat inexplicably called "Generations I - a Punk Look at Human Rights." Somewhat inexplicably, its title was listed as "Ya, Ya, Ya, Ya." It was later included on the ...and the Women Who Love Them CD comp. I believe this was recorded at Roof Brothers studio in Oakland, at the same session where we did the Duran Duran and Primitives covers. (We used to try to combine the covers comp recording sessions and throw in one of our own songs if there was time for it -- this track was unfunded, meant to benefit... something or other.) I can't remember much more about it, but I do remember the carpet. It was gray and kind of damp. Smelled like cats.

10. Semi-OK
This original version of this song was on a Lookout flexi sampler that came with the September 1995 issue of Punk Planet as well as on the Goober Patrol / MTX split 7"/CD that came out in the same year.

11. Flying Jelly Attack
This was recorded at Dancing Dog Studios in Emeryville ca. 1989 for a Shonen Knife covers compilation called Every Band Has a Shonen Knife Who Loves Them; later on, it appeared as a bonus track on the Making Things with Light CD and subsequently the Big Black Bugs CD compilation. Many of the covers we recorded were done solely because the people putting them out gave us a small amount of money for studio time, but in this case it was a band I really loved and was one of my favorite songs by them. Our version is... well quite weird sonically, but sort of charming I guess. The guitar stuff was perhaps a harbinger of things to come in a way: this is what happens when you give a boy an SG and a Mesa Boogie. A guy from Jon von's work transliterated the Japanese lyrics for me and I sang them not very convincingly, but that didn't stop it being used as evidence for the still extant folk legend that I am half Japanese. (I'm not.) When we played with Shonen Knife a few years later Naoko Yamano told me my Japanese was "very well." Success.

12. As Life Goes On, You Get More and More Out of It
A home recorded never-before-released song that first appeared on the ...and the Women Who Love Them CD. comp. All it's got going for it is the double-entendred title really, but it's a pretty good one.

13. Kenny Smokes Cloves
One of the earliest MTX songs, recorded in that Greg Freeman/Lowdown 8 track demo tape session. Kenny Kaos needed to be immortalized in song, somehow, and while I'm sure I didn't quite do him justice, I did the best I could. This first appeared as a bonus track on the Night Shift album CD re-issue.

14. Can't Get There from Here
Recorded for a 1992 REM covers compilation called Surprise Your Pig (because they gave us $200) and included on the Big Black Bugs CD comp. Figuring out absurd sound-alike lyrics for the incomprehensible Michael Stipe lyrics was the fun part and the main memorable feature here, a rare instance, perhaps, of nonsense parody lyrics making more sense than the original. "Donna Reed is not my mom" will forever live in infamy. Years later our old associate Robert Shimp was engineering an REM record in San Francisco and played the track for Peter Buck, who reportedly said "at least they got the chords right." As with so much else in our repertoire, it was the very least we could do. 

15. God Bless America
This much loved/maligned song originally came out on the Blame and Burn 7" comp on Flush Records in 1992. Later it was added as a bonus track to the Our Bodies Our Selves CD issue with no indication that it was "bonus" leaving many/most fans with the impression that it was the final track of that album. In fact, the song pre-dates the album by many years and was originally meant to be solo/acoustic, and generally played during broken string breaks and such at shows. (Ironically, on the other hand, "Even Hitler Had a Girlfriend" had been intended as a full band song that became acoustic by exigency.) This recording was meant as the first iteration of what was to be a generic backing track with new lyrics/vox to be added and submitted every time we had a compilation offer with no budget. (cf. "Vive la France" and "God Bless Lawrence Livermore".) It was also included on the Big Black Bugs CD comp. A different mix appears on the MTX/Goober Patrol split.

16. I Was Losing You All Along
As originally conceived, this song was intended to be the grand finale track of Revenge Is Sweet and so Are You -- the album title appears as a lyric in the bridge, in fact. In the event it never quite "gelled" in the studio and we didn't have the time (nor, arguably, the talent) to do it justice so it was abandoned unfinished. Kevin Army and I did what we could with it several years later to make it presentable for the ...and the Women Who Love Them CD compilation. It was during this session at Shark Bite studios in Oakland that Al Jardine poked his head in to say: "that bass sounds a little picky... not to be, you know, picky" lending a Beach Boy's support the tone side in our ongoing argument over how trebly and stringy the bass should be. While the recording isn't perfect, this is still one of my favorites among my songs, and I'd love the chance to re-do it properly one day, or to hear someone good do a cover of it. The reprise of the guitar line from Milk Milk Lemonade's "See It Now" was intended to link those two albums together on the basis of some no doubt pretentious rationale I've since forgotten.

