The noise means we’re winning

Hi everyone,

It’s Anton. I haven’t written to you for quite a while, and I now regret that. For the last couple of months I’ve been working in the rights team, and I thought that since Revibed is, first and foremost, about finding artists and revitalising music, this is probably the most relevant subject for us to be talking about, especially after all the noise caused by that commissioned article in RA, which, first, smears us, and second, is transparently stitched together.

I do not want to go too deeply into the details, but I actually see it as a very concrete achievement for the Revibed team. Just look at it: vinyl speculators and pirates, exactly the people who have been milking forgotten artists the hardest, are now getting people like Michael Lawson from RA to drag us through the mud. If that is happening, then surely that is a kind of success.

Our independent research shows that since our appearance in the industry, second-hand vinyl prices in the IDM 1998 to 2005 segment have fallen by an average of 38%, showing atypical behaviour compared with the rest of the second-hand market. And it is obvious why: people are no longer willing to pay for records that have never been reissued, because Revibed exists. We can feel that very directly ourselves.

Buying vinyl for pre-orders is becoming cheaper and cheaper. Over the past year, the average vinyl cost per pre-order has dropped from €130 to €80, so you can congratulate both yourselves and us. And of course, we have also stepped on the pirates’ toes, because more and more people who previously bought or downloaded music from pirates, simply because they had no other choice, are now buying from Revibed, knowing that we pay rights holders properly, and that there has not been a single case where a rights holder came forward, claimed their music, and did not receive 100% of what was due to them.

And I will tell you this, we are making history. I still do not know where all of this will lead, but history is being made.

I hope I have not tired you out, so I will wrap up. There will be no announcements today, apart from this: in these weekly letters, every Tuesday, I am going to tell you who we have signed, who we are speaking with, what our plans are, and so on.

Probably next Tuesday we will present our new project. We have signed Demarcus Lewis, and we are now going to revitalise 60 of his releases, for which all masters and source material have been lost. If it were not for us, that music would quite literally disappear. But more on that next Tuesday.

For now, if you would like to subscribe to something, you can follow our Instagram, if you are not already there.

That’s all. I’m off to get back to our artists.

Wishing you all warmth, light, and peaceful skies above your heads.

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Anton from Revibed