Indie Music

Artist and label services company IDOL has appointed Nashville-based Thomas Sharp Maxwell as General Manager, USA, to lead the growth of its operations across North America.

As General Manager, Maxwell will focus on drawing new talent to IDOL’s US team and developing its local roster.


Joining IDOL in 2016 as its first US employee, Maxwell was previously Senior Director, Label Development and A&R.

In recent years, he has led the signing of some of IDOL’s first North American label clients. These range from storied New York jazz label HighNote Records to neoclassical and ambient imprint Moderna Records, with recent signings including Montreal-based record label and creative agency House of Youth in September 2022.

Madeline Nelson (Amazon Music) and Jennifer Masset (Spotify) to keynote; Recording Academy roundtables, Web3 series, and CLE announced!

The 50th annual Spellemann awards, AKA the Norwegian Grammys, have announced their winners, honoring releases from 2022. The ceremony took place on Saturday, April 15th at the H3 Arena in Fornebu where everyone joined for the celebration. Congratulations to The Orchard’s distributed artists and labels on 15 wins!

Utopia Music is moving through a period of intricate change: it has bought and then subsequently sold both Sentric and Rostr; announced layoffs in November 2022; held a reorganisation that included the departure of its CEO in January 2023; and was sued by SourceAudio, a company it didn’t acquire but allegedly had promised to, in February 2023.

Downtown Music Holdings (DMH)-owned Downtown Music has formed a new Artist & Label Services division. Ben Patterson has been promoted to the role of President of the newly-coined Downtown division.

The Artist & Label Services division was born from Downtown’s distribution arm, DashGo, and the company says that it is “integral” to its “core mission to empower artists and build an equitable music ecosystem”.

In an unusual move that seems intended to eliminate age-discrimination in music releases, BMG, one of the world’s largest music companies, announced Tuesday that it will abandon the “outdated” industry distinction between “frontline” — a.k.a. new releases — and older catalog recordings.

The company, which notes that older catalog recordings account for up to three quarters of revenue in the streaming era, will fully integrate its new release and catalog recordings businesses. It is the first major company in the industry to do so.

Record Store Day: Spin Your Attention To Indie Stores, Artists, Labels - Across America, US - Record Store Day celebrations include performances, meet-and-greets with artists and record releases on independent labels.

There’s so many outlets releasing extreme music today, but it takes a keen ear to seek out the ones emitting the most worthwhile noise. I, Voidhanger is one of those labels.