ZINE MUNCH #12: Anti-Pop and the Aesthetic of Failure (w/ Ken Shipley, of The Numero Group)
The value of amateurism and persistence, ‘working artists’ and uneven stardom, technological change and the continued importance of craft.
Ken Shipley is one of the founders of the Numero Group, an archival record label founded in 2003. I first found them tracing my favorite hip hop samples in high school, loving soul songs like The Ponderosa Twins Plus One’s “Bound” and Wee’s “Aeroplane (Reprise).”
In college, I found Duster, a 90s “space rock” band who, in spite of relative obscurity in their (initial) prime and 20 years of inactivity, had amassed a cult following online. The answer was The Numero Group, a label that’s made a name for itself re-issuing out-of-print, once-forgotten records in beautiful packaging, filled with essay-length liner notes and pictures of the music’s production.
In a culture that over-glorifies newness, we might get a lot from looking to the past to see what we missed, and what still stands the test of time. I’ve spent the last few years devouring Numero’s catalog, always pleasantly surprised by their breadth and quality, ranging anywhere from Hamlet Minassian’s self-explanatory Armenian Pop Music to California folk (Wayfaring Strangers: Ladies from the Canyon) and 90s dream pop (Ozean s/t). I keep a running playlist of all of my favorite songs that’s nearly 6 hours long now:
Numero envisions themselves as an “alternative history of popular music,” a rewriting of history without the same ‘winners,’ where different people were pop stars and different songs linger in our memory. Talking to Ken brought up a bunch of threads I think about a lot: the value of amateurism and persistence, ‘working artists’ and uneven stardom, technological change and the continued importance of craft. I DMed Ken on Instagram about an interview after running into him at the Numero pop-up store in SF in October. He graciously agreed, and we talked by phone on a Friday afternoon.
Interview, as always, has been edited for clarity and concision!
(P.S.: It’s been awhile since I published the last ZINE MUNCH, mostly because I’ve been super busy: I finished college and moved to San Francisco to work at a startup! If you’re in the area, I’d love to grab coffee!)
Mastery and rediscovery
Lucas Gelfond:
You’re talking about people who spend their time mastering a craft, and get very good over the course of a lifetime. You guys [often] find people who made music in their twenties or their early thirties or whatever. They stop being musicians and then you approach them later, with music of their youth. Is this by design? I’m also curious generally how people respond to your approaching them about work that often is from very very long ago.
Ken Shipley:
It really depends on the type of person and what the experience was with the work. Like I was saying earlier, a lot of people tend to fade away. It’s not necessarily because they’re not good at it, but because they didn’t find enough success in it, they’re not patient enough to seek it and it’s hard. Music is not for everyone, most people will not make it.
LG:
Yeah…
KS:
If you had a really negative experience around your art, there’s a tendency to dismiss it, or be suspicious of people who are interested in it. That sort of negativity will permeate a relationship.
If people feel that they’ve been horribly overlooked, they tend to have a bit more of a chip on their shoulder about it, and that requires a different approach with them and having different conversations with them. Not every relationship that you want to start with a client is a relationship that you are going to quite consummate with a deal. You might meet this person and you’re like: I can’t be in a relationship with this person, because it’s gonna be too toxic. Most people are super pleasant, I’m giving you the negative example.
There’s plenty of examples where you talk to someone and they’re like: "I've been waiting for you, “I said to myself, I’ll just wait.” You show up and you’re there at the right time in their lives. There’s people where it’s like “you want me? For what, why do you want to be in touch? Oh, yeah, that thing I did, that group I was in for eight months? That?”
So it’s all a matter of stories at this point. We’ve had so many people, there’s not one mold. It just depends on how they feel about it, because [sometimes] you meet someone and they’re like, “that band was the greatest six months of my life.”
LG:
Wow, yeah.
KS:
They’re going to be so excited to work with you because they remember that music being so deeply important to their identity, and they have waited. That’s the person that you want to work with, really, it’s someone who’s excited about their own art, and ideally they’d kept something.
