Music Industry To Record Stores: Stop Selling Our Product Or We’ll Sue Your Asses

Not content with just bullying consumers, those delightfully hardheaded rascals at the major labels have now begun slapping cease and desist orders on record stores, with Universal Republic coming down on independent shops who have been selling import copies of Amy Winehouse’s debut album Frank, which the label is planning to finally release in America in November. As the Reuters story points out, though, this is merely an old industry strongarm tactic that’s come back dressed for an era when every penny counts:

Universal Republic, which has enjoyed great success in the United States with Winehouse’s “Back to Black” album, plans to issue her earlier album “Frank” on November 7 stateside and wants to prevent imports from cannibalizing potential sales.

“Frank,” which came out in Europe on Island, has scanned some 18,000 copies in the United States as an import, according to Nielsen SoundScan; meanwhile, since its December 19, 2006, release, “Back to Black” has sold 950,000. Universal insiders said that because the label’s goal for the latter is 1.5 million to 2 million copies, Universal is holding up the release of “Frank” to get the most mileage out of “Back to Black.”

So because Universal Republic wants to sell more copies of an album that’s already been proven to be a strong, steady seller with plenty of potential for further growth, they’re waiting to release an album that there’s already an obvious demand for. Because surely no fan of a hot new artist would be interested in even more material by that artist that they might possibly love as much, if not more.

More distressingly, most of the record stores seem to be rolling over with the demand, which probably just speaks to their reduced clout in the industry and lack of petty cash lying around these days to fight specious lawsuits:

“We have been selling ‘Frank’ long before (Winehouse) become hot here in the U.S.,” said Eric Levin, owner of Criminal Records in Atlanta and the head of the Alliance for Independent Media Stores. “We can certainly wait, as we have been asked to do.”

“Universal is just trying to protect their business,” said Michael Kurtz, who heads indie coalition Monitor Store Network. “We get the message; we won’t carry it anymore.”

In general, merchants — who foresee weightier issues with the majors down the line — said the stakes of the “Frank” album are not high enough to justify taking a stand or risk getting sued.

Frank is also currently unavailable on iTunes in the U.S., making an import the only legal way for stateside consumers to purchase the album at the moment. Well, at least I assumed it was the only legal way until now.

I can understand on a first-year-at-business-school level why Universal Republic would want to keep sales from being siphoned away from the album’s official American release, and why the label wants to milk the good thing it has going with Back to Black. And there can be all sorts of legal red tape holding up an import album, especially if it involves a label change between markets. But the industry’s image problem is bad enough these days; the last thing it needs is to alienate the dwindling number of outlets willing to hawk its wares, and the dwindling number of people who shop there, unless it’s attempting to hasten the demise of music retail itself. Don’t they realize that–in a P2P world, when media outlets are postively reviewing albums by American pop stars that are unavailable in their own country and blogs are hyping international bands months or years before their records are available in U.S. stores–labels have to get their shit together as regards getting imports to the domestic market in a timely manner, unless they’re going to go after, I dunno, Amazon.co.uk next?

Winehouse Album Reignites Old Debate Over Imports [Yahoo via Reuters]