setting up a digital label

[Dave Elyzium]

how do you go about this??? is it a case of punting your material to online stores and they give the ok to go?? can anyone advise on whats involved with setting up shop?

[judas_beast]

Theres some good info on the SOS forums, I forget which one. Be interested to know what you find out though.

[Miromiric]

i dont know, send your music to juno, beatport etc and ask if they want to distribute it, but it is kinda gay/futile to charge for net releases, profits are miserable.
chekc this http://www.archive.org/details/audio

you can copyright your material, host it and all for free.

[ERROR404]

i don't like the bit where it says you allow people to copy and distribute your music as long as they give you credit - surely that means someone can just sell your music as long as they put your name on it?? How does it work in that respect?

[Miromiric]

it means, they can distribute it and copy it as long as it is not commercial. if they want to sell it they need your clearance.

[ERROR404]

ah ok :)

didn't know about this - cheers for the tip-off guvna

[Dave Elyzium]

im not doing it for money or tryign to act gay or futile. the way i see it is i buy mp3's myself from junodigital and similar stores and they must attract a fair amount fo traffic and so i coudl get my music to more poeple with a site liek that than i could offering it for free on my own.

[Jay Pace]

Your problem is driving traffick to your site

Juno achieves it because they have a long established store, and they are just adding another product to their offering.

Your site will be unknown, you have no established offering and unless you spend a load on advertising or you can think of a powerful draw to your site your product, even if free, will go unnoticed.

Best align yourselves with similar netlabels or sites to start with, then go it alone when you have sufficient reputation or draw to bring people direct to your content.

[kai]

im not doing it for money or tryign to act gay or futile. the way i see it is i buy mp3's myself from junodigital and similar stores and they must attract a fair amount fo traffic and so i coudl get my music to more poeple with a site liek that than i could offering it for free on my own.


Excatly the route I plan to go down with the stuff I'm producing at the moment - just set up a free download site to get the music out to as many people as possible and promote it through the forums etc. Gonna be a while before I'm ready as will want to have a fair few tracks ready first to start with.


However once I'm ready - hopefully in next 12 months - would be up for doing some kind of link-up of sites with others who are thinking along the same line, or else all work together at set-up one central site for all of us to host our tracks on. ;)

[Miromiric]

check archive.org page then. a community of net labels, all genres - electronic and acoustic music.

[judas_beast]

myspace might be most gay, but its a good way of getting people to know about ya music, I usually end up with 65-80 listens a day, and its getting more. Once you got people who know about you, albeit on a limited scale, you're more likely to get people prepared to shell out 99p or whatever for an mp3.

[kai]

Yeah - good point matey - def the way forward to put it out there free to build a rep before thinking about charging and can see MySpace being most useful that way.

[eyeswithoutaface]

ive met some of my best friends and contacts label wise through myspace, gotten commercial radio play via meeting up with people via myspace, ive had requests for ep's via myspace. There is the annoying side of myspace as there is with most services that are so popular

wheat, chaff etc etc

[Dustin Zahn]

i dont know, send your music to juno, beatport etc and ask if they want to distribute it, but it is kinda gay/futile to charge for net releases, profits are miserable.
chekc this http://www.archive.org/details/audio

you can copyright your material, host it and all for free.

Profits for mp3 sales aren't all that bad. It depends which sites you're on and what kind of music you're selling. There are MP3 distributors now who will handle 100+ online stores for you at the cost of around 10-15% of your profits. Even if you do mediocre sales, the 250 euros every few months is better than nothing. I'm all for free music and not so much for going digital, but having the artistic freedom and not risking thousands of dollars on 20 minutes of music is extremely inviting.

[Miromiric]

¸which distributors
?

[judas_beast]

i dont know, send your music to juno, beatport etc and ask if they want to distribute it, but it is kinda gay/futile to charge for net releases, profits are miserable.
chekc this http://www.archive.org/details/audio

you can copyright your material, host it and all for free.

Profits for mp3 sales aren't all that bad. It depends which sites you're on and what kind of music you're selling. There are MP3 distributors now who will handle 100+ online stores for you at the cost of around 10-15% of your profits. Even if you do mediocre sales, the 250 euros every few months is better than nothing. I'm all for free music and not so much for going digital, but having the artistic freedom and not risking thousands of dollars on 20 minutes of music is extremely inviting. Do tell.

[Dustin Zahn]

http://www.epm-musiconline.com/index.php
There's one to start. A buddy of mine knows of some more that he told me about. I will get the links for him. The digital thing hasn't really been for me so far so I haven't looked into digital distribution much. There are plenty of middlemen popping up out there though, so keep your eyes peeled.

[electoad]

hmmm - i like to think labels are kinda like a quality control - if anyone can try to sell any old crap on the net - wont it make it harder to sift through the masses of shit(hard enough WITH labels)??? Maybe I just dont understand the process - any clues on quality control???

[Dustin Zahn]

Every site will have different takes on how to handle quality control. Beatport is pretty extreme at times. I was rejected 3 times before getting in, and there are labels bigger than mine who said they were rejected too. So they do reject a lot of crap but at the same time if you look at Beatport you'll see there is a ton of "sh!t" on there as well.

[judas_beast]

Very interesting. (said in a German voice.)

[Komplex]

Every site will have different takes on how to handle quality control. Beatport is pretty extreme at times. I was rejected 3 times before getting in, and there are labels bigger than mine who said they were rejected too. So they do reject a lot of crap but at the same time if you look at Beatport you'll see there is a ton of "sh!t" on there as well.

the guys at beatport are useless to deal with... they probably rejected you cus they couldn't be arsed filling out forms or doing some work...