According to New Media Age ecommerce provider and marketing agency Trinity Street has ceased trading. How many more service providers too the recorded music business are there going to be left in the UK? First we had pinnacle, then EUK followed by ZAVVI all going down the toilet.
Clients affected by Trinity Street’s closure include; Ministry of Sound, Oasis and Razorlight amongst others. Each website has had its retail store closed down. The effect of this on sales to Ministry of Sound or the aforementioned artists affected is unknown. Due to the high level nature of said artists and label the loss in sales could be large. The key issue here will be how quickly each affected party is able to find a new partner to handle ecommerce and billing.
When we tried we could not get any of the aforementioned websites to work
from TMVs office bunker. Albeit Trinity Street’s website seemed to be working fine and dandy…and still with the hide to be pushing its D2C managed services! TMV hope other clients listed on the marketing agencies website including; BBC radio, BBC radio 2, Snow Patrol, Invisible Noise, Artic Monkeys, XFM and many other large industry names are not caught out.
What is interesting to note is the following quote provided by a source at the company stating, “Everything was going really well and we were on the cusp of some exciting things. But in this current climate our venture capitalists, Ingenious Media, couldn’t afford it.” Is this just a case of receiver of VC funds placing the blame squarely at the foot of its key backer or is it something that goes deeper.
We at TMV have to state that if it is indeed something deeper, then any other music related companies with funding associated with Ingenious Media may want to watch there hides. TMVs research has uncovered the following music companies being funded by Ingenious Media; Cream (Creamfields festival), Stage Three Music and Outside Line (specialist digital PR and marketing agency).
However, could it be that the business was not managed well or indeed that revenues were not meeting projections? Either way it is sad to see another respected music entity go by the way side. Reinforcing this is the fact 50 employees no longer have jobs, adding to the UKs ever increasing line of jobless.
Regardless of this according to an Ingenious Media spokesperson TMV spoke with “It is defamatory rubbish to suggest, as an unnamed source in New Media Age, that Ingenious cannot ‘afford’ to sustain its investments. The fact is that Trinity Street was in a mess. We only recently unearthed the full measure of it. For all the usual reasons we cannot say more at this stage, but you can be certain that this sad case has no relevance whatsoever to our other investments”. So there you have it from the ingenious Media’s side. On a personal note I myself had heard whispers of problems at Trinity Street as far back as October 2008.
If all of the other companies noted above are similarly caught up in not having there digital store fronts live to consumers then the costs to the UK Music industry are likely to run into the millions. The domino effect (pun intended) could lead to further job loses. Finishing on a positive note there are numerous UK based companies who help the affected companies pick up the pieces including 7Digital and recordstore.co.uk just to name a couple.
