Today is the release of ‘LUX’, one of the most important albums in the world, but small businesses are not going to enjoy it. According to El Diario in an article by our former editor Francisco Gámiz, Sony Spain is not distributing Rosalía’s new album in small stores. It has prioritized Amazon, Fnac and El Corte Inglés. For example, they have only taken 3 copies to La Botiga of El Genio Equivocado in Barcelona. The same dynamic as other Oldies Records stores in Valencia or Bora-Bora Records in Granada.
JENESAISPOP has been able to verify that the situation is the same in the Marilians store in Madrid. Dani tells us that they have only received “3 vinyls and 8 CDs”, when their business is selling vinyls, they hardly sell any CD editions. “It’s outrageous,” he tells us. «3 vinyls and 8 CDs is what they have offered us to have today. A shame since for us it is the most important release of the year.
In these times, when it is so difficult to predict how many copies a vinyl will sell, and to gain margin of course, sales are being prioritized through the label’s website and the artist himself. So far, more or less OK: it is logical and common for the artist to want to waive the distribution cost if he can, to gain margin after the enormous investment involved in paying for an album.
The problem is when pre-sales are activated in large stores, but not in small businesses. And when many more copies are delivered to large stores than to small businesses. “I hope one day the majors will also look down again, where the music really beats,” La Botiga wrote in a letter addressed to Rosalía on their networks. From Sony, they responded to La Botiga on the subject of pre-sales: “They are commercial strategies and we can’t do anything.”
El Diario has now contacted Sony to expand its version of the events, without receiving a response at the moment. This same medium reveals that Miguel from the Linacero store in Zaragoza usually works with a European distributor, where they usually deliver more copies of an album than the Spanish major itself. It is the height of absurdity. Regarding ‘LUX’, he indicates: “We are going to bring it from Holland. Look at what nonsense!”, since he had been warned that from the Spanish label “very few copies were going to arrive.”
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