About Us
NMC Recordings is a unique, award-winning arts charity and record label, dedicated to the promotion of exceptional contemporary classical music from Britain and Ireland. The vital role that we play in the new music sector means that without NMC, hundreds of important works would not be recorded and heard by audiences across the world.
NMC supports composers at every stage of their career: from the emerging names taking part in our talent-development partnerships, to the rising-stars releasing their first portrait album in our Debut Discs series, and through to music by established voices that needs to be heard and is not available elsewhere.
The NMC team work closely with composers to produce high-quality recordings of their music, providing guidance through every stage of the process. All our recordings benefit from specialist international distribution and significant in-house expertise in marketing, fundraising, the recording industry and the wider sector. We are a small organisation with world-wide reach, and the impact of an NMC album on a composer’s career is significant. NMC has become a trusted brand, relied on by critics, producers and commissioners around the world who want to have their finger on the pulse of cutting-edge British and Irish music.
‘Having my music recorded by a wide range of exceptional musicians and released by NMC has been a significant milestone in my development as a composer. First and foremost, it is now much easier than before for people to listen to my music. This has greatly increased the number of people who now know about my work and has already led to new works being commissioned as well as more performances of my existing works by people who did not know about my music prior to the album’s release,’ Edmund Finnis, NMC Debut Disc composer
Increasing diversity in the music industry is at the core of NMC’s work. We are focused on collaborating with, and creating opportunities for, communities that are traditionally under-represented in classical music, ensuring that these exceptional creative voices are heard. Our release schedule since 2019 has been at least 50% gender split (in 2022 75% of our releases featured composers who identify as women) and we achieved our commitments doubling the number of global majority composers in our catalogue from 19 to 38. From 2024 we are formulating a new EDI Action Plan, aiming to meet more progressive targets.
NMC is a National Portfolio Organisation of Arts Council England, and as a registered charity we rely on donations from individuals, trusts, and foundations to fulfil our work. Our releases do not have the aim of creating a profit and any income generated from sales is used to further promote contemporary classical music.
The composer Colin Matthews founded NMC 35 years ago to remedy the almost non-existent representation of living British composers in the recording catalogues of major labels at the time. NMC’s invaluable work celebrating and supporting the rich breadth of compositional talent from across Britain and Ireland means that our constantly-evolving catalogue has grown to now hold over 300 albums, and our unique non-deletion policy ensures that each of these recordings will remain permanently accessible. The NMC catalogue is a diverse living archive of ground-breaking classical music, that now spans multiple generations of composers.