HOOKED: “I’d go to flea markets for 12 hours. Then to the record store. I was a label hound.”

If you’re a producer of house music and you’re looking for a label, you might well submit your tracks to Escuro Records. Jon Viera, a young clubgoing type who grew up in Florida but graduated from Peabody High School, has based Escuro in his house — indeed, in the computer room upstairs. That’s where he can usually be found, listening to tracks submitted to him, producing new tracks, and communicating with artists, DJs, producers, and, in this case, the Phoenix.

The night of my visit, I find Viera at the computer. DJ Deka, a friend whose debut hit, “In the Darkness,” is an Escuro track, is there too, watching the Red Sox on television. Pizza is ordered. It might easily be just another sports night in the suburbs for two hard-working guys.

How did Viera get into house? “I was still a kid, living in Florida. A friend would bring over his tapes — I liked the artwork and I liked the music. Soon I started seeking out raves. Eight or nine hours of great beats! Hey, I’ve always walked the path of a different drummer, so at raves I found perfect happiness, which I couldn’t get from Top 40. So there I was, getting home at 6 am, when the rest of the guys my age were just getting up. It was kind of my secret, my passion — it was mine, nobody could take it away from me.”

It was the mid 1990s. Raves ruled. Viera started buying vinyl. “I’d go to flea markets for 12 hours. Then to the record store. I was a label hound. I was always begging mom for more money, spent every penny I could. Five years ago, I moved from record collector to the DJ booth. After a while doing that, I decided that my true future was in running a label. Now this was the time when, because of the Internet, all the real-world record stores were closing. I realized that digital distribution was the way to go, and it made things possible for me, because on the ’Net you don’t have to worry about being shafted by a distributor or paying to have vinyl pressed.”

Viera found himself prominent among the first wave of labels to exist solely in ’Net space. A page at MySpace and friendships with many of the Boston area’s best-known DJs plus DJ Manolo from Philadelphia quickly put Escuro in play. “Right away, I had great tracks to sign. Before, you had to be a top top DJ to get a record deal — a Junior Vasquez, a Danny Tenaglia, a Steve Lawler or Josh Wink, say. I wanted to show that the new guys have great music too.

“This was two years ago. For the first year, I signed nothing; I listened. I made contacts. I visited the DJs, saw them spinning, chose my label name, which means ‘dark’ in Portuguese. Finally, in the last year, I’ve released tracks.” Keven Maroda’s aggressive “The Freq” was the first; DJ Tomer’s deep-beat “You Don’t Know Me” the second.

“Who buys them? DJs do. There’s more than enough DJs out there to support a pretty substantial hit.” Indeed, Viera counts on Internet venues like Beatport — a site DJs rely on for new product. Selling chiefly to DJs would seem a precarious business model. But Viera disagrees: “Hey, in 2002–2003, turntables outsold guitars for the first time ever. DJ-mix academies are blossoming everywhere. People are buying these tracks at two dollars a pop. It’s value for the customer and profitable for me.” He has a point. In the late 1990s, 12-inch vinyl house singles sold for between $5.99 and $9.99, CDs for an average of $16.99. And if you wanted just one track from a CD, you had to buy it all. Today, at Beatport, you can buy a full-length CD or single tracks.

Escuro released several timely, if not groundbreaking, tracks that stepped right into last year’s house sound. Then came Deka’s “In the Darkness,” which took the season’s atmospheric, deep-beat style to a more intense, even melodic level. It became a Top 10 download. “Deka and I had a production team, so I already knew him. ‘In the Darkness’ is his first-ever published release. What’d I tell you about the new guys having just as much to say as the big boys?”

The success of “In the Darkness” has made Viera work that much faster. He’s signed another bag full of tracks that include two (“After Sun” and “View from the Window”) from Jero & Costa, DJs based in Salonika, Greece. It’s not Escuro’s first Jero & Costa track; that was “The Tribe,” with Boston’s own Craig Mitchell doing the vocals. Mitchell remains very much a member of Viera’s support team of DJ remixers, which also boasts Brazil’s FC Nond, who did a remix of “In the Darkness.” Another important part of the picture is MySpace; Viera maintains his own page there as well as one for Escuro. “It’s sort of like the old Satellite record-store community we used to have here in Boston, only bigger. It’s also a terrific way to audition my stuff. Go to my page, listen. You like? Go to Beatport, buy. How do you beat it?”

One way you beat that is to get your track played in Europe. “London! Hey, if I could get a track played on just one pirate station! It’s all a community there, thriving in small clubs and pubs, and they have been doing this since the late 1980s.”

Viera is staying local but going international: he has Deka, and he has Cytric, too, a track called “Sleeping,” in several remixes — Cytric (a/k/a David Costa) being one of the most famous of the Portuguese “tribal” DJs now playing in clubs all over the world. Viera is also starting a subsidiary label, Baixo (“deep” in Portuguese), to support the growing demand for a deep-house sound different from Escuro’s signature tribalism.

“You’d be amazed how many deep-house guys there are locally,” he says. “Deep house is so underground, it gets overlooked even by house fans, but it’s here, and I’m going to sell it.”