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Psyshop closed its doors?


pedro

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Sad if true. It has been a long journey. I think I even bought my first vinyls from there in the early 00s. One of them was Are You Shpongled. It was cheap (by today's standards) and hadn't moved off the shelves particularly fast because vinyl DJing was fading out. Times were changing and now they're changing again. :lol:

 

Coincidentally, just yesterday I ended up on the label/distributor page of Saikosounds on Discogs. That one I only visited for the 2 min samples, though. Probably never ordered a thing due to the possibility of customs fees and hassle. Apologies for wasting their bandwidth for years. :mellow:

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It's really weird how they didn't even have a closing sale or final words..

21 hours ago, Dolmot said:

Coincidentally, just yesterday I ended up on the label/distributor page of Saikosounds on Discogs. That one I only visited for the 2 min samples, though. Probably never ordered a thing due to the possibility of customs fees and hassle. Apologies for wasting their bandwidth for years. :mellow:

I remember saiko being quite fair with prices?

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I haven’t visited Psyshop in years, but yeah I remember ordering some CD albums there in the past. Times move on. :) A very difficult market-space these days, I guess bandcamp and beatport took over? Among other actors. And yes indeed changing consumer patterns and what not.

And yeah a bit strange with no heads-up before closing shop. Perhaps they sold their remaining inventory in bulk on discogs or something? Or continue to sell it there under some unrelated account? Since I haven’t visited Psyshop in many years and wasn’t subsribing to any news-letter, nor following them on facebook. I don’t know for sure. :) Maybe they did write something somewhere?

Maybe something drastic happend who knows. Covid times probably saw sales drop down due to higher import fees and so on.

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Was not the greatest fan nor the greatest buyer there, but still, this is sad news :( ... also because it comes so out of the blue with no message...?

Anyway - if I had a business and yould be in some kind of trouble, I'd make sure that the cry is at least heard ... I'd say?

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3 hours ago, RTP said:

Was not the greatest fan nor the greatest buyer there, but still, this is sad news :( ... also because it comes so out of the blue with no message...?

Anyway - if I had a business and yould be in some kind of trouble, I'd make sure that the cry is at least heard ... I'd say?

Yeah I mean even by creating a simple thread around here or elsewere. Announcing a final clearance sale, could’ve made them a few extra bucks I would think. :) 

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I definitely bought more from Saikosounds but this is still a shame.

I loved the adventure of hitting up dozens of online record shops and finding random releases and hard to find pressings. Those all kinda dried up as Discogs took most traffic and the record store dwindled.

That turn-of-the-century era was something special

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i reckon the $ i spent there from the start would equate 6 figures, was hard to buy cd's here in australia so psyshop was my go to, last time i went on there the shipping went from $5 to $50 during covid, would be interested to find out what happened, kind of sad lots of fond memories

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I must admit, I stopped using Psyshop after that appalling site update. I just couldn't browse it anymore. But yeah, Bandcamp and discogs are one of the reasons behind that. Although they could transfer their shop to Bandcamp and Discogs (like Beatspace did) and still be fine. You have to go with the times I guess.

How many years has it been now? Decades? Anyone remembers Chaos Unlimited? Memories.

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I'm SO bummed about psyshop, I literally pull it up just about every day to check new stuff that's come out. It was a great place to buy CDs since the shipping from germany was crazy low. A while back I transitioned into buying only digital, partly because of bandcamp but definitely in part because of how easy and convenient it was on Psyshop. 

Are there any other psytrance focused digital distro sites like Psyshop? Bandcamp is great of course, but I really loved having a place that was Psy only where you could see all the new releases, charts, etc and search by artist/label/year/etc

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1 hour ago, winterelegy said:

I'm SO bummed about psyshop, I literally pull it up just about every day to check new stuff that's come out. It was a great place to buy CDs since the shipping from germany was crazy low. A while back I transitioned into buying only digital, partly because of bandcamp but definitely in part because of how easy and convenient it was on Psyshop. 

