Russian music labels. Loud controversy and criticism

Every young band that records their first demo dreams of getting on a label and becoming famous. For many, a contract with a record label looks like a panacea that instantly solves all problems. But is it? Is it really worth instantly transferring the rights to your music, letting others decide where you will go with a concert, in which studio you will record and under what cover you will release your new record? Are music labels really for aspiring artists? the easy way achieve what you want?

To begin with, we will try to consider all possible aspects of a musician’s work with his creativity. The first, and most obvious, is DIY (Do It Yourself is an acronym used to describe people acting independently, without any support or connections). You are the rightful owner of your product, you are free to dispose of it as you please. In such a situation, the artist takes on the functions of the label and is responsible for finding a studio, production, organizing his own concerts, releasing merch, etc. If you have chosen this form of work, then the most competent decision would be to hire a manager who will help you with this.

Realize that by working on your product on your own, you won't be able to focus on creativity; a significant part of the time will have to be devoted organizational issues, which will definitely affect the quality of your activities as a whole. However, by gathering a whole staff of specialists yourself, you will get a chance to realize your goals. One of the successful examples of self-promotion is the group Enter Shikari, which has been releasing its works using the DIY method for a long time. The guys achieved significant commercial success, arousing enormous interest from major record companies, partly due to the fact that over a period of time they turned down good offers from various smaller labels. Perhaps you will succeed too. Do you believe in your own strength? Forward!

The next form is DIY or indie labels. These are small conglomerates aimed more at the underground or niche market. Often the income of such labels is very low, many work “for an idea,” but a contract with such a label can be extremely useful for a beginning artist as a launching pad and a way to make the necessary contacts. Yes, yes, it is acquaintances that will help you in your further advancement. The reality is that even the largest music labels base their activities on an extensive network of acquaintances, mutual favors and promises. Returning to DIY labels, it is worth noting that, unlike the artist himself, they already have some channels for distributing and promoting your work. It often happens that the artists themselves create small indie labels to promote their work, subsequently gradually expanding the list of signed groups. Plus, for the most part, indie labels have a fairly transparent and understandable agreement for the artist, unlike larger labels owned by large music corporations. Such labels are called major labels. We are talking about the so-called “big four record labels,” which account for about 70% of the global music market. These include Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Group (along with UMG, absorbed by the French media conglomerate Vivendi SA) and Warner Music Group.

There are several branches of these labels in Russia: Universal Music Russia, Sony Music Russia, Warner Music Russia and others. Each of these giants of muses. The industry has an impressive list of smaller labels associated with them, which, however, does not prevent both parties from successfully making money and promoting their product on the market. Such conglomerates are completely self-sufficient: a large record agency is able to provide a new record all the way from the sound engineer to the shelves of music stores (or online platforms like Apple Music or iTunes, which is more consistent with modern realities music industry) and organize a tour for the artist in support of it. But for a beginning (let alone an underground) artist, the path to a contract with such a label is virtually closed: in modern conditions, the outdated scheme under which musicians of the 1980s received multimillion-dollar contracts with record companies no longer applies.
If previously a band, having sent their demo to the label, could hope that the A&R manager would choose their work from thousands of applications, now such an outcome is very unlikely. With the advent of new technologies and the beginning of the Internet era, access to music creation became open to a wide musical audience, as a result of which the flow of recordings to labels' mailboxes from aspiring musicians became simply uncontrollable. This has led many companies to switch to new stage working with talents, noticing and signing only those who have already managed to break out and distinguish themselves from a million of the same ambitious figures of musical culture.

But the digital age has also brought significant changes to the industry as a whole, raising a number of new, completely unique and previously irrelevant questions. One of them is, does a modern artist really need to be signed to a label? Over the past 10 years, home recording studios have developed greatly, numerous devices have made professional recording at home possible, many designers are working on covers for releases, offering their services online, concert venues invite young artists to perform through mailings, without resorting to the services of concert agencies. And most importantly, the sale of physical media has forever faded into the background, giving way to streaming services and the ability to buy a release in digital format.

This is just a small list of examples of the irreversible changes that the music industry has undergone around the world. And this system continues to develop dynamically, revealing new opportunities for working directly with the listener.

As you know, in the era of new technologies, musicians can communicate with the listener themselves without any additional intermediaries, however, even in Russia, where the music industry has not yet fully developed, there are people who publish non-mass music at their own peril and risk (and with your own money). Afisha selected 10 dissimilar domestic independent labels and asked their creators to tell us what they do and why.

The most important Izhevsk label, which over twelve years has done tremendous work in two very different areas. On the one hand, Kama and his collaborators are diligent in documenting what is happening in local electronic music (which has long since become something much more than a local phenomenon). On the other hand, they archive the musical folklore of the Volga region.

Alexander Yuminov

« I came up with Kama Records, I main organizer and, strictly speaking, the owner. Kama is not a legal name, but from the point of view of documents we are just that, a legal organization. This is important: in recent years, it seems like a lot of labels have appeared, but there are few real ones, somehow designed among them. “Kama” has existed since 2000, but before that I had a proto-label, on which we released a record of authentic Russian folklore in 1992. The story was this: in the early 1980s, I somehow came across a wonderful record “The Magic Bulgarian Voice” - tracing its influence on Dead Can Dance and everything else was not difficult. Then an ethnographer friend, Marina Khodyreva, heard this record and invited me to Udmurtia. We went on an expedition to record grandmothers. There was no technology then. Igor Kolyadny from the group “Types of Fish” helped me out - he lent me his four-track portable studio. True, when we checked it, everything worked, but when we arrived to record, it turned out that the microphones somehow didn’t match, and the result was a bit of an industrial sound. They cleaned it up as best they could. The record was released with a circulation of fifteen thousand copies. We got the matrix with great difficulty. Everything that was printed at that time at the Aprelevsky plant belonged to Russian Disk. We told them: “If you want to get some money, then not from this record.” “Russian Disc” decided that this shit wasn’t worth fighting for, so they allowed us to quietly publish everything ourselves, which is what we did. This is where it all started - twenty years ago.

The first Kama discs also contained authentic folklore. This is what I'm passionate about, and it's always been such a lifesaver for supporting the label. Then we started publishing Izhevsk music. In general, I have been working with Izhevsk musicians for a long time - for example, I was familiar with “Knock of Bamboo at 11 O’clock” from the very beginning, they often came to my home, I know every recording they made before “It’s an Easy Thing Cold.” From 1994 to 1997, I did a program on local TV called “45 minutes of useless information.” It was dedicated to the Izhevsk subculture. One part is about all sorts of poets, artists, who the hell: for example, there was a man who collected the voices of birds. And the second part was dedicated exclusively to the musicians - interviews, videos that we made ourselves. So I was aware. We released “Rhodesia”, which later became known as “Ryaba Mutant”, released the collection “News of Underwater Izhevsk 1983-2001”, while mixing up the numbers 9 and 8 on the cover.

In 2004, the program “ Capital of Culture Volga region." Within its framework, we spent five years in a row big festival"News from underwater Izhevsk." It was very cool. Let's say we had contact with the British Council, and when they proposed doing some kind of joint project, we replied: “Let's do a week of English music in Izhevsk. So that English DJs come to us every month for a week, or better yet for 10 days.” They gasped: they said we’ve never tried this, but let’s do it. And they did. This gave us a gigantic amount of English press, there were a lot of publications about our clubs and music, I wrote twice The magazine Wire. The funny thing is that this wave reached Izhevsk not from inside, but from outside. Suddenly rumors spread around the city: “Listen, in Moscow they say that we have some kind of electronic music in our city.” It got to the point that during someone’s performance I heard people say: “Yes, this is actually someone else’s recording, well, they can’t play like that here.”

“The funny thing is that this wave reached Izhevsk not from the inside, but from the outside. Suddenly rumors spread around the city: “Listen, in Moscow they say that we have some kind of electronic music in our city.”

For the last two years I have been mainly engaged in publishing archives. Somehow it happened that the Izhevsk scene disappeared. It just became difficult to do all this, and we stopped our activities a little. At the same time, I have many different projects - artistic, educational, and they all exist on grants. One of the grants was given to collect memories of Izhevsk music, electronic and pre-electronic. I took up this task and discovered with surprise and sadness that during the three or four years that I had not acted as an active person in musical life cities, everything somehow fell apart and fell apart.

I fell out of the circle of my age; there were mostly young people around me. All my friends, classmates, and university friends are perplexed - they don’t understand what such a guy is doing with the pioneers. I kind of have to love Deep Purple, but I always liked the music, not just experimental, but, how can I put it correctly, raw. In my life I have heard a thousand musicians who played very well. We had a man in town who played Carlos Santana better than Carlos Santana. But when he was offered to play something of his own, it was such bullshit that it was unbearable to listen to. It seems that people are playing better and better, but there is no point. I know every note they'll play before it's played. Sincerity has always captivated me much more. That's why I made this kind of music. That's why I started publishing Bruno's 4 Positions? They have the same energy that the Izhevsk teams have lost.

When the mp3 boom began, it suddenly turned out that people didn’t need to listen to music at all. They need to gain gigabytes. For example, I met with some young people who obviously treated me as a person of the past who did not understand anything about the present. They named me musicians who have released 35 singles and 4 albums. I started listening to it, it seemed to me that it was just funny - I knew every group from which an entire album was made from one song. Repetition and degradation, this is happening all over the world. It used to be: “Have you heard this album, band, song?” And now: “How many gigabytes do you have?” - “I have 500.” - “And I have a terabyte in general.” This suddenly turned out to be the most important thing. But a terabyte of music cannot be listened to. And even if you listen, you won’t hear or remember anything. It seems to me that the human body simply cannot stand this.

“It seems like people are playing better and better, but there’s no point. I know every note they'll play before it's played. Sincerity has always captivated me much more.”

I switched back to authentic folklore and started going on expeditions again. In the end, electronics and folklore are things of the same order. The mysticism that exists in Izhevsk electronic and semi-electronic music also exists in folklore. On one expedition this happened: we recorded one granny, she sang and said: “Let me listen.” We played her singing and she started singing along. We turned on another microphone, and it turned out to be a standard budget recording technology - recording with overdubbing. In 2008, we visited her again, and she picked up this overdub and didn’t falter. Well, we made four tracks. And she listens and says: “I understand. I watch on TV - she is alone, but there are several voices. So now I understand how it’s done.”

I sometimes think that if we really take on the Izhevsk scene, we can make a business out of it. The audience in our country is wonderful, it is so pure, immaculate, and, as a rule, pure and immaculate things do not quite reach those to whom they should. Therefore, in general, Stas Mikhailov and Nashe Radio. Actually, I’m the only one involved in the affairs of the label. I am a designer, a printer, a director, and sometimes I am also a sound engineer. As long as we like it, we’ll act. When I earn enough money to feed myself and own family, I'm doing Kama. No, I don’t. This does not add arrows to the quiver. On the other hand, imagine: I have an Izhevsk music video archive starting from 1990. This may not be in demand today, but someday it will definitely be. That's enough for me. I read your conversations with sound engineers and promoters. This is an activity for a very limited circle of people who, in fact, in most cases work for interest. God willing, if these young promoters live to be fifty-two years old, like me, and continue to do this.”

