Hello, friends. Happy Fest weekend! Here is an interview with Craig Ericson of Rise Records to celebrate. Love, Thomas.

Rise is having a busy last couple of weeks. You guys put out the Man Overboard self-titled on September 27 and Transit’s record on October 4. This Is Hell is only a week later, on October 11. One release per week is pretty insane! Give us an inside look at what’s been going on with you guys for the last month or so.

Yeah, we’ve been really busy with all of the new releases. But, we can handle it. Our distro is top notch and the Rise team is really efficient and we work smart.

I think these days, a lot of record labels are sort of proceeding with caution. A lot are downsizing and maybe choosing what to release a little more carefully, especially some of the bigger independent labels. Take us through your guys’ outlook when it comes to output, as you’ve been increasing roster size and, like noted above, putting out quite a few records. Rise is - ahem - rising? during a period where lots of labels are doing just the opposite.

We’ve always gone against the grain. We know that word of mouth sells records and spending money on advertising doesn’t necessarily sell records. We’ve worked hard over the years to build a brand that the all-ages music scene can rely on. Whether it’s metalcore or pop-punk, kids can trust that Rise will release great albums from multiple genres.

September and October are particularly busy months for your “WTF” signings from a while back. Sticking to Man Overboard and Transit in particular since they just released albums, how have those signings played out for you and how do you think those bands are promoting the Rise Records name in the scene and amongst new listeners, who previously might not have listened to bands on Rise too much?

I think it’s a win-win. Rise has always had a diverse roster but none of the rock type bands got big and went unnoticed for the most part. I think it’s a little different with Man Overboard and Transit because they had some buzz before I signed them. I didn’t discover those 2 bands.

Another upcoming album is A Loss For Words’ No Sanctuary coming out on October 25, which is a dual release with Velocity Records. Can you first give us some thoughts on the new AL4W record, and then maybe explain for everyone how the whole Velocity imprint works?

I’m really pleased with how the new album turned out. It has all the elements to make it an amazing album. It’s super catchy, honest, earnest and sincere. I can’t express how much I like this band and this album.

Velocity is the Dave Shapiro’s record label. We joined forces last year and Velocity is an official imprint of Rise Records. Basically, Dave finds the bands and we work them as a Rise band. It’s been a great partnership.

Rise just announced the signing of Cheap Girls. How did that signing come about, and what should we expect from them moving forward? Give us some thoughts on their past work and what made them an attractive signing.

I’ve been a fan for a couple of years now and their manager reached out to us. We were very interested and worked out a deal. I really like Ian’s voice and their overall vibe. I think they’ll make a great addition to the roster.

Probably the biggest shocker that Rise pulled out was landing Hot Water Music and getting the rights to put out their upcoming 2012 full-length. I know you said this was a “dream” signing for you (assuming this is Craig), so can you talk about that signing and the excitement for it, and about how maybe this thing has come full circle for you so long after starting the label?

I don’t really know what else to say. It truly is my dream signing. They are my favorite band and the album “Forever And Counting” brought me back to music after a few year hiatus. They are great human beings as well and I couldn’t be more thrilled. I can now die a happy man.

When you guys announced the Cheap Girls signing, you released that info on your Facebook with a little bit of a disclaimer: “Core Rise fans….have some respect and cherish diversity. We can’t sign all screamo bands, okay?? This is what you’ll be listening to when you’re a little older so consider it a gift to you, from Rise. Trash talk and trolling will get you banned, you’ve been warned.” Let’s talk a little bit about the opposite side of the signing of these bands - the perspective of the dubbed “core Rise fan” who listens to metalcore music. What is the message you want to send to these fans, and what have been the most common responses from these fans to the latest additions to your roster?

My message was clear. Have respect for other types of music. Kids that exclusively listen to metalcore can sometimes just automatically hate everything that doesn’t sound like metalcore. I don’t want to stereotype people, but a lot them talk shit. I don’t really like shit talkers, especially if it’s on the Rise site about a Rise band. Common sense, right??

Continuing about metalcore music, a lot of people this is a genre with a pretty short shelf life. Do you see Rise continuing to sign and produce metalcore records, or is this the beginning of a movement to a more punk/pop-punk outlook?

We will continue to sign metalcore bands. We will continue to sign rock bands. We will continue to sign Pop-punk bands. We will continue to metal/thrash bands. We will continue to sign hardcore bands. Get my message??

