#middleeyt

Coachella 2018 is soon approaching and I am sure you are getting your playlist ready with that Beyonce, The Weekend, and Cardi B, but that is quite honestly just the tip of the iceberg with the amount of crazy good artistry at this years festival. So get your Spotify playlist ready and check out my picks for this years must see underdogs. (Checkout my very own collaborative Spotify Coachella playlist down below and feel free to add your favorite picks!)

Friday April 13th

Bleachers- Similar Artist:  Walk the Moon 

Bleachers is the official stage name of amazing songwriter and record producer Jack Antonoff, who is also part of the well known band Fun. Antonoff has written massive hits for people like Sia, Taylor Swift and Lorde.  Bleachers' music is heavily influenced by the late '80s, early '90s.

Belly- Similar Artist: French Montana

Ahmad Balshe, better known by his stage name Belly,is a Palestinian-Canadian rapper, singer, songwriter, and record producer. Belly’s music is both influenced by the political disparity between the Israeli- Palestinian conflict and the violence and poverty his own family endured.

PVRIS- Similar Artist: Florence and the Machine

PVRIS is an American rock band formed by members Lynn Gunn, Alex Babinski, and Brian MacDonald. As previously described by AllMusic the bands music "blends dreamy electronica with dark, beat-heavy rock."

LÉON- Similar Artist: Ryn Weaver

Lotta Lindgren, better known as LÉON, is Swedish singer whose musical inspirations range from Amy Winehouse, to Beyonce and Stevie Wonder.

Whethan- Similar Artist: San Holo

American DJ and music producer Whethan is most known for his collaboration with Flux Pavilion and MAX for their song Savage. Whethan has been touring for the past year with the popular duo The Chainsmokers.

Elohim- Similar Artist: Louis The Child

Most well known for their original version of Sleepy Eyes, Elohim is an LA-based synth-pop artist with irresistible dance worthy tracks.

The Blaze- Similar Artist: Ta-Ku

The French duo is well known for their powerful short films, their music, a blend of house and a soulful R&B reminisce.

MHD- Afro-trap

Mohamed Sylla, better known by his by his stage name MHD is a French rapper whose music is the precursor of "Afro Trap", a mixture of African music and Trap music.

Saturday April 14th

Tash Sultana- Similar Artist: James Bay

Australian singer-songwriter Tash Sultana, has been booked on a sold-out tour since the start of 2017. Her social media following has gained her world wide fame as a self-taught beatboxing, vocalist, guitar tapping, loopologist.

BROCKHAMPTON- Similar Artist: Amine

BROCKHAMPTON is self-proclaimed “online’s first boy band” after coming together through the online forum "KanyeToThe". Brockhampton is an entirely independent creative agency and record label, and a thriving musical group with die-hard fans across the country.

Alina Baraz- Similar Artist: Khalid

Most known for her collaboration with Khalid on the massive hit Electric, Alina lies between mellow R&B and down-tempo electronica.

WizKid- Similar Artist: J Balvin

Already famous in his hometown of Nigeria, Wizkid brings a blend of Afropop, reggae and dancehall to the Coachella scene.

Jorja Smith- Similar Artist: dvsn

At only 20 Jorja Smith has already independently released numerous records with her jazz tinted vibe and R&B influence. Smith’s acclaimed influences range from Rihanna, to Alicia Keys.

Flatbush Zombies- Similar Artist: Joey Bada$$

Brooklyn trio, capture the best of the 90’s rap scene with dense lyrics and melodic beats bringing a refreshing tune to the Coachella rap pool.

Ekali- Similar Artist: RL Grime

Ekali’s rapid rise to fame comes after being recognized with writing credits for Drake's If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. An advocate of young talent, Ekali brings a blend of instrumental and R&B infused trap music.

Party Favor- Similar Artist: TroyBoi

Much like his name alludes, Party Favor brings a dance party full of chart-topping tunes and rhythmic drops.

