#47 - Butterfly Effect 🌞

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Here's what we have queued up this week:

1. 🌶️ Review of The Good Witch by Maisie Peters.

2. 💿 This Week in Music: Luminate’s mid-year report, Utopia in Egypt, Sound gets $20 million.

3. 📈 Weekly Charts: Lil Uzi Vert and Olivia Rodrigo dethrone Morgan Wallen.

4. 🔀 Recommendation Station: Balanced Breakfast updates to satisfy your music hunger.

5. 🎙️ Tenille Arts is our artist of the week.

Rating Rationale: After capturing her first #1 album on the U.K. charts, Maisie Peters is proving that The Good Witch is more than just her maturation in songwriting, it’s an album in which her quintessential Y2K pop sound has real staying power. On the surface, the album is a clear expression of an archetypical breakup, with songs like “Lost the Breakup” and “Want You Back.” However, the deeper symbolism that brews interest is the interconnected concepts of choice, perspective, and intention of those feelings. To help visually represent both the theme and branding of her sophomore album, Maisie dropped a tarot card alongside each song on her album. We’re no psychics, but Maisie’s relatable lyricism and unique vocal sound give her a lot of upside. “Watch” and “Therapy” embody her potential.

💡 Luminate: Known for powering the Billboard charts, Luminate is one of the premier music and entertainment industry research firms. This week, they released their 2023 mid-year music report, which highlighted a few important points:

1. On-demand music audio streams have increased +22.9% year-over-year (by 400 billion song streams) from 2022 to 2023.

2. In the U.S., physical album sales are up 13.3% and vinyl continues to boom, up 21.7%.

3. 112,000 new tracks are uploaded daily. Talk about oversaturation - as an artist, standing out is more important than ever.

4. The market share for English songs is declining, both in the U.S. and globally. Latin American (Spanish) and Korean music are continuing their growth in popularity.

5. In terms of genres, regional Mexican music (like banda, tejano, grupera, etc.) and afrobeats continue to dominate.

6. Finally, 15% of the U.S. population are superfans (particularly K-Pop fans), meaning these fans exhibit high LTVs (lifetime value, a metric that estimates the average revenue a customer will generate for their artist) for musicians.

🏺 Egyptian Utopia: If you want to attend Travis Scott’s Utopia launch party, you might want to start by purchasing a roundtrip ticket to Cairo. Travis will be playing UTOPIA LIVE AT THE PYRAMIDS on July 28th.

💰 YMCMB: Young Money! Drake and Nicki are linking back up for a song on Drake’s upcoming eighth studio album, For All The Dogs.

🎫 Summer’s Live: That’s the name of Live Nation’s upcoming ticketing promotion, allowing purchasers to buy 4 tickets for $80 for select concerts between July 19 to August 1.

⭐ The North Star: Each year, The Polaris Music Prize is awarded to the best album by a Canadian artist. Here’s the shortlist of the 10 finalists. hint we’re pulling for a previous UV Index album review.

📺 You Gotta Watch This: Post Malone has always lived his life on “Overdrive.”

🥽 Ready Listener One: Virtual-reality music concert platform, AmazeVR, recently teamed up with Zara Larsson to launch their concerts app on Meta Quest and Steam VR.

📦 The Pre-Save Standard: The pre-save functionality (the equivalent of a “pre-order”) has become the promotional norm for music artists on streaming platforms. This week, Linkfire released a new functionality that allows for pre-saves on YouTube Music.

🧋 Creator Blends: In 2021, Spotify released their popular “Blend” feature as a way to personalize a playlist between two friends. This week, Spotify is allowing you to blend your music taste with your favorite artists.

💰 Securing the Bag: UK-based musician booking startup, Encore, raised £1 million. L.A.-based music payments and distribution platform, Stem, will be partnering with Victory Park Capital to fund $250 million worth of advance loans for artists.

🌐 Web3 Updates: Web3 music platform, Sound.xyz, raised $20 million from a Series A financing round led by a16z with participation from Sound Ventures (Ashton Kutcher), Ryan Tedder, and Snoop Dogg.

📘 Book of HOV: For our New Yorkers, The Book of HOV, a library exhibition at Brooklyn Public Library, commemorates the legendary, Jay-Z.

⚗️ Alchemists: Disclosure dropped a surprise fourth album. That’s it. Go listen.

🪩 STACKED Summer: This year, HARD Summer is moving to downtown L.A., and the lineup for their official pre-parties and after-parties is stacked.

👀 Demi Lovato is revamping her biggest hits by re-releasing them as rock songs. Fred again.. dropped soundbites of three unreleased songs and is letting his fans vote on their favorites. Brothers Osborne are dropping a self-titled album in September. Last year, Andrew Bird experienced Inside Problems; this year, he’s experiencing Outside Problems. Indie-rock band, Cherry Glazerr, will be releasing their fourth album later this year. Chris Shiflett of the Foo Fighters is releasing a solo album in October. Courtney Barnett will be releasing an instrumental album this fall.

🚶‍♂️ Artists On Tour: Madonna officially rescheduled her North American tour (due to a medical emergency), Walk the Moon is officially on hiatus. boygenius added a few fall dates, Playboi Carti is the primary antagonist, KAYTRAMINÉ, Above & Beyond are taking over Red Rocks for two nights, 100 gecs cancel their European tour due to exhaustion (touring is tough, and we get that), more Depeche Mode dates, Parquet Courts, BamBam, Porno For Pyros (they haven’t toured since 1997).

📈 What’s Trending?: This week, Lil Uzi Vert and Olivia Rodrigo finally unseated Morgan Wallen from his respective top spots on Billboards’ album and song charts. An honorable mention for an album that didn’t make it onto our forecast is Tainy’s DATA.

💿 Our Playlist Collection

1. 🍳 Balanced Breakfast: A balance of genres to satisfy your music hunger.

2. 🌊 Midsommar Solstice: Songs for your summer rotation.

3. 🤠 Austin City Limits: An annual music retreat to the land of tacos and cowboys. 2023 is a return to ACL's indie roots while showcasing talented upcoming British artists. We recommend shuffling.

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See ya next Sunday 😎

Chris and Donya