That’s the other thing. You go, you meet, and you’re like “oh man, I love your stuff.” [They’re like] “well, there was the tornado back in ‘88.” Then the shit’s just gone. That’s always so heartbreaking. [It’s like]: “yeah, we had this studio, we must have recorded for four straight years, every band imaginable came in, but there was that flood so we don’t have any of it.”
It sucks because it’s just gone. You’ve exhausted all of the possibilities of being able to resuscitate something when it’s gone, and you’re like, “it’s okay, not everything gets saved, it washes away.” When we think about the idea of cave paintings, we think, “oh, these people are so artistic.” Like, they had to get it out on the wall of this cave. And it’s like: no man, people didn’t just live in caves. They lived in all sorts of homes that have just gotten washed away over time, so any art that was made there, there’s all kinds of art you just didn’t get to see.
On technological change
LG:
Reading all of these [old] interviews is really interesting, because you guys have been around for a period of incredible technical change. I think it was in Pitchfork, there’s this piece where you're skeptical of the iPod, then you’re skeptical of Spotify. [Now you’re everywhere,] and over time, I feel like you guys have been among the best adopters of new stuff.
I think a lot about how I discovered Duster on TikTok before I saw them anywhere else. How have you thought about technological change? Or: there’s something really interesting about bringing old works that are made in very physical and traditional ways to contemporary platforms.
KS:
When we started we were such a physical company. We were just like “this digital world is fine, but it doesn’t really represent the work that we’re doing.” We were a storyteller brand, and we continued that. We were on Spotify for years before we started our playlist ecosystem, and we were always available digitally, but the amount of income [digital] brought in was like five percent of our revenue. It was tough to take that kind of business seriously when it was not really making any money. [Note: Numero has many huge playlists now!]
We’d always been technologically interested. We had a Facebook account, we had a MySpace page, we had Instagram and Twitter as soon as they came out, we were always following what was happening. As you need to, right, because you’re a media-focused company.
I’ll say this. On the technology side of things, Spotify for us was a real blind spot until 2015. One of my partners was like: “you guys are so good at compiling things, you should really think about building a playlist. If you get 500 followers in a month, I’ll take you to a really nice dinner.”
I love a challenge, so that really drove me on towards wanting to get really deep into playlisting. I spent, I don’t know, three years of my life super deep learning about playlists. We developed a bunch of them and I learned to look at the data, really diving deep into how [and what] people were listening to.
Where the weak part [was], what genres were missing on Spotify became really important to me; where can we fit in between? Spotify has a top line playlist, we want to be below that. We want to be underground, we want to be that thing you’re going to because you don’t want to listen to the Spotify playlists.’
Building out that architecture and infrastructure of like 300 playlists took a bunch of time. The funny thing about doing that: it ended up seeding us so much further into the digital future. All of a sudden we were looking at an audience that was a lot younger. When Duster did come along, we were already plugging into a much younger audience than a lot of our competitors. Numero had been very much, I think, a Gen X brand at this point, [people] who are [...] consuming older stuff they were adjacent to in their life.
Duster was the first when it was just like “no, there’s 17 year olds, there’s 16 year olds really getting into this thing and discovering Numero, and we have a responsibility to do cool stuff to ourselves and to this new audience.” [Editor’s Note: I was 19 when I first listened to Duster!]
We started thinking about what they would want, and not necessarily catering to them, [but] trying to understand. [We] recognize that: you’re into emo or Duster when you’re young, but by the time you’re 25 you probably listen to two different things. Maybe you got into indie rock after that, and then got into Big Star / Nick Drake type of stuff. Then by 25 you listen to soul music, by 30 you’re into gospel, and by 35 you’re getting into New Age or, whatever, jazz, there will always be these curves that the true music person will get into.
The people who stop listening to new music [were] never really into music. A true head will evolve, and Numero’s responsibility is to guide them to that next record. [We want to] be here when they do start getting into soul music, to have made cool records, and to reference different points of history for them: we want to be that next listen.
