Blog: Marching Out Of Servitude

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At some point, hopefully, within the next few days or week, a Mighty Event will occur - I will come out of debt with my record company.

What? Yes, I know, it IS my own record company (well, me and Mat and Rob's, but you get the idea), and the idea of me owing money to myself MAY WELL appear a bit daft, but it IS a true thing. Many many years ago, when "Say It With Words" first came out, we took an advert out in the NME (needless to say, this is the only time I have ever BEEN in the NME... how StRANGE that it should be when I actually paid for it, eh?) as part of a regular ad our distributors had. This cost quite a bit of CA$H, but we hoped to make it back in record sales...

Fast forward a couple of years, and we're trying to get out of our dealings with our distributors, largely because they owed us loads of money, still had loads of our records, and had never really bothered much to try and sell them. Unbeknownst to us (because our lying contact at the company told us it wasn't happening) they PRE-EMPTED this by recalling all our stock from the shops, which otherwise would have stayed on a long-term sale or return basis. THUS, all of a sudden, lots of the records we'd thought we'd sold, we suddenly hadn't. And lots of them were mine...

These two events combined meant that I ended up owing the lable about 150 quid - not a lot, in the great scheme of things, but still a FESTERING BOIL on the pretty face of our legendarily Open Accounting. It IRKED me to think of having to pay it into our account, as that felt like paying MORE money, indirectly, to the lying gits at the distributors, and obviously we couldn't just write it off, as that would be unfair to everbody involved with the label - most bands pay for 100% of the cost of their releases with us, and get all the money they make back, so just writing off my debt would be BAD. And so it remained.

That is, until (nearly) now. Online sales of the new album go directly into the AAS Bank Account, and every time a record is bought that way not only does the totaliser go UP, but the debt goes DOWN. Exact figures are not yet available, but somewhere along the line within the next few sales I shall actually be out of DEBT! HOORAH!

And then I'll be free to ... er.. spend more money again on the next record! BRILLIANT!

posted 7/8/2003 by MJ Hibbett

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