News

20 Most Played Tracks of 2020

We thought it might be fun to make two playlists of the 20 most played tracks of 2020, one each for SoundCloud and Bandcamp. We felt that such playlists would enable fans of our bands to hear what has been hot and to have the opportunity to enjoy listening to some of our most popular tracks of recent times.

SoundCloud
Overall Wud Records had a splendid year on SoundCloud. Activity was more than double what it was in both 2019 and 2018. We finished the year with just under 3000 followers. It is very pleasing that more new fans across the world are discovering and enjoying the great music made by our amazing artists.

Making a SoundCloud playlist of the tracks that were popular there is easily done. To listen to the 20 Most Played Tracks of 2020 playlist at the SoundCloud website, simply click here to open that page in a new tab.

The 20 Most Played Tracks of 2020 were dominated by Flicker. They achieved twelve of the available places with the wonderful instrumentals from their much-loved album At Least 1000 Words.

One of the most surprising results of the year was the amount of consistent love there was for The Ug Brothers. A lot of their tracks, especially their album of Ugstrumentals – live lofi cassette salvage instrumental bootlegs – proved to be very popular across the internet. All together The Ug Brothers took six of the available places.

One of the two remaining places was taken by Dark Company. Their song Medicines from the album Rage in Heaven has been our most played song for the last few years running. Fans continue to search for it and enjoy listening to it.

The remaining place was taken by The Bastard Sons of Dennis. The Furniture / Los Muebles is a comedy alternative folk flamenco epic. It is split into several parts and alternates with other songs throughout the entire Cherry Smoke Empire album. It is Part One (Overture) that features in the 20 Most Played Tracks of 2020.

The whole uninterrupted version of The Furniture / Los Muebles is also available for download from Bandcamp by clicking here.

It is worth noting that these are only the most streamed tracks at SoundCloud, rather than the most popular. The total amounts of likes, reposts and comments have been ignored. Taking these other factors into consideration would inevitably yield different results.

Eleven of the 20 Most Played Tracks of 2020 were also among the 20 Most Played Tracks of 2019.

Top 20 SoundCloud Tracks 2020

1. Flicker – Oily Road Hideaway
2. Flicker – Welcome to the Family
3. The Bastard Sons of Dennis – The Furniture (part 1: overture)
4. Flicker – Moonpath
5. Flicker – Lucky Stone
6. Flicker – Phoenix in the Bin
7. Flicker – The Percolator
8. The Ug Brothers – Deep Space (Ugstrumental)
9. Flicker – Farsight
10. The Ug Brothers – Wibble and Bling (Cute But Weird Ugstrumental)
11. Flicker – Blown Away
12. Flicker – Tomorrow
13. Dark Company – Medicines
14. The Ug Brothers – Paperchase (Ugstrumental)
15. Flicker – Hair and Eyes
16. The Ug Brothers – White Water (Ugstrumental)
17. The Ug Brothers – Grin (Ugstrumental)
18. Flicker – Week Five
19. The Ug Brothers – Spin Gone Crazy (Ugstrumental)
20. Flicker – Another Star in the Sky

Bandcamp
It’s been the best year we’ve ever had on Bandcamp! It’s the platform with the best ethos in the business. If you are not a member yet, it’s time to join.

One of the great new features on Bandcamp is the Communities. You can join ours by clicking here. ;-)

In 2020 our streams were up about 300% on 2019. Sales were also considerably stronger, with the overwhelming majority coming from outside of Bandcamp. The best-selling album was Flicker‘s At Least 1000 Words, and the best selling individual track was Sauce! from Flicker‘s work-in-progress HappySad album.

The 2020 chart was dominated by Flicker, with thirteen of the tracks, and Dark Company with six. The Bastard Sons of Dennis took the remaining place, with no other artist represented in the 2020 Bandcamp Top Twenty.

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

Top 20 Bandcamp Tracks 2020

1. Dark Company – Animal House
2. Dark Company – Armed & Dangerous
3. Dark Company – Second Sight
4. Flicker – Or Maybe Not…?
5. Flicker – Lucky Stone
6. Dark Company – Future Sadness Past
7. Dark Company – Astrologer
8. Flicker – Blown Away
9. Flicker – Welcome to the Fmaily
10. Flicker – One Place
11. Flicker – Oily Road Hideaway
12. Dark Company – Crash
13. The Bastard Sons of Dennis – Dominance and Submission
14. Flicker – Sauce!
15. Flicker – Tomorrow
16. Flicker – Moonpath
17. Flicker – Phoenix in the Bin
18. Flicker – Hair and Eyes
19. Flicker – The Percolator
20. Flicker – Minack

If you would like to compare all of the figures for the most played tracks of 2020 against the figures for 2019, please click here to open the relevent news post in a new tab. Eleven songs from 2019 are present in the 2020 top twenty.

If you would like to compare all of the figures for the most played tracks of 2020 against the figures for 2018, please click here to open the relevent news post in a new tab.

