Tom Krell of How to Dress Well records his EP for Love Letters Ink, the indie record label run by music video blog Yours Truly.
(Photo: Nate Chan/Yours Truly)

For Tom Krell, his latest record is extremely meaningful. Krell, who records as How to Dress Well, created the EP as a tribute to a friend who died last year. It’s an orchestral reimagining of music Krell previously released, inspired by the kindred spirit he lost.

As a collection of music, How to Dress Well’s Just Once is a tragically magnificent remembrance. It’s intimate. And that intimacy makes the way the record is being released meaningful as well.

“It’s a memorial record, something very close to my heart,” Krell said to Wired.com. “I needed a label that would allow me to do it exactly my way — have it be something grand, yet intimate and not something overly commercial.”

Krell’s heartfelt EP is being released by small label Love Letters Ink, which is run by San Francisco music video blog Yours Truly. Just Once is a very small release — only 1,000 10-inch vinyl copies of the record are going up for sale — and each $14 EP will ship with a copy of a handwritten letter from Krell.

In addition to the vinyl and letter, fans get a password to view behind-the-scenes footage of the EP’s recording done in the easy-going style for which Yours Truly is known. ($1 of each sale goes to mental health organization MindFreedom, and digital versions of the record were made available through Bandcamp for $4 Tuesday.)

“Some labels put their heart into it, but at the end of the day, their goal is to sell records,” Krell said. “But with Love Letters Ink, they seemed to have a different approach. We want to sell the record, of course. But it felt like they weren’t concerned in the first place about releasing a marketable product as much as releasing a piece of art — something that they were proud of.”

It’s not a common way to release a record, but putting out an album through a popular indie music blog is a pretty smart way to hack the traditional record industry business model. Yours Truly is just the latest indie music blog to launch a label, serving up lovingly crafted offerings and using the kind of promotional savvy that traditional record companies can’t seem to muster.

How To Dress Well: “Suicide Dream 3” from Yours Truly.

“We’re not even making enough [copies] to justify what the major labels take on, like taking out ad space and hiring publicists,” Yours Truly co-founder Will Abramson said in an interview with Wired.com. “For us, we’re a part of the online community of blogs that promotes this kind of music. It’s natural to just hit up our friends and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got this record coming out, would you give it a listen and let us know what you think and if you like it give us a post?’”

In a way it was only a matter of time. When Rcrd Lbl launched simultaneously as both a music blog and a label in 2007, the strategy was seen as a way to solve the riddle of how to make money when music can be found for free online. But Rcrd Lbl only dealt in digital songs and had to build its rep as a blog. Indie music blogs already boast cred in spades, and for years have done the heavy lifting of introducing cool underground music to the masses.

It’s only fitting that tastemaker blogs are starting their own record labels and releasing music themselves.

‘Bands come to us because they like what we stand for.’

“I think bands come to us because they like what we stand for,” said Nathan Smith, of the Weekly Tape Deck blog, in an interview with Wired.com. “We’re kind of small, we don’t have a whole lot going on and we try to give as much attention to the bands as we can.”

Weekly Tape Deck teamed with indie blog stalwart Gorilla vs. Bear to found Forest Family Records last year. “We try to use the fact that we’re going to take care of them as a selling point more than recognition through mass-media or anything like that,” Smith said.

Forest Family Records launched in March 2010 with a release from current indie darlings Cults (the band went on to sign with Columbia Records). Since then, blogs I Guess I’m Floating and YVYNYL have collaborated for a similar label called Small Plates. Others, like Love Letters Ink, have followed suit. For the most part, these labels don’t just release CDs and MP3s — vinyl is preferred. The blogs promote the labels’ artists, a service provided for free in years past to bands their writers just happened to enjoy.

Cults: “Most Wanted” by cultscultscults

“I think music blogs are very much dictating the signing habits of record labels, and while I don’t believe blogs will ever phase out record labels entirely, they’re definitely revolutionizing the way record labels approach A&R and the process of scouting music in the new age of the music industry,” said Derek Davies in an e-mail to Wired.com. Davies became one of the early adopters of the blog-to-label model when he folded his blog, Good Weather for Airstrikes, into Neon Gold, the label he co-founded in 2008.

The new model seems to be working, at least for the artists. Love Letters Ink’s first release came in the form of an EP made with Mississippi rapper Big K.R.I.T. For the record, Abramson and his team recorded an unplugged-style set, rearranging songs from the rapper’s mix tape K.R.I.T. Wuz Here with neo-soul band Grillade handling instrumentation. Released as the Wuz Here Sessions, the label sold 250 vinyl copies of the album, all carefully assembled by the Love Letters Ink crew following the label’s South by Southwest showcase featuring K.R.I.T. last spring. Last month, K.R.I.T. released an EP on Def Jam.

If nothing else, these upstart labels might be on to something with offering vinyl, the once-neglected format whose sales continue to surge. Some 1.9 million vinyl LPs were sold in the first six months of 2011 — a 41 percent increase from the same period a year before, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Blog-run labels might be the first to understand that the MP3 is the freebie that brings in indie fans, while the real money comes from peddling fetish items like records, personal letters and other arty artifacts that complement the songs.

“The quality and memorabilia effect vinyl retains has been an immovable centerpiece for music fans and audiophiles alike,” Nathaniel Gravely, co-founder of I Guess I’m Floating and Small Plates, said in an e-mail to Wired.com. “There’s a reason why cassettes, laserdiscs and CDs have all died a slow death and vinyl has stuck around.”

Some blogs are even going a step further than just offering music products. For example, food and music blog Turntable Kitchen launched a new label of sorts Tuesday that will send readers a monthly box containing not only vinyl records but also collections of recipes and ingredients to make dishes or drinks to compliment the vibe of the featured artist’s music. (Full disclosure: Turntable Kitchen founders Matthew Hickey and Kasey Fleisher Hickey are friends of this reporter.)

Neon Gold co-founders Lizzy Plapinger and Derek Davies.
(Photo courtesy Neon Gold)

How well these blog-based ventures will fare remains to be seen. It’s not cheap to run a label, especially one that releases something as complicated to produce as vinyl records, as these newbies are learning. Love Letters Ink, for instance, stays afloat thanks to funds that Yours Truly brings in by shooting videos for the likes of MTV and Pitchfork. Neon Gold recently signed a joint-venture deal with Columbia Records that “helps to sustain day-to-day operations of the label,” Davies said. And Forest Family pretty much breaks even.

“It’d be nice to become a complete label down the road,” Smith said. “But that’s kind of a dream at this point.”

Even though many of them are lucky to recoup their expenses — no matter how much they might hope to turn a profit — ultimately, the operators of these new types of labels measure success as much by how well their artists do overall as they do by record sales.

“Even though bloggers aren’t making the music, we become so emotionally invested in some of the bands we champion,” Gravely said. “Watching them evolve from Google Chats of ‘Yo dude’ to signing record deals and selling out venues, it feels like a part of you has succeeded, too.”