#11 - Shake it off 🌞

Happy Halloween... again! We were so excited about this week's edition that we hit publish a little too early. Nobody's perfect, right? Here's what we have queued up this week in our redux:

1. 🎹 Song recs to end your Halloweekend.

2. 💿 Industry earnings and high-profile updates.

3. 🎧 Audioshake is our Sunlighter Spotlight of the week.

4. 📈 Data on Taylor Swift’s record-breaking week.

5. 🎡 Electric Daisy Carnival and more tour announcements.

Rating Rationale: Steve Lacy’s unbalanced, eclectic compilation of funky, neo-soul songs are provocative but unmistakably definitive of Steve Lacy as he continues to mold his sound as a recording artist. “Bad Habit” is an obvious standout that you probably recognize from TikTok and mainstream charts, and we’ll go as far as co-signing “Static” and “Sunshine." While we applaud the originality, admittedly and very plainly, the album lacks a sense of flow and feels a bit chaotic.

Songs to end your Halloweekend 🎹 

From the Vault 🔙

Donya's Pick

Chris's Pick

The Sunlighter Playlist 🔀

Industry Updates 💿

• Yeezy Come, Yeezy Go: Kanye West’s antisemitic remarks during his recent interview on Drink Champs have escalated his reputational tailspin into a full-blown PR crisis with numerous companies and associates severing ties with his companies. Here’s a list, with the most notable companies being UMG, CAA, Adidas, Gap, and Balenciaga–effectively decreasing his net worth ~$2B.

• Universal Revenue Growth: On Thursday, UMG announced Q3 earnings, reporting a 13.3% rise in revenue. So far, Bill Ackman is right.

• Spotify Q3: Spotify reached a new all-time high of 456 million monthly active users and 195 million subscribers, just in time for the company’s annual Wellness Week.

• Apple Music is now $1 More: In a surprising move, Apple announced an increase of their Apple Music subscription price from $9.99 to $10.99, which now sits at a premium compared to other music streaming services. The decision was based on an expectation of increased music licensing costs.

• Adding to the Empire: EMPIRE, an independent record label and distributor (primarily focused on hip-hop music), expanded into electronic music with its acquisition of Claude VonStroke’s Dirtybird Records.

• Selling Music on the Dark Web: A 22-year-old hacker was charged with 19 counts of copyright infringement due to stealing and selling unreleased songs from Ed Sheeran and Lil Uzi Vert in exchange for cryptocurrency worth £131,000.

• Witness Intimidation: Gunna was denied bail for a third time due to witness intimidation tactics. Earlier this year, he and Young Thug were arrested for racketeering charges.

• No Back-to-Back: In an act of humility, Silk Sonic recently chose not to submit their album An Evening with Silk Sonic for Grammys consideration, a sigh of relief for all other artists. Last year, Silk Sonic won both Record of the Year and Song of the Year.

• Gritty in Pink: The Live Nation Women Fund announced an investment into Gritty in Pink, a company supporting diverse female creators in the music industry.

• Rising Festival Ticket Prices: Last week, fans faced a new, disconcerting reality: a 19% rise in ticket prices for Glastonbury 2023.

• Fyre Fest Mastermind Returns: After being sentenced to six years in prison for defrauding Fyre Fest investors, Billy was released from prison on August 30th. Now, he’s on a mission to pay back his restitution, starting with a teaser video of his new venture.

Sunlighter Spotlight: Audioshake 🎧

What's a stem?

In today’s era of modern music consumption, streaming is king. Whether you’re running to grab coffee before work or queuing up your favorite songs for a long drive, having access to your favorite songs with the click of a button has become a societal expectation. Your streaming apps reveal the depth and complexity of your music preferences, providing you access to personalized compilations of digitized and compressed sounds. In fact, each small nuance in the production of a song was likely placed intentionally by the team involved in the music production process. But what if we told you that deconstructing the complexity of all the sounds and instruments in a song into their own individual tracks could be valuable? Each one of these separate sounds is considered a stem, and to Audioshake, these stems carry their sound in gold.

What’s Audioshake?

