Connecting labels and distributors directly

Second-hand stock arrives one record at a time. New releases arrive by the box, with a delivery note and a price list, and somebody in the shop types them into the system. The Hub offers a shorter route: labels and distributors connect directly, and their releases, prices and availability appear in your Hub as a source next to your own shelves.

Two roads into the Hub

For the Benelux the existing road is Phononet, the EDI service of the music trade in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Shops search, listen and order there, and the catalogue updates daily with cover images, track information and audio clips: licensed data, along the road the trade already uses. Where Phononet exists, the Hub connects to it rather than building a second infrastructure next to it. The message traffic is standardised: PRICAT for the supplier's catalogue and prices, ORDER for your order, ORDRSP for the confirmation, DESADV for the shipment and INVOIC for the invoice.

Next to that, not instead of it, labels and distributors can connect to the Hub directly. That road is for whoever falls outside the existing infrastructure: small and self-releasing labels, artists with their own pressings, foreign labels without a Benelux distributor. Exactly the catalogue a shop types in by hand today.

What you see in the Hub

A connected label appears as a source. You browse its releases with the data the label maintains: artist, title, format, barcode, release date, dealer price. You choose what to stock; a connected catalogue is an offer, not stock. Add a release and the Hub creates the copies, with quantity and price, ready to publish on your webshop and channels the same day the box arrives.

Why the data is better

A label knows its own release best: the exact title, the edition, the barcode, the colour of the vinyl. When that data comes in directly, every shop on the Hub shows the same correct information, and a correction by the label reaches every shop at once. No retyping, no version of the title with a typo that lives on in one shop's system for years.

For the label

For a label the Hub is the reverse: one connection that reaches every connected record shop. Set a title live once, with the right data, and it is orderable in all of them, without emailing a spreadsheet to each shop separately. Stock and sell-through reporting come back the same way. Labels that want to connect can contact us; the connection form and the agreements are worked out per label.

Charts as a by-product

Every sale through the Hub is a complete data point: a barcode, a date, a channel and a price. That is exactly what chart organisations ask of a shop, and what is still exported by hand from a till and pasted into a spreadsheet today. Charts count new releases with a real EAN, so the better new-release data enters the Hub, the more useful that reporting becomes, for the shop and for the label.

Where this stands

Direct label connections are being built and the first agreements are being made. If you are a shop that orders from a specific label or distributor regularly, or a label that wants its releases in connected shops, tell us; the order in which connections are built follows demand.