Another record store owner, Terry Currier of Music Millennium in Portland, Oregon, placed an order last year with Universal Music Group: approximately 700 items to ship on October 1st, giving them plenty of time to make it to the store before holiday shopping began. None of the albums showed up until after the Christmas rush.
For many casual listeners, the convenience and rapid growth of streaming services has turned the physical side of the music business into an afterthought. But despite declining physical sales overall, CDs and vinyl still generated revenues of nearly a billion dollars in this country in 2019, according to Richard Burgess, CEO of the American Association of Independent Music .
“Direct Shot is obviously not prepared to handle the volume they took on,” says Andrea Paschal, executive director of the Coalition of Independent Music Stores. “It’s a one-inch pipe with 10 inches of water going through it,” adds Allen Kovac, CEO and founder of the independent label Better Noise Music, which left the Warner-owned Alternative Distribution Alliance a couple of years ago.
Retailers say Universal temporarily moved some distribution to a separate facility to reduce the Direct Shot logjam. More recently, the three major labels stopped shipping music to small stores as a way of lightening Direct Shot’s load, according to retailers. Stores were asked to rely instead on one-stops, basically middleman distributors, but that led to price increases.
An executive at an indie that goes through ADA says the chaos at Direct Shot has “cost us severe loss of business for almost nine months.” “We started to reschedule releases in the hopes that they would benefit if the situation got better,” he adds. Andy Farrow, who manages the metal band Opeth, says the delays in physical shipping also “impacted our chart position.”
Whoops got the wrong order going out of business now ah big business almost feels bad about that was my first thought
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Well just another symptom of the music industry that is too arrogant to locate the best artists...say for example those Bralalalala albums with the drummer and producer of the new Megadeth and better than Megadeth, the national act nominated artist put on court tv over gender etc
I worked for the largest wholesale distributor until 2001 when they went bankrupt. We sold millions of records, including 1 million Eminem records in one week. The industry has been dead for years, this is just another layer. There’s no money to be made shipping records.
Mini thread: 1/ The music industry needs to move on from analog and develop a coherent strategy for subscription based streaming. People want music and will pay for it but right now music is in the ether...
feriadelaluna Harry Nilsson would've had a tough time succeeding these days.
This is payback for killing Napster.
notMorganDoyle read this
“Crisis”
cbegss it gets worse and worse