Top City Records

Top City Records is a community label for the authors and musicians of Topeka, Kansas. We are committed to empowering and celebrating our local talent. With the primary objective of building community between Topeka’s artists and among its citizens, we take a different approach to sourcing talent, producing creative works, and publishing.

Our passion is producing and publishing community works such as compilation albums and anthologies of poetry and narrative that feature a variety of Topeka’s artists, and promoting these projects and the artists involved to our local community, and to each other’s audiences. We build connections between friends and neighbors to strengthen our community and local culture.

We also support our artists in self-publishing their own works, allowing them to keep all the rights to their work, and all the royalties, while still participating in and benefitting from our collective community efforts. The self-publishing workshops we host to teach local artists to use modern self-publishing platforms for publishing music and books are free and interactive so that by the end, they are able to hit the publish button on their creative works, and add their voice to Topeka’s pool of arts and culture.

Carlos Velez founded Top City Records after meeting several songwriters performing in his hometown of Topeka, Kansas, and being blown away at the strength of their original songs. He realized Topeka was full of talent and deserved to have a spotlight shined on it.

He got straight to work producing the compilation album This Machine Builds Community and thus Top City Records was born as a vehicle for working on collaborative projects with musicians, writers, and authors of all kinds.

As a software developer for Draft2Digital, an industry-leading self-publishing service, Carlos has had an inside look at modern self-publishing platforms in the book industry. Leveraging the power of modern technology for artists to publish their own works alongside those of major companies, Top City Records is educating and empowering local artists to self-publish and keep their rights and royalties, while providing a community label as an umbrella for Topeka’s artists to connect under, collaborate, share audiences, and cultivate the arts and culture of the Top City of Kansas.