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- #43 - Pops of Sunshine 🌞
#43 - Pops of Sunshine 🌞
Your weekly music round-up: My Soft Machine album review, Twitter lawsuit, all-in ticket pricing, GRAMMYs updates, Ingrid Andress
Donya Bayrami & Chris Xu
June 18th, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 14 minutes
Happy Sunlighter Sunday and Juneteenth weekend! Last week, we wrote about the possible resurgence in commercial jingles, and this week, T-Pain partnered with Lipton Iced Tea to debut “Pops of Sunshine,” their frozen iced tea flavored popsicles. Weird how on-brand that is.
Here's what we have queued up this week:
🌶️ Review of My Soft Machine by Arlo Parks.
💿 This Week in Music: Twitter sued, all-in ticket pricing, GRAMMYs updates
🔀 Recommendation Station: Stray Kids, ENHYPHEN, Latto, Moneybagg Yo
🎙️ Ingrid Andress is our artist of the week.
Rating Rationale: Coming off of her momentum-building festival circuit performances in 2022, Arlo Parks presents My Soft Machine, a strong follow-up album to Collapsed in Sunbeams, which won her the Mercury Prize back in 2021. Before music, Arlo Parks’ initial creative outlet was poetry, which she clearly showcases in the scene-setting intro, “Bruiseless.” Unlike Collapsed in Sunbeams, which focuses more on the mental and emotional struggles of her youth, My Soft Machine is more symbolic of the emotions felt in her relationships, including her current relationship with budding artist, Ashnikko. Songs we think are worth a listen include “Weightless,” “Devotion,” and “Pegasus” featuring Phoebe Bridgers. Coincidentally, Arlo Parks also announced her debut poetry collection, The Magic Border, with publisher Harper Collins.
This Week in Music 🎶
🚨 Beyond Wonderland: Last night, a shooting occurred outside of the festival grounds of Beyond Wonderland, leaving 2 dead and 3 injured (one being the suspected gunman). It’s sickening to see an incident like this occur at an event that’s supposed to bring people together.
⚖️ Twitter Lawsuit: Earlier this week, 17 music publishers filed a lawsuit against Twitter for over $250 million in damages associated with infringement on copyrighted music.
🎟️ Ticket Reform: After significant public pressure, Ticketmaster and Live Nation will implement “all-in pricing” to share hidden fees for concert tickets. It’s a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of ticket price gouging based on demand-based pricing.
🏆 The Recording Academy Updates: The GRAMMYs will be adding three new categories next year, Best African Music Performance, Best Pop Dance Recording, and Best Alternative Jazz Album. The Recording Academy also clarified that only human creators are eligible for nominations (sorry, AI). Finally, general field categories (Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best New Artist) nominees have been reduced from 10 to 8.
🎙️ A Moody Conversation: Remember when Lil Yachty interviewed Drake on a beach in Turks & Caicos? Get used to more interviews with Lil Yachty as he’ll be launching his currently untitled podcast soon.
🖊️ Songwriters Hall of Fame: Your 2023 inductees include Sade, Snoop Dogg, Gloria Estefan, Jeff Lynne, Teddy Riley, Glen Ballard, and Liz Rose.
🚗 It’s Luke’s World: And we’re just all living in it. Not only has Luke Combs’ rendition of “Fast Car” topped Tracy Chapman’s version on the Billboard charts this week, but also his country hit, “Beautiful Crazy,” recently became the sixth country song to reach certified Diamond by the RIAA.
📺 You Gotta Watch This: Another day, another jingle. Coke Studio dropped its “Be Who You Are” music video, an original collaboration between John Baptiste, J.I.D, NewJeans, Cat Burns, and Camilo. 10/10 commercial branding:
🥊 Music Fights Fraud: Distributors and streaming platforms from across the music industry (Spotify, DistroKid, VYDIA, UnitedMasters, and many more) have joined the Music Fights Fraud Alliance global task force to fight streaming fraud (like click farming), a problem estimated to be as high as $1 billion.
🔊 Sonos Layoffs: In their recently filed 8-K, publicly-traded home audio company, Sonos, sheds 7% of its staff in an effort to optimize expenses.
🧑🏽⚖️ GDPR Enforcement: The EU continues their clamp down on data privacy regulations, this time with the Swedish Data Protection Authority fining Spotify ~$5.4 million based on a previous complaint made by noyb.
🤖 MusicGen: Meta Platforms released their AI text-to-audio music generator, “MusicGen,” which was trained on 10,000 licensed music tracks.
💷 Get Paid Guide: On the heels of organizing the Music Metadata Coalition, the UK government has released its “Get Paid Guide” to support standardizing music metadata.
💰 Securing the Bag: Founded by former Spotify employees, Soundtrack Your Brand announced a $15 million “pre-growth” round led by previous investors to support B2B music streaming.