Audioshake is a music-focused artificial intelligence (AI) company that deconstructs recordings into separate, high-quality sound components (vocals, drums, bass, guitar, etc.) known as “stems.” Similar to other AI companies, the technology is only as good as its deep learning capabilities and models, which makes access to good-quality music crucial. Fortunately, Audioshake has trained its algorithm on “tens of thousands” of stems to build the best profile of what each instrument sounds like, releasing two versions of their technology, one catering to music industry representatives and one focused on supporting independent artists.

How are stems used by the music industry?

For many musicians and music industry representatives, technology that provides access to stems can be valuable for a few reasons:

1. Stems, original recordings, or masters can be lost during the music production or storage process.

2. Stems can be used in a variety of applications, some of which include karaoke, spatial audio, remixing, sync licensing, and re-mastering.

3. Access to stems can support music innovation, music education, and new music-themed fan experiences across various fields such as social media, gaming, and fitness (think a music-themed spin class).

If you’re interested in more examples, check out some of the case studies provided by Audioshake.

Audioshake has positioned itself as one of the notable trailblazers of stem technology within the music industry, and we’re excited to see the expanded use cases they plan to power with their disruptive technology. We’ve already seen hardware applications of stems, such as STEMPLAYER (which partnered with Ye for the release of Donda 2), proving that there may even be a market for mainstream users. As a whole, artificial intelligence has recently experienced venture-fueled growth which is exponentially increasing the rate of disruption and adoption across various industries, and we believe this will continue to be a benefactor for Audioshake.

Data 📈

Karma is Midnights: We’re spotlighting Chartr’s most recent newsletter and sharing data points on Taylor Swift’s record-breaking week.

Spotify Streaming Records

• Taylor Swift has now surpassed 35 billion total streams across all credits, becoming the #1 most-streamed female artist in Spotify history.

• Midnights earned 785 million streams in its first week of release, the biggest streaming week for any album in the platform's history.

• Taylor earned over 10 billion streams in 2022, recording the biggest streaming year for any female artist in the platform's history.

• Taylor Swift became the first artist in history to earn over 1 billion streams in a single week.

• "Anti-Hero" surpassed 100 million streams. It's her fastest song to reach this milestone.

Career Records

• Taylor Swift achieves her 11th #1 album on the Billboard 200 chart, marking the biggest week for any album in ~7 years (since Adele's 25) with 1.578 million albums sold.

• After a genius marketing play, Midnights becomes the first album in Nielsen history to sell over 500,000 vinyl copies in its first week of release. It also breaks the record for the biggest calendar year vinyl sales for an album in Nielsen history.

• Midnights officially earned the biggest US debut sales week of Taylor Swift’s career, surpassing 1989.

• Taylor Swift is now the #1 best-selling artist of the year in the US by total album units.

• Midnights has now sold over 1 million pure copies in the US. It's the first 2022 album to achieve this milestone.

Festivals & Tour Announcements 🎡

November is right around the corner, and for electronic music, that means one thing: Electric Daisy Carnival. Produced by Insomniac since 1997 (the first EDC was a warehouse party in LA), the largest electronic music festival in the United States is back at its annual alternate location in Orlando, Florida. Unlike the larger, more socialized summer version in Las Vegas, the high-production, multi-sensory music and arts festival is heading back to the east coast for those that want the “EDC experience” but prefer to spend less, not stay up all night, and have easier access to the host city.

Tour Announcements 🤘

• YG announced The Red Cup Tour, which kicks off early January 2023.

• Parker McCollum will be headlining a spring tour starting February 2023.

• Let’s go girls…Shania Twain is back with both a new album and a global tour boasting 49 stops, starting April 2023. If you’re a Citi cardholder, you can access presale tickets between November 1-3rd.

• Ashe announced her Fun While it Lasted Tour, which kicks off April 2023.

• Dermot Kennedy is heading to North America for his Sonder Tour starting May 2023.

• The Queen of Christmas, Mariah Carey announces two holiday shows in Toronto and New York.

• Jane’s Addiction canceled 5 dates while on tour with the Smashing Pumpkins due to frontman Perry Farrell’s injury from their MSG show earlier this month.

• Beck dropped out of Arcade Fire’s North American tour due to sexual misconduct allegations associated with Arcade Fire’s frontman, Win Butler.

Wrap Up 👏

We're closing the newsletter this week with a line that’s not actually spooky, just a soft flex from Donald Glover.

Lyrical Genius ✍️

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Happy Halloween 👻

Chris and Donya