The ready availability of data has changed music. For most of music history, few had access to the numbers, which meant they were prone to manipulation. The rise of streaming in the past 18 years—let’s date it to 2006, when YouTube exploded—brought with it a mind-boggling amount of information about what gets consumed, and by whom. Harnessing that data and helping people make sense of it is what Chartmetric does. The platform, founded in 2016, tracks data from streaming platforms and sources that pertain to radio, concerts, videos, and much more. They also run a highly informative blog—where Third Bridge Creative contributors have a regular presence—that tells stories around music and data. We recently caught up with Chartmetric President and COO Andreas Katsambas to discuss how data has changed the music landscape, how AI might impact music’s future, and what we can glean from the site’s recent year-end report. 

‍Let’s start with your history in the music business. 

My first job out of school was at a marketing firm on Sunset Boulevard, right by the Sunset Strip.  After work, I would go to shows—Whiskey, Troubadour, Kick Club—which was amazing. Not being familiar with the music industry or how things worked, I was surprised to see bands loading their own equipment and working the merch booth. I started helping some of these artists out: maybe doing some flyers, trying to get them into fanzines. At one point I thought, let's just make some cassettes and CDs and see if we can sell them. After a while, I quit my day job and started a small label called The End Records. It took about two years, but I ended up signing with Red Distribution, which is now part of The Orchard. 

That's when things really started growing. But [soon after] you had the decimation of retail, especially the chains. Tower went bankrupt. Streaming was still coming up; iTunes wasn't paying as much as before. At one point, I got a call from BMG, and they made me an offer to join them and bring my label into their company. I was tired of doing this by myself, so [in 2016], I joined BMG and changed my scope. 

I was asked to develop the international division for BMG. Within a year, there were about 10 people in the department, and it was growing nicely. I started using sales figures, data points, and SoundScan to figure out which market was the strongest for each release. What's the budget we have, and how do we develop it? What's working, what's not working? Data started becoming a key area for me, and by around 2018-2019 we saw some really strong growth with releases. I realized the power and the essence of data.

When the pandemic happened, BMG slashed a lot of their budgets, especially in the developing frontline areas. I felt it was time for change. I got a call from Sung Cho, the founder of Chartmetric, in 2021, and I've been with the company for three years now. 

It is amazing to think how much the role of data has changed in music. You used to guess a band's relative position based on the rooms they played. “Oh, they play the Bowery ballroom when they come to New York, so they're at a certain level of popularity.” Now anyone can see the numbers. 

It's changed how we think about music. My approach is that data shouldn't be the answer to everything. If you like something, listen to it. If you want to sign an artist, listen to them. Bowery Ballroom is one of my favorite venues in New York. It might not be considered a huge thing, but considering how many shows happen in New York on a daily basis, being able to sell Bowery Ballroom is a huge statement. With data, you can look at that and say, how do I keep growing to the next level? How do you pinpoint the top markets? How do you target the right audience? It's helping you get better at what you do. 

‍I’d imagine for artists in particular, there's a huge range in terms of data literacy. 

Yes. But it's good for an artist to be aware of which platforms are working for them. “How do I know which of my songs are getting the best playlist support on Spotify? Do I have any radio support? Who’s my audience? What's the age group?” Giving you some context will hopefully help get your music to the right people. We have 10 million artists in our system, and I would say the vast majority are unsigned. They don't have a label. They don't have a manager. Hopefully they’ll get enough tools to be able to get a better idea about their career and how it's developing. 

Chartmetric recently published their 2023 Year in Music Report. What were some important takeaways? 

The PDF version of that report is 70 pages. It was so long we had to break the web version in two segments. It took us about six months to put it together. It’s the first time we did a year end report, even though we've been collecting data for so many years.

One example: We categorize artists in different segments. You have legendary artists on the top, then superstars, mainstream, mid level, developing, and undiscovered. There are millions of new artists coming out every year. Can these artists still break? In today's environment, can artists grow from one stage to the next? If you’re in the bottom tiers, undiscovered, less than 1 percent move up. But if you get some traction and you get to the middle, it's a lot easier to move to the next level. Becoming a superstar is very difficult. There are only something like 1,500 superstars out of 10 million artists. But you can grow. You can keep building your career because you have the tools; you have direct access to your audience with social media. It can be done, it's just not easy. 

Another amazing insight, to me, is where the new artists are coming from. The U.S. was number one, which was expected. But then you had Brazil at number two, India, Germany, Mexico, and then the U.K. It was fascinating to see how things are changing. Brazil is so diverse, and it [music] is a fusion of many different styles. I think Brazil is the next wave, as they develop the infrastructure and get the traction they need. 

AI and large-language models come up a lot in the music business. Since Chartmetric deals with such a mass of data, I imagine you are having conversations about how these tools could be incorporated to improve what you are doing.

Our founder comes from a technical background, as both a software engineer and in product management. That's what helped Chartmetric stand out at the beginning, how the platform was built. When AI was coming along, he was at the forefront,telling us that we should find ways to integrate it into our system. So we've been working on this diligently for a while, testing it internally. You can see some areas where AI has been implemented. We now use AI to take our [artist] bios and create quick bullet points [out of them]. Bios can be very long, and sometimes you just want to get to the essence of it.

We have expectations that eventually we are going to [use AI] to give you insights, action steps, and really help you understand the data. For us, AI is a very positive thing, and I think it's going to help our users decide on next steps.

‍Data is what computers were made for, right? What about just you personally? Is there anything about it that makes you uneasy when you're thinking about AI? Even outside of Chartmetric.  

Depending on what movie you watch, you get a different perspective. I grew up with those big Hollywood movies where AI can destroy the world. Then you read about it a lot, and there’s a concern that it's going to have an impact on musicians. Are they going to be credited for music created by AI? Can they take a song and use someone's voice and generate a new one? There are areas we're going to have to address. 

But I've been doing this for a while, and the only constant thing in music is change. I remember when Napster was starting. There were so many disruptions, and then physical media started going away, and chains started going bankrupt and shutting down. For a few years, the mindset was that music was going to be free and artists were just going to be making music from shows. Then we had the pandemic, and people couldn't go on tour, so they were relying on other areas to make money.

