About Trade Root Music Group

Trade Root Music Group, LLC is a full-service recording label based in Takoma Park, MD, inside the Washington DC beltway. In addition, TRMG is a distribution and consulting company that specializes in helping roots-based musicians and non-profit arts organizations to promote and distribute their music products and content. We have over 25 combined years of experience in music sales & marketing, radio & music publicity, non-profit music & arts organization management, performance, and ethnomusicology.

TRMG includes two of our own imprints, Trade Root Music (roots music from around the world) and Free Dirt Records (roots music from the USA). In addition to TRMG's two label imprints, the group includes recordings and labels from like-minded, socially/politically progressive, and non-profit organizations. Through partnerships with us such organizations help to make their own recordings and archives available to a larger audience, while generating much needed reveune to keep their mission moving forward.

Trade Root Music Group's mission is to expand the visibility of traditional and roots-based music whether collected, curated, created or performed, and always put the integrity of the art form ahead of profit.

About Us:

Erica Haskell is a Ph.D. candidate at Brown University in ethnomusicology, and currently a Brown University/Wheaton College Teaching Fellow for 2008-2009. Her dissertation explores the politics of music, applied ethnomusicology, and the involvement of international humanitarian organizations in cultural events and projects in Bosnia-Herzegovina. She has worked at the Library of Congress American Folklife Center and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. She is the co-editor of Shared Musics and Minority Identities - International Council for Traditional Music - Music and Minorities 2004 Volume published by the Institute for Ethnology and Folklore Research, with Naila Ceribasic. In addition, she founded a music-recording project in three Hungarian refugee camps. This project was the subject of articles about refugee music in the Utne Reader and ai magazine (Art International). She is also co-producer of the critically acclaimed American folk music album Starlight on the Rails by U. Utah Phillips released on AK Press and Daemon Records.

John Smith brings nearly 15 years of music industry experience to Trade Root Music Group. He began his career co-managing and buying for an independent music store in Seattle. At the same time, he worked as an ASR for KOCH International, a nightclub DJ, and a radio producer at KAOS, the community radio station of The Evergreen State College, where his radio program The Stylus Speaks was voted outstanding radio program in 1996. Smith also ran his own promotions company, whose clients included Capitol Records and Almo Records. His well-rounded experience brought him to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in May of 1999, the record label of the Smithsonian Institution. There he acted as Sales & Marketing Specialist, bringing his expertise in radio promotions, retail marketing, and sales to the label. In his free time during his tenure at Smithsonian Folkways, he also joined the staff of KBCS community radio in Bellevue, WA as music director, and co-produced the critically acclaimed American folk music album Starlight on the Rails by U. Utah Phillips released on AK Press and Daemon Records. You can listen to some of his radio on-air voice work here.