Published
Mon, Jun 4, 2012, 17:20
- The esteemed Berlin record shop now sells digital files.
Hard Wax, the globally respected Berlin record shop, now sells digital files via its website.
hardwax.com/downloads/ arrived sometime over the weekend without any official announcement, more than two years after Mark Ernestus, who founded the shop in 1989, first mentioned the idea in an interview with Groove. "We do indeed come from the corner of the vinyl-fundamentalists," he explained. "Some see it as the wrong direction... But for us as a shop, it would, I think, be wrong to ignore the digital format, or even want to boycott." As of now the site sells mp3 and AIFF files for only about 100 releases, most of which come from labels that are distributed by or in some way associated with Hard Wax, such as Basic Channel, Do Not Resist The Beat, Equalized, Wax and Ben Klock and Marcel Dettmann's boutique labels, Klockworks and MDR. A number of these titles are out of stock in other formats. No word yet on how much Hard Wax's digital section will expand, though Ernestus has emphasized in the past that there will not be a separate download shop.