And here we are in 2024, and we're talking about AI.  We just have to adapt to it and find the best use of it, and utilize it for our own benefit and build on that. At the end of the day, I'm a bit of an optimist. I think technology is what helps music move forward as well helps musicians get better at what they do. I do think that there's going to be something good to come out of it.

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Over the past 25 years, Joshua Glazer has had a frontrow seat to the various twists and turns in the professional lives of the creative class. He was a freelance journalist for alt-weeklies in the late-90s before the bottom fell out on that market, and he later served as editor-in-chief for URB Magazine as it transitioned from a community and genre-focused publication to a national, trendsetting media brand. When URB went belly up during the transition from print to digital, he started his own creative services agency, Content Curious, where he is now trying to map out a path in a post-AI landscape. We recently caught up and discussed how he’s navigated the seemingly constant set of challenges for the creative class, and how he plans to survive and thrive in an increasingly uncertain terrain.

What have you been doing for the past 25 years, professionally speaking?  

Like so many others, I started as a music journalist, originally in Detroit in the very late ‘90s. I think 1999 was when I had my first thing published in a classic alt-weekly – RIP to pretty much all the alt-weeklies. From there, I graduated to working at national publications, eventually moving to Los Angeles to be an editor at URB Magazine, where I rose up the ranks to become the editor-in-chief. I was there until 2010, which was when the last print version was published. We kind of kicked around online for another year or two, but like so many other publications, we didn't stick the landing going from print to digital. 

After that I went and spent a couple of years overseas and came back to LA in 2015, which is when I launched Content Curious, a branding and content studio working with a lot of music clients. We also started to build out more of a business around working with tech companies, wellness brands, and some impact brands, with a focus originally on editorial content, [before] moving into UX content and gradually into more strategic branding work.

‍It sounds like you and I have similar shapes to our careers. I started writing in maybe 2002, really focusing on editorial for the first half of my career, and then finding ways to triage that as things changed.

Yeah, I feel like I caught the very tail end of the music journalist fantasy. The week I started at URB, they put me on a plane to go to New York and hang out with Prefuse 73 for 48 hours for a cover story. A month or two later, I got to go to Berlin for a whirlwind trip for another piece. It really felt for a hot minute like the Almost Famous fantasy of the music journalist right at the time when the economics just stopped working for such things and print not-so-slowly was overtaken by digital. No matter how many ways you try to slice and dice it, the model for digital is quantity over quality, which means more small stuff and not the big story writing that I think a lot of us got into it for.

At the same time the notion of critical opinion was flattened in a lot of ways when everyone could just access everything themselves and inform their own opinions and share their opinions. Everyone became a critic at the same time. 

I had an interesting interview earlier with Hazel Savage, the head of music intelligence for SoundCloud, and it corresponds to what we're talking about now. I hadn't thought about this dynamic for many years. But in my conversation with Hazel, she said she started her career as a record store clerk, and now she works with AI to help with music metadata tagging and curation and charting. It's just not possible to manually sort through all this music, so you need help from the AI. I guess it corresponded to what you were saying, just in terms of tech enabling the sudden proliferation of content on both the creator and media sides.

In that regard I'm conscientious of my particular hybrid power. My dream job as a music magazine editor, saying what's cool, what's not, in a lot of ways that wasn't supplanted by platforms right away, it was supplanted by bloggers. Most of them didn't make money, but they did it ‘cause they wanted to do it.  

That whole blog era of music, that was sort of the gap between [media and social platforms]. I think about tools like Hype Machine. There were a couple of years where Hype Machine was like, you don't need a music magazine anymore. You got a Hype Machine and a Hype Machine is going to aggregate it for you. As the quantity continued to grow and grow, Hype Machine could cover way more stuff than we ever could as more and more music came out. 

Out of all the ways you've seen the industry change over these past 25 years since you've been in it, how do you think the AI era stacks up in terms of pure disruption?

I think AI is different. I think that the current model we have for creative services is [ending]. Meaningful commentary and criticism as a business model is so long gone. That's what we've been talking about up until now – the end of criticism and commentary as a product in and of itself – and it's not been viable for a very long time. And that’s fine.

I divide it in my head in three ways. There's creativity, which is producing the stuff. There is commentary and criticism, where people come to get your take on something. And then there's creative services, where you are producing media, visual, text, video, in the service of another function. Creative services is producing something as part of a funnel that goes from the consumer who wants something, and the seller who provides whatever that something is, and you're the stuff in the middle that makes them aware, helps them find what they want, gets them the solution they need and makes those connections. 

I think that's the era we've been in for quite a while. Creative services is really what sustains the creative class. People with that skill set, people who were able to pivot from creativity and commentary to creative services have thrived in the digital era. And that is about to be interrupted. Not entirely, but I do think that the reality is that sometimes work is work, and even the creative stuff requires a certain degree of rote work that has to happen in the bottom. 

‍What I think I'm hearing is you're saying that AI could potentially disrupt this particular epoch. If criticism and journalism transition to creative services as a way for people in our community to exist, in a professional sense, do you have a sense of what's next after large portions of creative services fall through?

I wish I did. I know for myself, I have already been making the transition from writing, from the actual creation of content into the strategy level. I've gotten very involved in seeing what these AI tools can actually do and helping my clients utilize those tools. Because it seems easy, but you very quickly hit the wall with AI. I think you're gonna see a lot of people rush into AI, and then either gonna discover the stuff's good enough, or the stuff's not good enough, or the stuff never really mattered. It wasn't what propelled the consumer to begin with.

You mentioned not being able to really see clearly what's the next big thing in terms of people within our community. But also I was struck by the initiative that you're taking, your focus trying to explore different ways to kind of exist within the space. 

Absolutely, and you have to. I've perpetually been the…I don't want to say the last guy on the sinking ship, but I've been through it a few times now. I had to make the transition from critic to creative services.

I do think that ultimately as long as brands want to keep their hands on the reins to one degree or another, I think there's going to be space for people who understand  the art of the science of communication to do it. 

My advice to anybody who's in this, and who had a comfortable living making words, is you got to go up a level if you want to survive, thrive, whatever. You have to go up a level and start thinking about why your words work and frame that in a way that people can understand and frame that in a way that the AI can understand.

