whitepaper v2
ecologies of collaboration
& collective practice in electronic music
with CLMxGUN
essay - writing and graphic design
2022
essay - writing and graphic design
2022
The Whitepaper V2 is the continuation of CLM x GUN Whitepaper. This first version seeked to introduce our vision and to lay the foundation of our upcoming activities. It presented how the music industry and related artistic practices had been shaped by the evolution of techniques and technologies - changing the way music is produced, distributed and experienced - and therefore redefining the traditional figure of the artist, inscribing the individual in various networks and its inescapable entangling with collective practices.
Drawing inspiration from the open-source and free software movements, the Whitepaper V1 introduced the basis of what we defined as an open-source and collaborative music label, trying to draw lines at what could be our own structure and what would be our core values and operating principles, as a complementary approach to traditional structures of major or independent music labels. In 2022, the context surely is very different, but we’re still animated by the same core questions : how can we think of collaboration and collective action in creating musical and artistic content?
More a continuation than an update, this Whitepaper V2 delves deeper into our interrogations and learnings, first by presenting our thoughts about the role, difficulties and importance of independent labels in the current context, as well as presenting our advances with the CLM x GUN project and how it is operated, in a much more detailed and practical way. More a logbook than a manifesto, the purpose of this document is twofold. On a personal level, its existence helps us to lay a cornerstone in our adventure, taking the time to reflect back on our activity and putting some words on abstract concepts, intuitive decisions and empiric processes that emerged during the past few years of activity. But above all, it aims to be a useful tool for anyone sharing the same interrogations, with the hope that exposing our learnings, our practical solutions as well as our mistakes and deceptions will be able to help the creation of improved models and better collective organizations - a compass that we hope can help navigate our troubling times.