This started building all of that playlist infrastructure and understanding we had a younger audience. When Duster came out and [blew up] on YouTube, we [invested and YouTube] and TikTok. People want to be told “this is good” because there’s so much music, and [being] a tastemaker is a [great] position.
My thing has always been: we’re just the first step out. I want to be the people who take the thing from deep in the underground and push it up to that first layer. [...] It’s the rest of the world’s job, I think, to push it out there and to make it even bigger. We can’t control it to get to a certain point.
LG:
It’s a very interesting way of thinking about it, it makes a ton of sense, the idea you guys get it out from “very hidden “ and everyone else does the rest.
KS:
Yeah, everything’s shareable. That’s what you want, you want all of this music to get as far as it possibly can. I’m personally super psyched about Duster being a TikTok band, or a band that blew up on TikTok. Not every single person who listens to Duster on TikTok is gonna become a Duster fan, but you get this opportunity to reach all these people you weren’t gonna reach. You’re gonna catch some of them with the cool things that you do.
On re-issuing 90s bands
LG:
Obviously this sort of Duster, Codeine, 90s band thing is a later thing; the Numero bread and butter was all this 60s, 70s, 80s soul stuff at the beginning. I’m curious why that time period felt really conductive in this format, or why that made sense as your initial focus.
KS:
Again, it’s coming back to Tree Records, my first record label, and the kind of music I was interested in in the 90s, which was a lot of slowcore. I grew up with the guys from Duster, I played in bands with them, I’ve known them a very long time. I saw Codeine’s last show, their first round in 1994, I saw Unwound half a dozen times in their initial run. All these bands were things I had first-hand experience and liked. That’s what a record label is, it’s just taste. It’s coming in and saying, “this is the stuff I like, if you like this stuff, come along for the ride.”I thought they were great bands at their time, and we [offered] perspective. A lot of these artists were on record labels that weren’t really looking back at this in a historical sense.
Their catalogs had fallen out of [print, or] record labels had gone dormant or out of business. That’s the same thing we’re dealing with with an old soul label, right? Something has fallen away, and it needs some care to get back to a place where people are going to make it a regular part of their listening habits. There’s no difference to me. Just like when I talked to Bill Moss about Capsoul and saw Tree Records in Capsoul, it’s the same way I feel about all this 90s stuff. The bands were always good, it’s just [that] the access to the market was challenging, and now we have the flattest market possible.
Say what you will about Spotify, which definitely has its imperfections, but it is a democratic way to listen to music. If you want to listen to something, you can literally type it in, pull it up, and press play. No one’s stopping you from doing that. They may not be serving it to you, but if you find out about it, you can listen. Really, it’s just a matter of how you get somebody to find out about something.
I grew up in the era of CDs and tapes. A [store] had to have an album at the time that you were there and wanted it. There’s [now] an instantaneous way to be like, “I just heard this thing, I want to hear this music.”
That flattening of that, it’s really why all this archival music is going to continue to come to the surface. Julie Doiron is the new Duster. There’s going to be so many songs that just come out of the world that were always great songs and just didn’t have access to the amount of ears. Some of them are going to stick and have whole lives of their own, and some are just going to be trends that are over in six weeks.
Musical overproduction and MySpace archives
KS:
I listen to music all day long, and so I think about how much I haven’t gotten to, and how much there is to hear. If we just stopped, the world is gonna have years and years to catch up with, just of what we made in the last five years, let alone the previous 20. I think about the MySpace era, and how much music was made and distributed to MySpace, but then literally never made it because it was not big enough to get into iTunes, there wasn’t a TuneCore yet, and streaming didn’t exist, so it didn’t get there, it didn’t get to Bandcamp. There’s this whole little area of music that’s just fucking gone man.
LG:
This is also really interesting to me. The 60s and 70s and 80s were really great for you guys because there was still some amount of barrier to entry to producing music, right? You had to get a group together, you needed other people involved, there was some cost, so there’s a limit on how much music is produced. [Editor’s Note: I’m almost verbatim quoting Ken’s partner Rob Sevier in Spin: “That is a magical time frame when widespread recording technology became available, but there was still a barrier of entry.”]
