#But to be fair the album got on streaming platforms like earlier this year which the video goes into if thats something that interest you

[damondays]

A lot of my own posting here atm, I'm gonna go out for a walk in a bit and listen to the rest of the music recs I got (and also feel free to send more). But speaking of music recommendations as well as Feel Good inc. I just watched this video on De La Soul's album 3 feet high and rising and I just wanna recommend 'Eye Know' and 'The magic number' from that album. Such feel good songs, you can really tell how much fun they had when they recorded that album and it really shows how that carried onto much of their music with Gorillaz. Sad I didn't get into their music earlier considering Daves recent passing, but this album is such a gem and it deserves some love and redemption

[xneens]

side to side

Warnings: swearing

Word count: 4.6k

Summary: In which you're performing your hit single in front of your fellow Avengers cast-mates and Chris can't seem to take his eyes off of you, catching the attention of a few cameras.

"I'm here with the biggest pop-star of this generation, and she plays the very talented daughter of Tony Stark," the interviewer announced your name, smiling brightly at you as the camera panned your way. The hundreds of thousands of fans at home screaming when your face appeared. "How do you feel with all your nominations tonight?"

You smiled at the camera, giving a small wave at the people watching at home. "Honestly, I'm just glad I was even considered for these nominations. I mean, my girls Taylor, and Billie...they're amazing and I'm so happy to be put in the same category as them."

The lady grinned at you, her eyes twinkling. Or maybe it was her sparkly dress, the fabric nearly blinding you with how it shined under the lights. "If you ask me, you've got a pretty good chance at winning. I mean, your hit single—Side to Side—surpassed, like, a billion views in just a month? That's impressive."

"Well, I couldn't have done it without my fans." you replied, winking at the camera.

It was that time of the year again, where every artist, actor, and YouTuber hit the stage for the People's Choice Awards. With your crazy schedule, and the lack of sleep, you had planned to skip the award show until your friend, and co-star, Chris Evans—Captain America himself—convinced you otherwise. Even with the categories you've been nominated for had been more than a handful, but it was the begging and constant complaining from Chris that made you get off your tired ass and put it into a tight dress.

Your hit single, Side to Side, had everyone anticipated for your performance, unsure if you would be performing until the producers had put your name into the advertisement, making fans blow up Twitter. You were sure they had advertised your own song, along with your movie nominations, more than you ever had.

With nominations of Movie of the Year (Avengers: Infinity War), Action Movie of the Year (Avengers: Infinity War), Female Movie Star of the Year (Amara Stark), Female Artist of the Year, Song of the Year (Side to Side), Music Video of the Year (Into You), Beauty Influencer of the Year, and Social Celebrity of the Year, you had your hands full, which had only made your manager glow with happiness.

"Of course!" the interviewer agreed, glancing at the teleprompter filled with tiny words. "It was rumored that you wouldn't be coming, and a lot of us were upset, including me. Was that just a rumor or..."

"Actually, it's not that far off. I'm fucking—oh, shit—oh no!" you gasped, covering your mouth before anymore foul words could come out on live television. Instead of correcting you, the lady laughed, patting your arm softly. "Can't say that on tv. My bad. I, uh, with everything going on, I've been really tired, and I haven't slept in a week. I just wanted to chill, and accept my nominations at home but someone convinced me to come. So, if I say or do anything ridiculous tonight, I'm blaming him and my lack of sleep."

She nodded, clapping slowly. "I think that's fair. Is that someone, your onscreen father, RDJ?"

"He was one of the many people who unsuccessfully changed my mind, but no, it was Chris Evans. He promised me a day with his adorable dog, Dodger, and I couldn't refuse." you said, grinning at how his face had changed from hopeless to cocky as soon as he brought up Dodger.

"If I'm remembering this correctly, Chris Evans is that very handsome man you had kissed in your music video earlier this year. Into You, right? How do you feel kissing one of your co-stars outside of the movies your working on?"

"Technically, it was still acting, and I have kissed him before, so it wasn't awkward at all." you answered, glad Chris had accepted the role. Not only had it sky-rocketed the views and streams, but it made you feel better that it was his lips you were kissing and not a random model's. Yet, it didn't feel as professional as it had before when you pulled away after a take.

In scenes where you had to kiss the Boston actor, it was as professional as kicking Anthony Mackie's ass in Civil War but the kisses you shared on the set of the music video was definitely more personal. At the time, you had brushed it off as Chris being recently single, but now that you had broken up with Henry, you started questioning it again.

The interviewer nodded, squinting once more to read the words off the teleprompter before asking you another question that would certainly make the headlines. "I've been reading up on all those juicy tabloids and I've got one question that would satisfy my curiosity. Was Into You written about Henry Cavill or Tom Ellis?"

Usually, that type of question made you change the subject or altogether avoid the matter but this time, you wanted to joke about your failed engagement. "Henry, but Side to Side was written about Tom since I wanted more Grammy's considering the last album I put out won me a few. But this time, I'm gonna do it without an engagement."

The woman faked a laugh, surprised by the blunt honesty of your answer. "Um, you certainly do have a thing for British men, eh? I don't want to keep you up, but one more thing, for the fans. They've been dying to know if there's anything going on between you and Chris Evans. Any tea you wanna spill?"

"There's none to spill. We're just friends but it's always amusing scrolling through Twitter to find these edits of us." you replied, fidgeting slightly with the hem of your dress. Like usual, you had wondered if you should've worn something less extra but you had let your stylist play dress up with you for the past few months.

"Of course. Well, good luck to you, and I can't wait to see your performance." she said, giving you a little pat on the shoulders before announcing your name once again.

You got off the little platform, immediately taking Chris' awaiting hand, holding onto it as you climbed down the steps in your dangerous stilettos. Sighing, you leaned on him, trying to avoid the blinding camera flashes. "That was more exhausting than I thought it would be. You need to get me some caffeine after this is over because there's no way I'm making it to the after show without at least a few cans of Red Bull."

"So dramatic." Chris grinned, childishly sticking his tongue out as he guided you down the red carpet, stopping when told to take a picture. He let go of your hand, only to wrap it around your waist as you posed for the pictures. "Are you going to the after party?"

Posing seriously for a few seconds, you let your smile back on your face, facing the man beside you. "I was thinking about it, take a few photos, and head back home. Aren't you?"

"Actually, I was thinking we could ditch it and just hang out. You know, I did promise you some time with Dodger and you could waste a couple hours sleeping." he replied, his hand tightening ever so slightly on your waist. Flashing you a shit-eating smirk, he nudged you a little, pulling you away from the blinding flashes. "What do you say?"

You opened your mouth to answer only to be cut off by your manager, Alexandre coming out of nowhere to rip you away from Chris' arms. The latin man sighed in annoyance, glancing at his watch while giving you the look you've seen too many times before. "You're supposed to be in wardrobe right now. Get your ass backstage, and change before you miss your own performance. As for you, Mr. Evans, Megan wants your ass in a chair."

"I'll see you after." you say, getting dragged by your manager, winking at the actor before walking towards the changing area, the cameras following you until they couldn't enter the area.

Getting ready before a huge performance always calmed you down, maybe it was the smell of makeup or the feel of designer clothing made especially for you, but something about it made you feel comfortable and cozy. It was like a routine, especially with all the music videos and movies you had to film, the makeup, the hair.

They made you sit back, giving you your phone like a child while they made you even more sparkly than before, making sure you'd stand out against the flashing lights during the performance. A performance you made sure no one would ever forget. Smiling, you let your thoughts drift back to a certain super soldier as you were pampered.

—

"Welcome to the People's Choice Awards!"

The room darkened, the blue and pinks lights focusing on the stage as cameras all turned towards your shadow. Making sure your mic was set properly, tried to see past the darkness, to see a familiar face or two but with the headache coming on from the tight half-ponytail didn't help your case. The music started, the beat vibrating, you flipped your hair, and started.

"I've been there all night

I've been there all day (Nicki Minaj)

And boy, got me walkin' side to side (Let then hoes know)"

You rode the bike, belting out in your microphone, the attached headset limiting your movements a little. Gripping the handles, you made eye contact at the camera to your left, winking at it as you pedaled.

"I'm talkin' to ya

See you standing over there with your body

Feeling like I wanna rock with your body

And we don't gotta think 'bout nothin'

I'm comin' at ya

'Cause I know you got a bad reputation

Doesn't matter, 'cause you give me temptation

And we don't gotta think 'bout nothin'"

As you had sung, your eyes had adjusted to the bright spotlight focused on you, seeing a shadow of the one person you wanted to make you walk side to side. While you had answered the reporter's question, you hadn't been completely honest. Some of the lyrics had been written for the Bostonian; or to be more exact, your sex fantasies. With the chorus coming up, you let go of the handles, trying not to fall on your ass as you clapped your hands above your head, the claps matching the beat.

"These friends keep talkin' way too much

Say I should give you up

Can't hear them, no, 'cause I..."

Trying to be bold, you stared at him, his face in particular. The spotlight had blinded you so much that you couldn't see what his reaction was—or anyone's for that matter—but maybe it was a good thing. After all, his gaze always made you blush no matter how hard you tried not to. Pedaling faster, you threw your head back, hoping the motion would draw everyone's—Chris'—eyes on your chest.

"I've been here all night

I've been here all day

And boy, got me walkin' side to side

I've been here all night

I've been here all day

And boy, got me walkin' side to side"

With the help of a shirtless dancer, you got off your bike, taking the sheer jacket from him, and putting it on as you walked towards the front of the stage, moving your hips in to the beat of the song. Resting a hand on a shirtless dancer, you positioned yourself so you were grinding your ass against his crotch, throwing back an arm around his neck.

"Been tryna hide it

Baby, what's it gonna hurt if they don't know?

Makin' everybody think that we solo

Just as long as you know you got me

And boy, I got ya

'Cause tonight I'm making deal with the devil

And I know it's gonna get me in trouble

Just as long as you know you got me"

Sashaying to the little balance beam at the front of the stage, you made sure your hips swayed more than usual.

"These friends keep talkin' way too much

Say I should give you up

Can't hear them, no, 'cause I...

"I've been here all night

I've been here all day

And boy, got me walkin' side to side

I've been here all night

I've been here all day

And boy, got me walkin' side to side"

A few seconds after your note ended, you strike a pose on the balance beam, posing for a few more seconds while the cameras turned their attention away from you and onto the queen of rap herself: Nicki Minaj. The leather, pink bodysuit was identical to yours except for the color, her attitude fitting the badass outfit. She began to walk towards the stage, never breaking eye contact with the camera in front of her while the men pretending to work out to the choreo.

"Uh, yeah

This the new style with the fresh type of flow

Wrist icicle, ride dick bicycle

Come through yo, get you this type of blow

If you want a ménage, I got a tricycle

All these bitches' flows is my mini-me

Body smoking, so they call me Young Nicki Chimney

Rappers in they feelings 'cause they feelin' me

Uh, I-I give zero fucks and I got zero chill in me

Kissing me, copped the blue box that say Tiffany

Curry with the shot, just tell 'em to call me Stephanie

Gun pop, then I make my gum pop

I'm the queen of rap"

By the time she had finished her verse, you had caught up with the multitasking of both working out and singing, able to use your full singing capabilities for your high note. Nicki joined you on stage, hyping up the crowd while you built up for the high note, almost every camera pointed at you except for the one focused on capturing the headline-worthy expression slapped on Chris' face.

"These friends keep talkin' way too much

Say I should give em up

Can't hear them, no, 'cause I...

"I've been here all night (Been here all night, baby)

I've been here all day (Been here all night, baby)

And boy, got me walkin' side to side (Side to side)

I've been here all night (Been here all night, baby)

I've been here all day (Been here all day, baby) (Ooh, baby)

And boy, got me walkin' side to side (Side to side)"

Both you and Nicki motioned for the dancers to come towards you, curling your index finger at the sexy men. Singing the refrain, you both made them drop to their knees in front of you, as if they were kneeling at your command.

Just as the last note was sung, everyone clapped, the majority standing up, and more cheered. You noticed Chris hadn't done either, still sitting in his motionless while two camera men pointed their cameras at him. Your eyebrows furrowed, thankfully after the spotlight had shifted over to the miniature stage where the two hosts were babbling about nominations.

You were ushered off the stage along with the queen of rap herself, taking a few backstage photos before quickly returning back to your dressing room to change into your tailored dress. Your mind had wandered to why Chris hadn't applauded—not that he was obliged too, but a little something would've nice, especially with all the days put into the performance.

Taking a deep breath, you entered the big room, filled with your co-stars and other A-list celebrities. Little did you know you'd find out the reason to your question in the morning.

—

The loud ringtone woke you up, the sound obnoxious and borderline abuse to your ears. Beside you, Chris groaned, rolling onto his stomach, trying to muffle the sound of the call with his arm draped over his head. Putting him out his misery, you lazily reached for your phone, pressing the green button with dread, seeing the name across the screen.

"Hello—"

"You're trending on Twitter." Alexandre announced, happy with the results of the previous awards show. While it wasn't something as big as a Grammy or Oscar, judging by the amount of awards you had taken home, you became the people's favorite. "Hold on, lemme rephrase that. You and Chris are trending. Number one, world wide."

Glancing at the man sleeping beside you, you sat up, confused by the information given to you. You blamed Chris for making you stay up so late for your confusion. "Um, why? Did I accidentally have another nip slip?"

"What the hell?" Chris mumbled, rolling onto his back, his arm grazing your bare stomach. He immediately took it back, sitting up to look over your puzzled face. "What's going on?"

You shrugged, putting your phone on speaker so Alexandre could explain. Your manager chuckled, knowing you had stayed the night with Chris. He was just waiting for the day you'd finally have the guts to speak about the growing sexual tension. "Okay, Alex, explain."

"As much as I would love to go into full detail, I have other stuff to do so, I'm going to give you the basics. Chris' reaction to your performance went viral, people are shipping the both of you, and there's been thousands of memes made." Alexandre replied, a smile evident in his voice. "Anyways, I have to go. Got some interviews to schedule. Have fun getting your way out of this, Chris."

