I was thinking about some different ways I could add some originality to the blog/podcast last week, and came up with this: Label Gazing. I’ll sum it up pretty quickly, and then move on to the first edition. Essentially, every month on both the blog and the podcast I’ll be featuring a different netlabel, looking at artists both in their back catalogue and new releases. Part of the idea behind this is to get me looking at different music other than what other blogs recommend.
I haven’t exactly figured out whether I’ll be doing one podcast a month dedicated to a specific netlabel, or just feature a couple of artists in one segment of each podcast. Clearly I am deciding most of this on the fly.
First up this month is Dead Bees, a netlabel with quite a large number of artists under their belt. While most netlabels are assumed to give away their music under Creative Commons licenses, this is not the case with Dead Bees. Each of their artists have albums that average around $5-$10 – which, while not free, is still incredibly affordable compared to most LPs put out by the mainstream music industry.
Dead Bees was first brought to my attention last week, when I found three of their album samplers (with #10 coming out just last month). The label samplers provide a pretty good approximation of what you can expect to hear from their artists when you buy an album from Dead Bees: pretty awesome and creative Indie Rock. Some of it is not my cup of tea; but just to put things in perspective, I singled out 26 tracks that I really liked and will feature in the podcast. That’s not to say that people won’t like the rest of the tracks on the samplers, but it’s a pretty good indication that out of the three samplers available, I enjoyed that many tracks.
In the next few weeks I’ll be talking about various artists signed to Dead Bees and playing them in the podcast. Expect at least one post per week (if not more) to be about a Dead Bees artist. I hope you enjoy this new series! I’m excited to dive in and discover even more new music.
Alternative Airwaves 