In addition to my post above, here’s a message from Andy regarding the download problems and the download vs. hard copy debate:
“Hello WoMbles. It’s the school holidays and i’d planned to spend the day with my family chilling out. I’d been away from home working in the Netherlands and was looking forward to some downtime, instead i’ve spent all morning in front of a computer and on the phone trying to sort this bloody mess out.
I’m still none the wiser but i’m assured the ‘powers that be’ are sorting it now. Apologies to those that have tried to get their mitts on the single and have been knocked back. We trusted that it was in good hands and those who wanted to hear new material would be doing so by now.
I don’t live in London (neither does anyone else in the band) so we can’t even ‘drop in’ on the culprits in question. The whole fiasco feels out of our hands and it’s not a situation we like to be in.
Many people have asked why we didn’t release a ‘hard copy’ of the single.
Simple fact is we can’t afford to and the recoed company don’t want to take the chance.
If we take, for argument’s sake, the U.K. Spitfire have been down this road with the’ If It Kills Me ’ single and found that it didn’t work.
When T? goes on tour we play, depending on the length of UK tour, to anything between 4000-8000 people adding up all the various attendance figures. It takes between 1000-1500 sales to get into the top 40 so if (again, depending on the size of tour) a quarter or an eighth of the punters buys the single we should be laughing. Unfortunately it didn’t work like this with IIKM which sold poorly (the vinyl itself sold only a handful of copies) and cost the label (ie, ultimately the band) a LOT of money.
Therefore it was not a gamble they wanted to take again. What surprises us is that the single sales were not representative of the sales of the album, High Anxiety which did o.k. for us.
On the industry side if we release a single and shops have to return unwanted copies to the label then the same shops are hesitant to stock forthcoming releases of the band which was why, initially, some people found it hard to get the HA album in their local record store when it came out.
The last two Therapy? records have been selling steadily and keeping the bands profile on a curve upwards. This is something we intend to keep up.
Albums and concert tickets have been steadily on the rise gain for us but we have to maintain it, hence not spending £25,000 a territory releasing a single which in all likelyhood will fail. We would love to release a hardcopy single, we get demand for it from the website and at punters at gigs but the harsh reality is that not enough people buy them.
As has been well documented here, myself and Michael have sunk enough money into the band without taking another risk.
It’s a shame as if the amount of people who bought our albums bought our single releases we would be on firmer ground to ensuring further hard copy singles.
We all feel a bit helpless to be honest and it’s not nice at all. I look at bands i love like Wildhearts and Killing Joke getting back into the charts and wonder why we, as a band that have sold over two million records worldwide, can’t do the same in our own country.
Howver, snipes about our age and being past it don’t help matters much.
Never mind the Rolling Stones, the Fall, Ginger, Motorhead, Supersuckers…the list is endless, are all still making great records.
If Spitfire thought at least a thousand members of our fanbase in the UK would buy a hard copy single then they would release one but as the IIKM single seemed to show them it wasn’t worth taking a risk.
It’s all shit and i really don’t want to think about it anymore as it’s depressing the fuck out of me.
We do the best we can but we’re losing control over certain things and i hate it. Here we are, having made a great record with it coming out in a fortnight and we have this bollocks to deal with.
I don’t know what more we can do.”
