Our philosophy is rooted in the principle of open-source and unlimited access!
We are planning to write a substantial update in our manifesto section on the main website to better explain our reasoning. This will come in the next couple of weeks.

However, in the meantime, here is the link where you can access 44 fantastic albums for absolutely free!
Hypnotic Dirge Records Bandcamp

More info:

This gives you the opportunity to pay what you think an album is worth or what you can afford to pay if $5.00
was too much in the past. Downloading the album for free is absolutely fine and ultimately the goal is the spread the music and make it as easy as possible for people to acquire and enjoy! That is the main motivation for setting the minimum price at $0.00. Finding Hypnotic Dirge releases for free download on various metal blogsites is incredibly easy so all the people who weren't able / willing to pay $5.00 for the digital download went to those sites anyway.
It's much better if everyone downloads the albums from an official Hypnotic Dirge source, and also get the option
of receiving the album in wav or flac format as well!

If you can afford to donate, even $2.00 or so can be very helpful over time as all donations (much like all sales in the past) will go towards label-related stuff, most of which towards a fund for new physical releases in 2015! I am
hoping that enabling free downloads will also lead to more sales of physical CD's as people eventually want a
physical version of an album they have come to really enjoy! (It's a shame that so many CD's sit unsold)

All-in-all, this new format though will leave the decision whether to donate or not in your hands! I feel like this is a much more appropriate way of dealing with digital music in the current technological paradigm with the availability of
an incredible amount of recorded music and the relative ease it is to download any album ever released. Also, as a strong believer in open-source digital media and being a bit of a anarcho-socialist myself, it really makes no sense to me to charge people for digital files which cost no money to replicate,(unlike physical media) especially when our ultimate goal is to spread the music! After all the effort and time spent by the bands on these releases, it really
makes no sense to put restrictions on the access to that music!

Here are a few points from the book "Music in the Digital Age" (Thanks Alex!)

1. The rules assigned to the music industry by the Internet are quite different from those relevant in the previous
period, the age of television and major labels. It is useless to try making time go backwards (e.g. forcing people to
buy your CDs by suing hosting services).

2. Digital data cannot have any objective value, because it is, unlike printed stuff, perfectly replicable. Physical copies require resources to be produced and are always limited in number. Digital data, on the other hand, can be copied to infinity for free. It is therefore clear, that you cannot set a price for digital stuff the same way that you do in case of printed material.

3. Quoting Dubber, ‘You don’t have the right to make money from your music – only the opportunity.’ And ‘people aren’t giving you money for your music, but because of it (and because of everything that goes along with it that gives
it richer and deeper meaning)’.

"We respect the listener’s rights as much as the author’s. We are listeners ourselves. That’s why we give you choice. Support the band and/or our labels, if you can (be it half a buck). And if you can’t, please spread the word and share the album with your friends."
-Vin de Mia Trix

Besides donating on digital albums, you can also support our future plans by ordering physical CD's from our
webshop which now includes close to 700 CD releases as well as a handful of shirts, magazines, and patches.
Webshop link