That is what we call an A HA moment! So how did you get Comedy Central on board to back it from there? That was when the idea crystallized that it was time to start a comedy label, and instead of trying to raise funding for it, the obvious home would be Comedy Central.
I was blown away and tracked down his self-released CD, Strategic Grill Locations.Īfter memorizing it, it hit me that it was crazy that something this good wasn’t being properly released and marketed. The clincher, though, was around 1998 when I saw a clip of Mitch Hedberg doing a few minutes on television. I had also been a fan of Comedy Central and had watched it basically since its inception. I had been a huge fan of comedy for years, and as I was growing up, amassed a large collection of comedy albums that I played over and over. For the next couple of years I was at loose ends and couldn’t figure out what to do next. In mid-1999, the phone stopped ringing and we couldn’t sell another swing record. In fact, by the time it went mainstream, the burnout took less than 18 months.
The media got ahold of it and it exploded, then went supernova, and burned out in under three years.
Crank yankers record store code#
It was a cool underground movement, with a distinct dance style and dress code and great music, and it happened to be so good that it was irresistible to the press. In many respects, swing at the time was a reaction to grunge and the tired alternative rock scene. In the mid-to-late 1990s, I was running a label called Slimstyle that was the independent label of the modern swing movement. How did you get the idea to start the label in the first place? Run – don’t walk – to the sharp insights available as Vaughn deconstructs CCR’s rise, its adaptation from a physical to a digital market, what they really look for in an artist recording, the shockingly simply A&R philosophy employed by him and CCR Label Manager Ian Stearns, why specializing is a dual-edge sword, and more.Ĭomedy Central Records has an interesting story of how it came into being. But he was blessed with resiliency, drive, and a genuine talent for niche marketing, and he would need all three to bring CCR into existence, and then deliver on the big promises he made to Viacom. And it turns out that by studying the evolution of this indie within a mega-major communications company, you can get a serious tutorial on record business success.īefore CCR’s Founder/Vice President in Charge Jack Vaughn, became a magnate responsible for signing elite funnypeeps like Mitch Hedberg, Daniel Tosh, Jim Gaffigan, Dane Cook, Lewis Black, Demetri Martin, Bo Burnham, Aziz Ansari, and Nick Swardson, he was overseeing another indie-label-on-the-rise story – one that quickly fell flat as a pancake. What we’re actually talking about here is Comedy Central Records (CCR), the label arm of the Viacom/ MTV Networks channel of the same name. If you guessed Epic Records, well, you may be right - frankly, we haven’t done that much research for this article.
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