We pick up with our interview with Jason Kulbel, label manager from Saddle Creek Records.  On Wednesday we talked with Jason about Cursive’s new release Mama I’m Swollen and Saddle Creek’s “dollar-a-day”digital pre-release.

Today we expand the discussion to Saddle Creek, the music industry as a whole and get Jason’s weigh-in on the recent comments on record pricing from The Cure’s Robert Smith.

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Dream Not Of Today: The Cursive release comes on the heels of the entire catalogue on Saddle Creek getting released on eMusic.  From the sound of it, this digital pre-release is not much of a change in the way Saddle Creek is doing business at all.

Jason Kulbel: Yeah, for sure.  You never say never, but we don’t have plans to do this with the Beep Beep record or the Tokyo Police Club records that come out later this month.  This is sort of an experiment; sort of something for fun.  We’re just trying new things.

(d)N0t: How involved was Cursive in this pricing strategy? Who had the idea first?

J: We had the idea as a label.  We all sat down and had a day-long meeting, put all of our heads together.  We tried to come up with different things we could do around the record.  From things like what we ended up doing to, you know,  should we have different packaging or what we should do on videos or what we should do on retail.  Probably a thousand different ideas were thrown around that day.

(d)N0t: The record is a bit of a return to form for Cursive.  I think it’s interesting that the anthem for the very first song is “wearing out our heels on the road to hell.”  Do you think that’s an appropriate first song for this experiment?

J: [laughs] I don’t know, I find a lot of irony in Tim’s lyrics.  It’s probably just a happy coincidence, if you could call that happy I guess.

(d)N0t: Obviously, he’s talking about societal norms in general with that song, but do you think that’s appropriate for the music industry as a whole right now?

J: Definitely.  It seems like the music industry is going to hell, for sure.

(d)N0t: How serious is it getting for Saddle Creek specifically?

J: Um.  I don’t know, it is and it isn’t.  We’re down like every other label is, or I should say most labels.  We’re selling less records.  We are signing less bands and being careful about who we choose to work with and everything.  Running a label in 2009 is tough, just trying to keep everything running.   We just keep doing what we do and focus on the few releases we do each year and try to make the best decisions we can, like we’ve always done since Day One.  There’s probably just a little more financial pressure at this point to actually be careful about where you spend your money.

(d)N0t: One of the brightest gems from the Saddle Creek catalogue is Cursive’s opus The Ugly Organ.  Right after that release, it prompted an invite from The Cure to have Cursive on an opening slot for their national tour.  Robert Smith from The Cure recently had something interesting to say on digital releases and innovative pricing models on those release.  He actually called Radiohead “idiots” for the pay-what-you-want release of In Rainbows.  He said specifically that artists should value their art, if they do not value their music it is hard for him to believe what they create is art.  What do you think of that in light of the pre-release of the Cursive record?

J: [pause] I hadn’t heard that he said that, not that it really makes much difference in my mind.  I don’t know, that’s an interesting thing for sure.  [pause] If we could release everything on CD or LP and sell it for twelve dollars, then that would be the way you could run a label or a musician could run their band or their life.  But that’s just not unfortunately where the market is at.  It’s not how people are perceiving  music and how they want to buy it.  There are so many different things that go into being a band or being an artist, it’s not even just what happens at the label.  It’s touring and T-shirts, although even that is slowing too.

I’m not trying to speak for too many bands, but I think a band’s got to do what a band’s got to do to get their music out there, get their art out there.  If that involves selling your record for a dollar a day, that’s what it is.  If it involves pay-what-you-want, that’s what it is.  If it involves giving it away for free at your shows, that’s what it is.  A band’s a band.

Radiohead is not a good example to use.  Neither is Nine Inch Nails.  Neither is The Cure.  All of those bands are doing fine and have been fine in history.  It’s a little hard to believe that Robert Smith should dictate the price of a new and upcoming band that is trying to make a living in this current environment.

(d)N0t: One of the things he talked about in his blog post was this idea of giving art away as a “lossleader to build the brand.”  Do you consider this release a lossleader?

J:  Maybe to a little extent.  That would be just to get people talking about the record.  That benefits us, that benefits the release, that benefits the upcoming shows.  I hate to… the term “lossleader” sounds pretty gross.  But it probably is to a certain extent.

(d)N0t: After Happy Hallow, there are many who consider Mama I’m Swollen a comeback record for Cursive.  Do you consider this a comeback record for Saddle Creek?

J: [pause] No.  I wouldn’t say so.  We would have to be coming back from something, I don’t know what that would be.  Maybe you know what that is or maybe you have an idea of what that is.  It doesn’t feel that way here at all.  We basically put the same into every record that we release.  At least manpower or workwise, we certainly spend different amounts of money on different records.

We put out a new record and we’re going through that process with Cursive.  Like I said earlier, we’re just still doing what we do and doing what we’ve done for ten years, or however long its been.  We’re just putting out records that we like and trying to do it in a market that seems to change daily.

(d)N0t: Jason, thanks a lot for your time.

J: Yeah, no problem at all.

(d)N0t: Good luck man.

While The Cures and the Radioheads of the top tier of the music industry argue publicly over the future of products and pricing, independent bands and labels in the middle of American popularity share their struggles.  Sales have dropped off a cliff in every corner of the business, driving musical prince and pauper alike online in search of solution to higher marketing costs, a glut of supply and freefall pricing.