If you would like to compare all of the figures for the most played tracks of 2020 against the figures for 2017, please click here to open the relevent news post in a new tab.

The top ten SoundCloud tracks for December 2020 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 greatest weight to reposts, then likes and comments over plays. This is because when somebody reposts a track it gives it the opportunity to be heard by a potential new fan. This is always a tremendous help to creative souls. Likes from people who clearly don’t listen to the music are ignored.

Songs published at Bandcamp are also completely omitted from the SoundCloud statistics. This is because Bandcamp statistics require separate treatment.

Archive tracks and bonus tracks are also ignored.

Only you, the listener, can influence our January 2021 playlist. So if there is a track you particularly like, keep playing it! Leave a comment, repost it and share it to your social media feeds!

Massive thanks go out to everybody who helped to support all of us during December 2020 by listening to, commenting on and reposting our bands’ tracks on SoundCloud, as well as other platforms.

We would also like to say a special thank you to all the splendid people on Twitter who have been enjoying and reposting our tracks to their followers. All the support and positive feedback has been incredibly heartwarming for us all. It makes all our endeavours here seem worthwhile.

Congratulations to Flicker, whose wonderful instrumental piece Farsight finally topped our charts. The ever-popular Farsight has been number two before on several occasions and has charted many times. It features the voices of Maaharaj Ji/Prem Rawat and Jonathan Agnew as well as some sounds from Captain James T. Kirk’s ship the USS Enterprise.

Three more tracks from Flicker‘s beautiful album At Least 1000 Words featured in the final chart of 2020. Blown Away, Welcome to the Family and Lucky Stone all received plenty of love, ending the month in postitions three, six and seven respectively.

Flicker‘s second album, HappySad, is under construction and you can listen to it as it stands right now by clicking here. Several more tracks are likely to be released in the coming weeks and months, so please keep an eye and an ear on our News service and Twitter.

Alchemeon followed up their highly dominant month last month by also achieving four of the ten most popular tracks on SoundCloud in December 2020. The Freaks (Shall Inherit The Earth) slipped down to number two after two months at the top. Finale, The Centre of the Cyclone and Castrol GTX a-Go-Go were the other three fabulous songs by Alchemeon to chart, finding themeselves at positions four, five and eight respectively.

The only other act to be represented in this month’s chart were Dark Company. Our biggest selling song, Medicines from Dark Company‘s groundbreaking 1992 album Rage in Heaven, made a reappearance at number nine. The awesome and humourous Don’t Look Down from their work-in-progress Bad Habits album completed the chart by coming in at number ten.

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in December 2020, 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 Links collection or homepage.

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 or 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 2020 into one agreed playlist and published it on the first day of the next month.

Tracks have been arranged according to the number of plays at the exact moment 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.

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 the music too. At the very least you might end up making an independent musician’s day.

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 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 the 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.

This is for future-proofing. If the artist decides to leave SoundCloud or removes their track from that platform, you might still be able to enjoy hearing them elsewhere with a cunning click of the mouse.

If you are the artist and would prefer us to use a different link to the one we added, or if we got something a bit wrong, 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 also tend to link to something a bit more future-proof than “Listen to our latest single!” as we hope these playlists will be around for a long time to come. 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.

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 artist.

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.

We also encourage people to vote for the next featured track on Twitter. These votes are added to the votes cast by our team. All the featured tracks form an additional compilation which we also tweet daily. Sometimes we have a day off, but we tweet most days.

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 the opportunity to be included in a future compilation, first you need to follow us on SoundCloud so we can follow you back. You can even enjoy hearing some of the music by our fabulous bands whilst you’re there. :)

We listen to everyone we follow at SoundCloud on a first-in-first-out basis. It may take a few weeks for us to reach the newest additions. We always have a massive amount of music to listen to, so please be patient and eventually you will be heard.

If you would like to listen to this special new playlist of December 2020 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. Remember that we publish a new playlist absolutely full of largely undiscovered musical treasures every month and who knows – one might even include you!

The top ten SoundCloud tracks for November 2020 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 greatest weight to reposts, then likes and comments over plays. This is because when somebody reposts a track it gives it the opportunity to be heard by a potential new fan. This is always a tremendous help to creative souls. Likes from people who clearly don’t listen to the music are ignored.

From this month onwards, anything that happens at Musicoin will be ignored altogether. That platform has died. Sadly.

Songs published at Bandcamp are also completely omitted from the SoundCloud statistics. This is because Bandcamp statistics require separate treatment.

Archive tracks and bonus tracks are also ignored.

Only you, the listener, can influence our December 2020 playlist. So if there is a track you particularly like, keep playing it! Leave a comment, repost it and share it to your social media feeds!

Massive thanks go out to everybody who helped to support all of us during November 2020 by listening to, commenting on and reposting our bands’ tracks on SoundCloud, as well as other platforms.

