Preamble
United Studios Corporation (USC) is a music organization, label and community. Official foundation date of USC is August 1st, 2005 in Moscow, Russian Federation. Its main task is to present works of associated authors to wide public. Our project is open for creative and interesting persons: musicians, designers, reviewers, publishers and event organizers. The main direction will always be publication and distribution of music, mainly electronic. The important point is that all primary label publications are distributed by Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. The label also offers rather flexible terms outside the main license through USC Plus division.
Ancient prehistory
In the beginning there was a creative home-formation Studio 308 (numbered as the apartment) that was invented around 1996 in Moscow, Russian Federation by Sergey Mikhaylov (Grey). It started with home-video production and audio performances on cassettes, just for fun. In 1998 with the introduction to digital audio workstation Codemasters Music on Sony Playstation and later in 1999 new version – Music 2000 – the degree changed to music production. Several records made by Time Driver project of Grey from that period exist. In parallel his younger brother Dmitry a.k.a. Mike Winchester was just practising in music creation between video games with varied success, being enchanted by works of the elder. Unfortunately, no records of that period by Mike have survived. In 2002 there was a transition from game consoles to a personal computer. That was a background for the Ellipsoyde Project by Grey devoted to 3ds Max modelling. In September 2003 the WMRI by Mike Winchester was launched as a serious conceptual music project. In August 2005 Studio 308 in cooperation with two creative home-formations AndronLabs by Andrey Novikov and E.S. Project by Eugene Soldatenkov founded the joint project called United Studios. It was a kind of an all-side project about electronic music by WMRI, 3D modelling by Ellipsoyde Project, Linux software tutorials by AndronLabs, several other blogs of similar themes maintained by Andrey’s friends. But most of these projects were short-term. In the end, only WMRI and Ellipsoyde Project remained, though the latter was no longer supported by United Studios and continued on its own. In June 2006 it was renamed to more solidly sounding United Studios Corporation (USC). That time USC was first used as a music label for WMRI issues and reissues. It continued as a music label ever since. Shortly in mid-2008 USC was used for free publication of anime series Kogepan (10 series), Cat Theater (27 series) and a short film Ghiblies translated to Russian by USC and voiced by E.S. Project. The translation of Ghiblies 2 was started, but never finished. The roads with E.S. Project parted.
Modern times
Since January 2010 USC opened the doors to fellow musicians and became a mail-order music label with ever-growing catalogue of titles. Along the first official CD release label chose Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license as a standard for all further releases. In August 2011 another creative leader Anna Riet of Wandering Wind project joined label. In January 2012 a USC Unlimited division was opened for worldwide free distribution of web-releases (i.e. digital downloads). Due to recommendation from one of authors © and ℗ signs in all texts were removed to avoid any misunderstanding. December 31st, 2013 a USC Plus division was introduced with the first release in January 4th, 2014 - International Electronic Music Alliance: Berlin School Compilation - a big international project led by Anna Riet since mid-November 2013.
To be continued...