News

SoundCloud Top Ten compilations is the newest feature of the Wud Records website. These pages have been added to our ‘Miscellaneous’ section and start from when we joined, in October 2015.

This new section features the annual Top Twenties as well.

Whilst we have not yet finished adding all of these playlists and pages yet, more will be added in the coming weeks until the full collection is complete. Further compilations will also be added when they are published at the start of the new month.

Now everyone who follows what happens at Wud Records and the fans of our bands, both legacy and active, can see what has been hot and the trends in popularity over time. It is interesting to see what people have been listening to and enjoying. Only you, the listener can influence our future charts, so if you hear something you like, keep playing it! :)

As previously mentioned, we publish a new compilation of the favourite SoundCloud tracks at the start of each new month. These playlists are always announced in our News service and on Twitter. Our algorithm for calculating the chart positions takes into account reposts, likes, comments and plays. Archive and bonus tracks are ignored, and results from other platforms are also ignored. These results are for SoundCloud only and our method for determining final chart position has changed over the months, and may change in the future as inevitable internet developments take place.

The main page for the SoundCloud Top Ten compilations will always have the most recent month as its playlist. All of the previous months are linked down the left hand side of the page for you to check out.

As well as the playlist itself, we have added a table to each page. There are many clickable links contained therein, which will open new tabs and allow the listener to see track details and lyrics at the Explicit Music website when available, as well as more details about the band, and the album or EP the track comes from.

Similar to Billboard, we have included a column to show for how many months the track has appeared in our chart and the movement in position compared to the previous month.

If you would like to browse through all of our SoundCloud Top Ten compilations, you can can do so by clicking here.

Dr Bones and Mike Five interviewed George on New Music Saturday last weekend. New Music Saturday is a fantastic internet radio show that helps expose new and underground music from all across Europe and North America to its audience all around the world. The show goes out live every Saturday at 10 pm uk time, 11 pm CET and 5 pm EST. New Music Saturday is great fun and jammed full of the best music you probably never heard.

George’s interview is a fascinating insight into the workings of Wud Records and its bands and its history. There’s also lots of funny stories, interesting chat and tangents featuring bizzare deaths and Darwin Awards, the brexit shambles, Ig Nobel Prizes and inappropriate chicken love.

Besides all the fun and silliness that went on, George managed to describe the four active bands on the Wud Records label – Flicker, Dark Company, Pok the Bard and The Bastard Sons of Dennis. There were also mentions for Across the Sea on Premium Blend Radio (broadcast weekly on Hailsham FM), Ron Bowes, Verity White, Atom Collector Records and RutiCelli, among others.

George spoke of the things that are coming up on Wud Records, including some very exciting news for Dark Company fans, and some of the forthcoming work to songs by Pok as well as the remastering and release of the remaining Alchemeon tracks. More news on all of these things in our News service and on Twitter.

If you missed the show on Saturday, it is available for a catch-up listen along with all of the other episodes of New Music Saturday. Simply click here and a new tab will open where you can listen at your own leisure.

New Music Saturday has also been added to the awesome Wud Records Links page. There’s loads of great stuff there, and if you have nothing better to do, why not spend a couple of hours browsing through all the fascinating, diverse and helpful links we have gathered over the years? It’s an excellent resource for the independent musician.

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 September 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 September 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 September 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 October 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 September 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 September 2018 top ten for the second month running. These songs come from their re-released Winter 2008-09 collection of live tracks.

Born retains its place at the top of the September 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. By applying mastering to these old Alchemeon tracks, they are now sounding better than ever.

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.

Also appearing on this month’s chart are Dark Company, with four tracks, and Wud and Flicker with one each. 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 September 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.

As you may already know, here at Wud Records we make monthly playlists of Musical Discoveries compilations. These Musical Discoveries compilations consist of the most fantastic music we discover at SoundCloud during the month. Each artist has one track per playlist. If you would like the opportunity to be discovered by our team, we follow back on SoundCloud and listen to everyone we follow on a first-in-first-out basis.

A few months ago we started adding a list of the tracks and artists to each page, with links to the artist’s website or another place where the listener could hear, see and discover more about the artist in question. We only used the SoundCloud link if no other website was forthcoming.

We are very pleased to say that all of these links have now been added to all of the Musical Discoveries playlists, going right back to the first one in August 2016. Hooray!

If you happen to be an artist on one of these Musical Discoveries compilations and we have linked to a website of yours but you would like us to use a different link, please let us know by emailing info@wudrecords.co.uk so we can fix it for you. We have genuinely tried our best to provide good links, and where an artist has appeared in more than one playlist, differing links to allow the clicker the opportunity to visit a range of sites. When an artist has their own website we have tended to gravite towards linking to that one by default.

To celebrate two years of these Musical DIscoveries playlists and all the amazing independent music contained within them, we started doing an extra daily shoutout on Twitter. We now have a featured weekly Discoveries playlist and a featured track from that playlist. Featured tracks are a bit special as they are a favourite from a given month and you will probably want to hear them! We will continue to change the featured track and update the playlist on a weekly basis.

There is a new page for the Featured Tracks and you can reach it by clicking here. You might want to add the link to your bookmarks as well.

As we are all very busy we don’t plan to announce in our News service when we have chosen another track, it will simply appear in the playlist, at the top.

You can follow us on Twitter by clicking here and then you will see the new featured track being called.

Here’s a game you can play – listen to the Musical Discoveries collection coming next and try to guess which will be the featured track! No prizes other than kudos.

If you would like easy access to all of our previous Musical Discoveries compilations, please click here.

We have been asked – wtf is wud? What does it mean? Over the years many people have asked who we are, what we are about, what we are like and why.

It seems that we never particularky bothered to explain ourselves very well before, so a new page has been added to the Wud Records website that hopes to answer some of these questions.

By clicking here, you will go to the ‘About Wud Records’ page. There you can read an explanation and definition of what wud means, how to pronounce it correctly, a brief history of ourselves, and our list of personnel, both present and past.

We don’t wish to appear to be too evasive or aloof or mysterious to our fans, although a certain air of mystery is probably not an entirely bad thing. Hopefully these words will bring us all a bit closer together and maybe we can have a big intercontinental group hug. Who knows.

Meanwhile, we have a lot of great music to bring you and as such we will be beavering away in our studios trying to make things fit for public enjoyment! Lots more news to come on this subject and more in the coming days.