The Vinyl Factory interviewed Jannis Stürtz, Habibi Funk (and Jakarta Records) label head, about the origins of Habibi Funk, the challenges of licencing, and how he tries to “avoid cultural colonialism”:
The basic starting point when it comes to economics was for us to decide that we’re not going to treat any of the artists whose music we reissue differently than a contemporary artist. For contemporary artists, there’s a very standard, standardised form of releasing music–the classic 50/50 split deal where the label doesn’t have any ownership, but licenses the music for a particular time. These deals usually don’t include publishing rights.
We replicated this ratio which I think now a lot of people do and probably even when we started, a few did, but back in the days it was still common that deals tended to not be very advantageous for the artist. We wanted to avoid this […]
Stürtz also gave a list of essential Habibi Funk records including Oghneya, an absolutely legendary album from Lebanon by the incredible Issam Hajali’s group Ferkat Al Ard, released from 1978.