Sad to see another great store closed recently, but in my opinion some more will follow. The business model which worked pretty well for the last years, now tries to survive, or fade away.

Things haven’t really changed, since I started to write about it. Around 2003-2004 the underground community found a new tool, and the free quality community mp3 sites were replaced with the digital music revolution, the independent digital stores. Beatport, EDM Digital, DjDownload, Audiojelly were the pioneers, and make no mistake, both the stores and the artists made good business.

But if something works, more and more people come, and the number of stores, the number of new labels and artists increased more than the demand. Further to this, the big labels came in, with the same marketing budget they had in the past, and suddenly the small labels, artists do not find their place again. We are back to the age of vynils and CDs in a way, that the big guys can sell, the smallers cannot - even if in most cases their music is more original. Labels try to push sales with more releases, thus quality is declining, thus demand is declining due to the fact that many new releases are not interesting, not original anymore. People buy from charts, if at all, where you can see almost only bigger labels, artists and terrible bootlegs. Adding to this, people spend less due to the economic slowdown.

I believe this will be clean again some day, and many one time artists and quick cash labels will dissapear. But I’m not optimistic that the whole thing will come back as it was around the early 2000s. This game is not for the money again, either you do it from heart and passion, or you shouldn’t.