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The Comrades' Choice Franchise

Willemstani Economics

This article was last updated on: September 26th of 2022

Image at the top of the screen.

The shitty tape recorder used on Volume I. Eventually Comrades' Choice would upgrade to professional audio equipment.

Lore

The Comrades' Choice Franchise is the longest running Willemstan Industrial Union venture, and produced by Charlie Nolan using various shitty equipment, and eventually professional-grade audio equipment. The franchise originally involved the release of over half a dozen volumes, recorded on cassette tapes purchased from the internet. Unfortunately, the Comrades' Choice Franchise initially received very little sales, and was a net drain in finances. This was probably because most citizens of Willemstan did not have a cassette player, and thus couldn't actually listen to the Comrades' Choice tapes. Several tapes produced after Volume III received zero sales, and were not really marketed either. In early 2021, Charlie re-branded the Comrades' Choice Franchise into a rental service hosted on System IV's Willemstan.com branch. However, this turned out to be another failed venture, but interest in the mix tapes began to come back in early to mid 2022 and several more were made and sold. In September of 2021, Comrades' Choice: Unlimited Edition was released but has received little use from the citizens of Willemstan, such as the original franchise.

Original Mix Tapes

The Comrades' Choice Mix Tapes, originally called just "Comrades' Choice", began production and marketing in September of 2018, and concluded in 2020. Unfortunately, the release dates of many of the tapes has been lost to time. Volume I was $2, and Volume II was $5, and Volume III was $10. Costs for the tapes were increasing due to advancements in tape production with each volume. Money from Tax Collection was spent negating some of these costs. All mix tapes were recorded on standard Maxell normal bias compact cassettes, with a length of 90 minutes. Songs and other audio clips were mostly made up of requests by members of Willemstan, and mostly included meme songs. In later volumes, this began to change towards actual music, and each side of the tape staying mostly adhered to a certain genre or era of music. The most recent volume produced was produced on a chromium tape, and as a result was not available to the public. Volume I was recorded on a 20+ year old mono audio voice recorder, and as a result sounded like utter shit. Volume II was recorded on a new but also cheap $30 portable tape recorder. Volumes 3 and later were recorded on a $70 proper tape deck, built by Pyle, which was ultimately determined to be a "Pyle" of crap after it was discovered to only have monaural audio, a lot of flutter, and ultimately stopped powering on in early 2021. On April 14th of 2021, Charlie Nolan purchased a professional-grade refurbished Tascam 112 MkII tape deck from a local business in Williamston, Vintage Sound, for $175. It's cool look, versatility, and audio quality justified the large price tag, and the HiFi store took the Pyle tape deck for parts for free. Comrades' Choice tapes still in circulation were for free rental only, under the basically defunct Comrades' Choice franchise system. Now, they are back to being for sale, and custom orders can be made as well.

Comrades' Choice Mix Tape Volume I

34 minutes on 90 minute tape, made in fall of 2018, made on cheap dictation machine. Sort of a proof-of-concept. Here is a list of its contents:

Comrades' Choice Mix Tape Volume II

90 minutes, made on a new portable tape recorder. Here is a list of its contents:

Comrades' Choice Mix Tape Volume III

90 minutes, made on a Pyle tape deck. This is the first version to be made with a printed label. Here is a list of its contents:

Comrades' Choice Mix Tape Volume IV

45 minutes, tape not yet manufactured because of no orders. Here is a list of its contents:

Comrades' Choice Mix Tape Volume V

45 minutes, tape not yet manufactured because of no orders. Here is a list of its contents:

Comrades' Choice Mix Tape Volume VI

45 minutes, tape not yet manufactured because of no orders. Here is a list of its contents:

Comrades' Choice Mix Tape Volume VII

90 minutes, recorded on a Pyle tape deck. This volume had no label due to laziness. It is the first Comrades' Choice to be recorded on chromium-oxide tape. There is no list of the songs but it includes some classic rock songs and classic synthwave pop songs.

Comrades' Choice Mix Tape Volume VIII

90 minutes, recorded on a Tascam professional-grade tape deck. This Comrades' Choice has the best audio quality by far, and is the first version to be free from its initial production. The tape recordings are indistinguishable from CD quality and are definitely a step up from the crappy MP3s we listen today. Contains various rock and some pop songs from the 1980s.

The Return of Comrades' Choice

For a while, Charlie Nolan was considering creating some sort of rental service for all of his strange media, and rerecording over some of the crappy VHS tapes. He determined that this would be free because it would be unfair and would not get any customers to charge people to use obsolete media for a little bit of entertainment. This idea was expanded to less obsolete media, such as CDs and DVDs. Charlie had mostly forgotten about this, but the idea was revived following a conversation with Sean, who said he has listened to Comrades' Choice in his car. Charlie realized that since his tape deck has been broken, he has no current use for the audio tapes, and that it must get boring to listen to Volume II multiple times. The idea was fully realized on February 12th of 2021, when Charlie recorded a short promotional video announcing the return of Comrades' Choice on the Silly Goose YouTube Channel. On February 22nd of 2021, the basic versions of the Comrades' Choice webpages and order forms were finalized, and a small catalog was made. So, the return of Comrades' Choice was made official.

This later proved to be a complete waste of time, going the way of WENIS, as it seems nobody really cared. So ultimately, Comrades' Choice is back to basically just mix tapes, and several custom orders have been made. Custom orders are backed up though, due to the fact Charlie does not live at home and have access to his audio hardware/software.

Comrades' Choice: Unlimited Edition

Launched on September 18th of 2021, this is the first digital edition of Comrades' Choice. Instead of being recorded on a cassette tape, Comrades' Choice: Unlimited Edition is a playlist on YouTube, accessible by all citizens of Willemstan. Any citizen is allowed to add songs to the edition, but it began with 32 songs (chosen mostly from old editions), including some modern bangers. The idea of creating Comrades' Choice: Unlimited Edition came about in July of 2021, when Ian suggested the idea to Charlie. Given the fallout from the March Incident, the edition had to be hosted on a different YouTube channel. As such, Charlie sought out one of his many Willemstan alternate accounts to use for the project. In the end, on July 10th of 2021, the account "SuS or JoJ" was chosen for the project. Charlie sent the account information to Ian that day, but he did not get around to creating Comrades' Choice: Unlimited Edition until months later.

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