The CDs were seen as an adjunct to the vinyl version, and, like a lot of bands, we used to pile on any available extra tracks in a more or less archival spirit without much (or any) thought given to aesthetic cohesion. The idea was, why would anyone want to pay more money for a CD of this when you could get a perfectly good LP -- better give 'em something extra to justify the extra expense. (Though in some cases it's not at all clear that these extra tracks added value rather than subtracted it.)

Anyhow, the result was, in the end, a mess, and a blurring of the line between the albums per se and the morass of extras. (e.g., the crazy track listing of the Our Bodies Our Selves CD, where the obvious ending song "Game Over" is succeeded by three cool but random extra tracks (one of them inexplicably moved from the main album to the end) with "Swallow Everything" shoehorned in between "More Than Toast" and "Not Guilty" -- because they were recorded in the same session? And then there's a hidden track at the end of a big space of silence after "God Bless America"... Clearly, the product of a madman, if not several madmen. Yet I know that many people think of this nutty CD as the actual "real" album. And maybe it should have been, in that some of the crammed-in songs are many people's favorites. But, it wasn't.)
So when, in the wake of Lookout's exit, we re-organized the digital back catalog, we decided to restore the original vinyl track listing and sequences of the albums, eps, and singles. While many of the CD extras had been b-sides that had been included on their respective singles in the re-organization, this left out a great many previously released songs (thirty-two, to be exact.) Some of these were quite "important" ones too, like "King Dork", "We Are the Future People of Tomorrow", "Unpack Your Adjectives," as well as a lot of fun covers and such. The plan was always to compile these into an Odds 'n' Sods / Relics type album, but what with one thing and another, that plan hasn't happened till now.

I've tried to arrange the tracks as albums that can be listened to as such, eight songs to a "side" in the traditional manner, rather than chronological archives. They are from various sources, (covers comps, out-takes, demos, one live on the radio song) spanning 1987 thru 1999. The criterion for inclusion when it comes to the out-takes and demos is simply whether they have already appeared (and subsequently disappeared from) somewhere. I have however left off the terrible sounding live cassette recordings that were on the Making Things with Light CD; they were just messing everything up like they always have. (They're easy to find if you must have them, and in fact, I can even sell you a CD if you want one of those: drop me a line at [email protected]) As for the demos and out-takes, maybe one day I'll find the machinery and the gumption to re-examine those tapes and see if there's anything else interesting on them, but that's for another time if it ever comes. For now, this is what there is. You can get the whole thing at once, or song by song as needed. Or not, as the case may be. Just putting it out there, as it were.
​
Finally, big, heartfelt thanks go to our good friend Pete Mattern at Planet X Recording Studio for mastering the comp. You'll probably be surprised how good it sounds, especially considering the sources.

​

By Frank Portman and Chris Thacker
The devastation that the digital music revolution brought to the music industry and its reciprocally sustaining culture and subcultures has been exhaustively discussed and analyzed. The results of it are plain for all who walk in its ruins: music has been devalued to almost nothing in the commercial market, almost everyone went out of business, and the role of struggling musician became even more of a struggle. 

Less discussed has been the effect of this devaluation of music from the perspective of fans and music lovers, which has been paradoxical. While there is easy, cheap access to an effectively unlimited aggregate of material, being swamped in undifferentiated “content” has not proven to be the paradise it was cracked up to be. And in a world where releasing a record typically involves little more than pressing “send”, and where consuming the music encoded therein involves little more than clicking “add”, or even just doing nothing at all and passively allowing yourself to be fed from a cloud, the resulting experience, for all its convenience, has become highly impersonal at best. 

What can be done to restore the immediacy and personal quality that made bands and their “content" so compelling in the first place?  No one has figured out how to do this very well.  Most of just press “send" and click “add” and hope for the best.  That’s just not good enough, and we decided to do something about it by--

• Curating the best possible music from amazing artists
• Focusing the best physical product to support the music
• Creating a shared experience for fans

A record label is nothing more than a curator of music. If people trust the curator's taste(s) they will buy the music. That's why it is critical to focus on working with amazing artists. When the idea of Sounds Rad was being kicked around, the first person to immediately buy into the idea of personalizing the experience of buying music was Dr. Frank of the Mr. T Experience. If Sounds Rad’s first principle is to curate the best possible music, then damn it, MTX has to be a part of it. And from there it became clear that to goal is to find as many existing MTX fans and create a community by knocking them on their ass with releases that they would love to hear; merch that they would love to wear; and a shared experience that makes that them feel if they are members of a secret MTX cult replete with ritual handshakes, code names, and songs about girls.

Everything that "we" (the royal we--Sounds Rad and MTX) are trying to do is based on quality: records, apparel, and the experience. Imagine this: You place an order on the Sounds Rad website. A few days later you come home to a custom designed box at your door. You run inside and carefully open the box to find a new signed limited MTX album, a t-shirt that you actually want to wear all of the time, and the knowledge that you got amazing value. That's what we want to do. Everything item sold is coming from the band to the fan: a shared experience.