💾 Archived View for gemini.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › gemlog › purchases-2020-05.gmi captured on 2022-04-29 at 11:44:15. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2020-09-24)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
My first three albums for this project are:
"Tropical Depression", by Jake Schrock
All three albums are on the same record label:
Holodeck Records, in Austin, Texas, USA
I never paid a shred of attention to record labels back when I acquired all of my music on CD. I understood why they existed - being a successful musician in the pre-digital era required things like mass manufacturing of CDs, tapes, and records, along with signing licensing deals with radio stations, and all kinds of stuff that it was totally unreasonable to expect artists to coordinate themselves.
Once the internet became the dominant means of distributing music, I kind of expected labels to fade away as a relic of the old physical media world. It seems especially weird to me to find labels which are active on Bandcamp, when Bandcamp themselves handle the collection of money and the distribution side of things. Why accept yet another cut out of your income as an artist in exchange for inessential services? I'm sure the labels do promotional work, but artists can do that themselves on Twitter/Facebook/whatever. Maybe it's tied to the resurgence of tapes and vinyl in some circles?
But I have to admit, as somebody exploring the wide spaces of online music, I'm finding labels incredibly helpful as discovery and filtering tools. If I find an artist I really like and they're on a label, I'll generally check out the other artists on the same label. Sometimes, like in the case of Holodeck, this leads to a veritable bounty of good finds. They definitely work better than hashtags, which can be overly broad. I guess a sufficiently cohesive label does, in this way, provide a kind of genuinely useful promotional service that an artist can't do on their own.