Sigrid- Similar Artist: Phoebe Ryan

Voted as one of BBC’s Sound of 2018, Sigrid is a Norwegian pop singer/ writer whose rich and powerful voice has landed her debut single Don’t Kill My Vibe on the U.S. charts.

Chloe x Halle- Similar Artist: Solange

Known to many as Beyonce’s prodigies, Chloe X Halle is a contemporary R&B duo whose rise to fame came through a rendition of Pretty Hurts by queen bee herself. Signed to her record label Parkwood Entertainment, the girls are not only great singers but great actresses starting in Freeform’s Grown-ish.

Hundred Waters- Similar Artist: HAIM

If you’re in the mood for a simp session, Hundred Waters is the act for you. Hundred Waters album “Communicating” is the bands attempt to ask societies most interpersonal questions through lyrical nuance and a crap ton of crying.

Sunday April 15th

Russ- Similar Artist: Bryson Tiller

Most known for his song Losing, Russ Vitale is a rapper, singer, songwriter from Atlanta whose work is inspired by Eminem and 50 Cent.

Jessie Ware- Similar Artist: AlunaGeorge

England native Jessie Ware’s debut album has peaked on UK Albums Chart at number 5 back when it was released in 2012. Since then, Ware has taken her powerful voice all over the world and collaborated with artist such as Ryan Tedder from Onerepublic and Cashmere Cat.

Kamaiyah- Similar Artist: Iamsu!

Oakland native, Kamaiyah’s sound is heavily influenced by 90’s rap making her debut much like the queen herself Missy Elliott, dropping some mad verses over a Young Thug beat.

DeJ Loaf- Similar Artist: Ty Dolla $ign

Born Deja Trimble, Dej Loaf’s rise to fame can be attributed to Drake’s Instagram shoutout over her first mix-tape Try Me. Now signed to Columbia Records, Dej has gained some massive popularity in the Hip-Hop scene.

LP- Similar Artist: Tegan and Sara

Laura Pergolizzi, better known as LP, is an LA-based singer/songwriter whose edgy look and epic voice has gained her a huge fan base among the Indie-pop scene.

Jacob Banks- Similar Artist: Jack Garratt

At the age of 20, Jacob Banks began his journey singing at small open mics, by 2014 he began touring with people like Alicia Keys and Sam Smith. His soulful voice makes him a heavy contender at this years festival.  

MAGIC GIANT- Similar Artist: Magic!

No artist screams #coachellavibes more than MAGIC GIANT. The LA-based band has been recognized as one of Rolling Stones “10 Artists You Need to Know”.

It's been close to two months since the death of George Floyd. We’ve lived through two months of one of the largest movements in U.S. history. However, these events have been lived, and protested against over and over again for hundreds of years. Black folks in this country have endured centuries of fear and pain refuting against a government that has disregarded their existence and importance. In light of the Black Lives Matter movement, many injustices have surfaced to the exchange of mass media, including the policies, structures, and cultural impacts nested in the racism that follows the music industry. I am by all means not an expert or nearly as educated as I wish to be on the matter, but I wanted to share what I’ve learned so far about the inequality that exists in an industry we claim to be so diverse. 

Music Education: 

As with many things, the racial imbalance in the music industry starts in school. Higher education lacks a diversified thinking and representation for art, literature and of course music. Current educational programs teach Western music as being defined mainly by European traces. Music culture should be taught as being part of a global system as opposed to just isolating it to the European musicians and composers that people get in most classes. Not many institutions prioritize works by people of color in their curriculum, and as a result students are being taught an inaccurate depiction for how the history of genres, music styles, and lyricism came to be. Music programs across the country are discrediting the massive cultural impact that Black artists and composers have had in defining music over the years.