Your phone screen went back to the home screen, a picture of your family dog, Buster, smiling widely. Looking at Chris, you saw his eyes widened, his hands coming to rest of his face in embarrassment as he fell back onto the bed with a bounce, his head nearly hitting the headboard. "Oh, fuck."

"Are you going to show me what your face looked like or do I have to scroll through Twitter until I find it? Oh! Maybe they edited it in my performance." you thought out load, tapping on the YouTube app. You hadn't trusted yourself enough to log into your official account, knowing you'd probably make a mistake so you opted for having a secondary account where you could watch cat videos without the anxiety of posting something stupid.

Chris' hand snatched your phone away, tucking it in his pocket, the sweats he had slept in was somehow wrinkled, and his shirt damp from the warmth. "You wanna get some food? I'll cook some bacon but you'll have to make the pancakes 'cause the last time—"

"I wanna see your reaction." you whined, reaching across his stomach for your phone. Chris turned his body away from you, shielding the phone from your reach. "Chris!"

He waved your attempt away, rolling off the bed, his feet hitting the floor before you could fall back on the mattress.You poured, getting on all fours, crawling towards the edge. Chris took a step back, brows furrowing. "It's not important. Let's get you some food."

"Fine." you mumbled, an idea making you light up. Rolling off the bed, you glanced at his phone on the nightstand, exposed and easy to take. With quick reflexes, you grabbed his phone, rolling back on the bed until you reached the other side, making it impossible for him to reach for his phone back.

"Hey!" the Bostonian shouted, launching himself on the bed in attempt to get his phone back. He made a noise as you rushed out of your room, locking yourself in the nearby bathroom, laughing evilly when he threw himself at the door. He yelled out your name, his fist banging on the door. "I'm serious! Don't!"

Ignoring his begging, you opened his phone with your thumbprint. How ironic how much he didn't want you to look at his phone when he was the one who insisted you have the password to it. His arguments became louder as you opened up his Twitter, immediately heading to the trending section, seeing both your names at the number one spot.

"Damn, I look hot." you joked out loud, making Chris silent for a second before pleading for you not to continue. You smirked, scrolling through the tweets, trying to find his reaction. "Jesus Christ, what the hell happened to you? Did you fall on your face or something?"

Chris groaned, banging his head on the door in defeat as he heard your almost inaudible gasp, that quickly turned into little giggles. If he wasn't so embarrassed, he would've broken the door down to hold you in his arms. "Oh, no."

Bursting out into hard laughter, you fell into the large bathtub, hitting your head on the wall but you couldn't care less. The expression on his face during your performance had been borderline comical, the wide eyes, the jaw hanging open, the open hand resting on his chin while his eyes stayed strained on you the whole time, never wavering from your body, the sexy choreography making his jeans tight.

Cackling like the Wicked Witch of the West, tears ran down your cheeks, your stomach cramping from the maniacal laughter. Lifting yourself up from the tub, you stumbled to the door, your loud laugh ringing out towards the whole house. You let Chris in the bathroom, his phone quickly taken from your hand but it was too late. The blush on his cheeks wasn't going away anytime soon. You leaned against him, your head resting on his chest, while you panted out a question. "Why did you look like you were trying to attract flies in your mouth?"

Chris groaned again, covering his eyes with a hand while the other rested on your back. "You're not going to let me live this down, are you?"

"Oh, God, no." you giggled, wiping the tears away, beginning to calm down. Glancing up at him, you noticed everything above the shoulders was gleaming red, the embarrassment too unbearable for him. "Chris, you looked exactly like the first time we were forced to share a bed together."

"Yeah, you have that affect on me."

"You gonna tell me why you looked so ... shocked? Or do I have to search through Twitter and go with whatever fan theory makes the most sense?" you asked, unable to keep the smug grin off your face. Chris closed his eyes, wishing he hadn't made you come to the awards show in the first place. You raised an eyebrow, fingers itching towards his phone. "You know I'll do it, Evans."

The man raised his hands, taking them off of you as he paced around the bathroom, deciding if this embarrassing moment was the right time to finally confess. "It's just, you know, the dance was so ... sexual and hot that I probably wasn't the only one looking at you like that. You can't exactly blame me for being shocked, watching the girl I'm in love with—"

Chris stopped as you be watched the colors drain out of your face, immediately freezing when he realized what he had said. Both of you stared at each other, eyes wide, not moving a muscle, barely blinking; the atmosphere so tense neither of you were breathing, waiting for the other to talk. But neither of you wanted to go first, terrified.

It wasn't until you started to feel dizzy that you realized you hadn't been breathing, letting out a huge breath, trying to relax while Chris did the same, his hands shaking, a nervous tick he got whenever he was anxious. You got the courage to speak first.

"What?"

It was better than nothing.

Chris was so nervous he nearly ran out of the room. There wasn't some kind of handbook or script he could read, helping him tell one of his best friends how head over heels he was for her. So, he said what his brain was stewing. "What?"

"What—what?" you replied, unsure if he even said the L word, so lightheaded by the sudden confession.

The actor stilled, eyes widening even further, while his eyebrows shot up his forehead. "What?"

"What?"

"What?"

"Say what one more time, Evans, and I will make nothing but mac and cheese for the rest of your stay." you threatened softly, getting tired of not having an answer to your one-worded question.

Chris took a deep breath, hands trembling as he clasped them together, hoping to find the right words, hoping his inner thoughts would come out clear, giving you the answer you asked for. "I'm sorry. What do you want me to say?"

"What you were saying before. You know, before you looked like you saw a ghost and almost stopped breathing. I think that would be a good start." you replied, backing up to take a seat on the plush chair. Chris mirrored your actions, putting down the lid to the toilet before sitting down.

"This isn't the way I wanted you to find out." Chris whispered, his blue eyes trained on the emotions that flashed on your face. Your uncertainty of the situation didn't help his anxiety.

"Okay, um, were you going to tell me in the first place?" you asked, playing with the hem of your shirt—it had been a borrowed Patriots shirt from him. Looking back, you realized all the little things he'd done hadn't been because his platonic love for you. "Or were you just going to keep letting it be this way?"

Fidgeting with his hands, Chris peered through his eyelashes, seeing the hurt flash across your face before you quickly composed it. "Scott was hyping me up, trying to convince me to tell you before you got into another relationship. Do you know the real reason I broke up with Jenny? It hurt like hell when you announced you were engaged. Fuck, I couldn't even pretend to be happy because you were going to have the life I wanted with you, with someone who wasn't me. It was selfish and I got really mad at myself for being a dick."

"But—"

"And then the horrible, horrible relief I felt when you called off the engagement." Chris continued, his heart clenching. "Truth to be told, that was the day I found out I was in love with you, breaking things off with Jenny. Of course, I wanted to wait until you moved on, hoping to be the friend you went to but with my schedule, that was impossible. So, you seemed out comfort in Henry fucking Cavill."

"You're in love with me?" you whispered, hoping this wasn't some kind of cruel dream. If it was, you wouldn't mind staying.

The actor nodded, waiting for you to call him names and rush out. "Yes. You can leave or slap me or whatever you want to do but I love you."

You got up, running a hand through your hair. "Okay."

Chris' heart sank, wishing for any other kind of reaction, wishing you'd do something. Taking a deep breath, he got up. "Is this a goodbye?"

Frowning, you walked up to him, taking his face between with your hands, pressing your lips softly to his. You could feel his heart beat, the little organ beating so hard. You pulled away before he could recover from his shock, before he could kiss you back.

"Hello."

[common-void]

Where do I find new music?

I got to be honest, none of my friends ever asked me about how I find new music to listen to. But, indeed, most of them have told me that I got a good taste in music (excuse me). Sorry for bragging but it’s actually my kind of favorite compliment. Kudos to anyone who (still) thought that way. I would say that I’m lucky enough to experience a lot of genres since my childhood. From Disney bop (was a huge fan of Jonas Brothers when I was 10 years old, but that’s where I discovered Shania Twain), rock, electronic, pop, alternative, even latino. Those things shaped me into a multi-genre music snob. Just to be clear, I’m not an expert but my ears are somehow above average (I really have to stop bragging), and I got 62,160 minutes listened on Spotify. Sounds fair enough to you? Sure, what I mean by “new” music, it’s not always a “recently released” music. It could be songs from the 80s or the 90s that I just discovered. There is still a lot of good music out there that I haven’t discovered yet. But hey, enough for the chit-chat, let’s get down to business.

1. Music Blogs

I would really recommend visiting music blogs like Pitchfork, Stereogum, NPR Music, or anything you find intrigue. They got a lot of different genres of music from a lot of artists, mostly independent. For a first-timer, you could just pick up their monthly chart playlist or start a baby-step by listening to their best music from a particular year. Example: Best Music of 2019. If you thought of Billboard, I don’t think they give a recommendation for a variety of genres as they mainly focus on pop and hip hop. Anyway, sometimes when I feel like it, I do surf on Tumblr just for finding new music. Some of the music blogs on Tumblr are inactive nowadays but it doesn’t matter to me as long as I found some stuffs worth listening to. Of course, of course! Music streaming platform is not limited to this point, try the easiest like Soundcloud or Bandcamp to discover newly born artist.

2. Social Media/Forum/Communities

Whew, a lot of slashes! True, most of my music I discovered are from social media like Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, even TikTok (guilty). When someone uploaded a song that they’ve been listening to on their social media, if it catches my attention, I’d give it a try. Set following on music communities you like on Instagram, they give cool recommendations. On Twitter or Reddit, someone usually just asking people “What was your favorite song this decade?” or “Your favorite album of all time?” something like that. In an instant, it becomes your music recommendation galore. Even on Reddit, the music enthusiasts have their own music chart which by the way, doesn’t suck! Bravo, bravo! For TikTok, some people (well, a few) do use cool songs as their background music. Just don’t forget to take notes or else you lose it.

3. Youtube

Isn’t it Youtube a social media? Yes. But I prefer to break it down since the method I use is pretty different than the one mentioned above. I didn’t really fancy (not never) surfing this site to find any particular song. What I do is to only watch the Full Set of live performances on Youtube. Could be from festivals, talkshows, or sessions. If you’re serious enough, you can subscribe to music critics like The Needle Drop (for album review) or Alfo Media (for songs in particular). Besides, I don’t think Youtube is the perfect platform for discovering new music. From my experience, the music they’re trying to recommend me sucks. In the case of Youtube Music, I haven’t tried it. But for now, I don’t think I might. Another thing to keep in mind, we are all only human, sometimes our ears are tired and sick of listening too much music. How do I overcome it? Give it a break OR you could just binge-watching music videos on Youtube because visually, you’re not tired (yay). Or just give it a break, mate.

4. Soundtrack

Don’t ever think about googling “Best Movie Soundtrack” or “Series Shows With Best Soundtrack”. Trust me, don’t. You will end up not enjoying it. My tip, if you’re watching a movie or series you like, try to pay attention whenever a song plays in the background. On Netflix, sometimes they even put the song title on subtitle (if you do watch your movie with subtitle). Take notes on whatever catches your ears or simply just search the playlist on Spotify.

5. Spotify

Ah, yes, finally! You might be wondering why I didn’t mention Spotify earlier even though Spotify is the one and only music platform I use daily. To be VERY honest, I do get a bunch of music recommendations from Spotify but what can I do if my ears often disagree with their choice. I’m not saying that their curated “My Discover Weekly” sucks, just not really clicked with my preferences. So, what I would do is exploring Spotify users with legit playlists. Whether it’s from music blogs, music critics, or even some random person I found along the way. Hey, if you my friend, found out I’ve been jamming to your playlist, don’t bother, because I think you’re cool.

Those five points only narrowing down my sources on finding new music. In fact, you can find any new music everywhere. At a bar, a bookstore, the mall. Just seize your Shazam app on your phone or if you don’t have one, type the lyrics you heard on google. One last tip, in the journey of discovering music you like, you might find some that didn’t fit your taste or preference. Hell, you might even hate a few. Just remember to give your ears a chance. Don’t judge too quick unless you already try to listen to their stuff (wise, huh?). May you find a gem. Good luck!

Adios, Risdiana Izzaty

[scarlettsabetlondongirl]

Read the New Interview by Poet Scarlett Sabet and Led Zeppelin Founder Jimmy Page in Interview Magazine below or click on headline link.

JIMMY PAGE AND SCARLETT SABET ARE THE MUSIC-POETRY POWER COUPLE THE WORLD DIDN’T KNOW IT NEEDED

By Stephanie LaCava

Published October 10, 2019

Scarlett Sabet’s poetry is felt three-fold when she performs it. The written words aren’t the same when she says them; they are trance-like, told as if from memory. To call the London-based talent a poet and performer seems inadequate. She’s more so a musician, or, perhaps, a mystic. Her haunting readings have taken place at storied book shops such as San Francisco’s City Lights and Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, and she’s been invited to read at the likes of Wellesley College. She has published four collections of poetry on her own imprint: Rocking Undergound, The Lock and The Key, Zoreh, and Camille earlier this year. 

Today, she debuts her spoken word album Catalyst, produced by her partner, the legendary musician Jimmy Page. 

Interview sat down with the couple to talk about coming together for this project, the brilliance of the Velvet Underground, and paying to produce your own work.

STEPHANIE LACAVA: You two met in 2012, but it was two years later that your relationship started and you first talked about collaborating together. It would be five more years before today’s release of your project on all streaming platforms. Why this album now?

JIMMY PAGE: One project that I knew it shouldn’t be was poetry with music. So with the production of Scarlett’s work, I wanted to create an individual character for each poem, a sonic landscape to compliment it.

LACAVA: And with all due respect, that was also a cool move. It would have been kind of eye-rolling to do music accompaniment.

SCARLETT SABET: Yes. It feels exciting, but also like a natural progression, I think, because we live and work together every day. Literally every one of these poems, Jimmy was there when I wrote it, and he was the first person that heard it and he’s seen me perform so many times.