5 showcase albums

"Nowhere 2 Run"

“4 positions of Bruno” + “Demidovsky what?” "Brokenness"

Fresh album from the Yekaterinburg band “4 Positions of Bruno”; The latest disc released by Kama to date. Unlike previous albums, “4PB” exists only in disc form and is not distributed on the Internet; and everything is the same as before - toxic, strange and scary electronics.

Mombus & Bacillus Orchestra “Soothing Collection No. 3”

Music by Murmansk electronic artist Mombus, partly played by real people. Deft and gentle electronics, assembled from small sounds; Live instruments include, among other things, accordion and flute.

“Ambient 2003. Music for the airport. Izhevsk"

As the name suggests, this is a collection of ambient music, although not only from Izhevsk: there are musicians from both Murmansk and London. Nevertheless, an excellent explanation of why Izhevsk has always been considered the capital of local electronics: 16 outstanding and smart tracks.

Baba Liza/Baba Nastya “Songs from Buranovo”

The latest release of the folklore part of Kama Records to date: songs of Baba Lisa from the Udmurt village of Buranovo with drawings by Baba Nastya.

The best, if not the only Russian DIY cassette label. Everything is as it should be: Full of Nothing releases strange and marginal music in small editions - dense folk, drone and hypnogogic pop. The label is located in Petrozavodsk, but this does not prevent it from having strong ties with the world cassette scene; Specialized Western blogs regularly write about Full of Nothing releases, and they are also bought primarily abroad.

Anya Kuts and Ivan Afanasyev

« Vanya has been collecting music since he was seven years old, so similar ideas have visited him since childhood. By 2005, he already had a name and concept for the future label, but something seemed to be missing, the moment was not right. We met in 2007, and three years later we released our first release - by that time we had already been making music ourselves as part of Love Cult for a year. We really wanted to open some doors, trodden a path. We were fascinated by the cassette and CD-R underground, especially what was happening in America and Finland. This crazy cheap version of free jazz, the new psychedelia, the last wave of noise - all this was a huge source of inspiration. In Russia the underground is not like that. It’s as if it’s afraid to engage in dialogue with the listener, afraid to flirt. We wanted to keep prices to a minimum, change, send a lot of Russian music to the West and get a lot of fresh music from there. It’s clear that there is the Internet, but it is real involvement that gives nerve to the cultural environment.

We used to hang out much more in Europe than in Russia, and over time we realized that our idea was not close to the Russian crowd. Although, I must say, we managed to bring down a small new micro-community. But still the label is aimed at America, England and Japan. Clients from other countries can be counted on one hand. The main sales are direct from our website. We have a minimum markup most Delivery eats up money. We don't work at a loss, but all our small profits go straight back into the label. Now we see Full of Nothing more as an elite club. Closed home production of fetish objects with unique music, reflecting the cultural vision of two specific people. Some might call it a personal art project.

Nowadays, independent labels are, above all, landmarks in the music world. They filter the cultural environment around them and select what is most striking and impressive from it, documenting it with the help of objects. Documentation of culture is the most important thing! The objects can be anything, only fans will buy them - most listeners will only have the files. But the physical object must exist. Without physical documents, culture ends up in the digital trash heap. Vinyl, cassettes and even CDs are souvenirs that a person can take away from a concert. Collectibles that are interesting and pleasant to twirl in your hands, put on a shelf... It is much easier for people to understand the world through objects, becoming attached to some of them. And at the same time, music released on physical media seems to connect us with previous eras, with the history of music.

“We view Full of Nothing as an elite club. Closed home production of fetish objects with unique music, reflecting the cultural vision of two specific people"

We used to follow radical DIY rules. Initially we released cassettes and CD-Rs, but last year we abandoned discs. That is, we would be happy to release them, but we have very high demands on them. Most of the disks that we have, somehow we don’t even want to store. After you listen to the music several times, they seem to have no value. But we don’t have the funds to produce incredibly cool discs. In addition, discs, even the most interesting ones, sell very poorly. The situation with vinyl could be easier, since it is better bought, but with the current policy of the Russian Post, it is unrealistic to keep a vinyl label. Cassettes are valued as an artifact, they are very cheap, and they sell well; They are easy to send by mail, and now this is the most convenient option for us. Recently, we have been purchasing high-quality color cassettes in America and writing on them using a professional duplicator. And we also started selling digital releases through Bandcamp. Fans of digital formats, or those who do not have anything to listen to cassettes on, can instantly get the album in excellent quality and support the musician and the label.

There's a really big cassette scene in the world right now.— incredibly many labels and artists; Some stay for a long time, others radically change formats and genres. In general, a healthy and vibrant cultural environment. Most of these labels are still focused on dark noise and drone, which is not exactly our path anymore. All communication takes place by mail. We actively maintain contact with many guys - from America, Poland, Australia, Finland, Germany... We became friends with other cool labels precisely because they released our music, and there they already became acquainted with our label. Some people we discover by chance when we are on tour with Love Cult - most of the people who run labels are also either involved in music themselves, or organize concerts, produce bands.

"Full of Nothing releases music that came after noise"

The label functions like a family to some extent. Full of Nothing has its own crowd with own history. We cross paths with many artists in our personal lives, and half of us are just best friends. We try to work with musicians who have a similar picture of the world to us. Music can be very different, but we breathe the same air and want similar things. Our ears are sharp; It's very easy for us to decide who to release and who not to release. When everything is as it should be, it just clicks and there is no need to discuss anything. We've said no to an incredible number of musicians over the past year. When we started the label, we didn't even think we'd be getting so many demos. Genre? Let's put it this way: Full of Nothing releases music that came after noise. It grew out of noise experiments, but it can be absolutely anything: folk-pop harpist Woodpecker Wooliams and futuristic modular synthesizers M.Geddes Gengras seem equally interesting to us. The last thing we want is to isolate ourselves, go into a shell and stop developing.”

4 showcase albums

Polypus Acephalous "The Outcast Tribes"

Slow, dense and mesmerizing wordless forest folk; 16 short compositions, each of which is built on the repetition of a simple musical move - it’s impossible to put down.

"Four Suns"

Billiam Wutler Yea "Calico Desman"

The first recording of the cassette obscurantist Billiam Wutler Yea. Dark and viscous electronics; unlike “Quantum Pilgrims”, which we wrote about, there are no signs of collage, two tracks of honest drone with a total duration of forty minutes.

M.Geddes Gengras "Rebirth Los Angeles"

Album by American M. Geddes Gengras, colleague of Cameron Stallones and Pocahaunted. Probably the most famous name, if it is at all appropriate to operate with such categories, is on Full of Nothing, and deservedly so: great talent is felt in the booming synth drone of Geddes Gengras.

Banana Pill/Calypso Borealis

Split tape from Finns Banana Pill and French Calypso Borealis. Both of them, in general, play drone, spacious and flowing music, but Banana Pill is sonorous and dreamy, bordering on hypnogogia, while Calypso Borealis is more cloudy and impressive.

ABOUTA relatively young but rapidly growing Moscow label specializing in local electronics. Present only on the Internet, but there he has already released 14 recordings, which form a completely complete picture of sound ideology: Ritmo Sportivo— about music that is equally lightweight and inventive.

Ilya Bodrov

« It all started as a small community of enthusiasts: We made mixes based on black music - soul, funk, disco, hip-hop. The idea was that you don’t have to be a DJ or a musician to do this, you just have to love music, so a variety of friends took part: photographers, designers, and so on. We had a tumbler where we posted everything; someone read all this. Then, quite by chance, I met a talented musician from Kamchatka named Ignat. He plays the trombone and likes hip-hop. And I tell him: “Let’s make a selection for us.” And he was like: “Come on, what about your tracks or some of my favorites?” I answer: “Well, give me yours.” Well, we decided - why record the mix, we’ll post it. We made a cover, hung it up, everyone really liked the album - in the first week there were about a thousand downloads at once. Even in Los Angeles they played it on one radio station. And so it went. Actually, I am the only one who deals with all sorts of administrative issues at the label. Design, promotion - everything is me. The guys only make music.

With the transition to digital distribution, the role of labels has greatly diminished. In a good way, the artist can now do everything himself. But there are still a lot of talented guys who know how to do some cool things with music, but have absolutely no idea how to promote themselves. Any label of any size has some kind of audience, even a newsletter, to put it in a very primitive way. The label can push, make a design, shoot a promotional video, and it will be easier for people to find out about this music. And if you do it all yourself, it just takes a lot longer. Although there is an opposite example: the Luxembourg musician Sun Glitters. When he first started, I wrote to him too; Various labels were generally actively interested in him. But he refused everyone, and copes well on his own.

This is how I select musicians - whether the music appeals to me or not. That's the only thing that matters. At the same time, everything somehow works out by itself. Only The Pilots from Holland, our latest acquisition, wrote it themselves. Three guys from Holland, one plays the saxophone, the rest play synthesizers. It was very nice - after all, in their homeland they probably have more opportunities in terms of music, the movement there is more interesting.

“There are a lot of talented guys who can do some cool things with music, but have absolutely no idea how to promote themselves.”

I would really like for us to have someone singing or reading. Female vocals in a soul style, male vocals, it doesn’t matter. But everyone I like is abroad. I don’t see anything like that here yet. I wish there was someone singing in English. In Russian, I don’t see the point of working in this direction. It so happened that we are better known abroad than in Russia. Such is the paradox. And in Russia, people who are interested in this kind of music know English well, so the interests of our compatriots do not seem to be violated.

I never set out to make money from the label. The fact that we are selling something at the bandcamp is just an experiment. This is the same interest as if I were writing a dissertation on the topic “Is it possible to sell music online in 2012?” Now there is also the opportunity to distribute through iTunes - it will also be interesting to see if this makes sense. At least even from an advertising point of view: will the very appearance in these largest stores bring something to promote the label? And so - all musicians have a job besides music. All creative affairs they get confused after work. If we talk about experience... We released our first paid release a year ago - it was just the album of Ignat, aka I-Tone. To be honest, I expected more. In Russia it is very difficult to force people to give money for something. In general, I talk to a lot of people about this, and everyone has the same conclusion - you can’t sell anything here. In Russia, literally only a few people buy anything, mostly all receipts come from abroad.

They write about us quite often. But mostly foreign thematic blogs. Recently it was very pleasant when Interview magazine wrote about Audiosynthes and did an interview with him. There was a buzz, everyone learned about the Bashkir guy who makes iron doors during the day and writes super mega-disco house at night, which makes all the girls squeal. But more often they write abroad.

