NEWSLETTER

HISTORY

THE STORY BEHIND DEAD FROG RECORDS – ON THE ’NET SINCE ’94.

1990-1993
Dead Frog Records was started during 1990 by Peter Åstedt. A teenager at the time, he was attending school in his home town of Örebro, in central Sweden. Whilst playing in a number of bands, he was given the job of promoting his own band and other bands rehearsing in the same studio.

After a while he became tired of sending demos to the major record labels, only to receive standard, unsigned letters saying ’Thanks for your demo, but it doesn’t fit our profile at the moment’. Having received the same letter over and over again, he decided to launch his friends bands in a different way, by forming the production company L.M.P., and releasing them himself.

All recordings were done in Citystudion at TBV in Örebro. The access to their 8-track portable studio was of a great help. It was a very simple set-up, but with huge enthusiasm, Peter succeeded in his aim to build the platform that would help his friends to finally release their music.

The capital to start the company was earned by Peter after hard Summer’s work as a caretaker at Lithells sausage factory, Örebro. The first releases were cassette tapes of different quality, and all artwork was done by hand or on basic, early-day computers. The success of the company was up and down at first, but at least for Peter, it was a start.

1994-1997
In 1994 a revolution happened to L.M.P., when they got connected to the Internet. This was a breakthrough, since the Internet was a fairly new concept in those days.

This breakthrough was enough for Peter to create contact with people in other countries who shared his interest in music. L.M.P. lacked the traditional distribution channels for their releases so they started to market their products on the Internet. The first vinyl recording was released in conjunction with punk band Klas Extas from Göteborg in 1995.

It was at this stage that L.M.P. began to act like a ’real’ record company. The first vinyl release sold in many countries, and Klas Extas received a huge amount of feedback from fans.

Despite this success, L.M.P. weren’t completely happy, and wanted to take it a step further, since vinyl was on it’s way out and CD’s were becoming the main media for distributing music.

The first CD was released in 1996. The band was Timer, and the release was ’Avgång’, recorded at Studio Pannhuset in Göteborg. Although it had Swedish lyrics, it sold well in many countries, but strangely, not in Sweden.

Since all marketing and promotion was done on the Internet, this could be the reason why there weren’t any major successes in Sweden. L.M.P. met its audience through the ’Net and marketed their music products directly to them - young people around the world who loved music.

1998-1999
Although L.M.P. was still afloat, the company had their share of peaks and troughs, depending on the artists and the material. Peter came to the conclusion that he needed to decide which direction L.M.P. would take next. It was time to quit or to become completely serious with the business. The system of the early years when they released everything they liked was no longer viable.

In autumn of 1998, Peter started to look for other people to work with, to expand his business contacts and to lighten his workload.

At the same time, Göteborg band Johnny Reptile entered the scene. Their manager, Peter Emery of Emery Music, contacted L.M.P. and invited Peter Åstedt to a gig at the venue Jord in Göteborg. Johnny Reptile had a knack at promoting themselves using the Internet, and had already gained a worldwide fan base from this.

L.M.P. started to promote the band and tried to find another company to release them, since at that time, L.M.P. didn’t have the funds to do it themselves. They came across MIMO Sound, a small record company based in Stockholm, Sweden, and in September 1999, the companies jointly released Johnny Reptile’s debut CD, ’The F.A.B. EP’.

In October of the same year, Johnny Reptile and L.M.P. were invited by the American Embassy to the New Media & New Economy Conference at Berwaldhallen in Stockholm. The band played and also presented their website and new media strategy to the auditorium, whilst Peter Åstedt and Peter Emery discussed issues about developing and promoting music on the Internet.

Now things really started to happen for L.M.P. Since the success of Johnny Reptile, Peter Å spent more and more time working on the record company. Now was the time to form a new strategy for the future of the company. Peter Å joined forces with Peter Emery and during the last few weeks of 1999, they formed the company Dead Frog Records.

After a while, Rickard Åstedt and Fredrik Muskos also joined Dead Frog Records. Both had helped out with L.M.P. on occasions in the past.

2000-2001
Dead Frog Records went into action straight away by signing the Uppsala band In Deed in February 2000. Shortly afterwards, during April 2000, they signed another Uppsala band, Spiral Motion. They were also continuing to promote Johnny Reptile.

Now the strategical policies for Dead Frog Records were decided. They didn’t want the new company to work in the same tradition as other music giants. They wanted to be more flexible and open to new ideas and technology by using methods which were out of reach to the bigger record companies.

In July 2000, Spiral Motion’s first EP, ’Chaos Parade’, was released, followed one month later by In Deed’s debut EP, ’Apologize’. There was a great deal of interest in both EP’s from the media, and this strengthened the position of Dead Frog Records.

Johnny Reptile played at Sweden’s Kalas Tour during the Summer of 2000, which was headlined by three of Sweden’s biggest bands and pulled audiences of up to 6,000 people each night. They also represented Sweden at Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany during August 2000, giving Dead Frog Records the chance to make a number of business contacts worldwide.

The end of October 2000 saw the departure of the lead singer from Johnny Reptile. However, the remaining four members quickly reformed as Subspeed and now continue to work with Dead Frog Records and Emery Music.

To test the public reaction of an ’Internet only’ release, Subspeed silently released their first EP purely on the Internet, via MP3.com in May 2001.

Although Dead Frog Records had been born, L.M.P. was not forgotten, and was transformed into a video production company. They have so far produced videos for Spiral Motion and In Deed, as well as a number of bands outside the Dead Frog family.
Dead Frog Records’ first full-length album release was In Deed’s ’At 4000 Meters’ in March 2001.

During May, Spiral Motion was voted as one of Sweden’s ten Most Interesting Bands, in the music industry magazine ’Musikindustrin’.

The publicity from these achievements strengthened the name of Dead Frog Records even further, giving them the confidence and motivation to transform their little record company into something really big.

The growth of L.M.P. into Dead Frog Records shows how, with a little bit of inspiration, determination and love of music, one man can help to realise the dreams of many people, including his own.

The rest of the history will be updated soon! (Oct 2005)