Punk and pop-punk are genres that have been out of the mainstream for quite a while now. Rise is a pretty big label as far as independents go, with a lot of resources to make things happen. With some of these bands - especially Man Overboard, which happens to have a more “marketable” sound, and might have been on the radio in the earlier parts of the 2000s - do you see them ever getting the chance to be widely known like that again?

I hope so. Though, we don’t do any radio. Not sure it will ever be like it once was. I think it will still be underground with a few artists that go big every once in a blue moon.

Thanks a lot to Craig!

The following interview is with Sam Vermette, the creator of one of our favorite iPhone apps here at Limited Pressing: Shows. Learn more about Shows or download it by visiting the website or iTunes.

Tell us a little about yourself. Where are you from and what do you do?

I’m a 25-year-old, self-taught iOS and web developer living in Montreal. I’ve always been passionate about how people interact with things, so software development appealed to me like the most accessible way to scratch that itch. You just come up with an idea and get to build it out of thin air. It’s nothing short of amazing.

I’ve always been a big preacher of Apple design and that’s kind of how I learned to make things look simple and clean. Studying industrial design at University of Montreal also helped, as I was taught how to better approach design problems and solutions. Looking back, I’m glad I spent those 4 years studying design. With so many apps in the App Store, it has become clear that design is what make apps stand out (it goes without saying that I’m among those who claim ideas by themselves are worthless, execution is what matters).

Tell us about Shows. How does it work?

Shows is your live music companion. It automatically stays in sync with your iPod library and makes it really easy to import artists from your Rdio and Last.fm accounts. From there you usually have all the artists you’re interested in seeing in concert, but you can also add more manually.

By default, Shows will show you concerts in your local area. You can easily offset your location so you know what’s going on at your next travel destination. You can also increase the area radius so that Shows displays concerts from further away. For instance, say you’re in NYC, you can increase the distance slider to view shows from more cities like Boston, Miami, etc.

Location offsetting and area radius are in fact the only 2 settings in Shows. Settings are evil!

Last but not least, Shows sends you push notifications when artists you follow announce a new gig nearby (where nearby is defined by the user-defined location and radius).

Oh and I should probably mention that it’s all powered by Last.fm (although Shows has its own backend, which is the one interacting with Last.fm).

Why did you decide to develop Shows?

In 2009, I was sick of not knowing when specific artists were coming next to Montreal. All the apps out there were showing me *all* local upcoming concerts for artists I didn’t even like. They were terribly designed, slow and had too many useless features (most of them still do). So in the summer of 2009, I decided to make Shows. Version 1.0 was using Apple standard UI and had very rough edges, but it still gained a bit of traction. By the end of that year, I was ashamed by it and didn’t have any more time left to work on it, so I decided to take it off temporarily (I was still in school back then).

Then in October of last year, I had just graduated and decided to rebuild it from complete scratch. When it launched In January 2011, it gained tremendous momentum, so much that I had to momentarily take it down within the first 2 hours. As I kept working on other projects and learning more about design and good coding practices, I once again felt guilty about the version that was in the App Store. I got back from WWDC with a huge list of improvements to be done on the app, which led me to this week’s release of Shows 2.5.

What’s your favorite thing that Shows does?

Push Notifications are probably the feature that’s the most exciting to me. That feeling when you get a push notification about your favorite artists coming to town, it’s quite awesome.

What kind of feedback have you received from Shows users?

It seems unanimous that everyone loves the design effort that went into it; the simplicity, the lack of settings, the very straight-forward display of content. The sliding panels, although non-standard and maybe hard to grasp at first have also become a hit and are kind of Shows’ trademark. The 2.5 update has only been out for a couple of days but Favorites and Artist Sources (which allow you to import music from Rdio and Last.fm) seem pretty popular so far.

The complaint I’ve been hearing the most about Shows is the sometimes inaccurate data. Since Last.fm is all user-generated, erroneous data gets in (like dead artists playing at some place in Brazil) as well as dupes, or missing listings. I don’t have much control over this, and I’m guessing Last.fm has other better things to do than to moderate content (although they do). Some other sites allow artists to post concert listings themselves, therefore making their data set super accurate. It’s the case of Songkick, from whom I’ve been declined an API key because our apps are too similar (I don’t blame them, they have a business to run).

Do you have any plans to develop other music related iPhone applications?

