I have been sent the details of a very interesting story. Having done some checks, I’ve verified that it’s true and I’m going to tell you about it now. The names in it have been redacted, mostly due to the fact this will soon be the subject of a legal action.

It concerns two people. For the purpose of this blogpost, I will call them Tom and Jerry. Tom is a noted producer with decades experience who has travelled around the world to DJ. Whereas Jerry is a producer with around 15 years experience who hasn’t done quite so much travelling around the world – yet.

And now we go back to 2016. Get a coffee if you want. This could be a long one.

Jerry was running an independent record label and doing quite well. But he was looking to change his distributor. Tom got word of this and reached out, offering him an opportunity. Tom had a well known record label that did distribution for other labels too.

Jerry was originally going to sign up for a seperate distributor, but thought Tom could offer a lot in terms of promotion as well as distribution. So Jerry took the offer.

Jerry was offered remix opportunities on Tom’s label as one form of extra promotion, which Jerry duly completed to Tom’s satisfaction. A number of forthcoming releases were uploaded, ready to be distributed in the near future.

Some months later, the releases went live on the download stores. However, the four releases had been combined into just one big release, much to the annoyance of Jerry. However, Jerry did not challenge Tom on this, as he presumed Tom knew what he was doing.

Soon after this, Jerry was speaking to an old friend, and he told him about the distribution deal with Tom’s label. The friend was horrified – he’d done the same thing years earlier.

It turns out that Tom’s label does not actually do the distribution. The distribution was done by – yes, you guessed it! – the same distributors Jerry was thinking of signing with in the first place. And Jerry was effectively paying for two distributors as a result.

Jerry is now suing Tom for a lot of money. How will he get on? I don’t know, but I’ll be reporting it here once I find out!