aaahh records

FREE? Well, what is it all about? To begin with, we would like to introduce a quote from Richard Stallman who once said: “[…] To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer”". Although he was talking about free software, we would like to apply this attitude towards “free music”. So, all the songs that are available on our pages are not only free in price. They carry the freedom to share, to remix and, of course, to listen to wherever, whenever and however you like. Like many other netlabels, we would like to give you an interesting answer to the ongoing changes in the so-called music industry. But hold on! Before you think we dislike good ol’ cd and vinyl, let us tell you that we will offer you real records, too - records you can touch, lick or nail to your wall. The difference is that the balance between free music and expensive records will be turned upside down. So again, “free”, in this sense, implies music the artist wants to share with the world, because he/she doesn’t like to see his/her music as an inflexible or colourless product. Today it’s not common to share music freely, so we shouldn’t simply take from the artists, what they have created with blood, sweat and tears. Instead let’s give them back what they want us to give them back: The possibility to make their works accessible to the public, to make people listen to their music and to give them a chance to grow. Growing is a process that both parties, the musician as well as the listener, can relate to. The musician as an artist, on the one hand, needs to grow in a certain way by receiving feedback on his work to explore new viewpoints, new angles and new possibilities. The so-called listeners, on the other hand, we don’t see as passive consumers. They need to and they want to grow just like the artists do. They don’t want just to consume, they want to communicate. We believe that there is no better way of appreciation than (re-)using, remixing, spreading and sharing an artist’s work. That’s why we would like to recommend Creative-Commons-Licenses (CCL) for the distribution of our artist’s music. CCLs are a simple and legal way to communicate the rights the artists intend to carry within their works. Therefore we let the artists decide which one of the CCLs they want to have going along with their music. WHAT WE CAN OFFER OUR ARTISTS: We will give interesting artists an opportunity to release their work. At the same time we will use the ongoing changes of “music-business” in a positive way. CCLs are the foundation of our way of distributing music, because they allow us and everyone else to use P2P-Networks, Bittorrent, Blogs and other multipliers on a legal basis to create the biggest possible awareness of and attention to the works of our artists. Although all of aaahh-records music will be free in price, we give everyone the possibility to donate a certain amount of money to our artists. That will also help them to keep up their work: to create wonderful music, that we all love. Therefore we will apply a donation-button on every release-site. We try to take an advantage of the new technologies and applications going along with the internet. But we will also follow “traditional ways” that seem to become a niche: printmagazines, fanzines and other “old” types of media will be made aware of our releases as well. Last but not least we will also try to press cds and/or vinyls in small quantities (in collaboration with our artists), because we also like these formats and their haptic characteristics. MUSIC? We have talked about music in general quite a lot now, so let’s get a little more specific about our style of music. Many other netlabels focus on electronic music. That’s not surprising at all, because one doesn’t need a pile of expensive instruments, studios and bandmembers to record electronic music. Compared to so-called handmade music, recording electronic music is a simple thing. Although we really like various kinds of the latter, the core of our netlabel will focus on the former. We believe that it is time to take the next step in the evolution of netlabels and take on music that has not been in the netlabel-sphere before - music like pop, indie, folk, etc. Although we try to focus on handmade music, we would never reject an interesting artist that goes a slightly different way. This means we would love to release some hip-techno-thrash-metal-rap-project with jazz influences as well. We like to listen to many different genres and we want to have many of these in our netlabel-catalogue, but the core of our netlabel focuses more or less on classic bandmusic or singer/songwriter stuff.