Netlabel? What’s a Netlabel?

I would like to kick off a series of posts regarding some thoughts I’ve had on future of the music industry by getting our terminology straight.

I chose to found Rock Proper as an Online Music Distributor but most people would describe what we do as a Netlabel. Others might describe Rock Proper as a Web Label or Mp3 Label. Call it what you may, the reality is that people have been sharing music / art online for a while now. The roots of this type of distribution can be traced back to the demoscene when people started making art and music on their Commodore 64s.

When I was a young boy, I wanted to play video games. After a few rants about this desire, my uncle donated a broken Tandy computer to the cause. Then, my folks bought me a book on how to write code and create my own video games, which I did in a musty unfinished basement. My most complicated game was a dice program that generated random numbers and it held my friends attention for less than .5 seconds. The sad part of this story is that there was no hard drive on this computer and the diskette drive was busted, so (sigh) I had to rewrite the games every time the computer was shut down.

Now, if I had stuck with it, I probably would have gotten into creating graphics and sound and animation and all the other cool aspects that make video games compelling (more so than say… a couple of random green numbers appearing on a dusty black monitor). If I had kept going I probably would have stumbled into the demoscene which is made up of folks creating computer art. These were some of the first people to make and share their artwork in a digital format and the pioneers of what we now refer to as a netlabel.

Because the distribution method is strictly electronic, it just makes sense the most of the netlabels around these days cater to electronic music. This, however, is rapidly changing due to the state of the current music industry. The fact that many independent labels and record distributors are closing their doors has not curbed the desire for great new music one bit.

There are more people creating and enjoying music now than ever before, in my future posts we’ll take a look at how Rock Proper and other netlabels are trying to directly connect those musicians and listeners.

I’d like to thinks of these posts as the beginning of a conversation, please add any thoughts in the comments below.