Major Labels: 

Besides gender inequality being one of the most noticeable issues in the music business, for years the industry has also had a very poor record of hiring minorities for top positions. “The Power 100” is an annual list created by Billboard, which hosts the names of the most influential people in the American music industry. It is incredibly evident to see the disproportion of Black executives on that list, and just how much more obvious can it be, that when there is a lack of Black leadership, the industry begins to hurt. How can labels expect to support and advocate for diverse artistry if there are no people in power who have lived through and know of the nuances and storylines that minorities carry? Since the start of the BLM movement record and label companies have been getting away with donating money without pledging to make systemic changes. 

Projected in the media, award shows continue to fail in crediting and honoring Black artists in annual celebrations that are intended to commemorate the contributions of culture to the art of music. Year after year, Black artists are nominated mainly under R&B and Hip-Hop categories, as so many other artists continue to borrow artistic styles from those so called “urban” artists and are labeled/nominated under “pop” categories. The term “urban” has segregated Black artists because of the color of their skin, and while much of the industry has already parted ways with the term, many charts and award programs still use categories like  “Latin Pop” and “Urban Album”. As the industry goes on to define music genres, it is obviously still also defining who can partake in them (remember “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X?). 

The Black Artist: 

The music business is booming, but rarely do artists get to see much of that return. “Royalties” is the way that music rights-holders get paid through the sale of their creations when distributed, performed or embedded in other media/monetized. As of today those rights-holders can earn anywhere between between $0.006 to $0.0084 per song listen on a streaming service. All of this is to say that through streaming, artists are not making living. Most artists make the majority of their income through merch sales and touring. The benefit of being under A&R, publishing, and label management is the budgets that can be set out to help artists create and market their work. Minority artists are most often given disproportionately lower budgets to work with than many of their white counterparts. When under a label, artists are also paid in ”advances” for a body of work, and it is a sad common that like the budgets that are set out, many Black artists are underpaid in comparison to their white counterparts under the same label. We can’t deny the fact that the respect and support for an artist is being clearly defined by the color of their skin. 

As a digital marketer, it’s important that I get the maximum ROI from every marketing campaign that we run. But with so many different avenues available, and with some of these avenues becoming overly saturated with brands pushing their agendas, it’s difficult to identify the right channel to use.

 Research shows that SMS (Short Message Service) open rates are as high as 98%, compared to just 20% on email, which I like to think as one of the most widely used marketing channels. So it is without a doubt that labels, PR, and artists are taking note of the effectiveness that a text message could have in helping bring awareness to music, merch, and concerts. 

You may have recently noticed your favorite artists sharing what seems to be their phone number on social media, asking you to text them. Hate to break it to ya, but that isn’t their actual phone number. Artists are using SMS platforms that allow them to use a phone number to communicate individually or at scale. As artists and celebs become more and more digitally savvy, they are beginning to realize that SMS communication is becoming the best way to make their businesses platform agnostic. 

With social media platforms, you are letting an algorithm dictate the reach and level to which your communication circulates, making it difficult to ensure that your messages reach your intended audience. SMS has allowed artists to control where their communication ends, because put it simply texting as direct of a communications channel as direct can be (except for calling, but we in 2020... no one does that). Texting is a private medium, that is making fans feel exclusive and kinda cool...because who doesn’t want to say that they have a celebrities number in their contacts. 

SMS has become one of the most meaningful forms of interaction with fans aside from broadcast social media, creating a more personal and certainly less public space for communicating with an artists fan base. Your favorite artists now get to learn more about their audience and do everything from one-on-one texting (which to be honest is rare), to targeting specific groups by metrics like age and geographic location, all very useful data. Put it simply, the very thing that makes SMS based communication attractive to both stars and fans is the intimacy at scale. 

What in the hell is "Pop Rap" and where did it come from?

December is here and that means It’s time for Spotify Wrapped to let you know just how embarrassing your music listening behavior really is. 

