Indie Label Skipping Discs Puts A New Spin on “Tribute” CDs

Skipping Discs is a new record label out of northern Massachusetts that specializes in unsigned bands doing cover versions of songs by well-known artists. Their latest disc is " Spiders From Venus: Indie Women Artists and Female-Fronted Bands Cover David Bowie." Other Compilation CDs are "Love Her Madly: New Women Artists Cover The Doors" and the improbable but fun "Saturday Night Hay Fever" Bluegrass Artists Perform Disco Hits." You haven't lived til you've heard hillbilly-esque versions of "Funkytown" and "How Deep Is Your Love." The idea is so wacky it actually works! The company is currently working on another all-female tribute disc, this one to feature the music of Joe Jackson. I recently conducted an interview via e-mail with Rick from Skipping Discs about the label's recent projects

When you began Skipping Discs, did you have a definite idea to focus on compilations & cover versions of songs or did it just happen that way?

The plan from the very beginning was to be a covers-only label. We wanted to do something that not a lot of other labels were doing and it made sense for business reasons, too. As a new label, we'd knew we'd be dealing with a lot of unknown artists and we figured we could sell more CDs if we had a bunch of no-name bands doing songs that the general public was familiar with than if we released all new material. Also, we had an automatic audience for these compilations - hardcore fans of the artists our bands were covering.

How do you come up with ideas for your CDs? Is it generated in house or do artists and consumers offer ideas?

So far, we've come up with all the concepts for the compilations although we do get a lot of suggestions from bands and people who've bought our CDs. Actually, we've got way too many ideas for future projects that we'll probably never get to because of time and money. Like our idea for a "Britney Invasion" compilation, which would be Beatles sound-alike bands covering Britney Spears hit, or "El Gato Estaben," an all Latin tribute to Cat Stevens.

What sort of response do you get when you put out a call for submissions? Are you overwhelmed with tapes/CDs?

We haven't reached the point of being overwhelmed with submissions yet but with each release, we get more and better material. For our first release, "Saturday Night Hay Fever," our bluegrass tribute to disco music, we got maybe 20 submissions, and only a few of them were usable. We had to go back and ask a couple of the better bands if they would consider submitting a second cover for the CD which, thankfully, they did. For our all-women's Doors tribute, we got about 40 or 50 submissions, and for our latest release, "Spiders From Venus" (women cover David Bowie), we easily broke 100. We're just starting to get demos in for our next release, an all-women's tribute to Joe Jackson called "Different for Girls," and I think we might come close to doubling that

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