By Analee Campbell

Music companies have recreated themselves in recent history, as a response to the industry’s evolving future. Changemakers in the space revealed what they've done to take the lead in this new era in this 2012 Internet Week throwback session.

The idea of the traditional ‘record industry’ is on its last limbs. Moderator Courtney Boyd Myers described the panelists as “running into the burning building as most were running out.” Since they are on the frontier to a ‘remixed’ industry, they’ve had to tackle various problems along the way — and continue to do so. Myers started out the discussion by inquiring about the current issues that these panelists were fixing.

Cantora Record’s Co-Founder and Director of Technology, Jessi Israel, took the lead in responding, revealing that his company started as a way of connecting musicians, and technologists to other established people in the industry as a way of curating the right relationships for success:

We identified an opportunity for us as a label about a year and a half ago. We saw that there was place for us to apply our expertise as guys who know how to work with musicians, who understand live events and tastemaker culture, to help another part of the music industry, which is music startups. A lot of the technologists and young people who are creating technologies for the music space tend to not know anything about the music industry so one of the things that we have been addressing, besides helping bands, is been helping music technologies, giving them money, crafting their product and getting them into the industry through the right relationships, and the right marketing strategies. It’s a very similar process to working with bands.

Dean Bein, founder of True Panther Sounds, followed after Israel in the discussion, specifying that it was his music passion that helped break into this ever-changing industry and pushed him towards success:

My inspiration was purely as a music fan. I saw that, I’m from San Francisco, there was a section of the music world that was underrepresented. I felt like that I came from a music community, starting working in music and I saw a lot of musicians that were trying to get a huge label deal or trying to break through and I realized that you could kind of scale things properly and allow the artist to get access to things at that scale. You can be successful even if you are not in a major city or whatnot. Basically, we ended up here. That was the entry point, very humble and and appropriately scaled things can be successful.

Founder of Fool’s Gold Records, Nick Catchdubs, agreed with Bein’s position and revealed the ‘selfishness’ that helped bring Fool’s Gold to life:

I think the Fool’s Gold approach is pretty similar to Dean Bein’s. We never really thought of it as ‘where does Fool’s Gold fit in the music industry.’ We founded the company based on stuff that I liked and stuff that A-Trak liked so it was completely self interested. We wanted to put out things that we enjoyed personally and help our actual friends release music. We never worried about where we fit in the music industry, we worried about making a Fool’s Gold industry and when that dovetails into the kind of music system at large that’s nice, but that doesn't really make or break the way we approach things. That’s why we have the store and are just as psyched about bringing people into the store with stuff like art shows or quirky little items as how we are going to navigate selling MP3s.

Ghostly International’s Founder, Sam Valenti, discussed the issue of finding good music, and how his site is striving towards a solution, but that it still is a work in progress:

The problem to be addressed is that there’s so much good music and there’s so much talent right now that you could spend all day looking for is so what is a label? It’s a philosophy. We’re a school of thought. Our job is to separate what we think is good. So if it’s Dean’s taste, or Nick’s taste or our taste at Ghostly, that’s what we believe is great. We can provide context and create a kind of co-op of artists for people to come and enjoy. That’s one of the major problems that labels saw, which is discovery. That we don’t currently. We’re still figuring out how to discover music on the web and I think that social media is great but at the same time we want people who are also are everyday living and breathing finding artists and focusing on artists. Some of our friends do that, and some of our friends don’t so which one do you trust?

To continue to see what these experts in the music industry had been doing to ‘remix’ the record label, watch the full panel session here: