Wud Records: musical discoveries – what next?

What next for our Musical Discoveries? Do we continue making them? Or do we stop? That is the burning question here at Wud Records.

We have made precisely 100 musical discoveries compilations over the course of nine years. Such fabulous music we found! For the first eight years, we published one every month. For the last year, we have only published one every three months.

So, what now? Another one? Or shall we simply call it a day?

The Musical Discoveries were quite popular for a long time. They actually helped drive new traffic and new fans to the artists included, as well as to ourselves.

However, with social media being squeezed to the point where it is almost a complete waste of time, nobody seems to be listening any more. Which rather defeats the point of making them in the first place.

After all, it takes quite a lot of work and time to produce one of the musical discoveries compilations. First we have to listen to the music and agree that a song is worth including, then we have to make a page at the website, find links to the artists, big them up online, and then… hear nothing back from 99% of them.

We could use that time doing more for our own artists instead, rather than artists we discover, who are doing wonderful things – but are ultimately not especially bothered that we not only discovered them, we also liked them enough to tell our communities about their creations. After all, if only 20 or 30 people see one of our tweets now, instead of thousands as it used to be, it’s not really such a big deal – is it?

That is not all. SoundCloud destroyed our account. They don’t have anybody doing support any more. They haven’t repaired our account, and they haven’t replied to our pleas for help. That is unacceptable after eleven years of top tier membership, so we decided that we are moving.

That means that although the Musical Discoveries we have already made will remain, making more seems a bit pointless.

We have started moving our music to HearThis, Audius, and Audiomack. Our fully distributed music has started being added to Coda now we have left spotify.

Perhaps we shall discover more great music on those platforms. And perhaps it is time to draw the SoundCloud thing to a close.

We would like to know what you think. Would you like us to continue publishing Musical Discoveries playlists, of truly amazingly wonderful music that we discover at these platforms? Including SoundCloud? Or are you not really bothered?