About Spindle Music

The cataclysm that’s occurred in the music business might not have yielded a Viggo or a Denzel packing heat with a strong will and a good heart. Hell, it might not even have a Mel Gibson in chaps. But the post-apocalyptic survival scenarios are similar: hunker down, conserve your resources, and look at your bottom line. But if a tall, dark and unshaven stranger comes through your town sporting goggles, a duster and a sawed off shotgun, you might not be so quick to trade your stereo for canned tuna.

Spindle Music is a new label group built to evolve, not hunker down. Our goal is to assemble a group of premium labels and deliver them to quality music retailers everywhere. “Sure, punk,” you’re thinking. “‘Premium,’ ‘quality’ - those words come out easy, but have they got legs? I read hundreds of one-sheets a month and 95% of them are blowing smoke up my stinkhole. What do I need another distributor for?”

We’re not another Distributor.

All of Spindle’s releases will be distributed by RED and available through all the channels you usually buy records through. If you’re not open with RED, there are still plenty of ways for us to work together. What’s different about Spindle is the way we’ll be selling those records to you and the way we’re asking you to sell them to your customers.

Every day is Record Store Day.

Spindle’s staff comes from the world of independent retail, labels and distribution. For us, every day is Record Store Day. We’d like to work with you on making that happen, not with unilateral changes, but one store at a time.

Let’s start with the goggles.

We need to collectively look at things a little differently. Crap, I’m softening the language. We need to look at things a lot differently. With over 100,000 releases a year, there is no reason to pursue the kind of broad market coverage for every single release like we used to. The drain of dead stock, returns and refurbishment on resources, coupled with the carbon trail and footprint of product that doesn’t sell are too great to ignore.

Are you the best record store ever?

Digital is a turnkey distribution system with 100% fulfillment but it’s just a tool. People come into your store and they price in their heads the delivery system they’d be willing to pay for – whether physical or digital. Yet when they do leave your store with that round object, they’re a street walkin’ cheetah with a heart full of napalm or they’re a roustabout, a rebel girl, the real slim shady. They’re flying to the moon or Mars or West Virginia. They leave with a sense of who they are or how they want other people to think of them. A little precious? Maybe, but you’re a facilitator between that one record and a bad dye job, a breakup, a move to London or New York, a mixtape that leads to marriage. What’s that worth?

Now, look at the duster.

We’d like our labels to make products that look and sound like these things matter to us because they do. We know they matter to you too, but we’d like you to consider that in the way you’re merchandising. The duster is the way your store dresses itself. In a clothing boutique, the beautiful and expensive new merchandise is given plenty of space in the front of the store where the sales people greet and fawn over customers, working the store’s inventory to dress them properly. The sale racks are stuck in the back of the shop. In a record store, the expensive stuff is on the wall, behind the counter, in a case while the sale rack is front and center. You shouldn’t be fighting with labels over $9.99 vs. $11.99. We should be collaborating on creating and selling something for $22.99 that conveys value far beyond its $9.99 digital equivalent.

Load the shotgun.

We have the marketing ammo. We are employing a modern approach to generate a new level of co-branding and customization for our releases in your shop. We want every person that works in your record store to hear the music we’re releasing. The most effective and affordable way to do that is to digitally service your entire staff as part of solicitation. A single champion on your staff creates huge sales potential with every release, so once someone in your store decides they like a record – catalog or new release – we’ll give you the tools – sweet, sweet tools - to effectively market and sell it. With Spindle’s exceptional incentive marketing programs, the harder you work for our records, the greater the discount we give you.
Just email us at retail@spindlemusic.com, OK?