Kristoffer Lislegaard

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Being your own label in 2025 (is confusing)

This Wednesday my fantastic wife and partner in life, music and all that is good released her third solo album in three years! What an achievement!

Since we run our own record label I am thinking about how we can share the music, spread it, promote it, call it what you want. Because the goal of releasing music to the public is of course to have someone listen to it. But releasing music and actually having people notice and listen is very confusing. So I thought I would write some reflections on just that. The process, some questions and challenges of a small record label.

Cover of the album: ILKAMA - Superspeed

The backstory of our label

Let’s start with the backstory of how and why we have a label in the first place. Vilde and I have a duo together called Sgrow. Between 2013 and 2019 we released 3 albums and an EP of original music + some remixes. Our first EP was released by one record label and two albums by a second label. After the second album we were told the label would end so to keep the music online we would need to have a new label be in charge. We figured out the easiest way to move forward would be to register our own label and continue the deal with the distribution.

So now we have a label

So it was kind of random that we ended up with our own label, but what it does is gives us the possibility to release whatever we want, whenever we want. For me it is not a goal or wish in itself to do everything ourselves, but at least we are not dependent on convincing anyone, or work to other people’s schedule and approval.

It does feel sometimes like the whole world is turning into either giga-corporations or automated systems (run by giga-corporations), both without any real person you have a relationship to. And it is no different in the music world. If you look at a platform like Spotify, even though there are lots of music from independent labels there, I am pretty confident that the two biggest piles of music are either released by pretty big (probably major) labels or they are released by no-label-necessary systems like Distrokid and CD Baby. These are websites where you make a user, upload your music and they distribute and collect royalties for you. The major labels own about 1/5 of Spotify the company with whatever influence and motives that gives them, and sites like Distrokid are flooding the platform with ai and stock music, and then mistakenly remove music from real musicians without any warning. This is well documented. The artist Karra recently got a lot of attention for her video I invested $100,000 to create my album & Spotify deleted it 😳.

So to have our own little small thing rather than these huge systems is something I like! This also led us last year to change from our original distributor, to team up with smaller, more personal distributor Diger Distro. They are really nice and have a record store in the middle of Oslo where I can go say hi. They are quick to answer any questions on email and I don’t feel like I am less worthy even if…let’s just say we are not their most sold label. So I am really happy to work with them. I wrote a blog post about starting this collaboration here.

We called the label Heart Baby

One difficult thing with every project is of course picking a name! We ended up going with Heart Baby which is a semi-direct translation of the Norwegian expression hjertebarn (hjerte = heart, barn = child). The expression means a mother’s / father’s favorite child, which of course is something you are not allowed to pick. Also it is funny how tracks and albums are often called babies. When you release your album you often say that this is a baby you have been making.

The label exists mostly to release our own projects. So for now the roster is:

Digital distribution is weird in 2025

The physical side of our label is not too complicated. The Øy vinyl and Kristoffer Lislegaard tapes are sold at Tiger record store which also includes worldwide shipping. We also sell them on the Bandcamp profiles of Øy and Kristoffer Lislegaard, as well as in the merch booth at concerts of course.

I am considering pressing my next solo album on vinyl. If I do so I think I will try to get the record into other physical record stores as well for people to discover, but other than that the physical distribution is small and easy to understand.

Digital is a different story full of questions and actually quite a lot of ethical dilemmas. Should you follow the industry standard, go full underground DIY or something in the middle? Currently Diger Distro can distribute our music to all the mainstream platforms, and we also upload it to Bandcamp and Mirlo.

I actually have way too many thoughts on the topic of digital music distribution to fit in this blog post, but a few are:

As you can see, there is a big system rigged to sort of force people into going by the rules. I am VERY curious how this will develop in the coming years.

