Fuck what a sad day. I've been reading, this morning, all these articles about the folding of Touch & Go. What's confirmed is that the distribution and manufacturing parts are for sure over. 20 of 25 employees will lose their jobs in 6 weeks. All the labels that T&G distributed and manufactured are without a home. This means PPM. This means Kill Rock Stars. This means Drag City. Evidently the only label that will stay is Merge. Not confirmed is that new music will cease to come out on Touch & Go's record label. Crystal Antler's April 7" release seems to be the only new music T&G will release in the near future possibly forever.
Touch & Go has such a great history. Over 26 years of it. Big Black, Jesus Lizard, The Buttholes, Slint, The Monorchid, and many other bad ass bands from the 80s on. Most notable though, to me was the nurturing of all the indie labels it housed and supported. It was just, like, 6 months ago that I excitedly 'announced' on here that PPM was taken on. And since then, it seemed many more were "proudly announced" to be picked up. Oh well. I've already personally seen the death of record stores locally. Are strong independent labels/distros next? Is everything destined for mail order?
Time Out Chicago's Story
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5 comments:
I understand what this means for Touch & Go. . . that they'll just be releasing their own records or maybe just their back catalog.
But I'm not sure what this means for - say - PPM.
Would you mind explaining how the distro and production side of this works?
It's sad to see such a positive company forced to go backwards.
Touch & Go has manufacture & distribution deals with these smaller labels like PPM. SO PPM can focus on the artistic side of things, such as finding bands, getting them recorded well, putting together art and spreading the word best they can. T & G takes care of the rest. Pressing, getting art printed, using promo resources 2 1/2 decades in the making and reaching out farther than most can. Also, makes it great for a store to order from a wider variety of labels and bands using one cool distribution house. Make sense? I think that pretty much sums it up as simply as possible.
Yeah thanks.
"T & G takes care of the rest." Sums it up quite nicely.
So fucking cool to run a business like that and that makes this news all the more rotten.
So weirddddddddddddddddddddddddddd.
i don't think this will be to bad for the little people. from what i have heard ppm and all of the other labels that got distro through T&G are looking for another distro place. T&G has agreed to keep distro-ing them until a new place is found, which i don't think would be too hard. as for smaller labels i think that mailorder will be their best bet and provide a safe market for music to get out their until any such distro's can continue to distro well enough for profits.
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