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Three products, each of which began as an internal necessity. PromoLink delivers a release to the DJs and radio who might play it and reports back on who listened, who downloaded, and what they thought. FaceDrop gives an artist a visual identity from a phone camera and a reference image. Both are open to anyone. The third, Traxroom, we keep in-house: the operating system our labels run on, with demos, contracts, masters, delivery and royalties in one place and in order, and the piece of engineering we are proudest of. It is not for sale. The only way onto it is to have us run your label. Every feature in all three was a problem on a Monday morning before it was a feature, which is the only product roadmap we have ever trusted.

Fourteen imprints, from peak-time techno to afro house and pop, some six hundred artists from forty-nine countries, one demo door and one standard. Each label has its own A&R and its own sound; what they share is the machine behind them: the same intake for demos, the same contracts, the same promo to DJs, the same distribution and the same statements. The labels are where the company began and where its software is tested, on the principle that a tool which has survived two thousand releases has earned the right to be sold. A demo goes to one label, is heard by a person, and is answered either way.

The half of the money most independent artists never see. A recording earns twice, once as a master and once as a composition, and the second copyright is the one that goes uncollected when nobody has registered the song, named the writers, and told the collection societies where to send the money. We do that for the artists on our labels: register the works, keep the splits straight, follow the money through the societies and the sub-publishers, and pay it through with a statement a musician can actually read. It is unglamorous, it takes years to compound, and it is the part of the business we would least like to hand to somebody else.

For the label or artist who would rather borrow the machine than build one. The agency runs your release the way we run ours: Meta ads, clipping, promo to DJs, with the same playbook and the same people. Consulting is ninety minutes with the founder on the release you are about to make or the label you are about to start. Label management puts your label on our system and our team behind it; you keep the A&R, we keep the operations running and report every month. The academy is for anyone who would rather own a label than dream about one, and it opens by waitlist.

Every week we put our own money behind one record from the catalog and film what happens to it: the ads, the clips, the promo, the invoices. It lives on Spartaque's channel, @spartaquelive on Instagram, and it comes with a promise rather than a plot: one release, real money, everything shown, including the weeks it does not work. Around the experiments runs the longer story of a producer and label owner twenty years in, changing his own sound in public and building the tools as he goes. Most of this industry teaches by anecdote. We would rather teach by receipt. Subscribe there if you run a label or a release and would like to spend less of your own money learning what we have already paid for.

Founded by Vitalii Babii (Spartaque), a producer and DJ with two decades of records and rooms behind him and the group’s CEO to this day, the company has outlived several versions of the music business and expects to outlive several more. It started as one techno label with a release schedule and a mailing list; it became fourteen labels, a publishing arm and three pieces of software, because every time the business changed, the tools we had stopped working and nobody else was building the ones we needed. Everything those years taught us is now written into the software. The lesson we trust most is the least glamorous one: the records get the applause, and the operations decide whether anyone gets paid.