News

Here at Wud Records we have had to reduce the amount of online activity we are involved in to an absolute minimum. Despite our best efforts there are simply not enough hours in a day, nor days in week to maintain our internet presence at the same level as of recent months.

Please bear with us! We are not going to completely vanish in a puff of smoke any time soon.

Sometime after Monday 8th April 2019 things will quieten down a bit. With luck we will thereafter be able to continue all of the online activity for which we have become known and appreciated once again. Until then, we are all very busy in other areas of life.

We understand and sympathise that this is perhaps somewhat disappointing for some of those artists whom we have attempted to help. Unfortunately there is nothing that can be done, barring an eyewateringly massive and sustained jump in sales and profit.

If you would like to support us and the work we do, please download something from our online shop at Bandcamp. Although everything there can be downloaded for free until the end of 2018, you can pay as much as you want if you wish to support our cause. Every penny and cent helps! You can visit our pages at Bandcamp by clicking here.

Occasionally we may have an outburst of activity on Twitter and we may be making the occasional announcement in our News service. For the most part we will be as ducks – very calm on the surface but with lots of activity going on out of sight.

We believe fans of Wud Records and our awesome bands will understand this situation. We are looking forward to rejoining the mad world in the spring of next year. Until then, as they say…

A brand new playlist of all the favourite musical discoveries of the Wud Records team has been published at SoundCloud. All of the artists on it are amazing independent unsigned artists who are making great music that simply aches to be heard. These artists are not associated directly with Wud Records in any way. We simply accumulated songs that we all liked during November 2018 into one agreed playlist and published it at the end of the month.

Tracks have been arranged according to the number of plays at the time of publishing, starting with the fewest. Tracks that are early in playlists tend to receive more plays than later tracks, and we feel that the ones with fewer plays need the best chance of exposure.

Can you complete the challenge of listening to every track?! If you manage it, tell us, tell some of the music makers involved, and tell the world on social media how you feel about what you heard. Everyone concerned would love to hear your thoughts. If you find some new favourites on there, why not shout about them on social media as well? We are sure the artistes responsible for creating the music will welcome such word-of-mouth exposure and your friends and followers would probably love to enjoy hearing it too. At the very least you might end up making an indie musician’s day.

There is a vast amount of great music on SoundCloud if you have the time and inclination to filter through it. If you happen to be looking out for some great new music, we’ve already done that filtering for you!

If you are one of the bands from which we recently liked, shared or tweeted a track at SoundCloud, there is a chance that one of your tracks might be on this new playlist.

Towards the bottom of the page is a list of featured artists and tracks. The artist name is clickable and links to an external website where you can find out, hear and see more of the artist in question.

If you are the artist and would prefer us to use a different link to the one we added, please send an email to info@wudrecords.co.uk so we can fix it for you. Generally we try to use the artist’s own site where possible. We only linked to SoundCloud as a last resort when we were unable to find anything else, as users can already click the track and go to the artist’s SoundCloud page for themselves.

Are you a member of SoundCloud? We always follow back if you have your own tracks and we always listen eventually, even if it takes a few weeks. So if you would like the opportunity of a bit of free publicity you could follow Wud Records on SoundCloud. It’s even free to join with a basic membership!

We hope that a lot more people will find and listen to the wonderful songs on this new playlist of musical discoveries. Each and every track has something that we felt was special or interesting in some way. In many cases it was a tough job to choose just one track from an artiste.

The playlist is very eclectic, so there is probably something on there to suit every taste. If the track you are listening to isn’t quite doing it for you, skip to the next one and perhaps that will please your ears more. Sometimes similar tracks end up next to each other, and sometimes extremely different tracks do, so we recommend you just try it for yourself.

In addition to the latest compilation being our pinned tweet on Twitter, every week on Twitter we boost a previous Musical Discoveries playlist and a featured track from that playlist. The featured track is chosen by the Wud Records team and is one which is a real favourite amongst us. All the featured tracks form an additional compilation which we also tweet daily. All of the featured tracks can be found on a separate page at our website by clicking here, or on SoundCloud by clicking here.

If you would like to listen to this special new playlist of November 2018 Musical Discoveries over at SoundCloud, please click here.

To enjoy this new playlist of great music here at the Wud Records website, please click here.

If you would like easy access to all 26 of our previous months’ musical discoveries playlists, please click here and bookmark the page, and remember that we publish a new playlist full of undiscovered gems every month!

The top ten SoundCloud tracks for November 2018 from Wud Records have been published in a new playlist. Tracks have been arranged from one to ten according to their popularity and take into account plays, comments, likes and reposts. The algorithm we use gives greater weight to likes and reposts than it does to comments and plays.

