Revibed Isn't Digging

Revibed has been selling digital files of rare vinyl, cassettes and CDs since March 2024. Vicious Magazine, writing up the charge, described the model. People put money in. The company obtains a physical copy, digitises it, sends the file to the people who paid, and then offers it in the shop. The pitch is that rare recordings would otherwise disappear. The objection, from artists and from labels, is that the people who own the masters were not asked.

The company’s own terms call it an intermediary for the purchase, digitisation and resale of rare recordings, and they tell the buyer the file is for personal listening. The same terms say the mission respects authors and the owners of masters. Vicious reported a narrower admission. Revibed has an arrangement with SABAM, the Belgian collecting society, covering publishing royalties. It does not hold licences for the master rights, which are the rights you need in order to copy a recording and sell the copy. Copyright specialists quoted there said that copying and selling a recording without the master owner’s consent is an infringement, whether or not the record is rare or out of print. Co-founder Anton Khodos told Vicious the company tries to operate as legally as it can, and that fewer than five percent of the artists they reach object. Producers told the magazine they had never been contacted, and that listings came down only after a complaint. Catalogues of dead artists were up without their estates being told.

Terre Thaemlitz put a name on the version of this that happened to him. On his own site he writes that he found Revibed selling Soulnessless EP 1, the K-S.H.E remixes of Rosary Novena for Gender Transitioning, and Institutional Collaborative, the album he made with Jane Dowe. He sent a takedown on 4 April 2024. Artist Support replied the next day and confirmed the files were down. Weeks later Dries Nys, writing as Artist and Label Relations, asked after the rights holders of the old Mille Plateaux label, including the album Thaemlitz had just forced off the site. On 2 May 2024 Thaemlitz refused, in writing, to have any of his work carried by them. He told Nys that the standard Mille Plateaux contract returned the rights to the artists after a term, and that those contracts were for physical formats. He had already had to ask once. The second letter arrived because they were still looking for someone to bless a record they had been selling.

Khodos told Vicious the project sits in a legal grey zone left by the move off physical formats, and that the company tries to be as transparent as it can. Thaemlitz, writing on 2 May 2024, quoted the shop’s description of itself: a Belgium-based start-up for older music that usually had no digital edition, promising reissues on demand to people who could not afford the vinyl. He had assumed, until Artist Support wrote back, that the site was not a functioning company. The second letter corrected that. He set the letter against an older injury. From 2003 to 2009, he writes, iTunes, Juno Download and other large download shops sold his Mille Plateaux catalogue without permission or payment, and in 2010 Beatport did it again. A request to carry a record, arriving after a takedown of that same record, was a small copy of a pattern he already had dates for.

Resident Advisor published the charge on 22 December 2025. Michael Lawson’s piece is headlined as an accusation: an online store selling unlicensed vinyl rips without clearing the master rights. Vicious ran its own report the same day, and said the shop was still trading while the removal requests kept arriving. That headline is the sentence the shop’s language is built to blur. A digger buys a record, or does not, and lives with the price. A company that rips the record and puts a checkout on the rip is running a shop. The people who pressed the music, and the people who inherited it, are the ones who get to say whether the file exists. Thaemlitz said no. The letter is dated. The listings had already been live.

Sources

• Resident Advisor, Michael Lawson, 22 December 2025: Revibed accused of selling unlicensed vinyl rips without clearing master rights.
• Terre Thaemlitz, 2024: the Soulnessless and Institutional Collaborative listings, the 4 April takedown, Dries Nys, the 2 May refusal.
• Vicious Magazine: Revibed since March 2024, the crowdfunded rips, Anton Khodos, SABAM, and the missing master licences.
• Revibed terms of use: the company describes itself as an intermediary digitising rare vinyl, CD and cassette.