HVH vs. F2F

Man, record labels can be infuriating.

Melbourne electronic-gothic-hardcore outfit House vs. Hurricane, currently the flavour of the month among Melbourne's angsty teens (although, to be fair, I'm quite a fan myself), had announced that their debut EP Forfeiture would be available in stores over two weeks ago. Naturally, being one of the only hardcore-friendly record stores in the eastern suburbs, Fist2Face was eagerly anticipating the arrival of the CD weeks in advance of its official release date, because a new release from a local band will always do well for us.

Then, the delays came.

CD manufacturing cock-ups and sticker printing delays meant that the packaging was not ready by the release date, but we were assured that it was mere days away and that we would be the first store in Australia to stock it.

The rest of that week was spent sending emails back and forth with Amphead, who were distributing the release, and posting MySpace bulletins saying that no, the CD wasn't available yet but yes, we would be getting it within days.

Those days eventually turned into two weeks, and in the meantime we had upwards of 20 people per day coming into the store or calling us on the phone asking if we had it. I felt like a bit of a knob after I had been promising we would have the CD in a couple of days when in reality it was still over a week away, which I guess is a good advertisement for Apple's "under-promise, over-deliver" strategy. Perhaps next time we have a big upcoming release, I'll hold off until I have it in my hand before I let people know about it.

But today, finally, we received a box of 100 brand spanking new House vs. Hurricane EPs, complete with cover sticker.

I posted a victorious MySpace bulletin at around 4:00pm, and within three minutes had received a dozen replies asking me to put a copy aside for someone who was on their way to the store right then. Tomorrow, I won't be surprised if I spend 60% of my day putting through sales of this one particular CD.

This Saturday we have HVH playing a full rock-band instore gig at Fist2Face, and we're expecting so many people that we will actually be moving all our CD and hoodie racks outside onto the footpath outside the store to make room for people.

I would be very surprised if at the end of Saturday we have any of the 100 CDs we received left.

And people say CD sales are dying? All you have to do is produce something that people are interested in.