How Cool Am I To Be A Record Label?

First, there is the bizness of harvesting the plastic. Plastic grows very slowly over billions of years, starting out life as tiny rocks, buried deep in the suburbian jungle. As it grows, ever so slowly, it is exposed to powerful cosmic rays, which, over years, cause the plastic to become pliable. At just the right moment in the plastic's development, it becomes ready to accept SOUND. This moment is the EXACT moment when I need to be there, sound on hand, ready to SQUASH the sound INTO the plastic, which causes the sound, now together with the newly-harvested plastic, to be squished into the shape of a playable audio disc. Sometimes this volatile process makes wonderful records, sometimes it makes TERRIBLE records, and sometimes any kind of records in between. March up and down the aisles of any record store to see what I mean.

Trapping sound to put into the plastic to make records is another hassle entirely. Sound is a wily beast, I'll tell ya. Capturing sound is really as much of an art as it is a science. Deep below the ground of Earth and several of the smaller asteroids, there lies a layer of crust called the Blathersphere . In order to visit this layer, one must garb itself in special heavy equipment for the journey down below. Deep below the fiery lava of Mexico, the blather boils away little organisms from the rocks. In the throes of their tiny deaths, they emit tiny screams of fire. Unique to the Blathersphere, these screams are trapped in volcanic bubbles which gather into clusters. Using highly specialized nets, blathernauts (as they are called, or bubble-jockeys, in slang of the trade) rush the clusters of bubbles, and push them into sacks. Once back on the Earth's surface, the bubbles are sorted by size and color into different sacks, and passed by quality control agents, who send the bubbles through a rigorous cataloging process. Once cataloged, the bubbles are equally distributed by mule, and combined with plastic to make records, as described above. Upon joining with the plastic, the tiny bubbles finally burst, the various combinations of their tiny screams releasing to combine into the thing we know as recorded sound.

So, there you have it. That's how records are made! It's a lot of work, but it's so worth all of it, to see you cry along with it, and to hear parents world-wide yelling to "Turn That Thing Down!" Tune in next time, when I explain how we record labels get the things to market. Cheers!