NYC Indie Labels: Captured Tracks — Instinct, Intellect, and Artistic Expansion
Mike Sniper started the indie label Captured Tracks in 2008, working nights out of the basement of Williamsburg’s Academy Records, which he helped run during the day. Within a year, he’d be putting out a constant stream of new releases.
Although 2009 was an especially rocky year for the global economy, that didn’t slow things down for Captured Tracks at all. Sniper put out music at a near-frenetic pace, releasing more than 30 new recordings that first year, followed by about 50 releases each in 2010 and 2011.
Since then, the pace of new releases has slowed slightly, but the ambition has not. In 2012 and 2013, the label had some of its most successful releases to date, with new albums by Beach Fossils, DIIV, Wild Nothing, Mac DeMarco, Perfect Pussy and Widowspeak becoming critic’s favorites and big sellers in the scale of the indie rock world.
2013 also saw the opening of a new Captured Tracks record store on Calyer Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
For Sniper, this is one in a long chain of record stores that he’s worked at, managed or owned, and the second record label he’s launched. (The first being a power-pop label called Radio Heartbeat.)
A Cottage Industry in Greenpoint
“You’d be shocked of how many labels are here,” says Sniper. “You have Warp, Jagjaguwar, Secretly Canadian, Sacred Bones, Mexican Summer. And then you have two or three PR firms and management companies all within a four or five block radius.”
Mike Sniper
Sniper is friendly and pragmatic as he talks about the nuts and bolts of running a growing label and record store. Even as physical sales have dwindled industry-wide over the past decade, he has maintained tremendous confidence from being involved in a string of stores that have done well, and from studying what has caused other stores to flounder.
“You have the stores that are smarter and are thriving, and the stores that never adapted that are closing down,” he says. “Some stores close down because they’d buy 30 copies of the same non-returnable CD box set that they’re never going to sell, and they never bothered to have an online presence or to expand their vinyl section, or take in more used vinyl, which is kind of imperative at this point.”
“It’s just simple measures like that. It’s not ‘innovative’. It’s the stuff that every record store is supposed to do. You’ve got to make it business oriented, basically. I mean it’s a lot of fun, and you do it because you love it, but you’ve got to apply regular standard business practices. And you know, stay within your costs. The same thing goes with labels. You’ve got to approach everything that way.”
Budgeting
In dealing with his bands, Sniper likes to help them understand how the numbers break down, and invites them into the budgeting process. One of his biggest goals is to get his bands as much reach as they can while helping them keep costs as low as possible.
“We’re very transparent with our bands on all of our mutual expenses,” he says. “At first, a lot bands will want that ‘marquee’ promotion kind of thing. They’ll think: ‘Well, this other band has this cool lightbox display. How come we don’t have that too?’”
“I like to look at it with them: ‘Well, you can have that, but I don’t know if it’s going to increase sales. It’ll cost this much, which means you’ll get this much less when you get the royalty report, and it means you’d need to sell this much more.’”
“The bands who are doing well with us are doing really well,” he adds. “And they’re getting really great royalty checks every 3 months, because we keep our costs so low.”
But one place where Sniper doesn’t like cutting corners is in the recording studio. When working with a band that has already had some success on the label, they’re able to justify re-investing some of that revenue into the production process.
“Figuring that we’ll sell at least as much as the last one, we can take 20% of the profit from the last record and apply it to the next one. And that can turn out to be a significant amount of money.”
“And it’s worth doing. Every time I send an artist in to work with a really good producer or an engineer, it’s almost like training them how to be a great producer. Not to say I would necessarily benefit from that, but maybe. Even if they don’t like it compared to recording at home, at least they’ve tried it and saw it through and have no regrets.”
Getting The Word Out
For a small label to really help new bands, it’s got to have followers. Captured Tracks has attracted many of its own fans, who check back regularly to see what Sniper and his staff have been up to.
“Oshin” by Captured Tracks artist, DIIV.
Predictably, the web has been one of the best places to get the word out, even if roughly two thirds of their sales still come from CD and Vinyl. But not all strategies are equal:
“I don’t know why people are trying really hard to get their albums previewed a month before they’re released,” he says.
