New Releases — Hip-Hop, R&B, and Electronic
Get Known Radio's new-releases section is a daily rolling index of fresh records the station considers worth listening to — pulled from a few sources, filtered by a person, and presented with 30-second audio previews and links to every streaming service the record is on. We do not auto-publish every new release we see. We listen first, and we publish what we would listen to ourselves.
What this page is
The new-releases section is one of the four rotating editorial surfaces on getknownradio.com, alongside the news archive, the editorial column, and the live stream. It is built around a single goal: if you only have ten minutes a day to find a new record, this is the page that earns those ten minutes. To do that we keep it tight, sorted by release date, with previews you can play in-page.
The interactive version of the section — with genre filters, the in-page audio preview player, and direct links to Apple Music, Spotify, Bandcamp, and SoundCloud where they exist — lives on the front page. This static page exists so that the section, its sources, and our editorial methodology are readable and indexable without running JavaScript.
How releases get surfaced
The desk uses two structured feeds to build the candidate list, then a human filter to decide what runs:
- MusicBrainz recent releases. The open music-metadata database publishes a continuously-updated feed of just-released albums and EPs with verified rights data. We pull the hip-hop, R&B, and electronic subsets every twenty-four hours.
- Apple Music's recent and chart endpoints. Apple's catalog feed includes a daily refresh of new-release activity in the genres we cover. We pull the U.S. catalog plus a handful of regional charts (UK, Canada, France) to catch international records that have not crossed over yet.
The combined daily candidate list is usually in the low hundreds. We do not publish all of them. The editor reviews the list, removes the records that are not a fit, and publishes the rest with our own commentary.
Why we filter
Streaming services have an obvious volume problem: new music is released constantly, and almost none of it gets meaningfully surfaced to people who do not already follow the artist. A page that just dumps every new hip-hop release into a feed is not useful — it is the same noise problem in a different shape.
Our filter is editorial, not commercial. We keep records that an attentive listener would find worth hearing in full, drop the ones that exist primarily as catalog filler, and almost always favor independent and unsigned releases over major-label products from artists who already have a marketing budget. We will publish a major-label record if we think it is a good record, but the default tilt is toward smaller artists.
What the previews are
Every release on the page where we can find one includes a 30-second audio preview, served through Apple Music's public iTunes preview API. These are the same official preview clips you would hear on apple.com or the Apple Music app. They are not redistributed audio, they are not full songs, and they are governed by Apple's standard preview terms. Where Apple does not publish a preview — most commonly with Bandcamp-only or SoundCloud-only independent releases — we link directly to the artist's hosted page instead.
Pressing the preview play button does not start the live radio stream; the two players are independent. We picked Apple's preview API specifically because it works on every modern browser without requiring an installed app or a Spotify login.
What we link to
Every release card has links to every streaming service where the release exists, in this order: Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, YouTube Music, Tidal, Amazon Music. Where a link is missing it means the release was not on that service when we last checked. We re-check the streaming-service availability for every release in our top thirty whenever the list refreshes, so a record that goes live on Spotify three days after release will pick up the link automatically.
We never hide or break a link to push a particular service. The order above is alphabetical-ish; it is not commercial.
How long records stay on the page
The default window is thirty days from the release date. After that, the record falls off the new-releases page but remains in the station's full catalog, and the more interesting records often resurface in the editorial column when they have something to say a month or two later.
We make exceptions for late-discovered releases — records that came out two months ago but only crossed our desk this week. Those get added with a small "from the catalog" tag so it is clear they are not a fresh-this-week release.
For artists and labels
If your record is in MusicBrainz or Apple Music's catalog, it is already in the candidate pool — the desk will see it. If you want to be sure the editor takes a closer look, the path is the submission form. Submissions to the form are reviewed for the rotation (the actual station audio), and any record we like enough to put on rotation almost always gets a corresponding new-releases entry.
We do not run pay-for-placement on the new-releases page. There is no Boosted Release slot. The order is editorial.
For listeners
The fastest way to use the section is to open the front page, click the New Releases tab, set the genre filter to whatever you are in the mood for, and start clicking previews. Most people find one or two records per session that go on their rotation; that is the design goal.
Suggestions, corrections, or releases we missed: [email protected].