🌐 Web3 Updates: Sound.xyz deployed onto Optimism L2, reducing fees and increasing speed. You can now save music more easily by using bookmarks on Catalog. Snoop Dogg and Avenged Sevenfold have released their respective tour NFTs to explore novel ways of engaging with their fans.
🤳🏻 Businessisbusiness.biz: Young Thug dropped a QR code on his social media accounts that redirected to this url with a countdown timer. Slatt.
🇺🇸 Made in America: This year’s lineup pushes women to the forefront as SZA and Lizzo are the headliners while the rest of the field includes Tems, Ice Spice, Coi Leray, Latto, Doechii, Lola Brooke, Coco Jones, and others. Mase and Cam’ron will also be doing a special joint set.
🌚 Moon Man’s Landing: Kid Cudi’s second annual music festival in Cleveland, Ohio will include $uicideboy$, Lil Uzi Vert, and Coi Leray. More to be announced.
💀🌹 Day of the Deadmau5: Deadmau5 will be playing six shows in four cities around the Day of the Dead.
🎶 Upcoming Songs: Olivia Rodrigo announced her new upcoming single, “Vampire.” Next Friday, Ice Spice and Nicki Minaj will be dropping their collab song, “Barbie World.”
🚶♂️ Artists On Tour: The 1975 is Still…at their very best, R&B trifecta NE-YO + Robin Thicke + Mario, Daniel Caesar, ZHU, Tate McRae, Reneé Rapp.
👀 Peso Pluma’s Genesis is arriving next week. Korean house DJ, Peggy Gou announced her debut album. ScHoolboy Q is rumored to be working on his next album. Troye Sivan is making his comeback with “Rush.” Alice Cooper announced that his 22nd studio album (talk about a discography), Road, will be released in August. Romy (of The xx) is releasing her solo album Mid Air in September, with production credits by Fred again.. Coincidentally, Paris Texas is also releasing an album named MID AIR coming out in July.
Recommendation Station 🔀
Weekly Chart Data 📈
💯 US Hot 100: Latto’s “Put It On Da Floor” debuts at #13, Moneybagg Yo’s Hard to Love and Metro Boomin’s Spiderman: Across the Spider-Verse lands multiple songs in the top 100.
🌐 Global Charts: Dave & Central Cee’s “Sprinter” debuts at #9. Ooh wee, Jain’s 2016 hit “Makeba” makes it onto the global charts for the first time.
💿 Billboard Albums: K-Pop catapults to the top of the charts this week with Stray Kids capturing the top spot with 5-STAR while ENHYPHEN’s mini-album, DARK BLOOD, debuts at #4.
Sunlighter Playlists 🔁
We’ve updated Balanced Breakfast with Burna Boy, Purple Tears, Zzz, and Arlo Parks.
A balance of genres to satisfy your music hunger. Listen to Balanced Breakfast.
Artist of the Week: Ingrid Andress 🎙️
Primer: This rising country star is a Berklee College of Music grad who started her road to becoming what she calls a “4-time Grammy losing singer-songwriter” by singing with an a cappella group on The Sing-Off. Currently, she’s on tour with Walker Hayes, but to date, she’s toured with Tim McGraw, Keith Urban, and Dan + Shay.
Influences: Because Ingrid aims to have her writing sound conversational, she describes her major music influences as songs where she can feel the emotion from the artist. A few of her favorites include John Denver, Coldplay, Evanescence, Stevie Wonder, Whitney Houston, Faith Hill, The Doobie Brothers, and Handel’s “Messiah.”
Genre: Country
Current Label: In 2014, Ingrid honored her songwriting roots by securing a publishing deal with Nashville-based Sea Gayle Music in partnership with Arthouse Entertainment (co-founded by her Berklee professor, mentor, and accomplished singer-songwriter Kara DioGuardi). Here, she had the opportunity to write for artists like Sam Hunt (who she would later collaborate with on Grammy-nominated song “Wishful Drinking”), Charli XCX, Bebe Rexha, and LANY. Four years later, she signed as an artist with Warner Nashville and Atlantic Records.
What’s Next?: Ingrid is spending most of 2023 promoting her second album, Good People, on her first headlining tour. She performed at CMA Fest in Nashville last weekend, has a spot on the Lollapalooza lineup, and opens for Stevie Nicks later this year.
A couple of our favorite tracks:
Wrap Up 👏
Since summer officially starts this week, we're closing the newsletter this week with an artist (who we interviewed at SXSW) whose music we believe brings the summer vibe to life.
Lyrical Genius ✍️
Back on your back
I cursed the lovers and the fools who rush in
The spring in their steps
Hot heavy summers and their pools to bathe in
Who’s Burning? 🌡️
All of the AI-generated music.
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See ya next Sunday 😎
Chris and Donya
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