Students in Woodside’s Music Production Club are launching a student music label, enabling students to produce and release music in a more official capacity.
Since January, a team of Woodside students including senior Ayla Defouw and sophomore Camille Sonnenburg have been working with music production teacher Raphael Kauffmann to launch student music label 199 Records, an homage to Woodside’s street address.
“Basically, [the label] is under the school,” Sonnenburg said. “Kids at Woodside can record music together and produce it and have a way to release it.”
Students already have the freedom to produce their own music and potentially put it on streaming platforms, by going through one of Spotify’s approved providers. 199 Records will streamline the process, allowing students to navigate the production and distribution process with greater ease.
“It makes it easier because kids don’t have to deal with it themselves,” Sonnenburg said. “[We] just put it through a distribution and then it gets sent out to all streaming [platforms].”
According to Kauffmann, this will make the music production process feel more professional and more exciting.
“I do think that the opportunity to publish to international streaming platforms really makes it more real to kids, and kind of more exciting,” Kauffmann said.
The label’s first song, “Sound of a Hurricane,” by Ayla Defouw, is already released, and the label already has plans for what to do next.
“I like to call what we did a proof of concept—we can do it, we have done it,” Kaufmann said. “We now have the infrastructure to do it. We need to build our capability for marketing and merchandising, and everything that a label would do to support artists. [We also need] to encourage more students to do it.”
That theme of encouraging more students to get involved can be seen in the collaborative aspects of the label’s development.
“It’s offered a really cool opportunity to collaborate [with] the different classes that we have,” Kauffmann said. “The video production class made a music video for us. We are having digital art kids make a logo. It is really an opportunity to bring the different artists together to work on something bigger than what we [can] do individually.”
While Kauffmann does plan to integrate the label into his audio production classes, anybody that is interested can get involved.
“Just come to the club on Thursdays at lunch and talk to us about it,” Sonnenburg said.
According to Kauffmann, this label will be just one of many ways that Woodside students showcase their talents. For example, Woodside student artists involved in the label including seniors Marisa Mendez and Kadian Smith will be playing at the PV Palooza music festival in Portola Valley tomorrow, June 1. However, according to Kauffmann, the label will allow students to expose their music to more people.
“It makes it real for kids to get their music out there and feel like they are playing [music] in that tier of professionalism,” Kauffmann said. “It’s pretty cool.”
