Record Labels

Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound Records specialise in electronic dub-reggae music. They’ve been releasing their dubbed out electo-fusion for several decades now: in fact 2010 is On-U’s 30th anniversary. A core collective of producer Adrian Sherwood, Doug Wimbish (bass), Keith Leblanc (percussion), and Skip McDonald (guitar) have frequently worked together on albums from acts like Tackhead, Dub Syndicate, African Head Charge, [...]

Northern Kind are Sarah Heeley and Matt Culpin, an English synthpop band who’ve worked with synth-stars such as Alan Wilder (Depeche Mode, Recoil), Kajagoogoo, and Simon Heyworth (Simple Minds, Mike Oldfield). Northern Kind’s 2nd album WIRED was my favourite release of 2009 and it has been available on Spotify for a few months now. I asked Matt about his experiences of Spotify from an artist’s point of view: how he went [...]

Most regular Spotify users will have seen a message like this before: “This Album Is Currently Not Available in United Kingdom” (or whichever country you live in). It’s an annoying by-product of the music industry’s licensing practices and the source of constant joy/disappointment for those that follow the “what’s new on Spotify” announcements and services. But now users can see what’s going [...]

Electro Arc is an independant German label specializing in industrial dance and oldschool EBM (Electronic Body Music). They currently have several exceptional compilation albums on Spotify. Label boss Michael aka Intrendent kindly spared some time to answer a few questions.

Here’s an updated clickable list of my favourite record labels that have extensive catalogues on Spotify. I often find that if I like a band, I’ll probably like other bands on the same label: a list of labels like this acts as a simple recommendation service and is a quick and easy way to see what’s new that I might like (click a link, scroll to the bottom of the list for the newest releases). The labels here are split [...]

This week’s Spotify updated included over fifty releases from G-Stone Recordings, the downtempo-dub label that features artists such as Tosca, Peace Orchestra, and Kruder & Dorfmeister.

Spotify has over 2,000 tracks from Metropolis Records, the American label that specialises in electro-industrial, synthpop, futurepop, darkwave, and gothic. Some of my favourite bands are on this label (KMFDM, Front Line Assembly, Seabound) so I’m particularly pleased to see their inclusion on Spotify.

Finally, we have trance on Spotify! I’ve been looking out for these genres to appear on Spotify for ages, so I was particularly pleased to see yesterday’s Spotify update including some of my favourite progressive and psychedelic trance (psytrance) acts, as well as a healthy dose of psybient and some progressive trance too. Here’s a summary grouped by record label: Twisted Records Simon Posford’s UK-based label specialise [...]

Out of Line is a German record label who specialize in EBM, Industrial, and Synthpop. Their line-up includes Combichrist, Blutengel, And One, UK synthpop femmes Client, and Mexican aggrotechers Hocico. Browsing through their list of new and recent releases, I’ve noticed much of this is now on Spotify. Here’s a brief run-down of new Out of Line releases (with direct Spotify URIs): Aggrotech / EBM Agonoize – “For [...]