Music Ally Focus

Ep. 161: Direct to Consumer is a model that most artists, of all sizes, are now prioritising. But which type of artist does this approach work – and not work – for? Mag Rodriguez, CEO/founder of D2C platform Even – which has the tagline "Buy The Art From The Artist" – talks to Music Ally's Editor Joe Sparrow about how artists can use this business model to generate money. He says tha...

Ep. 160: A marketing-focused episode – Sarah Seukeran analyses three recent notable campaigns and activations from Lainey Wilson, The Cardigans, and Peggy Gou. Featured are campaigns that combine local weather data with music streaming, showcase a good way of getting catalogue to connect with The Kids on TikTok, and encourage fans to design localised merch. It's ideal if you're trying to f...

Ep. 159: Dhruv Chopra, co-founder/CEO of Brooklyn venue Elsewhere , joins Joe Sparrow to talk about finding new ways of running local independent venues. Dhruv and Elsewhere are reaching around to find a new business model in a new gig-going world. Today, music is consumed, created, performed, played, discovered, experienced and valued differently – and yet, the basics of live music are the same:...

Ep. 158: When Jamie Oborne's career as a musician ended, he decided that the second best thing was to be an artist manager. He also decided that he'd stay independent, write contracts different to the one's he'd signed, and work closely with his artists. Twenty years on, Oborne's approach seems to have worked well enough: he runs management company All On Red and indie label Di...

Ep 157: Cast your mind back to 2020, when public spaces were shut down and the world suddenly felt insular and closed. Live-streaming became wildly popular overnight – in fact this podcast began in these circumstances – and many apps and platforms appeared and disappeared to feed the need for watching live events from our homes. A mere four years later, and live-streaming has matured and the froth...

Ep 156: Superfandom, superfandom, superfandom. Unless you’ve been living on the moon for the last year, you’ll not have been able to avoid the latest obsession of pretty much anyone working in the music industry. We chatted to Jacquelle Horton, CEO/Founder of superfan platform Fave, about the nature of superfandom – and we also dug into how to nurture it without taking advantage of enthusiastic fa...

Ep. 155:  Andre Benz founded The Nations when he was in high school. What began as a Youtube channel uploading dance music remixes has transformed into a media conglomerate with a record label and various genre-focused channels.  In the latest episode of the Music Ally Focus podcast, he explains the challenges of building a multi-faceted ecosystem that meets the needs of modern music fans, and als...

Content warning: this episode discusses sexual abuse. Ep. 154:  Caroline Heldman Ph. D and Samantha Maloney are co-founders of the Sound Off Coalition, which recently published a report that called out “the scathing history and financial impact of decades of sexual abuse and coverups in the music industry”. In the report, publicly-available information on reported allegations of sexual abuse, hara...

Episode 153: What's the health of the music festival ecosystem like? Not great, says Nick Morgan, CEO of UK festival company The Fair. Nick, who is also vice chair of the UK’s Association of Independent Festivals (AIF), and his colleague Yasmin Galletti join Music Ally's editor Joe Sparrow and discuss the pressures festivals are under, in an environment where, they say , having seen one in...

Episode 152: Young Voices arranges huge, arena-sized, choir performances for school children, and we were joined by Ben Lewis, CEO of Young Voices, and Anna Phoebe, violinist who performs with Young Voices (and is on the Board at The Ivors Academy.) We spoke about the importance of music at the grassroots level, and encouraging children to sing and perform together. They talked about the unifying...

Episode 151: We're joined by music industry psychologist and therapist Anne Löhr to get a snapshot of the state of mental health within the music industry, and her interpretation of how well the industry has supported the mental health of the people in it. SPOILER : uh-oh, it’s not been great – but it’s getting better. The music industry has, according to Anne, stuck to one approach when deali...

Episode 150(!): Suzanne Bull, founder of Attitude is Everything – which connects disabled people with music and live event industries to improve access – and Dr Teresa Moore, Director at A Greener Future – which helps organisations, events, festivals and venues be more environmentally sustainable – join Music Ally's editor Joe Sparrow. They spoke about how the twin issues of sustainability at...

Ep 149: Sofar Sounds CEO Jim Lucchese joins Music Ally editor Joe Sparrow to talk about the current economics of live music and its impact on local, independent artists. Live music is a hard business at the best of times, but for smaller and emerging artists, it can be brutally tough. A good number of artists now get their start playing Sofar Sounds shows, so we ask Jim to explain what artists and...