You guys have moved towards 90s music, a part of me is like, at what point is Numero doing “2008 SoundCloud” or things that are on the internet. There’s just so much more music that’s produced…
KS:
We’re already moving there. There’s already things like: A.R.T Wilson is a great example. It’s a record from 2013, it was some shit I heard on YouTube and thought was super cool. It had come out in Germany, but the LP was super expensive. I was like: “if I pressed this record, I could sell thousands of copies of this, and I bet millions of people would stream it,” and I was right.
When you hear something good, you can’t really be bound by when it came out. I used to have more of a strict guideline for it, but now I just want to make the stuff that people missed. A.R.T Wilson, it’s classic music to me, and in 50 years you’re gonna look back and be like “that’s one of the greatest records of [2014].” Hopefully I’ll have done my part to keep it in print and to have pushed it up. I might not be on every leg of the journey of that record but I want to get it started.
LG:
Do you find a lot of stuff on YouTube these days?
KS:
I listen almost exclusively on youTube.
The “wild goose chase” theory of archival music
LG:
You were talking about how you found Bill Moss [founder of Capsoul Records, the basis of Numero’s first release] because you found his number in BMI [Editor’s Note: Broadcast Music Inc., a music royalties agency] and called him. I read the Spin profile where you guys go to New Orleans [and knock on doors of addresses from phone books or LP covers], do you still do this kind of thing?
KS:
I just did one.
LG:
Where were you? How was it?
KS:
We’ve been looking for this guy, I won’t say who it is.
LG:
Sure.
KS:
But we heard he worked at a grocery store in San Diego.
LG:
Oh wow!
KS:
I tried to call the grocery store and I confirmed [he worked there]. I kept trying to call him, like, can I get this guy on the phone at his place of work? It’s a really dicey thing to do, but I called him, and it happened.
They wouldn’t ever transfer, I couldn’t count on them ever. So I was like: okay, I’m gonna have to go to this grocery store. We were in San Diego for another meeting, and so I was like: “while we’re down here, we’re going to drop in on this guy’s work, even if we don’t know he’s here that day.”
So we went. We get in and this guy runs past us really quickly, he’s like “hold on I’ll be right back.” He comes back like 10 seconds later, but I’m looking and it’s fucking packed in this grocery store, man, like it is an enormous amount of people. I don’t know how I’m going to find this guy in this maze.
I’m like, “Hey, does blank blank work here?” and he’s like “yeah, you see that guy in the black hood sweatshirt over there?”
LG:
Woah.
KS:
That’s an example of—there’s different methods to it. Not all of it’s on the phone. Some of it’s in person. I mean—I’ve tried that guy, I’ve had his email, I’ve had so many different ways to access him, and I’ve never been able to do a face to face with him. I had to put that time in, eight or nine years to get that.
On learning how to dig
LG:
It’s just really amazing to read these stories of: you’re going to a barn, or you’re on these crazy wild goose chases. It’s just really fascinating. I don’t remember where I found it, but there’s this quote about some general intuition when you can tell there’s going to be ‘greatness in a box of tapes,’ or you have some sense when you’re looking at a record that there’s going to be something worth looking at there.
How have you gained this kind of intuition, or how do you think about this? Is it just purely a feel thing?
KS:
Man, I’ve just done it for so long. You just know what you’re looking for.
A great example, I was at the Long Beach Flea Market recently. I go there every month and I try to look at it. I look for a number of different things. Some people are like ‘oh, you’re probably looking for record sellers. I actually only look at very specific kinds of records. I’m not just gonna sit there and thumb through a bunch of chudded out Fleetwood Mac and Paul Butterfield blues band LPs that guys are trying to resell somewhere else. Don’t care about that at all.
