NT RCRD LBL

15 November 2007

RCRD LBL is not a Record Label.

It’s a music blog.

As much as they try and make out that it’s a radical new take on a record label, it really isn’t – it’s just a slightly less radical take on a traditional music site. Sure, they have a lot of bluster about doing things like A&R and all that kind of thing, but in reality they haven’t signed any artists, they just have exclusive tracks from established acts on existing labels.

No artists = not a record label.

Now, all of this should come as no surprise as the main founder of RCRD LBL is Peter Rojas, formally of both Gizmondo and Engadget two of the largest blogs around. He’s certain good at a bit of spin, and this one has been spun mightily well – I haven’t really seen many people pointing out the utter false-ness of the core concept. I assume that’s why the called it RCRD LBL, as no one would have thought it was one otherwise.

Now that we’ve established what RCRD LBL isn’t lets talk about what it is – while it’s not a record label, it is something that is very interesting. The main trust behind the site is to take the traditional music blog structure – posting up free MP3s – and, via sponsorship, pay the artists that they feature. They’ve taken the advertisement supported music model proposed by people like SpiralFrog and made it workable, which is no mean feat. It’s been fairly obvious that the concept of actually inserting adverts into the audio of music was a non-starter, so using advertisements on a high traffic website as the revenue stream makes a huge amount of sense.

The other interesting aspect is their focus on widgets. When you load up any page on the site over on the right hand side you can see a whole load of widgets – one is a music player, one for tour dates, one for ‘fans’ (which is a whole slightly unnecessary social networking addition), one for photos etc. Each one of these is sponsored by a high profile sponsor (I’m seeing Nikon, Virgin American and Puma at the moment) and I would imagine this viral spreading of advertisements is what interests them the most. It’s a very clever way of being able to place adverts in places that wouldn’t normally take advertising, like iGoogle and the Mac OS X Dashboard. In fact, in many ways RCRD LBL is acting as an ad-hoc advertising network.

I’d be very interested to find out what kind of deals they’ve done with their partner labels, and how much money they’re actually getting. Unlike the situation a few years ago, most music blogs are supplied MP3s by record labels already as it’s a great form of promotion so I’d be curious to find out how they played off the revenue stream / promotion balance in this case. It would also be interesting to know things like who actually owns the tracks – is it RCRD LBL or is it the original label – and hence who has the licensing rights to them, as licensing is another huge revenue stream that’s only going to get larger.

In conclusion then, interesting for a music blog and they’re certainly putting a new spin on things, but RCRD LBL really isn’t one.