So I am curious…is the label still going? Do you all intend to release solo artist? Won’t take it in any way…but been told otherwise when attempting to release with the label, and if my stuff isn’t good enough for the label that’s fine…just curious if you all are looking for material/new artist/artist to release.
Thanks in advance
Thanks for the inquiry.
Until an official statement is made by @relic, @Auto-meh-geddon or me; IDMf Netlabel is, has been, and will remain active as it has in the past. There aren’t any plans for an official statement in the near future.
In fact, we just recently revised (slightly) and reposted our submission guidelines. You can have a look at them here…
https://idmforums.com/t/idmf-netlabel-demo-submission-policy/5760/2
If you have questions you can feel free to post them in that thread or message me. Should you submit anything via the e mail in the guidelines shoot me a PM as well so I don’t miss it.
Currently, we are in the middle of a cooling off period. It would only take the right release, at the right time, to rekindle the flame.
Thanks as well, on my behalf and any other s.o.d ! 
Solid unit the 3 of you, gave me a bit of smirk reading that! Do hope the advice, a&r, yaddayadaayaddda of whomever else has been involved might still be of avail to you boys.
Think we are all always looking for something to rekindle the flame with this place, and can only hope this message serves as an inspiration for any, and all! big up yuhself, seen?!?!
You should have a very large, obvious link on the home page and at the top of the Label section - excuse me if I’ve somehow missed them.
The releases used to be in numerical order in the sidebar - now you kind of have to do a bit of searching to even find that there are forum releases. Seems sub-optimal. I don’t know why you would hide the label, other than to disguise it’s inactivity, but that seems a little unfair to people who effectively donated their music to the IDMf label in the past.
Nothing is being hidden. The truth is the current Admin team suffers from a lack of time to attend to these things due to external obligations and other interests. If you do some more looking you’ll see where we have recognized this in public, going so far as to ask for volunteers to take over. Nobody volunteered, so here we remain.
The Netlabel has been ran by a few different people over the last several years. Control of the label transitioned back to me and the current Admin Team when the OP in this thread was made. Maybe twice a year we’ll organize a community release or something, maybe not. Our goal for next year is to maybe do 2-4 releases that are worth listening to. Outside of that……
The label will never be what it once was. We’re hoping to keep it going as a small project for those of us who remember what it used to be.
Having been on the other side of this now, I can totally confirm what RFJ is saying. I was part of that “different people” that ran things, in name at least, from about 2019 until earlier this year (which was probably a year longer than I should have tried to hang on, but that’s another conversation). Everything from 055 to present was at least in part signed off by me, and I’ve been involved behind the scenes to a lesser extent since 048, which goes back to 2017.
Every time you think “oh, we need to just update this real quick” it turns out you need to get 3 people to agree on exactly what “this” is, what an “update” looks like, who’s going to be responsible for it, and then you need to find the time to do it - which will never be as “quick” as you think. And when that’s your day job that puts food on the table, you get it done and move on. But when you’re doing it with what’s left of your spare time/energy, hopefully after making some music of your own, helping forum members get a new release ready, keeping an eye on the forums themselves, trying to make the most of our impressive back catalog, and doing the business behind all this stuff (I did the accounting and made sure we were accountable for the money coming in on top of all this other stuff) - it’s very different story. Hell, just having a meeting more than a few times a year is a challenge, with timezones being what they are. Then it’s 3 months later, you finally find a few seconds to make the change, and someone doesn’t like it, or it glitches out and now instead of the site looking barren it looks broken and that just put a new thing at the top or your to-do list…
All of that is to say, I’ve been there. I don’t begrudge anybody their opinion, but I tried to run this thing for a long time, tried a lot of things, and by the end I was in the same place as the current admin team - get a “what is IDM to you?” compilation out every year and call it a win. The world has moved on, and that’s OK. Just keep chugging along and see if we can’t make it to 75, then maybe 100. It would be really neat someday if my contribution to the label was in the middle of some tapestry instead of near the end, I’m really interested to see what that would feel like, and who might come after me. For my part, I didn’t leave in bad blood, and I don’t resent whoever thinks they can do better. I just can’t give enough of myself to the label anymore to make things any better than what they are. I started out on this fresh out of college with a entry level job and time to kill. Now my career is starting to take off, my health isn’t as good as it used to be, and I’m pursuing a few interests outside of music in addition to trying to push myself musically a bit more. I just realized that the label is too far down my list of responsibilities for me to make the impact that all of us feel the label needs.