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You can reach out to Joshua for a free AI copy consultation here.

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For the first few years of its existence, SoundCloud had a rep as a dynamic, mutable creator ecosystem, but one that could be disorganized and alienating for the uninitiated. That’s changed dramatically over the years, and the service has become a more welcoming place to its millions of listeners, and has harnessed real value for its deep bench of talented artists. A not insignificant degree of credit belongs to Hazel Savage, her co-founder Aron Pettersson and their team. Savage began her career as a record store clerk in the UK, before quickly ingraining herself in the digital music world through stints at Shazam, Universal, Pandora, and Bandlab. In 2018, she co-founded the AI tagging company Musiio and served as CEO. Through its ingenious technology, the company was able to use AI to process and understand the relationships and attributes of millions of tracks. This was useful in deciphering things such as genre or key, and developing throughlines between tracks that powered discovery. It was particularly advantageous for SoundCloud, who acquired the company in 2022. That service focused Musiio’s tech on the millions of tracks by its creators and provided clear pathways to discovery for those tracks.

Third Bridge Creative co-founder Sam Chennault recently caught up with Savage to have an open and clear dialogue about the possibilities and limitations of AI, and how these new technologies work with human workforces.

As someone who’s spent two decades working in the digital music space, I've always heard terms like algorithmic curation, audio fingerprinting, big data, etc. As it’s been presented to us in this past year, AI seems to be something novel, but is there a throughline between all these concepts?

To me, the throughline has always been looking at the problem and then looking at the solution. I feel like those of us who've worked in music and curation for a long time went from a phase where scarcity was our biggest challenge to massive abundance, where all music is available online at your fingertips at any given second. There’s 100,000-plus tracks uploaded every day. The challenge then becomes not what can you access, but what should you access? How do you actually find the stuff that you want to listen to either from a curation or search perspective? 

Back when I started in a record store 18 years ago, we didn't talk about things like algorithmic playlisting, collaborative filtering, or even AI fingerprinting because we didn't need these things. You could walk into the HV on Oxford Street in London where I worked and you say, “I like classical cello music, what do you recommend?” And I'm walking over and picking you out two or three things. We've gone from that very manual process to an automated process, so the technology has risen to suit the occasion.

It's an interesting concept. The technology, and the tools, were built in order to engage with a certain market dynamic where we went from scarcity to suddenly 100,000 tracks being released every day.

I’ve always tried to view it through the lens of positivity. I came up in a time where releasing music was insanely expensive and very limited to people with the financial means, and that's no longer the case. I would never want to go backwards. I would never want to limit creativity or say that we need less music. I'm always for more music and more creation.

Makes a lot of sense. Do you think people like promoters, A&R, music supervisors, DJs, curators, radio programmers, critics – people who were traditionally thought of as tastemakers and gatekeepers – are going to exist, or will AI displace them?

It’s an interesting question. I think that there's something very human about finding someone who likes what you like, and then wanting to know what else they like. And I think that's true whether it's recommendations for clothing and footwear, right through to restaurants and music. We're social beasts. So I don't ever think AI truly replaces that need for the tastemaker and the fascination humans have with the tastemaker. But you can't hire a tastemaker for every single person on your platform. Zane Lowe is a great rock curator, but we're not going to send his playlist to everyone. I'm a Bon Jovi fan, and another person might be a Coldplay fan, and he might not playlist either of those, so it doesn't necessarily scale the way that AI does. I think where AI is powerful is it can put very, very personalized recommendations in front of millions of people for a very, very low cost.

If you just played me one song right now, Sam, and you asked me to list the genres, the key, and the BPM, and say whether there's a vocal, I'll do it, I'll do it a hundred percent flawlessly, and I'll do it better than an AI could, with more level of detail. But what I can't do is five million of those a day, and that's what AI can do. Like I said, I don't want to stop people creating music just because we can't tag it quick enough, that's not where we should put a limit on creativity, but understanding where the limits of AI are is really powerful.

As someone who’s worked at tech companies, I’ve also been told that I should never suggest that a human can do anything better than a machine.

I feel like there's a real benefit and a real power in talking about AI’s limitations, because that's when you start to see that there really isn't anything to be scared of. Talking about the limitations makes people comfortable. To the man on the street, they might just think AI playlists are taking jobs from human curators, and when you start to understand the reasons why you would choose a human curator or why you would choose an AI curator, it starts to make sense and you start to really understand.

Developers may feel very strongly that technology is the only way to do things, and people that have got 20 years' history in the music industry at the major labels may feel very strongly that only humans can do things. I just strongly feel that the reality is somewhere in the middle and that people like me, or maybe people like yourself, we understand the power of technology. But we also understand the benefits of humans, and if you can figure out how to harness the best of both, that's when you figure it out. The minute you just blindly say, "there's only one way of doing things and we cannot change and this is absolutely a hundred percent the best way of doing things," that's when you're wrong, and I think that's true whether you're on the tech side or the human side. So, for me, I’m trying to figure out how you blend the best of both worlds.

What are some of the limitations of AI? Can you expound on that?

I'm not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but I’m fascinated and I love to really dig in on where the ethical limitations are and where they should be. AI is good at doing something that's super tedious, the super boring [work] that humans don't want to do—for example, listening to hundreds of songs a day and writing down the key that they're all in. That's not super exciting or creative work, and humans don't really want to do it. So AI is very helpful in that category. The second category where AI is really helpful is when it's something that humans aren't physically capable of doing, or where there are chances a human might miss or miscalculate. If I've listened to 200 songs in C sharp, I'm going to make more errors.

We have a great use case for AI. Now we can say this application is for good more than for bad. And I'm really fascinated by companies that want to look at these ethical frameworks and want to apply them because I think it reassures a lot of the creative people in our industries that we're not just going ahead as fast as possible and doing anything Jurassic Park-style. We stopped to think if we should. It's really about the ethical and the integral integration of these technologies...I'm willing to step up and be one of the custodians of this technology because I think it's really powerful and can bring a lot of benefits.