I like the general movement we have now. Good resources like Gimme 5 are appearing and doing a lot. And the most important thing is that we already have a reputation in the West. Russia has proven itself in the electronic scene, we are a force to be looked up to. Our musicians are invited from there: in almost any compilation related to electronics or instrumental hip-hop, you can find guys from Russia. And all this is precisely the fruit of our joint efforts. And I think that everything will only grow, the guys will increasingly travel to perform in the West. Previously, it seems to me, it was generally difficult to imagine that a musician who makes fairly experimental music could play not in front of his friends at a house party, but somewhere in Berlin. So for now the future seems bright to me.”

5 showcase albums

Audiosynthes "Audiosynthes"

The record that made people start talking about Ritmo Sportivo: summer hedonistic electronica from the Bashkir city of Oktyabrsky. Lightweight and moving music, in which nothing betrays its origin, Audiosynthes could easily originate anywhere in the world.

"You're My Poison"

Sumeo "Birds"

Released in a limited edition of 50 CDs, the album by the Siberian producer: delicate and relaxed instrumental hip-hop cut from old jazz.

"Night Flight"

Oh!Dee "Beat Tape"

Laconic, as the format suggests, electronics from Moscow beatmaker Oh!Dee: choking, deftly chopped and mixed instrumental hip-hop. For some reason I want this music, as befits beat tapes, to find a utilitarian use.

"Slipping Away"

"Family"

The best way to quickly get acquainted with Ritmo Sportivo: a compilation released after two years of the label's existence. 10 musicians who produce on Ritmo Sportivo recorded a track. Essentially the label's manifesto: instrumental, quite hip and well-crafted music with an overall sense of light-heartedness.

Feyorz "Flwrs"

Creamchild "Grimsight"

Debut EP from St. Petersburg electronic engineer; also instrumental contemporary electronics, but with a slight touch of mysticism. An ideal product for export: Western commentators on YouTube write that the producer “seems to be from Russia.”

A small Moscow label, which over the three years of its existence has managed to release four albums and several collections. The label’s main achievement at the moment is the “Invisible Music” collections and festivals, which tried to find interesting new Russian music at a time when no one had yet paid attention to it.

Alexander Pantykin

« Anton Kasimov and I, with whom we create the label together, five years ago were involved in"Mysteries of Sound". I collaborated there as an independent music producer, working on various projects. Anton Kasimov was then doing a project called “Invisible Music”. It was a series of collections. An underrated series in my opinion. We then continued it at Tutti Futurity. “Mystery” began to slowly deflate, like a balloon, because a grandiose trick was already flying in the air then. Anton left there, nothing was holding me back either. We decided to make our first release. We thought for a long time. The forerunner of our publishing activity was the “Invisible Music” festival, which we did in five cities. Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk and Izhevsk. Chelyabinsk - because it falls into the Yekaterinburg branch, Izhevsk - because many Izhevsk musicians participated in the festival. Izhevsk was once a mecca for Russian electronics engineers, but now the scene there has died down. Some attribute this to the fact that drugs began to arrive there either of very low quality, or there were very few of them there.

It took us two months to prepare for the festival. We printed posters for all five cities. Our first event was in mid-February 2009. After that, we returned to Moscow and published “Invisible Men Looking at Shoes.” For me, the record was very pop, I generally think that what they are doing is a completely outdated story. This is how it should have been played ten years ago. We are, as always, somewhat late. But it seemed cute, and we decided to publish it. Then they released a very strange group, Ntta Ta Loonna. I suggested changing the name many times, but nothing was achieved. The project is absolutely hopeless. These are our bruises that we grew up with. Now we have come to the conclusion that if you are working on an album, the artist must be active in some way. It shouldn’t be that you constantly call him and say: “Come on, let’s go there, let’s record, let’s play.” He still needs to do it himself. First of all, to play concerts. Because we paid these guys for rehearsals and recording, but they didn’t do anything at all. All the money was wasted. What I heard on the recording was not serious. They didn't rehearse at all. The artist was simply blown away. But we published the album.

One of the main characteristics of our publications is their design. I am deeply convinced that when you bring a disc to a reviewer, everyone should pay attention to the cover. Even if you don't like the music at all. What I love about physical media, vinyl and CDs, is that it's not just music. There is also a design visual art, which is inseparable from music. Here is the group “War of the Poets”. It was a release in the “Our Radio” format. Green group. But the design turned out very well, expensive, interesting design, individual. It's not like when some band Moremoney practically self-publishes a CD that won't open, the paint sticks to the sleeve, and so on. I have a good, respectful attitude towards what they do from a musical point of view. And yet.

“We paid for the rehearsals, the recording, but they didn’t do anything at all. All the money wasted"

We may not be the most interesting musically, but we release what we think is necessary. Of course, there is some kind of taste. Any label is still her. Sasha Gorbachev has his own understanding, Troitsky has his own understanding, he brings to light some completely odious and infernal groups. We have our own history. I believe that we have quite solid releases in terms of the depth of music. For example, LLAC. When they brought me this album, I was living with a blonde. I think: “Well, let me check whether this disc is worth publishing or not.” I turned it on, and only forty-one seconds of the first track had passed, my wonderful blonde said to me: “Oh, Sash, what’s playing so scary, turn it off, please.” For me this was a signal: I definitely need to publish it.

One of ours latest projects, which we really help and really want to publish, is “Bonch Bruevich”. Not the rap group “Bonch Bru Bonch”, but simply “Bonch Bruevich”. Nyskor is like that. We helped them shoot videos, I personally helped compile and produce some tracks. In general, they previously worked as musicians with me, participated in projects that I produced. We at Bonch Bruevich are very confident, because this is an authentic project - well, in our opinion. Unlike some other Russian groups - there, Cheese People, the same Moremoney, Manicure - they do not have these borrowings. This schematic Western thinking. In fact, all these guys are very secondary music. They just do it with high quality, well, create some kind of surroundings around it, but not everyone understands that this is absolutely inauthentic compared to the global context. And we would like to strive to be on an equal footing with our Western colleagues. In addition, everything there is in Russian. This is very important—by the way, this is another important principle for us. The argument here is that our language is very rich. All our greats literary works were written in Russian. Even writers who lived abroad still wrote in Russian. And songs in Russian are much more difficult to write. Some people just have a little guts. I know this for certain, I have written a lot of songs.

Indie labels and artists— It's still just one party. It's always been like this. Accordingly, everyone supports and helps each other. Purely human psychological level. Of course, when an artist just posted an album on the Internet, it’s dead, cold story. I pressed the button - and that’s it, information flowed through the wires. The label is needed primarily as support on a human level. Support, meet, smoke a joint together. Go to a concert. Discuss something, come up with an idea, shoot a video. Plus managerial things: clearing rights, for example, someone should do this. Organizational matters. Not all musicians are managers. And the Internet is a good opportunity for labels to promote. You know that we, music lovers, listened to a lot of independent music thanks to specific labels. If you know that something you like is being released under this label, you listen to it. In this sense, no one has canceled labels.

“The label is needed primarily as support on a human level. Support, meet, smoke a joint together"

The panic around the Internet reminds me of the moment in history when radio appeared. The live musicians shouted: “What are you talking about! No one will come to our concerts at all! Everyone will listen to the radio!” It was the same story with gramophone records. What happened? Radio and records became channels for promoting musicians. So is the Internet. It’s just that the Internet is developing so quickly that we ourselves don’t even have time to understand what’s happening there. It should be regarded as another sales channel. In the 2000s, no one understood what to do with the Internet, but now, in my opinion, everything is obvious. You can’t make money online, everything leads to the fact that you won’t be able to make money. This story needs to be developed so that it can help concerts, authentic media, and unique publications. But we are still just trying to figure out how to integrate the Internet into our system. We are late in this sense, unfortunately, but we don’t want to turn anything back so easily.

We no longer have that enthusiasm when we wanted to do something incredible. We have clearly defined for ourselves that our immediate plan is to support Bonch Bruevich and support a number of other projects. Including it seemed to me interesting group“Town of security officers”, the group Tip Top Tellix seemed interesting. Everything is sad with electronics engineers. We would like to focus on specific artists and support them. The only thing is that I have a personal request. I have been very involved in the recording industry for a long time, I know almost all the producers and engineers in Moscow and other cities. Everyone is sitting like Gray wolves, each in his own hole, with his own bone, looking at everyone else with disapproval. Such parties. I think this is wrong. I try to be friends with everyone and stay in touch. I believe that we are all doing one big thing. I wish we were more united. Journalists, labels, producers, musicians, art directors of clubs. If we are more united, we will do much more. And while we are sitting in different corners, of course, it is very difficult for us.”

5 important albums

"Invisible Women Looking at Shoes" "Attachment"

Peaceful, almost motionless indie pop - according to all the laws of the genre, as they were in the mid-2000s in Russia, with a smooth sound, smooth guitars and insinuating melodies.

"Dark Waters"

"War of the Poets" "Minute of Flight"

Rockapop in the vein of “Our Radio”: meaningful lyrics, undemanding melodies, music stuck in the late 1990s.

"Sombrero"

LLAC "A Boring Story"

Moderately inventive electronics made from ghostly samples of voices, train sounds and acoustic instruments like guitar and piano.

Ntta Ta Loonna "Only Freedom"

The Ural group with an extensive discography and history performs lightweight (even in its militant manifestations) guitar rock with semi-poetic lyrics.

"Invisible Women Looking at Shoes" "Bound"

Oddly enough, the most interesting record released by Tutti Futurity: a collection of remixes of the compositions “Invisibles”. Among other things, there are interpretations from Nick Zavriev and a prominent club figure Tripmastaz.

The main champions of the Russian underground in its traditional sense, a label that has released countless strange, marginal and simply important music. First of all, “Vyrgorod” is associated with “Civil Defense” - this is where their discs have been released for the last five years; But“Defense” their catalog is by no means exhausted. Of particular value is the Vyrgorod online store, which also sells discs of various comrades, “Geometry” and “Exit Branch”, among others.

Ales Valedinsky

« Summer 1999I went to work for the “CHORUS” label, which published Civil Defense. In the process of work, I saw that publishing at least an audio cassette is not as difficult and expensive as it might seem. Since I had a lot of musician friends whom I wanted to support, I decided to do this. And there was a choice: either to convince the employer, with whom I had very good human relations, to publish one of my friends, or to do something on our own. And when I came up with the name “Vyrgorod”, I suddenly realized: I had to publish it myself.

I wanted to somehow popularize, make more accessible what I considered worthy and interesting. When it all started, in 2001, I distributed audio cassettes, and at the very least it worked. And it reached people, and somehow helped the musicians. Financially, I always believed that you should first earn money from other jobs, and then start publishing music. In fact, I still spend ninety percent of my energy on earning money. Over these eleven years, nothing has changed fundamentally in this regard. If I had just created my own label, I would have quickly lost the ability to publish anything.

