I started @noyokono's Music Writer Exercise (MWE) last year, but didn't get to finish it because reasons. So, I'm going to try again.
Every day this February, I'm going to listen to an album I haven't heard yet and write a tweet about it on this thread. Wish me luck.
@noyokono 1. The opening to Blue Lab Beats' "Voyage" is the same key as Daft Punk's "Voyager" and conjures the same feeling of shuttling into outer space. But @Sampa_The_Great's flow jolts you awake, with the rest of the album slowly cradling you back down to earth. open.spotify.com/album/7HJsSTwN…
@noyokono@Sampa_The_Great 2. (day late) Sinead Harnett's "Lessons in Love," like many good albums, makes its core subject matter clear within the first minute. But then the rest of the album feels almost *too* straightforward given its focus on love, a highly mysterious topic. #MWEopen.spotify.com/album/17MS1oIT…
@noyokono@Sampa_The_Great 3. I tried to listen to Sudan Archives' "Athena" in the background while working, and failed; the spellbinding, mythical strings, beats and vocals commanded my full and immediate attention. Aching for more R&B that sounds and feels this symphonic. #MWEopen.spotify.com/album/4HOPqliD…
4. “1000 gecs” by 100 gecs. AKA if Metric, Crystal Castles and Anamanaguchi had a musical baby that was processed through a GarageBand overdrive filter and then tasked with making the soundtrack to a horror movie set entirely in an amusement park. #MWEopen.spotify.com/album/2uhB1Kiv…
5. (day late) Many Nordic jazz groups seem to have echoes of math-rock in them—their rhythms angular, rather than swinging, but not in a bad way. Jaga Jazzist's "One-Armed Bandit" is a prime example; weirdly, I also hear a strain of Philip Glass here. #MWEopen.spotify.com/album/6Gk0nFXM…
6. Baby Rose's impassioned COLORS performance of "All To Myself" left me awash in so many emotions. Her album "To Myself" rounds out that song nicely with smoother R&B/soul bops, accentuated by her unmistakable voice that is at once rich & assertive. #MWEopen.spotify.com/album/07PqTotv…
7. (2 days late) Dominic Fike is the same age as me, which makes the genre-hopping DFAMD so interesting because it somehow brings me straight back to the exact angsty emotions I felt at age 13—like a sense of nostalgia for a time I don’t really miss. #MWEopen.spotify.com/album/05jbNkYo…
8. (1 day late) The opening tracks of Kikagaku Moyo's "Forest of Lost Children" seem sluggish, but then "Smoke and Mirrors" shuttles you into several minutes of hypnotic, shapeshifting grooves that feel, weirdly, like meditating on a rollercoaster. #MWEopen.spotify.com/album/6wIs5eVE…
9. !!! Sasami's self-titled album is *exactly* the kind of music I've been craving lately—delicate but pithy stories told against a backdrop of edgy rhythms, hooks and harmonies slithering in parallel, its haziness unfamiliar but nonetheless cradling. #MWEopen.spotify.com/album/5dJhE07J…
10. SiR's "Chasing Summer" feels like when I heard Snoh Aalegra's "-Ugh, those feels again" for the first time—like taking a long, brooding bath with all the right scented ingredients, but eventually feeling the urge to pull yourself out of the water. #MWEopen.spotify.com/album/5zUDvKAy…
11. Streamed JPEGMAFIA's "All My Heroes Are Cornballs" sitting by a washing machine on high spin—which felt like going 100MPH in a convertible with the top down, each glitchy sample a Mario Kart-like obstacle flying from out of nowhere. 'Twas awesome. #MWEopen.spotify.com/album/5ilsl5R2…
12. I'm so embarrassingly late to ROSALÍA's "El Mal Querer," which is a revelation in combining medieval + modern and local + universal storytelling in a singular journey, with lush strings and an unmistakable voice I'll be thinking about for a while. #MWEopen.spotify.com/album/355bjCHz…
13. Also super late to this one: Prateek Kuhad's name was on the tip of everyone's tongues when I was in Mumbai last summer, and now I understand why. His songwriting in "In Tokens & Charms" is somehow both airy and extremely airtight—no note wasted. #MWEopen.spotify.com/album/1no8c4PY…
14. TEK.LUN's "Dweeb" is a cinematic, lopsided beat tape that will take you around the world and travel back *and* forward in time, all in a matter of around half an hour. It's also one of the few albums I've heard that sounds just like its album art. #MWEopen.spotify.com/album/2KmCOIqc…
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
1/ there's a lot of really sharp writing happening right now on music-tech innovation + strategy, by both reporters + industry folks working on the ground.
