In 2023 – having experienced again the great atmosphere of Castle Party Festival – we started working on Halotan Records’ revival (documented here).
Original plan was just to make our old website working again to let people listen to and download our releases.
One thing led to another and today we have not only our first release after hiatus, but we are also happy to announce that we have launched a brand new website and store.
It is still work in progress and will always be, but now our store fully reflects our new, compilation-centric approach to releasing music.
Over the last years the landscape has shifted and label like ours became obsolete and irrelevant. We need to reinvent ourselves a bit, and our new website is one of the steps we needed to take.
Going forward our plan is to focus almost exclusively on compilations. This means continuing our “Sampler” compilation series – example release here
Our latest release, Halotan Sounds 3 (2024, joint release with Castle Party Festival) – a compilation of Polish dark electronic scene – shows roughly how our releases will look and work going forward.
We ditched our custom-written store software and moved to open source while plugging a lot of our ideas into the new shop software.
Because or store is not just a store – it is place for discovering and sharing music, connecting with bands. It has custom built music sharing system that does things corporate owned outlets don’t want to do.
You see, we want you to connect with bands, not to “increase time spent on the platform”. We are happy to let you go where you prefer to consume music. It is better for you and for the bands.
Thus, we want to ensure that every artist on our compilations can be reached immediately on all of their social media, Bandcamp and Spotify. Our system reflects this mindset.
As we ourselves do not release music on Bandcamp and Spotify, we cannot interfere with bands sales or streaming revenue. We can only generate it.
Bands and other labels simply cannot loose by being on our “Sampler” compilations.
Our previous releases are now available to buy – temporarily through bank transfer payment only. We are testing if this solution is possible – we don’t want to give your money to card processor.
Currently we ship to Europe only, but it will change as we work through delivery methods for other countries. Our next release should be available to ship almost worldwide.