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This sort of thing has been happening in the totally or near-totally DIY musical scenes (anarcho-punk, crust-punk, some bits of the UK dub scene, some bits of the drum'n'bass scene, probably some techno, etc) for as long as the technology has been available (altho in the more "politically-DIY" scenes the tracks have often been distributed for free (and/or as little-more-than-cost-price CDRs at shows), and in the less politicised [in that sense] scenes such as grime, DnB etc some artists who started out pressing up their own vinyl, distributing free mp3s thru their blogs, etc have now got record deals on the back of that)...
It's perfectly possible for a band, group of bands or group of solo artists (or any combination thereof) to run their own record label as a workers' co-op, and IIRC some Jamaican reggae record labels in the 70s were constituted in this way (will try and dig up data on that, i think i read it at somewhere like uncarved.org) (of course plenty of others were run by total rip-off merchants - and most, whatever their ethics with regard to paying artists, were little more than producers or recording studios who rented vinyl presses in terms of organisation - one producer would often have several "labels" at the same time) - probably true of many other relatively-self-contained scenes as well...
"Major" (in the sense of "mainstream", internationally famous) artists doing this sort of thing is interesting, particularly in so much as it puts out the message that anyone with basic web access can do this, but IMO it's nothing new in terms of the phenomenon itself, just in terms of its appearance in the mainstream... |
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