Netlabel Advice

I hope you’re having a more festive Christmas Day, because I’ve spent the latter part of mine scouring netlabels for all kinds of electronic music. I’ve been successful, but I’ve quickly developed a few pet peeves when searching around these sites. Netlabels, please:

1. Don’t release your music in anything other than MP3 format. Fuck Ogg Vorbis, Shorten, or any other crazy-ass format. People use MP3s. Software uses MP3s. Hardware uses MP3s. Use MP3s.
2. If you’re offering your music for full MP3 download, don’t bother with a Real Audio preview. If you’re offering nothing but a Real Audio preview, just don’t bother.
3. #1 and #2 combined: don’t be Tokyo Dawn, offering nothing but Real Audio and Ogg. Life’s too short, guys, even if your music does get hella down.
4. Take a hint from Roh Format and employ a clean-but-stylish design and offer plain ol’ MP3s, spicing things up with DJ-friendly goodies like Traktor sets. Take another hint from the Roh crew and release hard-ass minimal techno that would make Richie Hawtin cream himself. Seriously, go download some Dupont. Damn, that’s hard.
5. Release early. Release often.
6. I know hosting is expensive and hard to come by, but netlabels hosting their content at Scene.org make for some slooooow downloads.
7. More labels should consider offering their archives via BitTorrent, as a generous few already have. That way the bandwidth costs would be on us, not them.

All that said, there’s lots of good stuff out there, and it’s great that people are making their art freely available, minor issues of presentation aside. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of my upcoming sets are comprised of seventy percent or more netlabel tracks. And, when you think about it, that’s a precedent that really speaks to the electronic music ethic: from the bedroom studio, delivered via the global communications network, right to the DJs and dancefloors.