Blood & Fire

[bonga]

It's the same with Basicchannel. I see their reissued records (wackies) in every second hand store,in Europa in the USA everywhere ( and also on auction sites..) they must have sold tons of them during the last 8 or 10 years..
although it's very easy to find those records for free online....

[Pots n Pans]

the problem is that the youth of today prefers mp3 low fi shit and the days of vinyl and cd come to an end i fear. so it becomes more and more difficult for a small label to survive in a ever shrinking market.

Agreed. But it may not be their fault. People are being brainwashed, somewhat, into believing that an iPod loaded with mp3s is some sort of 'state of the art' sound reproduction kit.

Yup, and with the vast selection available on illegal download sites, huge iPod capacities, and small file sizes, I think people with this technology are *drowning* in music. I know people who have a solid MONTH or more of uninterrupted music on their hard drives, and they keep downloading more!
Recorded music has always been a commodity - and people nowadays are very aware of how much it is (or should be) costing them financially, but they don't seem to appreciate how much of their time it costs them too. I think there are a lot of people with a lot of music they don't have time to listen to - a 120kbps mp3 may only take twenty seconds to download, but a three minute song is always going to take three minutes to listen to - and it is cheapening *music* by reducing it to a commodity for filling up a hard drive or an iPod.
Even on a legal site, a song is reduced to a title and an artist name, and maybe a little bit of info and a cover scan, and the emphasis is pretty much placed on **who/where** you are downloading from, not **what** you are downloading. On the illegal ones I've seen it's just a bunch of text, and you run the risk of picking up a whole bunch of nasty malware too. There is no real knowledge or respect for the music in either approach.
I am not against online music services - I actually think they could have great benefits, particularly for archiving and making available music that it wouldn't be profitable to physically reissue - but I don't think what is on offer now is the best a man can get!

And yeah, low quality mp3s sound AWFUL! Lossless for me!

[Pots n Pans]

There is an interview with Disrupt (electronic dub producer guy) where he makes some interesting observations along the same lines

http://www.spannered.org/music/1242/
(scroll down until you reach the question that begins "You recently said to Spannered that there's an excess of..." It's about two thirds of the way through the interview.)

[bwoyrough]

I don;t think blood+fire have ever had any problems with there business +marketing techniques, this has nothing to do with why they closed, they where going a long time and had plenty of contacts and had there distribution network setup well, there isn't one decent reggae whop i've been to that never had a B+F cd in there cd stand, i can't say this about any other re-issue label.
The market is simply not good enough right now, there aren't that many roots fans in the bigger scheme of things, there sales where dropping, the vinyl wasn't worth pressing because people wheren't buying.
It was just down to the market, if they where bad business men like someone suggested then i don't think they would have lasted and been so successful for so long. Saying there bad business men only helps create bad rumors, we can see they where successful, just check your local record store to see this.
My guess is that the internet piracy killed them, where as people used to buy every release on cd, once the internet made is so easy for people to just download the latest album and print the covers etc. a large amount of there would be customers moved onto doing this to save money, this is whats killed them i'd bet on that.
No mater what anyone says sharing official CDs/DVDs online is killing the industry, but there is no way to stop it, and it will continue and the industry will re-form into something new, a take a new business model, like giving music away for free and profit from gigs or whatever it might be.
B+F deserve alot more credit than some give, i personally think they are responsible for reviving roots throughout Europe throughout the 90's, will always be my fav re-issue label.......
RIP B+F