Olympia is an incubator and exporter of DIY music culture, a place where musicians do big things on small budgets, recording themselves, passing the hat, touring from living room to living room, up and down the coast, sometimes sleeping on the same floor they had performed on. They do it for the love, but thanks to Bicycle Records, musicians are getting checks instead of spare change.
As do-it-yourself musicians, Bob Schwenkler and Ross Cowman fell in love with the Olympia music scene. They performed, toured, and hung out with hundreds of musicians from Olympia and around the world, seeing first-hand how musicians are an undervalued, yet vital, community-building force.
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| Ross and Bob are musicians as well as businessmen. Pictured: Ross's band, June Madrona. |
Bicycle Records, the label that Ross and Bob own and operate, records and distributes musicians from across the globe. Their beautiful, hand-letterpressed packages cradle CDs, vinyl, sincere lyricism, energetic performers, and a sound you might call “folktronic.” It repays musicians for their dedication and contribution to the community. Instead of earning about a dollar for a ten dollar CD, a Bicycle Records artist takes home five to seven bucks!
When Bob asked Ross to become his business partner, neither of them knew much about running a record label. They learned fast, but their learning curve skyrocketed when they enrolled in Enterprise for Equity's Business Training Program.
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| An old-fashioned letterpress creates unique album covers. |
With some guidance and encouragement from Enterprise for Equity, Ross and Bob created a catalog, streamlined their online presence, created a custom inventory database, began selling to retailers, scaled up production, and grasped what it meant to be sustainable.
Bicycle Records is a micro-enterprise ideal, creating sustainable careers in place of passing the hat, supporting musicians who, in turn, knit the community together and provide us with their art.
