Buy Records. Save The Planet.
Don Giovanni Records co-founder Joe Steinhardt talks about independent record labels, music discovery, and the inherent toxicity of streaming
In the early 2000s, Joe Steinhardt, along with his good friend, Zach Gajewski, founded Don Giovanni Records. Steinhardt is a New Jersey native, and he and Gajewski started the label—which was initially a Jersey-centric punk label—while living in relative exile as students at Boston University. Their first project was pressing a 7-inch of their band’s music, which, at the time, was an almost impossible task, and that soon grew to include releasing 7-inches for other bands from their local scene. Since then, Don Giovanni has grown beyond its parochial New Jersey focus, and today has an impressive roster that includes artists like Screaming Females, Moor Mother, Irreversible Entanglements, Jeffrey Lewis, Laura Stevenson, Lee Bains III + The Glory Fires, and many others—and also gave artists like Waxahatchee their start.
Steinhardt, in addition to his work at Don Giovanni, has a PhD from Cornell University, and does research in risk and health communication. He’s an Assistant Teaching Professor at Drexel University’s Music Industry Program, where he hosts a music industry interview series—recent guests include alternative industry icon, Steve Albini, and Merge Records co-founder, Laura Ballance.
Steinhardt is an idealist. He has strong convictions about ethics in music, and prefers the autonomy and independence exemplified by DIY punk. Although, as a label head, he also has a responsibility to his audience and artists. “I pray for a day when people will stop using streaming services,” he says in our interview below. “But my duty as a label is to distribute our artists to where people are listening to them. Similarly, I was also never interested in tapes, but people want our records on tape, so I make cassettes. The label is not here to serve my interests. As a consumer, I don’t stream. I buy CDs and LPs. I listen to them on physical players, and I encourage others to do that, too.”
I spoke with Steinhardt about his experiences at Don Giovanni Records, the rich history of regional punk labels, the reasons artists should consider working with record labels, his opinions about major label business practices, and why he considers streaming a cultural, as well as ecological, disaster.
When did you start Don Giovanni?
I started it in college in Boston with my best friend, Zach Gajewski, who I was in a band with. Neither of us had any intention of starting a record label. The plan was to self-release our own band’s record, which was something that was very attractive to me at the time for a variety of reasons. I was already interested in independent music and outsider music—I don’t think I had the language for that that I have now—but I was very interested in outsider, independent, and alternative scenes. Most of the bands that I listened to self-released their own records in some form, and that was something that Zach and I wanted to do for our band.
What type of release were you looking to do?
There was no digital. The internet existed, and computers existed, but there was no digital media or anything like that at that time. It was a 7-inch, but it had 13 songs on it. Our band was a thrash band.
Were services like CD Baby available at that time?
No. I had to figure that stuff out, which is what led to starting the label. For example, you had to call Barb at United Record Pressing on the phone and send stuff in the mail. It wasn’t like filling out an online form when ordering stuff today. The way I figured it out was I talked to other people I knew who made records, “How do you get jackets made?” “How do you get a 7-inch made?” It was a challenge to get it to exist, and a lot of bands would give up once they started going down the trail of plating, mastering, and this whole thing you had to figure out. Zach and I figured it out, and then my friend Brian Gorsegner, who was in a band called Snakebite with my friends Ian Thompsen and Jeff Desantis—Jeff’s important because he did the cover art for our 7-inch—and they had just recorded, and asked if we wanted to put out their 7-inch, too. We didn’t have money, so we decided that if we sold enough copies of our 7-inch, we’d put the money into the Snakebite 7-inch. At the same time, my friend Craig, who was in this band that I grew up worshiping, called the Degenerics, started a new band called Kamikaze. Craig knew that I was such a big fan and asked if I wanted to do a 7-inch, too. So we instantly had three releases planned, but we didn’t do them immediately, because we had to sell enough of one to press the next one.
Also, there was another local label I grew worshiping, called 9Volt, which was run by a guy named Vasil Daskalopoulos. I asked him for tips about how to press records, and he had an unreleased 7-inch by this band called, Full Circle Swing. He had pressed 300 copies, but never made jackets, and had these bulk 7-inches in his closet. He said to me, “If you want to make jackets for this record, we can release it as a split release.” I said, “Hell yeah.” Now we had four records, and three-and-a-half bands—Full Circle Swing had broken up long ago—although Benny Horowitz, from Full Circle Swing, is the drummer in the Gaslight Anthem now. We made 300 jackets for this record for a band that never left New Brunswick, and we couldn’t get rid of them. Six years later, when Gaslight Anthem started, we changed the description of the 7-inch on the distribution website to say, “Members of Gaslight Anthem,” and sold all that we had left in a day.
