You’ve probably read all about the London riots already (and forgive me if you’ve read this  somewhere else because it’s been making the rounds in the news), but one of the repercussions has been the burning and destruction of the PIAS (otherwise known as Play It Again Sam) Distribution Warehouse in Enfield, an area with pronounced looting and damage.

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Most importantly and unfortunately, the warehouse was the three floored home to the UK’s sole distributor for independent record labels.  The extent of the damage to the warehouse is still not known, but it’s estimated that this was the largest destruction of vinyl records ever, and it looks like there was a total of 25 million discs destroyed.  There could be far-reaching impacts not only to independent music artists and record labels in the UK, but also around the world.

Here’s a link to some of record labels affected by the warehouse fire (Images come from Boomkat).

Here’s a post from Tom Ewing’s blog on one specific event during the riots and how social media transforms how news is transmitted to the masses.

Updated post from Warp Records here: Unfortunately some releases may never be available physically again.