Indie Digital Merchants

I don't need to remind you how CD sales are slumping or that the Soulja Boy torrent you are downloading is already done. Alright, I'll give you a minute to finish posting your Crank That video to The 'Tube.

The iTunes Store proved that MP3 was for the masses, and my friends at Beatport proved that digital music for niche markets by niche retailers could be a success. They are leveraging that success to launch Beatsource for the 'urban' side of things. Two well-loved online retailers for all things hiphop/soul/funk/rare groove/etc are also launching their digital efforts this week.


Hiphopsite.com has stopped selling CDs and closed their storefront in Las Vegas in favor of moving to digital sales. With the beta just having gone live, I purchased the new Mumbles album. The price came in at $13, which is a bit more than iTunes, but no DRM, and 320kbps .mp3s justified the price for me. The download was fairly slow (around 23k/sec), but to be fair I was using a lot of bandwidth on a differnt machine at the same time. Hiphopsite was always really slow to ship orders in my experience, but their exclusives kept me coming back. It looks like they are going to keep that momentum going with bonus tracks on digital releases. Overall, I'm pleased with the new shopping experience there, and I'll def keeping checking back in with them.


I found Turntablelab.com way back in 2000. They have been on point every day since then. They are up on trends like nobody else, and it seems like they have been smart about growing their business over the years. Digital sales are a natural fit, and the timing seems good for them to launch the new service. I have yet to try it out. The content is amazing as usual, and I'm sure it is good. You should be there buying the Greenwood Rhythm Coalition EP right now.

I'm saying though. The design of the digital portion of their site has kept me from jumping in. The TTL brand has evolved over the years into a unique sort of heavy-handed Swiss design meets LES, NYC. Solid color fields, well-crafted and slightly clumsy type, tight use of color and an obvious passion/obsession for design. Every pixel is accounted for. Then along comes the Digital portion of the site, and it looks like they fell back on the now-established (and kind of played out) Web 2.0 look. Whats the deal? Gradients, shiny buttons, confusing icons. It seems to me that they are violating the best parts of the TTL design language. Obsession turned to over thinking maybe? Of course, I may just need to get used to the new look.

Good luck to everyone entering the market, and keep an eye out for the Wax Poetics shop to open soon as well.