Where were you selling them?
Most of our records were sold through the mail. People would send me dollar bills in the mail in an envelope to a P.O. Box in Boston, and I would send them a physical 7-inch. They were sold at shows. I put an ad in Maximum Rocknroll, and in Razorcake, and we’d also get labels that wanted to trade with us from all over the world. They’d trade us five of their records for five of ours.
Was swapping with other small labels a standard practice?
Extremely standard. It was the main way that things sold. We would swap 200 of a 500 pressing at the time.
When did it start taking off and becoming a real label, as opposed to releasing your friends’ music?
In some ways, never, and the goal is still to release records from a specific scene or community. I am not out shopping, entering bidding wars, or trying to sign things that I think are going to work. It’s still very much based on documenting the community. But for the first couple of years, Zach and I approached this as pure fans. We tried to be extremely professional, and I think we did a good job, but we approached it as fans, and as vinyl enthusiasts. Vinyl was not in at the time. The vinyl resurgence probably started around 2008 or 2009, but this was 2002/2003. You couldn’t get record players. You couldn’t get vinyl except at vinyl-only shops, or at weird punk places. Vinyl was still just for punk.
The first thing we put out that exploded was this band called The Ergs!. The Ergs! were playing mostly in the pop punk scene, but also appealed to hardcore and punk kids. The Ergs! were only available on CD, but I think the fan base was more people like me who wanted it on vinyl. Me and Zach were huge fans, and we asked them, “What if we put out your CD on LP?” No one in the world wanted to do that at that time, so it wasn’t like a savvy business move, it was actually what felt like an awful business decision, because it had been out on CD for over a year at the time, and so everyone already had it. But that record did amazing. And we still sell lots of copies of that first Ergs! record today. That was the first thing that got our label attention, where other bands wanted to be on the same label as the Ergs!. We were only still focused on bands specifically in our region, and regionally, The Ergs! were big.
Did you stay regional on purpose?
We were in the tradition of these regional labels like Dischord in D.C., Lookout Records in Berkeley, and No Idea Records in Gainesville. That Ergs! record did so well, that another label in New Jersey, called Gern Blandsten, wanted to put out their next record. Gern Blandsten was a major influence to me at the time. Many of the bands I listened to growing up locally were on Gern Blandsten. Our first thought was that we took this band huge, and that was really cool. But then—we were on a bus to New York from Boston—and we thought, “Instead of letting Gern Blandsten do that Ergs! record, we should ask The Ergs! if we can do it.” I called the band from that bus—their second EP was called Jersey’s Best Prancers—and the pitch I gave them was, “What if we did Jersey’s Best Prancers? We can do all the same things Gern can do.” A day later they said, “Yeah, you should do it.” Now we had to actually be more serious, we owed it to them to do it. That was the first step like that—and there were one or two others in our existence, too—where we realized that we have to take this more seriously or we have to stop, and that was the first one.
In terms of genre, with artists like Screaming Females and Waxahatchee, when did you expand beyond punk?
I understand what you’re saying, but I’ve always understood those bands as punk. I’ve always seen punk more as an approach than a sound. There are a lot of things that sound punk that are not punk at all, and there are a lot of things that don’t sound punk, that are. I believe in punk as an approach. That’s the niche that we occupy, people who want to approach things from that mindset, as opposed to from a more corporate, business-minded mindset.
When did you start building a distribution network?
With The Ergs!. Before that Ergs! record came out, we had just been trading records, or selling them at stores or anywhere I could. With that Ergs! record—there was a label called No Idea Records in Gainesville, Florida—and they were buying 100 Ergs! records at a time from us. They were self-distributing, and they had bands like Against Me!, Hot Water Music, and Less Than Jake. They were a distributing their records—they weren’t distributing other labels other than one called Prank—but they were buying so many of our records that I asked if they wanted to be our distributor. They said yes, and eventually they started signing on other labels and had a full fledged distro going. I think we were the second label in, and at one point they were distributing about 30 labels. That started our distribution, it was still pretty punk, but you didn’t need much more than that to sell thousands of records. When that second Waxahatchee record came out and sold over 10,000 copies, it was through No Idea. You could sell 10,000 copies of a record through that type of distribution.
