Touch & Go record label S&D

T&G never really figured out how to thrive in the 2000s, seems like. Just funny because a couple of other semi-regional labels with a similar amount of weight behind their names have done really well over the same time period.

Considering this is one of my favourite labels ever I'm curiously unbothered by this TBH

it's more desensitized for me than not bothered. Also, T&G's not completely dropping off the earth. They'll be around to keep certain titles in print, but allegedly won't be signing new bands or won't be "moving forward" for lack of a better term. All the rumination here was already rumination several years ago, tbh.

xpost

uh they did sign a couple of bands by the name of yeah yeah yeahs and TV on the radio.

fuck me. this sucks.

It is sad because even in the crooked 80s, artists on T&G (except for one obvious example) talked highly of how fair the label was in royalty deals. It was really hard to find any label like T&G once upon a time, so I can imagine the emotions in the Chicago music circles are running high right now. :(

holy shit holy shit holy shit! silly me, i thought they were doing well, for some reason. like matador and maybe close to sub-pop well. guess they never got teh subsidy $$$ like those folks. major bummer. though our tastes diverged in the 00s, i still respect the shit out of them guys/gals.

who's gonna put out the crystal antlers LP?

this is a bummer, but as long as they keep their old records in print I won't be as bummed.

the real low-down thing that sucks:

T&G's distro arm does TONS of smaller labels...i don't know what like drag city and shit like that is going to do...

fuck the economy.

^ yow, good point. rough trade 91?

i think merge, drag city, atavistic, KRS, bunch all distro through T&G

wow, that's huge. merge is a label that seems to be doing well, and i recall reading something will oldham said about drag city gets by and pays its artists very well.

matador, sub pop, and actually secretly canadian/jagjaguawar have all struck gold a couple times over the past few years. i guess T&G signed TVOTR and the YYYs but didn't have them for long and didn't make much money for them? just kind of thinking out loud about why they weren't able to sign and retain a band with decent mass appeal.

hands off, artist friendly, binding-contract-averse approach may not allow them to fully "leverage" their more profitable signings

how can they not be making money through their distro if they do merge? Hasn't the arcade fire alone sold enough records to allow all parties involved to light cuban cigars with hundred dollar bills on a regular basis????

My post was before the update re: distro arm, that is legitimately something that sucks even if it's less big-scare-quotes 'glamorous'

i'm not positive they still do merge, but they def used to, back when merge meant like portastatic records and shit like that.

yeah the sad thing is that someone who was more of a dick w/contracts (unlike rusk) would still be eating off TVOTR and Yeah Yeah Yeahs

secretly canadian funded that entire dead oceans imprint with antony and the johnsons money

maybe it's a projections thing. like, given how much they have tied up in distro, how little they're making off of house label, and how dire they see things getting over the next couple, they figure they've to get out NOT in order to avoid screwing over all parties involved. maybe?

^ "get out NOW", that is...

plus go to merge's site, there are pleeenty of records that don't sell shit on that label

yeah the sad thing is that someone who was more of a dick w/contracts (unlike rusk) would still be eating off TVOTR and Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Wait, he's not some indie Broadway Danny Rose, tons of people stuck with him in part because he wasn't setting up deals that put him in an adverse relationship with the bands. It's just as likely that a contract-dependent version of Rusk would never have gotten TVOTR or YYYs because he'd have burned (and been burned by) so many bands before their era that they would have just signed with some NY label.

This situation sucks, RIP T&G P&D. But are they in fact cutting back anything as far as their own new releases goes? The press release only says it's about the packaging deals with other labels, and Corey told DeRo that rumors otherwise aren't so.

Pitchfork as usual wrong. Check the Tribune site, Kot's blog.

Kot blog

Time Out even more impressively wrong -- leading with the fact that they are printing rumors, then backpedalling furiously in the comments.

Dad A OTM re Time Out worse than Pitchfork here.

We live inside "The Wire, Season 5" now, getting worse every day.

yeah (and yay) to above few posts. glad to hear it's just the distribution arm, should have taken time to read rusk's official statement in teh 1st place. hope the label is doing okay, and hope the transition goes smoothly. godspeed you one and all

seriously sometimes i think i would shut the internet down right now if i could bring back all the stuff we're going to lose because of it.

i feel bad for thinking that though, like it's a backwards way of thinking but i can't help it sometimes.

