Erin Bond launches a new initiative to help bring more New Brunswick music to national audiences.
Matt Carter
If you’re at all familiar with New Brunswick music culture and its many supporters, there’s a good chance you’ve heard the name Erin Bond. She’s a tireless volunteer, she can often be found working the door at music festivals or sharing her music industry expertise with up and coming musicians. She is also the station manager at Fredericton’s CHSR FM and in 2018 she launched her own record label, TwoFifteen Records.
This week Bond announced plans for a new project aimed at bringing more New Brunswick music to a national audience. The initiative will involve the production of music samplers featuring New Brunswick artists, curated and manufactured for distribution to 50 campus/community and independent radio stations across the country.
“This isn’t a new idea,” said Bond. “Larger cities like London and Hamilton have done something similar in the past. So I reached out to Music NB to see if a project like this would be eligible for Music Industry Development (MID) funding.”
Bond has been working in CHSR’s Music Department for nearly a decade and has experience distributing CD’s for dozens of artists, both locally and outside of the province.
“I’m always trying to think of ways I can support the music scene more, and I think by creating a compilation CD we can at least get a few more ears on our province and the incredible artistry we have here.”
Bond is confident that by including diverse artists and genres within each release, these compilations will appeal to various radio programmers within the campus/community network. The project could also potentially give exposure to local artists who tend to release single tracks which typically are not accepted by music departments in the campus/community radio sector.
Submissions for the yet-to-be-titled compilation will be accepted from any New Brunswick band or artist with the hope of being able to include a mix of Francophone, Anglophone, Indigenous and LGBTQ+ artists from throughout the province. Priority will be given to tracks of higher sound quality and each compilation will include an estimated 12 songs, depending on the song length.
Bond hopes to have enough interest from the province to continue to produce these compilations in the future.The submission form, requirements, and details can be found here.
Submissions close March 6, 2020 and artists will be notified March 9, 2020.