In midtown Omaha, Nebraska, the critically acclaimed boutique label Saddle Creek Records are also trying to figure the Internet out.  A mid-level imprint of no small prestige, Saddle Creek recently unveiled their entire catalogue on eMusic, adding subscription music services to their iTunes availability.   Their latest flagship release – Cursive’s Mama I’m Swollen – paints a 21st century picture of the American indie label; the frank, pragmatic working artists in an industry half drunk on its own bullshit swill.  Releasing their product early, online and ubercheap, Saddle Creek distinguishes itself from the headline snatching NIN launches with practical concern, not ideology, driving its business decision.

I got to catch some time this morning with Jason Kulbel, label manager for Saddle Creek and ask him about their new “dollar-a-day” promotion, the state of his label, and its place in the wider, currently tumultous climate of selling music.  The first installment of our two-part interview with Jason has his explanation of the “dollar-a-day” promotion, his candid rationale behind the Cursive pre-release and his assessment of the fair price of music.

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Dream Not Of Today: The band is Cursive, the record is Mama I’m Swollen.  The record drops on March 10th, but before it reaches the shelves there is a very special digital pre-release.  Jason, I was wondering if you could tell us about the innovative model you guys are using for that pre-release.

Jason Kulbel, Saddle Creek Records: Well we decided to take the ten days before the record and on the 1st we started a sort of dollar-a-day thing where you could buy the record for a dollar the first day, two dollars on the second day, three dollars on the third day on down to, I guess, four dollars today since it’s March 4th.  We announced it basically at midnight on Saturday night just by our email lists – the Saddle Creek email list and the Cursive email list, Facebook, MySpace page, stuff like that – just trying to get the word out.  We didn’t do any sort of press release, so we started out sort of underground and word of mouth.

(d)N0t: So far it’s been exclusively through the communication channels that both the band and the record label has set up.  We’re only four days into this thing – how’s it going so far?

Jason: It’s good.  I don’t think we had any idea what to expect, so it’s hard to say whether it really met or exceeded any expectations.  Probably the biggest hiccup was the first day.  About eight in the morning to two in the afternoon or so, our hosting company went down which had actually nothing to do with this Cursive thing.  It was just sort of a freak thing.  I guess when you hear that your hosting company is up 99.99% of the time, it allows for catastrophic sort of events like that once or twice a year.  And it just happened to happen on March 1st.

(d)N0t: Wow.  That’s spectacular luck.

Jason: Yeah, no kidding.  Exactly.  But beyond that, there was probably a lot of people that were trying to order that time just assumed that it was jammed up and they couldn’t get through.  But other than that it’s been really smooth.  It seems like people are liking the idea at least.

(d)N0t: Would you characterize this response so far as overwhelming or underwhelming?  I know you mentioned you guys didn’t have much in the way of expectation coming into this, but has it been solid, strong?

Jason: I would say it’s been solid.  Strong.  Not particularly overwhelming yet definitely not underwhelming.  Underwhelming I suppose would be if hardly anybody bought it.  It doesn’t seem like it was a crazy story.  It doesn’t seem like it was a failure either.  Really, how we viewed it was something for the fans.  Something to get people interested in and talking about the record from this time in the record’s period.  I think the fast Cursive records, particularly the last one they did Happy Hallow and a lot of records we’ve released…  When you have records leak early or have a huge lead time like three months or something before a record comes out, it seems like all the talk is spread out over such a long period of time.  So we tried to kick that stud a little bit.

(d)N0t: Speaking of leaks, one of the last big releases for Saddle Creek was the latest from Tokyo Police Club when Elephant Shell got leaked a month and a half ahead of its release.  In response, Saddle Creek threw that record up on the website for $9 and also had it on iTunes a couple weeks after the leak.  Was that incident Saddle Creek’s first foray in digital distribution?

Jason: No, we’ve had stuff available for a long time before that.

(d)N0t: How much of this Cursive pre-release is searching for a financially viable way of handling digital distribution and how much of this is heading off the leaks before they can hit the torrent sites?

Jason: It was more about the leaks, for sure. We’ve definitely went out of our way with watermarks and handing out to specific  journalists and radio people and things like that before this last Friday.  It was more on the leak end, for sure.

(d)N0t: So you would say a lot of this is not necessarily the same sort of inspiration that Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails had with their recent digital releases and more a business reaction to the current reality of how music gets released.

Jason: Yeah, I would say so.  Yeah.

(d)N0t: The grand total when we reach March 10th is $10.  Is that the new price of music for the 21st century?

Jason: It’s $9 on our site.  I think that’s the going rate for a digital record.  Definitely part of what we’re doing right now too is trying to emphasize the physical version of the record.   The packaging for both the CD and the LP is nice and it comes with a download card you can’t buy digitally.  The download card has some unreleased songs, some demos from the record, some tour videos they did from the last tour in January.  I guess the price of a digital record is what you can get people to pay for it which seems to be about nine or ten bucks.

But we still price our CDs for $11 at the online store.  Especially in this industry, that’s a much better value.  It’s also something we like as a record label, is releasing CDs and LPs.  Especially LPs I guess; it’s more fun to release a physical CD or LP than it is to release a digital record.

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In Part Two we get the genesis of “dollar-a-day,” Jason’s reaction to Robert Smith, and find out if the music industry is wearing out its heels on the road to Hell.  Published noon Friday.