My field of interest is things that people don’t know are valuable, things that have maybe been lost to time. I tend to go through garbage, boxes of things where people are just like “here’s a box of things.” If it’s a ‘box of things’ that means somebody hasn’t really organized that box, there’s something interesting in that box. With that in mind, the way I go through a flea market—I have a different way to think about it. I’m not always looking for records, but I’m always looking for master tapes. [Editor’s Note: master tapes are the source format and often the highest quality version of some recording.]
I find master tapes all the time, but I found a guy who had just come across this storage locker, cracked it, brought out these tapes and I was the first person to get there and look at [them]. I just decided to buy all these tapes right then. I was like—you know what? I’m never gonna see these tapes again, I don’t even know what’s on them. I looked at Discogs, found the guy, and was like “okay, this guy’s doing something interesting.”
It’s really hard to stay doing music in your life. Most people quit because life gets in the way. I mean, think about how many garage bands, high school bands [there are] that have just broken up. Shit don’t last, things fall apart. With that in mind, most people don’t stay in music so they never had the chance to get good at it. All that is to say that the people that do stay end up becoming really good at their craft, and if you’re gonna do this, you’re gonna put money into it. At a certain point, you have to have some kind of success. People have to like it, something has to come of it.
The hobbyists tend to fade away, but the professionals, the people who are like “this is my life,” they get really good at their craft. So if you’re finding someone who’s spent their entire life working on a craft, there’s gotta be something interesting in there. I think that article you might be referencing is when I went into Chris Stein’s barn and saw all the Blondie tapes. [Editor’s Note: I was referencing something else! But this one is quite good as well.]
When I saw that I knew. It’s just like: “if I can’t make a record out of what I’m seeing here in front of me, then I shouldn’t be doing this job.”
The anti-Taylor Swift / the mythos of the pop star
LG:
I never really understood what you guys meant by this whole sort of “alternative history of popular music” thing, or the idea of the “aesthetic of failure.” How did that become a part of the label?
KS:
I mean, the aesthetic of failure is a really interesting idea, I’ve never really thought about it that way.
LG:
I totally stole that from one of your or Rob’s quotes, (laughs), just FYI, that’s not my idea. [Editor’s Note: this is actually from a (phenomenal) Spin profile about Numero. As David Peisner writes: “Slowly, a sort of defining aesthetic has emerged: Failure is more interesting than success. If history is written by the winners, Numero tells the stories of the beautiful losers.”]
KS:
I think that people resonate with the idea of failure. Most people’s story is the story of not having success. A pop star has a one in multi-million, one-in-a-billion chance to become Taylor Swift. It's so hard to do this thing, so most people’s experience of music is very grounded in reality. I think when you tell people that this is just normal people doing interesting things and it happens to be great, it’s maybe easier to digest.
LG:
There’s something very human or compelling about it: that these people were doing this thing they didn’t recognize was really amazing. I love that it comes back from the dead in some way, or that people eventually realize it is as good as it is. I don’t know. There’s also something very rousing about the idea that there’s all this amazing stuff out there that we haven’t seen because it’s bad, but just because stuff is not seen [by mass audiences] in a correct or linear way.
KS:
Coming back to the “alternative history of popular music,” thing, right, there’s a timeline that is known, and the timeline that you can recontextualize. We have an idea of history being written by the winners, because it is. When people went in and wrote the history books that you and I read in high school, it’s like: “here’s the story,” and that’s what we believe happened. As more information comes out, you can put context around it and understand the perspective of the winners better.
Like: Fleetwood Mac was a massive group in the 1970s, but only in the context of pop music reaching the very, very top of the market. Pop isn’t for everybody, it’s just the biggest thing, it’s not everything. There’s plenty of people who never listen to pop music, they only listen to country, or fucking bluegrass bands. There’s so many different people out there who listen to all these different things. It’s really taking it out of context and recognizing that, just because it wasn’t a multi-million seller does not mean it isn’t great. This song can be just as great, and if this song truly is great it doesn’t matter what genre or what year it’s from. It’s a great song forever.
