These days - when everyone who owns a guitar also has a record label – its tempting to ponder on the question: “which ones are the record labels and which ones are artist labels?”.
Most are a bit of both. When I say “most”, I really mean that the majority are artist labels that are set up to get the tracks out there in the world. Get them up in cyber space and let them float around there. They can then rest assured that they made at least one artist happy. The guy who made them. The tracks I mean…. can rest assured…eh.. okay, never mind – too complicated.
The rest of them are more common record labels who release more than one artist, and put more
of an effort into promote and less effort on producing themselves – maybe they dont even write and produce. Maybe they are “real” labels that release electronic, hiphop, downbeat, chill out, dancehall, dub or whatever genre they choose.
The question is if the artist labels are really record labels. They are ofcourse, somehow. But not in the oldfashioned way.
Many of them are owned by the artists who also contribute with the content. This is the new way.
Bottomline is there are 2000 registered record labels in the city where I live – Copenhagen – thats a lot. And probably – as I said – most of them are artist labels. Not probably – they are artist labels.
You need to set up a label yourself if you are tired of dealing with the dinosaurs and their crooked ideas about music and how to sell without the artist getting payed.
But this is great most people would say – that everyone is free from the big multinationals huge influence on artistic output. This is true to some intent. Everyone who has good quality music and wants to put the labour in it, can probably sell their downloads to some extent. Maybe not enough to get rich, but maybe enough to get enough encouragement to continue making music.
And this is maybe one of the most important aspects of all this. This new business model for artists really encourage grass root work, and this is very much the idea and basics of what music and art should all be about. It should all center around the content, the interaction between people who experiences the artistic products and it should – at best – be as small scale as possible – that is, the distance between the artist and the audience should be as little as possible.
Maybe this is what this new web 2 business model is good at in terms of artistic products. Its easier to get to see who the artist really is, because the interaction is much easier these days.
Communication is easier. The generel artistic level of music released is probably lower than 10 years ago.
Ganga – Downbeat / Chill Out Music
http://www.ganga.dk
http://www.flincmusic.com
http://www.myspace.com/gangalounge
http://www.youtube.com/gangalounge
http://www.last.fm/music/Ganga
http://www.ilike.com/artist/Ganga
http://www.gangamusic.info
http://www.bandbase.dk/ganga
http://www.reverbnation.com/ganga