KASSEM IS HIS company’s official hype man, announcing each reissue campaign with excited but unfancy YouTube videos, grinning and nodding his head while flipping through LPs, as if he were savoring a Louisiana étouffée.
And it works. Since 2021, the company has sold more than 35,000 copies of Miles Davis’s 1959 landmark “Kind of Blue,” in boxed sets that went for $100 and $150. That success gave Kassem the idea for what he titled “Birth of the Blue”: four tracks that Davis recorded with the same players a year prior, which had been anthologized before but never given the full LP treatment. Kassem licensed the music from Sony — where Davis is a flagship catalog artist — and it immediately started flying off his warehouse shelves.
Next up is Bob Marley, whose catalog will be reissued by Analogue Productions in deluxe editions, after a deal with the Marley estate. “We got stuff coming that’s going to frost some people’s cookies,” Kassem touted.
Acoustic Sounds is one of a handful of specialty reissue labels that cater to discerning, deep-pocketed customers. It’s a small, competitive market in which versions of the same titles can be issued in succession, so each company’s process and marketing are paramount. One label, the Electric Recording Co., in London, specializes in low-run, artisan simulacra of old jazz and classical releases — down to letterpress-printed covers — that it sells for $500 or more.
Kassem takes diplomatic but pointed aim at Mobile Fidelity, or MoFi, his most formidable direct competitor. In the 1970s and ’80s, it was a pioneer of high-end reissues, laying much of the groundwork followed by later entrepreneurs like Kassem, whose early days as a collector-dealer were spent hunting down MoFi titles (and reselling his duplicates). But in 2022, the company was exposed for using an undisclosed digital step in what it had promoted as an all-analog process. The audiophile community exploded — many, many angry YouTube videos were made — and Mobile Fidelity settled a class-action lawsuit with customers the following year.
“They do things differently than we do,” Kassem said. “They believe that mastering from a digital copy is as good as mastering from the original master. How can a copy be better than the original?”
