“People don’t talk about music in terms of quality anymore,” exclaims Chris Murphy, former manager of INXS and founder of top Australian world music record label Petrol. “Everyone talks about it in terms of quantity! Your MP3 player holds 10,000 tracks. There are 700,000 songs for sale online. What do you do: spend the rest of your life looking for tunes to download?”

Petrol’s new series The Greatest Songs Ever—distributed by Time-Life Music—takes out some of the guesswork and labor of exploring uncharted waters. September sees the release of four CDs in the series: India, France, Argentina, and Ireland. This follows on the heels of successful series releases Spain, Brazil, Mexico, and Cuba; the latter peaked at #10 on the Billboard World Music Chart. Each CD is the product of someone scouring the planet for the highest quality music to represent each country.

The recordings strike a delicate balance between offering classic songs and the work of current artists, appealing to both newcomers and aficionados of a particular country’s music. The CDs are packaged to draw you in with something everyone recognizes: fruit! The simple and accessible design gives the series a consistent look and playfully hints to music fans that they do not need a degree in ethnomusicology to appreciate the tracks. The excitement of exploration is further emphasized with the country-specific recipes that are included in the liner notes of each CD.

Murphy—who traveled with INXS to Jamaica, Spain, Argentina, Ireland, Brazil, and dozens of other countries—founded Petrol Records in 2002. But, surprisingly, it wasn’t simply his global travels that drew him to launching a series of music from around the world. He was interested in how new forms of music caught on and in his research came across the possibilities of digital radio, which had the potential to revolutionize radio. “The bandwidth of digital allowed for a station to play flamenco for as few as 300 people,” says Murphy. “Of course, this was before Internet broadcast started to take off.” Digital radio faced too much opposition from the broadcasting infrastructure, but Murphy knew that new types of broadcasting were emerging.

“Every time the delivery system changes, so does the music,” proclaims Murphy. “When we switched from AM radio, we went from three minute pop songs to FM, which opened the door to play eight minute tracks. It was the same in the late ’70s with MTV. Another platform brought new music.”

Murphy established Australia’s first digital music broadcasting company to deliver niche genres to audiences with such stations as Radio Havana, Radio Groove, and Radio Reggae. As an earlier adopter of Internet broadcast and the Microsoft Media Player, Murphy found a high demand around the world for what had been perceived as niche genres. “We found that, like me, people had a mind to hear music new to them,” says Murphy. “They just needed to be exposed to it in an accessible way.”

From there, they began compiling CDs to meet the demand of their listeners and soon-after launched Petrol Records, which in three years have sky-rocketed to one of Australia’s most successful indie labels.

“If spending hours and hours looking for music is your hobby great, but otherwise… we have done it for you,” says Murphy “All you have to do is drop a nickel in and you get what normally takes days and weeks to find.”

Additional Info
Freshly Handpicked Music of India, France, Argentina, Ireland, ...
The Origins of Petrol Music and The Greatest Songs Ever

Top of Press Release