Interviewer: So I'm really, really incredibly proud and honored to be sitting next to Andy Allen. Andy and I got to know each other, surprisingly must have been 10-12 years ago, maybe more, when I had first started my very fir – I had just started my very first label. And Andy was one of the few people in the distribution business who would return my calls when no one else would, and was kind enough to meet with me, and did not give me a distribution deal. Broke my heart, but as it worked out things went okay for me, and Andy and I managed to stay in touch. I have long admired the company that he has built, the company that he runs, which is ADA, which stands for Alternative Distribution Alliance. I think it's the best distributor out there. I'm not alone in that thought, as I'll read you some statistics of the artists that are currently being distributed by ADA.

Of the top 15 records at Newbury Comics, which is, I don't know, one of the preeminent independent accounts, this week ADA has 8 of them. It's shear dominance really. Artists like Bright Eyes, The Shins, Arcade Fire, Interpol – do you have The Streets?

Andy Allen: Streets.

Interviewer: So it's really an incredible assortment of music that Andy works with. To give you a bit of a background it's been in existence for more than 10 years, and it has fulfilled the promise for a variety of top independent labels, including: Sub Pop, Beggars Banquet, Touch and Go, Matador, Side One Dummy, Epitaph, worked with artists like Liz Phair and Nirvana, local heroes Better Than Ezra, Sixpence None the Richer, Death Cab for Cutie, Tom Waite, Elliott Smith, The Postal Service. So it's a wonderful pleasure to have Andy Allen here, and we're gonna learn a lot tonight I think. Andy Allen.

I'd like to ask Andy a few questions, and hopefully this will be kind of conversational and then, obviously open up the floor for you all with questions, so please do be thinking. Would you mind giving a little bit of your background? How did you find your way into the position that you current are –?

Andy Allen: Well, I guess if you go all the way back I was initially interested in broadcasting, and started by doing a private radio station. St. Louis, Missouri wasn't a lot of things happening at that point. You have to go back to that time period, FM actually was just beginning. We had AM radio stations, and they were basically all Top 40 and nothing was happening, so, you know, you had to – it's not much different actually than webcasting no really. You know, either you did it on your own or you came up with small groups of people that were likeminded and you did things.

So I started in broadcasting. I went to a small community college out of St. Louis called Florissant Valley Community College, and they had a 10-watt FM radio station there, and it was kind of freeform at that point, so I started working at the radio station and met some people, and ultimately ended up pursing a commercial broadcasting thing. There was – at that time there were very few FM progressive rock stations, but there were several, and one of them was in St. Louis, and it was KSHE in St. Louis. That group of stations were kind of like KSHE and ABX in Detroit, and WNEW in New York, and KSAN in – I think that was LA or San Francisco, but there was a handful. There was, like, 8 or 9 throughout the country, and there were big FM stations in St. Louis. It was 100,000-watts. It was heard in 3, 4, and 5 states.

So I went to school. Did the broadcast thing at school. Went into commercial broadcasting. Didn't have anything to do during the day, started working at a record store. Ended up managing that store. Kind of did the radio station thing on the weekends. Was hired by RCA to do sales. Did sales for a couple of years. Was hired by RCA to do promotion – radio promotion. Did that for seven years. They moved me to New York to do national promotion, so I spent 10 years with RCA. At that time I moved over to one of the largest independents at the time, which was Island Records, and the first project I worked was Addicted to Love, Robert Palmer, and the second project I worked was Joshua Tree – U2's Joshua Tree. And had a wonderful time, and probably learned more about the business in that period of time, which was about 10 years also.

And then left Island to come to ADA, and I've been at ADA for about 11 years, and the thing that intrigued me about ADA, actually, Island at the time that I was there, seven years it was an independent company, and then the last three years Chris Blackwell, who I think has been here before as well, had sold the company to Polygram at that time. And it, as things do when you sell, it had changed fairly dramatically, and I was looking for an opportunity to work kind of again with independents, and ADA is primarily a distributor of independent labels. I found kind of a comfort level and have been there ever since.

Interviewer: Still enjoying it.

Andy Allen: It's really – I don't know. If you talk to somebody who's a music business professional, I suppose, I don't know that you'd find anybody that's having a great deal of fun over these last couple of years, but I have to say we're having a ball.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Andy Allen: And most of that is driven because we're working with independent labels that don't have something to protect. It's all opportunity to them. They're having a great time. They're being able to reach an audience that, until recently, was hard for them to reach, and they're enjoying it, and we like kind of acting as aggregating kind of all these underdogs. And it's wonderful, for example, to see Bright Eyes debut with, you know – doing a very unconventional thing, which is to put out two records in the same week, vastly different records, and have it debut at 5 on the Billboard chart, and I think 10 or 1 and 15, or whatever it would be. But for Bright Eyes to debut in the top 200 in Billboard is spectacular, and I think it speaks a lot to what's happening with independent music now.
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