At first, she admits, she dismissed Abdullah, who approached her after hearing her play. When he told her he was starting a label, “I said, ‘Oohh, you and every other 20-something-year-old kid who likes to play,’” Boggs reports. But Abdullah was persistent, and kept talking about producing her next album. “When he gets it in his mind to do something, he just runs with it,” she reports.
Boggs, a singer-songwriter who had recorded one other album, knew firsthand how expensive and challenging the project would be. She decided to give it a shot anyway, and says she was amazed by the level of support Abdullah gave her. She invested about $300 initially, and Abdullah matched her investment. He located a place to record—another Rev Records artist had a basement studio—and helped her work out licensing for “I’ll Fly Away,” one of the songs on the album. For Boggs, packaging was important, and Rev Records solved this expensive issue by producing beautiful, silk-screened muslin cases for the hand-burned CDs. For the fledgling record executive, it was a hands-on operation that depended on the help of friends and family. In the hours before the CD release party at Tess’ Lark Tavern, Abdullah was burning the CDs individually on his computer, his mother and girlfriend were sewing the muslin, and friends were busy stuffing the finished records into their cases.
Nevertheless, by selling nearly the entire first run that night, Abdullah says Boggs and he made enough to recoup their expenses. The project and the experience couldn’t have been a better or more fitting expression of the label. “It was very much in the spirit of what we’re trying to do,” he says.
Nearly a year later, the little label is definitely making progress. With some of the profits raised during recent Rev Records events, and his own personal investment, Abdullah says he has been able to put more capital into successive projects.
Thomas McWatters, another singer-songwriter on the label, has known Abdullah since high school. When Abdullah approached him about joining the label and producing an album, McWatters, 28, was straightforward with him. “I said, ‘If you want me to put out a record on your label, then you need to pay for it. Because if I’m going to pay for it, I’m just going to release it on my own label.’ ” Abdullah agreed.
McWatters, an electrician by trade, had self-recorded one previous album when he was 19, “just sort of a notch on the wall, you know, to see what I could do.” The upcoming album with Rev is being recorded at the professional Cotton Hill Studio in Colonie, and McWatters is hopeful about its potential. A good CD is “the job interview in this business,” McWatters said. “Somebody just has to hear it and like it.”
Howard Glassman, owner of Valentine’s, an Albany music venue, says being a musician in Albany is difficult. The main challenge? “Getting people other than friends to come see you,” Glassman says. “People really don’t do that anymore. They really have to have their hands held. Thank you, MTV.”
Abdullah has helped create opportunities for artists to play and sell their wares, booking monthly Rev Records Revealed showcases at the Lark Tavern and the Capital District Federation of Ideas art space on Albany’s Madison Avenue. He’s no slouch when it comes to marketing and promotion, either, making use of MySpace and CD-Baby on the Internet to promote artists and show and sell CDs. He’s also reserved a Rev Records domain name, and has T-shirts and buttons ready, in anticipation of the label’s own eventual website launch.
For all the work Abdullah is putting into making and promoting albums, arrangements for profit-sharing remain informal. Abdullah’s royalty rate varies by project. Up until this point he hasn’t used contracts, preferring to keep arrangements friendly. As business grows, however, that is changing, and he’s currently in the process of creating a contract for future use. He said his artists have a great deal of input in pricing, and that he’s willing to work with them to defray costs and keep prices low—even though it means less money for him.
For now, Abdullah is signing artists from his circle of friends. He acknowledges that he doesn’t have the resources to sign other talent, since not every musician is willing to help out in the way his friends have. That admitted, the end goal is to eventually run Rev as a profitable, full-time business, and allow all his musicians to quit their day jobs. Asked how, Abdullah readily admits, “I’m not sure I know.” Returning to the metaphor of the cliff, he explains that he and his friends don’t just cross a bridge when they come to it: Presented with a chasm, they construct the bridge.
