Record #5: My Baby's Into Witchcraft by The Yell

I knew that this was going to happen eventually, but thought I might get further than number 5 before it did. The single I've chosen to pontificate upon doesn't have a video that I can conveniently link to on the youtubes, so I've sat the laptop in front of the record player and recorded it that way, as blogger seems to have a video upload option, but not an audio upload. Here it is then. I bought this a couple of years ago after hearing it on Marc Riley's show on 6music back in the days before George Lamb. I thought it sounded a bit like The mighty Fall so I bought it, probably over the internet. Relistening to it again now, it still sounds a bit like The Fall, and it's on a record label named after a Fall song but where Mark E. Smith's lyrics are hard to fathom sometimes, they do tend towards the enigmatically gnomic. "She's got a huge personality/ She keeps it on her mantelpiece" doesn't quite satisfy in the same way. Still I actually secretly really like this - my laptop's inbuilt microphone makes it sound quite flat, but actually it's got a pleasingly ragged bass kick and seems to be only just hanging together from verse to chorus. In this context, these are Good Things. Edition of 500, from memory, maybe less. Marquis Cha Cha are no longer with us, but Puregroove, the shop which birthed them, abides. The aim of the venture though was to "act as a step up for bands, giving new artists the chance to release their first single. According to labelmeister Tarik: "If we believe in it and the band think it's a good idea then we are off." (source). I don't know the reasons behind the cessation of the label, but putting out singles (and MCC was explicitly geared at 7 inchers) isn't a fantastic way to make money. The little quote above illustrates of course that that wasn't the primary motivation for the label and quite right too, I feel. As they already have a record shop both online and In Real Life one of the major problems - distribution- is made less of a battle before they even start. Finally, it's not that expensive to have a few hundred singles pressed up, if you're working closely with your bands and they have a strong local following with a prevailing wind you should shift most of them.
Thing is though, why bother?
I know, if they hadn't I'd have no blog entry today and I've made no secret of my approval of... well, bothering. If you think about it though, cdrs are cheap as proverbial chips. Get a box of a few hundred, burn them on your computer, sell them at shows, send a few out to reviewers or the radio or whoever you want really, and bung the tracks on iTunes and Spotify and the whatever the next big thing is. Total expenditure: about fifty quid.
Despite this though there are dozens of labels putting out black plastic disks (they also use the itunes and whatnot of course). So why?
If I may take the liberty of answering my own question, I think the answer lies in the little quote snippet a couple of paragraphs back. "The chance to release their first single" is what pretty much all bands (who haven't had it yet) want. I could record myself and flog cdrs bit it wouldn't be the same.
The Yell are, as far as I can reasonably ascertain, still going, with being played on 6Music about the highpoint of their career so far. Chances are they won't have a "hit" but who has hits nowadays anyway? the little record labels in back rooms all over the world aren't trying for hits, but for a little stab at immortality. A single like this cements your position of being a band in a way that a cdr just can't.