Take any given Psy Trance hit, compare its obvious popularity with the sales number of the CD or the digital download and you will have to admit: Our scene is everything but innocent in terms of illegal music downloads. You don’t think so? Well, just enter into the Google Search ‘[name of any popular album] MP3’ and go for it…

We won’t wag the finger today, but in fact it’s not even necessary downloading illegal copies from the internet. There is heaps of free music around! The keyword is netlabel. Offering completely ‘copyleft’ material or using the Creative Commons license, they provide a huge variety of free sound from all musical sub-genres of our scene.

Being free of the constraints of monetary revenues, they are definitely more independent as their commercially structured counterparts. And for sure there is a lot of passion for the music involved, since what else would be motivation if there is no money?

Still there is one idea deeply rooted in our Western minds: What doesn’t cost anything, isn’t worth anything. Speaking of netlabels, it is widely believed that they only present the sediments of that multicoloured cocktail named music. Obviously there really is quite a number of artists who upload their debut album on Soundcloud only three weeks after they grabbed their first cracked version of Ableton Live.

However, basically a netlabel does nothing else than a traditional, profit-orientated music label: Filtering an ever growing input of music and presenting only the best. In fact there are more and more doing so really well- check it out yourself!

Eine Alternative zu illegalen Musik-Downloads bieten Netlabels. Sie stellen ihre Veröffentlichungen unter der Creative Commons Lizenz zum Download zur Verfügung. Dadurch sind sie frei von den Erfolgszwängen eines profitorientierten Geschäftsmodells, als reine Leidenschaftsprojekte bieten sie die perfekte Basis für innovativen Sound.

Jedoch hält sich in unserer Gesellschaft hartnäckig der Glaube: Was nichts kostet, ist nichts wert. So denken viele, Netlabels würden lediglich den musikalischen Bodensatz präsentieren. Aber im Endeffekt tun sie nichts anderes als ein klassisches Label: Aus einer immer größeren Masse von kreativem Output nur das Beste und Spannendste herausfiltern. Und einige tun das wirklich ganz hervorragend!

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