Very much so! I love music and there are a couple other problematics I’d like to tackle with iOS apps. One particular thing that’s been bothering me is album releases — I always find out about them weeks later! That being said, I have a bunch of other ideas in the works, so it might take a while before this one ever sees the light of day.

Hey everyone,

Thomas Nassiff here. Exit 384 Media launched last week a new website called FreeMusicFirst.org, where they basically get a guest DJ every couple of weeks to choose a few bands, and they offer a free stream and download of a record from each band for free. It’s a pretty cool (and legal) way to discover new stuff based on recommendations, and you can’t go wrong with a few free LPs. There are three full-length downloads up there now, chosen by Less Than Jake drummer and Paper + Plastick founder Vinnie Fiorello.

What do you guys think of this project? The idea behind it is to concede that music is free - whether we admit it or not, people can get anything they want for free if they try. The website is about sharing and spreading the word about good bands that people want to promote, and not worrying about squeezing every dollar possible out of kids who want to hear the records. Is this the right way to approach the industry today? Should labels and bands try to forget about indie bands selling albums, and start working on finding other ways to make money?

Check out co-founder Nick Mango’s recent guest post on I Live Sweat, where he discusses how there shouldn’t be a competition between Digital and Vinyl because they serve two different purposes.

“The fine gentlemen at I Live Sweat gave me the opportunity to write an article comparing digital to vinyl, but, to be honest, as I started to think about it, I realized that the only time you see articles comparing these two things is when someone has a passionate opinion about one or the other. And yes, I could do that kind of article, but what good would it do us? Not much. My opinion on which is better or worse will not change anyone’s mind. It’ll just be another ranting piece of drivel falling on the deaf ears of those opposed to my opinion, so I thought it might be a better idea to do an article about how digital and vinyl serve two different purposes, and it’s those purposes that we actually have passion for, not the medium in which we experience them.”

READ MORE HERE!

Hi everyone. Thomas Nassiff here, with the second installment of the LP Interviews series. This month, we have an interview with Buddy Schaub of Less Than Jake for you guys. We talk about how LTJ is doing things that really no other bands are doing right now; about how they come up with and execute these unique plans and about the music industry in general. I hope you guys enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed talking to Buddy. Thanks to him and LTJ for taking part in this.

First off, can you introduce yourself and say what you do for Less Than Jake?

I’m Buddy and I play trombone and jump around like a monkey on stage. I also do most of the video projects for the band and am now in the beginnings of handling the ins and outs of our web store.

Most recently, LTJ released the Greetings From Less Than Jake EP, which was received well by critics and fans. Can you talk a little about the EP? How it’s different or similar to your past work? And whether we’ll see a 7” of it in the future?

Working on this record was a nice breath of fresh air for our band in that no one else was involved at all this time around. It’s been a long time since we’ve done a record with no outside involvement at all such as a producer or label schmooks tossing in their opinions here and there. We recorded everything at Roger’s studio (The Moat House) and got done with everything: writing, recording, mixing, and mastering in only a couple of months. I believe the plan is to put this out on vinyl in the very near future as well as get back to the drawing board and start working on another EP.

Less Than Jake also just wrapped up a couple months on the Vans Warped Tour. You guys were probably the most “veteran” band on the tour. What can you say about being one of the older and more established bands on a tour that always includes a lot of up-and-comers?

We’ve actually been running with the older crowd on the Warped Tour the last few times we’ve been on it and have definitely learned the ropes from bands such as NOFX on how to utilize your seniority on the tour. It was a lot like The Godfather movies this year with us playing the role of Don Corleone…

Less Than Jake has always made a point to offer products that are a little out of the norm to its fans, like the TV/EP and past products, such as the cereal box and things of that nature. On Warped Tour, you guys were selling LTJ rolling papers that, if purchased, would also get the customer a download of the EP. What goes into the formation ideas like this?

A lot of these great ideas pop out of Vinnie’s brain, but we do sit around and brainstorm some ideas before tours for new merch goodies. These days people expect to get the songs for free so it’s become really important to make the physical record be worth something to the fans whether it be a cool packaging concept, some sweet colored vinyl or a specialty item that comes with a download.

Let’s talk a little about the live shows you guys have released and the DVD you just put out. Products like these excite fans easily because they aren’t very common. What gave you guys the idea to put all of the shows together in a DVD format, and what is it that makes Less Than Jake so much more apt to try out things that no one else is really doing?