It's hard for me to define how I choose music. To put it very roughly, I release what I really like and fits into “Vyrgorod”. I may be madly in love with some rare recording of the opera “Prince Igor” by Borodin, but I’m not sure that I can release it on Vyrgorod without taking any additional steps for this. If I came across such a recording, then I need to think about who could hand it over to, who can publish it and bring it to people. And if I have known a person for a long time, I see that he has been fighting for many years, that he has an audience, that this fits into my vision of the publishing house - why not? I have different attitudes towards what I have published: some I love madly, some I support as a human being, some I even misunderstand. It also happens, of course, that something appears, and I think: wow, wow, for the first time in recent years I liked something... And then a year later it’s no longer there, and those who created it , this is no longer needed, and if people themselves don’t need it, then why should I?

“Financially, I always believed that you should first earn money from other jobs, and then start publishing music. In fact, I still spend ninety percent of my energy on earning money.”

Disc release nowfar from the main way of distributing music. Why continue to be involved with the label is an insoluble question. I constantly try to answer it for myself, it is open to me. Now the arguments are as follows: after all, the fact of publication, especially if the label already has a reputation, can be significant. I have some kind of internal obligations to my living and deceased musician friends. Just posting something on the Internet is, given our information oversaturation, actually less than nothing. Million unknown authors, now there’s another one – it’s impossible to notice. But here, after all, there is a certain marking of a publishing house, about which some group of people has a definite opinion. There are a number of other arguments related to supporting active musicians. In their heyday, musicians were more able to survive primarily through concerts. But disks are still additional support. When a person goes to a concert somewhere, he can also offer these discs. Still, some fans understand that if we buy a musician’s CDs, we are supporting him. Although it is very heterogeneous depending on the region. For example, quite recently I traveled with the Adaptation group to Kazakhstan, we were in three cities - Astana, Karaganda, Alma-Ata. In Astana and Almaty they need discs, people ask for them. In Karaganda they bought T-shirts and books, but not a single CD was purchased. Apparently, the tradition has not developed, and now, when it is more convenient for people to listen to everything on some MP3 players, it is only a burden.

“Starfall” was our first vinyl. I am in the process of coming to terms with this experience. I must say that there is a great merit here to the Soyuz Music company, the wonderful Alexey Alyaev, with whom we have long established mutual understanding. That is, I doubted whether it was necessary to make vinyl, but Lesha, as a music lover, a lover of tradition, convinced me. And now he and I are jointly planning to continue publishing “Civil Defense” on vinyl. Now this is economically possible, and even more so - vinyl is more profitable to publish than CDs, although it is likely that this will not last long. The economic feasibility of publishing CDs in 2012 is generally questionable.

“We plan to continue publishing Civil Defense on vinyl. Now this is economically possible, and even moreover, vinyl is more profitable to publish than CDs.”

Ideally, Vyrgorod should continue to exist and cope with the difficulties that have begun to arise recently. We need to look for some ways of development. Now I looked towards book publishing and published a book of poems by Yegor Letov. There is a difficult task of publishing certain music, maybe it should be done as a book with an audio supplement. There may be different directions. Another question is that you never know what will be implemented and what will not.”

5 demonstration discs

Yanka "Anhedonia"

Two years ago, Vyrgorod reissued Yanka Diaghileva’s four best records on CD; This is perhaps the most important Russian re-release in recent years - the purest, most truthful and desperate rock music in the Russian language.

"From a great mind"

"Civil Defense" "Starfall"

The most touching album of “Civil Defense”, consisting entirely of re-singings of Soviet songs. “Starfall” has already gone through two editions at Vyrgorod - on CD in 2010 (with bonus tracks), on vinyl last year.

“I’ll get off at the far station”

"Rada and the Blackthorn" "Conspiracies"

Magical and bewitching Russian folk, sung by one of the strongest female voices in Russian music.

"Dorm" "I woke up"

The debut (and so far only) album of the Dormitory group, two discs of earthly underground rock. A wild thicket of ideas, meanings and references, an ambiguous, but certainly interesting record.

"Laida" "Spring in Paris"

Girl duet performing to acoustic guitar songs that are a cross between Current 93 and old-time romances. Subtle, beautiful and incomprehensible recording.

"Boulevard Raspail"

Probably the most successful Russian label in terms of club music: local heroes “Arma 17” and “Roof of the World” and their Western colleagues are released here. Over the four years of its existence, Highway has managed to earn a name for itself in Europe: there the label’s products are played on the radio, played in clubs and generally recognized. Highway itself publishes primarily house music in all its forms, but around it a small family of sub-labels have managed to form, on which the owners of Highway allow themselves to experiment - releasing music from downtempo to new disco.

Mikhail Spirit

« It all started with the cooperation of the Gorod club and the Megapolis radio station. Actually, I hosted a radio program with the banal name “Highway”. The name was meant to link the city, the metropolis, and the history of music in the big city. And a year and a half later a label appeared. Highway was conceived as a company that would promote domestic musicians in Europe. We immediately decided that the label would be vinyl, even though the records weren't selling that well at that time. However, our first releases before the crisis had very high sales. The main idea was to take tracks from domestic musicians and collaborate with European producers, asking them to do remixes. From the very beginning we had a fairly high bar: for example, on the third release, the single SCSI-9, remixes were done by Guy Boratto and Pascal Feos. Actually, this release was and remains one of the most popular on our label, an imperishable thing that disc jockeys still play with pleasure.

Over time, we realized that we were becoming cramped within the stylistic framework of Highway. Because here we release progressive, deep, tech house, and there were other types of music that we wanted to work with. The Cooltool sublabel has appeared, which we are making together with Anton Rayo from Arma 17. It is more aimed at disc jockeys who still play from vinyl, on it we release correct and relevant house music - now for the first time in our lives we have done collaboration between Anthony from Audiofly and Philip from the band Mandy, pillars of club electronics. There are also two labels that our friends make, and we help with management - Grusha and Nopassport. The Ketama label has also appeared, which is aimed more at downtempo; for example, the cult project The Orb is represented there. They are currently working on a collection of remixes for the title track for the film “One among Strangers, a Stranger among Ones,” which Eduard Artemyev wrote. We have signed a contract, and a record will soon be released with new interpretations of this music by the best representatives of European electronics. And our last label is called What’s in the Box, on which we release vinyl with all sorts of fashionable new disco and deep house. This is what we live by.

Disc jockeys play not only in clubs, but also at private parties, and at home. There are a lot of collectors who are happy to buy our records for themselves and play them for their friends. Our music is not necessarily the music of large venues, it can be perfectly listened to at home, in the car, it is music that can accompany you in everyday life.

“Talking about big business here is still not entirely correct. But you can’t call it a hobby either - it’s something in the middle, probably just what they call life.”

Our label is paying off. Now, three years after it all started, we finally understand how it should work economically. At first we poked around like blind kittens, changed different agencies, communicated with different means mass media regarding advertising and so on. Now we’ve finally found the right moves, so we can exist as a big family of labels. It takes both strength and energy. Although talking about big business here is still not entirely correct. But you can’t call it a hobby either - it’s something in the middle, probably just what they call life. To earn big, you need to go commercial, sell a huge number of ringtones so that they are in the top ten in downloads. Then it will be a business. And we still live by some kind of fiber of our soul, sometimes publishing music that will not become super-selling, but which can be listened to for decades. It's all still done for fun.

For me, music and its publication will in the near future be inextricably linked with video production. I just don’t want to make music anymore, I need to move somewhere further. Therefore, we are starting to work with young directors, making videos - staged, concert. On Ketama we released a joint project between British producer Martin Glover and VJ Michael Holes. So for me, the immediate meaning of a record label is collaboration with video producers, creating some kind of common story from music and pictures. But even if we leave all this aside, music is communication. Communication with musicians, the opportunity to give them some new ways of self-expression and communication with each other. A huge number of joint projects between musicians happened after we made some prefabricated records. This is the most important thing.

We managed to enter the West thanks to distribution, communication with different musicians, and charts. I don’t presume to speak for everyone, but every time I personally go somewhere, I find that people know about Highway. For example, I had a very pleasant meeting with Denis Rayer, the host of the “Dance Department” program - this is one of the main dance radio shows in the world. He had a studio at a conference in Amsterdam, where absolutely all the top disc jockeys came for half an hour to play some music and have a quick chat. I got there with my friends, I just wanted to meet Denis. And he said, “Oh, Mike from Highway! Very cool, I really like what you do, I played the last two releases in my program.” I was like, “Wow.” Then another DJ friend comes up and says: “I really like what you release, I still play your last single.” "Oh, wow." And like this all the time. Someone hears something somewhere and gets the impression: yes, I know Highway, this Russian label, he puts out good music.

“Aww, Mike from Highway! Very cool, I really like what you do, I played the last two releases in my program.” I'm like, "Wow"

We are sold in almost all electronic stores in the world. You can find us everywhere. Today, digital sales are worth much more than vinyl sales. Vinyl is still more about maintaining some sort of label status than being a financially profitable medium. Digital sales, of course, make much more sense. One of our latest releases has been in the top 100 downloads on Beatport in the deep house category for two months now. This is a serious indicator.

In music, all boundaries have long been erased. There are some national characteristics, but everything else depends only on the way of thinking and mentality. You can create a successful label while sitting in Australia, you don’t have to be in Europe or New York. Eat great amount DJs and producers who live, so to speak, outside the civilized world, and nothing, feel great. If you go on tour, then yes, here you need to move to Barcelona, ​​or Berlin, or Paris to make it more convenient to travel. As for the label, no. Timati, for example, is now moving to New York, I heard. I don’t know... In my opinion, wherever you want to live, live and work there.”

5 demonstration discs

SCSI-9 "Tierra Del Fuego"

One of the first and still one of the most popular releases of Highway, a single by the Russian duo SCSI-9; the label's first serious success in collaboration with foreign musicians: the single contains remixes by Guy Boratto and Pascal Feos.

"Tierra Del Fuego (Gui Boratto Remix)"

Select 05

The latest collection in a series of regular selections of new club music; Among other things, there is a track by Ukrainian producer Marcato.

Marcato "Body and Soul"

"Milestone One"

Highway's best-selling album according to the Beatport online store. A compilation based on the results of the first two years of the label's existence, the best tracks from the first ten Highway releases. Guy Boratto's remix on SCSI-9 could not have happened here either.

F.E.X. "Meditation (Tripmastaz Remix)"

"High House Vol. 2"

A compilation of the label's best from 2011, compiled personally by Mike Spirit. The main hit is the track “Crossing the White Line” by Italian Francis.

Francys “Crossing the White Line (Gorge Interpretation)”

Vadim Lankov “Start the Trip”

The first vinyl in the Highway catalogue: a single by Moscow DJ Vadim Lankov, twenty-three minutes of sharp and hard tech-house.

Geometry, an old-school CD label that celebrated its tenth anniversary at the end of last year:Only collector's editions are published here (that is, no glass boxes, but a lot of special packaging), and the subject matter for these editions are, for the most part, honored heroes of Russian rock in its extremely broad sense: “Auction”, “Polite Refusal”, “Exit”. In addition, Geometry specializes in the noble task of re-issuing archival recordings - here, for example, three classic album"Night Avenue"; There are, however, completely new clients who continue approximately the same avant-rock tradition— like "Iva Nova" andCook's Offices. "Geometry" is essentially affiliated with a music store“House of Culture” on Kutuzovsky Prospekt, where creative meetings with the label’s artists regularly take place.