Tracks published at Musicoin and Bandcamp have been omitted from the SoundCloud statistics. This is because we feel these results require separate treatment. Archive tracks and bonus tracks are also ignored.

Only you, the listener, can influence our December 2018 playlist. So if there is a track you particularly like, keep playing it!

Massive thanks go out to everybody who helped to support all of us during November 2018 by listening, commenting and reposting our bands’ tracks on SoundCloud, as well as other platforms. SoundCloud‘s popularity seems to be waning following a rather uncertain time for the company, a downgrade in sound quality across the entire platform, a downgrade in customer service standards and the emergence of new blockchain-based music streaming platforms such as Musicoin and Choon.

Musicoin is currently offering what we believe may be the best pay-per-stream deal on the internet and a far more credible deal than any of the established industry players. Choon is on our to-do list and there may be others that are worth investigation. Atom Collector Records is an excellent place to look for further information on this subject.

The Musicoin currency itself is a rather new and turbulent form of currency and at present somewhat complex as well, so we will all have to see how these new Crypto services pan out in the coming months and years. However, we believe that these platforms may be the way ahead for many independent musicians and we definitely recommend trying them out and seeing which ones work best for you.

A special mention needs to go to Atom Collector Records. Their service continues to help us achieve consistently and significantly better activity. If you have tracks on SoundCloud, Bandcamp, YouTube, Spotify, ReverbNation, Musicoin, dSound, Choon or FanBurst, you too could see considerable growth in activity. It’s even free to join. Just click here to go to their site.

Congratulations to Alchemeon for achieving four spots in the November 2018 top ten for the fourth month running. These songs come from their re-released Winter 2008-09 collection of live tracks. By applying mastering to these old Alchemeon tracks, they are now sounding better than ever.

Born by Alchemeon retains its place at the top of the November 2018 chart. It really is a wonderful song, full of mystery and questions. The recording was a bit broken on the right hand side to start, but fixes itself when the groove kicks in.

We anticipate there may be the second Live in Session collection from Alchemeon, from the spring of 2009, coming soon. We shall let Alchemeon fans know of such developments in our News service and on Twitter.

Congratulations are also due to Dark Company who have five tracks on this month’s chart. The (mostly unfinished) Dark Company albums that were represented this month were Mind Dance, Alien Heat, Rage in Heaven and Signmaker.

Also appearing on the November chart was Wud with their every-popular campfire favourite That’s No Way To Pay a Bodyguard. No more artists managed to break into our top ten this month.

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in November 2018, as played, liked, commented upon and reposted by listeners, please click here.

If you prefer to listen here at Wud Records, you will find that it is the new default music player. You will find it on all non band-specific pages at the site, such as our News service or homepage.

The ‘Pay What You Want’ policy that Wud Records has operated for some time will be coming to an end at the end of 2018. From 2019 we will be setting a minimum price for all digital downloads again.

Although the policy worked quite well in the beginning, in more recent times a lot of freeloaders have come along and downloaded our entire catalogue for free. Musicians need to buy bread and pay the electric bill as well, you know! We will keep an open mind with regard to this policy again in the future.

If anybody who wants a download of some of our music and really cannot afford it, or intends to use it for broadcast or journalistic purposes, we will happily send you the files.

Please let us know you would like something by emailing wudmaster@wudrecords.co.uk and we shall consider your request. Probably favourably.

So if you want to download something, anything or everything from our Bandcamp store without giving us a single brass farthing, hurry up! The freebies end at the end of this year.

We will be posting more on this subject in our News service and on Twitter when the time comes.

A brand new playlist of all the favourite musical discoveries of the Wud Records team has been published at SoundCloud. All of the artists on it are amazing independent unsigned artists who are making great music that simply aches to be heard. These artists are not associated directly with Wud Records in any way. We simply accumulated songs that we all liked during October 2018 into one agreed playlist and published it at the end of the month.

Tracks have been arranged according to the number of plays at the time of publishing, starting with the fewest. Tracks that are early in playlists tend to receive more plays than later tracks, and we feel that the ones with fewer plays need the best chance of exposure.

Can you complete the challenge of listening to every track?! If you manage it, tell us, tell some of the music makers involved, and tell the world on social media how you feel about what you heard. Everyone concerned would love to hear your thoughts. If you find some new favourites on there, why not shout about them on social media as well? We are sure the artistes responsible for creating the music will welcome such word-of-mouth exposure and your friends and followers would probably love to enjoy hearing it too. At the very least you might end up making an indie musician’s day.

There is a vast amount of great music on SoundCloud if you have the time and inclination to filter through it. If you happen to be looking out for some great new music, we’ve already done that filtering for you!

