Dear listeners, artists, friends and family, happy new year! We’re so excited for this new year that we’d love to start it off with a blog, telling you more about what’s been happening in 2022 and what’s going to happen in 2023. But before we do that, I would first like to take a moment to thank the 37 artists or ensembles we’ve worked with for their amazing support, their fantastic musicality and and wonderful insights. I really value the friendships we’ve built with these marvelous people, and hope to work with all of them again soon!
2022 recap
2022 started with a big bang – we’ve completely revamped our branding with new typography, a new colour scheme, and, as those of you still rocking the physical media, new SACD cases! After seven years of the same branding and colour scheme, we decided to change these to better reflect our current views as a label. We also changed the cases we put around our SACD discs to the Super Jewel Box format, a way stronger and more rigid formats, better able to protect the precious disc inside. Of course, we’re also going to miss the oversized DVD cases we made in the past, but with that format some people thought they were DVDs or Blu-rays, so the new format helps with that too.
Furthermore, in the past year, we’ve made some huge changes to our recording and mastering workflow. This results in a much more natural, organic, and more immersive sound — yes, even in stereo! We’re not going to bore you with all the technological babble, there’s a blog article about it if you’re interested. Lastly, we also started releasing music in immersive formats such as Dolby Atmos TrueHD, Auro-3D, and Discrete DXD, the latter being downloadable packages of 40-70GB each! Overall, we’d love to continue along this path, offering even higher quality, more immersive recordings of exceptional music.
Which brings us to my final point. We’ve released a lot of fantastically surprising music in the past year, because it’s one of our core values that music should always surprise, exhilarate, inspire us. You’ll not find many “mainstream” kinds of artists or repertoire on the label, and if we do, you bet there’s something in it which goes totally against the grain, so to speak. We would really love to continue with this, and we have a number of talented artists with whom we’re setting up projects full of music you might have never heard of, but will inspire and surprise you. 2023 will be a year of inspiration, most of all.
In numbers
In 2022 alone, we’ve released 13 albums by 29 fantastic artists and 36 composers, spanning from early music to contemporary, from world music to jazz, as well as anything in between. We’ve also recorded, edited, mixed, and mastered a staggering 432 tracks! These tracks and albums have together allotted 104 reviews (that we know of; we often don’t hear from reviewers when reviews are published), three awards, and great feedback from listeners too. Sales-wise, it’s still hard to give more than a rough estimate as statements usually come in around springtime, but from what we can gather, here’s a little overview.
Split up over the categories CDs/SACDs, Hi-res Downloads, Spatial Audio Downloads, Vinyl and Merch, the majority of sales now come from Hi-res Downloads. To be more precise, they accounted for about 53% of all sales and 48% of all revenue. As expected, this is followed by CDs/SACDs, accounting for 42% of sales and 43% of revenue. Third place is occupied by our newcomer Spatial Audio Downloads, with a little over 4% in sales and 6% in revenue. Last up are vinyl and merch, the latter being a fairly new category which we just released two months ago.
Some other fun numbers include having gone through about 43kg worth of coffee beans to produce around 1141 minutes of music. In other terms, each minute of music was the result of 37,7 grams of coffee (about two double-espressos). In the process, we created almost 35TB worth of data. If we had recorded unto 3.5″ floppy discs rather than blazing-fast NVMe SSDs, the stack of 24,3 million floppy discs would be a little over 80km tall (almost 50 miles for you non-metric folk). Thank heavens for server clusters and SSDs, am I right? But in all seriousness, let’s continue to 2023 and check out what we’ll be up to.
2023 and onwards
So how do we go from here? Well, for starters, I’m excited to announce that I’ll be taking back my position as label manager, after having had some health issues over the last year or so. And I’d love to get working on it to keep running TRPTK in the same spirit we started it all, an indie label with an insatiable lust for great new music you’ve never heard of, by talented artists from all around the world, captured in the best quality imaginable. And boy oh boy do we have some great releases lined up for you in the next year: we’re continuing Nicolas van Poucke’s Schumann Collection, we’re releasing a beautiful new album with compositions by Marion von Tilzer, a new live album by baroque ensemble Postscript, and even some tango coming up, amongst many, many others. We also have some interesting new artists who’ve just signed TRPTK and are just dying to release some fantastic stuff too.
But how will the music industry in 2023 and onwards look like? We’re expecting that streaming and digital downloads will keep climbing in sales, and physical media will keep diminishing little by little. Does that mean there might be a time coming where we won’t produce any physical music? I don’t think so, but the way in which the music industry is shifting away from good old CD and vinyl makes us wonder what other changes we might see in the upcoming year. Which beautifully segues me into my next point.
We’d love to hear from you.
So here’s where you come in. We’d love to hear from you where you see your own listening habits, your curiosity in musical genres and styles, your wishes and dreams, where all of those will go in 2023 and onwards. How do you see the music industry evolving? Has the way you’ve been listening to music, or the music you listened to, changed in any way since 2022 and before? We want to hear from you, and most of all, I personally want to invite each and everyone of you to join the discussion, to become part of a new frontier in the music world. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll bring out some more information, but the gist of it is this: we want to organise a think-tank or discussion group, where we’d like to listen to your personal stories, thoughts and ideas.
If you or someone you know have something to share, ideas, stories, whatever else, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter or check out the blog. We’ll soon announce some open evenings at the studio where, whilst drinking a nice espresso or something else, we can discuss all those ideas. To hopefully make the music industry a better place for everyone. And this doesn’t just relate to TRPTK either, if you work at another label or if you’re an independent artist, feel free to join also. Only if we work together, we’re able to change the music scene for the better.
For now, I wish all of you a beautiful first of January. May each and every one of your dreams come true.