On persistence
LG:
I feel like there’s this dominant talk in media businesses of, “you know, it’s all very power law, the only people who make money are the really big fishes, and with this long tail, there’s nothing.” It seems like, by design, you guys only focus on people who have not had enormous commercial success, but you’ve managed to build a really good business out of this.
I’d love to know more about how you guys have thought about this. I know you have referred to the “You and Me” [Editor’s Note: an amazing Penny and the Quarters song] business model before, which I thought was really fun, about the song. I’m curious how you guys have made this work because clearly it’s working, and it seems like a very hard thing to make work.
KS:
Part of it is that we were really ambitious when we started. When you have an enormous amount of time to put into something, it’s gonna succeed if you want it to. Rob and I were just so committed from the beginning. We quit our jobs in 2004. Doing that was the difference maker.
Most people aren't willing to do that, they’re not willing to give up the safety net to go after the thing. For me, I’d already lived on nothing. When I was doing Tree Records, I was living on four or five hundred dollars a month.
Once you figure out that you don’t need very much money to survive in this world, it becomes a lot easier to imagine not having any money and just putting all of your energy into it. I was up at 6am, we hit the pool at noon, and we’d go back to my place and work until 9, 10 pm, and then go to the bar, stay out until 2am, listen to records, and get up at 6am and start going again. It's because it’s what it took. I was in my 20s, and I just had an enormous amount of energy. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re gonna do everything you can to make your thing happen.
I know I didn’t really answer your question about the “You and Me” business model, but I will say that we had a lot of ideas really early. Like sync, we’d always wanted to get into sync. I knew, because working at Rykodisc, the Pink Moon commercial for Nick Drake had been so massive to his career, and he sold like a half a million CDs. That was little more than a car commercial. [Editor’s Note: “sync” is an industry term for placing songs in TV/movies/advertisements].
On Numero shows
LG:
Can you talk about bringing all these people back? Another thing that was really cool to me: there’s so much prizing of youth and newness, and there's something very cool about bringing a bunch of people in their 60s or whatever to perform. I guess I’m thinking about the concerts in particular, when was that something you decided you wanted to do, and what has that been like?
KS:
We’ve been doing them for a really long time. We did the first one in 2009, this thing called Eccentric Soul Revue. It was like Syl Johnson, and the Notations, Renaldo Domino. We took them all around the country and did a bunch of shows with Syl as well, so we've always been doing shows for a long time. The 90s thing put a new wrinkle in it because it’s like “oh, these people are young enough to perform, they can get another run at this.”
We didn’t promote those [initial] Codeine shows, but that was the first band we worked with that said “we’re gonna do some shows.” We’re like, “cool, we’ll have this product down there with the shows, we’ll get this press out through these shows,” and it all worked out, and ended up being a really great trial balloon.
LG:
I guess it was also crazy to me that some of these bands have bigger audiences the second time around.
KS:
Yeah, I would say that the Everyone Asked About You audience is so much larger right now than it ever was. The first time around, nobody came to those shows.
These kids can go out and hear it, and go “oh, my friend from school was wearing this Everyone Asked About You t-shirt, who’s that, let me look it up on my phone.” The barrier to entry is so low. The music was always good, it’s just: how are you gonna get it to people?
If you made it to the end, thank you! This is the longest interview I’ve published here, but I kept thinking back to what JC Gabel said about Interview when I first talked to him: “if you had a good story with Tom Waits, you would just run 10,000 words of it because why not, it’s good.”
Anyways, thanks for making it to the end! I think Numero publishes some of the coolest music out right now, and, as a (hopefully self-evidently) huge fan, it was a real honor to get to talk with Ken. I’m not sure when the next ZINE MUNCH will come out but—I’m starting to get back into the swing of writing / publishing! Likely more soon. Thanks for reading!
(PS — thanks to Matthew, Karly, Swetabh, and Will for taking a peek at this / helping me clean up the transcript before it went out!)
Lucas
Sooo awesome Lucas, happy for you that you got to do this!!