as a musician, when i first began recording myself digitally i found that it really is a new form of radio. i do not want to “own” my files anymore. i do not trust digital storage mediums anymore. i would prefer to upload my material and let anyone use it. by making a code analogy with our music we establish a right to maintain some form of loving relationship with our playback hardware. the netlabel itself is a format. it is a form of macrosample in the world of musical culture. samples by nature are viral, all digitally based musics contains them.

netlabels are a wonderful expression of the culture of format. the love of the medium. when i think of netlabels, i think of how the tracker scene and various now obscure player formats used to be an interface. the internet itself is now an interface.

if you were to create a genre, or collective now, would you first consider that you are already a part of one first? if you did, would you promote the people who inspired you? because when i am on the internet, enjoying music, i am actually also turning into a geek. not only finding out about music but math and science. this is a cybernetic age and the machine does not yet speak the human language.

music is ephemeral and mostly enjoyed yes, for the slice of culture which it gives us. it can transport us.

first of all, i would like to thank you, that you mentioned http://www.phlow-magazine.com - it’s an honour that someone like you have a look on our small magazine :)

i would like to contribute to this discussion:

i am sure, that in the future there will be more and more netlabels - professional. there are a lot of facts. first of all i define a netlabel like…

=> a netlabel is a musiclabel which distributes music through virtual formats (mp3, flac, ogg vorbis,…)

=> a netlabel is not per se a free music label

in the future, more and more old labels will discover, that cd- and vinyl-selling won’t work anymore. thusfar more and more professional netlabels will rise. they will spread their music via beatport, itunes and such mp3 shops.

but more and more musicians will discover, that they have to give their music away for free, because more and more other musicians will do so.

music as data will be only a promotion-tool in the upcoming years.

in my opinion, you only can earn money with limited goods and all culture be it text, video, pictures or music can be transformend into infinite goods like mp3s or other digital formats.

the future of musicians is to do concerts and make promotion via digital free goods to download to drag the people into the club or to visit their concerts.

i believe more and more netlabels will rise and in the next 2-5 years netlabels will hit the mainstream with fantastic productions.

@janko: “I think it’s important to understand netlabels in their musical context - which is mostly electronic music”

=> that was true for a long time, but more and more musicians and netlabels distribute indiemusic (with guitars), hiphop and more and more pop music (have a listen to calendar girl on ccmixter)

i hope you understand my german english ;)

cheers from germany, mo.

The thing about netlabels as the extension of electronica culture, including the offline world like Kompact, is that I think this is too limited a view of net-native music. What Brad Sucks does isn’t electronica. What I and all the other acoustic guitar players posting on YouTube do isn’t electronica.

Not sure where I’m going with this, except I guess just to say that this issue of electronica as the indigenous music of the internet has been stuck in my head for a while.

find #1: http://www.zshare.net/audio/14816337d6da400e/

find #2: http://disquiet.com/2008/07/07/remixed-78-rpm-mp3s-from-alan-morse-davies/

For an example of his perspective, what other non-musician talks about *music in forums*: “The forums at cratekings.com continue to be a great place to dig for excellent electronic music in the form of beat-heavy, sample-based solo work.”

P.S. Formatting in the comments is messed up since I moved my blog over to the new home. You might need to do html link breaks. Here’s a test of a BR:
did it work?

Yet I agree entirely that internet release in general, and netlabel releases in particular, lend themselves to collectives and other voluntary groupings. To some extent, CCmixter can function that way. I’d love to see “schools” and “salons” and “collectives” and “movements” arise, because in each of those models there’s the sense of a group interest around a defined goal–which is a cool, non-annoying form of branding.

Labels that work really well are analogous to collectives. Ninja Tune, Wax Trax, Cleopatra, Ed Banger, Elephant 6 — what makes (or made) these labels/collectives valuable to me is that they essentially are a genre. So there’s built-in crossover that happens just by being an Ed Banger artist or an Elephant 6 artist. Fans who like artists under the umbrella will check out other artists due to the endorsement of being included.

Does anyone get a Warner Brothers album and go “wow, I gotta check out more of these Warner Brothers artists”?

To me a collective can be greater than the sum of its parts. And there’s no reason why the collective couldn’t hire the same PR/distribution folks that the labels do.

If I were going to leverage a collective off of Brad Sucks, I’d stick to other artists and bands I thought Brad Sucks fans might enjoy (not necessarily 100% the same, but in the neighborhood) and that way you can have a nice rotating bunch of entertainment for fans. When I’m (as Brad Sucks) agonizing over a new album for three years, there can be other artists in a similar vein for people to enjoy and benefit from me being a slacker. And vice-versa.

It seems unrealistic to think that one artist or band will be able to organically sustain a tremendous amount of interest over long bouts of inactivity. I think a collective would distribute it out among many different artists and potentially pool more resources and bring in a lot more money than one artist on their own could.

That was a long reply.

Brad, you’ve done a great deal to spread your music through your own efforts–and it’s been very impressive to see. I think it’s true, as Lucas mentions, that your work is “net-native” rather than “netlabel”–and that alternative has been perfectly workable for you.

I think that perhaps “netlabel” and “collective” are old ways of thinking, and that viral music spread will evolve ways of thinking about releasing music which move beyond either idea.
Tags, links, mutual friends, shared music, social networks–a whole set of tools, and software and websites that aid in their management may be the true tools needed when it all shakes out.

An issue in the back of my mind is the difference between net-native music, which includes yours, and netlabels, which have roots in the old demo scene and which are a different thing.

I’ve been finding lately that old timey acoustic guitar players on YouTube get clumped together by the site’s recommendations, shared keywords, subscriptions to one another, mutual subscribers, and links in comments. I consciously cultivated those relations after the threads here a couple months ago about labels as collectives, and it did yield some