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Your cassettes are going mouldy in the back of the cupboard and in the boot of the car,your CD collection looks like a rack of gigantic waste. You no longer run to the music store in the corner to grab the first copy of your favourite artist.

Your cassettes are going mouldy in the back of the cupboard and in the boot of the car,your CD collection looks like a rack of gigantic waste. You no longer run to the music store in the corner to grab the first copy of your favourite artist. You have forgotten the charm of looking at the cover art or swinging to music while holding the lyric sheet,before you carefully fold it back. The world of music as we knew it is as dead as Jacko. Songs are compressed in pods,streamed and stolen off the Net. Delhi musicians,aware that digital music is as in as Lady Gaga,have launched indie record labels that are all about digital distribution.

Qilla Records is four months old,although the plan had been brewing in the minds of Gaurav Malaker and Madhav Shorey for much longer. They want to promote quality techno and minimal house music,both forms of electronic dance music. We intend to release intelligent,electronic music since there is so much talent that is untapped not just in India but the world across, says Malaker,who is also part of Delhis electro act Blot. A digital medium gives us an opportunity to work with talented young musicians from across the globe and makes distribution easy, he adds.

Agrees Arjun Vagale of Jalebee Cartel,who started his own label called Mak.Tub Music in January with a musician friend from Uruguay,Nicolas Silvano. Digital distribution is really the future of music distribution, says Vagale,It helps us reach a wider audience and cover more music than it would be physically possible. It also helps two people who have never met start a record label. For,Vagale and Silvano have met only on weekly chat meetings on the Internet. But we have known each other for four years now and have been sharing music and swapping remixes, says Vagale. This led to a good friendship and now a partnership. We both are pretty big in our respective regions,so it helps us to reach out to more people. We split the work between us. We have weekly Net meetings where we discuss the strategy of the label and send tracks back and forth on e-mail.

They want to bring out a different kind of dance music,outside of the usual trendy tracks,and have already released six,albeit little-known,artists from around the world,including Smartminds from the Netherlands,Balcazar from Mexico and Alex Dolby from Italy. They also have onboard artists like George Delkos from Germany,Chris Nemmo from Greece and Ben Brown from the US. Qilla Records too has four international electronic artists onboard,including Flippers from Israel and Spikers from Portugal. Which means Indian indie labels are no longer about Indian artists alone.

The dynamics of indie labels dealing with electronic dance music are different. They do not release an entire album: Mak.Tub and Qilla Records mostly sign individual tracks and release singles. The economics too are different. Vagale says,Profits are shared 50:50 by the artist and the label. While Malaker says,Sometimes we give the artists royalty,other times we purchase the rights to the track,but often it includes a bit of both.

While Mak.Tub artists are distributed by Groovecollection in Amsterdam,Qilla releases will be out on all major online retailers,including Beatport,iTunes and Djdownload.

While physical distribution isnt their priority,they cant totally get away from it either. After all,they are the cusp children and still hold on to old vinyl days.

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