Q&A with Dublab's Mark "Frosty" McNeill

Mark McNeill by dublabrat on Flickr

Mark McNeill, co-founder of Los Angeles online radio station Dublab, chats about how he got his start in radio at the University of Southern California, his first experiences recording audio as a kid, his collection of unusual cassette tapes, and why he thinks cassettes are still around.

Read the full article on Neon Tommy.

Rewind to cassettes: the analog, low-fidelity, hands-on movement

Tijuana Panthers' Half Baked cassette by Kill/Hurt 

The sleeve artwork for the limited-edition cassette tape released by Los Angeles indie band Tijuana Panthers has black clip art of a panther's head, cowboy boots, and jumper cables over a picture of an orange tropical flower. The band name is scrolled in cursive along the top, and the album name, Max Baker, appears in block letters on the bottom corner. Opening the case, with a screech of the plastic hinge, reveals a gold cassette tape—the band's release on Kill/Hurt, a Hollywood cassette-only label.

"I grew up collecting and listening to cassette tapes and records, because that's the format that was around," said Phil Shaheen, drummer for Tijuana Panthers. "I like the fact that cassettes are in again and that there are cool little labels putting them out."

It’s true—cassettes seem a little ridiculous at first. They’re bulky, they require listeners to flip them in the middle of a track, and cassette players are no longer widely available. But in contrast with the easy accessibility of digital media, the intimate quality of the cassette outweighs its limitations. An increase of cassette record labels in Southern California and mixtape enthusiasm in the Bay Area and up the West Coast signal the medium's renewed relevance.

Cassettes attract small indie bands with their cheap price. For 70 cents a tape, an artist can get small batches of music in the public's hands for less than on CDs or vinyl. Michael McKinney, president of M2 Communications, a Pasadena-based duplication company, reports his cassette output to be between 6,000 and 10,000 tapes each month. "Tape orders have definitely picked up from almost nothing in the last couple years, and it's been almost entirely indie bands," McKinney told the Los Angeles Times.

Several record producers in Los Angeles provide cassette releases to interested bands. Chris Jahnle and his girlfriend Kat Bouza, founders of Hollywood's label Kill/Hurt, started the company dubbing small batches of noise-rock cassettes with giant grey duplicators purchased for $200 from eBay. Cassettes naturally have hiss, treble, and distortion—qualities that go along with the mood of garage, punk and other noisy genres, said Bouza.

Not Not Fun, an Eagle Rock-based label founded by Britt Brown and his wife, Amanda Brown, specializes in cassette releases for noisy rock bands. They both loved cassettes since high school, so when they started the label it was never a question whether or not they would produce cassettes, said Britt Brown. The label completes about 20 cassette releases a year, charging the band $1,500 for 500 copies. Because Not Not Fun gives 20 percent of profits back to the band and doesn't require a contract, the Browns haven't had trouble attracting clients since the company started in 2003.

Mark "Frosty" McNeill by dublabrat on Flickr

For Mark McNeill, a self-proclaimed music nerd who co-founded the Los Angeles Internet radio station Dublab, the attainability of cassettes attracts artists. "I think that some of it is just that it's being rediscovered…but it's also affordable," said McNeill. "A lot of tape labels are pressing them at home one by one and it's instantly accessible and you can make it. I think that kinda low-entry barrier and ease of creation are great and make it desirable to make tapes."

On the second Friday of each month, Dublab hosts Top Tape, a DJ night at Silverlake's Hyperion Tavern. The event features a tag-team rotation of tape-only DJs and the magnetic, low-fidelity sounds of cassette tapes. About 20 DJs show up each month, with enough time to spin three tapes each. "We had to go from five to three since a lot more DJs have been showing up," said McNeill of the event's growing popularity. DJs play anything from "brand new music straight out of the studio that they dub on a tape and bring down, to old cassettes they find in thrift stores," said McNeill. "A lot of the DJs that come down are buying cassettes for the purpose of bringing them down and playing them at Top Tape for an audience." The event, he said, "perpetuates a community that gets excited about it."

McNeill feels the medium brings a sense of community among those enthusiastic enough to dig through resale shops and garage sales to find unique tapes and sounds to remix. "For someone who's on the hunt for exciting music, it's really interesting because when you're out there at a thrift store going through a pile of cassettes, you're going to find some home recording tapes—you find mind blowing stuff on straight-to-tape demos. It's a one-off private glimpse into a moment . . . it could be anything," said McNeill. "The search and the exploration can pay off in a big way."

