Absolutely. Labels shouldn't be reduced to the large majors everyone has in mind when talking about the evil music industry. There are a lot more niche labels that focus on very specific genres and audiences.
A lot of them are very passionate about what they are doing and are as music loving as their listeners. They act as a curator by selecting and developing artists, a ability that becomes increasingly underrated in times of services like EchoNest - while I really like what those guys are doing, as a user of various music services I tend to notice that all those discovery features provide very similar results - probably due to the fact that they are using the same APIs by EchoNest. That makes it hard to find new quality music.
Therefor it's good to have a curated selection like the catalogs of small and caring labels that give a human touch to a selection process that is a refreshing equivalent to the popular "You might also like..."-feature. Of course I can only speak for my personal interest, but being on the release schedule of labels like Morr Music, Kranky, Secretly Canadian, Domino, 4AD or Sub Pop is usually a very good indicator for music I might enjoy. Surely there are examples from other genres too.
Nevertheless things can also work out without labels: I'm a big fan of bandcamp which has a lot of talent to showcase and does almost everything right for listeners and artists alike. From the wide range of lossless formats to the flawless iOS audio player or the flexible pricing configurations - if you want to offer your music without a label, bandcamp is the way to go.
Both approaches offer benefits and I'd like them to co-exist.
Yeah, this is spot on. A label is simply what we call it when a group of people involved in music get together and combine their resources. Labels provide marketing, contacts (with other musicians, with recording studios and other services musicians need), and by curating content, they help bands find their audiences and help fans provide new bands.
In fact, it's a very common thing for musicians, once they achieve some kind of success (whether financial, or in terms of their following) to start a label so that they have an organization they can use to promote acts they like.
Why exactly do you think curated content would magically disappear from the internet? The very website you're using right now was created specifically for content curating.
Content curating is an ubiquitous trend in the internet. Startups are built every day, focusing specifically on this problem. And the fact that you're posting here on Hacker News makes me assume that you think it's working.
Yes, record labels also curate content. But that's so easy to replace. If curating music is the reason why you think record labels are useful. Then that's just one more evidence they're useless.
It's a little silly to say that record labels only curate content. Of course that's the easiest thing to replace. They also negotiate IP rights in every country in the world, handle any sample clearance, handle accounting for the publishing and sync copyrights on every individual song for every release, handle accounting of royalties for every credit songwriter and player for each track released across every service and distributor, front large sums of money to make recordings possible, front large sums of money to make touring possible, fulfill merchandise globally, market the music, handle production of product, handle distribution of product, mediate between the dozens of parties involved in nearly every transaction, and take the heat for the entire process.
Yes there are a lot of really bad record labels, but the hard working people at Sub Pop, Domino, Mom+Pop, and dozens of other indies are integral to the success of artists. Marginalizing them or even playing devil's advocate claiming all they do is content creation is silly. It's akin to saying all Facebook does is "make a website."
The music industry is far more complex than people assume — so while massive change is certainly needed, thinking that a simple HN upvote system is remotely related to the work of a label is silly.
Vilifying all labels based on the majors is like vilifying all startups on the behavior of only Oracle or Google.
The term record "label" is an interesting anachronism, pointing back to the label on a physical record. We'll see how long it lasts as a business category.
As others have pointed out, labels are far more than a middleman. To market music as a product requires just as much business infrastructure as any other modern media. Which is to say a lot!
In addition, a major label will front the money for the project, with budgets in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Since most of their acts come nowhere near recouping, the contracts are structured aggressively in the label's favor. They hope to cover all the production and marketing costs of all their acts from the few that make money (hits).
One problem for both fans and musicians is discovery. It's trivial to make your music available to anyone in the world, whereas it used to take a huge capital investment to get product distributed. On the other hand, the marketing and production costs haven't significantly changed. Getting a significant amount of people to discover and like your music is a daunting project for any entity, large or small. On occasion a viral hit breaks through, but the acts that represent the bulk of economic activity are actively created and pushed by pros.
Spotify is providing the most promising alternative distribution system I've seen yet. But they are more of a hybrid between radio and a store. They don't provide anything to the creation or marketing of artists.
As NotJim already mentioned, I really appreciate the new ways of content discovery, yet I still value the old approach of a bunch of music loving people hand-picking releases. This is one of the jobs labels do very well and some startups hooking into the EchoNest API can't replace that functionality yet, however it adds additional options to the discovery process.
Other things labels do well is marketing and artist support - again, we're talking about the smaller, passionate labels here. While I am very involved in music and may find and listen to your bandcamp releases, others rely on third-parties to get recommendations. Now try getting your bandcamp album reviewed by Pitchfork - it can happen, but it's not very likely.
With easier access to production tools and simple ways of sharing and showcasing your work, there is a lot of noise when it comes to searching for music. Bandcamp won't mind as that's of course the nature of the service and absolutely ok. However there's value in a place that filters out the noise and provides the good stuff only.
A lot of them are very passionate about what they are doing and are as music loving as their listeners. They act as a curator by selecting and developing artists, a ability that becomes increasingly underrated in times of services like EchoNest - while I really like what those guys are doing, as a user of various music services I tend to notice that all those discovery features provide very similar results - probably due to the fact that they are using the same APIs by EchoNest. That makes it hard to find new quality music.
Therefor it's good to have a curated selection like the catalogs of small and caring labels that give a human touch to a selection process that is a refreshing equivalent to the popular "You might also like..."-feature. Of course I can only speak for my personal interest, but being on the release schedule of labels like Morr Music, Kranky, Secretly Canadian, Domino, 4AD or Sub Pop is usually a very good indicator for music I might enjoy. Surely there are examples from other genres too.
Nevertheless things can also work out without labels: I'm a big fan of bandcamp which has a lot of talent to showcase and does almost everything right for listeners and artists alike. From the wide range of lossless formats to the flawless iOS audio player or the flexible pricing configurations - if you want to offer your music without a label, bandcamp is the way to go.
Both approaches offer benefits and I'd like them to co-exist.