06/08/2022
It’s been a while, it was 2008 when Daniel Englisch (Diablo - NL) & I decided to create our own label "Defuse Records". At the time there were just few options for digital music distribution companies to cover all the right portals, such as Beatport and Juno.
We decided to use a German music distributer that ticked all the necessary boxes for us back then.
At the beginning it all seemed fine, but in the course of time many new digital music distributers, online portals and streaming platforms were introduced to the market and we realized that our current distributer was not only overcharging us but also not being very helpful, transparent and supportive whatsoever in terms of indie music label needs.
When we finally wanted to terminate the contract (late 2019) and move on to other distributer, we suddenly realized this was almost impossible as they had us locked in with a ridicules contract, that was obviously only beneficial for the distributer.
Even though our tracks were licensed to 3rd party compilations and local compilations without our approval, we had to pay and wait (over 2 years) for the deletion of all these compilations which we didn’t even approve in the first place.
Next we had to pay for the deletion of our entire collection including the ISRC codes & EAN codes, which we originally bought from the same distributer for every release we had – which caused us to lose all the releases data and statistics from the streaming stores (this is normally not necessary when moving from one distributer to another).
We started the process in mid-2019 and we can finally say it is finalized now, this has cost us a small fortune (4 figures amount which is 3 times more then what we made by selling or streaming our music) and it also damaged our label reputation as we had to postpone releasing as long as we were not out of this distributer.
As a result we created a sub label “Defuse Limited” which will be used for special occasions and will be incorporated into defuse records again.
After the distributer has informed us we need to stay with them until late 2023 due to contract deletion rules, we have been spamming them like crazy and calling them directly requesting to terminate the contract asap, as we had no music linked anymore to their system (otherwise we would still be involved with them for another year). Finally the distributer did give us their final approval to move our collection to other distributer.
The moral of the story is - If you want to have your own label, make sure to check well and read the small letters in every contract, make sure the distributer’s system is transparent in every process it offers, try to collect as much feedback as you can about the distributer you are interested in and if you have the chance than try to negotiate with the music portals directly (Beatport, Juno, Traxsource, Spotify, Tidal etc.) Also try to keep the rights over the music to yourself as much as you can and always have the power to control where your music will appear at.
We hope this information is useful for some of you guys who want to pursue their dream and have their own label.
So what’s next you might ask? Well, First of all we would like to thank all the dj’s, producers, followers and anyone who helped us along the way..
As of today our complete catalog is available on our Bandcamp page https://defuserecords.bandcamp.com and finally it has been
re-release through most of the major music portals again, so stay tuned, as new banging Techno will be coming out soon again from Defuse Records Amsterdam… Mazzel
https://www.beatport.com/label/defuse-records/16533
https://www.traxsource.com/label/31930/defuse-records
https://www.junodownload.com/labels/Defuse/
