a note on who

Who this is addressed to

Sessions happen by invitation, so there is nothing to apply to. What there can be is a description of what the asking is looking for, set down clearly enough that anyone reading can tell whether it is meant for them.

A pierced stone screen lit from behind, its repeating star pattern arriving as points of light rather than as an even wash.
A jali is a screen rather than a wall. What it decides is how much arrives, and which side you are standing on.

Three things, and not one of them is a judgement about how well somebody plays. Musicianship is the easy part of an invitation and it is settled by listening. The rest is not settled by listening.

None of it ranks people either. What gets weighed is a position — whether it is timely, whether it is relevant to what is actually going on, whether it is honest about its own terms. A position can fail all three and be held by a better person than anybody involved here. Positions are what an invitation can go on.

Livelihood is not a private question

Some artists solve their own income and treat the income of everybody they came up with as a separate matter. A subject for policy, or for nobody. Others cannot hold the two apart, and you can hear it in how they talk about work — what a gig actually paid, who was paid four months late, what a room costs for an evening, who stopped playing because they could not afford to carry on.

The second kind is who this is for, and the reason is not sentimental. A label that makes records out of invited sessions takes on obligations to named people: who is paid, how much, when, and who holds the recording afterwards. Those terms are part of the work, not the administration around it. An artist who thinks of money as a private solution will find them beside the point.

A room where the pay is unsaid is not a generous room. It is a room where somebody else is carrying the question.

Five vessels, one full and four holding almost nothing with no line joining them, beside five filled to a level that is held in common one of them is fine and the question stops there a level that is said out loud nobody has to ask what theirs is
On the left, one is full and the rest are not, and nothing runs between them — which is what a room looks like when pay is a private arrangement made separately with each person. On the right, less in any single one, and a line that everybody can see. The second is cheaper to build before the first invitation than after it, because afterwards it is a renegotiation with people who have already played.

What Zariia pays, and on what terms, is settled. An invitation that cannot state its terms is asking for a favour. The same fee for everyone in the room, paid before the record goes out. You keep your rights; Zariia has the only release of that recording for a year, and after that you do what you like with it while Zariia keeps its copy up. That is all of it, and the invitation says it aloud.

The year is bounded on purpose. It protects two things: that a record is not stale on arrival because somebody put their take out first, and that Zariia's copy never has to come down. Past those two, what a longer term protects is catalogue value, and there is no catalogue. Three years is the customary figure. It assumes a back list being earned from, and there is none.

The licence: exclusive for twelve months after release, then non-exclusive, with Zariia's own copy continuing session release + twelve months the recording zariia only yours as well zariia’s copy stays up — never has to come down release inside twelve months or the licence ends
The exclusivity is a window, not a lock. It runs from release for a year, and it covers only that recording. Underneath it, Zariia’s own licence carries on, which is the part that means the record never has to come down — and which is not exclusivity at all.

The scope is narrow on the same reasoning. That recording, as it appears on the compilation — not the composition, not another recording of it, not playing it live. Your own performance is yours to show anywhere, at any time, including during the year. If Zariia has not released within twelve months of the session, the licence ends. Labels do sit on people's work. After twelve months this one cannot sit on yours and keep the rights to it.

Withdrawal. Zariia will stop distributing on request. It cannot recall files that have already passed between people, and promising otherwise would be a lie — the object is built to travel hand to hand.

One thing is missing, and it is the figure. A model can be decided; a number needs money, and the money is not there yet. So every term here is sayable except the amount. That is where the label is, and it is not comfortable.

Not a better rate inside the same arrangement

Everything above could be read as a promise this is not making.

Terms that can be said aloud are a floor, not a purpose. Zariia is not a scheme for getting artists paid better, and a label treating pay as its purpose would be a small agency with an unusual file format. The point runs the other way round. The livelihood problem musicians have is the livelihood problem most people have — irregular work, no floor underneath it, money that arrives late or not at all, and a bargain with a platform that nobody was really offered. Artists are not a special case of that condition. They are an instance of it, and the useful move is coming down off the horse, for anyone who is on one.

A few figures raised on a plinth above everybody else, beside the same figures standing among them the height a special case arguing for its own exception an instance of it arguing from the condition it shares
The same people, at two heights. Nothing about making music earns a separate category, and the belief that it does has kept a good many artists arguing for their own exception rather than for the thing they have in common with everybody standing on the same line. That is the part this label cares about, more than the rate and more than the format.

The question of purpose is still open

The second is about whether an artist has a live sense of what the work is for — socially, politically, and in relation to the machinery it passes through. This is not asking anybody to hold particular views. It is asking that the question has not been closed, and on that one point it does turn people away.

The sharper half of this concerns social media.

Everyone already knows what the platforms do. Musicians know it better than most: the demand to keep posting, reach that decays the moment you stop, work reshaped to survive a feed, an audience that belongs to somebody else. Where artists differ is in what they say after that. Some say it is a bad bargain, that they are taking it anyway, and that here is what it costs them. Others say the bargain is fine, that this is simply how anyone gets heard now, and that a livelihood requires it.

It is the closing this is not addressed to, not the use.

Underneath there is a substantive disagreement, and it is about what access means. Everything, immediately, identically, arranged for you by something that already knows what you will accept — that is not the absence of mediation. It is the most complete mediation anybody has built.

