About Altavoz

Our Story

A group of indie music lovers from Raleigh, N.C. launched Altavoz in 1994. The first catalog featured popular independent bands, including Squirrel Nut Zippers, Bad Brains and Sound Garden. In late 1999, Altavoz launched its own prototype online broadcasting station in a co-marketing agreement with Microsoft and Ibeam. By the time of the dot com crash, the Altavoz broadband streaming station had 78 thousand people streaming music each day, and Altavoz.com enjoyed 1.2 million hits a day.

Today, Altavoz is refocused and re-energized with a new team and expanded strategy. We’re owned and operated by the husband and wife team of Jess Sarmiento and Nelson Jacobsen. We don’t answer to a major corporation, we only answer to our suppliers. We’re a passionate bunch; we take risks and thrive on creativity. The entire Altavoz staff spends each day focusing on what we do best: leveraging decades of expertise and relationships to ensure placement AND purchase of your product in any and all retail environments.

Our Mission: Indie with a Purpose

With more than fifty percent of music sales coming from physical retail, no band or artist can be fully successful without a comprehensive retail strategy. Our attention to physical sales, combined with digital, will put you in front of fans in all the places they are seeking your product. Our mission is to ensure suppliers have access to all distribution channels with the right marketing to retailers, leaving them the time and resources to promote their music, video or other entertainment content.

How do we do it? At Altavoz, we bring the best in music, video and other entertainment product to retailers and other channel partners, with a twist. Altavoz boasts a proprietary “clicks to bricks” solution that allows us to take clicks and use them to pinpoint the bricks—geocentric data that tells us which albums or artists will sell the best, down to the zip code.

In the process, we do good. Our social change arm—Help Earth Foundation—directs our charitable giving. We connect artists and entertainment content producers with social causes, so when you do business with us, you are supporting good works in local communities and around the world. We believe that collectively little things can make a big difference. And most of all, we believe that people with passion can help change the world.

We seek relationships with independent labels serious about long-term artist development. For more information, email us at labels@altavoz.com or answer a few questions and we’ll get back to you.

Memberships

Memberships Our membership in the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM), International Association of Entertainment Buyers (IAEB), National Arts Recording and Science Academy* (Grammy), and the Country Music Association* (CMA) ensures that our suppliers will be presented to buyers, clubs, promoters, tours and retailers and will be considered for industry awards and promotion opportunities. *voting member