Soundshiva’s Report
Soundshiva’s Report — small research with statistics based on information of netlabels from Soundshiva’s catalogue since 2010 till July 2019.
Introduction
Soundshiva was founded in 2010, and nine years later was redesigned and relaunched as version 2.0 in July 2019. Most of the netlabels data from the current (old) version has been migrated to the new — and this is the key to creating this report.
During the migration of data to the new version, I had to explore netlabels from the current database. To transfer netlabel to a new version I needed to gather basic information about it: whether netlabel is active (active status was in high priority to migrate), whether it has a website, in what country it operates, whether it is commercial, where it hosts its releases etc. I inspected every netlabel, visited all the websites, pages on archive.org, bandcamp.com, sonicsquirrel.net, scene.org and collected this information in one file.
This is public information and I thought it may be useful not only to me but also to all participants in the netaudio scene, so I decided to design it to a small report, which is based on data of active and semi-active netlabels from Soundshiva’s catalog.
Glossary
Active, semi-active and inactive netlabels
- Active — last release was in 2019
- Semi-active — last release was in 2018
- Inactive — no releases since 2017 or earlier
Free and semi-commercial netlabels
- Free — distributes only free/pwyw (pay what you want) releases under Creative Commons licenses
- Semi-commercial—distributes not only free/pwyw but also paid releases
- Commercial—distributes only paid releases (not migrated to version 2.0)
Current database
After migration Soundshiva’s database includes ~290 netlabels
62 active netlabels
15 semi-active netlabels
213 inactive or dead netlabels.
Inactive and commercial netlabels was excluded from Soundshiva’s report
Netlabelism countries
Based on 77 active and semi-active netlabels
Now Soundshiva’s database includes netlabels from 44 countries.
Graph below showing stats for 26 most active netlabelism countries.
Netlabels established
Based on 77 active and semi-active netlabels
Many netlabels was founded in 2009–2012 — seems like 2009 and next few years was peak time for netlabelism community.
Oldest active netlabels
Based on 62 active netlabels
Amount of releases
Based on 77 active and semi-active netlabels
Remark. This is my superficial subjective observation.
The graph shows that many netlabels have to face problems in the beginning — semi-active netlabels has not reached the mark of 25 releases. 25 releases is a pretty big number, and probably not one year of the netlabel work. Also, the crisis is observed from 50+ releases. Perhaps on these stages of motivation of netlabel managers falls and may depend on many factors, but later everything is relatively stable.
Semi-commercial active netlabels
Based on 62 active netlabels
Remark. This is my superficial subjective observation.
13 of 77 netlabels from this report are semi-commercial
9 of them still active (showing on graph). Simple conclusion can be that semi-commercial model motivates more and helps netlabels to stay alive.
Platforms
Based on 77 active and semi-active netlabels
Archive.org is still number one for free releases. Bandcamp have now big influence to the scene because its great for pwyw and semi-commercial models. Some netlabels still hosts their releases on own websites/servers — why? may be for better control. Sonicsquirell.net and scene.org are dead.
Conclusion
This report was made for fun. Idea was to go a bit deeper into scene not only exploring genres and other obvious information. You can go more deeper basing on this report and found other interesting details and concluions. Hope you enjoyed reading this article.
With best, Nikita from Soundshiva.
