Category Archives: Good Reads

Pirates Press Celebrates 5 Years!!!

I received an email this morning from my pals over at SolidPR I thought I would share with everyone. With Record Store Day being celebrated just this past weekend I felt this was a more than appropriate good read:


Pirates Press Announces Five-Year Anniversary!!!

The best stories are those that write themselves, when all the writer has to do is expressly write what they see (or in this case, see AND hear)… and all the reader has to do is envision their role.  The story of vinyl records and especially its burgeoning resurgence is this type of story, and the proud leading role PIRATES PRESS has been playing in it is one as well. Their family of salespeople, production coordinators, project managers, and graphic designers have experience from all over the manufacturing, sales, and distribution industries and care deeply about the experience people have working with them.

Putting their customers ideas to life is the essence of Pirates Press’ true goal… helping artists, record label owners, and other entrepreneurs do what the market and industry are demanding of them to survive; bring collect-ability back. Helping create tangible products that reflect an artist’s visions in such a way that creates a real demand to purchase it (rather than download it) is important in an increasingly downloadable world that too-often looses the tangible dimension that once [financially] drove the industry.

Vinyl collecting has for generations been the baseball card of the non-jock (and even the occasional jock), and remained present in certain scenes and genres (underground for the most part) regardless of the pressures from the industry to exclusively digitalize. It was always that tangible element of vinyl in combination with the nostalgic sound and feeling you get from playing records which resonated with collectors through vinyl’s darkest moments. Now, when the digital world that everyone assumed would replace it entirely has brought such strain to the industry, vinyl and other creatively packaged albums sales have made a tremendous resurgence, once again giving people something their passionate about going out (or [ironically] going online) and buying. Pirates press believes that the sky is the limit at this point for vinyl and other types of creatively packaged music and ideas, and we’ll continue doing everything in our power to bring our customers there in as powerful and prominent of a way as possible!

Pirates Press Statistics in the last three years:
– 680,000 records produced in 2006
– 1,100,000 records produced in 2007
– 1,750,000 records produced in 2008

High Profile Projects: Spiderman3, MyChemicalRomance, Beck’s “Odelay” Deluxe 4LP Package, AgainstMe!, The Dark Knight, Madonna’s “Hard Candy” & a slew of singles, Talib Kweli, Brian Posehn&Lewis Black&PattonOswalt, Pulling Teeth (Holographic Record Jacket), Murder By Death 16pp Foldout, Bob Marley Boxset, Isis Boxset, The Watchmen, All the WBR Singles, & Much More…

High Profile Customers: Warner Brothers Records, Reprise, Sire, Atlantic, Original Recordings Group, Relapse, Robotic Empire, HydraHead, Deathwish Inc., Troubleman Unlimited, Anticon Records, Temporary Residence, Suburban Home & Vinyl Collective, Southern Lord Records, Tank Crimes, Chunksaah Records, Fat Wreck Chords, Vagrant Records, Slumberland Records, &  Many More…

Pirates Press Unique products include: Gatefold Jackets, Tip-On (casewrapped) Jackets, Boxsets, 5th and 6th Color Printing, Foil Stamping, Embossing, Spot Gloss and other special finishes, Insertion of CDs/Digital Download Cards into the vinyl, BIG Posters, Slipmats, Stickers and other Merch, Unique Types of Colored Vinyl, Limited VERSIONS to create immediate collect-ability! Looking to the future, we’re also working to redevelop the technology to make flexidiscs, as well as new technology, a multiformat CD/DVD/Vinyl Disc, Shaped Records and Picture Discs as well as diecut shapes of vinyl pressed directly into the records. Lots in store in 2009 and beyond!

Props to Pirate Press for staying in the game for five years now!  As a vinyl collector myself I think it is great this company is doing better and better every year.  I can only blame them some for helping empty my wallet as more releases come out in the future, but I am ok with that.

F My Life.

Well not me personally.  Not today at least.

I found a great website to kill time on.  Basically the site, F My Life, contains true short stories from random people like you and me with outcomes that make them say FML (F#ck My Life) at the end. 

You know the kind of story I speak of, the kind that ends with you taking your hand and smacking your forehead with it.  Bum luck.  Misundersood.  I can not believe that just happened.

They are stories you might relate to or will laugh at and I am sure some of the stories are fake but still it is entertainment.  Some of the entries can rub off a bit depressing but for us demented folk, we laugh at it all.

Here are a couple of recent entries from this morning:

Today, I was working as a swim instructor for kids. Teaching them not to be afraid of the water, I put my face in the water and blew bubbles. I asked them to try it. All of them did, except for one. I went right to him and blew bubbles again. He then said to me, “but I just peed in that water.” FML

Today, I took the bus to work and a sweet old lady got on after me and sat next to me. Halfway to work, she fell asleep and her head was on my shoulder. Trying to be nice, I gently tried to wake her up before my stop came. She wasn’t sleeping. I let a dead woman lie on me for 30 minutes. FML

I have found myself checking for updates when I can becuase some of these are so entertaining.  When you think you are having a bad day, there is someone else out there who is having it worse and was bold enough to post their situation.

For all you Twitter users out there you can follow FMyLife and receive Tweets with the latest FML stories: http://twitter.com/fxxxmylife

iPhone users there is a FML application out there too that is free.  That is how I found out about this crazy site.