Robert Simonds

American distributor, record label executive, founder of East Side, Inc. and its Nordic roots imprint NorthSide, and founding partner of Rykodisc. Simonds started his career by working in record stores starting in the 1970s. In the early 1980s, he started his own wholesale distribution company which imported vinyl records from Japan. Soon after, he started importing CDs from Japan and Europe, which was so successful that in 1983 he became the United States' first CD-exclusive distributor, East Side Digital. In 1984, as a way to give his distribution company proprietary product, he and two partners started a record label called Rykodisc. In the 1990s, as his responsibilities at Rykodisc expanded, he hired a label manager to run ESD and stepped away from it. By 1995, he was looking for a way to get out from Rykodisc, and decided to regroup ESD and start a sister label, NorthSide. NorthSide's most successful years were in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and by 2012, the label had reduced to a single band, Väsen. In the fall of 2022, Väsen made an announcement that Simonds had decided to retire from the record business.