For some bizarre reason, I thought it would be a good idea to start a netlabel. Let me retrace my steps here for a moment and say that although I’ve been listening to electronic music for 10+ years and many of that was at archive.org, other than I think it might be lots of fun, I have no freaking idea what is possessing me to do it. I’ll probably need to think through that a little more.

In the netlabel forums, there was a recent thread Netlabel CMS? (Content Management System) which talked discussed what a curator should use for his/her netlabel. Over the years I’ve notice that many use blogs such as Blogger and Wordpress and I didn’t want to write too much code, so I thought I’d stick with one of the pre-packaged blog platforms.

More importantly, the thread let me to Eldino’s post entitled Come aprire una netlabel or “How to Start A Netlabel. Even though it was written in Italian and all I know are Italian vulgarities, with a lot of help from Google’s Language Tools, I made a stab at trying to understand it. So, here is my basic understanding of what Eldino was getting at. Apologies to Eldino if I’ve butchered it.

  1. Eldino’s first states not to do it alone. Good advice, but it really depends on what your definition of alone is. Is alone one man at a keyboard? Or is alone one man with the internet at this fingers? Though I’ll be doing most of the work myself, I cannot see how I’ll be doing it alone considering the artists that will be involved, the infrastructure at archive.org, and the vast information out in the internet through interviews, articles and just plain websites — I really don’t think I’ll be doing it alone.
  2. Elidion writes:

    Although the music distributed through netabels is a free product, though does not mean that it should not be presented in a professional manner.

    More on this later, but I’d agree with his theory and I would even take it a step further in that the perception of order and professionalism is even more important than actual order and professionalism.

  3. Plan, plan, plan and plan. When you think you are done planning, plan some more. Here Eldino takes the measure twice and cut one axiom to another level, say measure four times and cut once. As a project manager, I can definitely agree with this thought: the more one plans and designs the easier it will be to execute. So taking a page out of my professional life and no matter how eager I am, I need to take a few steps back and plan out what I will be doing.
  4. He writes that a netlabel should decide on immediately what musical genre they will be producing. Eldino recommends 1 genre and its derivatives, even though there are many netlabels out there that span many genres.

    Experience teaches me that netlabels of the mono-kind are those with a greater and more consistent quality over time.

    Eldino writes that by a netlabel staying “mono-genre” listeners will learn what to expect form your site as well as your netlabel will be able to tie in better with the like-netlabels

    This definitely stopped me in my tracks since I was envisioning the gauntlet of electronic music forms, maybe even some Country music. Worse case scenario in taking Eldino’s advice here is that I would just add new genres in the future. However, if I disregard his advice, the netlabel could become thin and wandering in its presentation.

  5. He also recommends that a perspective netlabel curator should spend some time looking at what other netlables are doing and how they are doing it. Well, that is probably so, and even though I’ve wander about to a great many netlabels, maybe it is time that I look at netlabels from a student’s perspective.

Wow, and this is just Part One of Three. I guess for homework I have to go and visit as many “good” netlabel sites as I possible can and start looking at them. Eldio has a few listed in his post and I know a few as well. Should be interesting. Next up, Part Two of Eldino’s Come aprire una netlabel.

Three Souls - The Drone from Webbed Hand Presents String Ambient

“funky chicken” photograph by AndyMc73 and licensed under Creative Commons.