Indie Music

30 Top Indie Labels Partner For Music Discovery Site TheNewRecord.com

image from www.thenewrecord.com Community building doesn't only happen on Facebook, and a new indie music discovery site founded by Bill Armstrong of Side One Dummy hopes to build a community of indie music fans more tied to the creators than to Mark Zuckerberg. To help make that happen, Armstrong assembled a unique partnership of 30 top independent music labels to launch TheNewRecord.com.



The site is designed as a digital newsstand offering a free filtered environment to play and download new songs weeks in advance of release. Anti-, Sub Pop, Epitaph, Kill Rock Stars, New Century Media, Nettwerk, Daptone Records, Side One Dummy and VP are among the 30 founding labels.

"As a fan, I felt that new music wasn’t being organized in a way that made it easy to find," says Armstrong. From a label's perspective, Armstrong's solution was to create a music discovery community with other independent labels. “I wanted a filtered environment with what I consider other high quality artists whom we might share similar or even some of the same fans.” The New Record is a result of those two concepts and "a lot of shop talk with other labels to try and define an idea that could be approached as community".

Other participating labels include: ANGR, Asian Man, Bar-None, Brushfire, Dualtone, Equal Vision, Fat Wreck, Hellcat, Hollywood Waste, Hopeless, Inside Out, Lefse, Long Live Crime, MapleMusic, Paper & Plastick, People Like You, Prospect Park, Relapse, Rhymesayers, Rise, Sabot, Sargent House, Superball and Volcom.

“TheNewRecord approaches the digital promotions arena with a focus on selling records, tapping into the familiarity of the social environment, and ultimately driving people to our store. Which is why we are into it,” said Cathy Bauer of Daptone Records. Jim Mahoney, VP of industry group A2IM, adds, “Every A2IM’er I know who has seen how TheNewRecord works has been blown away.”

With a free one-time sign-up, a user can play and download unlimited free MP3s, use a built-in widget to embed songs or playlists, create and swap customizable playlists, and share on Facebook, Twitter, email, or other social networks. Using the “Follow” feature, users will have new music delivered to them directly from the record label or artist before release date. Users can also follow each other, filtering new music through their friend’s tastes.

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5 Comments

  1. This is a fantastic thing, really great news… alas the web-design is horribly executed. Feels like 2002. A proper developer needs to get on the back and front end of this asap because users web expectations are far to high to deal with such an ass backward design.

  2. I agree with all three comments above – poor quality site and already full of ads all over the place. Hasn’t anyone learned from the Myspace model? Simplicity is bliss…and then they over-complicate it and pretty much spam people with unwanted ads.
    Spotify will be interesting to watch as it progresses (or not)…
    http://www.daveowensmusic.com

  3. Indie labels can’t compete with music tech companies at the tech game. They can only hope to catch up. I hope New Record focuses their effort into curating their releases to help music lovers better navigate the music scene in which their band’s exist.I’m not talking about recommendation engines. I’m talking about personally built playlists, with more context to the bands/albums/songs included, which is something the tech companies CANNOT do. Okayplayer is a great example of this.
    And yes, the website is atrocious.

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