Are there any other psytrance focused digital distro sites like Psyshop? Bandcamp is great of course, but I really loved having a place that was Psy only where you could see all the new releases, charts, etc and search by artist/label/year/etc

Beatport is pretty neat. :) If you haven’t tried it already that is? It’s not 100% psy of course, but certainly a heavy focus on electronic music. Certainly on Techno and Psytrance and related subgenres. And I think it works well in tandem with Bandcamp. Since I tend to find more obscure less known/indie stuff on Bandcamp. And beatport provides all the major labels I would think.

Only downside to Beatport from my experience is that the previews are rather short. On the plus side Beatport is extremely DJ-friendly. It’s really geared towards DJ’s. For Techno I think it’s the biggest platform besides Spotify/Youtube.

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Now this sucks. I used to buy shitloads of CDs back in the day. I made a few orders since covid started but nowadays I mainly use discogs. 

Quote

Are there any other psytrance focused digital distro sites like Psyshop?

There still is goastore.ch, the prices are swiss-like, this means they are rather high. Don't know about the shipping costs for foreign countries. Are you guys sure psyshop is really gone? Maybe the owner just failed to renew the domain name?

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21 hours ago, AstralSphinx said:

Beatport is pretty neat. :) If you haven’t tried it already that is? It’s not 100% psy of course, but certainly a heavy focus on electronic music. Certainly on Techno and Psytrance and related subgenres. And I think it works well in tandem with Bandcamp. Since I tend to find more obscure less known/indie stuff on Bandcamp. And beatport provides all the major labels I would think.

Only downside to Beatport from my experience is that the previews are rather short. On the plus side Beatport is extremely DJ-friendly. It’s really geared towards DJ’s. For Techno I think it’s the biggest platform besides Spotify/Youtube.

Guess I will finally have to make the switch to Beatport. For whatever reason I just really hate how the site looks and find it cumbersome to navigate...I think I've bought like one thing from there ever, many years ago. But they do have way more stuff than Psyshop had

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Surprised and sad.. that was my place to buy tunes. I always found it a bit of a cheek at Beatport to be charged a rather high premium for a .wav file. So you can get the music as the artist intended... i.e. uncompressed quality. (just spotted the goa constrictor feels the same)

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On 10/6/2021 at 1:32 PM, Tatsu said:

Are you guys sure psyshop is really gone? Maybe the owner just failed to renew the domain name?

These also were my thoughts at first ... we at Psynews almost forgot this as well :lol:

But it is gone since several days, so I assume that they should have noticed it by now if it was just the domain or a technical issue ... especially considering that it is a business, they'll probably have a few people out there that would notify them...
... the whois says the domain doesn't expire until 2022-08-20 ... so I'm afraid that it's indeed real. I do not like that there's nothing to be heard or read from them ... facebook site is just closed ... maybe it wasn't even bankruptcy but something else? :huh:

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1 hour ago, RTP said:

These also were my thoughts at first ... we at Psynews almost forgot this as well :lol:

But it is gone since several days, so I assume that they should have noticed it by now if it was just the domain or a technical issue ... especially considering that it is a business, they'll probably have a few people out there that would notify them...
... the whois says the domain doesn't expire until 2022-08-20 ... so I'm afraid that it's indeed real. I do not like that there's nothing to be heard or read from them ... facebook site is just closed ... maybe it wasn't even bankruptcy but something else? :huh:

 

Maybe the trademark for the psyshop brand expired?

https://alter.com/trademarks/psyshop-79014719

There is what I assume is a renewal history at the bottom. And I don’t have the full picture of this brand, but from what I can see there’s been no updates on renewal history since 2015? So unless the brand trademark registration was moved to a similar registration authority in europe for example. (This info on the linked site seems to suggest that the brand was originally registered in the USA?) 

I’m not even sure it’s the same psyshop brand as the store this topic is about. :P  Does any of the names match the one registered on the domain you checked RTP? There could have been a conflict about overseas trademarks or something. Just speculating. :) 

So a question to the people on the forum who runs labels. How does it work out when a big store like this folds or disappears without prior notice. Do they carry inventory of large amounts of vinyls/CD’s that they have not paid for in full yet to the labels? If so could that then be a motivating factor for doing a stealth-exit so to say?

