The Elephant In The Music Room * Consequence of Sound

The Elephant In The Music Room

from http://neurotica-.tumblr.com/post/15916100691

In 1991, I was working at Cargo Records, a nascent Chicago music distributor that we were running out of the un-airconditioned garage of an empty gas station at Clybourn and Greenview. (Like everything else, it's now condos.) Every day was an exciting, but exhausting, new scramble to stay on top of what was out there. We read every line of every zine we could get ahold of. We sent and received tons of US Mail inquiries every day. We sent and received reams of faxes. And we burned the hell of out our phone lines trying desperately to track down that kid that put out that one vegan hard core single that we needed 300 copies of to ship to Southern California (Hi Lou's! Hi Vinyl Solution!), Manhattan (Later Bleeker Bob's!), and London (Hi Rough Trade!). We could barely keep up with the flow of new music coming out, and sometimes we just couldn't.

I still remember the day that our order from the industrious indie pop punks (pop punk was not what it became) at Simple Machines turned up, and with it, an extra box of stuff we didn't order. In that box was

Music Store Buys Hoarder House Collection of 250,000 Records

Apollo Music in Port Coquitlam, BC, outside Vancouver, were contacted last year about taking possession of the massive record collection that one of their ex-customers had left behind in his house when he passed away. What they found astounded and amazed them, and it is still a work in progress.

Sometimes stuff just gets away from you. Mock not lest ye be mocked.

If you know somebody who's dying to get rid of their great record collection, give us a call at saki!

Here's the Apollo Records blog where you can read more about it.

HT stonyroads.com

Take it from Shroeder (not Linus)

The Party and The Archive

The party was a blast and if you weren't able to make it, we think you missed something very special that certainly won't happen again any time soon.

A big surprise came when The Coctails announced that they'd organized a compilation CD with a new track by almost every band who's ever been on CTR, each with a Sweet 16 theme! It's been two days and I'm still blown away by the enormous difficulty of that task—all the while managing to keep it a secret from (almost) all of us at work for the last four months. Wow.

To make it even better, we raised a big chunk of cash that still needs a full accounting. We'll post some pics, dollar figures, thanks, and thoughts after a good night's sleep.

In the meantime...

A nice short film (7.5 mins) about Record-Rama in Pittsburgh, the world's largest record collection—currently on the block and yours for only $3 million.

If you think that's high, watch the 7.5 minute video!

The Archive from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.

DRM Manifesto

As much as I read and think about this stuff, which is most of the time—awake or asleep, I have no clue how this great article skated by me for the last year. It is a great piece by Moses Avalon, the nom de guerre of the music industry vet who wrote the 1999 book Confessions of a Record Producer that laid out major label music contract evils in a slightly less bombastic manner than Steve Albini's famous Maximum Rock and Roll article.

Sadly, and as much as I wish it weren't true, I think this big ship has sailed, and mostly because most younger kids just don't care any more. All they know is free music and they've now been able to develop other priorities that don't include mowing lawns, cleaning pools and babysitting for music money. Of course there is a subset of cool kids who get the whole self-supporting indie mentality. They love their vinyl and they support their favorite artists. Their friends do not. For the kids who are file sharing, and that's almost all of them, stripping DRM makes no difference because the free-floating MP3s they're trading are already DRM-free. Even better, they're FREE free.

If there is a free champaign fountain flowing 24 hours a day anywhere you might be, would it make you feel better about driving all the way to my house and then paying $40 a bottle if I promise to uncork it for you first? Didn't think so.

Is it possible that the next generation—the kids now in elementary school—may feel differently? I can't (yet) see the future, so I suppose so, but I can't for the life of me figure out what titanic event would cause that shift back to such a monumental revaluation of music after more than a decade of freefalling erosion.

Here's to the cool kids.

And Happy Birthday Deborah Harry!

Long Live Vinyl

Amid the almost daily reports of some venerable music institution falling on harder times, an honest startup with a good idea packing it in, and even a recent Next Big Thing choking on its own overcooked and anemic espresso hubris, there are signs of hope if you choose to look for them.

People are still consuming vast amounts of music and some are even choosing to pay for it with legal tender. Digital music revenue in the US jumped 43% from 2006 to 2007—though not nearly enough to offset diving CD sales.

Much cooler, US ELPEE vinyl sales jumped from 900,000 pieces in 2006 to 1.3 million records in 2007. That's $22.9 million in 2007, up from $15.7 million in 2006. We even recently got a notice from our pressing plant that they aren't taking on any new customers for the foreseeable future and have a record backlog (pun intended) of 500,000 pieces to manufacture! (So of course we piled two new titles onto their heap just this week.)

Clearly tons of people out there still want music, and happily a chunk of them love the look, feel, sound, heft, and smell of vinyl albums. Makes us want to come to work in the morning!

US sales stats courtesy of  The Recording Industry Association of America.