It's been a while since I've rapped at ya, and it seems that a lot has happened in the "music industry" since then. It's also been the first chance that we've been able to celebrate a full year of us being a label. Looking at the Bomb the Music Industry! calendar, it seems that a lot of us were in St. Louis with good friends, drinking and playing pool on the official year anniversary which seems like a good way to unintentionally party on our birthday. If you're the kind of people who like numbers, well, we've made a couple thousand bucks in donations this past year which has gone to help record bands and pay for a lil' bit of tour support. Yeah, it's not as much as some other bands, but it's an awesome start for us! We really want to show our appreciation by showing you this hilarious dog on a unicycle in a top hat.



The end of 2007 is poised to be a very very busy one for us. This Tuesday, the internet release of a split between the O Pioneers and Bomb the Music Industry! will FINALLY see the light of day. After that, we have some surprises waiting in the wings for the month of December. You see, MOST record labels cannot release things in December; after Thanksgiving, stores don't have time to stock small CD's that aren't going to sell. That's why around Christmas time you see the usual piles of greatest hits, holiday songs and Now That's What I Call Music's. Thankfully for us, we don't give a fuck about stores! So watch out after Thanksgiving for some new bands that we're working with, some old bands that we're finally working with, some reissues maybe, shit, a comp with unreleased jams too.

And remember... it's all FREE. Well, if you're a good samaritan you could donate, but we'll let you hear the records first. It's funny how many phone calls we got about that Radiohead thing when it happened. People were saying that the music industry was finally going to change, Radiohead were ushering in a new era, blah blah blah, and what did we get up getting? Iffy bitrates, no album art, and not even a complete track listing of the next record. Granted, them giving their music away for free is a really nice gesture but when it's uncovered as marketing it doesn't seem as revolutionary. [edit: I guess it's important to say that Quote Unquote downloads are the same bitrate, and that these two sentences were more of a 2 AM response to all the press hoopla and backlash surrounding this record. and also, eat shit.] At the same time, the new Saul Williams record has just been release under a donation basis by another 90's-rock-legend-turned-flat-out-rock-legend. This record is available for free download, or a higher quality download for 5 bucks. And obviously, these records have gotten more press than the stable of Quote Unquote unknowns.

Is this a bummer? Who knows. But I think it's great that we've been able to do what we've done in the last year, and I think we can all learn from each other to take music away from the greedy people and just let it be music. We've got some ideas on how to make Quote Unquote better next year: higher bitrate records, lossless torrents, digital liner notes and more. As cheesy as it sounds though, the most important thing to us in what YOU think we should do to get you everything you would want from a band without the lawsuits. We opened up a thread on the Bomb the Music Industry! boards where we're taking suggestions... when we can figure out how to work computers better, we'll open our own board.

One of the first times I spoke with Brett from The Riot Before about doing a record together he had mentioned that he liked Quote Unquote because by donating, listeners are actively participating in an artist's career, therefore the art itself. At the risk of sounding like a motivational speaker, punk rock is in our hands and I really think we can make something awesome together, that will outlive hype, marketing schemes and the archaic structure of the current music industry. Fuck yeah, right?

PLEASE DIGG THIS STORY SO MORE PEOPLE HEAR ABOUT IT, YEAH?