PAGE: It was six years ago that I first heard Scarlett read.

SABET: At World’s End Bookshop on the King’s Road in Chelsea.

PAGE: I thought, “This is really interesting. She’s really interesting. She’s definitely got something there.” And the people in attendance soaked up Scarlett’s reading.

LACAVA: Surely, you’ve read a lot of crowds.

PAGE: That’s a good point. The whole place hushed. Rocking Underground was the first poem I heard of Scarlett’s and when we started production, we began with it.

LACAVA: I think people assume the title of the poem is a music reference, but it’s actually quite literal…

SABET: I was on a train. My computer had broken. It was just one of those, ugh, kind of despairing Sunday nights. I just remember there was a guy with a backpack in my face, and I got out my notebook, and there was the rhythm of train.

LACAVA: Do you usually listen to music while you write?

SABET: It’s got to be something that’s trance-like. I can understand why you’d listen to jazz, for example.

LACAVA: That’s a place where both of your practices kind of overlap.

PAGE: Well, yeah. I did this interview with William Burroughs for Crawdaddy Magazine in 1975. We started to talk about trance music. I thought maybe he’d been to see Led Zeppelin on just one occasion. Actually, it was many times at Madison Square Garden. Anyway, we then started talking about this whole trance ethos, about the Master Musicians of Jajouka, this whole genre of tribal trance music from Morocco.

LACAVA: You learned about Jajouka from Brian Jones?

PAGE: Yes. To be fair, I know that Brion Gysin had introduced Brian Jones.

SABET: He was a painter and musician, Burroughs’s lover, and he came up with the cut-up technique with Burroughs.

LACAVA: Ah. What was your connection to Jones?

PAGE: I’d heard Elmore James songs (which Jones played a lot,) but I couldn’t quite work out how to play the music. People would say it was literally, from the neck of a bottle. I thought, ‘So, let’s see how this guy Jones does it.’ Sure enough, he gets up on stage and starts doing some Elmore James songs, and he has the equivalent of what everyone would know as a slide on his finger. I started talking to him when he came offstage, and I said, “Well you know, you’ve really got that down. What are you actually using?” You must understand that nobody that I knew played slide guitar at all. This is the first time I’d seen somebody do it—before Jeff [Beck] was doing it, before the Rolling Stones. So, he said, “Oh, have you got a car mechanic near you?” And I said, “I literally do have one not too far away.”‘ He said, “Go there and ask for a bush. It’s called a bush.” A thing used used in car maintenance. And he said, “You’ll find that it’ll just fit on your finger absolutely perfectly, and that’s what I use.” This guy was so generous.

LACAVA: Is there any young musician today who has really impressed you?

PAGE: Well, I was so impressed with the two guys that I saw with you.

LACAVA: Stefan Tcherepnin and Taketo Shimada, the New York-based Afuma.

SABET: They were so good. You said that was reminiscent of New York in the ’60s?

PAGE: Well, well, yeah. It was. It definitely had that sort of trance vibe.

LACAVA: Back to Scarlett’s start. You did your first reading at Shakespeare & Co. in Paris in January of 2015. Jimmy help set it up?

PAGE: So, when Sylvia (Whitman, owner and daughter of George Whitman) was giving me a tour after my own book signing, I saw the poetry section there, and I said, “Do you having readings here?” And she said, “Yes.” And I said, “Well, French as well as English?” “Oh, no. Only English.” And I thought, “I know a poet.”

LACAVA: It was Sylvia who introduced me to Scarlett years ago.

PAGE: After hosting Scarlett, Sylvia said to me, “It’s really powerful in print, but her renditions, they’re in another realm.”

LACAVA: So, Sylvia’s now the fourth person in this interview.

PAGE: That’s right. And something else funny happened when I was back at Shakespeare and Company. The man in charge of the rare book department said, “Oh, Sir, that Françoise Hardy track that you were on was absolutely amazing. That’s one of my favorite pieces of your guitar work.” I thought, “Well, wait a minute. I’m going to check, I’m going to track this down.” When I heard it, lo and behold, there’s this distortion box. It’s called a fuzz box. And I was the one who helped create this thing, and there it was on Francoise Hardy’s Je n’attends plus personne. I did it when I was a session musician. It was a session in Pye Studios at Marble Arch, downtown where all these Petula Clark hits were done. It wasn’t until you were in the studio that you’d see the artist come in. And you’d go, “Oh, I know who this is.” Or, “I don’t know who this is.” But when Francoise Hardy came in, I knew who she was. She had on one of those turtlenecks and that sort of tweedy skirt.

LACAVA: You also did some early sessions with Nico before she was part of the Velvet Underground.

PAGE: Nico came to London to record the Gordon Lightfoot song “I’m Not Sayin” with Andrew Oldham as a solo artist. So, there’s this huge orchestral session with Nico singing, and Andrew asked me to write a B-side with him for Nico, routine, play, and produce it on a separate session, which I did. It’s called The Last Mile. I was a staff producer on Immediate Records.

LACAVA: How old were you?

PAGE: 19 or 20. I was going to routine her at her apartment just near Baker Street in London with my acoustic 12-string guitar. Nico’s son with Alain Delon was there and he was holding up my guitar in the air, and I decided it was time to rescue it.

LACAVA: When did you see her again after that?

PAGE: Steve Paul’s Scene Club (Paul’s nightclub The Scene at 46th and Eighth Avenue) had been decorated by Andy Warhol. I don’t know what you’d call it here, but it’s this silver wrap—

LACAVA: Mylar.

PAGE: All the walls were covered with Mylar because Andy Warhol said that color was the color of speed. And playing down there was Nico and The Velvet Underground. I had an incredible connection with Lou Reed, and we spent lots of time talking.

SABET: Was that the first time you met him?

PAGE: Yeah, and I’d seen The Velvet Underground on more than one occasion. They were almost like a resident band. Andy Warhol was keen for them to be there. I can tell you exactly what it was like. When I heard the first album, it was just exactly what they were like. They were just like that. It was absolutely phenomenal.

LACAVA: See, that’s interesting in the context of his new project, as well. The difference between seeing someone in person versus the recording…

PAGE: The other thing about Steve Paul’s and The Velvet Underground was that it didn’t really have too many people coming to hear it, which I found extraordinary.

LACAVA: How many people were there?

PAGE: Well, hardly any people. Like, nine, a dozen people. It was so radical, such a radical band. You know, Maureen Tucker just playing the sort of snare drum. And the fact that there was the electric viola with John Cale. You just didn’t get this sort of line-up. It was really arts lab, as opposed to pop music, this wonderful glue, this synergy between them that was dark. It was very dark.

LACAVA: You mentioned Warhol. Do you remember seeing him there?

PAGE: No, he wasn’t actually there, but I met him with the Yardbirds. I don’t actually remember the hotel, but there was a reception for the Yardbirds. He came in, and he was with one other person. I was talking to him, and he said, ‘I just want to feel the band, feel the Yardbirds.’ “I want to feel their presence,” was the exact quote. We had a conversation and at the end of it he said, “You should come to the Factory, and do an audition.” But we were working, and I didn’t manage to do that. And then I saw him again in Detroit in ’67, when we were playing there. Andy Warhol was proceeding over this wedding, and The Velvet Underground were there. So, I got a chance to say hello again.

LACAVA: Something interesting that Scarlett told me once was that you steered her toward self-publishing. That legitimacy doesn’t come from a label—it comes from creating the thing you want to create.

PAGE: Yes.

LACAVA: You could have told her the opposite, based on your experience.

SABET: Jimmy was like, “Well, look. The first Led Zeppelin album, I paid for that.”

LACAVA: You produced and paid for it?

PAGE: Yes.

SABET: They had a record. He then took it to record companies. He took it to Atlantic and said, “This is what we’ve got. I’m not releasing singles. Take it or leave it.” He literally said the words, “I didn’t want to go around cap in hand saying, ‘Oh please. We’d like to write some songs.’ It’s better to do it.”

PAGE: What I’ve been producing over the last few years are Led Zeppelin rereleases and catalog items. It means a lot of listening to quarter-inch tapes, and it’s all in real time. I had to approach this project in such a way that the first album speaks for itself. The last and ninth album of the studio albums were Coda, so on every album in between, I had to make sure all of these companion discs were done and present the idea to the record company along with new artwork—that way to ensure the complete vision of the recordings were released.  

SABET: With the sound engineer, Drew, Jimmy would explain how he wanted to kind of layer some of my voices. And I practiced some on cassette, so it was like a guiding track, and then I’d listen back, and I understood the timing and what we were going to do for each one. If there was a sound or there was a better take, we’d talk about that.

PAGE: The first one that I wanted to try was Rocking Underground, which opens up the whole of this work. It was recorded on a cassette tape. It was so noisy, but urgent. I said, this is what we’re going to use, but then it needed some extra work to be done to augment the base layer—

LACAVA: Oh, that’s cool!

PAGE: So, it opens, and it’s really disturbing, all this ambient noise. And I know we pulled it off. Because there’s such a variety on it, and it will be such a surprise. It’s the sort of thing that you listen to for, say, Side One, from beginning to end. The whole sequencing is there for a reason.

LACAVA: We’re living in an age of the ubiquitous podcast. Everyone has those things in her ears.

“Catalyst, a spoken word album written and performed by Scarlett Sabet and produced by Jimmy Page, is released on a special 12-inch etched vinyl via JimmyPage.com.”-Jimmy Page

Photos: Interview Magazine

[thefreshfinds]

Propelled by the vibrant energy, treasured ambiance, connectivity, heart drenched food and melodies intertwining with the Saturday afternoon clouds —

There I stood in the emblem of The Philadelphia Music Festival, starving for a bite of fresh talent and so I decided to fill my plate with only the best manifolds of visionary hip hop, pop, R&B, trap and rock but little did I know I was in for a feast!

*Credits to @_brandoncaptures_ *

The first to perform was Monica Joelle, a dynamic Pop/R&B songstress from Philly that strikes your heart hard like Cupid’s arrow with her orientally sweet voice and cherry dripped instrumentals. She effortlessly plucks you with relatable lyrics (whether it’s about sticky situations, love or having a crush) and that’s why no one can seem to get enough. Monica started off with songwriting / singing lessons and from there she has continuously bloomed into her own sound as an artist, writing pieces that show off her complexity through set-ups and syllables. The songstress has only been making music until December 2017 but prior to that she has always been performer whether it was for dance or theater. The first song she ever created which was “Never Forget You” which is your ordinary heartbreak song but still relatable (and surely a track she had the most fun making.) To prepare for the festival she took the living room as her stage — using the microphone and speaker as the components for an astounding set off in real life. And in the future? Monica plans on releasing an EP and shooting out singles. (she can’t give us a name as of yet but I’m sure whatever it is will reflect the bubbly aura she conveys on and off the stage) The date will be revealed before you even know it but don’t take the risk of missing out on it.. just make sure to follow @MonicaJoelle.

“I’m not going to stop, I’m going to keep going. Forget what the haters say” Monica says.

SoundCloud - https://soundcloud.com/monicajoelle

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/artist/55UAah5w59sJuQyekaRswr?si=wKn4V9eeSJaIM8XJtvZFAw

Fun Fact: Her favorite slang is “Jawn”

My favorite song? On My Mind.

The next performer to zazzle the crowd was conscious wordsmith, Teef. Teef is a laid back visionary from New Jersey (residing now in Philly) who puts your mind at ease through charismatic storytelling intertwined with a fusion of neo-soul hip-hop, concrete flows, very solid messages and speaker knocking beats that could make your head snap off your neck (literally). Resonated with A Tribe Called Quest, one could even say that he has their style down pat as he makes sure to transition a soothing ambience through the vibration of his rhymes and wit. Teef started his musical journey in 2015 after dropping his first project called “Hip Hop On Purpose”. He was always into music but this project was the pinnacle of his musicianship “I just stopped thinking about doing something and I finally just started doing it,” says Teef “I was very hesitant about becoming a rapper at first because of what was out on the mainstream. I don’t even rap about that stuff [being on the block, etc]. Then one day I performed at an open mic, people liked it, asked me to come back and since then I kept going.” Aside from spitting bars Teef also enjoys welding, reading informational novels, free styling and networking. “Earlier [before the festival] I was actually welding up a rail and it wasn’t even a joke!” Teef goes on to say “Genuinely I just love to be around people. [when asked about networking] I like being around other independent artist and feeding off of their energy and ideas.” To prepare, Teef didn’t do much but go with the motion of the [creative] ocean and sway his natural repertoire in the ears of the ones close by. “I picked my songs when I got here. But I don’t always put my set together until I get there.” Teef says “I just went with the vibes”. One song that Teef enjoyed making the most was his first song “Get Free” because it allowed him to showcase his style to other people. “It was really random. It was made at three o clock in the morning and I really didn’t have an intent but it just hit me out of the blue. I crafted it in my own way. It was the most memorable time for me. That’s why I consider it to be fun because it just happened.” Common to persona, Teef’s favorite slang is “coolin” and the number one person that he looks up to in history is Bob Marley because he brought people together (and even squashed beef between politicians). “He was all about the people and the community”. Teef is currently running a weekly radio show called “Most Slept On Radio” on 98.5FM (it covers the Philadelphia area). He also runs Table Talk with Teef on Tuesday’s.

