King Street Sounds is a record label which is very happy to plunder its own archive for modern gain. If the new music they released now was as good, it might not be an issue – but here we are.

Many producers who end up on the label are asked to remix something from the archive. Fizzikx, for example, remixed “Alright” by Stephanie Cooke. It did well on Traxsource, but some people were left scratching their heads at why it was bundled on a big album stuffed full of old Cooke remixes.

It turns out there’s a reason behind it. A source close to King Street told me “We’ve noticed that many people won’t listen to things if it’s a name they haven’t heard before. So we decided to test a new way of doing it – put them on albums that the streaming audience can treat as a playlist. It seems to have worked well so far.”.

However, a source of mine who’s worked high up at a number of labels thinks the idea is “utterly dumb, to be honest. The likes of Kerri Chandler and Roger Sanchez would never have tolerated that, so I don’t see why the likes of Fizzikx and Demarkus Lewis should get shafted by labels that don’t want to put the work into promotion.”.

I’ll let you make your own minds up on that one…