But to those of you out there who are considering it, the experience is invaluable. More difficult than you think it will be and often surprising in it’s mundanity (I think we once argued for almost a month over whether a new font was the right fit for the label). BUT, it is rewarding in a way nothing else is when someone comes to you with their music and asks you to guide it out into the world. If you think putting an album of your own out feels good, then wait until you put out your first compilation album with a bunch of artists excitedly wondering if they made the cut, who else did, where their song fits in, what the album even sounds like… they give you the pieces and you put it together as the best representation of this place.
Pro tip, album art is and always will be a bitch. I am going to be using more of Midjourney myself, and any label people in the future might consider it as a way to take some of the load off. I cannot tell you how different the story of my time on the label might have been if album art had been a non-issue like it can be now. Do not get holier than thou “our art demands real art” about this, just take the easy road here, trust me.
15 years for idmf is a long time and an accomplishment on the internet…
I guess whatever the future holds whether it be death or rebirth i wish everyone that was or will be apart of this community if it is still around the best.
Hindsight is a thing…looking back i could of done better but i didnt and what happened happened… like the beat tape headbutting.
As far as legacy goes idk…idmf accomplished a lot but i guess not many have the time anymore to dedicate to rebuilding idmf because of other real world responsibilities…
My ideas for the future…in case anyone wants to steal…
Youtube production classes.
Real world marketing.
Partnerships with other forums like gear slutz and kvr.
Im basically copying from glitchdotcool…
Being that they have an active community via discord…
Im not sure…im just spitballing…
I mean no offense…even though i have probably offended you all…
Ill shut up now.
Thank you…
Take care everyone.
I get this feeling IDMF has no interest in becoming the next glitch.cool, but that would indeed be ‘cool’.
Side note, that place is definitely awesome.
Artwork is always the easiest part for me, but then again having to get a bunch of people to decide and agree on it probably makes it 1000% harder. I’d never want to just have it up for grabs / votes either. It cheapens the whole experience, but then again imo so does using AI.
This is part of the problem. Not just that all the label heads have to agree on it, but the artist/artists involved in the case of single-artist releases (we spent two months going back and forth with one artist on their cover). Add onto that that we are also using the cover as a big part of our promo (in any video we’d consider doing it would be the background, we’d usually reveal the cover a few weeks before the album to try and get people worked up, etc) so it has to be cool enough to make decent promo material on its own. Without exaggerating - EVERY SINGLE RELEASE I WAS INVOLVED IN (after 055) WAS HELD UP TO SOME DEGREE BY COVER ART. Not most of the time, EVERY time.
I’ll get into some numbers here for the average compilation album, if we budget 6 weeks to get songs in, 1 week for selection ( a very time consuming process for us all, so we can’t really do art in parallel until after selection is done), 1 week for mastering, it would easily be another week or two to get cover art and promo art done (mostly various renders/scales of the final cover art) and start up promotion of the release (which needs another few weeks to hit properly). And we tried a lot of different styles/methods with cover art, I like the style we landed on for the forms compilations, which are computer generated by Creepr and he can throw us half a dozen options in one free night.
Add it all up, and we couldn’t really get a release done faster than about 3 months at a time (6 weeks for music+1 for selection+1 for mastering+2 for art+2 more for promo=12 weeks) if everything went perfectly and we didn’t have to extend the deadline for songs or art - And we almost always end up extending the deadline for songs by another few days at minimum. And then you have to clarify song titles, who sent what, hey this link is broken, etc. So really add in another week just for that and call it 13 weeks. AND all of this is photos only, any video work cannot start until after mastering is finished and also takes a longer time to render as a bonus, that’s why we have almost no video unless the artist provided it themselves.
There are a few exceptions, but if you look at 2019-2022, the label did 64-55=9 releases in 4 years, or put another way 9 releases divided by 48 months is an average of 5 months and some change from release to release. And that’s with something always going on, in my case I was focused on accounting, demo/submission intake, song selection, and mastering. That’s enough to keep you pretty busy. To go any faster, you have to operate in parallel on multiple releases at a time, which isn’t really possible if one of the releases is a member compilation album because at that point we’d hope most of the members are working on songs for that, and we can’t very well run 2 compilations at a time either - It’s a lot to ask of forum members and ourselves.
But hey, if suddenly we have a bespoke library of art to pull from, already rendered mostly at the right resolutions, and all we have to do is add a few text layers, well the lead time for art just dropped from a week or two to a day or two because even I can do text layers and basic cropping/transforms, and that gives you some breathing room. So yeah, I know it’s not as good as the real deal where cover art is concerned, but you have to cut time out of this process somewhere. Another thing I wanted to try that I don’t think we ever did (correct me if I’m wrong) was to get album art done first, then present that to the forum and ask for musical interpretations of the cover. That could frontload art to a less busy time and no one could argue “tHiS cOvEr DoEsNt FiT tHe MuSiCcCcCc”.
