Hey folks! Today we updated some areas of the Record Union website to give it a new and improved look and feel.

First off is our landing page which now has some new graphics and layout on it. It also links to our new info page which is a nice place for people new to Record Union to get an idea of what we are up to.

We have also made some improvements to the procedure for publishing a release. This is now a single seamless process, combining the upload procedure and release creation phase into one tidy sequence.

The settings page has also undergone a major overhaul - making it easier to update and change information concerning your account and profile page.

Last but not least is the navigation bar (the thing on the left when you login to your account). This has been updated to with new more intuitive headings.

Anywho, we hope you like these tweaks to the website. We are also working on a number of cool new features which we will roll out soon. Stay tuned.

Exciting news! Spotify is now officially available in 8 new countries - including major new markets in Asia and Latin America.

As of yesterday, people located in the following counties can enjoy access to Spotify:

Mexico
Hong Kong
Malaysia
Singapore
Estonia
Latvia
Lithuania
Iceland

This means that Spotify is now available in a total of 28 countries and is of course great news for those of you who have your music available on Spotify. New countries mean new listeners - this in turn means more potential fans and plays to be got! As Spotify works on a market share model, the more subscribers that Spotify has results in increased royalties that can be paid out to artists.

If your music is available on Spotify via Record Union then your music will be automatically feature in the Spotify catalog available in these new countries. The exception is if you have chosen to specifically exclude these territories when you published your release(s) on Record Union.

On Friday 12th April our techies will be doing some maintenance and upgrades to our servers.

Due to the nature of this work the Record Union website will be offline for a few hours starting 10:00 CET. These could take up to a few hours to complete and we should be up and running again at around 13:00 CET.

Apologies in advance for any inconvenience this may cause!

Last week the Spotify Trends data feed from Spotify was temporarily stalled - this resulted in stats for the 17th - 21st March not being made available.

We are glad to inform you that this data has now been made available and Spotify Trends is now fully up to date.

We are excited to announce we can now offer distribution to streaming service Simfy .

Simfy is a leading streaming services in Europe and gives music fans access to over 20 million songs in the cloud. Users can listen to music, create playlists, and share them via social networks. A number of service options are available for listeners, including free advertising-financed and subscription based premium services. Simfy launched in 2010 and currently available in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and South Africa,

With Simfy on board we Record Union now offers artist and labels unparallelled coverage of the most popular streaming services around the world. With every new service we add comes more opportunities to reach new fans and listeners and we are excited at the new possibilities that Simfy can offer those of you using our service.

Simfy will be part of the “World domination” package but can also be selected as part of the “Build your own” package.

Important

As is standard when we add new services, we will be delivering all existing music on Record Union to Simfy. This means if you have music on Record Union it will automatically be added to this new service free of charge.

If for some reason you would like to opt out and not feature your music on this service please contact content(at)recordunion.com by Wednesday 16th January.

We are excited to announce that Vinsten - the duo behind the recent Spotify hit “Luckiest girl” - has recently signed a record deal with major label EMI.

As always, it is with mixed feelings that we say goodbye to such talented artists. However, we take this latest major label signing of an artist distributed by Record Union as yet more proof that we are providing an important service for aspiring independent artists. We are seeing more and more evidence that good performance on Spotify (and other digital channels) are very important when attracting label attention.

Commenting on this development, Calle from Vinsten had the following to say:

“We never thought Luckiest Girl would be such a hit! After dealing with all major record labels, we chose EMI. We are excited to work with them and looking forward to make new releases! Record Union is the easiest way to distribute your music online. Thanks to their service we reached 3 miljon plays on Spotify and we had daily statistics with their Spotify Trends, which was important while dealing with labels.”

We would like to wish Vinsten members Niklas Benjaminson and Calle Wachtmeister the very best for the future. We would also like to congratulate EMI for adding such a talented new artists to their roster.

Though their journey here on Record Union may have come to an end - the next chapter in their own journey has only just begun.

Happy new year all! We were chuffed to see that the Spotify community picks playlist for 2012 was cram packed with some great artists currently distributed by Record Union. This included the likes of Dr.Sounds, indie superstar Nomy and classic dance poppers Digital Explosion.

Some additional great news is that Swedish underground Hip-Hop duo Trainspotters was included in the official Spotify Nordic playlist. The track is a single from their new album Bastards!. Oh how we do love this track. Need a backing track for some late night spittin´? Hit up the instrumental version. The cover image for this album is actually so awesome were were forced to use it as the image for this post.

Again, a very happy new year to all.

Record Union would like to wish all a Merry Christmas and a festive end of year.

We are pleased to announce a cool new feature. We have created - and are excited to introduce - our very own custom-built “Your music is now available on Spotify” notification system.

The addition of this feature means that when you distribute a release to Spotify you will now automatically get an email notification (also containing a direct Spotify link) the day your music becomes available for listening.

This is particularly useful if you have chosen to deliver your release immediately and have not set a specific release date. In this case you will no longer need to check in every few days to find if your release has become available - you will now get an email notification the same day it goes live.

In the cases where you have set a release date the new feature is also handy. It will be checking throughout the day of your release date ready to notify and send you a link when your release has become available.

We have had many requests for this feature and we hope that all of you all find this a useful addition to our service.