“I’m just growing with my artistry”

You can follow him on

Instagram : @realteef03

Bandcamp : https://lateef.bandcamp.com/Spotify : https://open.spotify.com/artist/0wNgFnLMKH5Dui6DdHSoUK?si=We2MVY6jSE6eut8W_CQaGg

My favorite song? Strangers in the Night

Wafting their chantable ad libs through heavy marijuana smoke, this group’s sound floats smoothly to your ear canals. The next act, The Joint Cheefs allowed me to let my conscious free through their use of moderate boom bap and sharp witted lyrics… but to be more clear, I can say that this trio changes the high experience by implicating an old feel of New York rap through their wrap of rhymes *that solely support the 420 movement* and calm aesthetic. To begin Geo The Rican, Sonny Blue Note and Loud Pack Ralph formulated as a triad one day while working in their studio in the Bronx. “We are producers and engineers so the idea itself just grew organically” says Geo the Rican. They have been making music for some time but to get to where they are now they pretty much just smoked a lot (no pun intended) and became more personal with their music, putting their trials and tribulations through their rhymes and as a result they have been gaining a peak of listeners on a daily basis. To prepare for the Philly Festival they answered with “smoking weed” but ultimately it was through the power of fun. “We take the music seriously but we try not to take ourselves too serious.” they go on to say “We take pride in our sound far as recording and making it.”To separate theirselves from the rest, the Joint Cheefs actually live through what they rap about. “We’re in a lane that we want to be in. It’s not too crowded, some people might say it’s our own and we’re going to hot box all the way to the top.” Aside from their recent release of “Never Canoe” on April 20th 2018, the Joint Cheefs are currently working on their album “Jars” which will be on all platforms by November 31st. When it comes to favorite strands, Sonny Blue Note enjoys Indica because it helps him sleep, Geo the Rican chooses Sativa because it helps him stay focused and Loud Pack Ralph enjoys hybrid because he just wants to get high. Fun fact: Their favorite slang is between “BroGod” and “Deadass” because they love to pay homage to their hometown.

You can follow them on

Instagram - @thejointcheefs

Soundcloud - https://soundcloud.com/thejointcheefs/the-joint-cheefs-n-high-c

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/artist/1DQg3ISncFAuWAdDhebBMc?si=Q-Lu8Xv9QP-pfqkDU9tflg

My favorite song: It’s a tough one. It’s between “N High C” & “The Art of Hotboxing”

Lights on (meaning the sunlight of course) and centered on the stage, the next act to captivate me was Almost Famous who reels his listeners in with a hook of merciless R&B and a fair amount of auto tune. Generally speaking, Mr Famous has the 2000 feel of soul mastered perfectly as he dashes platforms with a similar production that Ne-Yo or even Genuine would use. The difference between him and the artist mentioned though is that he adds his own twist of dominating words, making sure to switch it up through trap and pop (while also warning his mysterious lover from time to time that they could be replaced in a heart beat) But don’t assume that his heart is locked up in a cage, Mr Famous still has a soft side to him and shows it from time to time. To begin, Almost Famous started off his career as a background dancer for a mass of Philly artist. “Hearing them, I realized that maybe I should create my own music so I started writing, perfecting melodies and harmonies and going to shows.” Famous says. This West Philadelphian has been doing music for 4 years but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s slowing down. Almost Famous grinds hard through releasing new singles and it even shows through his stage presence! “[To prepare for the festival] I had a few shows coming up, so I just kept on rolling with my other ones.” says Almost Famous. One song that Almost Famous enjoyed making the most is “Options” because it was during a time when he had to walk to work in the midst of a strike. “I heard the beat and it was mine from there. If it wasn’t for the strike, it wouldn’t be what it is now.” Fundamentally, Almost Famous would collaborate with Jasmine Sullivan if he was given the chance because her song writing skills and singing is perfect. But the bonus? Jasmine Sullivan is also from Philly. Even though Almost Famous shows love to his hometown he is not too fond of the people who run the Philly Hip Hop Awards “About a year or so they dogged me out but now that I’m apart of a new record label, they try to follow my moves and the label I’m with [Spit It Out Entertainment].” Famous goes on to say. As for his opinion on DMX? He thinks that DMX is a legend. “I feel like he’s been through a lot and a lot of people try to discredit him.”

Almost Famous’ favorite slang is “you drawlin’. “ He also considers himself a morning person because that’s when he’s able to get the day started. His project “Growth” will be released in November. Almost Famous also wants to give a shoutout to Spit it Out Entertainment.

My favorite song? Options (but the other song title can’t be given out. I will let the fans know when “Growth” is on streaming platforms)

You can follow him:

Instagram - @almostfamous215

YouTube - https://youtu.be/ilkKpQ0X8us

*Credits to Brother IB Photography @brother_ib *

The next act to glide his angelic floetry to the streets of Philly was Mashich, an upcoming trap soul artist from Philly who keeps things interesting through a singsong vocal pattern and propulsive beats but to stand out from the other singers that took a part of the festival, Mashich graced the crowd with silver printed dance moves. Even though Mashich has been singing since he was 7, he started taking his craft seriously in the past year. He’s originally from Aiken, South Carolina but he moved to Philly 7 years ago. When it comes to his favorite slang from his new home, he says it’s “d*ckhead” or “f*ck out of here”. To prepare for the Philly Festival, Mashich practiced nonstop. “I’m really big on practicing so I utilized any free time and space I had.” Mashich goes on to say. “I blasted music from my speaker, went over the song and got my movements down. From there I was able to find a form that helped to present myself and my style.”To stabilize his vocal chords, he drinks a lot of tea and does a range of warm ups while making sure to sing out of his diaphragm. In addition, Mashich would collab with Daniel Caesar if he had the opportunity. “All of his music is super creative and how he keeps his vocal deliveries organized is really dope,” says Mashich “I could learn a couple of things from him.”What makes this crooner so different from others is the thing he plans on bringing an old school feel back to R&B. “I hope that through my unique songwriting and vocal structure I am able to push other artist to do the same” All in all he wants good fortunes for the human race. Because let’s face there’s more to life. Love is limitless. “Miss My Dawgs” is currently out on streaming platforms. Be on the lookout for his debut EP “Small Town, Big City” which will cover his coming of age story. Leaving his house and growing with Philly.

“Whatever you believe you can do, you can do that sh*t. You can much success and much love”

You can follow him on:

SoundCloud - https://soundcloud.com/mashichmusic/miss-my-dawgs

Instagram - @k.ing.tut

Last to wow the crowd away was Bronx native Captain DMac who “makes your neck stretch like an ostrich”. Ticking the spinal chords of those familiar with dancehall and pop, Captain DMac’s brush of sultry vocal play and enticing melodies took me back to a tropical island that effortlessly illuminates peace, love and good vibes towards it’s community. I couldn’t help but to move my hips to the vigorous, self pulsating beats to follow.

We [Luis and I] were instantly allured. We needed to find out more and so we did.

Captain DMac started making music when he was in high school. “I was doing songs for different environments and people or surroundings,” DMac goes on to say “Anything that would happen I would make a song about it. I would often recite Snoop Dogg’s “Drop it Like It’s Hot” [in that time period] too because he’s one of my favorite artist and then someone said “Hey you should make your own song” so I decided to try it. The first cover I did was “Dreams Money Could Buy” by Drake and ever since I have been creating my own songs.”His tracks are mostly embed with a homage to his culture and admirable women and when he spits, he SPITS. Before switching genres, Captain DMac was just an aspiring rhymester who made headlines with his hit single “Big Ol Booty” because of the line from the song “Stretching out her neck like an ostrich” (and it became so well known that it went viral on Facebook and Worldstar, gaining over 8 million views to date.) However, Captain DMac didn’t get the credit he deserved but eventually he was gaining more recognition and reclaimed what was his. A lot of people [A&R’s] saw his songs for what it is and not what it could be, but his close ones thought otherwise. “One day I was talking to my boy and he said “Yo you’re Jamaican you should really touch that dancehall scene because there’s a lot of American artist that are doing it.” and I said “You know what you’re right let’s try it. The first one I made was Hold (which received positive feedback) and from there I said to myself let’s keep creating these vibes.” says Captain DMac. “There was a lot of obstacles to get to where I am. I met a lot of good people, sometimes bad. But I continue to strive and I surround myself around people who also strive. They have to work hard towards what they want to get and that’s what my team does. We just trying to get it. It all starts with good music.” Captain DMac also says that “Just Me & You” was his favorite song to make, “I recruited my friend to do light vocals and in the end he sounded like Super Mario.” All in all what makes him unique from the rest is his pen game. “I can have multiple versions of one song”

Captain DMac will continue to touching the Dancehall scene & the people.

He will be dropping two EP’s very soon.

His single “Think About” ft Juanialys is out right now

Fun fact: His favorite slang is yerr

&

He is a boxers guy.

You can find him at:

Soundcloud - https://soundcloud.com/captaindmac

Instagram - @captaindmac

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/artist/5p154fD2gshCzENn8a4W8b?si=YLJ645G7TEOZSWFjQuj47Q

At its best, Philly Music Festival will continuously flourish as a platform for artist on the rise.

It’s more than just an event, it’s a spot that’ll reign of harmony, inspiration and positive energy.

By: Natalee Gilbert 🌞

[willswalkabout]

Ho Chi Minh, El Nido.

I can guarantee this blog will be the hardest to write of my travels. These have been the toughest and most unforgettable 9 days of my trip so far, but not without some great moments thrown in. (On completion I’ve also just done a word count and it’s really long again, sorry, but maybe one to print!)

When I left off last time I had just landed in Ho Chi Minh. It was about 11pm and although I was shattered, I really didn’t want to pay £15 for a taxi, so after some searching I found the 80p bus, which would drop me off 5 minutes from my hostel. On arrival the place seemed closed, though only because the reception desk didn’t function after 10pm. A security guard who spoke zero English met me in the lobby and took my passport in exchange for a key. Other than that he just motioned for me to go up the stairs, with no further direction. Unlike most hostels my bed number had no correlation to the floor number, which led to some confusion before eventually finding my mattress for the next 3 nights.

The next day was to be my touristy day, though it didn’t start till quite late due to tiredness from Thursday’s travel. I walked to the Independence Palace first. Ho Chi Minh’s attractions have odd opening times, as I discovered the palace was not to open till 1pm. It was around 34'C and so I decided to sit outside in the shade for about 40 minutes watching Vietnam’s most crazy city fly by. The palace itself is quite odd. It’s very typical 60s architecture, after its rebuild in 1966, and doesn’t really resemble a palace at all. On top of this it has never been inhabited by a King, and now only functions as a tourist attraction. It did play a pretty symbolic roll however in the “fall of Saigon” something that coincided with America’s evacuation of the country, so was a good reinforcement of my grounding in the events of the war. I find it sort of crazy that it doesn’t make up even a small part of any history course taught in school, despite it being the most monumental post-WW2 ideological war.

After this visit I engaged in culture of a different form, heading to the nearest Starbucks so I could stream Ed Sheeran’s latest album, which had just been released. I have been playing it practically nonstop since, through some incredibly arduous journeys which will be described later in the blog.

I then visited a very old post office, and Ho Chi Minh’s attempt at the Notre Dame, though, as mentioned earlier, odd timings prescribed that this building closed at 4, preventing me from going inside. I went back to the Hostel, which is effectively run solely by travellers who ran out of money and thought they’d chill in Ho Chi Minh for a bit. Although Flipside Hostels is Kiwi owned, the only staff I met were Canadian, British and Vietnamese. My route back to the hostel is actually a mini story in itself, as I had my first and last experience on a ‘Grab MotoTaxi’. Grab is Asian uber, and for 25% of the price you can sit on the back of a driver’s moped (helmet included!). It was more like a thrill ride than a taxi, as my driver swerved through non-existent gaps, and used the pavement as a 'shortcut’ when he got bored of the traffic. At one point during the ride he asked me to rate him 5 stars on the app at the end of the trip, to which I replied that I would do, if we made it that far. Beers at the hostel were cheap, and I spent most of the evening with a Canadian girl, and 2 Norwegian guys, all of which were in my dorm. It is fair to say we were all feeling the effects of the previous night on Saturday morning, but it was to my delight when at about midday a hilarious English guy called Joey, with a helicopter hat (baseball cap with the spinny thing), burst into our room announcing that we were going to a pool party. At this point I will admit that there many more cultural options in the city that I didn’t explore. For example the war museum, or tunnels. On the other hand I liked the people in the hostel, and in the past I thought pool parties only existed in LA, Vegas, or movies set in LA or Vegas, so I went. I would definitely like to return to see more of the city in the future.

It was a good laugh, and a very relaxing way to spend the day, with good food, and some fun conversations with one girl who was half Russian half Swedish, but about to go to University in Spain so she could be fluent in 4 languages by the age of 20. As well as a French man who decided we should try and have a conversation where we could only speak our native languages. This was a stupid idea, albeit with amusing consequences, given I got my French GCSE over 2 and a half years ago, and he was 30 and working in English. It did however give me the smallest of glimpses of how possible it could be to learn a language if you were forced to speak it full time.

I went out again that night with the same guys, and spent much of it playing ¾ rounds of pool with 2 Indian guys while discussing the IPL.

I left Ho Chi Minh the next morning with an English traveler who was heading to Sydney, my next stop being Manila. I hijacked his pre-booked taxi, my 3rd time doing so on this trip, however due to his nerves about missing his flight I did arrive at the airport 3 and a half hours before my own. Something I was prepared to take for the ease and cheapness of getting to the airport. El Nido is impossible to reach from an international destination in less than 2 days realistically, unless you align everything perfectly and don’t take a single rest. It is 7 hours drive north of Puerto Princessa, the island’s only airport, which is an hour and 50 from Manila. Therefore I spent Sunday night in Manila, in a small hotel about 15 minutes from the airport. People generally don’t hang around in Manila, I can’t honestly pass judgement on the claims of dirtiness and roughness, however my hotel’s location was certainly not somewhere you wanted to spend any time. I was able to locate a McDonalds a 10 minute walk away, but that was enough of Manila for me in this case.

The next day I had to leave at about 5 to get my 7am flight. I got a van from Puerto Princessa at 11am, getting me to my El Nido hostel at about 5pm. The bus journey is infamously horrific, not a view I can personally attest to. The road itself is reasonable for South East Asia, and my driver was fast and very friendly. The ticket was 1000 pesos return, about £16. I also managed to persuade a girl that had somehow booked the front seat of the minibus next to the driver, that with long legs in comparison to her stature of no more than 5ft1, my need was greater. I think the driver had in fact invited the woman to that seat, no reservation had been made, and she was quite relieved to move.

