Or: More Hatred For Big Indies.
For those of you that don’t know, Jay Reatard has signed to Matador and has been doing a singles series. The supposed release structure is:
#1 - 3517
#2 - 2750
#3 - 2000
#4 - 1300
#5 - 900
#6 - 400
I have been over Jay for quite a while now, probably since his hissyfit a few months back and have completely missed the hype surrounding these. Anyway, it looks like besides the lackluster songs and quality control (as the reviews have it), the whole enforced scarcity marketing gimmick backfired yesterday. The following is the official response.
As many of you are aware, the preorder process for Jay Reatard 7″ #4 turned into a nightmare for you and for us. First, on Monday, the preorder accidentally went live at 1:30 PM, 90 minutes earlier than was announced. Early orders poured in, and since this seemed unfair to those who were waiting until 3:00 PM to order, we cancelled those orders and started the process again at 3. However, due to a rule at our credit-card processing company that we had never had reason to encounter before, anyone who ordered for a second time on the same card got a duplicate/fraud message, and were not allowed to complete the order. In addition, the rush of orders at 3 was so intense that the server slowed down to a crawl, and many people were not able to complete their orders at all.
In light of all this we decided to redo the order at 3 PM on Tuesday. We cancelled all orders for a second time, got with our credit card processing company to shorten the timeout period for duplicate orders, and got with our ISP to prepare for an onslaught of traffic at 3.
However we were not prepared for the amount of traffic we did get yesterday - over 10,000 unique visitors at 3 PM, and the server once again slowed to a crawl or worse, leaving many people out in the cold, disgusted, and fed up with Matador - understandably. (For comparison’s sake, the entire Matador website usually gets 8,000 unique visitors per day.) We’re still not clear whether the publicity resulting from the previous two preorders led to the increase in visitors, or whether this was some kind of denial of service attack from a disgruntled customer.
In any event, we have collated orders from everyone who ordered successfully the first OR second time with those who ordered successfully the third time, and we are filling orders for everyone who got a successful order confirmation from us, whether it was cancelled or not.
We’d lke to offer apologies for all the drama and hassle, but we’ve been apologizing non-stop and that’s not what you guys want - you want an efficient order process, and that’s what we pledge to offer in the future. It’s going to be even harder to buy singles #5 and #6 - that’s the whole point of this exercise after all - but it won’t be due to technical problems. We’ll have security, traffic, credit card processing and everything else sorted out and tested well in advance of the remaining 7″ preorders, and it will work the way it’s supposed to. I think that’s all we can say at this time.
Matador Records
Hint, if you have 10,000 people that may possibly want to buy your record, fuck your stupid limited edition hype bullshit and just release the damn music.
UPDATE: I listened to it and it’s sung in MOCKNEY.