If you are one of the bands from which we recently liked, shared or tweeted a track at SoundCloud, there is a chance that one of your tracks might be on this new playlist.

Towards the bottom of the page is a list of featured artists and tracks. The artist name is clickable and links to an external website where you can find out, hear and see more of the artist in question.

If you are the artist and would prefer us to use a different link to the one we added, please send an email to info@wudrecords.co.uk so we can fix it for you. Generally we try to use the artist’s own site where possible. We only linked to SoundCloud as a last resort when we were unable to find anything else, as users can already click the track and go to the artist’s SoundCloud page for themselves.

Are you a member of SoundCloud? We always follow back if you have your own tracks and we always listen eventually, even if it takes a few weeks. So if you would like the opportunity of a bit of free publicity you could follow Wud Records on SoundCloud. It’s even free to join with a basic membership!

We hope that a lot more people will find and listen to the wonderful songs on this new playlist of musical discoveries. Each and every track has something that we felt was special or interesting in some way. In many cases it was a tough job to choose just one track from an artiste.

The playlist is very eclectic, so there is probably something on there to suit every taste. If the track you are listening to isn’t quite doing it for you, skip to the next one and perhaps that will please your ears more. Sometimes similar tracks end up next to each other, and sometimes extremely different tracks do, so we recommend you just try it for yourself.

If you would like to listen to this special new playlist of October 2018 Musical Discoveries over at SoundCloud, please click here.

To enjoy this new playlist of great music here at the Wud Records website, please click here.

If you would like easy access to all 26 of our previous months’ musical discoveries playlists, please click here and bookmark the page, and remember that we publish a new playlist full of undiscovered gems every month!

The top ten SoundCloud tracks for October 2018 from Wud Records have been published in a new playlist. Tracks have been arranged from one to ten according to their popularity and take into account plays, comments, likes and reposts. The algorithm we use gives greater weight to likes and reposts than it does to comments and plays.

Tracks published at Musicoin and Bandcamp have been omitted from the SoundCloud statistics. This is because we feel these results require separate treatment. Archive tracks and bonus tracks are also ignored.

Only you, the listener, can influence our November 2018 playlist. So if there is a track you particularly like, keep playing it!

Massive thanks go out to everybody who helped to support all of us during October 2018 by listening, commenting and reposting our bands’ tracks on SoundCloud, as well as other platforms. SoundCloud‘s popularity seems to be waning following a rather uncertain time for the company, a downgrade in sound quality across the entire platform, a downgrade in customer service standards and the emergence of new blockchain-based music streaming platforms such as Musicoin and Choon.

Musicoin is currently offering what we believe may be the best pay-per-stream deal on the internet and a far more credible deal than any of the established industry players. Choon is on our to-do list and there may be others that are worth investigation. Atom Collector Records is an excellent place to look for further information on this subject.

The Musicoin currency itself is a rather new and turbulent form of currency and at present somewhat complex as well, so we will all have to see how these new Crypto services pan out in the coming months and years. However, we believe that these platforms may be the way ahead for many independent musicians and we definitely recommend trying them out and seeing which ones work best for you.

A special mention needs to go to Atom Collector Records. Their service continues to help us achieve consistently and significantly better activity. If you have tracks on SoundCloud, Bandcamp, YouTube, Spotify, ReverbNation, Musicoin, dSound, Choon or FanBurst, you too could see considerable growth in activity. It’s even free to join. Just click here to go to their site.

Congratulations to Alchemeon for achieving four spots in the October 2018 top ten for the third month running. These songs come from their re-released Winter 2008-09 collection of live tracks. By applying mastering to these old Alchemeon tracks, they are now sounding better than ever.

Born retains its place at the top of the October 2018 chart. It really is a wonderful song, full of mystery and questions. The recording was a bit broken on on the right hand side to start, but fixes itself when the groove kicks in.

We anticipate there may be the second Live in Session collection from Alchemeon, from the spring of 2009, coming soon. We shall let Alchemeon fans know of such developments in our News service and on Twitter.

Congratulations are also due to Dark Company who have five tracks on this month’s chart. Four of them were from the work-in-progress Mind Dance album and the fifth was our perennial best-seller, Medicines from Dark Company‘s Rage In Heaven album.

This is the first time the charts‘ top eight places have been held entirely by tracks from just two albums.

Also appearing on the October chart was Flicker with one track from their album At Least 1000 Words. No more artists managed to break into our top ten this month.

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in October 2018, as played, liked, commented upon and reposted by listeners, please click here.

If you prefer to listen here at Wud Records, you will find that it is the new default music player. You will find it on all non band-specific pages at the site, such as our News service or homepage.