Stone Throw Records

Leading indie hip-hop label Stone Throw Records isn’t new or anything, but I wanted to mention it because of something that I noticed on their website. Look below the giant ’10’ logo (congrats on the 10 year anniversary, guys!) on their page and you will see a link for ‘ Digital Downloads‘. There you will find what is clearly the battlefield of the next generation in music distribution. If you are a user of either iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster, or Yahoo Music, then you can download or listen to almost every Stones Throw release. As a music lover, the fact that indie labels can use these new channels to efficiently deliver music can only be a good thing. Unfortunately, I’m guessing that this is probably bad news for the big boys. To compare, I paid a visit to Def Jam’s website and found that they are still in the stone age with streaming audio via Windows Media Player and Real Player. There’s a lot up for grabs and I’m happy to see labels like Stones Throw being aggressive and on the cutting-edge of things in their industry.