Vadim Ulyankin

"Geometry", producer

« Recently my boss told me that I am a cultured sommeliere- in a sense, this can be called what I do here. At the beginning of the label’s journey, I was involved in editorial policy, artists, and so on, but at this stage all this is already happening in a more civilized form, collegially. And I deal with contractual work with artists, the production process, and control of printing.

Geometry was not intended to be a publishing company. More like a multidisciplinary one: we have another line of business, construction, although it probably doesn’t make sense to talk about it now. There was a company, there were musical interests. One fine day, the director of the “Auktsion” group, an old friend of mine, showed up and said that Leonid Fedorov had some material that he would like to put on a record. So in 2003, our first release appeared - “Purple Day”. Then there was the group “Vykhod”: Silya (Sergei Selyunin, leader of “Vykhod”. - Note ed.) at some point complained that he didn’t have records and you couldn’t buy “Exit” even on “Gorbushka”, which was still moving at that time. Well, no, that means it needs to be done. At the same time, for the first time, we closely involved Evgeny Gapeev, our famous sound engineer, restorer, search engine, archivist; he did a lot of work with the sound there.

It is extremely difficult to make money in the publishing business. The people involved in the process have nothing to pay large salaries from, but they nevertheless need to live on something. So we coexist with the construction part of the business. It cannot be said that it fully finances the publishing house. But sometimes there is not enough working capital, it is necessary to finance it. We have a desire (and for some time now this has been achieved) for the publishing sector to be more or less self-sustaining. The construction business, unfortunately, takes quite a lot of time - it would be possible to release records faster, but then people would have nothing to eat.

“The construction business takes quite a lot of time - so it would be possible to release records faster, but then people would have nothing to eat”

Our label has been niche from the very beginning. We are not trying to sign some popular artists or publish discs with a circulation of fifty thousand copies. Labels that deal with such things have their own risks: if a new record from, say, “Leningrad” appears on the Internet or from pirates, it seriously hurts them. Our story is different. Our goods are piecemeal. We put quite a lot of effort and money into the design, and we work carefully with the sound, because we have quite a lot of archival publications that need to be seriously restored. In our rather large country there will always be several thousand people who care about how it sounds, how it’s designed, and so on. For example, we decided from the very beginning that we would not create so-called regional publications. Well, you know, in glass, with the inscription “not for sale in Moscow.” Pirates often take advantage of this. And if people know that our products have never been released in this form and will never be released, then they will understand that these are illegal products. And if you look closely at the situation on the market, quite a lot of labels are now gradually moving onto the same tracks. "Nikitin" and so on. Everything is starting to appear in complex digipaks, with DVDs. That is, apparently, our strategy was correct.

With us, everything is decided by the editorial board and, of course, taste. There is a guiding thread that we had from the very beginning: the music is not mainstream, not in the Nashe Radio format, not pop. The paradigm exists. We haven’t had new artists for a long time - because last year we took on the re-release of three large back catalogues, “Auktsion”, “TV” and “Polite Refusal”, and this took a lot of time. We don't have many people. And the task is important. “Polite Refusal” and “Television,” when they came out, were published in small editions, they ran out. Then in those days people had other technical capabilities, they did not approach publication carefully. We are trying to correct this situation. Or the album “Fatherland of Illusions” by “TV” - this is a landmark thing in the history of Soviet and Russian rock music, it should be published, published well and beautifully. We tried to do this.

Geometry has an iTunes account where our releases are sold. It is clear that for us sound and quality play a major role, but the reality is that the new generation listens to everything this way, so we have to do that too. “Iva Nova” on iTunes, for example, is selling well because they tour a lot in Europe. Russian digital distribution today can only be considered as advertising, because it is almost impossible to raise money from our artists. The “pay what you want” scheme is also sly, in fact. I know musicians who make such releases on Kroogi and offer them with a minimum price of one dollar. The end result is cat tears. We don't have a culture of buying music for money. But we are trying to create a specific format: in reissues, the second disc often includes a DVD with rare concerts; this whole business cannot be distributed through any “Circles”. Vinyl? Well, we're thinking about it. But there are all sorts of nuances here. The idea of ​​vinyl is a little profaned today. Because they make records from digital recordings, and this somehow devalues ​​the idea. This is a fetishistic thing, and if you understand that everything is made from a digital matrix, then this is nonsense. This issue must either be approached well or not approached at all. As with any activity. We, after all, waste our lives, and they are short. I want it to not be excruciatingly painful later.

“I know musicians who make such releases on Kroogi, offering them with a minimum price of one dollar. The end result is cat tears. We don't have a culture of buying music for money."

In the West, by and large, no one needs our music. We went to MIDEM to talk to all sorts of people, and everything there was quite revealing. They are all looking for a market, not content. Because the shops are closing, and they need to sell their farm somewhere. Western distribution also comes down to logistics, all our legislative stuff, transaction passports, foreign economic activity, customs and other bullshit. Of course, there are independent distributors, just as stubborn as we are, who are interested in something. “Polite refusal” will probably appear in our independent distribution network. But this is a semi-partisan story, because in order to avoid delays with customs, the director of the group simply buys a certain number of records and organizes private delivery himself. This is the number of copies that we can talk about, but I would not have any great illusions on this score.

Releasing seven or eight records a year is, of course, not very correct. The death of the format was announced five years ago, but we would like to at least finish what we started. Back catalogs must be released. We are not only publishers, we are experienced music lovers. For example, I am very nervous about the situation with the announced reissue of Kuryokhin, when eighteen, or something, records were supposed to be released, eight were released, and the rest were unfinished for various reasons. So we said that we will make these re-releases of ours, which means we need to do it. The faster the better. I always put myself in the shoes of our consumers. It is clear that it is morally difficult for them to wait for years; they want everything at once. Everything doesn’t happen at once, of course. But it must be done."

5 demonstration discs

Leonid Fedorov “Purple Day”

The first disc released by Geometry: solo album Leonid Fedorov, recorded by him in his own kitchen. Incomprehensible acoustic lo-fi with music from Vivaldi, Eminem and Ima Sumac. One of the best Russian records of the 2000s.

"My Music"

"Polite refusal" "Concerto"

Documentation of the concert at which one of the best concert lineups in the country came back to life. Two discs of sophisticated jazz-rock, avant-prog, abstruse and absurd poetry. It seems like aesthetic and intelligent music, but played with such fiery passion that God forbid.

"Assistant"

"Auction" "Girls Sing"

The return of “Auktsion” after a ten-year pause in all its glory; recorded over four days in New York with prominent figures of the world avant-garde, a hymn to lightness and freedom. Visual proof that even ten people can play so that there is still air in the music for a hundred people.

"Wait"

Port Mone "Dip"

An unexpected release for “Geometry”: the Belarusian instrumental trio performs something between minimal techno and peaceful post-rock on accordion, bass and percussion.

"River"

"Night Avenue" "Acids"

One of the first and probably the most famous industrial record in the USSR. Noisy, menacing and sad electronics. "Acid" was carefully recorded and mixed, but the sound quality was somewhat lost on the original magnetic tape - the re-release of "Geometry" corrected the situation.

A young Krasnodar label that has united three projects related to modern electronics under one banner: the Fragment and Passage labels and the Jumble Podcast. The repertoire is appropriate: topical electronic music of all stripes.

Yuri Vasilchenko

« Our history is long. First, in 2009, my friend Zhenya Shchukin opened Passage - an online label that specialized in releasing ambient, IDM, and all sorts of abstract things. In turn, Passage was a sublabel of Fragment, which was opened by Artem Anrilov in 2005. Another local resource appeared, Jumble Podcast, where we recorded mixes with local bass music. And when the electronic scene began to appear and grow in Russia, we came to the conclusion that it all needed to be united. We wanted to cross different audiences. People who listen to techno usually don't listen to ambient music, for example - and we're not like that, we listen to everything. And we also decided to combine what we release. In general, combining audiences is our main task; one might say it is an ideology. As a result, people slowly started writing to us: “I’ve never listened to electronics in my life, but then I listened to Passage and now I don’t want to listen to anything but ambient music, it’s so cool.” The main idea is for people to expand their horizons.

Any label is a more or less organized structure. Even if everything is released, the storyline is still visible. The ratio of artists and labels will always be this: there will be ten million artists, there will be a million labels. You can upload the music yourself, but then there will be no distribution: you’ll either be lucky or not. And labels have mechanisms. One musician told how it all worked out for him: he posted a song on the Internet, someone heard it in another city, he liked it, he told someone, they released a record, some girl in Bucharest bought the record, this girl , in turn, told someone about the record, and everything went from there. There are only a few such cases, in fact. Although, of course, labels are now becoming obsolete. Everything works very poorly.

If you calculate everything, it turns out that for each release we earned from 50 to 200 dollars. In principle, the result is not bad. It is clear that Warp and Kompakt earn more money, but how many years have they been developing? And now it’s very difficult to develop, because there are many people like us. The question is not whether something is selling or not selling. We need to create a new structure for distributing music. Because they buy something just like that, but not as much as they would like. Although the foreign press writes about us and all that. I think that relative to the level of development at which we are now, we have reached maximum turnover. Now, if we now find some kind of distributor and release records, that will be a different conversation.

“I posted the song on the Internet, someone heard it in another city, he told someone, they released a record, some girl in Bucharest bought the record, this girl, in turn, told someone, somewhere everything went from there. There are only a few such cases."

Here in Krasnodar our label is not very well received at all. They don't react at all. We rely more on the West. Of course, I would like to promote all this in Russia, but in Russia it is relatively deaf. We don’t even have many good music resources that can write about us. You, Big Echo, wrote something on Look At Me. And I can’t remember anyone else.

I believe it's vinyl— This is cool and nothing will be cooler. A cassette is also good, but recently a friend of mine released a cassette and he sent it to me. Cool! I'm holding it in my hands, that is. And I have a good deck, but I haven’t used it for ten years. I turned it on and the heads were already demagnetized. In the end, I couldn’t listen to anything. Therefore, on the one hand, the cassette is great, but on the other, the format is completely outdated. It seems to me that now more people have the opportunity to listen to vinyl than a cassette. It's cool to hand out cassettes at a party, but nothing more. Vinyl - yes, vinyl is the best. And CDs, it seems to me, are no longer needed at all in the circle in which we find ourselves.

Igor Gorely

« RAIG is run by two people, the entire label. I am its owner, creator, and administrator. In ten years we have released about seventy albums. Publishing a record now, in general, is not a problem at all. There are much more serious problems. The record needs to be conveyed to listeners somehow. It needs to be distributed somehow. And as soon as the need for distribution arises, the need for a label immediately appears, because a structure is needed, connections and mechanisms are needed. Actually, it didn’t immediately dawn on us either. Only a year later, when it dawned on us that the CDs we had published were lying around collecting dust and were not being distributed in any way, did we begin to somehow become institutionalized.