Spotify 2019 Wrapped, shows the songs and artists you’ve listened to the most throughout the year, along with other awesome statistics about your interactions with the music platform. For a few years now, Spotify has been delivering to its listeners a yearly rundown of their favorite listens. This year in particular, Spotify users can access their top artists from the past decade, seasonal favorites, top podcasts, yearly listening minutes, and the highly talked about…top genre stats. 

For many of us music junkies, the genre spectrum is much much more expensive than the popularly noted Pop, Hip-Hop, R&B, EDM, Country, and Jazz. Each one of these genres has its own level of sub-genres and even those sub-genres can be classified by different monikers (I can go days on out about this) So seeing sub-genres represented in the 2019 Spotify Wrapped might have been a great way to help you define your true music interest, but to others it might have caused some confusion. In this year's Spotify Wrapped, one particular genre seemed to have caught people off guard... and that was “Pop Rap”

To be honest this sub-genre is not that hard to define, looking at the pattern of artists who you might have seen contribute to your Spotify yearly roundup stats, it's basically just Drake sounding shit…Drake fundamentally re-wrote the rules for what it means to be a rapper in this decade. Before Drake’s “So Far Gone” mixtape, the rap formula was as follows: Rapper brings a narrative, a singer brings a melodic chorus, and boom you got a rap song. But on Feb 2009 rappers became singers, singers became rappers and shit just got blurry. Now in 2019, almost every new rap artist has been a true hybrid of melodic rapping…there you have it folks Pop Rap = melodic rapping. Artists like Lil Uzi Vert, XXXTentacion, Juice WRLD, Travis Scott, Lil Baby and a fuck ton more, have shown that the lines between pop music and rap have lowkey been eradicated. 

This week marks the 16th consecutive week that Lil Nas X has maintained the number 1 title on the Billboard Hot 100 for his absolute banger: “Old Town Road”. See, the song at its core was meant to be a short lived fad, but careful crafting and a strategic industry play has gained the song over 1.3 billion audio and video streams (which includes the 30 million versions of the song...I might be exaggerating, but who knows I hear Dolly Parton is working on the next one). “Old Town Road” currently holds the title of 2019′s highest-selling digital song, selling close to a million units. This song is just one example of why releasing series of versions for popular songs has paid off for a number of artists. 

We all know by know that we have fully moved into the digital age of music streaming. The way we consume music, and more importantly the way it has been categorized under a number of charting platforms, has drastically shifted over the past several years (peep my previous post on how music charts are created) “Old Town Road” is currently on its 5th (I think...) remake, but on the charts, you'll only find the song's name once. That is because Billboard counts remixes under certain parameters as an entity of the original song. If a song is similar in structure and lyrics it will most often be categorized as one and accounted for once in the streaming play. So when Lil Nas X asked RM from BTS to go in on yet another remix of “Old Town Road”, you best bet the structure, general lyrics, and production remained the same, the only thing that changed was the thousands of BTS fans who are now playing the song over and over and over again because of RM’s added vocals (you know who you are). 

We’ve seen this methodology play out before. "Despacito," currently holds the record for the most consecutive weeks at number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100,  but before it was remixed with Justin Bieber as a feature, it wasn’t completely the top charter smash it remains today. Billie Eilish is another savvy newcomer that has used the power of Bieber (and this theory of re-releasing a song) to bring new attention to her already popular song “bad guy”. Her current remix is competing with “Old Town Road” for the spot as number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

New Music Friday (NMF) isn't just another carefully crafted playlist made by music streaming giant Spotify, it is also most commonly known as the official music industry global release day.  

Prior to establishing a global release day, international releases were scattered throughout the week. For example an album would be released in the UK on Monday, and in Japan on Wednesday. Before NMF, Tuesday was commonly known as the US release day, and before the shift to Tuesday release days in 1989,  Mondays were the US recognized release days. These standardized days were largely established due to transportation logistics. Back in old days crates of records, cassettes and CDs would ship over the weekend,  arrive on Sunday or Monday, and be on the shelf the next morning. 

