about us and the story so far

Mad Image

This little web site started many years ago before digital stores and Itunes, emusic, napster and all the other (now) mega players in digital download World. It started back in 1997 just after I watched my record label go down the pan. Sitting in my office come spare bedroom with my AV Mac and a 56k internet connection I started to surf the web and came across a funky Los Angeles based tech company who were about to start a revolution with music on the net. They where call 'Liquid Audio' and they had discovered a way of get music to people down a telephone line. Now that was cool. This, I thought to myself, is very definitely the future of music distribution. The problem was, how do the artists and record companies get there hard earned cash? I had been working in the music industry for a long long time as the drummer for electro pop giants OMD and The Listening Pool. I was no stranger to computers and all things digital, technology was what we had been using to create our music for over 20 years and it had created one hell of alot of dosh along the way, which in turn helped buy a small island in the Caribbean and a couple of Jumbo jets for the record company boss and publishers (The Enemy, as they came to be known). One thing was for sure, record companies where not going to give there music away. What was needed was away of tracking the music that had been squeezed down your telephone line and turning that 'download' into real money. 'Liquid Audio' had come up with an answer, quite possible V1.0 of the Music Download technology.

From the bedroom my idea started grow. I met with tech people in New York, investors in London, industry big wigs in Cannes and muso's who had the same vision as I did. Before I knew it, my idea had been taken from the bedroom to the market, the stock market, IPO (as the men in suits say). There were business plans, business angels, business portfolios and more people after a fast buck than you can shake a stick at. Then, just when I didn't need it, someone got a big pin and burst the bubble, the dot com bubble. It had to happen because people were making lots of money out of fresh air.

The dust settled and the big players started to come out of the wood work. Those Mac people had been developing Itunes, there own digital rights management (DRM) system and building a huge digital warehouse full of music in cyberspace, others would follow. Meanwhile the likes of Napster and other P2P networks thought it would be a good idea to give music away for free without asking the people who own it. Now that was just dumb, but what it did do was give a wake up call to major labels (The Enemy). Digital downloads have arrived so get on board or get back to the stone age. In the meantime rock and roll was going to give me a wake up call in the shape of a big time analog heart attack. After being cut open with a circular saw and an interview with the grim reaper I decided that the little idea I had 10 years earlier was actually a very good idea.

So Finmusic is back. All the hard work I did was not in vein. You can call us a netlabel, internet label, boutique label, DIY label I really don't give a f ***. We were one of the first legal download sites in the UK, we have a ton of knowledge, experience, contacts and our digital distributor is one of the biggest in the World , but above all finmusic is about music, great music to be precise.

We are not the Enemy.