Zariia wants the opposite of that, and wants it small. Music that a few people make, hold, and pass between themselves without asking a platform for distribution and without needing an audience in order to exist.

the boundary

Anything with an outside has an inside, and every autonomous culture has a boundary. The boundary is what makes it a culture rather than content.

A wide field of identical items narrowed through a filter into one even stream reaching a single listener, beside a few unlike things passed by hand between four people it already knows what you accept sorted before it reaches you nobody handed you any of it a few, no two alike, arriving whenever somebody put each one into a hand
The objection this page keeps meeting is that a small keyed thing puts something between a listener and a song, where a platform puts nothing. Look at what the ideal of nothing-in-between describes: material sorted for you by something that has already learnt what you will accept. Agreeing to that is easy, which is a different thing from it being free.

There is a structural version of the same objection, and it is the one that decides the shape of this label. What the platforms produced is mass. One audience, sorted by machine, where everybody is the same distance from everybody. What they replaced was small worlds: dense pockets with a few links running between them, where most of what reached you came through somebody you knew.

This is not nostalgia, and the finding is unkind to both extremes. Connectedness helps up to a point and then reverses: past a certain density the same people produce for each other and the work thins. Mass is the far side of that curve, and the far side feels like reach. The parabola, and where the first sessions should sit on it, is drawn in the curatorial note.

An undifferentiated field of evenly spaced identical points, beside four dense pockets with a few links running between them mass everybody reachable, at the same distance nothing that is anybody's own a small world dense inside, and thin between most of what reaches you came through somebody
Both pictures hold roughly the same people. On the left there is no inside anywhere, so nothing is anybody's in particular; the sorting is done for everyone at once and reach is the only measure left. On the right the pockets are dense and the links between them are few, which is the shape scenes have historically had, and the shape a label can make, because it is built one room at a time. What this label would like to be is the traffic between a few pockets, and not a pocket of its own.

This works against the logic of the platforms without asking anybody to leave them. The usual measure is how many people a record reached, and reaching them means putting it in front of everybody in the hope that some fraction turns out to want it. Most musicians are not offered another arrangement.

The measure here is smaller: whether the people who would want a record heard about it. There is no second number, because how many people did not hear it is not a figure a label this size has any use for. Zariia has released nothing yet, so it has neither number, and it would rather say that than invent one.

Hype is not the job

The third is the plainest of the three. Hype makes people want a thing before they have it, and it works by managing attention, not by the thing being any good. Some artists talk about their work almost entirely in that register — reach, momentum, buzz, getting eyes on it.

This is worth saying out loud because Zariia is more exposed to the charge than most. A record with a sealed channel is a secret, and a secret makes people want. Simmel described the failing version: the secret that works as adornment, conferring standing through what it withholds, with nothing inside worth keeping back.

the only defence

If what the key opens is worth hearing, the key is a door. If it is not, the key is a badge and this is a small vanity.

There is no argument that settles this in advance. There is a condition, and it has to be met release by release, which means the sealed channel is judged by whether anybody would want it.

The same test applies to the whole label: could a record have been made without the sealed channel and still be worth hearing?

Nested frames with an empty innermost chamber, beside the same nesting with something lit inside it — the badge standing conferred by what is withheld nothing inside worth keeping back the door the same nesting, the same key and the difference is what is inside
Simmel named the failing case in 1906: the secret that works as adornment, where the standing comes from the withholding and the chamber is empty. Drawn side by side, the badge and the door are the same object — the same frames, the same key, the same person handing it over. Nothing in the form tells them apart, so every release has to settle it again.

The objection runs: the key is a device for manufacturing desire; anything standing between a listener and a song is an imposition; a scene with an inside is a smaller version of the thing it claims to be refusing. That is a coherent position, held by people who have thought about it, and it is not going to be argued out of anybody in a paragraph.

If that is where you land, this is not addressed to you. Not as a rebuke — the question is a good one and a fair amount of this page exists because somebody pressed it. But a label this small has nothing to offer a person who wants the boundary gone, for the plain reason that the boundary is most of what it has.

What this asks that it cannot pay for

One of these three costs far more for some people than for others.

Refusing a platform is cheapest for the people who need it least. An artist with a teaching post, or family property, or a partner earning, can walk away from it and lose very little. An artist with none of those cannot, and it is not the same refusal at a different price. It is a different act. A criterion that reads as principle can quietly select for cushion, and an invited room already concentrates that problem instead of escaping it.

Three people making an identical step off three ledges of different heights, so that the same act carries three different drops to the same ground the same step, drawn identically three times a post, or property, or somebody else earning some of the work comes through it the living is on it the ground
The step is the same in all three. The drop is not. A principle that costs one person an evening's inconvenience costs another their rent, and a page that asks for the step without saying so is quietly asking to be joined by people who can afford it. This is not solved by lowering the ask or by raising it. It is the reason the second thing above is written as a question about what somebody says, which anybody can answer, rather than about what they do, which not everybody can choose.

So the second asks what an artist says about the platform, not whether they are on one. Somebody who posts because they must, and says plainly that it is a bad bargain, is not who this excludes. The settled position that it is fine is what does.

What an invited room costs, and who it leaves out along lines of caste, class, gender and language, is set out at more length in the curatorial note.

What this is not

If some of this is recognisable, the address is on the contact page. One person reads it, in Ahmedabad, and slowly. Nothing gets sent to you afterwards.

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