End of music carrier distribution in South Africa

End of music carrier distribution in South Africa - Press Release

Our flagship label, Mountain Records has finally ceased sales of physical product being distributed in southern Africa. For our many different artists it is the end of a long history of selling music on physical formats in the territory.

Future releases and the current catalogue will be available in digital distribution and a small quantity of CDs and LPs that are still in our Hamburg warehouse will be available in Germany, essentially on mail order. There will be some exceptions where Vinyl and possibly CD might be used on new releases as well.

In 1980 a division of EMI UK, EMI South Africa (SA) took on the label through their CCP Records department, releasing the debut releases of our Cape Town based projects. These included Dave Nissen, the first artist to be on Mountain Records and the debut album of David Kramer. These were followed by amongst others, Robin Auld and Z-Astaire, Edi Niederlander, Amampondo, Robbie Jansen - well over a hundred albums (and even more singles) by almost fifty artists in all.

Prior to that label deal our SA firm produced and distributed albums by the jazz-rock band Pacific Express through CCP.

It was not long before the distribution deal was converted to what is referred to as a P&D deal, for pressing and distribution through EMI SA directly. This arrangement ran for some forty years until Universal Music bought EMI International in 2012.

At that point the product of LTE Distribution (Germany) was combined with the Mountain distribution deal for southern Africa, bringing in releases by other African and international producers. This ran for a further 10 years.

In July 2021 major disruptions in the distribution systems in SA caused by political/civil unrest a few months earlier, resulted in a reassessment of the viability of music distribution in the country. This coincided with an already growing downturn in demand for CDs in SA. Finally in October this year Universal ceased to offer Mountain and LTE CDs and LPs to the market.

We are grateful to the management and staff of CCP, EMI and Universal for their services and support over almost half a century of music business. Together we launched and grew the careers of numerous SA artists, winning industry awards and topping the charts. Thank you.

Patrick Lee-Thorp

Mountain Records, Songwrights Publishers and LTE Distribution.

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Some history - https://wifidead.blogspot.com/ and https://leethorpentertainment.blogspot.com/

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