Eggy Tapes - I started a label!

1st Feb 2023
In December of 2020 a drone band featuring a few friends of mine released their debut EP Pure Drone.
For quite some time after the release of this EP I was singing it's praises and asking them when they might doing a physical release of this material as I'd love to own a copy.

Eventually, I realised that I was actually in an excellent position to do this myself. I had the time, the money, the equipment, the will and relations with the band to make a physical release a reality.
For a while I was unsure if I was even going to bother starting a label in the first place, since this EP was basically all I was interested in releasing. I figured if this goes well enough hopefully they'll let me release some of the future releases too.

But the more I thought about it, the more attractive the idea became. I started seeing other opportunities where I could be of assistance to other local artists.
In for a penny, in for a pound!

To make myself commit to this venture I enlisted the help of another friend of mine to turn my awful of idea of a logo into something actually usable.
I think you'll agree that Immi's work certainly improves on my inital mockup 😅


Go check out Immi's instagram, she's great!

I wanted to do as much as this first release as much as possible by myself. One of the more popular solutions for artists wanting to create their own cassette tapes, bandcds.co.uk, will do just about everything for you for a price. J card printing, cassette dubbing, on shell printing, OBI strips, the works. While this is great for artists with an established following happy to charge upwards of £10 a unit, my friends sadly don't have quite the following just yet and one of my main goals was to help them get a bit of extra money into their pockets. Those £10 cassettes on bandcamp are that much for a reason, the profit margin when doing an order from a site offering to take on all the labour costs is almost zero. If I was going to do this, I was going to get my hands dirty and get busy however I could.

Doing this as a hobby, my time here is essentially given away for no cost, brilliant for being able to hand made product with a unique touch at a very affordable price point. This again was partly out of my own desire to collect more tapes but often being unable to justify the costs, especially when coupled with the ever increasing price to ship to the UK from mainland Europe and beyond (if you're reading this and voted for Brexit, I hope a spider crawls into your mouth tonight).

Frugal ramblings aside, the result of these efforts was;
  1. To handle graphic design myself
  2. Dub all cassettes on my own hifi setup
  3. Print J cards from a local printer in Bristol
  4. Print the OBI strips in black and white from my local library and use a yellow pen for single bit of colour in the logo
This also meant assembling each OBI strip as well as cutting and folding each J card. This was not a quick job. By the end I was very happy to started with a relatively small run of 25 units. 50 or more probably would've driven me a little mad.

The final result, EGG01: Grandchild - Pure Drone was released in November of 2022 and have now entirely sold out!


Listen to Grandchild - Pure Drone on bandcamp

It does feel wonderful to be able to bring this thing to life and have it benefit my friends in the process.

I've already got the ball rolling on the next couple of projects for Eggy Tapes which should see the light of day within the next couple of weeks, watch this space!

🏠