Thinner (netlabel)


Thinner was a German netlabel, launched in 1998, that released mainly electro dub, ambient, and other variants of techno and house music. It was founded by Thomas Jaldemark and mainly operated by Sebastian Redenz and Ole Schulte as leading parts of an international team until 2009. The label was based in Frankfurt, Germany. Thinner’s catalogue includes releases from artists such as Digitalverein, Marko Fürstenberg, Benfay, Pheek, krill.minima, Vladislav Delay, Christian Bloch and many others. By September 2006, Thinner productions had accumulated over two million MP3 downloads. Thinner had a sublabel called Autoplate, focusing on experimental and ambient music.
In 2008, Der Spiegel described Thinner as having the reputation of being "the best of its kind" among several thousand netlabels worldwide. Thinner was repeatedly voted best netlabel in the annual polls of de:Bug magazine. In 2007, Redenz was invited to present Thinner's volunteer-based business model to Sony BMG's top executives.

Label sound

Much of the music published by Thinner can be described as “dub-inspired”, i.e. some permutation of a fusion of dub with house, techno, or even ambient music.
Many of early Thinner virtual releases were clearly efforts to emulate styles/genres offered by popular physical labels. From 2001 to 2006, Thinner grew and evolved to encompass a wider variety of sounds beyond the signature dub-inspired techno/house music for which it had become recognized initially.

Notable artists