And btw a Psyshop brand could potentially be worth a lot today, certainly with the advent of the legalization of psychedelic mushrooms in some states in the US. I could easily see it be an attractive brand name for a shop selling those kinds of products.

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On 10/6/2021 at 7:29 PM, the goa constrictor said:

The upcharge on beatport for flac/wav has always annoyed me

I feel ya but at the same time, it’s probably one of the reasons Beatport is so big, and other stores have to close down. :P Sometimes the premium price point is what keeps the boat floating. 

I certainly understand it from the point of view of a big business venture like that. They invest a lot in providing a platform with not only music, but interviews and a lot of related stuff. So they must have quite a big work force to maintain operations. ;) 

I think another aspect of it is that since Beatports main focus is to cater to the DJ-segment. I think a lot of DJ’s are willing to pay premium in order to have access to a lot of Beatport exclusive releases. Since it’s such an important thing the DJ’s need for their work. 

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21 hours ago, AstralSphinx said:

I’m not even sure it’s the same psyshop brand as the store this topic is about. :P  Does any of the names match the one registered on the domain you checked RTP? There could have been a conflict about overseas trademarks or something. Just speculating. :) 

The Whois service has all info redacted from that psyshop.com domain, but you don't need to search a lot to get proof that this is indeed the right Psyshop brand -- i.e. the persons behind are the same.

(If you're interested in the proof: it is connected via the "CompactStick" project, this was something exclusive on Psyshop and if you search for info on the people behind it, you will see the same name appear. Here's the german article: https://www.openpr.de/news/255838/Der-perfekte-Musikgenuss-von-Morgen.html )

But what is odd about this case is, that I try to dig around, but find NOTHING;
I have now searched all kinds of stuff concerning this certain Mr. "J. R." ... and there's this adress in Maisach, but also one in Altomünster ... but other than that, the info is really scarce, they have taken down most of the info, such as this one: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jR0tSFH_busJ:www.miz.org/details_31520_71.html+&cd=11&hl=de&ct=clnk&gl=at (yes, Google Cache, because the original is down, feel free to check :) )

... the only thing of _real interest_ that I found is one container shipment recorded by the U.S. Customs, you can see here:

https://www.importgenius.com/importers/geomagnetic-distribution

This is a shipment, that went from "PSYSHOP, BORDAS & ROY GBR HEIMBERGSTR. 11 ALTOMUNSTER 85250 DE" to "GEOMAGNETIC DISTRIBUTION" ... containing "Music compact discs"...

grafik.png

... and this MAY give an idea about an answer that is formulating in my head concerning this remark:

21 hours ago, AstralSphinx said:

So a question to the people on the forum who runs labels. How does it work out when a big store like this folds or disappears without prior notice. Do they carry inventory of large amounts of vinyls/CD’s that they have not paid for in full yet to the labels? If so could that then be a motivating factor for doing a stealth-exit so to say?

I am NOT intending to make any claims or accusations, have no more info than the one I showed, but ... Crazy Theory Time: "can this be a Rug Pull and they sent all the stuff that still had value over to Geomagnetic?" ... there, I asked it. What do you make of this?

Opinions very welcome...

PS: before anybody thinks I am making unjustified accusations ... this here is exactly what happens when you exit business without any word to people ... rumors form out of thin air ... so please: if you have a business and ever plan to exit, do it properly and leave a note :) 

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Hello everyone,

I run the GOAPSYRECORDS label, we were on the psyshop platform, know that we were not warned of anything, all access to psyshop have been blocked without reason, we can no longer upload, and all the tracks we had put on the platform are potentially gone, we have no way to contact them, all links have been deleted.

we are very disappointed in their behavior, psyshop owes us money on digital sales that we will never see I think.

We have been producing trance music for 5 years now, we hope that this story will not have a big impact on the small and fragile labels.


Thank you for continuing to support the independent labels,

Have a nice day

GOAPSYRECORDS Logo 2021.jpg

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