‘Supporting today’s music’ is the motto of new Limerick-based website, Red Track Music, and according to co-founder, Robert Tubridy, emerging and Irish acts deserve such a platform.

Robert, who is originally from the Old Cork Road, set up and runs the revamped Red Track—which began as a simple blog last November—with fellow music fans Rob McNamara and Kevin Coughlan.

Robert—who is still studying E-Business at Tipperary Institute of Technology—started by founding the website ‘leaked albums.com’ with Rob, which was going for a year-and-a-half before another co-founder went abroad.

“The idea was to review albums that ended up on the Internet before their official release because that was happening a lot more. We’d try to review them before anyone else and it was fairly successful. We wanted to continue but decided to change the type of site. We realised that there was a market and a niche for a site that gave space to up and coming bands and decided it would be easier to focus on that,” he explained.

“We started Red Track Music last November and the original format was like a blog and that was fine at the time but we needed a content management system. The new site pulls away from the blog layout and offers reading material like reviews and interviews and multimedia content like video interviews. That’s what people want.”

“We’ve improved it a lot. It has videos, an improved search engine and the archives are much more accessible. All the sections—like gig and album reviews—have better flow and look better. We hope to add facilities for streaming and music downloads eventually as well as make other adjustments to the sections.”

Robert also hopes that the Red Track site will have a dedicated student section.

“That’s an idea that we’ve had for ages. Students don’t always know what discounts they could be getting so we’re hoping to go to the student unions and set up a page with coupons and other information that would be printer friendly,” he said.

“We have contributors from Limerick, Dublin, Cork and Galway and a lot of them are students as well. It’s an outlet for young journalists and photographers to showcase their work and add bits to their CV and portfolio. In the future, we’d also love to offer up and coming bands a package where the site would host their music and we’d make a music video. It would be a way for bands to cut out the middleman because it is hard starting out.”

Teamwork is also an essential part of the site’s popularity and quality content.

“Rob is the editor; he knows what’s going up and who’s doing what. The contributors go to him with ideas for gig reviews or interviews and he organises tickets, photos and anything else needed. Kevin handles advertising and marketing and I do a bit of everything. I’ve been working on the re-design and I answer emails and manage things.