an ongoing thread of examples (disclaimer, many of these folks have also been instrumental in @water_and_music's growth) 🧵
2/ @holmesprice, who helped spearhead @water_and_music's current AI coverage, now has his own newsletter Future Filter on how tech is shaping electronic music culture. his latest issue on AI voice model marketplaces is a really good guide on the topic
@holmesprice @water_and_music 3/ @srishtitechts, formerly of @midiaresearch, has started her own newsletter and consulting agency @hivewireclub focused on emerging music markets. the writing they've published so far is sharp and strategic, with tons of concrete examples / case studies. hivewire.club/hivewire-how-g…
for some weekend reading, i present to you the absolutely chaotic mess of rights holders and music/tech companies all owning stakes in each other, 2023 edition — in 4 parts.
pt. 1: the tencent music ouroboros, plus Sony adding Bandcamp (via Epic Games acquisition) to its arsenal
pt. 2: the emerging Access Industries <> BlackRock <> Rotana Group tech/rights entanglement, with newly-public companies Warner Music Group and Deezer at the center
pt. 3: Liberty Media + Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund being two of the top three shareholders in Live Nation, plus those two individually being top investors in two separate behemoth media/tech companies (SiriusXM + Kakao)
it's coming, for sure (we're dedicating a whole season to it at @water_and_music). but i think ppl are underestimating how much more of an uphill battle it's going to be for music to get its "midjourney moment."
a short 🧵on why...
1. LACK OF DATA
text+image models are trained on dozens of *terabytes* of data EACH. there isn't close to this much public training data for music. to get to that point, we'd have to train a model not just on all recorded music, but on everyone's GarageBand/Ableton/Logic drafts.
2. LAWYERS
one could *maybe* pirate all the 10s of millions of tracks across music streaming services and use that as training data — but then the majors + their legal teams will come straight for you.
IMO lawyers have more power in music than in any other creative industry.
compared to our previous collab sprints on music/web3, Season 2 presented an incredibly steeper learning curve; there are SO many contradicting definitions of the metaverse out there, and so many different technologies it invokes (gaming, 3D design, VR/AR/MR, spatial audio, etc).
so, we had to start from square one. in this first drop, we try to establish a shared language and understanding around what we’re really talking about when we talk about “the metaverse” — and why these underlying ideas matter to artists and the music industry in the first place.
we at @water_and_music have been working hard on a new Web3 strategy that will serve as the rails for a new model of collaborative music-industry research, and are thrilled to share an early view of what this strategy looks like.
ok now that Seed Club demo day is over... time to break this out into a mega-thread
the main points:
- Water & Music's history and community ethos
- why web3 makes sense for us (and the music media market) now
- our higher-level token strategy + launch drop plans
I launched Water & Music's paid membership in 2019, and am mind-blown that the community has since grown to nearly 1,500 paying members — spanning everyone from emerging artists and startup founders to marketers, investors and C-Suite executives at major music companies.
a simple but illuminating model from @createos:
if you an artist in an 80/20 label/artist royalty deal with a $300,000 advance, $80,000 recording budget and $150,000 marketing budget, your music would need to generate over 500M streams before you make just $1 on the backend.