The header image for this blog post is a misty view of the fields in my village, during a walk just after Christmas. Whilst it suggests uncertainty, this year has actually been all about learning, and clarity. To draw a line under a busy 2024 and to reflect back over the year, I thought I’d share some of what I’ve been up to behind the scenes. Fans of the label who have been following since the early days, may have noticed quite a few new things and there’s been a bit of a plan behind this, after I’d made myself a ‘roadmap’ of things to look at. It all started at around this time a year ago…

After reading some really inspiring and insightful books, I finally stepped towards understanding the business side of running a record label after all these years. I realised that as a record label you can still stay true to your artistic and creative purposes and operate it like a business. In fact, it's actually a pretty vital in terms of ensuring things are sustainable so that I can keep this ship sailing steady for many more years. It's really tough out there for reasons that are one for another day. But in this blog post, I wanted to reflect on what I've been working on in 2024 and to share a little of what's been going on behind the scenes.

And just as a quick and final reminder before it expires...the Whitelabrecs winter sale runs until 23:59 (UK time) on the 31st of December 2024 and if you enter the code below in red at checkout, you'll get 20% off anything you buy, be it a CD, vinyl, a download or merch:

https://whitelabrecs.bandcamp.com/
Discount Code: 20off

RELAUNCH

New website & email

If I'm being honest I’d sort of left Whitelabrecs to tick over in 2023 after having moved house. There was just too much gardening, painting and home improvements to do, to spare much time to develop the label beyond working through the release schedule. At the end of 2023 I bought a book called ‘The Label Machine’ by Nick Sadler and I read it cover to cover over the festive season. I was energised in the new year to start making some improvements and to give the label much more focus in 2024.

I noticed over several months how my costs for sending out email newsletters to label subscribers and the music press were starting to get very expensive. There was also the cost to maintain the Wordpress website too. Having read Nick's book and being committed to growing more this year, it led to me checking out The Label Machine in more detail. I became aware that through paying a monthly subscription fee I could essentially have a new back-end for the label, with a website builder, emailer, blog and more all housed in a one-stop shop. The math alone made it a pretty easy decision to give the initial trial a go, especially as I’d already read the book which was full of professional guidance on how to run a record label. When I joined I’d say it was immediately transformative. I’ve had to put in a huge amount of work to get the most from it, and there’s still loads of features and expertise that I’ve not yet tapped into. But my determination combined with the tools available and weekly community Q&A and coaching sessions have made a huge difference to Whitelabrecs this year.

So in March I got to work on the brand new Whitelabrecs website, spending hours playing around with the forms, buttons and functionality available to me. After the trial expired I got rid of my old subscriptions and committed fully!

In the summer I discovered another amazing resource; Scott Orr’s Other Record Labels. I was trying to improve some processes and systems and to learn lots more about marketing for record labels. I bought Scott’s ‘Record Label Marketing Strategies’ and after dropping Scott a note of thanks, he responded and invited me to do a podcast with him to chat about Whitelabrecs, CDs and Ambient music! This was an honour and I really enjoyed chatting to Scott.

I spent the summer slowly tweaking the website, learning more and more until in October I did a full redesign of the site! It felt a bit ridiculous to launch a website in March and then effectively redo it 6 months later, but just like music, taking a step back and revisiting makes a big difference, and I was able to see what needed improvement. It was mainly simplifying the design and making it all feel more like a cohesive brand, as well as stripping out some unnecessary detail so people could hopefully find it easy to navigate.

I launched the new email platform and set up a ‘get to know me’ sequence, where a few welcome messages are sent to new subscribers over time. This includes an initial hello, followed by a bit more about my background and why I set up Whitelabrecs, then I summarised a few records from the ever growing catalog before sharing a video about how I got into ambient music. With the help of a few label artists and visual artist George Korunov, we also created a free and exclusive compilation album for all who subscribe to the label’s email community, which is called Textures, Structures. I promoted this throughout the year on Instagram and YouTube and it’s still available for those reading who are not yet on the list - there’s a form at the bottom of the page where you can join us and get a copy of this album...

