D4Dirty Digital

D4Dirty Digital was a reinvention of my old record label, D4Dirty Records. D4Dirty Records  was a label recognised by the few who knew it as an exception underground label with exceptional underground beats but it ultimately failed becuase like many other labels it was based on a model that needed to evolve.

I had a break from music, from running the label and when I decided it was time to get back into it, I found that beatport had removed my label from their site. I wasn't quite sure what to do with all the work I had put into this label, and I thought that my labels days were well and truely over. I thought one person cannot possibly run a successful label that did itself and its artists the justice they deserved.

I quickly got onto twitter and started whinging about beatport and their business model, never helping out the up coming labels who have decent tracks. After a while I started writing out my brainstorming tweets on why my label failed to make decent sales targets no matter how much money I threw at promotion. After a few hours I found that I had twittered out a brand new business model, and I noticed that other people on twitter had been listening and like my ideas. I knew I was onto something!

 

D4Dirty Digital has a new approach to releasing fresh wicked house beats covering Tech House, Progressive House and Techno. As an underground label we have struggled for a long time to manage our artists, releases and promotions. We have always had the idea of an up and coming label making it big by letting the music speak for itself, and now after trying several different methods of promotion (Burning a lot of cash in the process) we have come to realisation that our methods simply do not work anymore.

 

Why do we even have labels anymore? The historic need for a label is they were able to pay for an artist to have an entire record produced, distributed and promoted and the label would take a tidy chunk of the profits.

 

These days, especially in EDM most labels are simply a collection house of one off contracts with artists for one or two tracks and they simply package it up some artwork, send it off to a distributor and spam their 3000 myspace fans. Also There are aggregators out there now like tunetribe who can have you distributed to iTunes, and other stores at the click on a button. Why are artists even bothering using the middle man anymore? 

 

Sure there are some great labels out there, with the time, money, skills and contacts who are activly promoting and building their artists up, but what are the chances of most up and coming producers getting signed to them?

 

Where Did We Go Wrong?

Our first point of failure was the fact that our label was owned and run by 3 key players. Slowly releases started taking longer to get out, contacts would drop off for long periods of time and the artists we relied on for remixes started charging more then we could afford. 

With so few people runing the show we decided to try new methods of promotion, viral marketing, link buying, myspace etc. We spent a lot of time and money developing these campains which ultimately did not produce the sales response we had hoped for.

I started to ask myself; Why is it that a group WOW geeks can run online clans where they have 20-40 people log in to a game at the same time and have organised virtual raids? How can a group of filesharers create professional looking torrent sites that run profits?

 

How can those kind of groups be so organise while it takes my label (and many other labels) 12 months to organise a release? 

 

What is my label missing that these guys have?  

The Answer: An enthused and professional community with a shared mission, key contacts and a solid promotional strategy with shared responsibility for each member.

 

This label is no longer a profit label, all profits will go to those who sign up with us.

 

We will open the inner workings of the label up and we will become what I envision as an open sourced label.

 

I am going to find 20 of the hottest up and coming artists and sign them all on equal exclusive terms for 12 months with a minimum number of 4 original releases each per 12 months.

 

These artists will be contracted to be social. We are after artists who are active in the community, who have twitter accounts, who enjoy chatting to fans and other artsts. They will be required to check into our internal forum at least once every few days to catch up (with an exception for a holidays or sickness). 

 

These artist will form army of producers with the same goal, to gain exposure, get reviewed, make fans and make sales.

All of us have different skills, assets to bring the group (besides hot tracks). I personally have a little extra money, lots of contacts and relationships. I have about 20 or 30 great contacts on my msn... just imagine 20 of us, how many more contacts we will have as a group? How many of us can offer something internally like release artwork, promotion tips, radio contact etc.

We will be keeping remixes entirely in house, which will help us out a lot as our reputation builds. I will be asking each producer to supply one remix for every original they want to release.

 

Each producer will have been chosen for their musical abilities and assets that they are bringing to the group, however I (D4Dirty) will have the final say if a track or remix is not up to scratch, in which case our team will work together to suggest how to bring a track in line with the quality we are after. 

 

I will be opening up all sales figures, all artwork, everything to the crew. The entire process from uploading tracks, remixes, mastering to metadata sheets for online stores will be streamlined via my site; we will as a collective work together to manage everything by the functionality of the site. Each of us will know how much each stage costs. I will front the first few releases to get things going, and they will have an option to donate if they want.

 

We will collectivly run promotions, each member expected to chip in with whatever they can, be it a few spare dollars for advertisments or handing out CD's to DJ mates, to sending out social network bulletins, giving releases to key radio contacts.

Profits will work completely differently from other labels. A percentage of profits will go into a pool to be used for mastering and promotion, while another certain percentage will be equaly split between all members. There will be a certain percentage given to individuals based on sales of their tracks so that when one of us producers a massive hit we recieve a fair ammount. Details of the formula will be available for all members.

I am taking expressions of interest from a lot of producers, if you are interested please drop me a line:

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