WC12: Niles, Epitaph Records Put New Distribution Deal on the Table

[CBR News]

During his WonderCon spotlight panel, Steve Niles announced a possible alternative to Diamond Comics Distributors coming in the future from Epitaph Records. We spoke with the vocal creator-owned advocate for more details.


Full article here.

[mietha]

It is not where Bad Religion "came from". The guitarist of BR, Brett Gurewitz, founded it to (originally) release their records. So the label "came from" BR, not the other way around. As far as I know, it is still owned and operated by him.
Actually on topic: for as much as I love Brett and Epitaph, I just don't see this getting much traction. In the current state of the industry, you've got (relatively) high profile stuff like Zenescope's and Top Cow's flagship titles selling less than 6,000 copies. The distribution and production costs for something potentially selling 500 copies would just be too damn high. There's a reason Diamond has a floor, as cruel as it may seem. Besides, with the traction that Comixology has gotten, wouldn't it make far more sense to distribute micro-print run stuff digitally? Besides, most comic store owners (and I'm known many of them) are pretty lazy. They don't want to do one order a month, much less two. And, um, the last time there were two major distributors, it was a cluster****, didn't really work out for anyone (other than at the end, Diamond), and actually drove quite a few LCS's out of business. It's not like the industry as a whole is going to have forgotten that.