A number of artists told me the only reason they sign with a label, as opposed to doing it themselves, is distribution. Do you agree with that?
I make no bones about it. The main things I can offer an artist are distribution and financial resources. I read your interview with Screaming Females, where they mentioned they don’t really need some of the financial resources like recording advances. But for a band like Screaming Females, we might still spend tens of thousands of dollars pressing stock, hiring press, radio, and things like that. But what you really come to a label for is distribution, financial, accounting, and resources like that. There are other things, too, but the main reason I would tell a band to find a label is distribution.
Do you offer the bands an advance, in the classic sense, and then do a profit share once the album is out?
Those are two separate questions. For the advance it depends, each deal is different with each band based on what they want and what’s best for them and for us. I try hard to be as fair as possible. Our profit share is always the same: 60 percent of all profits for every record for every band goes to the band, and we keep 40 percent. The standard punk deal is 50-50 and a non-punk deal can be really lopsided, but we try to do 60-40 in the spirit of recognizing that we can’t do this without them. It’s not an equal partnership, we can’t do it without them.
Is that split after you pay back the costs of pressing and other expenses?
If we paid for PR, pressing, advertising, any expenses—after any expenses we pay, that’s the profit share.
Have you been impacted by the debacle with Direct Shot Distribution? Do you deal with them, and is that causing problems?
I have always distanced myself as much as possible from the major labels and the things the major labels do. I was not distributed through Direct Shot, so their awful decisions don’t affect me. However, I am affected by Direct Shot in the sense that it was so damaging—and I believe it was intentionally damaging—to independent retail, which we rely on. Independent retail is the life blood of independent labels. When something like Direct Shot cripples independent retail, that’s damaging to us. But it’s an indirect effect.
And you think that’s on purpose?
One hundred percent. The majors have never liked spaces they can’t control. The majors loved physical retail when it was places like Best Buy, Walmart, and Tower Records. They loved that era. They made a lot of money in that era. And during that era they hated the mom and pop retail, because they couldn’t control it. They worked with Best Buy, Walmart, and Tower to price out independent retail. That’s why Best Buy had new hit CDs for $7.99 in an era when the going rate was somewhere between $15.99 and $18.99. They would take a huge loss, and do things to incentivize people to go away from independent retail. But it turns out that independent retail survived, and the majors started to need independent retail again. So they started pushing things like Record Store Day to push their records into independent retail. The major labels made it very clear, they like digital music because they can control the space, they make a lot of profit there, and it is harder for labels like myself to compete with them within that space. They also made it clear that they don’t want physical media. They don’t like it. It costs them money and they can’t control it. To me, it seems that it would be too great a coincidence that they just happened to pick this distributor that would take out their enemies like that.
Streaming has become dominant since you first start your label. What are the challenges and benefits of streaming?
There are no benefits to streaming. Streaming is incredibly toxic both environmentally and culturally. As a culture, we need to agree that we’re not going to participate in it before it kills our planet and our culture.
How is it toxic to the environment?
There are three times as many greenhouse gas equivalents emitted currently in the streaming landscape then there were at the peak of the compact disc era. A stream needs to be looked at as a disposable listen and not as some type of green alternative even though there is no physical product. It is actually much more like a styrofoam cup or a plastic fork.
How so?
Think about it, every time you listen to a song and you stream it, there is a server farm in Oregon or Arizona or Montana that is generating electricity and creating waste. It sends that to your phone, and that transfer generates electricity and waste when you listen to that song with every single listen. Whereas if you bought a CD in 1996, and you listen to it today, it’s the same one-time purchase. When you’re done with the CD, you bring it to the local record store to resell it to someone else within your community. It’s very reusable. I have records in my house from the 1950s and 1960s. Those records are actually worth more now, and are so sought-after because they sound so good. Physical media is incredible. It’s an incredible format and it is a green format in that sense. True, it is not made of recyclable materials, but that’s a misnomer, because it is also not going into the landfill. A metal fork is also not made of recyclable materials, but you’re not throwing away your metal fork. A stream is thrown in the garbage. You listen to it once, and generate waste. You listen to it again, and generate waste again—and it’s not viewed that way by consumers.