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For Maura Johnston, restlessness is a secret weapon. Over the past two decades, the writer-editor has channeled her need to stay busy into a multi-lane career path that’s seen her work as a DJ, a music critic, an author, and beyond. In her time as a media professional, she’s written for Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, the Boston Globe, and beyond, and worked as an editor for The Village Voice and a founding editor for Idolator. Now, when she’s not deejaying for fun or analyzing new music, the TBC contributor works as an adjunct professor in Boston College’s journalism department (she teaches, appropriately, a course called "Writing About Popular Music"). Here, she chats about her career evolution and how to stay ahead of a rapidly changing media landscape. 

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You’ve seen a lot of industry and technology changes in your time as a music critic, and those changes have made music more accessible than ever. Do you find that the function of your job has evolved in response to those changes? 

If you think about the way that you read a newspaper, especially a culture section, your eye falls on things and then you just start reading. But with the structure of journalism online, you have to take that split second to be like, “Am I gonna click this?” And it seems like such a weird thing to focus on. But it is that kind of a split-second decision that you see the results of in [website] traffic reports. Even people who are interested in music only have so much time in the day, and I get it. But, I do think that there is still a function in trying to help people figure out what's going on, because I see with my students that they'll just put stuff on playlists and it'll be this sort of decontextualized [thought]. I feel like it's important to contextualize and help people figure out what's going on. That's always been the case for what I've put forth. It's important to also let people know about your passions and to let people know about things that really excite you, because those things might be lost to the playlist wind.

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You’ve appeared in four music videos. Which was your favorite?

I will never forget the Speedy Ortiz video [“The Graduates”] because that was my friend Ivy and our friend Aurora. It was the day after the Grammys, and I only remember this because they were visiting from out of town for a Grammys party, and there was a giant blizzard and we trudged in the snow from my apartment to the now-defunct Alston Diner, which was this vegetarian diner in my neighborhood. I'll never forget that day because of everybody who just showed up in this foot and a half of snow. [Maura first appears at 2:05.]

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As someone who’s worked in radio, as a critic, and also as an adjunct professor, you seem to have a flexible idea of how to apply your skills, which feels increasingly important in an unstable media landscape. Was being this versatile always part of the plan? 

I've always just been really restless. I think it's more that I always loved radio. Radio was how I found out about a lot of the music that I love today. I loved MTV. I’m always busy because if I don't keep busy, then I get kind of bored. I think also, you know, it's like you kind of have to [be versatile]. I think about how the money is flowing and not flowing and stuff. And so I'm always sort of trying to be ahead of that. Teaching is really great in that way, ’cause teaching is like my stability. And I learned so much about how to deal with the upcoming landscape too. Because I'm starting to get students who were born after 9/11. Watching even the shifts in how they consume media over the time that I've been at Boston College has been really interesting and eye-opening—and a little distressing.

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What’s a piece of advice you have for any aspiring journalists? 

I think flexibility and curiosity are the two things. And also just trusting, and I know this sounds like such a cliché, but trusting your gut. If something doesn't feel right for you, like the pain that you're gonna go through, trying to fit yourself into a mold that you don't fit into or that just feels wrong. It’s not gonna be worth it in the long run. I think flexibility is a combination of curiosity about yourself doing unexpected things and curiosity about the world around you. Flexibility to go with that curiosity because that way, if something comes up you can immerse yourself in it.

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When you think "MBA" you might picture a highly analytical numbers person who loves to examine the gears of a business. When you think "journalism degree" you might picture an intrepid fact-finder who relentlessly turns over stones. When you think "metalhead" … it's possible you're now picturing Beavis and Butthead. 

Or you could stop exhausting your imagination and have a conversation with Wyatt Marshall. Since 2018 he's occupied a number of positions at SoundCloud—nearly all of which had the word "data" in the title—and he has now been the director of music intelligence and analytics there for two years. And it doesn't take much imagination to instantly see how those three elements of his qualifications make perfect sense when blended for the purpose of his role. He'd be no good at his job if he didn't love digging into data and spreadsheets, and he wouldn't know what to do with the information he extracts from the data if he didn't have a journalistic storytelling instinct. The metalhead part, well, Wyatt doesn't resemble Beavis or Butthead in the slightest. But his passion for music is what enables him to connect with the listeners and creators who use SoundCloud. 

Here, he tells us about the ways data is essential to digital music, but only when used in combination with human intelligence.  

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Tell us a little bit about your job—how do you describe it to someone who's not involved in the back room of digital music? 

At a high level, I generally say I try to keep the pulse of the SoundCloud platform. That includes making sense of what’s happening musically from an editorial, storytelling angle of the kind that makes for good music journalism. 

It helps to underscore that SoundCloud is more than just a place to stream music. It’s a place where listeners come to find their new favorite artist before they’ve broken into the mainstream, and it’s a place where budding artists can find inspiration, upload their first track and have it exist alongside tracks from the biggest names in music. In many cases, fans are artists and artists are fans, and they express their feelings toward the music they discover with the social features built into SoundCloud—likes, reposts, shares, and so on, which produces data.

So as a two-sided platform that’s fueled by both artists and fans, we want to understand what’s resonating with listeners, and how artists are using the platform and finding inspiration from one another and how they’re building communities. As the director of music intelligence and analytics, I try to make sure we’re keeping up with all the exciting things happening on the platform.

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Data analytics around streaming music is still a relatively new science, since streaming music has barely passed its 20-year birthday. How is it evolving? 

Because it’s relatively new, there’s a lot of room for novel thinking to take place. Watching the interplay between understanding what’s resonating with listeners and what’s inspiring artists has become increasingly important. I’m sure as the landscape continues to shift, with new modes of music-sharing and creation, we will all have to continue to stay on our toes.

I think we’ll see more emphasis on understanding fandom and identifying who is going to take the leap from casual listening to more tangible support. Data-driven A&R research is going to get stronger and stronger. But it isn’t all just numbers, and those who will do the best here, I think, will be those who bring a true appreciation of music and musical and cultural context and expertise to bear. 

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What are the most important questions that data can answer for a music service?

Data can help you understand what’s striking a chord musically with different listeners in different places, it can tell you what kinds of features help turn people on to new artists, and a lot more. We’ve all seen the discourse on the economics of streaming, so I think we all realize how important it is to understand the difference between casual listening and fandom, and what signals indicate real fandom. That understanding uncovers deeper connections between fans and artists, and makes for a richer and more rewarding experience for both.