New year, new TRPTK
Dear listeners, artists, friends and family, happy new year! We’re so excited for this new year that we’d love to start it off with a blog, telling you more about what’s been happening in 2022 and what’s going to happen in 2023. But before we do that, I would first like to take a moment to thank the 37 artists or ensembles we’ve worked with for their amazing support, their fantastic musicality and and wonderful insights. I really value the friendships we’ve built with these marvelous people, and hope to work with all of them again soon!
2022 recap
2022 started with a big bang – we’ve completely revamped our branding with new typography, a new colour scheme, and, as those of you still rocking the physical media, new SACD cases! After seven years of the same branding and colour scheme, we decided to change these to better reflect our current views as a label. We also changed the cases we put around our SACD discs to the Super Jewel Box format, a way stronger and more rigid formats, better able to protect the precious disc inside. Of course, we’re also going to miss the oversized DVD cases we made in the past, but with that format some people thought they were DVDs or Blu-rays, so the new format helps with that too.
Furthermore, in the past year, we’ve made some huge changes to our recording and mastering workflow. This results in a much more natural, organic, and more immersive sound — yes, even in stereo! We’re not going to bore you with all the technological babble, there’s a blog article about it if you’re interested. Lastly, we also started releasing music in immersive formats such as Dolby Atmos TrueHD, Auro-3D, and Discrete DXD, the latter being downloadable packages of 40-70GB each! Overall, we’d love to continue along this path, offering even higher quality, more immersive recordings of exceptional music.
Which brings us to my final point. We’ve released a lot of fantastically surprising music in the past year, because it’s one of our core values that music should always surprise, exhilarate, inspire us. You’ll not find many “mainstream” kinds of artists or repertoire on the label, and if we do, you bet there’s something in it which goes totally against the grain, so to speak. We would really love to continue with this, and we have a number of talented artists with whom we’re setting up projects full of music you might have never heard of, but will inspire and surprise you. 2023 will be a year of inspiration, most of all.
In numbers
In 2022 alone, we’ve released 13 albums by 29 fantastic artists and 36 composers, spanning from early music to contemporary, from world music to jazz, as well as anything in between. We’ve also recorded, edited, mixed, and mastered a staggering 432 tracks! These tracks and albums have together allotted 104 reviews (that we know of; we often don’t hear from reviewers when reviews are published), three awards, and great feedback from listeners too. Sales-wise, it’s still hard to give more than a rough estimate as statements usually come in around springtime, but from what we can gather, here’s a little overview.
Split up over the categories CDs/SACDs, Hi-res Downloads, Spatial Audio Downloads, Vinyl and Merch, the majority of sales now come from Hi-res Downloads. To be more precise, they accounted for about 53% of all sales and 48% of all revenue. As expected, this is followed by CDs/SACDs, accounting for 42% of sales and 43% of revenue. Third place is occupied by our newcomer Spatial Audio Downloads, with a little over 4% in sales and 6% in revenue. Last up are vinyl and merch, the latter being a fairly new category which we just released two months ago.
Some other fun numbers include having gone through about 43kg worth of coffee beans to produce around 1141 minutes of music. In other terms, each minute of music was the result of 37,7 grams of coffee (about two double-espressos). In the process, we created almost 35TB worth of data. If we had recorded unto 3.5″ floppy discs rather than blazing-fast NVMe SSDs, the stack of 24,3 million floppy discs would be a little over 80km tall (almost 50 miles for you non-metric folk). Thank heavens for server clusters and SSDs, am I right? But in all seriousness, let’s continue to 2023 and check out what we’ll be up to.
2023 and onwards
So how do we go from here? Well, for starters, I’m excited to announce that I’ll be taking back my position as label manager, after having had some health issues over the last year or so. And I’d love to get working on it to keep running TRPTK in the same spirit we started it all, an indie label with an insatiable lust for great new music you’ve never heard of, by talented artists from all around the world, captured in the best quality imaginable. And boy oh boy do we have some great releases lined up for you in the next year: we’re continuing Nicolas van Poucke’s Schumann Collection, we’re releasing a beautiful new album with compositions by Marion von Tilzer, a new live album by baroque ensemble Postscript, and even some tango coming up, amongst many, many others. We also have some interesting new artists who’ve just signed TRPTK and are just dying to release some fantastic stuff too.
But how will the music industry in 2023 and onwards look like? We’re expecting that streaming and digital downloads will keep climbing in sales, and physical media will keep diminishing little by little. Does that mean there might be a time coming where we won’t produce any physical music? I don’t think so, but the way in which the music industry is shifting away from good old CD and vinyl makes us wonder what other changes we might see in the upcoming year. Which beautifully segues me into my next point.
We’d love to hear from you.
So here’s where you come in. We’d love to hear from you where you see your own listening habits, your curiosity in musical genres and styles, your wishes and dreams, where all of those will go in 2023 and onwards. How do you see the music industry evolving? Has the way you’ve been listening to music, or the music you listened to, changed in any way since 2022 and before? We want to hear from you, and most of all, I personally want to invite each and everyone of you to join the discussion, to become part of a new frontier in the music world. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll bring out some more information, but the gist of it is this: we want to organise a think-tank or discussion group, where we’d like to listen to your personal stories, thoughts and ideas.
If you or someone you know have something to share, ideas, stories, whatever else, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter or check out the blog. We’ll soon announce some open evenings at the studio where, whilst drinking a nice espresso or something else, we can discuss all those ideas. To hopefully make the music industry a better place for everyone. And this doesn’t just relate to TRPTK either, if you work at another label or if you’re an independent artist, feel free to join also. Only if we work together, we’re able to change the music scene for the better.
For now, I wish all of you a beautiful first of January. May each and every one of your dreams come true.
Love,
Brendon Heinst