Read: Non-Rapper Dudes: DJ Pizzo Interview
Did you introduce the pre-order packages as a response to competition from Sandbox Automatic?
Competition with Sandbox was super-tight. It got ugly at times – on both sides. [laughs] They started it with the autographed posters and we were like, ‘We can do something cooler than that.’ I had a guy who worked for me named S-Boogie, and he was close with Egon at Stones Throw. They had a relationship that was built on trading records, like 45s and that sort of thing, so he went to LA and somehow came the idea to do a Yesterday’s New Quintet 7″ for ‘Rocket Love.’ We knew we were stomping on sacred ground a little bit, because Sandbox was hosting Stones Throw’s website and we had gotten this exclusive deal with Stones Throw. [laughs] Looking back, it was definitely a conflict of interest. That was when we upped the ante of what a free promo item could be, and that changed everything. We realised it was really cheap to press 45s, so we could factor the cost into the price of the promo package. The 7″s were really the premium promo items. We did CDs, mixtapes, t-shirts, but the 7″ was really the cutting edge one, because those things are still valuable today. A lot of them had runs of only five hundred copies.
