Iron Fortress Records - (Record Label Interview)

You talked about analog media.

I'm obsessed with...

I'm obsessed with analog media, physical media.

I really am.

That's because I grew up on that.

And now today, I just came from the record store a few seconds ago, bought a couple records.

And I'm curious about what, and I think I've learned my lesson doing this podcast long enough, but I'm always curious about what forms of physical media is more popular in given genres.

I see CDs on your website.

You started doing handmade cassettes.

I imagine you've evolved to manufactured cassettes now.

And then of course, you've talked about vinyl.

I've seen metal and vinyl go hand in hand.

I know a lot of great you know, super underground metal labels that are strictly cassette.

What is metal fans' relationship with physical media? Is it all of those things? Are there certain ones that are a little bit more popular than others? Can you just walk us through that?

Yeah, I would say CD is probably most popular, but I think there's a couple good reasons for that.

One, When it comes to actually storage, like memory storage, music storage, the quality of that storage, CDs is by far the best.

It'll last the longest.

They're the most durable.

When it comes to price nowadays, they're on par with cassette tape.

When tapes became popular because they were cheap, they're not cheap anymore.

And then I think second would be vinyl.

Vinyl is like the upper echelon, but not everybody wants to spend 25, 30 bucks when they can buy almost three CDs for that price.

So it really comes down to, I guess, quality over quantity.

Some people also just don't love the process of putting a record.

It's a much longer process.