The DVD was kind of a no brainer in this situation. The real genius was the idea of playing all of our records at six shows around Florida and filming and recording the whole thing. It was great for us as a band because it really made us go back and do our homework; we very rarely play some of the songs on those records if at all, so it was really fun and a rejuvenating bonding for us. And on top of that playing them in small venues around our home state was really exciting for our super fans who were essentially the people that bought tickets early enough to get in. What maybe makes us a little different than some bands I think is the conviction we seem to have to actually bring an idea to fruition. Many bands have good ideas, “wouldn’t it be cool if we…” but we take that crucial next 69 steps it takes to actually make the idea a reality.

A while ago, Less Than Jake said that it wouldn’t put out another full-length record. That’s something that goes hand-in-hand with the costs of recording an album and the profits that album goes on to return to the band. Are you guys still planning on sticking by that plan? Will all new Less Than Jake tunes in the future be delivered via EPs?

I don’t know if we want to paint ourselves into a corner and say we’ll never do something again, but these days an EP is plenty for people to digest. It trims the fat so to speak. Putting out 5 quality songs is better than 10 mediocre songs. And with our schedules and Roger’s studio, going in to bust out 5 songs at a time keeps the frequency of music into the fan’s hands at a peak.

Continuing on the same track, the band also refused to make Greetings available on iTunes. If I remember correctly, I think a Facebook status once said that you “can’t afford to let iTunes take 30 percent.” What can you say about iTunes, acting as essentially the world’s largest record label, and the future of not only Less Than Jake’s releases on iTunes, but your thoughts on what the future for digital music looks like in general?

Well, this is true for almost all aspects of being in a band. The days of letting someone else do the work for your band are coming to a close. Everyone always wants a piece of the pie, but the pie keeps getting smaller and the ability to take charge of your band is getting easier by the second through technology.

While we’re on a broader plane, let’s talk a little about record labels. Less Than Jake has its own label, Sleep It Off, where you guys put out your own releases. Can you guys ever foresee a situation where you sign to a traditional label again? Is the traditional label format even worth it for bands anymore?

Going to a major label these days will 99 out of 100 times mean signing a 360 deal which means they take a piece of EVERYTHING. The only reason to do this as a band is if you are young, good looking, and are sure you’re going to be the biggest thing since sliced bread. We’re pretty sure we are no longer any of these things.
We can do pretty much anything an Indie label can do on our own, so I don’t foresee us breaking the new mold we’ve made for ourselves any time soon.

Now let’s narrow it down a little. Who runs your webstore? Do you do it yourselves or does someone distribute stuff for you?

We currently have our merch in a couple of different places. MerchDirect.com has a wide array of stuff from our band on sale at their site and they handle all of that with the designs that we provide. But just this past summer we set up an account with LimitedPressing, which we are currently handling all ourselves, the posting of items to the store, stocking and inventory of the merchandise and shipping the products themselves. From the moment someone orders something, the responsibility of it getting there relies on us. It’s all part of our plan to put all things LTJ back under one umbrella.

What are some plans for the future? You guys have some time off before FEST in late October, and I believe the Orlando Calling festival is in Orlando? What’s the band planning for the time off?

We are in the midst of some new members to the Less Than Jake family arriving at our doorstep via stork, and while we’re figuring out how that whole world works, we will also be writing and recording some new material, getting together more items for our web store, and planning for the big year we have ahead of us. Next year Less Than Jake turns 20!!!

Anything else you would like to add?

Your Mother!

Co-Founder Nick Mango wraps up his Vinyl Bailout series with Pressing Amounts. In this article he dives deep into the Converge - Axe To Fall album, released by Deathwish Inc. He also looks quickly at styles used by Mightier Than Sword Records, and the long forgotten 90s label Wreck-age Records.

You can read part 5 in all it’s geekdom here.

In the latest part of “The Vinyl Bailout” series, Nick dives deep into the statistics behind Kickstarter’s incredible service, and tries to understand where the growth is coming from.

“On July 19th they announced on their blog that they reached their 10,000th successfully funded project. That’s a great number, but what really interested me was the amount of money they said changed hands over those 10,000 projects. $60 Million. Yeah, that’s a lot of freaking money. And when I saw that, I thought I should take a more in depth look at this platform, see if the music industry could utilize it, and maybe pose some interesting theories of why Kickstarter is thriving in the online tech industry.”

To read the entire post, in all it’s colorful pie chart and bar graph glory, head over to his blog.

