Why did you start your label?
Music is my passion, it's all I do. I have been making music since I was a child and using DAWS and plugin's for over 20 years, so I have gained a lot of experience in music production. It makes sense to use these skills to form a business and to get my sounds out to people that will use them. I probably don't run New Loops as a label per se, but more as a sound design company offering other services than just samples and presets.
What is your best selling product to date and why do you think it did so well?
It's hard to know the answer as I would have to look at analytics across our whole distribution network, but I think Trap sample packs are doing well at the moment.
What makes your label offering different to others?
There's a few things that come to mind. Every New Loops sample pack comes with free demo packs to download and try before buying, even our preset packs come with free presets to try. I think this is important so people can hear a sample (get it?) before they buy a pack. Another thing is the amount of time spent on the sounds. I am a very pedantic person and I spend a lot of time trimming silence from the start and end of sounds, making sure fades are done right, and normalising and naming samples, not to mention the hours and hours of checking loop points!
I also make sure our audio demos accurately demonstrate the sounds in the pack and what can be achieved with the sounds. Using a construction kit as an example; every sound in the audio demo will come in the sample pack and actually sounds like the demo. I think this important to help people make a choice about which packs they might want.
What do you think about the current state of the industry?
I think the sounds industry, if we can call it that, is really good actually. I can only see it growing in coming years as music production gets more accessible and more people are producing. I wish something was done about piracy though. I think children should be taught about the economic effects of it at school. Pretty much all sound designers are not big corporations like big record labels and have families to feed. When these websites take a new product and share it for free, they make massive amounts of money from advertising and affiliate links. I can see why all the new subscription websites are popping up to try and tackle this.
What format do you think is best for your customers?
I guess it is the format that they need. I would love customers to tell me what they want, but I think it is probably WAV files.
What are your favorite genres at the moment, and what do you think about categorizing music into genres?
I compartmentalise everything, especially music, and I love sub-genres. At the moment I am really enjoying making Trap and Techno sample packs. I have quite an eclectic taste in music though, and often listen to Trance, Drum and Bass, House, and Garage, that’s when I am not listening to Keane, Broken Bells, Foo Fighters, or Nirvana!
What do you think is most important about running a Label?
The most important for me would be making sounds that people want. It's no good spending months making something that no one wants.
What is the strategy: quantity or quality products?
Quality - always! I spend a lot of time on producing a product that is usable and high quality. There are other companies that do things to pad out a pack, such as rendering the same files in different formats such as WAV, MP3 etc. to boost the number of files. I don't do things like this, on the contrary, I spend time trimming samples to keep the file size down.
What is next for the label?
More quality sample packs in more genres. I would like to do a good Drum and Bass pack and I am looking at getting some of our packs converted to MPC expansions too.
Validate your login