Labels
Spindle Music is IODA’s physical label umbrella group, providing complete physical distribution in collaboration with its partners at RED. With a meticulously curated roster of quality labels and a unique, integrated approach to retail, distributor and label relationships, Spindle is the ideal solution for labels that require both digital and physical marketing and distribution services.
Why Spindle? A New Way of Thinking about Physical Distribution
The evolution of music retail requires a modern approach to physical distribution. Spindle was created for two reasons:
- The lion’s share of a label’s revenue should not suffer to service the minority of its business: IODA’s labels enjoy the best technology platform, rightsholder interface and digital supply chain in the market. The quality of service, support and international reach the IODA solution provides should not be compromised to satisfy physical distribution needs.
- Physical distribution and the role of the independent retailer are tremendously important to independent labels. In partnership with industry leader RED, the distribution sponsor behind Record Store Day, Spindle opens up the bottlenecks of traditional distribution, highlights regional development and effectively harnesses the massive sales force that is independent record retail.
- IODA’s groundbreaking technological achievements and quality relationships with rightsholders and digital retailers have earned it the widest reach of any digital distributor in the world. Its robust Rightsholder DashboardTM tools make it easy for IODA clients to manage their global digital business with unparalleled transparency and efficiency. With Spindle, IODA applies the same innovative thinking it brought to the digital sphere to the physical one, creating the essential physical-digital bridge.
A Healthier Ecosystem: Evolving Record Retail to Play an Integrated Role
By removing the “versus” between physical and digital by combining technology and traditional retail expertise, Spindle provides a full spectrum approach to serving the needs of artists, labels and retailers in the physical realm.
- Spindle understands the important role physical product plays in the marketplace: The product in a fan’s hand helps define the identities of artists and labels, frequently seeds consumer relationships and nurtures the fan experience. Instead of reactively scaling back physical efforts to reallocate resources to growing digital sales, IODA takes a more proactive approach with Spindle.
- Reassessing the physical space in the digital era - the way releases are packaged, solicited and sold - enables Spindle to increase efficiency and yield higher profits for labels and retailers. By integrating physical and digital distribution, IODA creates a highly effective regional and national ecosystem for artists and labels.
3 Core Strategies to Modernizing Record Retail
Focus on Packaging:
With more than 100,000 releases every year, the way music is packaged is key to making it stand out from the competition. While digital is the low cost, low priced option, a higher margin for greater perceived value is what keeps record stores in business. The more unique and compelling physical releases are in their design, the more attention and emotional connection they’ll get at the cash register - both from retail buyers and their patrons. Spindle also incorporates packaging into the solicitation process, emphasizing the attention to detail with retail buyers so they can be better sellers.
Feeding the Collector’s Market:
Once the boon of the independent sector, limited pressings fueled the 7” boom of the 1990’s and transformed indie rock from a strange, underground subculture into today’s rock mainstay. While artists and labels don’t earn royalties from the secondary market, the collector’s market that is fed by such pressings contributes to an artist’s cult of personality and creates an important profit center for retail stores. Taking a page from the comic book industry, Spindle goes one step further in utilizing these potential collectibles to incentivize general marketing support and higher sales performance by limiting their availability to retail partners actively supporting the primary release with which each collectable is connected.
Record Store Clerk, Marketing Genius:
By creating clear marketing requirements, aggressive pricing rebates and discounts, and store-specific micro-branding, Spindle helps motivate retailers to work harder and rewards them for their success. Customized, store-level marketing programs can show the importance of each individual store on an artist’s growth. This micro-branding empowers the retail sales force with the authority historically given to the press and other tastemakers and creates a healthy, thriving physical landscape. Witness:
- Digital servicing to the entire retail sales force, driving music & information beyond the buyers effortlessly into the lap of everyone on the sales floor, enabling the staff to have input in each store’s marketing priorities
- An online interface enables fans from within the record retail community to identify themselves and capitalize on potential marketing opportunities with buyers and labels. Spindle then gives retailers dramatic rebates to discount and better sell the records they want to sell.
- Commercial-grade, store-specific hype stickers grant these fans a critical voice alongside press quotes, empower the store by branding these marketing releases with the store’s logo. Store-branded product has a longer shelf life at retail.
Let’s Hug It Out
Veteran buyers and store-owners have been burnt. Any number of factors has taken the fun out of record re- tail. Spindle is in a unique position to be versatile enough to surprise them with what we can do together and creative enough to inspire them and force them to remember why they got into this business and how much fun it can be. We have the opportunity that every other existing physical distributor no longer has – to make a great first impression.