We’ve made a few interesting changes to The Old LP. One that’s pretty standard is the homepage now includes the largest search box in the history of web design. Hopefully no one will miss it cause there’s no room left to make it any bigger.

Now here’s where it gets interesting, we’ve combined the Trade and Money offers section with the Auction and BIN section. So all search boxes are now site wide searches, and display results in the marketplace area. Lastly, we’ve made it so if you have a picture attached to the item that’s available for Trade or Money, we show it as a thumbnail in the results.

If you’d like to check out these changes for yourself, head over to The Old LP.

The following is an interview with R.J. Crowder-Schaefer, owner and operator of Mightier Than Sword Records. It’s the first in a monthly series of interviews with Limited Pressing store owners. 

In the interview, we talk to R.J. about his stance on preorders, how he normally goes about his label’s business and, of course, MTS’s well-known licensing of the Blink-182 discography. Enjoy!

-Thomas Nassiff

For starters, let’s get a basic introduction out of the way. Who are you, what company do you run, and what do you do?

Hey, my name is R.J. Crowder-Schaefer, I run a company called Mightier Than Sword Records and I do a bunch of stuff, including A&R, mailorder/customer service, and most of the social media stuff.

Mightier Than Sword has been known for putting out its own releases as well as bringing older records to vinyl. What made you decide to go out and put some older records on vinyl, including some represses?

For the first couple years the label was a hobby for me, and we started licensing new releases to vinyl from labels that were only doing CD and digital. I did this for a while, working with bands that I was friends with and focusing mainly on vinyl. My friend Brooks started helping me run the label around March 2009, and came up with the idea of doing a 10th Anniversary vinyl re-issue series.

We started off the series with blink-182’s “Enema Of The State”, which took about 9 months of work to obtain, and was a complete dream come true to work on. From there we had the ability to request other older releases to license, most of which we’ve been able to do.

Obviously one of the huge things MTS has done is press Blink-182’s discography. It was the first time we had seen Enema Of The State and the self-titled on vinyl, and you did represses of Dude Ranch and Take Off Your Pants And Jacket. How did that collaboration come about?

In order to release those records, we had to go directly through Universal Music Group who owns the rights. After months of being passed along to different people within the company, I finally found the department that handles vinyl licenses and started the licensing process for “Enema Of The State”, which took around 9 months to finally happen. It was definitely a wild process and my first experience dealing with a major label and such a massive release (over 13 million copies sold worldwide the last time I checked.) [editor’s note – holy shit]

We’ve been very careful about making sure the band knows exactly what’s going on – getting approval on artwork layouts, and sending them copies of every color pressing. These are releases that were/are very influential to us so we make sure the band knows what’s going on and we have their respect.

Another collaboration has been with The Movielife and putting This Time Next Year on wax. Are you trying to do a handful of 10th anniversary pressings?

The 10th anniversary series is ongoing and we plan to release a couple 10th anniversary releases every year. There are so many amazing records that are coming up on their 10-year anniversaries and we want to make sure we can help spread these albums to new/younger listeners, putting as much love and care as possible in the packaging and presentation.

The preorder for TOYPAJ just launched recently. It’s definitely a cool concept – the 12” with a triple gatefold that has spots to hold the three 7”s that you can order along with the LP. How’d the idea for including the 7”s come about and what did you have to do to execute all this?

When we started planning for the release I remembered how awesome the 6 bonus tracks on the original CD release were, and how cool the idea was. You may remember that the CD was originally released in three different versions: green, yellow and red. Each version included the album with 2 different bonus tracks at the end. We wanted to continue that and keep the album in its originally released form.

Licensing the bonus 7”s took months to get done, and that’s why we had to wait so long to announce our pressing of the album. The bonus songs have never been released on vinyl before, so we’re really excited to able to bring these to blink-182 fans and vinyl collectors.

How has the preorder for TOYPAJ been? If I remember correctly, you put it up kind of sneakily, without an announcement at first.

Once we finally received the approval to move forward with the bonus 7”s, I figured it would be more fun and exciting to start hinting at the release instead of sending out a standard press release.

We decided to post a picture of a test pressing playing on our office turntable on the MTS Facebook (http://facebook.com/mightierthanswordrecords) and ask people to guess what release it was. I also included a quote from a song off the record as a hint. From those comments we will be choosing one person to win that test pressing, limited to 10 copies and super rare.