To reach my hostel you had to tramp 50m along the beach, to a view I don’t think I would ever get tired of. There are maybe a couple of photos of it on here, but I may have taken close to a hundred. My roommates were Catie and Lucie, recently qualified nurses from Northumbria.

I haven’t planned how to write this next paragraph, but am aware I would like to print this entire blog on its completion as a permanent memory of the adventure. El Nido is somewhere I will never regret visiting, with crystal clear waters, stunning sunsets and perfect weather. There are factors however that take a little away from the paradise, these being next to no internet connection and frequent power cuts. For these reasons notifications come in sporadically and in clumps. On Monday evening I suddenly had missed calls from mum and dad across 3 different platforms. This is a sight that truly does make your heart skip a beat. The connection was not strong enough for us to attempt any of the video calling methods of the last 5 or so weeks, WhatsApp, FaceTime or Google Duo. I slipped in my UK SIM card to the phone and made an international phone call from the beach, where I found out my Granddad, mum’s father, Reginald Flatman had passed away. Reg first got ill around Christmas, and had been in and out of hospital since, with various issues that were increasingly hard to diagnose.

I visited Reg a few days before I set off when he was in high spirits. I discussed my trip with him, and witnessed him as his trademark jovial self, as he laughed at mum’s gardening course exam, where she had somehow managed to hit the pass mark exactly…

Reg was possibly the kindest man I’ve ever known, with hardly a bad word to say about anyone. His only criticisms were directed at the attitude of the Ipswich Town football team, something I always found odd given his total indifference towards competitive sport of any kind. I’ll never forget walking the fields of Zoe and Des’ farm with him and the dog, when I would go down to Suffolk to work in the summer. I also had a memorable conversation with him 18 months ago at the reception of James and Vicky’s wedding, where he was utterly bemused by the 'racket’ coming out of the speaker system during the reception. I was delighted to be able to invite him to our school’s big band concert at Chelmsford cathedral last year.

Reg was a man of simple pleasures who would always refuse as best he could to trouble anyone for anything. We would rarely be able to contain our amusement at dinner, as when Reg was asked “would you like some more food”, he would reply with “that was great thanks”. Nana’s firm toned “Reginald”, uttered when he made a funny face across the table, nudged one of us under it, or tried to steal a roast potato, never failed to make myself or Kate laugh. Reg was to us polo mints, shredded wheat, and a day concluded with cheese and biscuits. Reg never bothered taking life too seriously, a characteristic summed up by a set of four photos in a frame at home, of him and Nana. He is screwing his face up in an effort to make the photographer laugh, in three of the photos. If this was a school photo session with a 10 year old, you would pretend the first 3 didn’t exist and just print the fourth large. The first three however said far more about Granddad than a composed shot ever could.

I will fly back from Melbourne to London on Sunday 19th to be with family for the funeral on Thursday 23rd. Then fly back out on Friday 24th to Auckland, NZ.

So El Nido. The nights are all very boring here as I did not have the energy or desire to go out. On Tuesday I accomplished a goal I’ve had for a long time, to visit a particular beach by the name of Nacpan. There is a particular travel blogger on YouTube by the name of Christian Le Blanc. While I was doing my exam revision last year, Christian was traveling the Philippines, and his trip to this particular beach was one that really drew me to the area. You have to drive 45 minutes north of the main town via scooter to get there. This is 25 minutes of glorious winding road up the coast, before a horrific 20 minutes along an unpaved dirt track to the beach. The reward is one of the largest and most untouched spots along the coast. Fine white sand and beautiful water. However I imagine it is becoming less and less 'secret’ by the month. Even in comparison to the video I saw 8 months ago there are now a few more food and drink stalls, a relatively organised parking scheme, and a far bigger sign from the main road. The one way in which El Nido has developed impressively is in its number of high end restaurants run by Europeans, in order to serve those visiting the town from nearby resorts. This did mean I enjoyed a great pizza that night, with about 10 others from the hostel.

The next day I did the hostel’s combined package of Tour A&C. The El Nido bay is very comparable to Halong Bay in Vietnam, except for more islands with beaches, as well as individual lagoons, in comparison to Halong’s mystical 1969 limestone rocks. At some point the tourist board must of grouped different combinations of the lagoons, beaches, islands, viewpoints etc, into tour A, B, C and D. There are now dozens of outlets selling these tours at prices from 1000-2000 pesos, (£16-£32). In the vast majority of cases you should try not to book tours and other items through your hostel. They will rarely be providing the service themselves, and will therefore be taking a cut simply for making a phone call to one of the companies on the street on your behalf. For example hiring a scooter from the hostel was 700 pesos a day, though I found one in town for 350. Saying all this the hostel ran their own in house tour which was a combination of tour A and C. It was 1700 which was nearer the pricier end, but the advantages were that it left from the hostel’s own beach, and you could do it with people you knew. I did love the experience, the videos of which online were another draw for me visiting the area. I snorkelled and got some decent GoPro footage of a small jellyfish that went on to sting me as I swam away. Taking photos on my phone and proper camera though was a more hap-hazard venture, with the boat being occupied by 16 soaking wet passengers constantly walking up and down around the kit. I also started to wonder if I was really getting the most out of the day, when seeing it partially through a lens. I was never going to get the greatest of photos, for that you’d need a chartered boat where you could specify time in each place. So I put the camera away for the most part of the trip, and enjoyed just sitting on the edge of the boat and taking it all in. Sunburn was the only tarnish on the day.

Thursday started with a torrential storm, which in typical Philippines style concluded with the weather returning to normal service in the space of 5 minutes. Myself, Catie, Lucie and a Swiss guy called Kevin went to do a zip line which was pretty awesome. I’d thought at the start of the day that I would be riding, and so brought my bike helmet with me. This meant rather embarrassingly this was to be my head protection for the experience, complete with visor. I managed to fashion my camera bag shoulder strap into a way of securing my phone to my harness, so I could film and photograph the ride. After this I returned to the hostel to relax a bit before planning to return to Nacpan to try and capture the sunset. This plan in hindsight was rash. Though cloudy, I was overly trusting on one German guy’s words that “his app said the sunset would be good”. It was not, with the clouds concealing nearly the entirety of the sun. I still enjoyed seeing the light shade of pink that took over the bottom third of the horizon, but it was not something I managed to pick up on the camera. What made the decision particularly stupid was that I then had to go back down the entirely unlit gravel path in the dark. I dropped off my scooter in town before meeting the girls for a meal at a traditional Philippino restaurant that had been recommended.

What followed was one of the most uncomfortable nights of my life, something I think I am only now really coming back from 2 and a half days later. Food poisoning hit me bad all night, as it did Lucie also. The plot thickens however, when we both awoke in the morning to find at least 7 others in the hostel had experienced identical symptoms overnight. I could not join up any dots with any of them leading some people to wonder if there was something airborne going around. I don’t think we’ll ever know, but it made Friday’s van journey even more daunting.

As mentioned earlier I had booked a return trip with the company that had brought me up, however the way it seems to work is that nobody drives if their vans are not full. This meant when I arrived at the bus terminal all the other companies that were present were enquiring about my departure time. My theory is that they knew my provider wouldn’t show. So at 1:35, five minutes past my supposed leaving time, a bidding war ensued. I was eventually bundled onto someone’s minibus. I can only assume after they took photos of my ticket, that they will get a refund off my people. This was not the main frustration of the journey unfortunately. The driver still had 4 free seats, and so he transformed into a hop on - hop off service for the whole island. This meant stopping for every random person on the side of the street, negotiating a price for their destination before letting them on. We must have made around 15 stops, something my stomach was not pleased with. 6 hours later we had arrived at Puerto Princessa airport. Advice I am giving myself for the future is not to book the cheapest hotel for short 1 night stopovers. This decision on Friday night involved a 20 minute tuk tuk ride to an area I was advised “not to walk at night”. The only pleasant anecdote in this experience was the fact my driver’s sister was a nurse in Ipswich, probably at the hospital granddad was receiving such good care. It was an incredibly odd and heartwarming meeting, as the driver spoke enthusiastically about his new brother in law, who runs a barber shop on the Woodbridge road. My room itself would be more accurately described as a cell. The bed was like a roll mat, and my troubles were furthered in the morning, when the building “ran out of power”. This was an impressive feat in itself as I was the only occupant in the entire 12 room hotel. I’ve got no idea how it copes with more than 5 customers… The power cut meant I woke up with no air con and no running water. I think I may have left without paying but the owner was so confused and I was so angry at the whole situation, I think the 600 pesos might remain in my pocket.

The next day I took a flight to Manila, then another to Kuala Lumpur. I’m writing this from the final couple of hours on what’s been a pretty grim overnight flight into Melbourne. I think when flying west-east you’re supposed to sleep, something I’ve completely failed to do.

I have a 2 hour domestic to Sydney and then the 47 hours from El Nido are complete. I think I have 14 hours to Abu Dhabi and then another 8 home next Sunday, so will try and summarise my week in Australia then.

Till the next time.

[jeroldlockettus]

How Spotify Saved the Music Industry (But Not Necessarily Musicians)

Daniel Ek, a 23-year-old Swede who grew up on pirated music, made the record labels an offer they couldn’t refuse: a legal platform to stream all the world’s music. Spotify reversed the labels’ fortunes, made Ek rich, and thrilled millions of music fans. But what has it done for all those musicians stuck in the long tail?

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability.

For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

Over the past year or two, we’ve done a couple special series of episodes. One was called “How to Be Creative”; the other was “The Secret Life of a C.E.O.” You wouldn’t think those two themes would intersect all that often. But today, they do — in a rare conversation with this man:

Daniel EK: My name is Daniel Ek and I’m the C.E.O. and founder of Spotify.

How does Daniel Ek define Spotify’s mission?

EK: So the way I think about our mission is to inspire human creativity by enabling a million artists to be able to live off of their art and a billion people to be able to enjoy and be inspired by it.

Spotify, if you don’t know, is a Swedish music-streaming service with roughly 100 million paid subscribers. Another 100-million-plus listen free on an ad-supported model. But it’s the subscribers that drive 90 percent of the company’s revenue. Ek co-founded the company in 2006, at age 23. It went public in 2018 and its market cap is now around $25 billion. Billion, with a b. For a company that doesn’t really make anything — other than making the connection between a beloved product and people who want to consume that product. The Spotify story is a singular story about the sudden transformation of an old, hidebound industry; it’s also a story about digital piracy, bandwidth, and of course about creativity; oh, also: it’s about the future of podcasting. In person, Daniel Ek is mild-mannered and unexcitable; he doesn’t soundlike an anarchist. But don’t be fooled.

EK: I think we are in the process of creating a more fair and equal music industry than it’s ever been in the past.

*      *      *

Depending on your personal perspective, Spotify is either an idealized digital jukebox or, as Radiohead’s Thom Yorke once put it, “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse.” Yorke wasn’t the only musician to hate on Spotify, especially in its earlier years. The Beatles and Pink Floyd famously kept their music off Spotify, as did some younger musicians:

ABC News anchor: Superstar Taylor Swift abruptly pulling all her albums from the streaming service Spotify, just days after the release of her hot new album 1989.

Today, Taylor Swift, Pink Floyd, the Beatles, and Radiohead can all be heard on Spotify. The barriers that might have made Spotify seem impossible have mostly been leveled. Primarily by one person: Daniel Ek. He grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Stockholm. These days, he spends about one week a month in New York, but he still lives in Stockholm.

EK: Yeah, and I have two very young kids, so one has just turned four and one is about to turn six.

DUBNER: You’re in the middle of it, aren’t you?

EK: I’m definitely in the middle of it.

One constant throughout Ek’s life has been music.

EK: So my grandfather was an opera singer and my grandmother, she was an actress but also a jazz pianist. So in my family learning music was almost an essential. It was probably more important than you going to college or university at that level. And in Sweden, we have public music education, so it almost costs nothing to get music education in Sweden and my cousin told me — he was way older than me — and was like, “You should learn how to play the guitar because that’s how you get girls.” And I was four or five at the time and definitely didn’t realize why that was a big thing. But I really thought he was really cool. So I was like, OK, well, he must know something, so I learned how to play the guitar. And then about the same time, I got my first computer. And that was a seminal inflection point because I had these two parallel interests that were both formed at a very, very young age.

For a time, Ek thought he might become a full-time musician. But the other interest began to win out.

EK: I think it was 1996 I got broadband Internet. It was like 10 megabits and when you think about it today — because it took until maybe two, three years ago until the average person in the U.S. even had that. But I had it in 1997 and —

DUBNER: And that was just a Swedish thing.

EK: That was just a Swedish thing, because the Swedes said, “Look, we believe everyone should have broadband. That’s going to be a big thing and by the way, we’ll subsidize your PC too, and it will cost $500 and you can get state-of-the-art PC.” So I had this virtually new computer which was subsidized by the government. I had this broadband that was subsidized by the government. And I went on the internet obviously all the time. The problem was there wasn’t really a lot to do on the internet except reading stuff. So I read a lot of stuff, but it wasn’t like the internet had movies for streaming or music or any of that stuff. And on came Napster. And it was a pure epiphany for me because you can search for any kind of music in the world. And within 10, 15 minutes you could have the entire album and you can listen to it, which was amazing.

Napster, which launched in 1999, became the most prominent peer-to-peer file-sharing service. And by “peer-to-peer file-sharing service,” I mean a piece of software that let a user like Daniel Ek download music files directly from the hard drives of other Napster users all over the world. Which meant that if one person bought a CD and copied it onto their hard drive, and shared it on Napster, all of a sudden, an infinite number of people could own it. For free. One problem: this is an infringement of copyright, and totally illegal. At least in most places. Sweden did not forbid the downloading of pirated content until 2005; the country became an international hub for illegal downloads and even gave rise to a political party, the Pirate Party, that won seats in the European Parliament. I asked Ek whether he had thought about the legality of music piracy.