For me, cover art was the pain point that didn’t do that much to enhance the product we were putting out (same music either way), but took a lot of time and effort to get right (months in the worst cases), and it never made everyone happy. If I could put my own music out without cover art without looking like I don’t give a shit, I would. But you have to look like you care about your music if people are going to care, and that means having art that fits the music for every release. A necessary evil to me.
But if you enjoy it, then awesome for you. Satan-lover.
I would be more inclined to genuinely care about what I produce rather than just looking like I care tbh.
This might be the crux of the problems here.
Idmf never was glitch dot cool…it was before…but it might want to adapt though…
Also it doesnt have to be…glitch dot cool
It just needs it own unique angle to carve out its niche…
Also once you carve out your niche…some bad apples will try to take your niche from you…so you gotta defend your niche…
Idmf wasnt strictly idm it was more “electronic music forums” without adhering strictly to genre well at least after skrillmau5 in reference to some of the label releases…being most people here make different genres anyways.
But yeah.
Also I was a home health aide…for a long time…in addition to working regular jobs, i currently dont have the energy to rebuild idmf…also i would just be pissing in the dark in my efforts. Tbh.
The cover art thing is interesting. Everything WN is saying is 100% correct. The only thing he’s leaving out is how absolutely viscous the community can be about it.
I was solely responsible for IDMf049 through IDMf054. If you take a look at the “cover art” during that time period, the black, monochrome style was my attempted solution to that problem.
Until one night I log on to find a YouTube video calling for pitchforks and torches over the amount of time in between releases and….cover art, lol.
It was pretty crazy that all these people who come here every day to only consume would go to those lengths to complain. It was at that point I stepped back from it and said, fine you can have it. Sometime after that WN came on board after the YouTube complainer decided he didn’t actually want to do it.
But yeah one of their major complaints was the artwork. I stand by it though and if we do another release I’d assume the next covers would likely revert back to the style of 049-054.
Cover art aside I’m particularly proud of IDMf050 and IDMf054. I think those releases show what the community can do at its best and I was glad to have spearheaded those.
For anyone who hasn’t yet, have a listen…
Back catalog is slowly working it’s way over to this version of the forum, lots of history there. Look for more of that tomorrow, followed by some reorganizing of the label category and a few pinned releases.
I feel a comp incoming, more on that later tough…
Thanks to everyone for continued interest in the label. It’s meant a lot to many people throughout the yeas, hopefully we can keep the fire burning in some way.
Perhaps a lot of the artists expect a bit too much and the IDMF label is too prepared to bend over backwards to accommodate any slight issues, in fear of being labelled amateur or assholes or whatever? I can admire that on some level, but not when it actually halts production entirely. Sometimes you just need to put your foot down and call time if people are dragging their feet over minor issues no one else will notice or care about. I doubt there’s many labels out there that would be so accommodating, certainly in the past things like printing schedules meant that there was a VERY strict timetable for decision making - I saw one friend get offered choices of artwork A, B or C for his first album release, no compromise, no “I like that bit but not that bit”, no “could you just change this colour and that font”. That’s something you could adopt. It’s a little extreme perhaps, but the idea of having pre-finished artwork ready to go would certainly speed up the process. AI can help, but everyone and his dog will be doing AI artworks and covers soon (probably now) to the point that a kids painting will stand out in a sea of generated images. I would be more inclined to find a small group of two or three upcoming artists who are willing to donate art for a period of time and try to develop a range of coherent styles over several releases that maybe incorporate AI but don’t rely entirely on it. I mean, literally get one of your kids doing the art if you have to.
You could lay out the ground rules again, what’s expected of artists, what they can (and shouldn’t) expect from you guys etc.
I get that it’s work and effort.
Perhaps put out a roll call for artists who might be interested - do another Xmas compilation or something.
BTW - I think I probably have the Unofficial IDMf Xmas Comp on a HD somewhere if anyone wants a copy, saw someone mentioning it recently. PM me.
Also, good f**king effort by whoever put up all those back catalogue release links last night - good work that man. I see you. Applause.
Having a look through - I forgot about the Radiophile release…
didn’t someone eventually ban him for his surly nature…? lol.
In retrospect, it’s perhaps a slight oversight to ban your own artists from the forum. 
Edit: After a reread it was clearly Rick putting in the hours last night - good work dude. 
Pretty sure it was before any of the current mods were onboard. Not so much surly as outright attacking people.