Ep 148: Gen Z music fans are able to immediately sense when an artist’s communications with fans feel inauthentic. But marketing has in its nature an element of inauthenticity – so how do you maintain a feeling of authenticity when marketing to this young, online-only generation? And how can artists and teams market effectively directly to these younger fans or potential fans? Keturah Cummings is...

Ep. 147: Stuart Dredge, Music Ally’s Head of Insight, joins Editor Joe Sparrow to answer some of the biggest and most complex questions in the DSP space in 2024. This podcast is aligned with Music Ally’s new quarterly report and the Big Questions they chat about include: • Who are the winners and losers from artist-centric payment systems – and will creators and labels be satisfied? • How often an...

Ep. 146: In this episode we ask: how do people search for music today and what do people really want in their results? We welcome Einar Helde, AIMS API co-founder and CCO, to the Focus podcast to answer that question, as well as to explain how technology is allowing people to search in novel and nuanced ways – and what that means for people who make music. The needs of people who make, share and u...

Ep 145: Joe Sparrow is joined by Sean Lee, CEO/co-founder and Kyungtae Kim, co-founder and Audio & AI Specialist, of Verses, an AI music platform that powers music generation in virtual spaces. We wanted to talk about the use of dynamic AI-created music in the metaverse, and how that music then connects to virtual items. Essentially: where three of recent years’ most hypebeast products – AI cr...

Ep. 144: Tuned Global's CEO Con Raso joins Joe Sparrow to talk about something that sounds a bit intangible and distant: the cost of storing all the music that gets streamed. If it’s essentially free for owners of huge catalogues of music to upload their files to someone else’s server, then they will – and smaller rightsholders like DIY artists and labels will be under increasing competition a...

Ep 143 : Marie Clausen worked hard to rise to a senior position in the music industry, only to find that she was often the only woman in the room. So she’s now driven to change that – and she explains to Joe Sparrow how she initiated Merlin’s Engage mentorship program, designed to boost the representation of women in the top ranks of the music industry. Marie is U.S. Managing Director at Ninja Tun...

Ep 142: Cory Docorow is a highly regarded sci-fi author, activist and journalist who is in favour of the liberalisation and modernisation of copyright laws. He recently coined the concept of "enshittification", which is when monopolistic digital platforms offer increasingly worse services to continue making money... and then they die. We talk about how the music industry is enshittifying...

Ep 141:  Dmytro Lopushanskyy, CTO of AI-powered song analysis and discovery tool Harmix , joins Joe to explain how tools like his actually work, and how they can find overlooked songs that are buried deep in catalogues. Dmytro also talks about what life in the music industry may be like when we have useful AI assistants, and how artists and rightsholders should be able to opt their music out of tr...

Ep. 140: Joe is joined by Sherry Saeedi, founder & CEO of Verswire. Sherry says that Verswire is a new alternative to record labels – or “a venture capital model alternative for signing musicians” as she puts it. We ask her why she believes it is “the future of music” and Sherry talks with the passion and language of a tech founder. She thinks that the Verswire model of investing in artists in...

Ep. 139: The Black Eyed Peas have sold an estimated 80 million records, are one of only a handful of artists to have simultaneously held the number-one and number-two spots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, and have headlined the Super Bowl half-time show. We were very happy to talk to Rachel Strassberger, one third of the Black Eyed Peas' management team. She speaks to Music Ally’s Editor Joe S...

Ep. 138: Lyrics are now everywhere - in our streaming apps, on short form social media, and in the now ubiquitous lyric video. So how might lyrics be used in the future in ways we may not have thought of? Joe Sparrow is joined by Darryl Ballantyne, founder & CEO of LyricFind, one of the oldest companies to license lyrics on behalf of rightsholders to various digital services, who chats about t...

Ep. 137: Marie Fol, Lead of the Keychange initiative, joins Music Ally’s Editor Joe Sparrow and they takes stock of gender representation in the music industry in 2024. Keychange is a global network and movement with a wide ranging remit to works towards what it calls “a total restructure of the music industry in reaching full gender equality.” Joe and Marie discuss Keychange’s ambitions for the y...