EK: Yeah, I thought about it. But I was 14. It wasn’t like it was a big thing. And since it was so easy to access and the alternative was for me to go out and buy a record with money I didn’t have, it was like the only option. So it was this weird thing where you start off with something and all of a sudden, maybe I was — wanted to listen to Metallica and all of a sudden realized that this person also had King Crimson. Which was like, “Oh, holy shit, I didn’t know that Metallica was inspired by those guys.” And Led Zeppelin and Beatles and all the seminal ones that all of a sudden you start listening to. Or prog music or Jimi Hendrix’s entire discography. It brought me this weird sense of very broad music education and quite eclectic taste, which in turn got me even further into music. I mean, I don’t think I would have been that interested in music if it weren’t for piracy, to be honest, because I come from a working-class family. We couldn’t afford all the records that I wanted.

Napster became very large very fast. You might have thought the music industry would see this growth as a natural expression of demand for their product, and try to find a way to exploit that demand. But they didn’t see it that way. They saw piracy as nothing but theft. And as the music industry began to go the way of many fading 20th-century industries, they blamed their decline on piracy.

A pair of economists wrote a research paper at the time which found that illegal downloads in fact did almost nothing to affect music sales. They wrote: “Our estimates are inconsistent with claims that file-sharing is the primary reason for the decline in music sales.” The idea here was that the kind of people who illegally downloaded music weren’t the kind of people who were going to pay $15 for a CD anyway. Daniel Ek certainly wasn’t going to pay $15 for one CD. What he found ludicrous was that the only choice the music industry gave you was $15 for one CD versus zero dollars for all the music in the world.

EK: My view is that the music industry has always been excluding the vast majority of its potential. And what do I mean by that? Well, at the peak of the recorded-music industry, 2001, it was about 200 million people who were participating in the economy, who bought records. So was it 200 million people who were listening to music? No, of course not. That number was in the billions. So what the music industry did fairly well was they priced a product at a premium for an audience that was willing to pay for it. But it only captured a very, very small portion of the revenues. So what was obvious to me as I started using Napster back in the day, it was just, this is a way better product than going to a record store, there ought to be a way where you can give consumers what they want and at the same time make it work for artists.

DUBNER: As you got to know the record labels over time, years after Napster started, do you think they regretted not having partnered with Napster earlier?

EK: I definitely think so. I mean, in hindsight they probably realized that it was the wrong thing, but they thought by shutting it down that they’ve contained the problem and didn’t realize that it would just create seven new ones.

The music industry did get Napster shut down, but it had to keep playing whack-a-mole with a bunch of new pirated-music services.

EK: If you think about piracy for music, what it really forced in this first incarnation was the unbundling of the album.

Unbundling the album, that is, into single songs.

EK: So Apple then created a business of that by selling songs for 99 cents.

Apple, by way of iTunes, introduced the world to legal music downloading. It had taken Apple a while, but they finally succeeded in negotiating the rights with record labels. Daniel Ek, meanwhile, was having a lot of success himself.

EK: I started web-design companies, web-hosting companies, and a bunch of different companies.

He actually started doing this work when he was 14. By the time he was 18, he had a couple dozen programmers working for him. He enrolled at the Royal Institute for Technology but only lasted a couple months. Starting and selling internet companies was more fun. Ek was a millionaire by the time he was 23, and he started living like one: a fancy apartment, nightclubs, a red Ferrari. All this left him flat, and depressed. As he’d later tell Forbes magazine: “I was deeply uncertain of who I was and who I wanted to be. I really thought I wanted to be a much cooler guy than I was.” He moved into a cabin in the woods, back near his family; he played guitar, meditated, and over time thought up the idea for Spotify. It was very simple, really: an essentially infinite library of all the music in the world, available instantaneously, to anyone with an internet connection. How hard could that be? Ek and his co-founder, Martin Lorentzon, had two fundamental problems to solve: building the technology to allow for the instantaneous streaming of music; and persuading the rights-holders of all the music in the world to go into business with a brand-new company from Sweden — a country famous for its music piracy — and headed by a man who’d grown up on pirated music.

EK: There’s many different pirates, we would put it. There’s the pirates who just religiously feel like everything should be free. We were never that. Sean Parker definitely was never that either.

Sean Parker as in the co-founder of Napster; Parker later provided some venture capital to Spotify.

EK: There’s the other group who just looks at it like, this is the kind of consumer experience that makes sense and that’s how the world will look at it.

DUBNER: So then how professional of a pirate were you? What was the highest level of professionalism of piracy you ever accomplished? It was uTorrent, was that the name of the company?

EK: So actually this is probably an unknown part of the story. I wasn’t very much at all a professional pirate. At the time as I was thinking about starting Spotify, my co-founder, who’s not very technical, said to me, “Hey, there’s my friend who’s asking me about this programmer and he needs some advice.” And I was kind of dismissive about the whole idea and then he told me the name of this programmer and this guy was the founder of uTorrent.

This guy was Ludvig Strigeus, and uTorrent was a piece of file-sharing software that was particularly useful for digital piracy.

EK: And he’s a legendary engineer and I knew about him from engineering circles as being one of those persons who wins a lot of competitions for being great engineers. And I was like, “I have to meet this person.” And he had started this thing, just a fun side project, and it was uTorrent and it was growing very massively. We were actually trying to recruit him to come to Spotify. And he was like, “Well, I got this thing, uTorrent, and I don’t really know what to do with it.” So we persuaded him to sell uTorrent to us instead. And the whole idea from the beginning was actually to fold it because we didn’t really care about it.

DUBNER: Because by then you’re saying you already had a vision of how to make this the legit model work?

EK: Yeah yeah.

Spotify did install Strigeus as a top engineer at Spotify; and they didn’t shut down uTorrent — they sold it, to BitTorrent, the huge peer-to-peer protocol. I asked Daniel Ek which early task had been harder: building out Spotify’s technology or persuading the record companies to let him stream their music.

EK: Well, it’s hard at different stages. So first, you need to have a really good idea of what it is that you’re trying to solve. And in our case it wasn’t necessarily that the technology had a worth in and on itself. It was more around, how do we solve a real problem? And I think the problem that we were trying to solve was it needs to feel like you have all your music on your hard drive. So if you think about that, that means instantaneous. So we probably have to solve that. It probably means also all the world’s music. Okay, well you have to solve all the rights issues and all of those different things all encompassed in this one thing. So it was very clear to me that if we could deliver something that felt like you had all the world’s music on your hard drive, it would likely be way better than piracy, which was the dominant force of music consumption at the time.

From the outset, Spotify partnered with the record companies, first in Europe and eventually the U.S. What enticed the labels to participate? Actually, they would have been fools not to. Remember, the music industry was in steep decline thanks to changes in technology, economics, and consumer preferences. As Ek noted earlier, the industry’s model had always been inefficient: charging relatively high prices to capture only the top layer of the listening market. Most people got most of their music on the radio, which was free.

Now, before you start feeling too sorry for the record labels, let me say this: in the history of the creative arts, and in the modern history of business generally, it would be hard to find an industry that was sleazier, more exploitative, and more deserving of its comeuppance than the music industry. Through means legal and illegal, from sham contracts and bribes to strong-arming and collusion, the industry had for decades stayed fat by making relatively skinny payments to the people who actually made the music. Their royalty statements were masterpieces of creative accounting. Yes, they did provide venture capital to thousands of musicians with no money, but on the rare occasion when one of those musicians recorded a smash hit, the label made sure to capture most of the profits. What about the industry’s role in discovering new talent? That’s a bit of a myth — like saying that publishers “discover” great authors or NFL coaches “discover” great quarterbacks. They mainly cherry-pick the talented people who’ve already worked their way up, and then squeeze out as much juice as possible for their own use. Many industries exploit their labor force, but few had done so with as much vigor as the music industry.

Now that they were starting to go under, Spotify was offering a lifeboat — and a fairly luxurious one: 70 percent of streaming revenues and an equity stake in the company. The big record labels — Sony, Universal, and Warner — were reportedly each given between 4 and 6 percent of Spotify’s shares, with a consortium of independent labels getting another 1 percent. When Spotify went public, in 2018, these stakes would be worth billions. The labels would also get to keep drawing down 70 percent of Spotify’s revenues, and distributing it to their artists according to their own royalty formulas.

EK: Correct.

DUBNER: So that 70 percent flows then to the rights-holders , which are primarily still the three big music labels.

EK: Yep.

DUBNER: But in terms of the money flowing to the actual creators of the content, that’s complicated and problematic. So can you talk about your views on that and how actually involved you are or can be or want to be?

EK: Yeah, sure. Yeah, it’s — music copyrights generally is probably one of the more complicated areas of both law, just because of how copyright law is treated by society, and then just how it actually works and how it flows down. It’s pretty complicated for a lay person to understand. But the best way to start is just taking two steps back. So the birth of the music industry, and if you think about the role that everyone had, a record company was both — it used to cost a lot of money to make music. So a record company could help you by paying for the studio, the studio engineers, all the people to help you record your music. So that was a pretty big value-add. The next thing that ended up being a big problem was getting promoted onto — in the U.S. was thousands of different radio stations. And internationally it was multiplied by 10 times. It was a pretty big thing. And then distribution ended up being very expensive. So why we have major record companies ended up being — it ended up being easier for them to aggregate around distribution. And that’s how they were formed. That’s how they grew to power.

If you look at it right now, some of those things have obviously shifted. So the recording of music ends up becoming fairly cheap today in most instances because anyone can record if they have a laptop and a mic. Distribution also ends up becoming fairly cheap because you can just put your music on Spotify or Apple Music or any other service virtually free and get distributed. Now the flip side of that is the problem of then getting heard ends up becoming harder than ever before.

DUBNER: Because the supply is so much greater.

EK: Yeah. The supply is infinite, so in order to stand out you have to do quite a lot more. And where we have been as an industry just a few years ago was that you couldn’t rely on one income stream alone. So even if you felt, OK, this is digital distribution or streaming and I kind of get that. The truth of the matter is radio certainly here in the U.S. is still a massive, massive force. So you needed to do a lot of radio both for promotion but just generally distribution and even how you did royalty accounting and all those different things was a massive thing. And then physical still matters greatly. Certainly in the middle of the country. So the value-add by record companies is fairly great and is very important certainly as you’re thinking about how to get this out.

Now the roles going forward is changing quite dramatically. So you’re finding that there are a lot more younger record companies coming out that are formed by maybe being specialists in a certain genre. They’re now finding equal opportunities to get their music heard. So they’re being distributed via indie labels or they may even go and distribute their record companies through one of the major record companies in order to get the support that they’re getting. So the industry is really changing. And we’re obviously a huge part not so much in the change but just being a participant in that dialogue about where it’s going, what is the role of a manager, what’s the role of a label, what’s the role of an agent, what’s the role of a publisher. Because all of those roles are now moving along as the industry is becoming more and more digital.

DUBNER: Right. But you — from what I gather Spotify has little leverage or maybe even interest in once you turn over the royalty share in how they distribute it to their artists, correct? You have nothing to do with that, I assume.

EK: We have nothing to do with that. What we are trying to do, however, because this is such a dramatic shift in an economic model for artists, one of the big things was just how do we educate people about this. Because really even the iTunes model was fairly simple. Because I’m selling my goods and I’m getting X for it. We can argue what X should be, but it’s really that. Here with streaming it’s like I’m getting a revenue share of something and it’s streaming, and it looks like it’s a very small number per stream. But what is a million streams? Is a million streams a lot? Is it a little? Is it — how should I think about it? That ended up being a very big shift.

DUBNER: Are you saying that independent artists are over time via Spotify gaining leverage in the revenue ecosystem or not really? Because the common complaint is this: Spotify is great for customers.

EK: Right.

DUBNER: Spotify has turned out to be a life-saver for labels. Spotify has been great for Spotify, and for you. And it’s been great for some musicians. But then there are others who feel that they’re worse off than they would have been. Now every case is a little bit different. But to those who feel like, “Great, I’m glad all music is available to everybody all the time and I’m glad everybody else is making out well” — what do you say to those artists, or maybe what do you say to someone who’s starting in music now? Can it be a sustainable future for them?

EK: I think we are in the process of creating a more fair and equal music industry than it’s ever been in the past. So I’ll take an example, back in 2000, 2001, at the very, very peak of the music industry, peak of CD, all of those different things. Our estimate is that there were about 20- to maybe 30,000 artists that could live on being recorded music artists. Now, they could be touring, they could be doing other things, and the number could be far greater than that. But there were only 20- or 30,000 that could sustain themselves being that. Why? Well, because, again the distribution costs so much, which ended up being that there’s very few artists that could even get distributed to begin with. And because the costs were fairly high for a person buying the music, you ended up going with what you knew and wouldn’t take that much risk on unknown artists. So in the world with streaming, what’s really interesting is the alternative cost for you to listen to something new is virtually zero. It’s just your time. And because of that, you do listen to a lot more music than you did before and you listen to a bigger diversity of artists than you did before which in turn then grows the music industry.

DUBNER: You were saying there were 20, to 30,000 artists that could be supported. Do you know what that number is now?

EK: I don’t know what the number is now but it’s far greater. Even on Spotify itself, it’s far greater than that.

The economist Alan Krueger taught for years at Princeton and worked in both the Clinton and Obama White Houses. He was also fascinated by the economics of the music industry. Krueger once gave a speech at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame comparing the music industry to the modern economy at large. In both cases, he argued, most of the earnings were going to fewer and fewer people at the top of the pyramid. It’s what some people call a tournament model, where the winners get most, if not all, of the profits. Krueger died recently at age 58 — by suicide. He left behind a book, to be published soon, called Rockonomics. In it, he writes that there are roughly 200,000 professional musicians in the U.S. today, accounting for 0.13 percent of all U.S. workers. That percent has stayed about the same since 1970.And what’s the median annual income for these musicians? Twenty thousand dollars. The argument Daniel Ek is making sounds good in theory — that digital distribution should make it easier for lesser-known artists to find listeners and get paid. Remember how Ek defines the Spotify mission:

EK: To inspire human creativity by enabling a million artists to be able to live off of their art.