Uh why is the internet responsible for the lousy state of our economy?

my feelings don't make sense alex

matt otm, sadly

if they stop distro, some of the labels will probably jump up to ADA. From ADA's website:

http://www.touchandgorecords.com/ Full List of Titles Chicago-based Touch And Go, at the forefront of music for over a decade, is home to artists from the Yeah Yeah Yeah's, Enon, and Black Heart Procession to Blonde Redhead, Dirty Three, Man Or Astroman?, and The Jesus Lizard. The label is also the home of many other indie labels such as 2.13.61, 5 Rue Christine, All Natural Inc., Atavistic, Cold Crush, Dim Mak, Drag City, Emperor Jones, Estrus, In The Fishtank, Jade Tree, Kill Rock Stars, Le Tigre, Merge, Overcoat, Quarterstick, Robocore, Suicide Squeeze, Thrill Jockey, Trixie, Trance Syndicate, Voodoo Eros, and Warm Recordings.

Dan - Sure. But imagine the costs of switching your p & d. Also: this might just be the first P & D to go under. Imagine trying to figure out what to do in this situ if you're one of the affected labels. Yikes!

a friend told me the reason a lot of those labels had to go through T&G in the first place was because ADA wouldn't take them on

Then again maybe those labels knew this was coming...? Still, even if that were the case, the cost of disruption might be more than some of them can bear. Many people seemed to be hoping against hope that Xmas would be good, but it wasn't, and this might be the final nail for some of those labels, or push them into layoffs and/or significantly scaling back their business. Perhaps we'll end up with a single solvent distributor of smaller labels -- it's certainly possible. Yikes x 400.

How well is Merge's mp3 store doing?

I remember taking a look and being really impressed with the simplicity and flexibility (in media formats). If only I didn't already own on CD the stuff that I wanted from them.

System - Totally otm. A lot of labels will likely go digital/vinyl after this, maybe with vinyl as direct order only...? Which is what they all should've been doing a year-plus ago, but whatever. But vinyl business is limited -- it costs a lot more to manufacture them than CDs, not just because of the materials involved but because there's limited pressing capacity... And no new plants coming online anytime soon. Or so I'm told.

Well, to all y'all who have slept on those David Kilgour albums who if you like the indie rock, go buy them mp3s from Merge NOW!

And the Volcano Suns ones too!

bbbbbbut look at this news from a few weeks ago, and Pitchfork is now highlighting indie rock on ABC news (see other thread) so it's not all bad news...Nah, this is sad and the big sellers are more the lottery winning exceptions to the rule

January 28, 2009 Billboard--It's a great week for indie rock acts, as Andrew Bird, Animal Collective and Bon Iver all debut in the top 20 of the big chart

curmudgeon - indeed. but, from what I understand, Pitchfork has a sliver of ABC News *website*, not their broadcast...

As an artist with an album due out on Atavistic this year, I was naturally quite alarmed when I heard about this.

A quick call to the label this morning made it clear that there was no advance warning. In better news, it seems other distributors are already courting many of the labels that are being left in the lurch by this...

Funny, I was in a band on Skin Graft before who lost their T&G distro after the Buttholes lawsuit. Also received a contract from Man's Ruin 30 days before they shut their doors.

Born too late!

DIY!

Nate - And what about the monies one presumes T & G owes to the labels...? If the labels can't cover that, then...

I doubt T&G is planning to rip anyone off in this process... But of course I have no way of knowing what will actually transpire in the coming months. Hoping for the best for all involved!

Nate - It's not to do with anyone ripping off anyone, as it's to do with who will bear the burden of the debt that presumably exists in the system, and for how long, and so on.

from Kot's blog, an update:

Mac McCaughan, cofounder of North Carolina independent label Merge Records, called the announcement "a sad day for music, independent music and punk rock in particular, and the music business as we know it in the real world."

"Corey Rusk is the most meticulous, cautious, thoughtful business person I know, which is what makes this whole thing so unbelievable and such a bad portent for the rest of the independent music business," McCaughan said. "If a company that did everything the right way can't survive in this environment ... then who can?"

