Why Halotan Rec is Not Using Bandcamp, Spotify etc.?
By using platforms like Bandcamp or Spotify we are bound to step on bands’ and labels’ toes. There will always be somebody thinking we are trying to make quick bucks off their work.
What better guarantee can you get?
If you take part in our compilation – you can rest assured we won’t release your music where you sell it yourself. Same goes for other release types.
As we are not pressed to be profitable, we have luxury of doing things our way. And this is our way:
We want to help bands, not to compete with them
Being on these platforms means monetizing music. By selling or monetizing music we would be competing with… bands who created this music.
They have their own profiles where they sell or stream. If we go in with our releases, even for free, we potentially compete and cannibalise their own monetizations.
This is absurd situation, we don’t want this.
We don’t want to get labels in the way
We want to be able to work with any band, signed to a label or independent. There are some labels that manage bands’ Bandcamps and streaming. If we use Bandcamp etc., we would create conflict of interest, some licensing issues and all this legal cocojambo we don’t need.
So if some concerned label representative reads this – there is nothing to worry about. We won’t be competing with you on Bandcamp and other corporate-owned outlets, because we have our own niche.
We can’t take away your revenues, because we are not on the platforms that generate them.
So effectively we are helping you – the label – to do your job. Meaning we help to promote the band. In our sharing system, we actively send traffic to platforms where you – the label – make money.
Do you see any downsides?
We believe bands should own and manage Bandcamp and streaming themselves
In the ideal world, bands should own their music, always. This means they should own and manage their Bandcamp and streaming by themselves. And of course they should keep all the money it makes.
If they are too big and busy, they can hire somebody (a label for example) to manage that for them. But the band should be in charge.
Thus, there is no need for us to be on these platforms, as we would have to partially dispossess bands off their music and create conflicts of interest mentioned above. No thanks.
We do not need to make money
You have probably heard of Open Source Community – programmers who give their work free to the world. Well there would be no Bandcamp or Spotify without Open Source.
Similar principle here – we give our work to the community.
Our running costs are low and we have day jobs. We do not need to make money to exist, we are a hobby, not a business. We have no employees, energy and phone bills, no office.
What we make on our CD-R sales is enough to keep us going, buy some ads sometime. We have businesses that help us out printing for us and whatnot.
We can sell literally nothing, survive and keep doing what we do. Free time is the only limiting factor for us.
We do not need Bandcamp and Spotify’s functionalities
We have our own homebrew music sharing system. It is no match for Bandcamp or Spotify (how could it be), but it has advantages.
It can focus on what is good for the bands, not on what corporations want. They won’t link to certain things, wont display certain things as they compete with one another. We can do whatever we think is good for bands.
Moreover, we think that paying through the nose to the corpos and giving away your fans’ private data just to have some basic music streaming and sharing capabilities is insane.
We don’t have to use them, so we wont.
We dislike corporations, for real
Many musicians in our scene sing about disliking corporations. We do something about it: we simply do not use their stuff where we can. Because when something is “free” you and your privacy are the product being sold.
We understand most musicians do not have such luxury.
A precentage of both Bandcamp and Spotify is owned by Chinese company Tencent. Do you think that the largest Chinese media corporation does anything that the human rights and democracy loving people of Communist Party of China do not like? Get real.
No point doing what anyone can do
Anyone can open accounts and start using Bandcamp or streaming. Doing so requires no skill, no knowledge, no thinking. This is why these things are so popular.
But things that are easy to do hardly ever have value. And why should they, if anyone can do it? So maybe there is no such tremendous value in these corporate services as people think?
Maybe it is not the only way to promote music these days?
We are going to find out and will be perfectly happy to fail.
We value privacy
Again if you like privacy, then stay away from corporations wherever you can. Especially those located in countries that do not safeguard privacy, leave alone basic human rights.
It is a balancing act, sometimes you can just inconvenience yourself completely in vain.
This is not an ideal world, we use privacy-paid services where we have to.
We are independent, so we want to do things our way
Is not being on Bandcamp & Spotify a crazy thing nowadays? It probably is.
But is not the music we like somewhat crazy? A noisy pounding techno with some psychopathic dwarf on the vocals?
When hobby becomes a job, the joy is usually over. We want to keep enjoying being in the scene. And we want to do things the way we do, whether it makes sense or not.
Why don’t you make some nice rap or pop tunes? Maybe you could earn some real bucks? Instead, you do this crazy techno of yours.
Well we like it too, hopefully we can work together to promote it some time – even if all this makes no sense at all.
