Buffalo Was the Distributor

In the spring of 1990, a nineteen-year-old Ani DiFranco was driving between folk festivals and college coffeehouses on the eastern seaboard with a box of self-released cassettes in the back of a borrowed Honda. The address on the J-card was a P.O. box in Buffalo. The label was a name she had given the operation a few months earlier — Righteous Babe Records — to make the business of selling tapes out of a trunk sound a little more like a business. Atlantic, Imago, and a half-dozen others were already calling. She kept saying no.

She was not making a political point yet. She was doing the arithmetic. A major-label deal, even a generous one, would pay her some fraction of a dollar per record after recoupment, and she would not own the song after she sold it. Selling the cassette herself for ten dollars cash at a folk festival in Saratoga paid her nine. The hard part — getting people into the room, into the songs, into the catalog — she would have to do anyway. There was no version of the work where she got to skip that. The only thing the deal really bought was a shortcut, and she had already noticed that the people who took the shortcut tended to end up on a slower road later.

By the time Not a Pretty Girl came out in 1995, Righteous Babe was a small operation in a small office in Buffalo with fewer than a dozen employees and Scot Fisher running the back end while she ran the front. They were shipping records by mail to anyone who wrote in, calling independent stores by their first names, and answering letters by hand. Dilate in 1996 moved two hundred thousand copies that way. The next year Living in Clip, a live double, went gold without a single trip through a major-label distribution arm. She owned all of it.

The standard read on the Righteous Babe story is that it is a story about saying no to the industry. That is not quite right. It is a story about understanding that an audience built one person at a time is the audience that does not leave. The person who bought the cassette from her at a college show in 1992 was still buying records in 2002 and is, in many cases, buying them now. A major-label audience is a number on a quarterly report; an audience built in person is something closer to a parish. The math compounds in the other direction.

It is also a story about ownership as patience. A song you keep is a small piece of property that pays you a little every year for the rest of your life and then pays your children. A song you sell for a check is a check. Most artists are talked into the check because the check is in front of them and the years are not. Ani had the unusual luck, at nineteen, of being able to see the years.

Buffalo mattered. New York and Los Angeles run on the assumption that the only way out of a rented apartment is a deal. Buffalo had cheap rent, a Honda, and a printer at Kinko's, which is to say everything a record company actually needs. The geography taught her a lesson the cities could not — that the building you record in and the building you ship from can be one building, and the address on the cassette can be your own.

She is still there. The cassettes are now downloads, and the Kinko's is a website, and the building is a deconsecrated church on Delaware Avenue she eventually bought and turned into a venue. But the address is still in Buffalo, and the songs still come back to her at the end of every quarter, because she never agreed to let them belong to anyone else.