Catch Re-Issue Postponed
TL;DR We had to postpone pre-ordering of the Catch for us the Foxes Vinyl Re-Issue due to Universal Music Group not being able to communicate a timeframe.
Ugh, So here is the deal… Last week we had announced that we would finally have a new vinyl release of Catch for us the Foxes ready ofr advance order at Midnight EST on Tuesday 9/16. That order would come with a promise of a shipping date of Winter 2014, giving us to end of the year to get it in your hands. Now it appears that this could be an impossibility. Allow us to explain.
Vinyl used to be easy enough to license for our band. Gilead Media and Burnt Toast Vinyl both acquired licenses from Tooth & Nail pretty easily. Once they got permission from the label, they paid them a licensing fee, put up their own money for manufacturing and within a couple months “Presto!” they had the album on available vinyl.
But Tooth & Nail no longer owns the masters to our records. For whatever reason they were transferred to Universal Music Group. Once UMG had these masters in their possession they squelched all licenses. Gilead and Burnt Toast were no longer allowed to press vinyls of our records. That’s because UMG is a big label with big resources. Vinyl is no longer the niche product it once was and they don’t need smaller labels to handle manufacturing for them, making a profit where possible. So now they want to control manufacturing, so they can charge wholesale prices to the buyer. In this case, mewithoutYou is the buyer. What would’ve cost us $6/unit and licensing fee now will cost us $10/unit and licensing fee. And thats fine. Really, it is. It is within their right since those recordings are their intellectual property.
But it does suck for us. It sucks for us because we tend to move quickly. mewithoutYou / Pine Street is a small business and Universal Music Group is a big business, with a lot of moving parts. mewithoutYou is a small f
As of 9/2 we had been given the green light from Universal’s legal and finance for this release. All the assets had been passed along to them. And since that sign off we’ve been working super hard to have a pre-order up so when the time came for UMG to ship them we’d have ordered an appropriate amount and we’d also have the money for Universal to ship the product to us. But sadly, there has been a communication breakdown with Universal. It has been radio silence from them since September 2nd. As a result we have not been able to put a single piece into production, despite this release being ready to go since July.
All this is to say that we no longer feel confident that Universal will be able to make this happen by the end of the year. So we are postponing taking orders until we are confident they can meet our shipping date.
These vinyls could still potentially ship before the end of the year, but at this rate we can’t make promises. We think it would be a disservice to our fans to wrangle them into advance ordering only to make the people that love and support our band take on an extended period of waiting.
We hope you understand and as soon as we have an estimated timeframe for shipping from Universal we will launch the order page. We are so, so dismayed and sorry to have to pull a false start like this. It is truly embarrassing. In the meantime we hope you enjoy our new website/store. We do have new shirts available and we will be shipping all those things ASAP.