Best wishes to all! Some thoughts about 2010

January 3rd, 2010 - Pheek

It’s a tradition to wish everyone a happy new year and so, I’d like to also wish you a great musical year for 2010!

What is music in 2010? I wonder what people were imagining music would be by now, about 100 years ago. If you look behind in sci-fi movies from the 60′s, the music usually played for the future is something of arpeggiated old school synths with a few swooshes here and now. That was pretty accurate if you think about it. There is that kid of music, as well as drone ambient music with futuristic fx. The last thing our grand parents would have imagined for the future was music being for free. Right?

But that is so 2001!

It’s pretty crazy to say that 10 years ago, the best way to promote yourself was to give your music for free. You’d reach a bunch of music lovers that would be really excited by their findings and would be really feeling lucky too. Now, I’m not so sure. It seems the music has not much value anymore. Everyday you can find more (good and bad) music for free (legally or illegally) than you can listen to and I know so many people that have terabytes of music, most of it, listened a single time and then stocked. It sort of reminds me of those homeless people who walk with a grocery cart filled with suff…

That said, what’s left of music is not so clear. Selling the music seems to get more attention then giving it for free. We, at Archipel, believe in both method as an hybrid approach that we have been doing for a few years already. Perhaps this is where the role of a label is important as a moderator of music we believe in. We’re not going to change our approach; we’ll still release both digital and physical releases (CD, vinyl). The digital will still be for sale then for free.

I’m not sure about you, but I feel that we have more power by buying the stuff we believe in. It sends a direct message that you are supporting something. My local grocery store started to have a few organic products and myself, with others, started to buy as much as we could. Now they have a dedicated section for those products and we get more and more quality food. It’s the same with music. If you want more music like you enjoy it, you can support it. I’m going to start an anti-piracy discussion here, but one problem behind that is, it doesn’t give any message back to the artists. Perhaps this is why Facebook is having a lot of success with their fanpages, where people can directly reach their favorite artists?

We’ll be turning 5 years old in October by the way and that is great news!

What’s in the plans?

There was a lot of thinking of what should do for the next year. First off, there will be an evolutive artwork throughout the year. You’ll need to collect all artworks to get the full picture by december. Since it’s an important year, we finally decided to try to release artists that have been affiliated to us, so less new comers and more new material by friends.

Eric Johnston from Detroit will be releasing a new album with us along with his first vinyl. This is very exciting since Eric is crafting really heady, mental music just like we love it.

Hailing from Quebec city, our friend Sul.a was due for a return with us. He already has a few albums out and wonderful releases with us, so it’s more than a pleasure to see where he’ll take us next.

Then we have Jin Choi, Marc Neyen, Rudolf, Niederflur, Christian Dittmann that will make new awaited appearances. Many others as well, don’t worry!

The next vinyl release will be by Stefny with remixes of Bruno Pronsato, Isomer Transition and Flourish. Stay tuned for that one, it’s already making dancefloors move worldwide and we’re quite thrilled to introduce those tracks to you!

Til then, I personally wish you all the best! I hope that you will follow us this year and we can share a musical excursion that will be the soundtrack of your life.