HYPNOTE RECORDING CONCERN is what we used to call a "record company", which currently has two in-house labels, Hypnote and Hyptone. Our years of experience at some of America's top indies were never just as a "label" but always included areas like distribution and multiple manufactured in-house labels and marketing/promotion.

This company started "with a robot and a dream", but as the music business continues to evolve, our current aim is to be more than a label (or even two labels), but an umbrella for all manner of activity which leverages the company's structure and expertise in a rapidly changing environment.

This all might seem awfully familiar if you have already visited our "about" page, but basically what it means is that we are looking to sign up new labels, as well as artists. We have already signed on three brand new labels— Monster Bobby's new label Little Other Records, the fine dance label Sente and the exciting South London hip-hop label RaggoTech— and are in negotiations for more.

Most people seem to agree that it is great that the music business is no longer held hostage by a mere few labels and expensive studios, and that now nearly anyone can record an album, start a label and begin releasing music. We have all heard the stories of self-released albums by bands that have received massive critical and commercial success.

But as the number of labels and self-released product increases, the relative number of distribution options shrink for the many people who have manufactured a CD and have neither the means nor expertise to market it. There are also many people who are doing fantastic productions at home— so many in fact that they are rightfully sceptical about starting up a label or releasing their own CD. Some of these artists do not have the means to come up with the "small" amount of capital it takes to manufacture a CD. Others do not fit into the "band" paradigm, where you can typically make your investment back selling CDs at shows. Some people, heck, MOST people are just not cut out for the music business, or more importantly, don't know the first thing about it.

The future scenarios wherein everyone is happily selling their music digitally online are giving way to the current reality which indicates that not only is the revenue outlook fairly modest, but that because of it, the top digital aggregators do not have the resources to sign, administer and encode all of this music for everyone. And individual digital services cannot manage this volume either (if they could, there never would have been any reason for aggregators in the first place!). Anyway, as a result, a lot of music is going undistributed. By sheer numbers, people are once again being excluded.

We are looking to step nimbly into this breach and sign on a few more labels, for whom we can act as a "sub-aggregator", whether for digital-only or physical distribution. We also offer up our expertise in the many areas of the business, including Marketing, Promotion, Design and Production (not as in a "producer", but as in knowing the particulars of getting a CD or album made properly).

We want to work with stuff we like and people we like and we want to deal with them fairly. One by-product of this much "indie" experience is that we have come out of it with a profound disdain for people out to rip people off and as much as we know all of the angles, we are just not karmically interested in playing them.

The truth is that we hope this website might someday be a reasonably desirable destination on the internet, with lots of exciting new music and "content" (apparently you must have this— we are not quite sure what it is, but we have borrowed a book about it).

What is our bottom-line self-interested motivation here (besides having fun dealing with and helping out lots of exciting young labels, young artists and young people)? Well, it didn't take us long manufacturing a premium physical product to realize that our future might also require a certain amount of lower risk, lower investment, lower return options as part of the mix. We have a solid infrastructure. Our partners have told us that they don't mind what imprint something is on, as long as it is coming through Hypnote Recording Concern and that we are behind it. We would like to open that up to you.

Think about it and go ahead and hit us up with your questions.