Record Label Tycoon

It's January 1962. You have $35,000, a back room behind a laundrette, a 4-track tape machine and a sleepy studio cat. Sign bands, make records, read the paper and try to become a major label before 1990.

Play through music history: Merseybeat, the Summer of Love, glam, the oil crisis, disco (and the night it died), punk, MTV, the Walkman and the compact disc. Learn what works by doing it: which sound for which genre, which sleeve, which price, which promo. Bands have whole careers: they ask for mink coats, fall out with each other, go synth in 1985, retire to a fjord or come back ten years later. Every era ends, and you choose what your label becomes known for next.

Cosy, a little rude, and very nerdy about records. No accounts, no ads, saves in your browser. One game takes about 1.5 to 2 hours. Best played on a laptop or desktop in fullscreen.

Made by Asger Krogh, MA in History, with Claude, an AI model by Anthropic, which wrote much of the code, text and pixel art to my design. All bands, labels and magazines are made up; any resemblance to famous musicians is parody.