Status quo
When people send emails asking if you still exist, you know that it’s about time to update your website. To everybody wondering: Yes, we are still alive. Yes, 2nd rec still exists.
So why the lack of updates? Well, if you’ve got some time, I’ll tell you:
During the last six years since Christophe and I started 2nd rec together, the label has evolved, the music industry has been shaken up and last not least our personal lives have changed. At some point we’ve felt, that things don’t work out anymore. We came to a point where we’ve realized that running the label wasn’t as satisfying as it used to be.
The more “professional” we got, the more we’ve had to play by the “rules of the market” and the more we’ve had to follow certain procedures. One example: When we’ve started, the record was officially released, when it came from the pressing plant. Today we plan our releases at least 6 months in advance.
The growth also led to more bureaucracy and administration — actually most of the label work is office work (running an indie label isn’t as glamouroes as it might sound).
Throughout the years, the business side of things compromised our creative ideas and left us less and less time for things we’ve really wanted to do. This was a gradual process, so it took us some time to realize, but now we know that we have to change something.
Change is necessary anyway in a world of iPods and P2P. CD sales are on the way down and while legal downloads are increasing, it’ll take years (if ever) to compensate for the loss of CD sales. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one of those who think that filesharing should be prosecuted and I believe that it could also have a positive effect on the music industry, but it’s obvious, that it has a major impact even on small labels.
But not only the label and the industry changed, our lives - personal and professional - have as well. When we started the label, we were both employed at design agencies, then I quit, then Christophe quit and since about 1,5 year, we’re running our own design studio called precious. It’s doing well and we’re pretty excited about it, but it also requires a lot of our time.
Anyway, some months ago, we’ve felt that the label wasn’t what we wanted it to be, that it was more of a burden than fun and that we either have to stop or change.
We’ve spend some time thinking about what we want to do with the label and how we can achieve it. We’ve made some decisions and we’ve got lots of ideas we are excited about.
Here’s something we can already tell you:
We will not limit our releases to music. We plan to do different types of products, anything that we like to do. Therefore we’ll probably have to say goodbye to the name 2nd rec sooner or later, because it won’t be a record label anymore. But it will be still us… For music releases we’ll focus on vinyl and digital downloads. We’ll probably not dismiss CDs immediately, but there will be definitely more vinyl.
It’ll all be good and even better. We are pretty thrilled about it and we hope you will be too.