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What's the coolest part of your job? 

What continues to fascinate me is the depth of discovery, and how small pockets of artists experimenting with diverse sounds can cast aside preconceived notions of genre and song structure and build fanbases that grow over time. Next thing you know, a small community that caught your attention for one reason or another is suddenly the next big thing.

As you go exploring, you discover incredible music, things you never knew existed. As a listener, you can chart a path from dark trap to Vinahouse and hit about 50 other totally different sounds along the way. Many artists who are uploading boundary-pushing music are forming communities with like-minded artists on the platform. Another thing that’s been cool to observe is how certain sounds have traversed international borders. Sounds can take hold in one place and subsequently catch on with artists who reside in another country, and you can sort of watch the spread of highly specific sounds and styles in real time.

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What are some of the limitations of data?

While data signals can point us toward tracks or artists that seem to be seeing greater activity than others, and maybe other data can give an indication of quality or sonic characteristics, there’s no accounting for taste. Music hits you and me in different ways, and it takes human ears and brains to pick up on the emotional connection that draws us to music in the first place. I don’t think data can predict the impact that music will have on the individual, especially when it comes to exposure to different sounds that are novel to a listener. I’m a metalhead, and an algorithm based on my listening habits as a middle schooler couldn’t have predicted that a chance hearing of Amorphis would have led to the lifelong connection it has.

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What do you think will be the impact of AI on the field of streaming music, and of playlisting and music creation?

I’m no expert here, but I personally believe it’s going to play an increasingly huge role both in trend and predictive analysis, and we’ve already seen a great deal of coverage about AI in music creation, playlisting, and more. With audio fingerprinting AI can give curators the tools to more effectively sift through millions of tracks to find the songs that most perfectly fit a given sonic palette or mood. In terms of personalized algorithmic playlisting, we’re going to see playlists that pick up on sonic traits and moods that fit our listening habits with greater and greater uncanny nuance. 

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Your education includes a masters in journalism and an MBA. Was applying those skills to music always a goal? How do they intersect? 

I was writing about music and a variety of other topics as a journalist before I went to business school, and when I was putting together my application essays I wrote about how I wanted to connect would-be-fans with cool, underground music that wasn’t served well by streaming platforms. That was rooted in my work as a journalist and as a fan. At SoundCloud I quickly became aware of the need to see things from a big data point of view, though, and I found that there was room to plant guideposts rooted in music expertise into the data to help better make sense of it all. 

The need for music contextualization applies to both someone analyzing the back end of a DSP and to a listener navigating an app. I think cultural context and storytelling really helps bring music alive, and helps move someone from being a casual, passive listener to becoming a fan of an artist or genre. So I try to sit at that intersection of analytics and editorial contextualization as often as possible.

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How do you, for your own personal purposes, discover new music? 

When I’m not in my SoundCloud chair, I’m far, far from scientific in my discovery methods. I write a metal column, the Black Market, over at Stereogum where Ian Chainey and I highlight our 10 favorite metal tracks every month, so I’m constantly looking for new metal. For that, I’ll dig around on Bandcamp, where metal has a really strong community, there are some YouTube channels that are really useful sources, and I’ve got a stack of promos landing in my email every day that I could never hope to keep up with. It may sound a bit basic, but a good band name will catch my attention, and so will album art—metal has such a strong visual language, and if a band nails the look and vibe, they’re onto something, so I’ll give it a listen and am usually not disappointed. It’s hard to beat the feeling of stumbling across a new gem that clicks within seconds and will stick with you for months and years.

Jocelyn Michelle Brown is a music supervisor who turned her nerd tendencies into a multifaceted career. In the time since her mother taught her how to make a mixtape with a dual-deck boombox more than 30 years ago, she’s worked as a music critic for a local Florida alt-weekly, a public relations coordinator for an indie label, a DJ, and now as a music supervisor. These days, she operates as the principal of Reality Club, a music consulting agency she founded three years ago. As a supervisor, she has advised on music for films like Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game (2022), Ferguson Rises (2021), and others, helping determine the proper synergy between music and tonality for the projects. Here, she chats about the not-so-obvious TV theme that helped inspire her career path, her music listening habits, and more. 

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What things in your childhood led you to your career as a music supervisor?

The real origin starts with Jan Hammer’s Miami Vice theme. Miami Vice was a thing that my mom and I watched. No little kid should have been watching Miami Vice at this time, but it was the ’80s, and parents do what they want. Whenever I heard those initial notes, I'd come tearing outta wherever I was. 

There’s this game that is popular in preschools called Memory, and it revolves around flashcards and pairing up images relative to those flashcards. That’s kind of what was going on with me relative to hearing that theme song and knowing [what was on the screen when] the percussion came in, where you'd hear the guitar solo; parts where things would amp up, where things would ramp down. I was pairing all of those sounds to the images that were flashing. And my mom, God bless her, she'd be like, “Who's that?” And I'm like, “Lieutenant Castillo.” What's that? Speedboat. What is that? That's a flamingo. My life as a music supervisor is really funny, that fundamental pairing of sound and image is still very much a thing. I've just always thought musically in that way, even when there's no image in front of me that exists in my mind, I'm seeing something and creating an entire story there. 

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Helping curate music for a show or movie is undeniably cool. What’s your favorite part about the job?

It's that Rubik's Cube element. It's solving a problem musically, right? For me, it's looking at what the director is aiming for or what the brand client is aiming for, and presenting them with options. There's always a moment where I can go with the expected thing that is being asked for, or I can introduce them to something that's a little outside the box that also meets their ask. And I get to be the person who walks them through that and explains, “I know you're attached to this Minnie Riperton song and it's wonderful, but it's also overused. Here's a new artist who's reminiscent vocally, but doing some different things that I think might be a little more relatable to your audience. And her new album comes out in two weeks, right around the time when your campaign is expected to drop.”

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Before you worked as a music supervisor, you worked at a radio station and then as a DJ. How did those jobs prepare you for what you do now?