Walking past a Thai video store, McNeill spotted a stack of cassettes on the counter. Checking them out, he found they were talks on Buddhism in Thai. "I was hoping they would be music, but I'm going to record a Thai vinyl set straight onto the cassette," he said. McNeill has also played a set on Dublab with cassettes he scavenged from an Ethiopian market and created a DJ mix from tapes he bought on a trip to Cambodia. "It's not meant to be a gimmick, but it's a tool to exploring music that doesn't exist in other forms," said McNeill. "There's certain music that lends itself to cassette, whether because of economic reasons or because that's what was available."

The members of the San Francisco Mixtape Society understand the community and handcrafted feeling of exchanging mixtapes. Every month, members transform The Make-Out Room, a bar in the Mission District, into a venue for exchanging mixes. "Basically it's like a secret Santa party but with mixtapes," said Annie Lin, the society's co-founder. Each member brings his own mix to trade, leaving with a new set of tracks.

Although the club accepts submissions on CDs and USB drives as well, "you get a free beer if you bring cassette tapes," said Lin. The society will present a panel on the art of mixtapes at SXSW, a major music and technology festival in Austin, Texas in March 2012. "I think in the current digital age," said Lin, "people have a craving to get back to other people through music." With a mixtape, "it is one person who made it just for them, as opposed to throwing up a playlist on a music blog where millions of people can view it."

In late October, the indie band Wilco announced the release of its new album, The Whole Love, in a limited-edition cassette on its own label, dBpm Records. Cassettes make economic sense for bands releasing an album in a few hundred copies, but the release by Wilco, a band with two Grammy awards, points to the format attracting artists for reasons other than cost. "I think it's because of the fact that they want to see and experiment with the whole medium," said Lin of the release. "The value in CDs has really gone down over the years, and there is a huge resurgence of alternate media, like vinyl for example. I think going to cassette is just an experiment with that." A cassette tape can create a more personal attachment to the music because it can’t easily be dumped into an MP3 player and the listener can’t skip around to different tracks. The album becomes a cohesive unit.

"There's also something very interactive and fun about a tape," said Matt Carr, founder of the music blog Everybody Taste and Washington, D.C. record label Analog Edition. "You can literally see the magnetic tape travel around the spool, and when it gets stuck, you can fix it with a pencil," said Carr. "It's very analog, and now that the digital world has been conquered by the MP3…I think there's a lot of room in the world of music for physical, creative, and DIY forms of art." That return to do-it-yourself intimacy in spite of the digital era explains a famous band like Wilco’s choice to release a limited edition cassette.

The surge of cassette use by DJs, by bands and for individual mixtapes is an experiment reinventing an old medium for today's music scene. As technology continues to change the way we share music, making digital recording increasingly impersonal, musical counterculture will return to media of the past. Who knows, in the future CDs could provide the same comfort and nostalgia cassettes do today. It's a strange thought, but the return to cassettes also sounded a little ridiculous at first.

The unpaid internship: some call it a right of passage, but in most cases, it’s illegal

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During an unpaid internship at a youth football camp in the summer of 2011, Matt Leland, a senior Broadcast Journalism major at the University of Southern California, wasn't told he would be required to pay for his own transportation to the camp locations. This included flights to and from San Francisco to Colorado and San Diego, and a train to Los Angeles. Leland estimates spending over $1,000 in transportation costs during his internship.

"The most ridiculous thing about the internship came at the conclusion of the Colorado camp," said Leland. A supervisor asked him to drive a large truck full of equipment from Colorado to San Francisco. "This meant canceling my already-paid-for flight, getting into a vehicle I had no idea how to drive, and spending the next two full days on the road with a lot of expensive equipment that I was suddenly responsible for," said Leland. "Luckily, I was able to find someone who actually had experience doing this before being roped too far into it. . .but I still think it's ridiculous that I was even asked, considering the circumstances and my lack of compensation."

A national survey found almost 75 percent of college students take-on at least one internship during their time at four-year schools. The survey, conducted by Intern Bridge in 2010, included over 42,000 students at 400 universities. Of those interns, almost 20 percent reported they didn't get paid or receive school credit for working, making the work illegal.

"I think it's a mixture of free labor and the desire to educate students," said Faith Xue, a senior Communication major at the University of Southern California, on the motivation for companies to hire interns. "I've had five internships and they've varied in terms of how much I feel like the company or boss actually cares about what I learn and [them] using me solely to do the work they don't want to do."

