PRO VINYL ALLIANCE - go the Germans

Dear Friends And Partners,

As this may be already known by you, on August, 24th the first roundtable meeting of Germany's leading vinyl distributors took place in Offenbach. This meeting’s main topic was to discuss how to support and strengthen the vinyl format in a rapidly changing market. Under the “PRO VINYL” banner, we have initiated a way to exchange opinions and share experiences between our businesses. Our goal is to forge a strong alliance of distributors, labels, record shops, artists and clubs that can participate in providing extensive and productive solutions concerning the handling of vinyl and digital promotion.

The increasing indifferences and insecurities in the release politics of many labels, especially the ongoing trend of digital pre-releases occurring several weeks ahead of the physical format release dates and the vast and precocious digital promotion currently in place has lead to growing discrimination amongst vinyl DJ’s, dealers and stores.

The attending distribution companies Neuton, Intergroove, Wordandsound, Groove Attack and Kompakt have agreed there’s a necessity of discussing these topics together on a broader scale and towards working out a uniform guideline together with their exclusive labels pertaining the future distribution of physical format vinyl releases.

All future vinyl format products must be released two weeks PRIOR to the digital release date of said products.

Some of you may initially conclude that this kind of a move would only reverse the problem, bringing disadvantages to the digital format release. We unanimously have concluded that this is the neither the case nor of any of our intentions. “PRO VINYL” expressly doesn’t have any intention to stand in opposition of the digital market. The majority of supporting companies involved in PRO VINYL venture in digital distribution or mp3 stores of their own, so this initiative would only reflect as a complete contradiction of our business practice.

Our intentions are to find a supportive and harmonious equation between physical and digital formats. The rationalizing is quite clear. Depending on which region of the world one lives in, a vinyl release can take upwards of 2 weeks to find it’s way onto the shelf of your local record store. There are a number of factors due to this; shipping times and delays, customs clearance issues not to mention the time needed for the shop to process arriving stock. Above and beyond, as most of you are already aware, your releases go through an intensive preparation process not only by your hard work but also by your distribution partners around the world. This includes manufacturing your releases, creating and initializing marketing/promotional strategies,
commenting and listing them, and generating sales to record stores. After all these steps are achieved, your record is ready to be ordered by local dealers – many of whom invest their own fair share of time to bring them to the customer. In contrast, to date there has been a massive advantage for digital retailers surrounding the delivery and the opportunity for immediate availability of your releases. This has now become an issue that stands in-between the obvious larger economic relevance which vinyl provides your business.

Some may criticize that an offset of a delayed digital release will be that digital sales may drop and piracy issues will become a much larger issue. We highly respect this opinion but we don’t find this becoming a major issue. We unanimously concluded that there is a much smaller group of the illegal file sharing network online ripping music from vinyl in comparison to those that are sharing digitally purchased/promoted music. There is more to discuss about this issue and we will come back to this later.

In contrast to any digital online retail platform, your physical distribution partners support you on many essential matters that are crucial to your business whether digitally or physically based. They not only serve as communicators and promoters of your label’s identity and musical individuality through the staff they employ, they often carry much of the burden of your financial risk as a business. In the case of a pressing and manufacturing deal (P and D) they even act as your bank and pre-finance your label to enable and ease the day to day functioning of your business. Above and beyond, most distributors offer the services of in-house marketing and promotions, advertise your releases and ensuring they have the opportunity to be played and supported by the key DJ’s and magazines that are out there. Then there is the most important factor in this chain – the record store. The buyers and owners of these stores take massive risks day to day in supporting and bringing
in your label’s music and encouraging the public to buy it. They have no guarantee that they will be able to sell it or return it. In this day and age it’s of the utmost importance that we all give these folks the greatest opportunities possible to ensure they are able to take that extra step to support and sell your music. It’s through your understanding and effort that together we all can come up with compelling and panoramic strategies that will be key to supporting a successful future business. It’s in all of our hands to create a market for tomorrow today.

We are taking this for granted that every label whom is receiving this letter is still releasing vinyl and feel that they have a vital interest in continuing to do so. To those that are still in opposition of this initiative, one could say that your cutting off that branch of the tree that you are sitting on.

It’s apparent that we’re in the middle of a digital gold rush that couldn’t be more justified considering the times and vast amount of music available today. But based on numerous discussions with labels and experiences we’ve made on our own, we have grave concerns that many artists and labels won’t be able to survive exclusively from digital sales. The reality is that the vast, so to say, democratic network of independent record dealers that still exists are being rapidly replaced by so called ‘technological progress’, a supernova-like culmination of capital and power driven by the digital era. This development shows all signs of heading towards a dangerous stage due to a very simple fact: a monopolized system is replacing an organically grown, pluralist market.

Again, we feel it’s your choice to take a stand and recognize the armada of people that continue to stand by your music by ordering, stocking, packing, commenting, reviewing, selling and bleeding for YOUR records.

This brings us back to a topic we touched on earlier; digital promotion. Many labels have embraced this affordable method of ensuring your music is getting to the right people and outlets out there who are able to help support your releases. Unfortunate it is that many labels that have gone this route have enabled an file-sharing epidemic of sorts which has spun to a point where there’s absolutely no control over where your music is being sent to. We ask you consider keeping your mailing lists to a small, exclusive and trustable size. Utilize the many streaming players that are available – they are an excellent way to get proper feedback on releases along with the promise of receiving proper sound files if the person receiving this has legitimate use for the track(s). We ask you stay on top of the blogs and websites that continue to post music without the artist or labels permission. From our experiences, emailing a formal letter of desist is normally a very effective means of stopping them.

In closing, if you are in agreement with this first major step to support vinyl and businesses that continue to stand for your physical format releases, then please email your company logo to the sender of this letter. In the event you have any questions or remarks we’ll happily put them forward during the next roundtable.

The growing PRO VINYL ALLIANCE will be meeting again soon in order to discuss your input and feedback.

We’ll keep you posted...

Thank you in advance for your support!

PRO VINYL ALLIANCE

I didn't read it all, but I really like the idea of Vinyl being released up to a month before the digital release...