[CONTACT US]
Would you like to contact us for demos or do you have any questions concerning our project?
[SUPPORT US]
Would you like to support us? There are different ways to do that. You can tell your friends about us, use your twitter, facebook or other network to spread the word about aaahh records and if you like, you can also use the following services for donations. This way you will help us maintain and improve our project.
[BRIEF INTRO]
aaahh records – what is that?
We are a netlabel and we offer you free music.
Ok, question answered, but that was probably a little short. So here comes the long version:
aaahh was born in may 2008 in the german city of Bielefeld, grey pearl of Westphalia. We started as a humble netlabel – something we still are, in a way – but everything has grown a little less humble and a little less netlabelish over the past years. In case you are not familiar with the world of netlabels, it might help to read the following passage first. If you think you know the basic stuff, just skip it.
[CC]
Probably the most important part to know, is that we work on the basis of Creative Commons licences. We bet you have seen this © on several products. It’s almost impossible to avoid. It means that all rights on a specific product are reserved. Let’s imagine your product is a cd filled with some songs licenced under classic copyright. In that case you are allowed to listen to it after you paid for it and that’s it. It’s not really yours, it belongs to someone else in a very strict sense.
Creative Commons licences have a slightly different approach. Here only some rights are reserved. If an artist releases a song under a Creative Commons licence, you can do with it whatever you bloody like. There are only few constraints you have to respect, depending on the particular type of Creative Commons licence. The most minimalistic version would be, that you only have to mention the creator of that song, if you want to use it for your blog, film, for a public celebration of your capoeira club, if you want to share it with your friends, if you want to remix it etc.
A guy named Richard Stallman once said, that “to understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer.” Although he was talking about free software, we would like to apply this attitude towards free music. So, all the songs that are available on our pages are not only free in price, you may do with them whatever you like – almost. Which exact, slight limitations a specific release on aaahh-records has, these symbols 
on the release-pages will tell you. We mostly work with a cc-by-nc licence, which urges you to name the creator of a work and forbids to use it for commercial purposes.
[NETLABELS]
Of course we didn’t come up with all that ourselves and we are by far not the only netlabel, that uses Creative Commons licences. In fact most of them do. It is one central, connecting element between netlabels, but what exactly is a netlabel? Everyone knows record-labels. Why are netlabels so different that they need their own, special name. Well, first of all netlabels operate online. You might have guessed that one. That’s probably the most basic description. However that’s not all. Not only do many netlabels use Creative Commons licences, in most cases they are non profit-orientated, they aren’t companies, they release records more often as soundfiles and hardly on cd, are run by small groups or even single persons as a hobby etc. As said, netlabels work that way in most cases. Every netlabel searches for its own ways to fill the space the dying record-industry-dinosaur has opened for us. aaahh-records tries an approach that focusses on the combination of the best out of both worlds.
[WHAT WE ARE]
We want to deliver some evidences that a netlabel can work under economic conditions. The times of big business convenience in the creative sector are over. That’s why the creative industry has to become creative for a change; or to rephrase that for our case: record-labels and artists have to be creative to earn money; not only artisticly, but also when it comes to making a living. Let’s call it the sausage in the fridge-scheme.
Not every musician wants to be a free-time musician. Some want to pay their bills with their art and who can argue against that? Sure, art is something which belongs to everyone, but art needs time and time needs money. All that doesn’t sound very romantic, but we presume that everyone enforcedly has to deal with cold-blooded capitalism from time to time; and because we all have to work for our sausage in the fridge, we all need art, especially music, to relax and to reflect life.
We know it is hard to mix up the current economical reality with idealistic ideas of equal partnership and mutual respect. People do not pay a lot of money for music anymore, but the culture of sharing is not only a culture of sharing art as a good. We would like to see people share little amounts of their income with the artists as well. Please don’t misunderstand this only as a calling for more money. We merely think of a fair share in this whole world of sharing culture.
So shall we throw all our passion, our honest support for the artists we love away as soon as possible, just because we have to do real business from now on? No, of course not! Because what we meant with real-business is not what we are doing now. We – as a group of humble ordinary Joes – earn our sausages with different jobs. We don’t need the share to live. Sure, if that’s possible one day, that would be great. Who does not want to live from what he loves? Now you will probably understand why we want to do more business. We simply would love to offer our artists the possibility to live from what they love and – by the way – what we and you love too: their music.
What’s all that in numbers? We are still talking about voluntary dues here. Sounds like an oxymoron. Before every hq-download you will be asked to make a contribution. You don’t have to, but in case you actually want to give us some of your hard-earned money for a download, note that Paypal demands 1,9 per cent of every income plus a fee of 0,35 Euro per transaction. The remaining amount of money will be shared between the artist (80%) and aaahh-records (20%). We also would like to note, that we won’t line our personal pockets with the aaahh-records share. It will solely be used for the record label, which again should serve our artists.
You might want to ask now what exactly we are doing for our artists. We want to be a manager, a promoter, a concert-organiser, a general helping hand and only a little the organisation which sells the artists records. In any way you will be much more important than us. You can spread their music, visit their shows and probably spend some money for a fancy record or even donate some bucks. You can help them more than we ever could.
As a pre-dated thank you, we want to share more too. We want to broaden the open source elements of aaahh, which means that we will give away more sources of the music for remixing and all the other things you probably want to do with it. Furthermore we want to share our knowledge of the netaudio/netlabel scene. Check out our blog, if you like to know more.
After this sermon we should really move on to what it’s all about: music.
aaahh focuses on handmade-music. An artist must be able to play live. Not only because we love live shows, but because we think that a live show is something special. Whatever the future might bring, you will never be able to download the very special atmosphere in a small club or a bar.
Regarding genres, we were open for everything when we started the label, but it turned out, that we favour folk and pop and folk pop. It’s possibly a common denominator we can agree on, but when you listen to our releases you will see, that we are not too deadlocked on these specific categories. When you have a trance-metal-glam-hiphop-project we probably like it, but there are other netlabels who will pine over to release you.
If you want to send us a demo we recommend our soundcloud dropbox. We always try to reply to everyone, but we get a lot of demos and in case we forgot your demo, in case we didn’t reply to you, please ask again.
Yours,
the aaahhs