This was one of the great promises of the digital era — that you wouldn’t have to be a superstar to make a living. In 2006, the journalist Chris Anderson published an influential book called The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Daniel Ek, in a 2010 interview, called The Long Tail his favorite book. But Alan Krueger’s findings don’t support the long-tail promise. Social media and algorithm-driven recommendations — including Spotify’s own playlists — seem to magnify the bandwagon effect, whereby popular songs become even more popular by virtue of their popularity. In 2018, Spotify’s most-streamed artist was Drake, with 8.2 billion streams. Assuming a typical streaming royalty rate of 0.4 cents per play, that’s nearly $33 million going to Drake’s camp. But the pyramid is sharp, and things fall off really fast once you go beneath the top. Alan Krueger cites an industry survey which found that just 28 percent of artists earned money from streaming in 2018, with the median amount just $100.

So if you think about the streaming-music revolution as a sort of tournament, let’s think about how the various constituencies are making out. Spotify and Daniel Ek are doing very well; so are the company’s original funders, who got a huge return on their investment. The record labels have also been big winners: not only did Spotify reinvigorate their industry but it seems to have substantially improved their overall valuations. The Universal Music Group, for instance, which is currently for sale, has recently been valued at more than $30 billion; in 2013, its valuation was just $8.4 billion. Other winners in the Spotify tournament are customers, who get much more music than they used to get for much less money; and the most popular musicians are also winning big. One constituency that’s not obviously sharing in the winnings: the long-tail artists, of which there are many.

DUBNER: So if you weren’t you, and you were looking at this revolution from the outside, what would you say about the fact that a company like Spotify, which doesn’t produce content — well, it’s starting to, more — but is essentially a friction-remover and a distributor, is worth more than the entire music industry was about the time of its creation?

EK: Well, I mean I don’t want to — I’m actually very little focused on what a company is worth or isn’t, or if that’s fair. There’s something called a Wall Street which is really focused on that instead. I don’t really focus on that. We at Spotify are interested in is how do we get a music industry which actually participates in all of the income streams?

*      *      *

Daniel Ek was a teenage entrepreneur; a millionaire in his early twenties; and now, at 36, a billionaire, having built Spotify into a streaming juggernaut that is now worth more than the entire music industry was worth at the time of Spotify’s founding. Spotify is in the news pretty much constantly these days: launching their service in India, filing an antitrust lawsuit in Europe against Apple, claiming that Apple’s App Store is unfairly favoring its own Apple Music over Spotify. For Ek, the biggest challenge at the moment would seem to be figuring out a way to derive more value — more revenue — from the massive, sprawling ecosystem of recorded music, an ecosystem whose business evolution has been very slow.

EK: So if you look at say the video industry — I say video and I really encompass the entire TV industry, the movie industry, all in video. What I find fascinating is it used to be a conversation where it started off only as paid. Then it added advertising as a component. And then there was a bunch of firms that were only focused on the advertising part of it and then a bunch of firms that were only focused on the subscription income. So most notable, you had CBS on one end, on the advertising end of the spectrum. You had HBO on the other end of this spectrum, asking for subscription income. And then if you look at it today, the truth of the matter is CBS is about 50/50. So it focuses as much on subscription income as it does on advertising. And HBO still is paid-only. But you’re — as an industry, it’s moving that both of these revenue models are equally important.

And that’s my point with the music industry too. My point it’s like, what would happen to the music industry if you all of a sudden combined the the power of advertising as a revenue model, the power of subscription as a revenue model, the power of a la carte on top of that as a revenue model. The three of them on a base of the three billion people around the world that are interested in music easily, just by virtue of looking at how much time people spend listening to music, ought to be at least multiples greater than what the current music industry is and probably larger than the music industry’s ever been.

DUBNER: And you just added 1.3 billion or so in India, yes, potentially?

EK: The Indian music market, what’s fascinating to me, is 90 percent of that market is about Bollywood films. And they are throwing off music and that’s what’s selling in India.

DUBNER: Is it being well-monetized still? I mean people buy it, or I mean —

EK: It’s not well-monetized. But the music industry is essentially a byproduct to the film industry, which for me tells a very interesting story, that there’s so much development left to do. What would happen if the ecosystem there was healthy? Then people wouldn’t think about making music just for movies.

DUBNER: So the India Spotify story could turn out to be exactly the opposite in a way of the American Spotify story, where some people feel here small artists are getting — the long tail is so skinny that you can’t make a living. And theoretically it may disincentive some people from creating. There — maybe there’s incentives to join, even the middle of the long tail there would be a step up, yeah?

EK: Yeah. Well, I mean it’s virtually non-existent. So it’s in a much earlier development stage than the U.S. music economy.

DUBNER: Let me ask you about consumer surplus, which is something economists love to talk about — those rare cases where you get something for much less than you’d be willing to pay. So Spotify is, relatively, super cheap, $10 a month for all the music I want. And that $10 would buy two-thirds of one downloaded album. So if you like music enough to buy two-thirds of one album per month, then to get all the music in the world essentially for that same price is ridiculously cheap. So I’m curious to know two things. What do you know about willingness to pay more? And what do you know, if anything, about the disposable income that’s now been captured by consumers by not having to spend more than $10 to consume the universe of music — where that disposable income goes, I’m curious to have any data on that.

EK: Well, I mean, obviously we agree. We think $10 a month is a very, very cheap and an amazing proposition. But the amount of people who wake up in the morning thinking, Hey, I want to pay $10 a month for music isn’t as great as most people would believe. And we believe that is because not only did piracy exist in a big way just a few years ago, but there are all of these other sources where you can access music very cheaply. Mostly free. So you can go on radio and listen to it, but you can also go on YouTube and you can find the entire archive of music, including all the bootlegs and videos and you can listen to that entirely for free. That’s what we’re competing against. So in order to do that, you can imagine then it’s a free product versus one that’s $10 a month. That’s a pretty big stretch , certainly since all of these other things may have other things like convenience — in the case of radio, works in your car, works in all those different things. And then, in the case of YouTube, it’s just, it’s everything. It’s even greater than what Spotify’s library is. So that’s where we’re, from a competitive set, wrestling with. Now obviously as cars get more and more connected, I do think streaming service is a way better user proposition.

DUBNER: Although I did wonder with autonomous vehicles theoretically coming maybe relatively soon.

EK: Right.

DUBNER: It does strike me that listening to music in a car is a perfect complementary activity. Because you need to drive, you need to keep your eyes on the road, but your ears are free. I do wonder with autonomous vehicles whether it may actually be harmful to streaming music because now my eyes are free to something that might be more interactive.

EK: Right. I mean, you may be right. I don’t know. I think that what’s really interesting, however, is that countercultural force right now from people looking into their phones is all of these well-being things, both Google and Apple released “screen time,” which is supposed to restrict your screen time. And we have the Alexa in your home, which is another device which you’re not supposed to look at, which are all great countercultural reactions to this, watching a screen, which we wouldn’t probably have imagined just a few years ago.

DUBNER: Do you have those kind of aspirations for Spotify to get into, health and wellness and hand-holding of various sorts?

EK: Not directly. To the extent that we do something like that, we’re already very big in terms of meditational music, wellness music, sleep, pink noise, white noise, everything on the spectrum. And now with podcasts obviously on the service too, there’s a lot of people who are focused on those things, which I’m very excited about.

Spotify has been streaming podcasts for years. But it made news recently by spending a few hundred million dollars to acquire two podcast-production companies, Gimlet and Parcast, and a firm called Anchor that’s primarily a podcast technology platform.

EK: Correct. Correct.

DUBNER: So that really changes things in a number of ways. Because you have been successful not being a content creator or producer — too much, at least. So I guess first question is why, and then the second question is, how will it unfurl?

EK: Right. Well, in the future, I don’t think people will make a choice whether they’re subscribing to a music service. We think that they’re making a choice whether they will have an audio service of their choice. It wasn’t this well-thought-out master plan. “Hey, we need an adjacent business, and we don’t know which one it is.” It wasn’t like that at all. What actually happened, because Spotify is a platform was we started seeing in my home country Sweden actually, we started seeing record companies buying podcasts and uploading them to the platform as another revenue opportunity for them to grow. And it resonated really well with listeners. And that was the first step. And then in Germany, record companies there had massive amounts of rights to audio books, which I wasn’t aware of. And they started uploading that to the service and very quickly, we went from no listening to that and now we’re probably if not the biggest, the second-biggest audio book service in Germany. And this is without our involvement. This just happened by proxy of us being a platform. So we started seeing it resonating really well into people’s lives. And they thought of Spotify not just as a music service but as a service where they can find audio. And it played really well into our strategy of ubiquity — i.e., being on all of these different devices in your home, whether it’s the Alexas or TV screens or in your cars or whatever as just another source where you could play your audio.

DUBNER: But why do you want to go to the trouble to pay a couple hundred million to buy a firm that’s creating it when almost everybody making podcasts would probably willingly have their content on Spotify?

EK: Yeah. Well, the reason why is really twofold. So one is that the format of podcasts, we’re still very early on into what it will be. If you really think about it, for most people, there’s all of these basic things for creators that haven’t been solved, like how well am I doing. It’s not that easy to find out. How am I monetizing the show and the value for advertisers, it’s just not that easy to find out. And thirdly, what are people saying about my show, feedback. Those are three very elemental things that if you think about it almost all other formats, if you’re a journalist today and writing in text, there’s ways to solve all three of them. We can already —

DUBNER: I mean what you’re describing does exist to some degree on Apple Podcasts, which I realize Spotify has a complicated relationship with. But that’s also, like Spotify, it’s a closed ecosystem. It’s not part of the web, quite. So if Apple Podcasts data existed in a non-closed environment would that have been enough for Spotify to not need to buy its own firm?

EK: Probably. I mean, in the end I mean it’s all about solving needs that creators or consumers are having. That’s what we’re focused on. And if someone had solved that need then obviously there would be less of a reason for us to do anything about it. And you know the same thing, if there was massive amounts of audio-book services in Germany I’m sure we wouldn’t have been successful.

DUBNER: Can you talk about Spotify customer data. What do you have and what do you do with it?

EK: Well, what we do with it now is very tightly regulated because we’re originally a European company and in Europe, I believe, five or six years ago there was a new initiative called G.D.P.R. that officially became a law some time April, May I believe last year. And obviously we’re complying with that. And what it basically says is that all the data that we have around you as a customer, you need to be able to ask us for it and we need to deliver it back to you. You need to have an opportunity for it getting deleted by us.

DUBNER: What are your abilities to monetize that data, though, to third parties?

EK: Well our ability to monetize it is obviously based on the contract that we have with our users, so obvious things that would be what genre of music are you listening to, what’s your age, what’s your demographics. And those are things that advertisers can target against.

DUBNER: Right. And how well do you monetize that currently?

EK: You mean if we do monetize it?

DUBNER: Yes. If you do monetize it how well do you —

EK: We monetize some of those aspects of course like any normal ad platform. It’s very important though to note that we’re not selling any customer data.

DUBNER: That’s what I’m asking. So there’s ads on the Spotify platform.

EK: Yes.

DUBNER: You’d be fools not to target those to listeners based on their demographics and their listening tendencies.

EK: Of course.

DUBNER: But you do have a lot of data that would be valuable to third parties.

EK: Oh yeah, massive amounts, but not even just for other advertisers. But you can imagine even for the music industry, there’s tons of data about how their songs are performing or other people’s songs might be performing that could inform them about what they’re doing. We’ve taken the stance that we don’t monetize the data itself at all. We don’t sell the data.

DUBNER: Why?

EK: Well, it’s an important one for us that users should be able to rely on us not — my fundamental view is, it’s their data. If we can use the data in order to make the Spotify experience better, then all good and great. And I think many users would say yeah, I agree with that. But because now of G.D.P.R., which I do think is the right step — we can argue about like was it the right implementation of it and all those things. But I do think it’s great for customers that there’s something like G.D.P.R. there. And you can delete the data. You can also say opt out of specific things that we are gathering about you and say, hey I don’t want you to know X or Y.

DUBNER: Yeah. I’ve read that you operate your life in a series of sort of five-year commitments. I don’t know how finite or real that is, but if it is real.

EK: Right.

DUBNER: Where are you now in the five-year cycle, and what happens next?

EK: It’s not always been five years, by the way. So when I started the company, it was a five-year commitment because being 23 at the time, having started lots of different companies before I really wanted to see what would happen if I applied myself to one thing and only one thing and do it for a meaningful amount of time, how far I could get on that problem. And the longest I could imagine spending on anything was five years. So that’s how it ended up being five years. And then when the five years passed, I was 28 so I said, Well when 30 — so it was a two-year increment. And now I said to myself, just before going public last year, is this what I want to do? And what would happen if I made a 10-year commitment? Which felt pretty daunting and what is it that we would have to do, what does the company have to look like for me to be interested to do this for another 10 years? Well what would my role have to look like in order for me to be interested?

DUBNER: Is that a key component, how interested you can remain — I mean it needs to be constantly challenging to you?

EK: Yeah, definitely so. I mean to be honest because otherwise if you don’t have that passion and you don’t feel like you’re growing and challenging yourself, someone else will probably do a much better job.

DUBNER: So where are you right now?

EK: I’m in year two now of a ten-year commitment.

DUBNER: So what did you see in the future of Spotify that you thought was going to be so amazingly, excitingly challenging for 10 years?

