I've had a discussion with Discomania about my label, and about many underground techno labels in general. It seems like the the trade of records are way out of the personal level of selling underground music. The commercial system doesn't work for underground music.
Nevertheless they struggle hard, as all the other distributors as well,
to fight against the diminishing vinyl sales. Mp3 and CDR DJs getting
more an more each day, and so the vinyl sales go down. This is like a general opinion for most distro's.
They told me a 100% cover of the market with an underground label like mine is not possible, as it is not interesting enough for 100% of the world vinyl market.
Vinyl sales are going down and we all want hits, no matter if they
come from James Holden, Anthony Rother, Sven Väth, Ricardo Villalobos, Mylo or whoever
...
Many Distributors and stores will not take what they consider as 2nd
class or 2nd or 3rd priority records anymore. This makes it hard for
them and for every other distributors too sell records of more or less
unknown (or hardly known) producers and djs. That's a truelly bad development. In my younger times I just went to the recordshop to go and search for interesting unknown stuff that can blow your mind.
It was getting harder and harder and they figured out that this style (UK techno sound) is much less popular than they thought it could be.
The quoted message above was one of the messages from Discomania that got most of my attention. It realized me to just f.u.c.k. the whole system of distribution. Labels need to get more personally involved with the stores around and the people in general. Because it's going to take a long time again before the situation will be improved again. This is more of a structural problem. Structural problems will take a long time to heal.Quote:
Did we ever wonder why companies like Prime, CPL and other went down?
Nevertheless times will be hard, and 95% of the guilt for (likely) unsatisfying sales of you and many other labels, if you and they do not come with big names remixers or productions on their labels, are caused by the general vinyl problem (mp3, cd final scratch, economical crisis). Its nonsense, that we can not sell techno, or loose many labels or customers, but they can not change the market and it's problems. Even distro's like Neuton will have to cope with this situation.
People need strong and good records and more & more big names. Anyone, who offers this to distributions in general, will be satisfied with the sales of for instance Discomania, if he does not expect the sales of 1999 or 2000.
And there isn't a problem when the records are in store. For instance, i've sold around 30 / 40 records in Outland records store in Amsterdam. Meaning the people do dig my techno!! So we need to create and break the wall ourselves to reach the people.
Comments, suggestions?