The digitalization of how we go about consuming music lead to these scattered release days becoming a problem to the industry due to the increase in piracy (shoutout to my homies out there who were on that LimeWire wave). When the UK would release music in Monday, there was all kinds of piracy and non-monetized usage of the releases on the interwebz. 

So on July 10th 2015 (also known as ya boys 20th birthday) the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (some London homies with a big say in the industry) decided that with the slow rise of streaming sites and increased number of illegal downloads, it might be best to unify the date of music release for all 1,300 of its member labels (aka most of labels that carry the music you listen to) 

This change in release day ended up being the right choice for many reasons some which include: 

 1. Music charts now having a more accurate and established determinant for the charting of songs and albums across the globe. 

2. Fridays are pay days and back when people used to pay for songs (damn that was ages ago) people were more likely to purchase music. 

3. And the obvious reason, it helped stopped piracy (to some degree) 

But some believe the Friday release day is actually doing a disservice to many artists in 2019. Smaller unsigned artist don’t get much media coverage for their releases as Fridays get saturated with big advertise spends by big record labels. Along with that statistically, now that streaming has become the main source of music listening for most people, reason number 2 up above does nothing to support sales.  This is why for an artist to land themselves on that NMF Spotify playlist is a big move (peep my Importance of Playlist post) its one of the few ways they get to showcase their work without the financial and PR backing that most record labels help attribute to a release. 

There you have it friends, NMF is more than just your way of getting the ins to what's hot and new...its the ins for everyone around the globe to get the ins to what’s hot and new! Happy New Music Friday. 

NMF Spotify Playlist 

9 out of 10 social media users do some sort of music related activity on their social apps, that’s like everyone except our moms... who we all know use social media to keep tabs on us, and comment weird stuff on our friends pictures. Social media is straight up changing the way the industry goes about distributing, and how we go about sharing music.

A Culture of Sharing (We like making people have FOMO):

What is social media better for than to allow us the opportunity to be the first to share what's “new”. It is human nature to have an urge to share with those around us, our first encounters with latest trends, and music is no exception. We find a track we like or a new song by our favorite artist and first thing we do… is listen of course, and then share. Our trust in word of mouth has proven to continuously be the most powerful form of marketing, and social media has allowed us to share the wealth of music wokeness with our social following. Due to these platforms, music labels no longer have to spend large sums to try and sell an album, instead a simple Instagram post or tweet update will let the fan frenzy do the work.

Not only has this culture of sharing allowed us to discover and help promote music, but entire careers can now be build through the help of social media. From Vine (RIP) stars making it big on YouTube and Instagram, to musicians gathering a fan base online that has allowed them the momentum that back in the day only A&R help could do, social media has helped launch the careers of many artists.

“Tribes”:

Today, most music fans turn to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, to keep themselves up-to-date on their favorite bands and artists. Communities are build through these platforms, allowing fans to share experiences and spark conversations with people across the globe. These fan communities can take the shape of Facebook Groups, fan YouTube accounts, and those oddly weird Instagram fan pages where crazy 15 year old girls invest some heavy time editing themselves in the arms of their favorite artists. Social media not only allows fans to interact among each other, but it allows artists themselves to interact with their fan-base. These platforms humanize our idols and help give us a small glimpse into the lives they live, as we develop a sustained interest in the careers of our favorite musicians

Social Media and Music Streaming Platforms:

So when streaming services found out I was posting songs to Instagram stories, they were quick to turn that into a business venture (you're welcome Spotify). Many artists and labels partner up with Snapchat to create filters aimed to promote the release of a song, and Spotify has most recently allowed Instagram users to choose among a library of songs to make part of their story making. This has created a more traceable way for royalties to be collected, and an even easier way for social media users to do some marketing on a labels behalf without even realizing it. Social media and music streaming are almost synonymous, when close to 60 percent of social media users visit streaming services to listen to music after they see an update, tweet or a post.