2017

Annnnd we're back. 2017. Another year lived. Tech now dominates our art form. Places we embraced and used to form communities have well and truly given way to corporate interest. We were really naive. These were never public spaces. We licensed our work to advertisers.

This year we saw Soundcloud bury your plays. Facebook charge you for impressions. DSPs became the new radio - and the majors that own them used their influence accordingly. We’re sold so many myths about the democracy of these platforms and their opportunity for new artists. It’s marketing. There is a huge move to condition our parents towards streaming music and recent projections show that by 2019 there will be more money in music than there ever was in the height of the CD.

Difference is there’s currently no credible platform for independent music. It’s cool. The artists who win at streaming are pitched by labels with existing market share pre-dating streaming. It is a fallacy to believe you can become Frank Ocean without major label resources offering you the scale of audience that enabled his incredible chess-move from Channel Orange to Endless to Blond and beyond. And look, maybe you’re ok with that. This isn’t your fight. And we’re all glad that Frank exists don’t get me wrong. But he poses a question for what we do as a team of new musicians and what we represent. Here’s what we’ve worked out: we’re not in opposition to the majors. Right now their money is largely channeled towards young people who have adopted streaming - so hip hop is winning and we’re living through an extremely healthy period of new rap music. We're glad every day that it's those voices who are getting these influential playlist additions. But as other audiences wake-up to streaming this is bound to change. There is no loyalty to any music over your share holders.

And we’re telling you that simply playing the game of driving audiences solely to dsps is not a sustainable model for new independent artists. They will not be able to live off their music alone. It’s only companies with catalogue who can rely on the culturally implied value of albums from another time to bolster their streaming income. As a young label - we gotta make this work right now. We're compelled to work this out. And we know our value.

Last year we vowed to move priority of our messaging away from socials - to make ring fenced audience on our own platforms. Our mailing list has just passed 100K and that’s driving more sales then we’re used to. Jacques Greene and Lunice's albums really smashed it this year. We’ve taken the money we were meant to spend on advertising and put it back into creative for new music. When the work was good - you guys told people for us. That seems smarter to us than giving our money to big companies to show our audience our work. When you tell people about LuckyMe - that keeps us growing. And we share every cent you invest in us equally with our artists.

This site is to say thank you. It represents a completely open internet: a weirder silent-majority who still swap files with each other. It’s a gesture towards free distribution of art. In the spirit of all this we’re inviting you to donate to the ACLU. Together we'll keep building in 2018.