Xynthetic

About Xynthetic Music and Xynthetic Netabel
Xynthetic Music is a label from Vancouver, BC, Canada devoted to quality electronic music across a number of genres focusing on Techno, Drum'n'Bass and IDM styles. Xynthetic makes its music available through two primary catalogs: a digital release catalog (XDR series) which is ditributed by IRIS Distribution and available through online retailers, and a netlabel catalog (XSN series) which is available for free directly from this website using a creative commons licensing structure.

Xynthetic Netlabel was created in late 2006 to be an open, artist-friendly web presence for the promotion of quality electronic music. Our primary currency is attention and audience. We do believe that artists deserve to be paid for the work they do, but we also recognize that with easy electronic distribution of files and subsequent changes in the market for recorded music the development of a new model for reaching listeners and making music available is required.

In the past recorded media was the primary method of making music available to the public, whether recorded on vinyl, cassette, or CD. This tied the music to a packagable artifact, the distribution and sale of which was more easily tracked (not counting bootlegs, resale of used media, etc...). When the phonograph made its debut, the sale of sheet music and the need for a musician to be present to interpret the sheet music declined, and was eventually supplanted. Tapes and CDs used the same model as phonograph records, and the recording industry had a good run for many decades using that model (and this was generally not good run for recording artists due to arcane and opaque accounting practices that grew up around mechanical rights, licensing, label recoup of advances against potential future income, etc...). Electronic distribution and the internet are now doing to the phonograph and its progeny what they did to the sale of sheet music.

The majority of income received by artists comes from performing live, licensing of music, and in the sale of merchandise; not the sale of CDs or other artifacts of the mechanical music industry. This is particularly true for many forms of electronic music, where a successful track may only sell several thousand copies. For Electro, Techno etc... though we may love these forms, the pie is pretty small, and it's been largely sliced up before many of us even arrived for dinner.

With these facts in mind, we want Xynthetic Netlabel to act as a place where artists who share our approach and attitude to electronic music can come to release music they want to make without having to worry about sales figures or commercial success. We want to bring together strong artists because that is what will bring the audience and allow the cross pollination of different artists' audiences.

Anyone can make a website and post MP3s on it, but we want to be sure the MP3s we post get heard. We are focusing on the types of music we love: Techno, Electro, DnB, IDM and we want to see the artists producing that music get the recognition and audience they deserve. All we have to lose is attention, and if the music we make available is good enough, we will keep that attention.