I would say the radio station figured in in terms of knowledge of catalog, learning about which record labels had which artists and specialized in which things, what [artist] backstories were, how they connected to other artists, other collaborators. 

DJing, however, was a little different in that you're there in a bar, you're observing social interactions, you're observing what people respond to and what they don't respond to, and really able to read emotion and feeling and tonality. If someone's talking to you or coming up to you or complimenting what you do or making a request or outright telling you they hate what you do—which did happen sometimes—you're able to really register all those ranges of emotion and response. And to me, I took that with me into my job to let that inform how I thought about [taste, as in] I know I like this, but is Debbie in Nebraska going to respond to this? When I put this song in a commercial for McDonald's, is the creative team gonna respond to it? It's rarely about me. It's more about, what are people gonna respond to? What do I know people have responded to? 

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For your job, you have to provide and advise creative teams on the music to choose for films and TV series. Has having to listen to music so critically for a job changed how you listen to music for leisure? 

I can't not notice it [laughs]. Every time I go to the movies, I have to stick around for the end credits just to see who worked on what. But that's to satisfy my own personal curiosity and to write people and give kudos when they've done something really cool. There's no way for me to watch something now without observing what happens musically. In terms of my casual listening, yeah, it does change things a little bit. If I were to be completely honest about what I choose to listen to in my spare time, man, lately it's been a fair amount of ambient [laughs], a fair amount of instrumental music that is not jazz. Sometimes, [it’s] just straight-up proto punk, like the Stooges or Death. Stuff like that doesn't cross my desk so much relative to the publishing realm or music supervision realm. Because for me, that's a pocket of interest that I need to protect. I need to still be able to connect to music as a fan.

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What’s something that you think needs to change in the world of music supervision?

There aren't a whole lot of music supervisors of color who are looked at for a lot of jobs. I hope that changes because we are here. We're not necessarily seen, we're not necessarily heard, but we are very much here. And that's literally across every ethnic group that you can see. There are Middle Eastern music supervisors, Latin music supervisors, African American music supervisors, AAPI music supervisors. We are here, we want that work. We're doing the work to get the work, but we're not necessarily the people who get called into the room. I want that noted because there's a perception that we're not there, and we are. We are.

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Annie Zaleski is a writer, editor, author, and music curator who's been lending her considerable talents to TBC since 2017. But she was honing her craft professionally for close to two decades before that (and she points out that her fervent energy for writing dates back at least as far as elementary school). She wrote a book on Duran Duran's Rio (2021) as well as Lady Gaga: Applause (2022), and other titles are in the works. Annie is profoundly passionate about and fluent in rock, pop, punk, and New Wave music, among other genres, and without breaking a sweat can throw down 16 reasons why her hometown, Cleveland, is truly the only place that could be the home of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Here, she told us about her accomplishments, challenges, dreams, and nightmares. 

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What is the piece of work you've created that you're most proud of? Describe how it came together. 

The 33 1/3 series book I wrote on Duran Duran's Rio. (Available in two editions!) It's a long, complicated story: I pitched the book in 2007 and 2009, to no avail, and finally wrote a better proposal in 2018 that was accepted. I started working on it in late 2019 and spent the first very fraught part of the pandemic at home, doing interviews, research, and writing, and finally finished it in fall 2020. I labored over the writing, the word choices and arrangements, the editing and copyediting because I had been wanting to write the book for so long—helping to place Duran Duran's music in the greater canon was deeply important to me. I'm enormously proud of how it turned out and that people like it!

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What is the most challenging part of your job, and how do you address that? 

Time management. Projects with hard deadlines are preferable, since then I can plan better, but I often have projects with long deadlines (or amorphous deadlines). Trying to balance short- and long-term deadlines is tough for me because things keep getting pushed off. That old saying about assignments expanding to fill the time you have is so deeply true. My best solution is not to overschedule, because that's when I tend to get overwhelmed—it's definitely a work in progress. 

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What's the best work advice you've ever received? 

That there's enough work to go around—so operate from a mindset of abundance, not scarcity. 

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Name one time you said "yes" to something that felt like a leap of faith, and you're so glad you did. And name one time you had a hard time saying "no" to something, and you're so glad you did. 

Back in the 2000s, I said yes to a job working as the music editor at the Riverfront Times in St. Louis. I moved to the city knowing absolutely nobody, just my soon-to-be co-workers, into my first real full-time day job out of college. In hindsight, I marvel at how much confidence it took for me to make such a bold move. But years later, that job has continued to pay dividends for me professionally and personally—and I'm so grateful for taking it and for everything I learned.

As far as saying no—years ago, I applied for and was accepted to grad school for journalism at UC Berkeley. I opted not to go because it would've been very expensive. While I sometimes wonder what might have happened had I moved to California, many very good things happened because I didn't go, so it was ultimately the right decision. 

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Professionally speaking, what's your biggest fear? What is your ultimate dream? 

Biggest fear: having assignments and opportunities dry up and editors stop emailing. Ultimate dream? To write a book that makes the New York Times best seller list.

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What have you been listening to/watching for pleasure (not for work) recently? 

The K-pop group IVE, the forthcoming albums from Hannah Jadagu and Laura Cantrell, and my current favorite jam is Julia Jacklin's "I Was Neon." I was also marveling just this morning about how spoiled I am to live in the Cleveland area, because we have an abundance of amazing college radio stations—four or five come in clear enough for me to listen when I'm driving around. So I've been flipping between those lately, too. Watching: new season of Single Drunk Female, the Brooke Shields documentary, and finishing up the second season of Girls5Eva.

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If you could hang out with any musician/performer/producer/actor, alive or dead, who would it be? Why, and what would be the first thing you'd ask them? 

David Bowie, because I find him absolutely fascinating. I'd ask him what he's reading.

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As a cofounder and head of product for Gimme Radio, and before that VP of product for 8Tracks and Rhapsody, Jon Maples has amassed a ton of wisdom around building experiences for music fans. In his most recent role, he focused on not just any fans, but on diehards of specific genres. It was a different remit compared to those of the big players in streaming music, who focus on building products for the largest and broadest audiences possible. Here, he discusses how to identify a product opportunity, how to keep your own biases in check when making product decisions, and the approach he takes when determining if a new tech trend is mostly hype.