The alternatives to the mainstream

But then there is also the community of people working to create alternative solutions. Our whole catalog of music is on Bandcamp and Mirlo. There are also others, but right now this is our main focus. And even here there are some problems. From an ethical standpoint I think Mirlo and other open source co-op-owned similar alternatives are the only ones that checks all the boxes. But very few people know about them, know how to use them, or even listen to artists distributed there, so it feels very alien.

But at the same time I don’t think that is a reason to not be there. So we are on Mirlo. We want to be available for the cool people who are at the best place and be a part of this movement towards music-and-artists-focused platforms. You can check out our label account here.

Then there is Bandcamp. All the artist projects have their own Bandcamp page. Bandcamp is a sort of middle point between Spotify and Mirlo. The service itself is pretty fantastic. You can listen to an album maybe like 5 times before it starts telling you that it is time to buy the album. When you buy it you can either stream it via the website or their app, or you can download the files in your preferred format and listen to them however you want. Want to host your personal streaming site with Navidrome? No problem, you have the files. Want to go off grid with a solar powered mp3 player? No problem, you have the files. Want to simply put them on your phone and listen without any subscription? No problem, you have the files.

So the problem with Bandcamp is the corporate structure behind. A quick search on the internet will let you know how Epic Games bought them to (probably) get a better deal for addons to the games in the Apple app store, before selling them to Songtradr and sacking everyone leading their union. You know, some good old union bustin’. Not great.

But what can you do right? Bandcamp right now is big enough that a decent amount of people that know how to use it, you can do everything from your phone, and they have been going for so long that many DJs and music lovers have a huge collection of music bought on Bandcamp. Again, their product is great, the company behind it has problems. Sounds like most tech companies if you ask me.

So we use Bandcamp.

Releasing music (to who?) in 2025

Ok so now we have the music on all these digital platforms. What do we do now?

I think this part is getting more and more confusing. It seems like at some point we had a sort of clear system around promoting or I guess just keeping people informed about new (digital) music. Things like newspapers, magazines, blogs, local tv and radio etc. were the old way, then everything shifted to social media. People could follow your page and they would get your updates. It was suddenly so easy to share behind the scenes, context and updates directly to the people who had said they were interested. Then slowly we had the massive enshittification of all these platforms we now were so reliant on and now it seems like it is impossible to reach anyone. The social media feeds are FILLED with ads, spam and short form videos of people I don’t want to follow. It has changed from a network of connected people to a slot machine of strangers’ videos.

So what do we do now? I don’t know really. My own music I have been sharing in electronic music forums, but of course sometimes I am afraid that I only manage to focus on a little bubble of other musicians. Nothing wrong with that of course, but it would be nice to be able to walk outside of these bubbles sometimes. Maybe one needs to join more bubbles? Who are we releasing music for? And what music are people able to find? Is it only major label artists and AI slop?

I have also been enjoying the Fediverse, blogs (RSS) and newsletters and this has been a nice way for me personally to find new music, but of course there are certain genres that are more present in these communities than others.

I would actually love to hear how other people are navigating this. Both on a practical, but also on a sort of emotional level. It is easy to feel like “the whole world” is happening without us, while we do our thing in our little corner without reaching people. Maybe it is more a mindset / expectations thing rather than a real problem, I don’t know.

We set up a dedicated newsletter for the label that sends out an email when there is a new release. You can subscribe to that here.

Giving context and depth

One thing we have started doing for this newsletter and the website is to write some longer artist statements for each release. As I as much as possible opt out of the surveillance capitalism I have no idea how many actually read these statements, but I think they are interesting, not only as a statement right now, but also as a sort of library of thoughts around our releases. In a time where most people listen to music on platforms where you have almost no info on an album it seems like a nice way to be able to provide something extra to the listener.

Rounding off

I think that’s enough for this post. I would love to hear anyone’s thoughts on this. Either from the artist / label side, or from a music listener side. Reply via email or tag me in the Fediverse.

I will end this with a list of links, with the new ILKAMA album and the artist statement being the top links. I hope you check it out, it is a really really good album.

Thanks for reading!




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