The Austerity Program finished recording their next record back in December. Here’s the master tapes, ready to go to Ventura, CA.
Six songs long, clocks in at about 25 minutes. I know that’s not very long for a band that hasn’t put a record out in five years but it’s pretty intense so you’ll get your fill.
Currently working on pressing details, cover art, setting up shows. Expect this thing to come out in June.
Our first post included the vague idea that we’d post about stuff as we learned it – as far as running a record label goes.
We’ve been bad about keeping that promise but there’s something that we did learn; it contains something like advice for someone thinking about starting a record label.
If you set up an actual company to do the label’s business then you’re going to have to pay taxes on the label’s income, as well as sales tax for sales in the state you’re based.
Here’s the problem – there’s a bunch of helpful reasons to set up a company rather than just running the label as your personal income. But hiring an accountant to do the taxes is going to run you a few hundred dollars at a minimum. And given that we’re releasing 1-2 things a year, that means we’d basically be sending all of the label’s net income to an accountant.
Which is stupid.
So we had to figure out how to do the taxes, which meant figuring out the accounting on our own. This was not easy. I am going to type that again for emphasis. This was not easy.
If anyone out there is reading this and faces the same problem (“I cannot afford to pay someone to figure out our accounting for me”) you may find this helpful: the key task was to figure out where the money was coming from and where it was supposed to go.
At the end of this long effort we have developed a database. It can tell us at any given date how much money we have, where it came from, how much we owe and who we owe it to. Corporate types call this a balance sheet.
You do not need a database; you can do this in Excel with some loss in gracefulness but a much smaller headache in setup.
I’d be thrilled to share deeper details if this, so contact me if you want to know more. I would especially appreciate it if you have a time machine I can borrow so that I can go back into 2013 and tell myself what I learned to save a huge headache in figuring this stuff out.
= Justin
Nonagon is playing the first ever West Cost PRF BBQ on Saturday, May 3 @ Leo’s in San Francisco. Should be a preeeeetty amazing event, with Kowloon Walled City, Eugene S Robinson, the Gary, the Tunnel and others.
And the new Austerity Program record, Beyond Calculation, will be out 6/17. More news on that in a bit, but if you live in/near Boston (4/26), Providence (4/27) or Brooklyn (5/7), you can go see them in the days ahead. The Shows page has all the details.
Thad and Justin have started putting songs on tape for their next record. It’ll be 8 songs long and about 40 minutes long. We’ll be putting it out next Spring.
You can read more about the latest by going to the Austerity Program’s site and following the progress. And the technically minded can always check out the pre-production journal that Justin’s been keeping. He runs tests on which microphone is the best or which pre-amp sounds the most appropriate and that kind of thing.
And did you see that Nonagon show poster? Damn, it looks nice.
= Justin
After a whopping 73 days in business (more or less), we’re already raising prices on most stuff by a buck. Why? Because we erred and forgot to include an important cost when we first put up the site. Hey, look, we’re bands, not MBAs and web designers and small business managers and PhD college professors and people who ship stuff for our jobs over here. (Actually, none of that last sentence is true because have one of each of those.)
So if you bought stuff early, great. For everyone else, we’re sorry that most things cost a dollar more. But now they do.
= Justin
PS – Thad would probably want me to say that our inflationary policy is suspiciously timed to Janet Yellen’s announced nomination for Fed chairwoman. You’d think with an attention to that kind of obscure detail, we wouldn’t have made this error in the first place but you’d be wrong.
Okay, we lied. Or Robert did. Let’s just say that Robert lied and be done with it. Because we didn’t really launch the label until today. (If by launching the label you mean telling everyone about a website, because that’s what we are doing and that’s what we mean by that.)
While we’ve been pulling together this whole label adventure together, we’ve each been doing work on our next release.
Nonagon came out to my house (Justin) back in May and spent 4 days recording. That’s going to be an EP called … actually, I don’t know what it’s going to be called. Should be out by the end of the year know.
The Austerity Program has been practicing our next record which is all written except for a few drum machine changes that I spend all night working on instead of sleeping. Real rewarding – small little tweaks that no one other than me is ever going to notice. That should be recorded this year and put out by the beginning of next year. 8 songs and we have no idea what it’s going to be called yet as well.
Not many shows coming up. Give us a break, we’re busy putting together these records and this label and it’s all going to be just great.
