One of the main goals of Label Engine is not only to provide top notch tools for independent labels to use but also, in the case of our distributed labels, to look after their best interests. We believe as distributors we are more than just aggregators of music, we also have the responsibility of being the “middle man” negotiator and our priority is to make sure our labels and artists get the royalties they have earned.
With that in mind, we have had some issues getting those royalties in a timely manner with some stores and have had to resort to stopping deliveries to them until a resolution was reached. From the stores we had to email this news to most of them immediately corrected the issue, however this was not the case with Nowtrax.
Nowtrax seems to have completely disappeared, we have been unable to get a reply from them in months and from looking at the store it seems it’s pretty much a ghost town. It seems pretty pointless to continue to deliver our catalog to them if it won’t benefit the labels in any way, so we have decided to stop delivering to them. This is temporary until we can hopefully get to an understanding with them but could turn final if we don’t hear back from them in the next few weeks.
In an unrelated event to the above, we are forced to temporarily stop deliveries to JB Hi-Fi. Because of the stores location in Australia and their unwillingness to work with us on alternate delivery methods, delivery is painfully slow and also consumes about 80% of our server’s resources. This has caused some issues in our back-end, has caused excessive waits for our customers accessing the system, and based on the little to no royalties we get from them it just makes financial sense for us to stop deliveries until they can provide us with a better way to ingest the catalog.
We know as labels/artists you want to reach as many people and therefore as many stores as you can but sometimes decisions like this have to be made for the overall benefit of the company and to continue offering you low distribution rates.
We thank you for your understanding and if you have any further questions, please feel free to reach us at support(at)label-engine.com.