There's an article on Billboard citing an inside source saying the damage at T&G is deeper than just distribution -- they're laying off most of the staff, winding down new releases by the end of the year. If so, yesterday's announcement was just the first step. And that would suck worse. But it would totally be consistent with Corey's above-the-level way of doing business -- if he gives the distributed labels time to gather their stock and find new distributors first, he can help them avoid replaying the Rough Trade bloodbath of 1991, when some labels got wiped out because there were too many debts and creditors in line. Hoping it's not true, but if it is, the man earns even more respect than he already has for going under with integrity.

I don't know about doing everything right. Their weekend-long 25th Anniversary festival (with Didjits, Scratch Acid and Big Black!) was awesome, but they should have reissued some special remastered editions of some of their catalog. No merch that I could see, no CDs. It's like they don't want to make money. Much of the catalog is badly in need of remastering, but the company still seemed in denial that vinyl wasn't going to make a comeback. Hopefully it's not too late. Dischord and Fugazi did it. A 25th anniversary box set would have been a good way to sell something cool as a memento too, and an introduction to best cuts from lesser known bands for the kiddies. They could offer high bandwidth remastered downloads online too.

Here's an idea -- get enough people to pre-pay for a deluxe reissue of Shellac's At Action Park with all of their early singles, b-sides, and other rare tracks like "The Futurist" which they gave out only to friends. The Guy Who Invented Fire, Rambler Song, The Billiard Player Song, Doris, Wingwalker, The Admiral, '95 Jailbreak, The Copper Song, etc. Who wants one?

I worked at t&g for 6 months in '95-'96 (man did I ever suck at retail promotion, sorry about that t&g) and know enough of Corey Rusk to believe that exactly nobody's going to get screwed over burden-of-debt-wise. I would bet money that he'll close his books properly & gentleman-like.

John D., that's not what I'm talking about. Sorry if I'm not being clear here. Hmm. Okay, try and think about why Cory might have made this decision, and then try to think what will follow from it, going forward. One assumes that one thing in play here is that there are too many CDs that have been manufactured, shipped to stores and shipped back to distributor, unsold. One can reasonably assume that there are also vendors who have sold CDs (say) to customers but are behind in paying T & G. Distributors like T & G often operate as a bank here -- they extend credit (that is, they allow for late payment) to stores if they think it will help the store to stay alive and give T & G a better chance at eventually being paid; I would also assume that, given their reputation as good faith players and wise businessfolks, T & G also extended credit (that is, allowed for late payments) to labels for manufacturing costs. If you take these two reasonable assumptions, then it's reasonable to assume that T & G is holding a serious amount of debt that Cory doesn't think will ever be paid. So, he stops. Okay. This means a large, sturdy, dependable source of credit is now disappearing from the whole process. What happens to the money one presumes is owed to T & G for CD sales that retailers can't pay? What if stores say "we need another 60 days" or decide not to ever pay T & G since their relationship with them is now over since T & G is no longer in business? Remember that everything is done on terms/credit at this level, not with cash! The accounting work is significant. For the affected labels, this means that they have to do a whole lot of work right that they were hoping they wouldn't have to do, at what's probably the worst possible time...they're already dealing with problems on every front, and now THIS HAPPENS. Yikes, total triple red emergency alert.

This mirrors what's happening in the economy at large: there is huge over-capacity for production in the current economy, and nobody has the money to keep it going at the level it once was. Charles Potts wrote about this on the Arthur blog. Heck, Paul Krugman writes about this twice a week in the NYTimes. It's not as if it's news. Could I have predicted that T & G was going to be the first big indie distributor to get out, then? No way. Then again, if the whole system is indeed going down, the smart ones get out early...

OOPS: Dropped a very important word "now" there.

SHOULD READ:

"For the affected labels, this means that they have to do a whole lot of work right (((NOW))) that they were hoping they wouldn't have to do, at what's probably the worst possible time...they're already dealing with problems on every front, and now THIS HAPPENS."

Basically what I'm saying is: Cory can't afford to bleed anymore. So, who can? Or, as Mac put it, if Cory, as smart as he is, can't afford to bleed, then who can?

Personally, I've seen way way way too many CDs being released by all of these labels in the last 36 months. Good records, sure, but not records that can pay for themselves, all things considered. That stuff has to pile up. And eventually the bill comes due.