A decade ago, at the age of 15, James Batsford and Sam Gilbert met at a Crystal Castles gig in London and immediately bonded over a shared love for music -- particularly vinyl, an appreciation they say their dads fostered at a young age. Now, 10 years later, the two have become business partners, having co-founded the first vinyl-only hip-hop label: Omertà Inc.
Launched in January of this year, Omertà's aim is to reunite hip-hop with its roots by making both mixtapes and albums that have never been released on vinyl available in their beloved format. The commodity’s resurgence over the past decade -- although incremental, vinyl sales have increased year-over-year since the mid-2000s -- allowed Omertà Inc. to go from an idea to a reality. "There’s a market for [vinyl] now," Gilbert tells Billboard. And now that Omertà is here, he and Batsford are laser-focused on their mission.
Year after year, the market for vinyl has become increasingly inviting -- in 2016, vinyl sales were up another 10 percent over 2015, according to Nielsen Music -- the format still only made up 6.5 percent of total albums sold. But Gilbert, 26, and Batsford, 25, are confident that combining previously-unreleased vinyl editions of rap albums along with mixtapes -- a previously-unprecedented venture -- is a strong enough selling point to succeed, despite how slim a slice vinyl sales are compared to the rest of the pie.
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To start, Omertà limits itself to a low-stakes release strategy of two albums per month, typically pairing a newer mixtape from an independent artist with a record from a major label. The first two releases -- Future's 2012 debut album Pluto and G Perico's 2016 debut mixtape Shit Don’t Stop, which arrived on Feb. 24 -- set the tone for what to expect; those were followed by Cousin Stizz’s tape Suffolk County -- which cost nearly $4,000 to produce and became Omerta’s first record to sell out -- and Three 6 Mafia's 2005 release Most Known Unknown in March; and, now, Murda Beatz's Keep God First, out May 26, and T.I.'s 2001 Arista debut I’m Serious, which will be made available on April 22 as a Record Store Day exclusive (Omertà's first and only release to not be sold through their online store).
Securing the rights, however, has been a multi-step process. Gaining access and approval from independent artists has been easy so far, Batsford and Gilbert explain; for Perico's project, they simply emailed a contact from his Instagram account and heard back from his manager within hours. Major label releases work differently, however.
Both co-founders have worked in the industry for the past few years -- Batsford has been at Domino Records for three years, primarily within the realm of direct-to-consumer sales; Gilbert works at an indie store in London -- along the way developing a relationship with Sony, which led to a meeting with the major's U.K. licensing department. "They asked us to submit a list of five titles to start off with," Batsford explains. "Hip-hop catalogs are known to be the hardest to license, and the first few batches we submitted did get denied. But we kept trying."
