the end of ecotone

When we started ecotone, we set out with a fairly simple mission: start a label to support the kind of music we'd seen our friends and favorite artists making; music that blended genres and influences and couldn't be reduced to a one-word descriptor. We saw artists in this space either fading into obscurity or being picked up by major labels, with no real support in between. We had a lot of ideas of how to go about creating this space, and unsurprisingly not all of them became reality - we never had a massive audience for ecotone itself, and several of the plans we initially had didn't pan out. Despite this, over the past year and eight months, ecotone has become more successful than we could have ever imagined back when we first started working on this idea. We could never have expected the level of support our releases achieved from independent promoters and platform editorial playlisting - but most importantly, from all of you. Anyone who ever streamed, bought, or shared one of our releases is responsible for our success, and we're so glad we were able to push all of our artists to new heights and new listeners.

Despite all of this, the time has come for ecotone to shut down. From the beginning, this label has been a passion project, driven by our desire to do something meaningful rather than by a drive for profit. Since the start of ecotone, our passion for some of the tasks involved in running a label has waned. We simply don't have the time, energy, and attention necessary to live up to our own and our artists' expectations. Moreover, we feel that a continued trend in the industry has made labels less necessary than before. Artists can be successful independently, and working with a traditional middleman like a label doesn't always bring the benefits it might seem to at first. Ultimately, we proved what we set out to prove: there's a space for music that doesn't fit into boxes.

What this means for ecotone is simple: we won't be releasing any more music for the foreseeable future. Our existing releases will stay up forever, on any platform you can currently find them on. You can still buy all of our releases on Bandcamp and stream them on Spotify, and we'll continue to make sure our artists get paid accurately and on time.

If there's one message we want to leave you with, it's this: keep creating and sharing meaningful art. Don't be limited by constraints or expectations - no matter what you want to make, someone out there will enjoy it.

─ the ecotone team