Why follow labels?

In 2021 I embarked on a project to listen to every independent record label, over 2000 so far. I've found around 400, across all genres, that sound fresh to me - and worth following.

This experience of systematic listening has really expanded my musical horizons, beyond the buzzed-about indie rock, electronic or hip hop artists I've tended to have a relationship with in the past.

avant.fm's mission is make it easy to explore, follow, and listen to these ~400 labels. We are a walled garden of music that contains *only* new releases from these labels. A place to listen safe from the mainstream; an indie front door to Spotify.

Following labels has been fun for me because each indie label seeks out the best of a specific sound. And it's so different from a playlist or an algorithm. When you begin to follow a label, you are joining a community of artists and music heads, centered in a city, creating in the now. A community that branches out into various tendrils of cool music.

I'm excited to share this way of finding music with you!

Avant.fm offers a few different tools to help you figure that out.

First off is our label recommendation engine. It's pretty simple: it ingests your Spotify top artists. Then it tells you what labels they're on.

We've also rated and tagged every one of the labels we track, including genre, city and country, along with a brief description. That's all presented for you in an organized fashion on the labels we track page.

Our new releases page is another way to find labels. It shows you every recent release from the labels we track, sorted by date.

Finally, using our search bar, you can search for labels by name, genre, city and country.

Every night we sync up with the popular open source music database Musicbrainz to find new releases from the labels we track.

That gets rolled up into your Feed of new releases, which you will find on your homepage when you create a free account and log in. You can follow or unfollow instantly from a label's page or from the Following page.

For many, the most seamless way to listen will be by clicking on the little Spotify logo beneath each album cover, which will launch the album in the Spotify app. But if you're on Chrome and logged into Spotify, the ▷ button will play the full album inline, vs just a 30-second clip otherwise.

You can add any record to your list of favorites, and browse them on the Favorites page.

avant.fm is an experiment and we're just getting started. I'm using it daily and getting a lot from it. I feel ... unshackled?

Thanks for reading this far. I would love to hear from you if you have any ideas or feedback - or questions!

Chris M.
avant.fm's creator.
marstall at gmail.com
@avant_fm

P.S. If you're an Apple Music user, please check out my other project, shelf.fm, an alternative client for Apple Music.