Wud Records: seasonal Musical Discoveries

Seasonal Musical Discoveries compilations will be skipping ahead one month. Their release dates will be as follows: Winter on 1st March, Spring on 1st June, Summer on 1st September and Autumn on 1st December. We have decided to do this to minimise disruption to other events and activities.

Continuing with having the releases a month earlier would have caused further inconvenient clashes in the wider Wud Records calendar.

This means that the next seasonal Musical Discoveries compilation will have a four-month gestation period, instead of the usual three.

In the past, we released a Musical Discoveries compilation every month, and did so without fail for eight years. After 96 compilations had been released and the algorithm on X (formerly Twitter) had been sabotaged, the amount of people listening to these compilations had dropped significantly. We decided to move to a quarterly schedule of seasonal Musical Discoveries, partly due to the waning popularity of the playlists and also due to the amount of work involved in making the compilations.

If we find that the amount of listeners and fans of these compilations increases to the levels we used to see before the algorithm squeeze, we shall certainly consider making them a monthly feature once more. Until then, they will remain quarterly. We may even stop producing them entirely should interest wane even further.

Even if we do stop producing more of these in the future, the ones that already exist shall remain both at SoundCloud and our web pages. The legacy playlists do seem to produce occasional visiting traffic, so thereby have some value to us. We also love the music, and that’s important as well.

Perhaps you might love the music too if you try one of them? The playlists are extremely eclectic affairs, so you may first have a piece of classical piano, followed by a reggae anthem, followed by a piece of experimental electronica, followed by some progressive jazz-rock fusion. The only way is to try one for yourself and see what leaps out at you from the speakers. You may well find a new artist or band to love and cherish from your own discoveries.

We recommend that you just start playing any compilation from the beginning whilst you are busy with whatever other tasks are a part of your day. Play it loud enough to hear and be background music for your potterings.

Compilations are organised by the number of plays each track had at the time of publishing. This is because tracks that are at the beginning of playlists tend to receive more plays than those that come later on. We collectively feel that the tracks with the fewest amounts of plays need more exposure than those that come after.

Of course, over time play counts will change. We set artists the challenge of overtaking the artists below them in the list, in the hope they will actively promote their wonderful creations. Sadly, few of them do. So much undiscovered wonderful music!

The best place to investigate the collection of Musical Discoveries compilations is from the main Musical Discoveries page at our website, and you can reach that right now by clicking here.