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For someone who’s not from a tech background, how do you usually explain what a product manager does?

It's three things: It's creating a business case for a product, which means figuring out if it's something that the business can actually make money on. It’s defining what the product is, and a lot of times we talk about this as product-market fit. And the third thing is technically building it, and that's usually two parts. The first part is dealing with technical people who can define the right way to build it. And then it's the design side of it, to make it look and work as well as possible for users. What a product manager mostly does is try to influence people, from the user level all the way up to the CEO.

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One of the things that I remember learning from you, that I believe is one of the main principles of product management, is: “You are not the customer.” Can you explain what that means?

Yes. So, it's extremely easy to be biased about product, because at the end of the day, we all use products. Why “You are not the customer” is important is because it makes you check your own biases about what you're building. If you are not the customer, then you have to go talk to the customers and gather evidence to figure out what they want.

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Is it harder to keep your biases in check when you're a product manager for a music product, given that we all have such strong opinions about music?

Yeah, I mean, let's face it, the whole thing about “You are not the customer”—it's something we all aspire to as product managers, and you're never gonna do it. Everybody's gonna fail to a certain extent, because you're biased. So in music, yeah, it becomes more challenging. I don't know how many times I've heard from everybody, from a CEO to a designer to an engineer, “That's not the way I use it.” So if you have evidence of what's going to be successful or not, you're going to create a much better product than if you just simply rely on your own biases.

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You’ve designed music products for a mass audience, but at Gimme you were very focused on creating an experience for this subset of music fans, which is the diehard audience, the true fans. What’s the difference between the two approaches?

I think there's a lot of authenticity that you can't really fake. Like one of the first things that we thought about was basically throwing out the playbook on how we design a product and thinking about the culture that we wanted to reach from the beginning, and letting that drive everything. We started with metal, and actually not all metal music, but specific genres of metal that don't get as much exposure, like death metal, black metal, a lot of thrash metal. We really tried to focus on speaking directly to those fans and embracing the culture around them from the beginning.

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You led product at Gimme for about six years. How did your vision for the service change over time?

I think we saw ourselves much more like a streaming service at the beginning, and much less like a fan service. The thing that we really changed over time was focusing on what fans want and how they help the midlevel artists—not top-level, but midlevel artists—make a living, which was through engagement with their most important fans.

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Gimme once did an NFT promotion with Deicide. We’re a couple years into the hype cycle around NFTs. What’s your view on them here in 2023?

I think in music, we’re still trying to figure out exactly what the value is. For NFTs across the board, there are going to be some very interesting approaches. A lot of people are talking about music rights and NFTs: You buy an NFT and you get a share of publishing for a song. That shows promise. But for us, we were really focused on physical merch more than digital merch. So what we wanted to explore was whether we could find ways to match and extend the value of physical merch through NFTs. So we did it for the Deicide box set. And what we were trying to do is test the demand for NFTs to see how many fans actually see value in them.

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As a product person, you have a lot of experience encountering new trends and trying to figure out when something is legit versus when it’s just hype. How do you think through that when it comes to things like the blockchain and AI and these new shiny tech trends?

Yeah, that's a trap. It really is. Because when you're building products in the digital world, people expect you to be all over [trends]. I think there's a couple of things that have to happen. The first thing is going through the basic product approach, where you figure out when it's valuable enough for users. I pretty much try to put the brakes on everything like that from the beginning. And something our CEO and I talked about all the time was when was the right time to do it. There is pressure, not just because it's the new shiny thing, but because investors are expecting you to have an answer for a lot of these things. But it's also extremely valuable to wait and to experiment. It doesn't mean you are against these new trends. It's just that you have to wait to see if the demand develops.

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Do all the developments in AI make you uneasy?

I think it's a fool's errand for anyone to try to fool anyone with AI. People can spot the lack of authenticity, and they don't want something that's fake. Everything needs to be tuned by a human. AI at its best is going to work when it's a tool for other people to use. People say, “Oh AI is gonna take over the world. And we're gonna be able to fire name-your-profession.” I don't think that's the case at all. What I think is it’s going to become a very powerful tool for people who know how to tune it, who know how to use it to accomplish things that would otherwise take a lot of time and a lot of effort.

How’s this for lucky: I first met Philip Sherburne—possibly the preeminent electronic music journalist of his generation—in 2002, because he was friends with my college roommate, and they produced a DJ night together at a local bar in the San Francisco neighborhood where I lived. We’ve been colleagues ever since—first at the alt-weekly SF Weekly, then o.g. streaming service Rhapsody, then Spin, and now Third Bridge Creative, where he’s completed over 11,000 assignments for TBC clients since joining the crew as a founding team member in 2015. 

Sherburne is best known for his coverage of electronic music, regularly spotlighting the genre’s most compelling new artists. But he grew up on punk and hardcore, and it’s not uncommon to find him opining about artists like Cat Power or Smog. The guy just loves music, and writing, and both these facts come screaming off the screen when you read him. These days, he lives in Menorca, Spain, with his wife and daughter. It’s no small feat to forge a 20-year career writing about underground sounds, but Sherburne’s managed to make it look easy. Here, we discuss how he did it. 

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So how did you get your start doing this?

I studied English lit in college, and when I got out I had no idea what I wanted to do. And then I went to graduate school, and I was not particularly enamored of graduate school. I was in Providence, Rhode Island, and because I was a music obsessive, I started doing some record reviews for a local Providence college publication. Then—I think it was ‘98—I pitched the Wire magazine on a piece on Plug Research, which was this label in Los Angeles. And I flew myself to Los Angeles to spend a weekend with those guys. I think the Wire paved the way for XLR8R and then SF Weekly around the same time. And then yeah, just one thing after another.

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At what point did you start to think of music journalism as your career?

I guess that was 2002. During that time I was beginning to write; I was working at Ask Jeeves, which is a search engine the older Gen Xers will remember. I was there for the Bay Area’s first big tech boom. And then everyone started getting laid off, and so around the time that I got laid off, I managed to step into a part-time role as San Francisco editor of FlavorPill. And so that covered my rent, basically, and that allowed me to freelance on top of that. And so I was very lucky because from that point on, I had a writing gig that could cover my rent and so everything above and beyond that was sort of gravy.

