Hey all... I know there is talk about the Mineral repressing so I just wanted to chime in and let you know the latest.
We've been getting a *lot* of requests over the years for us to repress a whole bunch of the crank! releases - with all the Mineral albums being at the top of the list (of course that's no surprise on my side, I'm as big of a fan of Mineral as anybody!).
We finally decided to do a repress and we made a very small allotment of special blue vinyl copies as well. (Of the many thousands of Mineral albums sold, I think there are a total of 150 colored vinyl available... so they are definitely rare!)
To answer a few issues and questions that have come up:
* We *really* apologize for some of the mailings that got bent or destroyed. As I hope you can imagine, that was completely unintentional. We have since fixed the issue and are sending replacement jackets to those that were effected.
* The band does, in fact, get royalties from all of these records. In fact, one of the reasons we did a repressing is because crank! still owes the band members some royalties for past sales - and this is the type of thing that keeps me up at night. I don't like owing bands money for their music - it goes against the integrity we always have adhered to in running crank! I won't go into the economics here of running a record label, suffice to say, there's little to no money in an indie label these days. By doing a repress, not only will the band get royalties from all these sales, but it gives us a few extra dollars to pay the band back for what we owe already them. Suffice to say, anytime you buy a Mineral record from crank!, it helps the band. (And anytime you buy one on ebay, it doesn't).
* The Power of Failing artwork is the original artwork, with a few extra changes that had to be made this time around. For the most part, it's the same thing as the first release. The picture on the front is a couch in the snow. It's a picture that the band members had when we were originally pressing the record. It may or may not have been owned by one of the band members - I don't remember that specific - we all just thought it was pretty cool. As with all Mineral and Gloria Record releases, the band's bass player and graphic design genius, Jeremy Gomez, had a lot to do with the design. In terms of there being a bar code on some records and not a bar code on others... we originally released the album without a barcode. Frankly, we thought it looked a lot cooler that way. Barcodes are ugly. Lo and behold, we soon found out that it was tough to sell the record at retail stores without a barcode, so our distributor forced us to put one on. Barcodes are still ugly, if you ask me. Unless it's made into a Black Flag logo... but that's a different topic altogether.
* We would *love* to repress EndSerenading too, and it seems the demand is huge for it. Our big problem is finding the original artwork. Give us a little bit of time on this one and we'll try to get that done for you.
I hope this helps answer a few questions. Let me know if you have any others.
And, as always, huge enormous heartfelt thanks for everybody's continued support of crank!
Mineral vinyl
in Vinyl Collective Message Board
Posted
Hey all... I know there is talk about the Mineral repressing so I just wanted to chime in and let you know the latest.
We've been getting a *lot* of requests over the years for us to repress a whole bunch of the crank! releases - with all the Mineral albums being at the top of the list (of course that's no surprise on my side, I'm as big of a fan of Mineral as anybody!).
We finally decided to do a repress and we made a very small allotment of special blue vinyl copies as well. (Of the many thousands of Mineral albums sold, I think there are a total of 150 colored vinyl available... so they are definitely rare!)
To answer a few issues and questions that have come up:
* We *really* apologize for some of the mailings that got bent or destroyed. As I hope you can imagine, that was completely unintentional. We have since fixed the issue and are sending replacement jackets to those that were effected.
* The band does, in fact, get royalties from all of these records. In fact, one of the reasons we did a repressing is because crank! still owes the band members some royalties for past sales - and this is the type of thing that keeps me up at night. I don't like owing bands money for their music - it goes against the integrity we always have adhered to in running crank! I won't go into the economics here of running a record label, suffice to say, there's little to no money in an indie label these days. By doing a repress, not only will the band get royalties from all these sales, but it gives us a few extra dollars to pay the band back for what we owe already them. Suffice to say, anytime you buy a Mineral record from crank!, it helps the band. (And anytime you buy one on ebay, it doesn't).
* The Power of Failing artwork is the original artwork, with a few extra changes that had to be made this time around. For the most part, it's the same thing as the first release. The picture on the front is a couch in the snow. It's a picture that the band members had when we were originally pressing the record. It may or may not have been owned by one of the band members - I don't remember that specific - we all just thought it was pretty cool. As with all Mineral and Gloria Record releases, the band's bass player and graphic design genius, Jeremy Gomez, had a lot to do with the design. In terms of there being a bar code on some records and not a bar code on others... we originally released the album without a barcode. Frankly, we thought it looked a lot cooler that way. Barcodes are ugly. Lo and behold, we soon found out that it was tough to sell the record at retail stores without a barcode, so our distributor forced us to put one on. Barcodes are still ugly, if you ask me. Unless it's made into a Black Flag logo... but that's a different topic altogether.
* We would *love* to repress EndSerenading too, and it seems the demand is huge for it. Our big problem is finding the original artwork. Give us a little bit of time on this one and we'll try to get that done for you.
I hope this helps answer a few questions. Let me know if you have any others.
And, as always, huge enormous heartfelt thanks for everybody's continued support of crank!
Jeff
crank! founder