Blog

Included in the backend of the website is a blog. I’ve always enjoyed blogging and actually, I began writing a blog called Audio Gourmet back in 2007 to track my musical journey. This became the name for my netlabel that I launched in 2010 but before then, I’d post mini reviews of records I was enjoying as well as share some of my early production experiments, which in truth were never particularly great! But, I loved being able to write about and share what I was discovering, as it was my only real outlet back then due to there not being much interest in experimental music locally. So this year I started using the website’s blog feature to announce releases on the website. I’ve seen on so many websites across different industries, that a blog can easily get neglected and it wasn’t long before I found that simply regurgitating information about a new release was becoming a bit of a chore. Having explored AI a little, I even experimented asking Chat GPT to turn my press releases into a blog post and whilst it gave me a chance to learn how the functionality of an AI tool worked, I wasn’t particularly proud of the output. It felt a bit soul-less really which personally, is my feeling on quite a lot of creativity produced using AI. With exceptions of course!

After a lot of reading into marketing and content creation, it struck me that what was needed in the label’s blog posts was things that people might actually find interesting, believe it or not! It needed to be a reason to visit the website, rather than something I hoped they might stumble across in case they missed the memo about a new release. What was needed was behind the scenes content, back stories behind the artist and their music, mixes, inspirational records by other labels and artists. I started to think that people may not always be interested in what I had to say about a record; after all, I write an overview of each record I release in the form of a press release. Perhaps what was missing was more of a direct link to the artist, which I knew to be true from the wonderful listening parties we’ve routinely been hosting for Whitelabrecs releases. So, with the help of my artists, we began to write blog posts and these gradually built up to being a weekly thing by the end of the year. Behind the scenes when an artist and I are planning, there’s a list of blog post themes that the artists can choose from and often it’s a case of me asking them a few ‘interview’ questions that they respond to. We have video performances, mixes, record collections; much of the creativity and work behind these are driven by the artist themselves and hopefully, these blog posts are interesting and well worth checking out.

Release schedule

After reading The Label Machine book in December ‘23 I created my own version of ‘the drop’ which is a framework of marketing and promotional activity, based around a release. It’s a sort of to-do list campaign of social media posts, artwork and content creation, listening parties and blog posts. I found this was constantly changing the more I learnt, with activities building up and by the end of the year this turned into an 8 week campaign I use as a blueprint for every physical release. I’ve also been working on a 6 week version for eRecords. This all helps communicate to the artists what will happen each week as we prepare for and then release their record. But it helps keep me on-track and organised too! It sort of highlighted how little I tended to do for so many years previously, with just announcing the news to my Bandcamp and email followers on pre-order and release day and a little bit of social media. I realised that whilst it’s a lot of hard work, I needed to do more to get the music heard and over a longer period of time too.

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

Shopify Experiment

One of the attractive ideas with using The Label Machine as a website, was an ability to embed products from a Shopify website onto my website. My clothing supplier also enables me to feed products into Shopify and integrate the fulfilment, so I set up a store subscription and added CDs, and one or two exclusive merch products. It was something I had under review and decided to get rid of in the end when I redesigned my website. I realised that people would have to choose between Bandcamp and Shopify and there were just too many complications - ultimately, it didn’t really help fans have the best experience. So I put all my eggs back in the Bandcamp basket! No bad thing as I love Bandcamp dearly. Part of the mindset I’ve been in is to try new things to see if they work, and not be too worried about making mistakes. This was a mistake, partially due to how I approached it perhaps.

Social Media

I’ve cared more about social media this year than ever before after being someone in the camp of finding it frustrating and limiting for artists and labels. I built a Facebook following of almost 3000 people in the early days before the big switch over to the paid advertising model and now it’s really hard to reach even a tiny percentage of them, unless I pay for it. Being more visual, Instagram has been my favourite social space for some time, but I’ve also seen the likes go right down in the last couple of years. On my big improvement journey this year I discovered something that helped me see it all differently. I’ve realised that people are ‘liking’ less, because perhaps the content is not so interesting or as relevant to other people as it is to me. Of course, I care about it all deeply but why should anyone else?

I watched so many videos from social media experts, both inside the music industry and outside. Some of the viewpoints differed but mostly, all were aligned in stressing the importance of social media to raise an awareness of what you do. You can achieve this by sharing updates of the latest releases on the socials and that does the job, but engagement is a whole different thing. I learnt that someone can go from simply being aware that you exist, onto raising curiosity enough that they might like or comment, and then some day they might head over to Bandcamp to check out what you do. Then it’s all down to the music. I realised that as a big music fan and collector myself, I do this too - it’s rare I’ll come off Instagram for example to listen to an album. So selling music on social media is in actual fact, pretty difficult especially with no strategy.

