Music Op - iPods and Record Labels
Hello, and welcome to the sixth edition of Music Op, my monthly opinion piece on music industry happenings found exclusively on Sacred Spiral Studios. This month’s issue is mostly focused on my personal experiences, as a few things happened over the short month of February that have excited me for the coming months (and hopefully years).
I will go into detail about the steps I have made with one of my friends towards opening a unique type of record label, as well as the fun I had stumbling upon a fully-functional iPod Nano. As always, I will also break down my top 10 favorite tracks from the past month at the end of the article.
Just another DIY record label?
During my second-ish year of college (fall 2021), my friend Bay (he/they) and I came up with an idea for a project that falls somewhere between a record label and a distributor. Basically, we wanted to make recordings and videos of artists doing special versions of their songs and release them exclusively through our platform, both online and in short runs of physical copies. Originally, we had wanted to produce and engineer both the recordings and videos for artists, in a Triple J or even The Cave type way. We had huge ideas and were very into the concept of making our recordings exclusive and sought after.
Now in 2025, the ambition has struck again for this project but with some modifications. We definitely do not want to work on the actual music anymore, as this would take infinitely more time and effort as well as a suitable recording space, multiple scheduled sessions with the artists, and inspired artistic visions for each release. The video concept has been axed as well, since the point of it was to capture the live recording of each session for a video series. The main focus of this “label” now is to just create and sell short runs of CDs, tapes, or eventually records for artists that we hand-pick. The music does not have to be worked on by us, but it should offer something that fans cannot get online or via streaming, giving our limited copies more of a reason to be accessed.
Our first big step towards execution of this idea was to purchase a good printer, which is now housed at Bay’s place. They found a Canon printer on Facebook Marketplace that allows us to not only print on larger paper, but also print directly onto a disc, which is hugely convenient and will set us apart from others who either sticker or draw on regular CD-R discs. I have ordered clear jewel cases and printable discs to package the CDs in, since that is the most achievable medium for us at the moment. As of now, we have been running tests with the printer and other materials to dial in our production before we work on our first run of CDs for an actual artist (who we have booked but shall not be revealed yet).
Overall, this has been the most exciting movement in anything creatively music related for me in a while. The possibility of actually making some money to pay for the operation is very possible, and so far, the products we envision seem marketable and believable to potential clients. We still have a long way to go before we are ready to release our first run of music, but when the time comes, I will absolutely give more details here.
The find of the century
I am now the proud owner of a lime green, 2nd generation iPod Nano. I came across it in the first few days of February, and it became my other monthly project. I don’t think the right people will find this so I will admit that I found this device in a cell phone recycling bin at my work, and brought it home with me to see what kind of music it contained. Turns out to be pretty much full of music (4 gigs worth), and also able to hold battery while unplugged. Besides an old iPod Touch 4th gen, this is the only one that I have that can actually be used.
Collecting iPods would be fun and somewhat cheap, as I am only really interested in the Nanos, Classics, and like one Shuffle. A Touch is too similar to a phone, and not as fun as the simpler devices that take you out of modern times. Also, music is the only thing I would ever want to use it for. Facebook Marketplace is fun to look at for iPods, especially since I live in a city. I am sure eBay has a crazy selection too, but so far I have only kept the search local.
The first step of the process was to connect the iPod to the computer, and try to get into its files. It was possible, but without trouble from the device disconnecting repeatedly after a few seconds of success. I’m not sure exactly what made it work, but I believe I had iTunes open and reading it once it decided to stay connected. All the actual music files on the iPod are codenamed and divided into multiple hidden folders, but once they are added to iTunes, they become their true selves again. As I went through the songs, there were two genres that stuck out: mainstream country and 2000s pop punk / emo music. Some of the country songs dated back to the 1990s or earlier, but the majority of the pop punk was from 2000 - 2007, which is when I think the iPod was last added to.
For pop punk / emo, some prevailing artists were Fall Out Boy, Bowling For Soup, Anberlin, and American Hi-Fi. This broad genre had a lot of artists with singular albums, most unfortunately missing a few tracks. I didn’t keep as much of the country, where Brad Paisley, Kenny Chesney, Gary Allen, and Lonestar must’ve taken up one of the four gigabytes. Some of my personal favorite pulls were a few unreleased Gym Class Heroes tracks, “Breathe (2AM)” by Anna Nalick, almost all of Taylor Swift’s debut album in good quality and complete with OG “Picture to Burn,” and a handful of tracks from smaller pop rock artists who I had never heard of. Even if they aren’t super great to me, it’s still very interesting to learn about them in this way.
Since excavating all the music and parsing through it, I have synced the iPod to my computer and loaded a new batch of music onto it. With only four gigabytes, I’m prioritizing music that I do not have on CD, since I have a fair amount of downloaded music from places like Bandcamp, other friend’s CDs, and vinyl download codes. It has been fun to use, although I cannot wait to have an iPod Nano 6th gen for running, so I can clip it. Obviously I’m still gonna listen to music from my phone a lot, but the act of using an iPod just makes me happy and changes the way I interact with music.
My Top 10 favorite tracks of February 2025
There were definitely some great songs this month, as more and more releases have started to happen. Valentine’s Day had so many new albums, with Frog, Horsegirl, D. Savage, Hooky + Winter, and Cryogeyser all getting multiple spins from me. I still haven’t gotten to the Ichiko Aoba or Eem Triplin albums though.
