we'd like to welcome you to RCRD LBL, a brand new music site where all of the downloads are both free AND legal. In a world where many people get their music for free, we wanted to create a site where bands we loved could put their music out there for free AND get paid for it. RCRD LBL is a new model and an experiment, putting great music out there for free and with absolutely no DRM. We hope you enjoy the music and support what we're doing by making RCRD LBL part of your daily music diet.

In some ways we're a music blog, written by people who want to bring you cool new music day in, day out. In other ways, we're a record label, championing, signing and partnering with bands we believe in. We'll have tons of exclusive tracks from everyone from Mos Def to Switch to Dirty on Purpose to Cold War Kids, but we're also working with an amazing roster of partner labels (see below) who will also be blogging and giving away music on the site. And since we're a blog, we'll also be pointing you to best of what else is out there on the web.

We're kicking things off today with a slate of amazing new tracks from Justice (featuring Spank Rock and Mos Def!!!), Jacques Renault, Bad Veins, Meanest Man Contest and Kings & Queens and in the days and weeks to come you'll be able to hit us up for exclusive new music from Junip (featuring Jose Gonzalez), Tokyo Police Club, Switch, Ra Ra Riot, The Champain Era, Apes and Androids, Dirty On Purpose, Professor Murder, Sam Champion and many, many more.

Here are our label partners:

* Warp
* Modular
* Dim Mak
* Downtown
* Drowned In Sound
* dirtybird
* Ghostly International
* SEEN
* Kompakt
* Turntable Lab

(with more labels to come!)

A few things about the site:

All of our downloads are free and legal, but we'd ask that you not rehost the tracks on your site or use them in any way that might be considered commercial. Since this is an ad-supported venture the best way to support what we're doing is to visit the site on a regular basis and/or to embed one of our widgets on your blog (you may have noticed the little modules on the right). The whole point behind the widgets is that we want to make it easy to grab any element of the site, from streaming music and tour dates, to photos and videos, and embed it in your own site or on your OS X Dashboard. We'll be adding compatibility with more platforms soon.

We'd also like to encourage you to register and create a My RCRD LBL user account. You don't have to log-in to download music, but you do need to register to post comments, and you can also use your My RCRD LBL account to create customized RSS feeds featuring just the artists and labels you're interested in.