Lokashakti Records is a New York City-based record label founded to promote protest music from around the world. Through various initiatives we seek to fill the need in today’s music industry for the promotion of innovative, incisive, political and socially conscious music, wherever it may be found.
Lokashakti Records is part of a larger nonprofit organization whose work includes the Lokashakti Network – a growing collection of online resources for activists working towards peace and social justice. Any revenue generated by the record label goes to fund the work of our nonprofit.
While we currently only feature one artist, in time we’ll add others to our roster, deepening our commitment to music as an essential part of the struggle against political, social, and economic injustice. We actively encourage those who feel they have something unique to contribute to this growing genre to contact us. Together we can help protest music gain strength around the world, and along with it, strengthen the power of the people as well (the meaning of the Hindi word lokashakti).
In addition to promoting certain artists directly, other projects of ours include:
- Protest Music, a website about political and socially conscious artists, albums, songs, videos, concerts, documentaries, and anything else catching our attention.
- A music publishing company to help channel revenue earned by the performance of the music we’ve released toward our nonprofit organization, Lokashakti Inc.
- A nascent and developing program integrating protest music within the website of our nonprofit organization: The Lokashakti Peace & Social Justice Network.
Future initiatives may also include efforts such as organizing community-based workshops to educate young musicians and lyricists, helping raise the profile of protest music amongst the general public.
If you’d like more information about any of these projects, please join our mailing list.
And if you’d like to support what we do, please consider helping out with a donation. As part of a nonprofit organization, all voluntary contributions to Lokashakti Records are tax-deductible for anyone who pays income tax in the United States.
Of course, purchasing the music we promote also helps, so make sure you visit our Online Record Store as well. Shukriya!