“I mean, it’s a brilliant strategy for NPR Music, but I don’t know if it really helps sales to have an entire album streaming a full month before it comes out. We want to get the CDs to people within a week or two of them hearing it, before they’ve moved onto the next thing. If I was in a record store with $20 in my pocket, I’d probably buy the record I haven’t been hearing for a month already.”
Still, coverage on sites like these are a big boon. NPR Music and Pitchfork are easily the two most dominant mass-market outlets for artists like the ones on Captured Tracks.
“I think Pitchfork can help increase sales. But I think it’s a little overanalyzed in terms of them impacting sales negatively. I think they can make bands, but I don’t really think they can break them.”
“It’s like in the 1970s in the UK when you had Melody Maker, Sounds, and New Musical Express, and they were all equally important. A band could be championed by one of them and be fine, even if they were being slammed by the other two. At the time, people used to complain that there were only three. And now, if there were three, I’d be in heaven!”
“People will complain about it, but Pitchfork is not doing anything wrong. They’re doing everything right. The problem is that there’s no other website that’s stepping up and saying: ‘Hey! We have different opinions than Pitchfork sometimes, and we also review 5 new albums and premiere 10 new tracks each day. That’s easily corrected if someone just has the tenacity to do it.”
“You have other things like Fader and Stereogum of course, and they have their own advantages. But they’re just not putting out as much content. It’s really about the amount of reviews. That’s what it all boils down to: It’s all about maintaining that daily pace.”
“Sometimes, we’ll also have an established, big indie artist champion one of our bands, and that’ll have a much wider reach than any Pitchfork premiere. It’s only people in the music industry who think that everyone who buys music reads Pitchfork every day. But they do follow their favorite artists on Twitter and stuff like that.”
New Formats
Captured Tracks’ Greenpoint storefront
Sniper has been a “ravenous” music buyer as long as he can remember. “It was probably around age 12 that I really became psychotic about it,” he says.
“I’d pick up on a genre and start to think: ‘I only want to listen to punk. Now I only want to listen to hardcore. No, now I only want to listen to shoegaze, this is the thing.’ By my twenties I was kind of up for anything.”
For him, vinyl is still the medium of choice. “I just feel like I don’t have it until I have it. Like, if I don’t have the vinyl, then I don’t really own it.”
“It’s the same way with CDs. There’s a consumer for it, where that’s their format and they’re sticking to it. And I think iTunes customers are the same way at this point. It’s a preferred format. And there’s a convenience factor to it.”
Sniper doesn’t concern himself much with paid streaming at this point. They get their royalties from it, but they’re not much.
“There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s all about how it’s monetized. We participate in it. But I’m never going to rely on that. Same thing goes for sync. If you sign a band thinking you’ll get them in a BMW commercial, you’re in trouble. So I only factor in sales when I’m budgeting a record.”
Curating the Music
All this business strategy of course, just facilitates the most important part, which is the music itself.
“It’s important to keep your nose to the ground, and to be aware of current trends. But I think the only constant thing is being able to recognize quality in whatever comes around.”
“There’s a time in your early twenties when you’re trying to get your own foothold, and it’s almost like you have to be really critical of anything that’s not what you’re doing. As if, to validate what you’re doing, you have to invalidate what other people are doing.”
Widowspeak
“I think a lot of people approach music that way. Young journalists in particular will have an idea about what music ‘should’ sound like now. But in reality, it’s all going on all the time. It’s just that different things waver in popularity a bit, and for now, one will get a little more attention than another. At the moment, indie music is more about post-hardcore and electronic and modern indie R&B. But that stuff was all going on 10 years ago, too.”
“There will continue to be small innovations. But so much of this has happened before. There is very little that is completely new.
“Music has become post-modern now. We had brutal noise. It got as brutal as it could go. You had people who went to techno and made it as fast as it could go. Now I think it’s come to a point where you can just say: ‘Here’s a talented artist working in this style.’”
To that effect, the music on Captured Tracks spans genres, sometimes happening on clusters of related bands playing in a similar style. There’s the hazy, slightly psychedelic pop of Beach Fossils, DIIV and Mac DeMarco; The savage, grungy noise rock of Perfect Pussy, the electro dream pop of Wild Nothing, the intricate heartland rock of Widowspeak.
This commitment to finding unusual bands worth hearing, and then figuring out realistic and sustainable ways to keep getting their music out in front of fans, has helped this label become a major player in the independent music scene of New York in only five short years.
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