The ’90s were a much simpler time, especially for the music industry. Napster wasn’t even a pipe dream in a young programmer’s imagination yet and for a while there, people could even make actual money off of music.
One of those places was Tommy Boy Records, a New York City-based record label, which launched in 1981 and has released countless treasured hip-hop and electronic records, including releases from De La Soul, Afrika Bambaataa, and more.
In 1991, the band’s formidable roster, which featured Buju Banton, Capone-N-Noreaga, LFO, and Danny Tenaglia, caught the attention of Swiss public access television, who decided to do a feature on the label and visited their NYC offices.
The grainy VHS footage that resulted from the impromptu tour gives viewers a nostalgic and eye-opening insight into how a record label operated before the tide of Napster came gunning for everyone’s ivory towers and how different the world really was.
Highlights include the label keeping track of radio plays on a computer that looks like a prop from WarGames and the buzzing mailroom from which the label would send out their mail orders, including the then-latest LP from De La Soul.
