#13 - Polachek yourself before you wreck yourself 🌞

Happy Sunlighter Sunday! We really value your time as a reader (especially on a Sunday) so this week, our goal is to make this a ~5-minute read.

Here's what we have queued up this week:

1. 🎹 Song recs based on what we're listening to.

2. 💿 Industry updates from an uptick in streaming prices to scrutiny on TikTok royalty payments.

3. 🎙️ Caroline Polachek is our artist of the week.

4. 📈 Data highlighting music industry earnings.

5. 🎡 Some tour updates and a LimeWire Music Festival…? 

Rating Rationale: After the mainstream successes of “Knife Talk” and “Jimmy Cooks,” Drake releases a (mostly) crowd-pleasing collaborative album with 21 Savage. It’s a return to a more purposefully raw, forthright, and at times, disrespectful style of rap that Drake lacked in Honestly, Nevermind but readily embraced in If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. We can probably thank 21 and Lil Yachty for some of that inspiration. After all, the latter has 4 production credits and is credited for the Suki Baby album cover. “Major Distribution” (and his hat tip to contemporaries Bad Bunny and Harry Styles) is the standout on this album.

The Sunlighter Playlist 🔀

Songs we’re currently listening to 🎹

Industry Updates 💿

• All This Jewelry Ain’t No Use When It’s This Dark: Frank Ocean launches a new radio show on Apple Music called Homer Radio, named after his luxury jewelry brand.

• Surprise Duet at Primavera: Lorde brought Phoebe Bridgers to the festival in São Paulo, Brazil to sing “Stoned at the Nail Salon.”

• Always Rooting for the Anti-Hero: Taylor Swift released a series of remixes for her #1 single of the last 3 weeks, “Anti-Hero”, including an upbeat version featuring Bleachers.

• Uptick in Streaming Prices: Since Apple’s announcement of their subscription price increase for Apple Music, YouTube and Deezer have made moves to increase their premium plans as well. Spotify is looking to enact a similar subscription increase in 2023.

• Apple Music Artist of the Year: Apple announced Bad Bunny as Apple Music’s 2022 Artist of the Year.

• Their Loss: Condé Nast recently filed a $4 million lawsuit against Drake and 21 Savage for using a fake Vogue issue to promote their collaborative album Her Loss.

• Piece of the Pie: The big 3 (UMG, Sony, and Warner Music) are demanding a share of advertising revenue and increased music royalties from TikTok, adding pressure to TikTok’s future bottom line. This comes after music artist scrutiny of TikTok’s limited royalty payouts.

• C-Pop Rising: Universal Music Publishing China, the Chinese subsidiary of Universal Music Group, continued its expansion in China with a new partnership with Ryce Publishing. We see this as strategic positioning for the inevitable evolution of K-Pop to C-Pop.

• Codec Moments: Meta announced a new audio compression technology, EnCodec, which is a 3-step process that leads to a neural network, allowing users to share high-quality audio. It’s something they think will eventually play a big part in Metaverse audio.

• Spotify Eyes Growth in the Middle East: Spotify is in talks to acquire Anghami, the first legal digital streaming platform in the Middle East, headquartered in Dubai.

Artist of the Week: Caroline Polachek 🎙️ 

The Common Denominator

What do the artists Chairlift, Ramona Lisa, and CEP all have in common? They’re not just projects of Caroline Polachek, they’re iterations of herself over time. In our day and age, Caroline is the quintessential definition of a modern-day artist, showcasing her diverse artistry across various music formats with one common thread: no bounds.

Many Influences

In Caroline’s early years, her family relocated to Tokyo, where she cultivated her initial music interests through both her gifted Yamaha keyboard and notable cultural influences from Japanese Anime and minimalist architecture. After her family moved back to the United States, Caroline started experiencing an unexpectedly tumultuous family life, which ultimately led her parents to divorce. However, the resulting coping mechanisms placed on Caroline as a result of the divorce, which included playing Enya around the house to calm her “hyperactivity,” became both a silver lining and a greater prognostication of her future artistry. Caroline’s influences were genre-agnostic across different phases of her coming-of-age, ranging from attending Third Eye Blind and Faith No More concerts during high school to discovering David Bowie during her college years at the University of Colorado Boulder (which was hugely influential in the conception of Chairlift). The one central theme from Caroline’s influences has always been artists whose looks were inseparable from their sound.

The Ether and the Idyll

During Caroline’s sophomore year at Boulder, Chairlift was formed as a folk duo that demanded a fervent focus on songwriting before embracing their recognizable alternative/indie sound. After Chairlift’s transition from Colorado to New York, Caroline continued to push her personal boundaries on vocal style and introspection into philosophical concepts closely tied to her psyche and music. These topics stretched from classic Romanticism and the Freudian condition on humans to the abstraction of fantastical parables through her solo projects of Ramona Lisa, CEP, and more recently, Caroline Polachek. Some compare her to a more contemporary Kate Bush or Björk but more ethereal and iridescent. Her sound is seductive and unique, and she continues to embody her operatic style, even in her more recent collaborations with A.G. Cook’s PC Music on Pang. It’s no surprise that Beyoncé’s “No Angel” or the interactive ballet score of “happyokay” is imprinted with Caroline’s production. 2022 has been a productive year for her, from her Coachella performances, to being featured on “New Shapes” with Charli XCX, to opening for Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia tour.

Here’s a video that epitomizes the intention Caroline puts into her music:

Data 📈

Music Industry Q3 Earnings: It’s been an eventful last few weeks in the markets: crypto exchange implosions, close election races, and a surprising October inflation level decline. Among the sea of market-moving news, several publicly traded music companies have reported earnings, all indicating that the music industry is alive and well. We thought it would be worthwhile to share the year-over-year growth seen by various companies in the music industry for Q3:

Festivals & Tour Announcements 🎡

Earlier this year, LimeWire (yes the one you probably used to illegally download your mp3s), announced its intention to rebrand into a web3 NFT marketplace. Fast-forward a few months and now they’re partnering with Decentraland to host metaverse music festivals. It’s been quite the year for web3, drawing in a number of (odd) legacy music company pivots, including Napster and Radioshack.

Tour Announcements 🤘

• Dua Lipa is headlining NYC’s Jingle Bell Ball on December 11.

• Lizzy McAlpine announces the “The End of the Movie Tour” starting April 2023.

• Wallows is bringing their Tell Me That It’s Over tour to Asia and Hawaii, starting Februrary 2023.

• Harry Styles had to reschedule 3 LA dates at The Forum due to the flu, and Holly Humberstone missed a show in both LA and SF.

• Don’t worry Swifties, you just improved your chances to get tickets. Taylor Swift added 17 additional shows to her Eras Tour, including five full nights at SoFi Stadium in LA.

• Thomas Rhett is hitting the road with Cole Swindell for his recently announced Home Team Tour 23. The tour makes 40 stops in cities where Thomas feels at home with his fans.

• St. Paul and the Broken Bones announced a few early 2023 tour dates in support of their most recent album.

• R&B duo DVSN, signed to Drake’s OVO Sound, announced their Working on My Karma 2023 world tour.

• Ex-One Direction member, Louis Tomlinson, is kicking off his Faith in the Future World Tour next May.

• America’s sweethearts Stevie Nicks and Billy Joel announce they’re co-headlining three exclusive concerts in LA, Dallas, and Nashville.

• Tyler Childers announces his Send In The Hounds Tour, which kicks off in London in February 2023.

Wrap Up 👏

We're closing the newsletter this week with a shoutout from the 6 (Ward 29) all the way to ATX.

Lyrical Genius ✍️

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See ya next Sunday 😎

Chris and Donya