poppedmusic

London Riots August 2011

Whilst the majority of news is of course covering the fires and High Street looting across London that has now spread to other cities, it has come to our attention that the UK Independent music industry has also been harmed in this outrageous act of mindless criminality. The Sony building set on fire in Enfield last night (as pictured) was indeed the home to much of the stock of many of the UK’s Independent record labels.

The Sony warehouse was the home to Sony Digital Audio Disc Corporation (DADC) where PIAS distribution held stock. The full list (as far as we know) of all labels affected by this will be listed at the end of this post.

Darren Hemmings, head of digital marketing for PIAS, commented on Twitter; “We know DADC was destroyed & are waiting to confirm exactly how badly this has affected PIAS.”

Labels involved include the homes to artists such as The Horrors, Adele, Arctic Monkeys and Two Door Cinema Club as well as many others. The UK independent music industry may have just lost all or a large amount of their stock and it will be extremely difficult to know how they may recover from such a devastating loss of stock. This will affect many more lives than could possibly have been thought of, bands and label staff alike will now face the loss of their hard work and could now find themselves in very precarious positions. Beggars Group chairman Martin Mills has commented in Music Week that his labels would be less affected than smaller labels, as they had stock in other locations. Still, he said that the loss was “horrible, horrible”.

Rob Da Bank, owner of  the Sunday Best label, also took to Twitter to confirm that all of their stock had been lost “So looks like all our Sunday Best stock went up in flames last night in the PIAS blaze”

PIAS have just released the following statement:

Official Statement: more news to follow

There was a fire last night at the SonyDADC warehouse which services the physical distribution for PIAS in the UK and Ireland. PIAS is working closely with SonyDADC who are implementing their emergency plans. PIAS’s UK offices in London and all other areas of our business are unaffected.

More information will be communicated shortly to all our labels and partners