Musictrade netlabel has now uploaded their entire catalog on Fairtilizer and embedded various players on their artists websites. Sampler playlist + bonus interview below:

It’s a difficult time for the music industry: how do you see the future of it?
To be more precise, it is a difficult time for the section of music industry that has based its business model on multiplication and sale of CDs. Other sections of music industry are doing very well it seems, and more music than ever is produced. Madonna just attracted 80,000 people into her Helsinki concert making millions in one night, and the whole live music scene all around the world appears to be vital and profitable for artists. As for the old CD selling industry, its main product is already living on borrowed time and the whole concept of per item pricing is getting obsolete. Nobody can afford to pay euro per track to fill a 32 gigabyte mp3 player, so music has to be provided either as free or as an eat-all-you-can type service. If it is not affordable to the masses the masses will take it from where it is affordable. The old CD selling corporations – the Big Music – either understand this in time and adapt – or they will suffer and possibly bankrupt. It is really up to them. Should they fail in the adaptation, there will always be better businessmen with better business models and more innovative services to take their place as commercial distributors. This has already happened to some degree: computer maker Apple and online bookshop Amazon rule the mp3 sales market and concert promoters like Live Nation make multimillion record deals directly with their touring artists. Some old middlemen are simply not needed anymore.

How do you use & see the web today, how do you see it evolving in the coming years?
The web (or more broadly, the net) today is a fantastic tool for any artist or artist community.We use it in the first place to keep together our artist community in daily socializing, in the exchange of ideas and songs for peer reviewing, and in the production process itself, including instrumental material contributions, mastering, artwork and so on. For this purpose we use p2p software WASTE, which provides us the necessary chat and file sharing/transfer functions in a neat protected environment. Outside this creative community we have various distribution channels for the release-ready music: our website, p2p networks and the social music sites. BitTorrent channels are good for mass distribution, especially for the large 24-bit audiophile editions, some of which are over a gigabyte in size (we have distributed over 300.000 torrents via Mininova’s featured Content Distribution). Social music sites like Fairtilizer with mp3 hosting and social networking services serve us well as sources of listener feedback, as promotion channels and as artist-audience relation building environments.

The evolution of the net technology itself and the evolution of the services built on it is very very rapid, and the landscape is changing all the time. This is a time of great possibilities both for the culture and its makers and for the culture related businesses.

What would be your dream online music service?
This is perhaps easiest to answer by pointing out what the various services have got right so far. Fairtilizer’s mp3 hosting environment is almost perfect, everything from uploading to playlisting to embedding works easily, and at the metadata level the songs, the artists and the labels are linked perfectly to each other. I like it very much. From our point of view it lacks support for FLAC and artwork distribution, which we presently manage through BitTorrent and sites like Internet Archive. FLAC distribution is very important for us as we love good sound and want to provide production quality masters of our releases to our quality conscious customers. Socially I think thesixtyone has the most advanced (or at least the most attractive) environment at the moment, and Last.fm is quite good too. Thesixtyone manages to connect listener groups and artists into the same exciting game of music discovery, mutual communication and competition for community attention. They also keep all their services free for both artists and listeners which I think is definitely a wise approach. Others try same kind of social gaming or competition approaches but are less successful in their outcome. For example, any services where artists have to pay something to get full community exposure or a full social toolbox are non-attractive for the entire free music scene. At the same time that scene is way too important to be neglected, as it already produces more music than the commercial scene, and more and more people are finding its offerings more fresh and interesting than the calculated and artistically compromised commercial scene output.

Servicing promos: digital or physical?
We haven’t really gone into the business of promo distribution at all. I myself have sent a few CDRs to a representative of the Finnish national radio and also got airplay for them but mostly we feel we are already reaching our target audiences through the net. The net is both the promotion and the distribution channel, and whenever we have a new work ready, we can instantly release it for the whole world and promote it on our own.