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

We would also like to say a special thank you to all the splendid people on Twitter who have been enjoying and reposting our tracks to their followers. All the support and positive feedback has been incredibly heartwarming for us all. It makes all our endeavours here seem worthwhile.

Congratulations to Alchemeon, whose psychedelic alternative rock anthem and call to action The Freaks (Shall Inherit the Earth) remained at the top of the charts in November 2020.

The Freaks (Shall Inherit the Earth) was a very popular Spacegoats song before Alchemeon started playing it. It was performed around many a uk campfire during various road protests, as well as other infrastructure project protests such as against the new high speed two railway.

Many people protest because they believe that these things cause terrible and unnecessary damage to the landscape of the uk. These projects cost billions to implement, money which arguably could be better spent on other things. And for what? A small gain in journey times. The HS2 project is the latest of many of these.

Alchemeon dominated the new chart in a way not seen for a long time, with eight of the ten most popular tracks. Only Flicker, with two pieces from their album At Least 1000 Words, had any of the remaining top ten tracks in November 2020.

Flicker‘s second album, HappySad, is under construction and you can listen to it as it stands right now by clicking here. Several more tracks are likely to be released in the coming weeks and months, so please keep an eye and an ear on our News service and Twitter.

If you would like to go to SoundCloud to hear the top ten songs from Wud Records in November 2020, 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 Links collection or homepage.

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 or 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 2020 into one agreed playlist and published it on the first day of the next month.

Tracks have been arranged according to the number of plays at the exact moment 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.

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 the music too. At the very least you might end up making an independent musician’s day.

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 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 the 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.

This is for future-proofing. If the artist decides to leave SoundCloud or removes their track from that platform, you might still be able to enjoy hearing them elsewhere with a cunning click of the mouse.

If you are the artist and would prefer us to use a different link to the one we added, or if we got something a bit wrong, 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 also tend to link to something a bit more future-proof than “Listen to our latest single!” as we hope these playlists will be around for a long time to come. 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.

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 artist.

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.

We also encourage people to vote for the next featured track on Twitter. These votes are added to the votes cast by our team. All the featured tracks form an additional compilation which we also tweet daily. Sometimes we have a day off, but we tweet most days.

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 the opportunity to be included in a future compilation, first you need to follow us on SoundCloud so we can follow you back. You can even enjoy hearing some of the music by our fabulous bands whilst you’re there. :)

We listen to everyone we follow at SoundCloud on a first-in-first-out basis. It may take a few weeks for us to reach the newest additions. We always have a massive amount of music to listen to, so please be patient and eventually you will be heard.

If you would like to listen to this special new playlist of November 2020 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. Remember that we publish a new playlist absolutely full of largely undiscovered musical treasures every month and who knows – one might even include you!

The Critical Error eponymous album has been added to the Wud Records Archives. The audio was salvaged from cassette and sent to us. We cleaned and mastered the files. Now you too can enjoy the amazing Critical Error eponymous album!

This is tremendously exciting news! We were all big fans of Critical Error back in the day and never thought it would be possible to hear their music ever again. Now, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, it’s here!

The band’s main songwriter, Steve Mavin, tragically died in March 1999 from complicated health problems. He was just 47. It is a real honour to be able to leave a monument to his memory and his wonderful music in the Archives.

We would like to say a massive thank you to everyone who made this possible. Paul for finding the audio files and the cover art, Aidan for his help and suggestions, and most of all to Rosie.

Rosie sent us the audio files and photos. She typed up the lyrics and credits and created a biography of the band. She remained in close contact to advise us every step of the way how best to represent the Critical Error eponymous album. We’re very grateful and humbled by the efforts that everyone has gone to in order to make this thing happen.

The Critical Error eponymous album was recorded in the summer of 1987 by Paul Bateman in his now legendary studio at 32 Howell Road, Exeter. Rough Terrain were recording their first demo there at the same time, and Prism shortly afterwards.

At first listen, Critical Error may sound like whimsical acoustic hippy music. Once you dig a little below the surface, there are some incredibly deep and sometimes tragic stories being told, based on the band’s real-life experiences.

We always admired their songwriting and their slick live performances back in the day. Listening again, with the benefit of more than three decades of hindsight, we appreciate even more what a great band they were.

Songs from the Critical Error eponymous album will be released one at a time. There will be a gap of a day or two, or longer, between each release. This is due to technical reasons regarding the way new tracks are released at SoundCloud.

There are eleven songs and a bonus track altogether on the Critical Error eponymous album. If you are reading this sometime in the future, all the tracks will be there. If you are reading it close to the date it was published, there may be more yet to appear.

There will be further announcements in our News service and on Twitter with regard to further Critical Error material being released. Be sure to follow those pages closely!

If you would like to enjoy hearing the Critical Error eponymous album right here at the Wud Records website, please click here.

If you should happen to prefer listening to it at SoundCloud instead, please click here.