That’s the environmental side of it. On the cultural side, it’s a business model—and not just a business model, but a listening model—that was designed for mainstream pop music, or the top one percent of music, and it works fantastic for pop music. When I say, “pop music,” I don’t mean a specific genre, pop music can sound like thrash metal—it sounds like anything—that top one percent is hit-driven music, or whatever’s popular. Streaming works fantastic for that kind of music at the expense of all other music. It’s a winner-take-all model. It’s based on play-listing, and pays out via a pro rata model. It’s based on a profit share that doesn't make any sense for anyone at the bottom. It treats it like it’s a normally distributed curve, which it’s not—it’s a long-tail distribution—so you can't say you’re going to pay everyone on average, unless it’s an average normalized distribution curve. It’s an awful proposition. It’s a guaranteed losing proposition for someone who’s not in the top one percent.
Are your artists available on streaming services?
Yes, and I pray for a day when people will stop using them, but my duty as a label is to distribute our artists where people are listening to them. I personally do not stream. I would never do it personally for all the reasons I am saying. If enough people wouldn’t do it, we wouldn’t need to be a part of it, but that’s where the people who listen to our artists are.
I would think that the types of people listening to your artists are not mainstream people, that they’re more likely to buy physical releases as opposed to streaming.
Potentially, but as a label we make a lot of money on streaming and we’re not getting lots of playlisting. That means that people are listening to our music there. I wish they wouldn’t. Younger people especially like to stream, because they grew up with it. I grew up with CDs and found vinyl. They are growing up with streaming. They have to discover CDs and vinyl. Some of them will and some of them won’t, but it has to be a cultural change like that or it won’t go anywhere.
Does streaming have no value at all, even in terms of discovery? For example, the reason we’re talking is because the YouTube algorithm suggested Screaming Females. I clicked on it, liked it, and eventually found you. What would be the alternative?
That’s not a fair question, because I want to believe that you would have found them the same way you found bands in the ‘80s and ‘90s, before streaming. Magazines—all the things that streaming bankrupted for no reason—I believe you still would have found them.
I read magazines as a kid, but the depressing thing was I’d believe the hype, buy the album, and if it was awful, I was stuck.
Exactly, I have a lot of thoughts on that, too—which may be for another time—but I agree. That’s what the majors wanted to control. They had built a system in the ‘90s, where they could sell you anything. They could make a flashy single with a garbage album, play it on radio that they controlled, or on TV that they controlled, and then you’d buy it. They didn’t give a shit after that. What piracy did was lifted that veil, and you could see how garbage the album was. But piracy was great for indie labels, because people saw how good the indie albums were. They couldn’t control that, which is why they complained about piracy. Spotify they can control again.
But to go back to your point about discovery, there was this notion before streaming of the great celestial jukebox—the iTunes music store was the first one—where you would have access to all the music in the world, and discovery. Go to Spotify and look at the top 40 songs being played. They are the same top 40 songs being played on the radio and everywhere else. This notion that people are discovering new stuff, you would think there would be these massive Spotify hits that people have discovered, but that’s not what’s happening. People are listening to the same stuff that’s being pushed on them. The people that are discovering weird stuff are the same people who would be discovering weird stuff back in the day, and the majority of people are “discovering” the radio songs.
You’re saying, that because of who I am, and what I like, I would have found you anyway.
You would have found it. Without Spotify, you would have more magazines again, stronger blogs, and a lot of other things. You would find it. You’d have your local record store guy telling you that this is a great record. All these other things that you used to find music in the past. And again, streaming is not producing anything new. It looks the same. It’s not like streaming pushed away Taylor Swift and Drake because people found this other, better version of them. That’s not what happened. Unless you truly believe in your heart that Drake is the best rapper and Taylor Swift is the greatest pop crossover country songwriter, and there are no better ones on the planet, if you don’t truly believe that, than someone should have risen to the top or near them, but they don’t. It’s a business and listening model that works for pop hits. For example, if you press play on Mike Watt on streaming, and you leave it running long enough, you’ll eventually hit Drake. That’s insane. That would have never happened before. If you opened up Spin magazine back when it was more alternative-leaning—or Big Takeover or Trouser Press—and you read a review of a Minutemen record, and you kept reading every single page and every subsequent issue that came out, you’d never hit Drake or Taylor Swift. It wouldn’t happen. Yet with streaming, you always bump into Drake or Taylor Swift. You always bump into these things, because that’s what it’s designed to do. It is designed to push these plays in that direction, and that’s what it does. That’s why it’s better for the top, and that’s why the top is doing really well right now, and it’s at the expense of everybody else. You can’t have an alternative on a platform, which is why platforms and recommendation systems are dangerous.