It took a while for them to get to this point, though. In the early years, says Stefan, “We pressed shitloads of records, but we didn’t sell a lot.” For a time, they sold their vinyl piecemeal—walking into record stores and wholesaling over the counter—as well as on their own now-shuttered web shop, the colorfully named Shit Fuck You. (“Favouring the possible over the feasible,” read a slogan on their homepage.)

Business was not brisk. As the brothers learned their trade, Stefan was lucky to sell 30 copies of a given release through the website, while the rest of their stock sat in boxes in their apartments. They tried going through a distributor but eventually got fed up with the paltry numbers that it was moving. The breaking point came when the distributor only managed to sell 120 copies of a reggae 7" by Kambo Super Sound and Don Papa. “It was like, Fuck—that’s really not a lot.” He had the distributor ship the remaining stock to him—at his expense—and, with a bit of help from a friend with links to London’s reggae scene, he eventually sold 600 copies. From there on, Stefan became his own distributor.

Today, in addition to the Sex Tags projects, he also distributes a handful of his friends’ labels, all of them small, slightly difficult, and resolutely DIY operations. “It’s cool when you make a structure that you can help other people with,” he says.

Unlike many labels that press wax and also offer downloads, Sex Tags has no intention of entering the digital market. In part, it’s a question of self-preservation. “We always imagined that if we made digital as well, we would sell less records,” says Stefan. “Because people are a bit cheap, a bit lazy.” But the decision is as much philosophical as it is practical. “In the beginning we didn’t sell digital because it wasn’t a format we thought was very interesting. Everybody thought it was the new shit, which it was—but it was maybe also a bit shit. We sell an OK amount of records to be an underground label, so why should we jump on the digital wagon now? I’m quite satisfied with where I am. Growth isn’t the only way of developing.”

The reasons he prefers vinyl are legion. Part of it is an issue of craft. Or, as he says, “It’s a nice process. You learn a lot—you don’t learn nearly as much when you make an MP3.” The day we meet, he has been at Dubplates and Mastering, the iconic Berlin mastering plant, helping cut plates for a handful of records—a jazz reissue from Finland, an electronic jam sessions from Jordan, a remix project by a pair of Italian producers. “They’re all very different, and there are a lot of things you need to do in order to get them onto vinyl records,” Stefan says. “Even after eight years doing mastering, there’s still stuff you learn.”

And while some people believe that digital offers an environmentally friendly alternative to the resource-intensive process of pressing vinyl, Stefan remains skeptical. Norway is a major supplier of iron ore, which is an essential component in manufacturing hard drives. “I’ve seen the ships leaving Norway for China, and they’re so big you can’t even imagine,” he says. “And the servers that store our information in deserts in the U.S. are not immaterial—they’re massive, and they take a lot of energy. Just because it’s immaterial to you doesn’t mean it’s immaterial for the world. With vinyl records, it’s more straightforward.”

With 500 12"s, he knows how much he paid to manufacture them, how much he can sell them for, and how to divide up any proceeds between the artists involved. The digital world, in contrast, is a black hole. What’s to keep a download store from selling a thousand MP3s but only telling you they’ve sold a hundred? And if that sounds paranoid, the way the streaming economy has decimated independent labels’ bottom lines while enriching tech executives’ doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the fairness of the system.

In any case, says Stefan, “I like buying records. It has to do with where I’m from and how I grew up. When you’re a kid, it’s fucking cool to see a DJ scratch records. And if you grew up in the hip-hop community, well, you can’t blame me for trying to be one of those guys.”

Unlike the many DJs who have swapped the back-breaking weight of a full record crate for an inch-long USB stick, Stefan even finds cause to celebrate vinyl’s physical dimensions. “I know how heavy 500 records is to carry. I know how much work it is to re-box them and ship them,” he says. “It is a way of calculating your labor.” And the fact that almost no one can master every task in vinyl’s supply chain leads to a self-contained ecosystem made up of mastering studios, pressing plants, and record shops that all rely on each other. “The customers get it cheap, and I still make money on the sales,” says Stefan. “It’s a fair balance.”