I’m comfortable that now my strategy is to think more about what people might find interesting, to share things that are not just centered around buying an album, but starting conversations too. An example is supporting other labels and artists by sharing the music I buy or sharing some of the classic albums from my personal collection. And lastly, I’ve decided to get over the hurdle of filming myself talking to the camera! I think the video calls I did with Kevin at The Moderns and Scott at Other Record Labels helped a lot; I’d technically already put myself out there, so it wasn’t such a big step to take. Although it always feels weird when there’s not another person there to chat to. It’s still not easy and I know from my own Instagram feed, that I’m seeing less of the people I want to hear from and more ads. However, I’m no longer seeing social media as a ‘sales channel’ and instead, it’s a free space that I can hopefully raise some level of awareness, that Whitelabrecs exists.

I also decided to look at a couple of new social spaces, with the Whitelabrecs YouTube channel being launched and I’ve also been a bit more active on Reddit. Having the YouTube channel gave me the idea to record the video for the About page on this website. Then Reddit and its sense of community really reminded me of my early days of DJing, when I was a very active member of the DJ Forum, where shameless self promotion is frowned upon and helping people is praised. There’s still a long way to go and I’m by no means becoming a social media expert! Miles away in fact. But its purpose is now clear to me after this year and hopefully it’s an area I can continue to learn.

THE FUTURE

Driftworks

Many will be aware that I’ve been working with Andrew Heath for a good few years now through releasing his music and his packaging design work for Whitelabrecs. For that reason we’ve been in regular contact for a good while now and we’ve regularly exchanged ideas and constructive feedback. Andrew had an idea of starting a record label and then I also happened to suggest that perhaps he could set up and run a sister label. When I made this suggestion, I wanted it to be its own thing, with Andrew basically calling all the shots. I didn’t want it to essentially be exactly the same as Whitelabrecs, or for me to be some kind of gatekeeper overseeing it. Instead, I wanted to pass on my support and to help get something set up, as well as give another outlet for the many talented artists I work with to release through. Andrew came up with the brilliant name Driftworks, and has an exciting first full year ahead. Whilst it’s already its own thing, its own brand, it feels very much like family and we’ll have some overlap between the two labels in terms of artists, utilities and…a community!

Inner Echo

On the community note, towards the very end of this year after regularly speaking to Andrew, we decided to explore the idea of having a community to run alongside both of our labels. I'd been reading another great book; Pat Flynn's 'Superfans' whilst on holiday in Autumn and came back really enthusiastic about how this might look for Whitelabrecs. Looking more into what Pat does with his own businesses, it's clear that he really cares about his customers and wants to get to know them and this really resonated with me. It's certainly how I feel and I always get a real sense of this during Bandcamp listening parties. It turned out that Andrew also had a lightbulb moment after watching a documentary about Pauline Oliveros, who once said 'don't build a career, build a community'.

Once we settled on the name, the Inner Echo, it took hold pretty quickly. Andrew adapted and recreated a logo idea I’d mocked up and then we got a few friends, fans and fellow artists involved to start testing our new online community forum. We have both been in and around music for a long time as both artists and music fanatics. We can create and curate releases and sell them but we wanted to do something beyond this, and get to know the people who enjoy what we’re doing. We want to give creative opportunities to people who might wish to get a bit more involved, and connect artists with fans on a bit more of a personal level. This has only been active for a short space of time, and already we have over 50 members of this ‘secret squirrel club for ambient music’ with some lively, positive discussion going on. If this sounds interesting to you then you'd be very welcome to join us! You just need to subscribe to receive email newsletters from either Whitelabrecs or Driftworks and then you'll automatically receive an exclusive invite within just a few days.

Vinyl

This year I managed to achieve a long-term dream of mine, by releasing a vinyl album on Whitelabrecs! The label is of course already inspired by the vinyl format, with the CDs replicating classic vinyl packaging styles. So after looking into options and obtaining many quotes over the years, I finally took the plunge and got a production and fulfilment arrangement in place with a company called 8 Merch. This helps a little with international shipping costs which had often been something that stopped me from going ahead with a vinyl release, as they have plants in the EU and USA. For those unaware, the record I went for was my latest Glåsbird album ‘Fenscapes’ and at the time of writing I’ve broken even which is never a given with this kind of risk. So, there will be more vinyl from time to time, albeit not too frequently due to the cost and logistics involved. The next one is set to be announced in the next week or so, with a talented musician returning to Whitelabrecs...

