All of the bands I play with still sell lots of CDs. These Kin to Stars samplers will be available at our Folklife Festival show on Saturday, May 26.

Truth be told, we had the actual discs made a few months back and planned to make our own DIY sleeves with rubber stamps and cardboard blanks from Stumptown. We made about 20 sleeves of, ahem, varying quality before giving up. Then a few weeks ago I got frustrated not having "proper" sleeves and just went ahead and designed the printed ones you see above.

And just to be clear: nobody complained about the cardboard-and-stamp sleeves. There's a certain precious charm that comes with the arts-and-crafts side of DIY. When I went to my first SXSW Music (before there was either an Interactive or Film) I was blown away at the creativity of dirt-poor musicians who mass-produced their own cassettes on 2-deck stereos, designing the inserts with clip art and glue sticks, decorating CD blanks with Crayola markers. But that was done out of necessity due to lack of funds and access to required machinery.

Musicians are still dirt-poor, but costs have come so far down since those days. What used to cost thousands now costs hundreds, and artists have more options than ever before. I didn't abandon the DIY sleeves because I disliked the DIY-ness of it all. I abandoned them because the average Instagram photo is the perfect size and quality for album art, and because a run of printed sleeves now costs less than our time is worth stamping and folding. And that is super-weird and awesome to comprehend. We've come a long way from those days standing in line at Kinko's.