EK: Well, there’s really two things. So the first and more important one is really from the inception of Spotify, the assumption was that we would solve the user problem. I.e., — get people to listen in a much better way and then they’ll contribute back to the music industry. The core assumption was that the music industry would take care of all the other things — how people get signed, how they get heard. And I realized that that just didn’t happen. So we’re largely doing business the same way as we were doing 10 years ago. There’s been some evolution of that. But I want to work with the music industry. I was never a disrupter. That’s the big misunderstanding about me. I’ve — I believe the record companies are important and will be important in the future. But we believe we can be the R & D arm for the music industry, that we can develop better tools and technology to allow them to be more efficient and thereby creating more, better solutions for them and for artists.

DUBNER: Can you give an example of how the efficiency happens?

EK: Well, one of the hardest problems right now for an artist is to get heard. One of the biggest platforms to be heard at would be Spotify, right? So today the primary tool that an artist has to get heard on Spotify besides putting the music on there is getting known by one of our editors. So in a weird way, while we want to democratize music, we’ve become gatekeepers as well. So the question is: can we develop tools that enables artists to promote their music more efficiently just by themselves on the platform? And that could be in the form of being able to talk to their existing super fans that are on the platform. It could be in the form of better promotional tools for record companies in how they pitch music and get the music out there.

Spotify having become a gatekeeper — whether inadvertently or not — is an important point. A song that Spotify adds to one of its playlists will get many more streams than one that doesn’t. And streams translate into money for the rights-holders. So having that power is important, especially from a profit-maximizing perspective. If Spotify were primarily concerned with profit-maximizing, it might promote content that is cheaper for Spotify to stream. Maybe it’s content they produce themselves; or just content that comes with a lower payment rate than others. It may not sound like a big difference to pay a rights-holder 0.4 cents per stream versus 0.3 cents, but if you’re talking hundreds of millions or billions of streams, it adds up.

DUBNER: What do you listen to these days?

EK: Music-wise or podcast —

DUBNER: Well, both.

EK: So music-wise I’ve been really interested in African music lately. So particularly West African dancehall music has been something that’s been pretty cool. We launched in South Africa a year ago. So all of those playlists started bubbling up and there’s been a lot of really cool —

DUBNER: It must be so cool to launch in a new place as a means for you guys to discover what’s the music —

EK: Oh yeah, for sure, and there’s a lot of things that you just don’t even know about. So that’s been for me the biggest thing over the last year that’s been really interesting. And then on the podcast side, it’s such a fascinating format to me. There’s obviously people who can listen to Crimetown or whatever it may be, just to get entertained. For me it’s more the educational part of it. So it could be a Freakonomics. There’s one called Invest Like the Best that’s quite interesting and thoughtful about investments and how you do that. I do listen to quite a lot of history podcasts as well. Just to get an hour uninterrupted about a subject. There’s no other format that goes to the same depth as I find that podcasting does.

DUBNER: Are there still holes in the Spotify music library that you really want to fix?

EK: There are. But obviously by now the holes that we have are probably more regional holes than the fact of the big ones. I’m sure that there are — Garth Brooks being probably the best-known example right now. But most of it is really about old music, getting the archives up. I’m very proud that we did that deal with the BBC a few years ago where we’re now bringing the entire archive onto streaming. Same with Deutsche Grammophon, the German equivalents as well.

DUBNER: Would you ever consider in a case like Garth Brooks — I mean, I’m sure you’re going to say no to this, because it would be illegal — but would you ever consider saying, “Look, we’re Spotify, we’re just going to put the music there,” and then he will see how well it does. And then the first check gets written. And then that will bring him to the table in a proper way. Would you or did you ever do that?

EK: No. We’ve never done that. It goes against the ethos of what it is we’re trying to do. I mean, again, when we started, that was the modus operandi. There was all these —

DUBNER: A sort of terrorism in a way, yeah?

EK: Yeah, a lot of these services, where people just uploaded all the music and then they figured out the problem later on. That was never the approach that we took.

DUBNER: And why was that? I mean, do you consider yourself a particularly ethical person? Is that the way Swedish business is done? Because to be fair, Uber pretty much did that. They would go into cities where they knew that local authorities wouldn’t allow them to operate.

EK: Right. Well I don’t like to say that we’re more ethical than other people. It just felt like the right thing to do. And I believed that the problem for the music industry with the past had been just that fact, that it always felt like it was people who wanted to disrupt the existing music industry. I don’t believe that the music industry has to be disrupted. I believe it has to be evolved. So we like to work with them as partners. That’s always been our approach. There isn’t music on Spotify that the copyright owners haven’t authorized us.

DUBNER: I have one last question. If you weren’t doing this now — let’s just pretend Spotify really hadn’t worked, that either the technology or the rights-gathering proved impossible. You’d be doing what now, and where?

EK: If I weren’t doing this, I would probably do something in health care. And it’s a weird revelation, if you asked me ten years ago, I wouldn’t have said that. But right now it’s like I came to that realization because people always said, “Oh, Spotify is so amazing,” and my response was always, “Well, it’s not saving lives, but it’s good.” A few years ago I was thinking to myself, why am I not saving lives, and what would I do if I did that? And I talked about these technology currents, and I think in healthcare a lot of those technology currents are starting to play out. And it’s not just about the sort of digital part of these things. It’s just the advancement in biotech overall, CRISPR, proactive medicine. It’s going to be the next decade or two decades, we’re fundamentally moving from a place where we will look at doctors or the way we treated people like it’s almost witchcraft two decades from now. We’ll just know a lot more. And that’s fascinating, to think about the implications that that will have economically, because I believe in the end it means that we can spend a lot less of our GDP on healthcare and as a consequence hopefully treat a lot more people. So yeah, I’m really interested in that part, and what’s going to happen in that space.

DUBNER: Do you think you will do that, I mean, in eight years? At the end of this ten-year, quote, commitment, you’ll be only 44.

EK: Right.

DUBNER: Do you think you will try something radically different for you like that?

EK: I hope so. My interests — I love music. It’s been a passion really since the beginning of my life. And that will always be a passion and always be something that I’ll do in some shape or form. But we’re here a very, very short period of time on Earth. And I feel a tremendous amount of responsibility having — you know, it’s insane that I’m 30-plus years old and having had as much fortune as I’ve had, so I feel like I need to do a lot more than what I’m doing to leave the world a better place than what I entered it.

If you want to learn more about Spotify — including how a team of Swedish social scientists tried to reverse-engineer it to see how the platform really works — check out a new book called Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music.

*      *      *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Harry Huggins, Zack Lapinski, Matt Hickey, and Corinne Wallace. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Daniel Ek, co-founder and C.E.O. of Spotify.

RESOURCES

“The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis,” by Felix Oberholzer‐Gee and Koleman Strumpf (Journal of Political Economy, 2007).

The post How Spotify Saved the Music Industry (But Not Necessarily Musicians) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/spotify/

[thecloudlight-blog]

New Post has been published on Cloudlight

New Post has been published on https://cloudlight.biz/how-internet-fandoms-are-gaming-the-music/

How Internet Fandoms Are Gaming the Music

N her Fans to The front column, Brittany Spanos dives into what is going on in fan culture at the Net.

Given the deluge of tune hovering at us from all platforms, every so often artists needs to get imaginative to attain Primary on the charts. Of route, it is clean for family names like Ed Sheeran and Taylor Fast who have mastered the method and feature the general enchantment besides. For nonetheless-growing acts, viral memes have helped songs like Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles” or Baauer’s “Harlem Shake” to capture the zeitgeist.

Net primarily based fandoms are nonetheless figuring out the formulation

And plenty of are seeking to take matters into their personal fingers, growing grassroots promotional campaigns. Fan accounts that are not affiliated formally with the artist visit outstanding lengths to ensure that everyone is on the same web page, taking an eager hobby in facts and income and supplying specific instructions on a way to maximize streams and change IP addresses for Fanatics who live outside of us.

People like Pop Crave’s Will Cosme were charting the movements of fan

Twitter and passionate promotional campaigns initiated via social media for years. The 23-year-antique’s very own account is a group of chart statistics, chart predictions, aggregated news and gossip that has racked up extra than 100,000 fans in two years and captured the attention of each Lover and most important artists who’ve shared the tweets published to the account.

For Cosme, the first and high-quality examples of while fan Twitter has become a powerful promotional tool turned into with the upward push of one Direction and later Fifth Concord, whose Fanatics and label mimicked the promotional campaigns of Directioners to present the female organization a public raise following The X-Component.

The Best Internet Business

There are several Net Host giants at the internet that provide non-public label rebranding to small enterprise proprietors. This is probably the high-quality possibility to “piggyback” on properly-set up corporations in case you are simply beginning out in net advertising. This gateway for limitless wealth is made feasible due to the developing demand of digital advertising and marketing in regions which might be outside the scope of these massive businesses.

For you to advantage a percentage of the market, those company Web businesses provide reseller plans to small groups which take their services and products, rebrand them and sell to enterprise owners at an income. these products include domain name offerings, Net hosting, online garage, commercial enterprise productiveness software, and tools.

There may be pretty a bonus in being a small business store due to the fact one is able to customize their enterprise on the neighborhood stage and meet the needs in their growing market on the arena Extensive Web. Permit’s study the definition of virtual marketing to recognize why the call for has grown extensively during the last decades.

What’s digital marketing

Digital marketing involves all capabilities that are geared closer to promoting online enterprise activities. This consists of however is not restricted to products and services in subcategories consisting of area name registration, Internet web site hosting, e-mail advertising and marketing, Internet design and improvement, software applications, income and advertising, social media advertising and session, and all medium through which corporations and individuals promote it and marketplace their products online.

Retail advertising and marketing

Retail advertising refers to sports geared in the direction of giving up users of an internet-based totally business answer including domains registration, Internet layout offerings, software apps for enterprise and personal use, social media control, Web hosting and other activities that promote online verbal exchange.

Because the want for business answers intensifies, enterprise persons turn out to be increasingly concerned about assembly the needs of the online industry, and consequently, the pros and Cons of the net enterprise become applicable.

The Cons of digital advertising

One might think that the more clients you’ve got, is the more profits you’re likely to accumulate however the reality be instructed, the extra the commercial enterprise turns into more challenged due to competition, need for online bandwidth, Web creativity, specialty, and want for customer service because of boom in customer queries and the want for technical assist.

Gaming Has a Positive Side

Video games can be the first-rate gifts for youngsters however progressively dad and mom would possibly remorse having ever introduced them to the youngsters. However, the global popularity of gaming has arisen because the case in point how attractive it’s far for game enthusiasts throughout the globe. Gaming may also have some of the baneful influences, however, its positives can’t be disregarded too because it brings the extremely good cost for the human race as an entire. They’re a whole lot extra than mere toys, in case you begin counting the advantages of gaming.

Here are a few superb aspects of gaming:

1. As human beings get into gaming, they analyze a lot about the use of IT, along with downloading files, taking display pictures, importing information and additionally sharing it with others. They come in touch with different game enthusiasts around the world and share expertise and studies with them, for that reason getting to know more and having fun.

2. Gaming enables human beings to expand their abilities and capacity to make the choicest use of gaming resources. They learn to control sources and make the proper use of equipment, expand theories and fashions and additionally layout strategies, all of that is carried out while paying video games.

3. Whilst humans play games, they increase a thirst for expertise and want to take it to the higher ranges.

They carry collectively their man or woman abilities and pool them as much as make the great of them.

four. Some other tremendous issue of gaming is that it encourages social interaction as people from extraordinary elements of the arena come collectively thru this platform and exchanges their abilities, thoughts, and thoughts.

five. It encourages people to sharpen their potential to interpret data via the lateral thinking technique. Individuals who really get into gaming device methods and tricks to address numerous conditions and turn out to be winners in the games they play.

6. Game enthusiasts expand an impeccable know-

How of the history of the arena as many games take them via the activities within the world records, a number of them even enacting the occasions and giving the lifestyles like stories.

7. Innovation is Any other present of gaming, as humans are able to think of new ideas to reap better stages in gaming. They can bring out new ideas in images, designs and software programming to step up games to a new stage.

eight. Subsequent among the high-quality advantages of gaming is the truth that gamers examine the art of collective trouble solving while they play games with others in agencies and proportion thoughts and strategies related to trouble fixing.

Emo Music: Is It Disappearing?

These days, I attended a Brand new concert and puzzled once I left the display, how popular is Emo song nonetheless in trendy society?

Emo tune changed into at its top inside the early to mid-2000s, and turned into a large element for teens and teenagers within the America. Bands that fell into this style have been bands like My Chemical Romance, American Football, and Dashboard Confessional.

The cause why I specially wondered if this genre

Turned into nevertheless famous became the reaction from more than one human beings I talked to earlier than the Latest show. I got reactions starting from “Who’s that?” to “Fortunate, I am jealous.” from people ranging in distinct age companies. The people who knew commonly of the Modern day have been in the age group who would be of their young adults in the mid-2000s.

So what I’ve been thinking because then, became it just a fad and the way longer will Emo track be on the earth? It rings a bell in my memory a lot approximately how new genres are emerging every 5 years or so. For instance, Emo track throughout the mid-2000s, then “Hardcore/Screamo” music, then indie tune the previous couple of years or so.

Do age and the duration you grew up in have a massive element in what you listened to?

I grew up in the “Hardcore/Screamo” song generation, and that changed into a big deal to a number of human beings. As I began putting out with folks who grew up listening to Emo track, my love for that entire genre was given more potent and more potent as I used to be greater uncovered to it. Once I had a broad angle of questioning that “Hardcore” song become the first-class thing ever

I noticed that many Hardcore bands have been beginning during the few years I was in love with it, and it seemed that the mentality for live shows like Warped Tour and larger fairs shifted from being generally Punk/Emo to by and large Hardcore. As stated earlier that, music does play a big function in young adults and teenagers lives, so as every new institution of teens and teenagers arise, will the sample of a brand new popular style emerge every few years?

So what do you think? What are your mind in this entire Emo tune scene? I’ve observed that increasingly bands have been doing 10-yr anniversary excursions for his or her greater popular albums as of Recently. Do you believe you studied so as to spark up or supply a wake up name for Emo track becoming extra famous again?