News

Passion and Meaning has just published a new blog post featuring none other than our co-founder, co-director and the band leader of Flicker and Dark Company, George. In the interview George talks about how music first came to him, his teachers and inspirations over the years, and right up to where he is now. It is a short but fascinating insight into the life and times of one of today’s champions of independent DIY musicians and well worth a read.

Passion and Meaning is the website and brainchild of composer, musician, lyricist, independent music supporter and all-round splendid human Elizabeth Chute. A number of her wonderful compositions have featured in our Musical Discoveries compilations and we highly recommend you listen to her music for yourself. You can do so by clicking here.

Being a ‘proper’ educated musician – like George – she also has sheet music for her piano compositions for sale, so you can learn to play and appreciate in greater depth the subtle nuances of her creations. If you click here, a new tab will open with all of her available sheet music for your downloading pleasures.

Every month Elizabeth publishes an interview with one of her musical friends and all of them are interesting, highly enlightening and show the enormous diversity not only of how people come to music and where they are now, but also the influences within the music of Passion and Meaning. Recent interviewees include Marcus Mandible, Josephine Pascoe, Jennifer Doll, Ronnie Sparks (Big Time Radio) and Verity White.

Due to length, not all of the interview was able to be published. Elizabeth suggested that we may publish the interview in full here at the Wud Records website so that remains a possibility for some later time. If it should happen, we will let fans of George’s bands know through our News service and on Twitter.

If you would like to read the interview with George at the Passion and Meaning website, you can do so by clicking here.

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 January 2019 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 January 2019 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 of the previous 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 January 2019 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 February 2019 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 January 2019 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 and Dark Company for completely monopolising the most recent chart.

Four songs come from Alchemeon‘s re-released Winter 2008-09 collection of live tracks, including Born, which has remained at the top of our chart for some time by now. 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.

The remaining six tracks by Dark Company come from just three separate albums. Three songs are from Mind Dance, two are from Rage in Heaven and one comes from Signmaker.

No other 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 January 2019, 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.

A new pricing policy has been implemented for all digital download products at Bandcamp. We feel that the pricing reflects general market trends for digital download products. If you follow our News service or our Twitter feed, you may remember that we announced this was coming on 5th November 2018.

The new pricing policy has been set in Euros as we are no longer based in the uk. We are now charging a single Euro for a single track. Albums and EPs are downloadable for two, three, five or seven Euros depending on their length and their quality.

Our previous policy of ‘pay what you want including nothing’ worked pretty well to start off with, but more recently a lot of people have simply downloaded the entire Wud Records catalogue at Bandcamp for free. As we need to buy bread and pay the electric bill like everyone else, we felt this had to stop. However, we will be keeping an open mind to the previous policy and may change again at some time in the future. We shall see.

There is still an option to pay more than the asking price if one is so inclined. :)

If you need a download of some of our music to use for broadcast or journalistic purposes, we will happily send you the files for free. Please let us know what you would like to use and in what format you need it by emailing wudmaster@wudrecords.co.uk and we shall consider your request.

If you happen to love some of the music we have and simply cannot afford to pay anything for it, please get in touch by emailing info@wudrecords.co.uk and we will consider your request on an individual case-by-case basis.

The whole team at Wud Records would like to wish everybody a very Happy New Year!

\W/

We thought it might be fun to make two playlists of the 20 most played tracks of 2018 on both SoundCloud and Bandcamp. We felt that such playlists would enable fans of our bands to see what has been hot and to have the opportunity to enjoy listening to some of our most popular tracks of recent times.

Making a SoundCloud playlist of the tracks that were popular there is easily done. To listen to the 20 most played tracks of 2018 playlist at the SoundCloud website, simply click here to open that page in a new tab.

The SoundCloud playlist was dominated by Dark Company, who claimed the top spot and half of the positions available. Also appearing on the SoundCloud chart we see Alchemeon and Flicker with two tracks each. Wud, Rough Terrain, Clonk!, Mark Drower and the Everyones, The Subterraineans and Laughing Sun complete the list, making it a diverse spread of different acts being heard on the platform over the year. All in all we experienced a significant drop in activity on SoundCloud compared to 2017, although the figures were marginally better than in 2016.

Bandcamp has also seen a slight decline compared to last year in terms of sales and activity, although overall the results there have been pleasing and better than any other year we’ve had at that platform. Dark Company registered the most sales but our most played track was Sauce! by Flicker, which is also our newest release, even though it isn’t very new any more. The 2018 Bandcamp chart was completely monopolised by Flicker and Dark Company, with no other act breaking into the top 20 this year. We find this slightly surprising as both Pok the Bard and The Bastard Sons of Dennis continue to be popular.

At Bandcamp it is not easy to make a simple playlist of our popular tracks there. Instead, what we have done is created some sort of playlist here within this news post for your listening pleasure. Simply clicking on the links below will allow you to play the various tracks.

1. Flicker: Sauce!
2. Dark Company: Sacrifice
3. Flicker: Farsight
4. Flicker: Hair and Eyes
5. Flicker: Lucky Stone
6. Dark Company: Lookin’ Bad
7. Flicker: Moonpath
8. Flicker: It Starts Right Here
9. Flicker: The Percolator
10. Flicker: Oily Road Hideaway
11. Dark Company: Last Train to Heaven
12. Dark Company: Terminal Road
13. Flicker: One Place
14. Flicker: Or Maybe Not…?
15. Dark Company: Under the Hill
16. Flicker: Serendipity
17. Dark Company: Astrologer
18. Dark Company: Spoiler
19. Flicker: Blown Away
20. Dark Company: Golden Eye

If there is enough interest in these playlists, we may do the same again next year. News of such publications and compilations will be posted in our News service and on Twitter.

We believe that during the course of this year developments in blockchain technology may allow more equitable methods of financial distribution to become more ubiquitous for creative people. We are hopeful that a blockchain-based solution to the issues associated with relying on SoundCloud to power the players on our website will probably become manifest sometime in the future.

If you would like to compare all of the figures for the most played tracks of 2018 against the figures for last year, please click here to open the relevent news post in a new tab.

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 December 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 December 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 of the previous musical discoveries playlists, please click here and bookmark the page, and remember that we publish a new playlist full of undiscovered gems every month!