ON U.S. VS. EUROPEAN RECORD RELEASE DATES
Friday, September 25th, 2009 at 4:30pm by Vince NeilsteinEarlier today in response to my Scar Symmetry post, MS commenter “cougar party” asked:
Could someone explain the reason release dates are always different in the US and Europe? I don’t see the logic behind two different dates.
The reason is that bands often have different record labels in different territories. A band may be signed to Nuclear Blast in Europe, but a different label in the U.S.; even when a band is signed to the same label in two territories, the European office often operates differently than the U.S. office. The reason for this is pretty simple; a local label has a much better understanding of how their own market and scene work and can more effectively work a band there, get them in the right press outlets, get them on the right tours, pitch them to the correct radio stations, etc. When it comes to marketing and setting up a record for release, it’s much easier to do a focused, territorial campaign than one that attempts to satisfy all the varying needs of the different regions of the world. A band could be hugely popular in Europe but have little to no following in the U.S., so it could make sense to wait to “release” it in the U.S. until a proper label can get behind it here and spread the word to the masses.
This was all well and good for many decades. Then the Internet came along and fucked everything up.
With the Internet an album is out worldwide the minute it’s out anywhere, which these days is whenever it leaks. The more and more the Internet becomes the main source of a band’s publicity, it makes less and less sense to have separate release dates; the Internet is fully global. Still, there is some benefit to having separate labels in different territories; a U.S. label is going to have no idea, for instance, how to effectively market a band in Japan, but a Japanese label can do a much better job of it. This is very important when different languages come into play, but by no means is it limited to that; I’d trust a U.K. label to do a much better job marketing a band there than any U.S. label could, just as I’d sooner trust a New Yorker over a Californian to tell me where the best hot dog in NYC is.
I predict that as the Internet continues to become an ever bigger part of the picture, staggered release dates will fade. We’ll see.
-VN
An interesting piece! I too have wondered this!
This makes sense for bands like Scar Symmetry who are from Europe, however in the case of bands like Devildriver who are from the US it is absolute poppycock that albums such as “The Last Kind Words” come out almost a month and a half later in the US! (Then again, that’s the type of ineptitude we know and love from the US branch of Roadrunner Records.)
Nice, now i get it. Thanks for the explanation, Vince.
How come MY stupid questions don’t spawn their own posts?
The 1990’s called and want their business model back… Record Labels doing “staggered release dates” = FAIL
What a stupid and uneducated post.
but why do records come out on tuesdays here and on mondays everywhere else????
It’s to do with the day that charts/sales are announced, usually the day before release dates to give new releases a full week of sales. As for why America is different to most of the world I don’t know, either way it’s probably decided by retailers at the end of the day.
Bingo. I also don’t think it’s “everywhere else.” I think it’s different in different territories, just like movies and books.
They won’t fade, because there’s an underground, and there always will be. There’s always going to be small bands signed to small labels only able to release their albums in a certain territory and then maybe down the road (a year or so) they’ll get a distro deal in another territory.
Aside from the basic “Europe releases on Mondays, N. Am. releases on Tuesdays” thing, different distributors have different release dates. Most domestic indies have the option to release an album every other week. That’s not necessarily the same in Europe. This is why bands on the same label are often a week (well, 6 or 8 days) apart.
anyway, the cool thing about this is that I was buy my copy of the last Alice In Chains yesterday !! Hail Europe !!
I used to work at a big record store (three letters, first letter h, last v) and this very topic would always baffle me. I understand the need for hype, but people would come in all the time after hearing a song on the radio or read about a band in a magazine (remember music magazines!!), but the album wouldn’t come out for another 6 weeks (many times by which their interest had gone).
Or, they’d have heard something during a trip elsewhere, and I’d have to say it hadn’t been released in North America (or may never be).
Also, and this is just my own thing, why do labels even send out advances anymore? There are albums being leaked all the time on the net weeks before you’re even able to buy it. Isn’t that just inviting lost sales?
That’s why labels aren’t sending a lot of promos out anymore.
Holy crap, I actually learned something from reading MetalSucks. This has to be a first.
Great post! Vince, why don’t you start writing your own column for Metalsucks? lol
There was a very interesting blog that Lilly Allen wrote about illegal music downloading which got quite a bit of publicity. It was on the papers today (at least The Sun -the paper famous for the Page 3 models, crappy news, and great sports coverage)… The press has given her commentary a lot of focus recently. Look it up if you can. Worth the read.
Any links to the blog? From what I can see, it appears to be removed/deleted.