Revel Lever®

FMQB (Friday Morning Quarterback), a publication servicing radio programming and management executives, as well as music industry executives, recently interviewed RCRD LBL co-founder Peter Rojas.

RCRD LBL is an online record label releasing exclusive and completely free music from emerging and established artists. In addition to their in-house label, the RCRD LBL network includes a curated roster of independent record labels offering free MP3 downloads and multimedia content in blog format.

Peter Rojas came out of the blog world where he founded the popular Engadget site, amongst others. Since he’d learned a lot of lessons about what made a successful blog, RCRD LBL became an idea about creating a site – a niche media site – where you try to connect with a very specific audience, and you try to do that by being very authentic or real with that audience. In thinking about what was wrong with the music industry, it seemed there was all this excitement and interest in music now, but it wasn’t being monetized through the selling of CDs or even digital downloads. He felt that the real excitement, energy and passion was all taking place online in various forms, whether it was music blogs or social networks.

So Peter thought, “What if you could take a lot of these lessons I’ve learned from what makes a great blog, and apply that to the music industry?” He recognized that there is a lot of interesting overlap between what a label is really good at, which is identifying and cultivating talent, and what a music blog is really great at, which is identifying and sharing music from artists that the blogger is really excited about. In the places where they overlap, you could create a really interesting business. You could create a site that gives away the music, just like a music blog does, but do it legally like a label does, and then monetize everything through advertising like a blog does. All the components fit together nicely, and it seemed like an instance where you can align the interests of everyone involved. The artists that are participating are getting compensated and also get to build their audience. The fans get great music for free, and the brands that are partnering with us and supporting what we’re doing get a chance to be seen as actively being part of the solution to some of the problems that the music industry is having. Everyone wins!

Up Close: RCRD LBL Co-Founder And CEO Peter Rojas — FMQB

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