Summary

New Music Distribution Services (or NMDS) was a non-profit

Non-profit organization

Nonprofit organization is neither a legal nor technical definition but generally refers to an organization that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals, rather than distributing them as profit or dividends...

 record distributor based in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. It was founded in 1972 by Carla Bley

Carla Bley

Carla Bley, née Borg, is an American jazz composer, pianist, organist and band leader. An important figure in the Free Jazz movement of the 1960s, she is perhaps best known for her jazz opera Escalator Over The Hill , as well as a book of compositions that have been performed by many other...

 and Michael Mantler

Michael Mantler

Michael Mantler is a composer and trumpeter in new jazz and contemporary music.-Career: United States:Mantler was born in Vienna, Austria...

 as a means of distributing recordings of experimental contemporary music. It was a program of the Jazz Composers' Orchestra Association (JCOA). The NMDS began by distributing recordings released by many different independent labels and artists, including Nodlew (Weldon Irvine

Weldon Irvine

Weldon Jonathan Irvine, Jr. , also known Master Wel, was an American composer, playwright, poet, pianist and organist.-Biography:...

's label), Jahari (Richard Dunbar

Richard Dunbar

Richard Dunbar was a player of the French horn, playing in the free jazz scene. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, on May 29, 1944. He began studying the French horn in high school and never put it down...

's label), Gibex (Michael William Gilbert

Michael William Gilbert

Michael William Gilbert is an American music composer working in the genres of electronic music and world music.-Biography:Michael William Gilbert was raised in Connecticut and Brussels, where he first heard the music of Africa and East Asia, as well as the electronic music of Edgard Varèse and...

's label), Philip Glass

Philip Glass

Philip Glass is an American composer. He is considered to be one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century and is widely acknowledged as a composer who has brought art music to the public .His music is often described as minimalist, along with...

's Chatham Square label, and many others. Several international labels such as Incus

Incus Records

Incus Records is an artist-owned record label, founded by Derek Bailey, Tony Oxley, Evan Parker and Michael Walters, specialising in the dissemination of free-improvised music. The first release on the label was The Topography of the Lungs, recorded by Bailey, Parker and Han Bennink in 1970...

 and ECM were also included in their catalogs.

In 1984, the NMDS was awarded a $10,000 grant by the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation.

Due the long illness of a manager, and the resultant failure to pay New York state taxes, the NMDS suspended operations in the 1990.