Xue worked without pay or school credit for a surf and fashion magazine based in Santa Monica, Calif. during the summer of 2011. "I expected to gain experience learning the ins and outs of what it takes to produce a magazine and hopefully exercise some reporting and writing skills," she said. The internship touched on this, but mostly involved menial, day-to-day tasks to assist her manager. "I was asked by one of my bosses to research cleaning companies in the area," said Xue. "A week later, she asked me if I could clean, dust and Swiffer the entire office space…completely disregarding the fact that I had emailed her cleaning company options a week before. She asked me to 'especially clean the bathroom, because it's terrible in there.'"

"Two weeks later, she asked me if I could clean the bathroom again, because I was 'so good at it last time.'  So for the second time, I was on my hands and knees scrubbing the floor and toilet of this magazine's bathroom," said Xue.

To be considered legal, an unpaid internship must comply with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The act spells out six qualifications, summarized below, allowing a company to hire "trainees" that do not qualify as employees.

The Supreme Court deems an internship meeting all of these qualifications legal:

• The training is similar to education received in a vocational school and is for the benefit of the student.
• The trainees work with a close supervisor and do not take the place of paid employees.
• The employer doesn’t receive any direct advantage from the work, and sometimes “his operations may even be impeded” by providing the internship.
• The trainee is not entitled to a job at the end of the period and understands he will not receive payment.

Although many unpaid internships don't follow these regulations, students continue to accept them due to an extreme pressure to gain experience, boost résumés, or make connections.

A senior Cinema-Television Production major at the University of Southern California, who asked to remain anonymous, interns for a prominent Los Angeles writer and director’s production company. “Between me and his assistant, we pick up his kids from school, we take them to their sports lessons, their after-school activities… we tell his kids when to do their homework. I know their schedule better than my own at this point,” he said.

Running an errand—a trip to the vet with his boss’s dog—the intern had to spend $170 of his own money to pay the fee. “Usually the companies are good about reimbursing…but it’s always awkward asking and I find that I’m too focused on the job I’m doing to really keep a good track of all my own receipts, so I’m not usually able to get reimbursed,” he said.

"In the film industry you’re expected to be someone’s bitch for years, even after you graduate. But I’ve had really good experiences... and overall it’s been worth it,” he said.

A survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that over 76 percent of companies reported relevant work experience was the critical factor in making hires. Often, adding internships to résumés is the only compensation students receive for their work.

"[Being] an intern is almost like a rite of passage, but a very important one. Sometimes they are given daunting tasks but everyone has had to do it. It is almost like a way of paying your dues," said Meredith Strober, who has seen both sides of the experience as a former intern in the entertainment industry and a former manager for a Discovery Communications' internship program.

"I think students get internships so they have better chances of receiving a job after graduation. Employers like to see that a recent graduate has experience in the real world. It is also a great way for college students with limited connections in their industries to get a foot in the door," said Strober.

Nearly 20 percent of large for-profit companies, defined as those with more than 5,000 employees, have unpaid internships, according to Intern Bridge. This doesn’t include the massive programs run by nonprofits, government offices, and small for-profit companies.

With 4,200 employees, Discovery Communications—the parent company of 13 U.S. networks including Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, and TLC—operates an extensive internship program in eight locations nationwide. "There were several departments that had interns in the L.A. office, such as production, development, education, ad sales, etc.," said Strober, estimating about 20 interns cycled through the Los Angeles office every semester.

The company, like many others, requires that students receive school credit as compensation. For many students in summer internships, this means paying money to enroll in an internship course at an academic institution if they are not taking summer school. At the University of Southern California, students must enroll in a class of 2-4 units to receive credit. At $1,420 per unit, this means between $2,840 and $5,680 of a student's own money in order to receive credit and abide by the FLSA.

Academic advisors recommend taking an internship course at a community college to avoid the hefty price tag of USC tuition. A course at Los Angeles City College costs $226 per unit for out-of-state and $36 for in-state students. "Even though it's probably not transferable, it will be a lot less expensive," said an undergraduate academic advisor at USC.

In an effort to make a good impression on employers, students make sacrifices to make the most out of their internships. "I was basically his assistant—I would schedule all of his meetings, doing his personal assistant stuff all the time, from home when I wake up and sending emails during class," said the Cinema-Production major of his two-day-a-week internship for the CEO of a prominent production company. "It's always worth it, you have to work your ass off for these places and I love doing that because if you show them that you care, they’ll care about you too."