Our label is non-commercial in its ideology. None of us receive any money for what we have been doing for these ten years. Everything that comes from turnover is the total cash of the artists. One hundred percent of it is used to publish new discs. Online distribution? Well, it's not music. These are, let's say, gigabytes of faceless information. Our topic is completely different: we make high-quality discs for philophonists, for music lovers, which means that a person has high-quality equipment, an acoustic system that allows him to hear all the nuances and feel the sound. I would not like to use the word “elite”, but, in general, we work for the elite. For those who are aware of why music media are needed.

We don't have any secretaries or salespeople, everything is very personalized. We deliberately refuse to install any kind of automatic sales systems, as happens on other labels - you threw it in the basket, some robot answered you. I personally know buyers and communicate with them, especially when it concerns our fellow citizens. Because there are not many of them - in Russia they buy little music from us. There is much more abroad.

“I would not like to use the word “elite”, but, in general, we work for the elite. For those who are aware of why musical media are needed"

We are focused on the international community. There is a little bit of life’s conditionality, a little bit of ideology in this. When we created the label ten years ago, we primarily received advice and recommendations from foreign people, who are more sensitive and enthusiastic about such initiatives. Nobody helped here. I am convinced that music, at least the kind that interests me, does not imply any territorial or national boundaries. This music should be understandable and should be perceived by listeners from anywhere. Asia, Europe, USA or Antarctica. Sound is a universal language. Another thing is that the international community speaks English, so from the very beginning we did everything in English. For the first four years, the site was generally only in English; the Russian part appeared later.

If vinyl were produced at all in Russia, then we would probably publish vinyl too. But we don’t have production, and ordering vinyl editions in Europe, then importing them to Russia, and then selling them back from there, is nonsense. Therefore, we are content with the opportunities that exist within the country. Another question is that we often license foreign labels, and now they are already releasing them on vinyl. But I personally think that vinyl is more of an element of some modern aesthetic than a successful way to convey sound. Vinyl is secondary compared to the CD, especially since eighty percent of modern vinyl is made from digital media.

We publish what we personally like. Me and my partner. The range of interests is quite wide: psychedelia, avant-garde, progressive, experimental music, electroacoustic music, we have published a lot of things. Some people send demos, some we find ourselves, some our friends recommend. And these are not only our artists - there are also Americans and Peruvians, and now there are our friends from Serbia on the roster. By and large, RAIG can be reduced to four main stylistic directions: psychedelia, avant-garde, progressive and experimental music. But we still don’t have a format. Our mood changes, aesthetic priorities change, and along with this the image of the label changes. Ours is flexible and plastic. That is, we have principles - but they are also not dogma. Although we formulate some postulates for ourselves. For example, we want to publish music that no other label will be interested in except us. If an artist has the opportunity and money to publish his work independently - or has a contract with another label - then ours is not for him. We try to support the completely marginalized who are denied attention.

“If an artist has the opportunity and money to publish his work independently - or has a contract with another label - then ours is not for him. We try to support the completely marginalized who are denied attention.”

The fact that we produce Western musicians— an indicator that we have successfully integrated into the international community. Foreign musicians don’t care where the label is located, as long as it performs its functions well. Apparently, we are coping, since many people turn to us from there. At the same time, we do not focus on names. The more famous the artist, the more published works he has, the less chance he has of being published by RAIG. In other words, we are interested in working with beginning groups, bringing them to some kind of international status. For example, the American group U.S. started with us. Christmas - they are now, I would say, stars of the first magnitude. Another selection criterion is that we never buy licenses. We always stipulate that if we undertake any publication, then it should be only ours.

It is much more difficult to exist in Russia. In our country there is no infrastructure for the social layer for which our label works. There is mass culture, and there is underground, and they have completely different mechanisms and systems of existence. In Europe and the USA, these two layers exist absolutely in parallel and on equal terms. There is no underground infrastructure in Russia. There is no radio station that broadcasts non-commercial music, there are no magazines that write about it. Everyone gives priority to commercial artists because that's how they make money. This is understandable, but we don’t have an alternative structure in our country, so, of course, it’s difficult. Actually, this is an objective motivation to target abroad. Because there the music we publish falls into the infrastructure and context and lives a prosperous life.

Everything was done primarily for pleasure. And I must say that doing this, following our principles, is truly a great pleasure, little comparable to anything else. Seeing how a product is born that is interesting not only to you, but to someone else in various countries is wonderful. As long as it brings us pleasure, the label will exist. As soon as we feel that it is getting boring, everything will end. Because this is not a business. This is the good will of those who create the label. We do not want to build any empire and did not want to. And we won’t.”

Kostarev Group "Works 1978-2006"

A collection of works by Alexander Kostarev, an honored figure in the local prog-rock movement. Everything is like the best representatives of the genre: complex instrumental compositions with changes in tempo and unexpected transitions.

The Gimme 5 label is part of a community with a short but complicated history. During its existence, Gimme 5 went through a number of metamorphoses: at first, its main forces were concentrated on a music blog, under which there was an Internet label; then the blog closed - and Gimme 5 finally switched to publishing music. Now the label's activity has come to a standstill, something new should follow. Nevertheless, Gimme 5 managed to thoroughly shake up Russian music: the importance of the 5 records (plus the collection “Fly Russia”, which was not formally released by Gimme 5, but to which the label had a hand) released by them is difficult to overestimate.

Stanislav

“While we were blogging, it turned out that in our country there are not so few musicians working in a genre that was interesting to us at that time . The idea was born to turn the product to face both local and Western listeners. With the support of foreign publishers, we released the collection “Fly Russia”, and from this collection we grew our own digital label, where several releases were released. At that time, we had already lost interest in the blog.

Today we are at the next stage of development - The original idea of ​​a digital label is no longer so attractive, but at the same time I want to not just switch to physical media, but rather completely change my approach to business. The attitude towards music, and the ideas themselves, have changed as naturally as the attitude towards the blog changed at one time - and I hope that these changes will only lead to the better. Last year the Nocow cassette was released, in April it is planned to be re-released on vinyl - this will be a joint release with the Germans from Fauxpas - and today we can say with confidence that this will not only be the final point in the Gimme 5 case, but also the beginning of something new.

It's hard to judge labels in general - they're all different. Ideally, probably, everything should be close to the Russian proverb, in which it is not the place that makes the person, but the person who makes the place. However, if for someone the label on a CD serves as a guarantor of quality, how can you blame him for that? In general, you can notice a special cycle in the music industry. For example, first a label promotes an artist, then he becomes more famous and promotes the label himself, this, in turn, allows the label to reach a wider audience in order to introduce new artists to the world - and so on ad infinitum. Maybe this is the right balance.

“If for someone the label on a CD serves as a guarantee of quality, how can you blame him for that?”

It seems that in Russia everything is approximately the same. Of course, on a smaller scale, but we don’t have the same traditions of independent music as, say, in the USA or Europe. At the same time, it’s hardly worth saying that we focus exclusively on the West - rather on people who will understand and relate to such music. Perhaps this is trivial, but for modern electronics there is neither a language barrier nor a clearly defined framework, and therefore its content depends almost entirely on imagination, and success - on desire.

It is not difficult to notice that today, with an objective assessment of one’s economic capabilities, everyone receives a little more than they give - and this “slightly” grows exponentially. Based on this theory, if an adequate aspiring musician decides to devote his entire life to what he loves, he will most likely sooner or later set up a studio for himself, travel all over the world and live on royalties and money from record sales, without thinking about where he will go. take money for new sneakers. It all depends on desire, patience and faith in your capabilities. Again, I would like to believe that approximately the same applies to labels - and if, if there is a strong desire to invest in the business amounts that correspond to the objective state of affairs, the turnover will sooner or later increase, and the activity will begin to make a profit. We are still at the very beginning of the journey, and I can only speculate, but even here it is much more pleasant to maintain an extremely positive attitude.”

Nocow "Pulkovo Heights EP"

Another Nocow record; it sounds essentially the same as the other one - beautiful sparse urban electronica.

If you want to become a musician, then sooner or later the question of distributing and selling your work will arise one way or another. Even if you are an enthusiast and do not plan to make money from selling your tracks, but simply dream of full halls filled with crowds of fans, you still cannot ignore the issue of commercial distribution of songs, if only because this is a great way to index the name of your group and brand on the Internet.

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What is needed for successful placement of your releases (singles, albums, EPs)?

1) High-quality material, i.e. your track/song must meet certain technical and time characteristics. If you decide to seriously study music, sooner or later you will come to the realization that a high-quality track recorded in a good studio by a professional is a level higher in sound processing than what you record at home.

2) Any release must have a high-quality cover. Very often among beginning Russian musicians I encounter complete disregard for this point. Beginning musicians simply don’t want to bother and think about what cover the release will have - but in vain. Any content that you plan to post on sales platforms must be thought out to the smallest detail, including the cover.

Remember yourself when you come to the supermarket and see an unfamiliar product - you are somehow primarily attracted by the label, picture (cover, wrapper, call it what you want), and only then do you pay attention to the product or product itself. Everything is the same in music, the more attractive the cover of your release, the greater the likelihood of attracting a new listener to your track. I believe that it is better for a musician to entrust the creation of a cover to a professional or designer. Ordering and making one cover from an artist-designer is a less expensive undertaking than studio recording of one song.

3) Once the release is prepared for release (i.e. you have the songs and cover), the musician should decide how it will be distributed. Of course, you can go 100% the right way and show your music to a publishing house. And it will really be a very useful experience if the publishing house is interested. But this does not always happen, and you risk losing a lot of time, or even not achieving the desired result. It is also possible that the publisher’s proposed conditions for the release and distribution of your release will not be acceptable to a particular musician. For example, popular Russian publishing houses practice acquiring exclusive rights from authors and copyright holders for 5 years at a “tariff” of 50% to 50% (in best case scenario), or buying each song conditionally for some money, for example, paying you 1000 rubles at a time, and you forget about your tracks for 5 years - in general, to maneuver in favor of the publishing house there are a lot of all sorts of tricks that are inconvenient for the artist.

Producer and founder of a Russian-language label in Chicago, Vladimir Gershanov (VG MUSIC LABEL), with 20 years of experience in show business, shared some details of the business in the field of electronic distribution:

"After technical progress Associated with the emergence of the Internet and the development of digital services that have become available to almost the entire population of our planet, “digital” rapidly began to displace analog video and audio media. Musicians, as well as record and film companies, started talking seriously about new remote forms of selling video and audio information to the public. The so-called electronic distribution of audio and video content through online stores has emerged.

More recently, in the late nineties and early 2000s, the largest record labels very carefully selected musical material for publication, since the costs of producing analog media were relatively high. It is for this reason that many musicians and groups who did not have a lot of money for production remained “behind” sales and, as a result, show business in general. They simply did not have the opportunity to express themselves, since, bypassing their opinions, the music editor made a decision about the commercial success or failure of the project.

