Heuristic Music started out in 2007 as a traditional independent label producing music for meditation. By early 2009, I had become dissatisfied with the limitations of the meditation genre and the low creative and technical standards that plague it. Furthermore, my interest in the genre was less artistic than it was commercial, which is not sustainable given the current economic situation facing the recorded music industry. When consumers' options in the marketplace are practically unlimited, the economic value of a product will always be low. When anyone can make an infinite number of copies of that product, it's economic value quickly falls to zero.
Musicians can and will argue this point endlessly, on the grounds that they should be able to derive compensation for their lifetime of work. From an idealistic standpoint, they're absolutely right. However, it has become clear that the average, passive listener has little concern for ideology. Of course, there will always be people who feel compelled to offer financial support for the creation of recorded music, which raises an important question: are you better off protecting your music's perceived economic value and losing potential listeners, or are you better off embracing free music's potential to attract new listeners and appealing to your active fans for support? Unless your only interest is creating mainstream pop for a large, passive audience, the latter approach seems more likely to bring success.
In light of these factors, I have decided to relaunch Heuristic Music as a netlabel. Netlabels are small labels that generally make their music available as free downloads protected by a <a href="http://www.creativecommons.org" target="_blank">Creative Commons</a> license, often supported by limited CD-R releases, merchandise sales or financial donations from fans. This decision allows me to stop focusing on sales and start focusing on creating new music.
As of this writing, new releases are still a few months away. If you want to keep track of progress, please join our mailing list (http://www.heuristicmusic.com/mailing_list), friend us on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Heuristic-Music/6171779882) or follow us on Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/heuristicmusic).
Tony Wallace
June 5, 2009
(read less)Heuristic Music started out in 2007 as a traditional independent label producing music for meditation. By early 2009, I had become dissatisfied with the limitations of the meditation genre and the low creative and technical standards that plague it. Furthermore, my interest in the genre was less artistic than it was commercial, which is not sustainable given the current economic situation facing the recorded music industry. When consumers' options in the marketplace are practically unlimited,...
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