How much money you could save by using more digital in ur day to day operations ?
For us as a netlabel everything is digital already, and everything we do we do using free services. This fabulous new environment enables us to run a ‘virtual label’ which produces and distributes recordings just like a commercial label does but excludes money and matter from the equation altgether. What is left, is just art and digital information, which is precisely what we want. Musictrade started off as a small and social filesharing community between lovers of electronic and ambient music, and there was a period of five years or so when the community served us all to expand and refine our musical tastes via peer recommendations and sharing. It was a sort of high shool of electronic music for us. Then time became ripe for us to start making music seriously on our own, and since then the productive aspect has more and more dominated our community life. I am sure there are many similar stories in the free music scene. This is one of the things that have happened behind the commercial scenes and under the radar of the media during the last then years, and the result can be seen in today’s hugely active and increasingly interesting free music scene.

You have some buzz in an emerging country but no way to monetize it, would you give away ur music for free to keep growing it?
We are not trying to to monetize our music currently at all. This does not mean that we would be anti-commercial, rather the contrary. We just leave the question of our own monetizing aside for the moment for now and focus exclusively on the creation of art and the quality of it. We however encourage with our Creative Commons licensing any interested parties to use our music in their own creative work and also to utilize it commercially. In exchange we expect to get visibility and new interested listeners. If a record shop owner would like to print and cell CDs from made from my FLAC masters, I will welcome and encourage him to do so. He can keep all the money, and I can even provide customized cover artwork if he asks nicely. Same with social music services. Free quality music is our contribution to the deal: we will be just glad if the website manages to monetize that somehow while providing us free hosting and distribution and thereby a section of the global audience. We know that web development, bandwitdh and storage all cost money, so there has to be some monetizing going on for the party that handles that task in the infrastructure.

How do you deal with / prevent / use an (un)official leak?
For us leaks are not a problem at all as we don’t play with artificial scarcity of our product. As soon as we are artistically and technically happy with a new release, we will put it out to the world and try to maximize its distribution. The Pirate Bay has never been a threat to us but just a useful service among others.

Could you you tell us what is the most important source of income today ?
Some of us make our living from businesses (unrelated to music), some of us are students on various fields, some have daytime jobs. We’re just a mixed group of normal people. The factor that ties us together is a serious love of music and some background for making it. For example I myself have worked in my ‘previous life’ as a studio professional, both in studio design and service and in recording / sound engineering, plus I have done songwriting and gigging with various groups I have founded. In the old pre-net and pre-PC times I could not have managed to combine that to the different profession that I now live from, but now that the PC has become a studio and Internet has become a free global distribution media I am suddenly in a position where I can – together with my friends – create music on my spare time without any artistic compromises and distribute it through a nice artistic label. With my studio background and gear I can produce recordings comparable in quality to any commercial productions. Still I don’t have any urgency to monetize this. I can afford to look and see what might develop out of it. This is something very important as it is not only my story but the story of thousands of other free music scene artists, many of which have professional studio and music experience and skills from various backgrounds. Just like the free social music sites bring a whole new factor into the equation of possibilities, so does the free music production. That’s the new world that is rapidly unfolding, and whoever has the mind and the vision to understand its true potential, can build succesful and profitable businesses on it, just like has happened with the free software which already employs millions of people.

Is there any feature/service we could build for you?
I think the important points have already come up. You can make your hosting service really really perfect to us by adding a possibility for FLAC and artwork hosting. What you have done so far is very functional and impressive, so you have a very solid foundation to build on. The next logical step might be to make Fairtilizer socially more active and attractive. The tools and ideas are out there, and any sorts of integration to the already active services like Twitter or Last.fm scrobbling can only make you stronger in the competition. I wish you success and together with other Musictrade artists am pleased to use your services!
with best greetings

Doc

Visit Musictrade Fairtilizer profile
Visit Musictrade website
Visit Musictrade Myspace

Share