Record-Play unveils global music discovery map

The global music site aims to unearth underground talent and showcase the music scenes and communities that are flourishing on every continent.

The platform, which was first launched as a Tumblr blog in 2016, now includes interviews, guest remixes, radio shows and regular live showcases and music including Turkish psychedelia, Vietnamese rap, Ugandan footwork, Ecuadorian electronica and Indonesian gabber, among others.

The service is also used as a platform to share tracks discovered while researching worldwide music scenes for clients such as adidas, Google and British Airways or finding upcoming artists in a specific country to appear in a film or ad campaign.

"The purpose of MusicMap has always been to celebrate artists making interesting music who might struggle to find an audience beyond, or even within, their national borders," editor Kier Wiater Carnihan. "Challenging ourselves to explore every single country while being unable to leave our actual houses meant discovering music we would never have heard otherwise, making this a journey of discovery for ourselves as much as our readers."

MusicMap is the brainchild of a number of journalists, DJs and music curators associated with Record-Play, which offers music supervision, audio branding and strategic guidance to fashion labels, video game producers and tech companies.

The company says it began planning to feature every country around the world a few months ago, which led to a series of articles and a Spotify playlist that goes in alphabetical order – from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

The website has also been offering a number of music documentary recommendations about how independent record labels around the world are coping with the COVID-19 outbreak.

More information on MusicMap can be found here.