Streaming

In the second half of the year I started to look more at the streaming world by getting some more label music onto the major streaming platforms. Wherever I looked, whatever I was trying to learn about the music industry, streaming is at the forefront of the conversation. To date I’ve focused pretty much exclusively on the ‘merch’ side of things with CDs, tapes and actual merchandise such as t-shirts and hoodies with some digital downloads too and a focus purely on Bandcamp as the home for these things. The industry has shifted and whilst many musicians and record labels rightly find it frustrating in terms of the deal they get, it’s worth thinking about how it is working for many people and therefore it cannot be ignored. There’s a generation now, who are experiencing music on these platforms as their primary destination of discovery.

There are so many creators of music too, undeterred by the poor deal offered in terms of simply having their creations available to stream. Yet, vinyl has been on the rise and apparently, next up is a CD comeback too. I know from my own listening habits that I listen to music on mass on Spotify all day and every day. Yet, I am a loyal supporter of physical music too. It’s just I can’t buy everything as I have neither the cash nor the space. So based on myself as a case study, I’m seeing streaming platforms as a way of discovery for listeners and a future generation of Ambient music fans. To boycott this would indeed be a way to stand up to some unfair deals and practices, but it may also mean ignoring the future generation of ambient music fans. So, the plan early next year will be to explore this further and see how Whitelabrecs and its artists can be more present on the streaming platforms, aided by distributor partnerships. A quick shout here to my most long-standing streaming partner and a guy I’ve known in the scene since my early days - David at Audiomoves. He convinced me to get some of my music as Spheruleus on streaming platforms and in the background, David successfully arranged the occasional playlist feature for my music which has generated a bit of cash for me to buy some musical equipment and software! The sums don’t work for streaming to be the only space for an artist to release their music, but you just never know.

Artists

This year I built a guide for artists and an on-boarding journey, consisting of a PDF pack covering key FAQs and setting out the path I’ll follow with the artists I work with, and what I’ll aim to do for them. As an artist myself (when I get the time!) I really want to do what I can to raise the profile of the artists I work with; not necessarily in terms of building stature but more in terms of connecting them with fans. I hope that with each artist releasing with Whitelabrecs, some people who weren’t aware of their work before become keen to follow their career, whether that be with this label or elsewhere. There’s so much risk involved and music just doesn’t sell out like it used to, so I have to be really careful in predicting what might work. So this guide, along with some calculations I’ve set up behind the scenes, help me to plot the right path for the artists I work with. I’ve worked with so many amazing artists over the years and made a lot of friends in the scene, and I am grateful that these people trust me to represent them and their music. What keeps me going is receiving an exciting demo and that’s all the fuel I need to keep plugging away with what I do. I’m amazed that after nearly 10 years, the music continues to find me rather than me ‘scouting for talent’ and as always, starting a new year with a fully loaded schedule fills me with excitement.

Reports

Lastly I thought I'd end on a boring note...In my day job in the insurance industry, over the years I’ve really found spreadsheets to be something I enjoy creating, tracking data and producing visuals to illustrate trends and monitor performance. I find the process to be creative too and I guess I’ve always been trying to pull together some graphs and charts for Whitelabrecs - mostly just to mess around with formulas and play with data. I know how useful data can be but I think until this year, I’ve not really understood what it was that I was trying to measure. This year with all of the improvements and clarity I’ve found through all my reading and research, I’ve been able to get some metrics together that I can measure and have a way to report clearly on these. It’s a bit weird making reports for yourself, especially wasting time trying to make them look good… but the aim for these is to get a view of what’s happening across all the key record label activities, to try and make the actions and steps I should take next more apparent. The goal is to make better decisions for the label so that it might continue, grow and inspire more people.

That's it for another year! I've already got my roadmap prepared for 2025...a huge thanks to all who discovered and supported me and my record label this year. I've had so much encouragement and this really helps to give me the energy needed to continue as Whitelabrecs approaches 10 years old.