After hinting at the release for a couple weeks online, we decided one Friday to put up the pre-order and hint about it on the Facebook page. Before even posting about it, we’d already sold a handful. It was really rad to see people that excited about a release and re-freshing our webstore so many times to ensure they get a copy.

It was a fun thing to do, and was especially meant to reward people who follow MTS on Facebook and Twitter, which means a lot to us.

In general, what is your stance on preorders? Some labels don’t like them because of the complications they can cause and other reasons. How do you usually handle your preorders?

Vinyl manufacturing is tricky and delays can often happen, which we are all accustomed to at MTS. Pre-orders for us are important to help us raise capital to keep the business going, especially when some of our bigger licenses require full payment upfront before they ship out.

Although some would disagree, my stance is that vinyl manufacturing should be perfect no matter how long it takes. These records will be in peoples collections for years to come so a couple weeks or month delay to make sure everything comes out perfectly is nothing compared to the lasting legacy of the record. But, that’s just me.

Do you package all your own orders and mail them out on your own? Or do you hire someone to help or have another company do it for you?

We assemble and ship every single record that we release directly from our office in Brooklyn, NY. Whether its 500 copies to a retailer or 1 copy through our mailorder, we do it ourselves. Luckily we have awesome interns and often pull late nights to get orders out the door.

I used to run everything out of my apartment, so I would sometimes have upwards of 100 boxes piled in my room and friends coming over to help pack orders until 4 AM to make deadlines. Now we at least have the space to work with and can handle larger amounts of orders.

Aside from vinyl, what else do you focus on? Is there a big focus on digital music for MTS? T-shirts, other unique and limited materials?

We’ve obviously put a large focus on vinyl, but are also moving in the direction of full-releases that include vinyl, CD and digital, along with t-shirt bundles and other pre-order goodies to get everyone exited for new albums.

We’ve also stared a screen-printing company through MTS, so we’ll be rolling out a ton of new MTS merch in the coming months, something that people have been asking about for a long time.

Is there one specific genre or a couple of genres you prefer to put out? Do you sign bands to contracts for releases or sort of just take it one release at a time?

Traditionally we’ve focused on punk and hardcore, but we are in the process of signing a handful of indie bands, and are pushing to diversify the genres of the label, working with any kind of music. We listen to different kinds of music, so we would love to work with bands in any genre, its just a matter of understanding how those genres work and how to make a band successful.

We do sign bands to contract for releases, but aren’t out to screw anyone over. Contracts just help to make sure that both sides know exactly what’s going to happen and have the ability to ensure that it does.

It’s a given that no one is trying to run an indie label to become a millionaire. When you hear an artist or band you enjoy and you want to do a release from them, how deeply do you consider the amount of records they might sell?

If it’s a band that we really love and want to work with we will make it happen, but its definitely getting tough to juggle the financial realities of running a small business and releasing an album from a band that we love but will only sell 35 copies of a record. 

We’ve definitely started to focus more on sync licensing and working with a couple companies to help get our bands’ music on film/TV, which can easily rule out the direct importance of album sales.

It’s a hard situation to be in, because unlike other industries, music is something that is extremely personal to MTS, and we are fully invested as friends/family with all of the artists we work with. Being unable to work with a certain artist due to financial realities is heart breaking and something we try to avoid at all costs.

What’s the future of MTS looking like? Will we see a concentration on 10th anniversary pressings or some newer stuff?

We are going to be announcing a handful of new signings in the coming months, along with a brand new website and a rad label video that will give everyone a behind the scenes look at MTS and our daily operations.

Besides that our main focus is going to be on new releases and developing our current roster of bands, all the while releasing bigger vinyl re-issues (including additions to the 10th Anniversary Series), coming out every 1-2 months.

We will be expanding our management roster as well, and start building up the screen-printing portion of the company to include outside orders along with all of the MTS bands. We’re are definitely excited for the future, and can’t wait to announce our plans.

We’re very proud to announce two things: One is a new interview series we’ll be doing once a month with an LP store owner, and two, the addition of Thomas Nassiff (Absolute Punk, P+P, and co-owner of Into/It Clothing) to do those interviews for us (seeing as we have zero skill in the interview department) HEYOO!!

Tomorrow we’ll be posting our first installment, which will be with our good buddy RJ Crowder-Schaefer, owner of Mightier Than Sword and Academy Fight Song! From what Thomas tells me there’s a lot of Blink 182 talk in this thing. Sounds good to us. 

Look for this baby to be posted in the AM EST. Later!