Whip-Smart in the Real World
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Whip-Smart isn’t a flop–Matador Records owner Gerald Cosloy notes that the record has a SoundScan count of more than 170,000, which is probably low considering the record’s strength in non-SoundScanned alternative record stores. “It’s doing about as well as we thought it would,” he said. But the famously bad-mannered Cosloy and his uncompromising label are no longer loose cannons: Whip-Smart was one of the first experiments in a joint venture between Matador and major Atlantic. (Atlantic pays for the label’s day-to-day operations and splits the profits; in return, certain Matador bands can take advantage of Atlantic’s superior distribution lines. Phair falls somewhere in between: she has an idiosyncratic long-term worldwide deal with Atlantic and Matador jointly.)
It could be that Whip-Smart has run up against a hard fact of the record industry: there are basically only two things that sell a lot of records. One of them is touring, and Phair scotched a planned fall outing.
