What's Up With This Sims Label Design

[boba]

is this a real label design or some sort of bootleg or reissue?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/WALLACE-BROTHERS-Love-Me-Like-Love-You-SOUL-45-/290665634004?pt=Music_on_Vinyl&hash=item43ad0598d4#ht_2776wt_1070

[Garethx]

This was the Wallace Brothers' biggest national hit and may have meant pressing at a different plant to the run-of-the-mill Sims releases. From the typesetting of the title / artist information it looks like the same NY plant which produced tons of independent labels like Frisky, Genuine, Triode etc. so i'm assuming it's legitimate enough. This 45 also has Monarch and Columbia presses too, which is not that common for Sims label 45s.

[boba]

This was the Wallace Brothers' biggest national hit and may have meant pressing at a different plant to the run-of-the-mill Sims releases. From the typesetting of the title / artist information it looks like the same NY plant which produced tons of independent labels like Frisky, Genuine, Triode etc. so i'm assuming it's legitimate enough. This 45 also has Monarch and Columbia presses too, which is not that common for Sims label 45s.

Thanks for the explanation. I guess I also never really understood how much of the label is controlled by the label owner vs. pressing plant. I have seen label blanks (for example, my friend has a bunch of mod-art label blanks), so I guess the artist / title / writer / publishing, etc. was put on the label by the pressing plant? Wouldn't they already have blanks that had SIMS on them or did the factory make up the entire label themselves?

Also, given that it was a hit, it has the potential to be a counterfeit for the market (although if they really wanted to counterfeit the record they probably would have tried to keep the font the same).

[Garethx]

This 45 is relatively early in the Sims story.

While the plants like Monarch, Columbia Custom were supplied with a 'Sims logotype' this one seems not to have been. It's not unusual for a particular plant to concoct its own logotype where none is actually supplied: think of Monarch presses of labels like Satellite where they simply render the logo in a typeface of their own choice.

This even extends to established labels. Volt is an interesting case. Various pressing plants would have been supplied with the flat artwork for the 'lightning rod' device, but not the typesetting for the falling characters 'V O L T' within the logo. Look at your Volt records and you'll see that the 'Volt' wording in the logo is rendered in any number of ways in terms of angle and typeface dependent on which plant pressed the 45s.

As an aside the 'Nashville' stamp which is on this (and thousands of other releases on myriad other record labels) refers to the manufacturer of the machine which produced metal parts (the metal 'mother' and so on) and will probably appear on all presses of the record which metal parts were sent to, even though the Sims label was based in Nashville TN.

I'd be interested to know the identity of this particular pressing plant if anyone knows, as I don't.

[boba]

This 45 is relatively early in the Sims story.

While the plants like Monarch, Columbia Custom were supplied with a 'Sims logotype' this one seems not to have been. It's not unusual for a particular plant to concoct its own logotype where none is actually supplied: think of Monarch presses of labels like Satellite where they simply render the logo in a typeface of their own choice.

This even extends to established labels. Volt is an interesting case. Various pressing plants would have been supplied with the flat artwork for the 'lightning rod' device, but not the typesetting for the falling characters 'V O L T' within the logo. Look at your Volt records and you'll see that the 'Volt' wording in the logo is rendered in any number of ways in terms of angle and typeface dependent on which plant pressed the 45s.

As an aside the 'Nashville' stamp which is on this (and thousands of other releases on myriad other record labels) refers to the manufacturer of the machine which produced metal parts (the metal 'mother' and so on) and will probably appear on all presses of the record which metal parts were sent to, even though the Sims label was based in Nashville TN.

I'd be interested to know the identity of this particular pressing plant if anyone knows, as I don't.

Thanks for the explanation. It also doesn't make sense that there would be "label blanks" in this case as there's no label art or anything like that. It still could (potentially) be a counterfeit for the current market (but that also might have absolutely nothing to do with the label design so I guess is a red herring). Weird that a pressing plant would just choose to make up their own style like that though.