Now, with the advent of the Internet and electronic distribution, a significant reduction in the costs of the production process, as well as stores and labels that are aggregators of these same stores, conveying information to the viewer has become significantly cheaper. But even under these conditions, it is extremely unprofitable for an artist to cooperate directly with online stores. Simple arithmetic. The cost of placing one song in almost any online store is 9 dollars 99 cents. The standard placement package reaches 200 online stores. Let’s assume that if an artist has created not even a standard hour-long album, but only 7 songs, then placing them in only one store will cost 69 dollars 93 cents. And this is just one store. Now let’s calculate how much it will be in two hundred stores. These are costs only for a year. I know only one performer who managed to sell well on iTunes with Russian-language content. And then she had to buy the songs from herself. In other words, it is not realistic to recoup investments with sales in online stores if the artist sings in Russian and does not have, say, American, English or German promotion before placing his compositions in online stores. It is still quite possible to make money if the musical material is truly original and in demand. At the same time, if it is not in pirate distributions, concert and touring activities, along with radio and television rotations, plus the Internet and newspaper PR work clearly and harmoniously. But not all artists have such resources. Therefore, he needs an aggregator.”

In any case, the musician always has a choice: give the release to a publishing house for distribution, or distribute it independently through an aggregator.
In order to independently distribute their own songs to the online platforms ITunes, Google Play, Yandex.Music, Zvooq, Amazon, a musician will one way or another need basic knowledge and information on this issue.

What do you need to consider?

1) The musician needs to choose a reliable intermediary (aggregator) who will accept the release from him and post it on various platforms. Of course, you can take the most tedious path and directly (bypassing the aggregator) place your content in stores yourself, this can be done, but there are a number of nuances: Apple, Yandex. Music, for example, is not profitable to work directly with artists, but Google and Amazon provide a similar opportunity to musicians, but for an additional fee. As a recommendation to save effort, nerves and money, use aggregator sites.

“An aggregator is a company or label that has entered into a permanent contract for the distribution of video and audio content with online stores. Typically, such aggregators themselves take on payments for at least 200 online stores per year. Of course, they do not pay the entire amount at once, since, for example, in the USA, they work under preferential internal agreements with online stores. At the same time, in collaboration with a distribution label, the risks of the artist himself are significantly reduced. This is the main thing for him. There is one more unpleasant moment. Let’s say YouTube pays an artist only after collecting $30 for his songs. And for CD Baby (a music aggregator) this bar is ten times higher - $300. They give the labels interest immediately after receiving any amount.”

In Russia, the most common services in the music environment are Tunecore, CD Baby, Believe Digital and Ditto Music.

Dima DOGMA, artist, music producer at Pr Stark:

I used tunecore and central ocean.

Everything is transparent in tunecore - there is an invoice that records every purchase of your content. Russian aggregators are significantly lame in such options.

In Russia, perhaps, distributors and well-known artists make good money from this. For everyone else, the main income still comes from performances.

Russian distributors take a large percentage of revenue for content, although they do this through the same aggregators, according to the same principles, whereas if you do it yourself, you see every penny. You just need basic knowledge of English to understand all the intricacies of foreign distributors.

Oddly enough, both popular and little-known artists prefer to use the functionality of the Tunecore platform. For example, the Lena Katina project distributes its last 2 albums through this platform, or Sergei Lazarev’s armor-piercing hit “You Are” the Only One" is also present in the Tunecore database. Moreover, the artist himself or even his management may not be aware of such placement, because he is probably under contract with a Russian publishing house, which, depending on the content of the concluded agreements, may not inform the artist about its methods and ways of distributing content.

According to sites emusic.com And believedigital.ru Russian publishing houses and labels, such as Nikitin Music Group, "First Music Publishing House", Gazgolder, Black Star, Studio Monolit LLC They also take advantage of the distribution capabilities of the foreign aggregator Believe Digital (by the way, this company owns the Tunecore service) and publish music content on foreign online platforms for selling music through this aggregator. Believe Digital, in turn, does not work with individual artists, only with labels and with more than 500 tracks in the audio library. Therefore, in principle, there is no difference in Russia through which publishing house or aggregator you will distribute your songs.
Vladimir Gershanov (VG MUSIC LABEL):

“But not every label leads fair play. This also needs to be taken into account. I am an experienced director and founder of a Russian-language label in the USA, and I quite responsibly state that 85% of Moscow labels are pirates. This is quite easy to determine. Firstly, if a label representative says that he places music material everywhere for free, and even gives 80-95% to the artist, you know - these are pirates. Miracles certainly happen, but very rarely. I started my own label 11 years ago because European labels didn't want to work with Russian-language material, and those who wanted to were just scammers. It is important to have good insurance value, issue your own shares and place on world trade exchanges. Reputable labels help artists earn money from their video content by having a direct agreement with YouTube and are not only its premium partner, but also its shareholder. This significantly expands the possibilities.

Monetization of Content-Id is possible not only from your own YouTube page, but also from any other page on which musical material is currently located. It is almost impossible for small labels, especially the artist himself, to do this without being a premium YouTube partner. Another commercial form is the release of compilations, which contain songs from several artists, depending on the genre. Distributing new musical material through a database of hundreds of radio stations “from Malta to Ichkeria” is very effective. Radio rotation brings very good financial reports at the end of each quarter. By the way, every self-respecting label is obliged to provide a financial report on sales to the artist upon his first request. This is usually done every three months.”

The figure shows all the main players in the Russian hip-hop market, the so-called music labels. I will tell in simple language about labels, without going into details of their structure, in order to give a general picture of the market, and you can decide for yourself whether you need to study this issue further or not. Below you can look at the extended table.

Labels in Russian hip-hop are different:

Majors are large organizations with large catalogs of artists, rights to most of the market's music content and maximum opportunities in the media. The opportunities of the majors, of which there are only a few on the Russian market (Warner music, Sony music, Universal), are due to close ties with radio and television; these structures pay the majors for the content they use. Majors are not interested in “non-commercial” music, I won’t even explain... Majors do not consider the Russian market as serious for their business and therefore their representative offices in Russia have limited budgets and powers. Majors do not work with artists directly, preferring professional managers as a layer. IN last year Warner music bet on Bianca and signed Guf, and this is only because the major lent his name to the company Gala rec., whose office is hidden under a well-known brand. The rest of the majors don’t even think about collaborating with rappers in Russia and you will waste your time knocking on the thresholds of these offices. When everything goes well with you, they will find you and offer you a contract, but you will no longer need this if you are a real rapper, of course).

Independent Label - This category features several companies involved in the music business, with structure, management and an artist catalog. Such labels are interested in recruiting promising artists and promoting them to increase digital sales and monetize concert activities. Such a label has diverse interests in the market and the music business very often diversifies into retail, etc. The main task of such a label is to accumulate the best music and video content in its catalog, create maximum distribution for it, identify a commercial product and efficiently promote it in sales markets. The most effective monetization of artists in its catalog over the past year was shown by the Black Star Inc. label, which increased the liquidity of almost all of its artists. The label does not miss the opportunity of loyalty from the audience of its “locomotive” - Timati for the development of new projects. The departure of leading artists at the beginning of the year did not affect the effectiveness of the organization, but demonstrated the internal contradictions and problems of the label. The project for the development of retail stores deserves special attention, which could eventually make the label a leading musical structure in Russia if the current financial difficulties of the chain’s growth are resolved. The label has the resources and experience to support aspiring musicians. The current trend of label development threatens to develop into a rap factory, hurry before this happens and the market is flooded with rap factories.

Another example of an independent label would be a company without hip-hop credits, but with a large number of signed rap artists, such a campaign was once Monolit, and now it is SoyuzMadstyle. I can’t say that these labels are bad and do not work effectively, but the fact is that hip-hop artists do not develop there. By the way, the Monolit company has learned from its past mistakes in working with rappers and is successfully developing projects at the intersection of genres.

The Universam Kultury label did very well while it was a one-artist label; under the influence of the trend, the producer signed two new members (ST and Johnyboy), who soon left the label. Currently, the label has stagnated its activities a little, but remains very influential, and the success of Noize MC has forever enriched the karma of the label's producer.

Hip-hop label is a category of organizations with its own legal entity and a simplified management structure. Such labels include a group/performer - a locomotive and several more extras - artists of the hip-hop genre or so, who do not have serious popularity. However, the fact of one strong brand on a label does not worsen its position, and over time such structures have the potential for another star to join. A striking example Such a label is Respect Production and its latest acquisition is Max Korzh. The artist received an invitation from the label at the height of his career and benefited from such cooperation. The label's producer and concert manager justified their work by increasing the artist's fees for the year by 10 times. Typically, hip-hop labels have a PR manager, SMM employee, concert director, and the main responsibility of management is maintaining communications with the audience. The artist is left to his own devices and the success of the project depends only on his tracks.

A creative association of artists is a kind of gathering of rappers around a celebrity, which creates a single information field for all its participants, which allows the use of fans of one artist to promote all participants. There is an example of an ideal union - Gazgolder, where Basta and K created an organic musical world in which everyone gets the laurels of a participant and some monetization. In such a union, the role of the leader is so high and unattainable that very famous artists can be among the rank and file members. There is also an example of an unsuccessful association - ZM nation, which was formed around Guf and has no significance due to the phlegmatic attitude of the leader and any lack of management.

Hip-hop labels do not produce artists as such, preferring to take on artists who have already proven successful in the market and are gaining popularity and concert activity. Most labels do not invest significant money in artists, but don’t let this bother you, because the time of real specialists, their creative capabilities and connections in the market are worth more expensive than money. All that remains is to find out whether there are real professionals on the label who can solve the problems of your positioning, distribution and sales? Find out the names of label managers/producers and see what they have done in the past, only checking with action will guarantee results. In Russia, according to my estimates, there are six working hip-hop labels that have experience in developing hip-hop projects and have the resources for new work.

It remains to consider the work of PR specialists in the music market. Beginning artists have an illusion about the all-powerful PR managers of the music market who can make the artist famous (I didn’t write popular!). Artists begin to look for such managers and find... girls of pleasant appearance with experience supporting artists and a price tag of 30 thousand rubles per month. These girls are everywhere in the market, in PR agencies and in freelancing, they have a standard form of plan for working with the artist and a desire to accompany the artist everywhere. Do not fall for simple forms; take the trouble to check the quality of work of the selected manager by consulting with his employers and market functionaries. Pay attention to your manager’s type of thinking, whether he is able to adjust plans according to the situation, find breakthrough solutions and achieve results. Keep in mind that a PR manager does not develop anything; he usually implements a positioning concept that was invented and approved by you in accordance with your image. You won’t find another PR manager for that kind of money, but you will be able to achieve effective work if you start planning, developing promotions and monitoring the work of the PR yourself.

In the last few years, bedroom producers, that is, musicians who record releases in their own bedroom, have acquired the status of trend setters in music. This applies to both dance music, as well as experimental dark genres or hip-hop. Music labels, in a sense, have lost their monopoly, faced with the emergence of a new software and free music distribution services like SoundCloud. The Village spoke with Moscow labels that have emerged in recent years and their residents to understand why labels are needed in 2016, who buys vinyl records, and how to combine the import of foreign artists and the promotion of their own residents.

*Wear headphones, the video plays with sound.

Ildar Zainetdinov, creator of GOST Sound:

About seven years ago, my friends and I created our own association “Rad” with a focus on hip-hop, beats and the local scene, and it was from this story that “GOST Sound” grew. Many Russian musicians have recently changed their priorities, and now releasing in Russia has often become more interesting than participating in Western projects. But the goal was and remains the same - to promote what is nearby and package it beautifully in order to develop the Russian electronic scene.

I am sure that in some sense we have set a trend for the popularity of domestic music. I remember her condition very well both five and three years ago. When I shared with others the idea that I wanted to create a label in which the so-called Russianness, both in terms of text and in terms of musicians, would become a key vector, in response they twisted a finger at my temple. After all, this all happened before the wave of pseudo-patriotism at the state level and the triumph of Gosha Rubchinsky. The Cyrillic alphabet was just beginning to come into fashion, and Rubchinsky was barely looming on the horizon - otherwise there was complete calm.

I am absolutely sure that the work that GOST does greatly influences the cultural image of Russia as a whole. Global people in the music industry are closely watching what is happening here. We constantly invite foreign guests to the Research Institute, who share their experiences, and upon returning home they tell us how great and cool it is here and that, despite political and economic difficulties, there is a place for cultural life and new creative expressions. This is a very important dynamic that should be supported in every possible way by the authorities. But so far there is only an anti-example - the cancellation of the Outline festival, which greatly damaged the Russian cultural reputation. Although I do not presume to say that this was solely the authorities’ mistake, it was in their interests to do everything possible to ensure that the festival took place.

Our time is the era of bedroom producers who make their own music from beginning to end. Need in incredible studios disappeared, and the musicians gained more freedom.

We print all our vinyl in the largest Dutch factory, where our distributor is also located. Our task as producers is to find the right musician who will fit the spirit of the label, and then form a key creative idea with him and select best works. I look at the musician from the outside and try to reveal him as much as possible. After the musical concept has been formed, we discuss the visual and image features of the artist, and think about promotion in the media. Then comes printing and mastering, that is, studio revision of the material. GOST has an exclusive agreement in this regard with craftsmen who have extensive experience and work, for example, with the legendary Affex Twin, Omar Es and Theo Parrish. We also closely monitor the distribution of vinyl and ensure that the price on the secondary market does not increase. For me this is a fundamental question. I'm not looking for our records to cost a fortune on Discogs, although for this to happen, we just need to limit the circulation. But I am against discogs hucksters and believe that the label and its musicians should earn money, and not the one who first buys records and keeps them at home in anticipation of a price jump.

A musician's job is to make music, and our job is to make a beautiful product out of it. We are slowly approaching the point of creating our own booking agency and organizing tours for musicians. And one of my global goals is to export musicians abroad. I want our boys to perform more in Europe, the USA and Asia.

Now GOST is preparing several releases, including guys who simply sent a demo by email. This was greatly helped by a series of programs on Megapolis.fm, which I dedicated exclusively to the local scene. Over the course of a year, a series of 12 programs was released, in which I played only domestic music.

We have musicians who are, so to speak, guest-formers: LAPTI, OL, Nocow. With Pasha Buttechno, we are generally involved in the “Research Institute” club, and everyone else is our talented friends and acquaintances. The main presentations of the label take place at the same Research Institute, but there is also a showcase format (festivals with the participation of several young musicians who play short sets. - Ed.). Such events can take place at interesting venues in Moscow - for example, in Polytechnic Museum, and outside the capital - in particular, in St. Petersburg Mosaique or in the XOXO space in Krasnodar.

Buttechno

Perhaps the main musician of the new electronic wave and business card club "NII"

I don't know how to talk about my music. Even critics can't describe it properly. It's always easier to post links than to describe in words. I have been making music for a long time - first guitar, then I went into electronics. I became friends with Ildar two or three years ago. I liked his label, and he liked my tracks. So we started doing a joint project.

Before GOST, I released all the records myself, but after I came to the guys, nothing really changed. It's not a major label, it's still an independent thing. But in terms of organization, everything became clearer. GOST prints on average 300–500 copies of one record, and this does not bring in a lot of money. The label has no influence on the format and genre of my music, but we always select the tracks for the final release together with Ildar. That is, you create the content independently, and he can already advise you on something. Thus, we combine our ideas about successful compositions.

I often play at NII because it is my home and here I always feel comfortable. I organize events where I periodically play myself - this is normal practice for organizers.

Of the Russian labels, I really like “Udacha” - such a rather eclectic project, its genre is difficult to determine. In exactly the same way, “GOST” can hardly be called a purely techno label; we are not limited to genre concepts. After all, there are a lot of techno labels, and they are all the same with their black covers and boring music. And “GOST” is rather a story about the search and study of talents that live in Russia.

Eduard Chaika and Masha Romanovich, creators of Sination:

Our label appeared a little more than a year back. From time to time we were engaged in importing artists, so we thought - why not launch own project? Just to publish your favorite music. We don't like CDs, so we mainly publish music on cassettes and don't mind trying to partially switch to vinyl.

Our team has been leading several music communities on VKontakte and closely follows various scenes, and is also friends with many musicians, so it was very easy to join the industry. We don’t set genre boundaries for ourselves, but long-term maintenance of specific music blogs still greatly influences the choice of music we publish. Now our label has a post-punk and synthpop orientation, but we are not going to stop at these genres and have already moved away from them a couple of times. For example, our first vinyl pressing was the album experimental group"Bruno's 4 Positions"

We are an independent label, so we do this simply for the love of music - we publish releases on physical media and help promote our artists. But we know that other labels are actively organizing events with their residents. We also sometimes organize parties and concerts, but not so often, since the Sination label is quite young, and our musicians are scattered all over the globe. Nevertheless, we managed to give concerts to the majority of residents and foreign musicians who were financially feasible to bring to Russia. For example, last year we brought Lust For Youth, Minuit Machine, Cold Comfort and Caerulea.

Our team consists of two people plus a couple of fellow designers - Nikita Toropchin and Vladislav Sontos. From time to time they help arrange parties and releases for nominal fee. Our musicians, as a rule, record music at home, because Sination does not have copies of thousands of records, and bands do not perform at the Olimpiysky. Although this is, of course, for the better.

Our work is spontaneous and chaotic - there are periods of both active activity and calm. We cannot know when and what will motivate us to publish or import. Now we have some planned projects, but they are not intended for the very near future. We are such, you know, calm guys - we are not in a hurry, because our label is just for the soul. We never really tried to promote it.

At the moment we have only seven residents, but, of course, we want to grow. It works like this: we get to know a musician, see material that is close to us and that has impressed us, and then offer to publish it. Therefore, there can be no question of any written or oral contracts, because we do not chase quantity and do not force anyone. Musicians can always send their demos to us by email, on VKontakte and on Facebook. Under no circumstances do we only hire people we know. The vast majority of musicians published by us found us themselves. That is, first cooperation, and then friendship, but not vice versa.

In recent years, Russian labels have begun to enjoy some kind of unhealthy demand not only in Russia, but also in the West. Especially those following the vector of experimental and dance electronics. The most popular are those that specialize in techno, row house and synth-ambient. We like Perfect Aesthetics, Full Of Nothing, Klammklang, GOST Sound - they all nurture very original and interesting musicians.

Pozhar group, resident of the Sination label

Russian-language experimental minimal synth

“Fire” has become something of a personal diary for me, and this makes it difficult for me to keep it within one genre or one mood and even more difficult to determine my audience. So every time I hear that someone likes my music, I really hope that these people will stay with me despite all the changes.

I met Eduard and Masha when they invited me to perform in St. Petersburg as part of another group - In a Lonely Place. And when “Fire” had enough material, I wanted to release it on physical media. I knew that this could be done through the guys. They helped me release cassettes of the mini-album “World”, and also organized a concert with the legendary Swiss post-punk band Veil of Light.

The label frees you from the need to worry about releasing physical media, merch, and organizing concerts. And how much this is necessary is decided by the performer himself. It helped me a lot. Moreover, before that I already had a positive experience of cooperation with the foreign label Domestica Records.

Sination cooperates only with like-minded people and therefore there is no need for them to interfere with creative process. I wouldn't want to deal with a label trying to influence my music. After all, we are not talking about pop music, where the label plays a completely different role.

Many musicians don't need labels. But today the relationship between labels and musicians has changed a lot - for the better, it seems to me. Without going into details, we can say that labels have become a kind of window out of musical reclusion, which helps to find new audiences.

Sergey Saburov, co-owner of Hyperboloid Records:

“Hyperboloid” appeared as a project by Dmitry Garin aka Acid Mafia in 2004, and its idea was to release experimental music and organize cool events. For example, the big Abracadabra festival (festival of experimental music and contemporary art. - Ed.) took place with the direct participation of Garin and Hyperboloid. Over the years, we have worked with more than thirty musicians, and none of them have left yet. After all, we are not Sony Music and do not sign contracts. Everything is built on trust and mutual interest.

Typically, artists record music at home and then transfer it to us for processing. We welcome those who have access to studios, but we do not yet have our own. All issues at the label are handled by three people - Dmitry Garin, Alexey Pixelord and me. We also collaborate with designers, but Pixelord takes care of a lot of the visual design.

We have always had the task of not just putting music on the Internet, recording cassettes or printing vinyl, but also helping cool music to break into the scene, which is why Hyperboloid today is not only a music label, but also a booking agency. We organize tours and collaborate with brands we love.

We don't want our musicians to get bored at home, that's why we organize parties. Our music sounds great at night with a crowd of people, and that’s why more than five years ago the Hyperboloid Night party appeared, which roamed around the clubs of Moscow, and now mainly takes place at Dewar’s Powerhouse.

Thanks to these parties, today in Moscow clubs you can hear not only house and techno, but some experimental things. Let's say we brought Om Unit, Lapalux and Sinjin Hawke. In addition, thanks to the parties, our musicians began to perform more often not only in Russia, but also abroad, and the label turned into a full-fledged musical community.

Of course, we import foreign artists. But when we just started making “Hyperboloid”, the main task was to show that Russian artists can be not only the notorious “local support”, but also independent musicians. Therefore, when we book someone foreign, we are guided primarily not by his popularity, but by how much we ourselves want to listen to him.

Now the label has a close circle of musicians who not only release music with us, but also support each other and communicate constantly. They continue to send us recordings to this day, but the flow is quite large, and we don’t always have time to listen to everyone. That is why we created the Hyperboloid sub-label -