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In the times I’ve been a freelancer, that was always crucial: having the anchor gig. When you look back at the fact you've been doing this now for two decades, what do you think has contributed to your ability to make this your career?

I think a lot of it is luck, kind of being in the right place at the right time. Like how I just happened to land this one anchor gig at the same time that I was getting laid off from this other job. And I was lucky that I continued to get a succession of anchor gigs like that. There was Rhapsody for many years. Then there was a period when I was living in Berlin, and I had a gig with Beatport. And then I went from Beatport to Spin as a contributing editor, and then I went to Pitchfork, where I've been for the last nine years. So it’s just a lot of luck, being able to get those anchor gigs.

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In the early stages of a career, most people aren’t worried about things like 401(K)s and buying a house, and then you get to a point where you start thinking about those things. You've been a freelancer for two decades. At what point did you start to think about those more adult things?

Definitely in my 30s, like mid- to late 30s. For a long time, I didn't have health insurance, and then I got into some credit-card debt too, just because some of that I carried from grad school. And so it was actually in Berlin when I got a semi-decent paying job, and rent was cheap. And that’s when I said “Okay, I need to get this shit together.” And since then saving became a focus. Because it's a precarious, precarious industry, you know?

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Yeah. So how do you think of your safety net? Is that something you worry about?

Yeah, I worry about it a little bit. I think it's something that I’m probably not doing enough to address.

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Well, you bought a house. 

Yeah, there’s that. And I’m growing a garden so, you know, if worse comes to worst… Honestly the stuff I worry about is like droughts and floods and plagues, as much as anything these days, as much as 401(K)s.

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Lately it feels like it’s hard to figure out which of the things we need to be most worried about. 

That's part of why I want to garden, ya know? I want tomatoes, at least. I'm probably fooling myself though, because I think feeding yourself and your family from your own garden is probably well beyond my skills, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

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A while back, you explained to me how you organize your music listening system, and I remember being really impressed. Do you still have that sort of system?

Yeah, I don't think it's as methodical as it wants to be. But basically everything that looks potentially interesting to me, either a record that I might conceivably review, or at least that I want to consider, goes into a Google spreadsheet, with basic data—artist, title, label, format, release day—and I take all of those and I download all those promos. And then there's the stuff that I come across randomly, on Bandcamp or wherever. A lot of it's just chance and aleatory. Every month I discover stuff that blows me away that I still just get so much pleasure out of writing about, so something's working.

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Did you just use the word “aleatory”? 

I did. 

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Well you stumped me. That’s actually related to my next question. You are hands down one of the best pure writers I know. You never run out of new, creative ways to describe music. As somebody who is very attuned to that aspect of the job, how do you feel the importance of writing itself has evolved over the years? I mean, in particular, I think we're all freaked out by the ChatGPT stuff.

I think the importance of good writing is only going to increase because you look at the ChatGPT stuff and it's a semi-convincing mimicry of human speech and prosody and writing, but when you start looking at it with an editor's eye, you're like, “Wait, but what is it actually saying?” 

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Do you feel anxiety about it? 

I don't feel personal, professional anxiety, although maybe I should—like ask me in a year when I've lost all my jobs and I’m making Molotov cocktails in my basement lair with an Edward Albee shirt on—but no, it hasn’t caused me anxiety. 

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It’s like we were saying earlier: What are the things that are going to cause you the most anxiety? Is it climate change? Is it your personal finances? Is it the AI takeover? Take your pick…

I'm also anxious about what it could do to music because we already see the sort of flood of content that's created simply for playlists, and now throw AI at that. And so what happens when Spotify is suddenly overloaded with AI music? 

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I just remembered when we were at Rhapsody, you were the one who coined the term “SEO pop.”

Yeah, this is going to be like that times a million. 

What were some of the examples we used to see at Rhapsody…?

It was like an artist called “Dubstep” with a record called Dubstep and then the songs would be called “100 BPM Workout Mix.”

Right, it was just totally crude. 

But it was pointing in that direction.

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Yes. A lot of reasons to be anxious. So you recently started a record label, Balmat; you have your writing and curating career; and you have your family. How do you balance these different things? Are you someone that has very strict working hours? 

It’s difficult. I think in some ways, it's kind of organic. Like, I've just found a mix of work that works for me. Pitchfork, Third Bridge, the record label… That's a good mix. I'm working on an essay right now for a major European arts festival, and I'm kind of wishing I hadn't taken it on because I think that my balance is off. It's just one extra thing and it's just on my mind always, and it's like, "Can I hang out with my family this weekend? Or should I finish this thing?" So yeah, you make some choices. But I think the work tends to expand to fill the available time for it. So I also think it's important to make time to do things with your family. My wife and I have started going to the gym three times a week. And it's two hours a day, three times a week, but it's two hours a day that I'm not on Twitter.

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Last question is the most cliched, but here goes: What advice do you have for folks just starting out? Do you ever get that question?

I do. I get emails from people sometimes. I think there's one thing that I left out when you asked what made it possible for me to do what I do. Like many other people, I just happened to come up at a time when blogging was—I was about to say viable but not viable because nobody made money off it—but it was just a dynamic, exciting thing. And everybody was blogging and there was this exchange of ideas and it kind of overlapped with mailing-list culture and bulletin-board culture and just all of these people discussing music online. And it became a really good way to become a better writer. You know, I was lucky to come up with all the alt-weeklies, SF Weekly, stuff like that, but also with the blogosphere. And I think younger people coming up now—it's tough because they don't have the alt-weeklies, and blogs aren't really a thing. But I think the most important thing is to be writing, to be practicing writing to be getting better at writing, and then to be pitching outlets. And that's a whole other conversation, How to pitch, how to know who to pitch, where to pitch... but the writing is the first thing, and just practicing. And reading. It’s so obvious that it sounds kind of like a cop-out, but that's the only way to get better.

The dance-music auteur known as Afriqua has plenty of story to tell. He was born Adam Longman Parker in Virginia and educated at the Royal Academy of Music in London. A classically trained pianist, he managed to place in the DMC DJ world championship when he was just 12 years old. His works—a stylish blend of house, disco, and techno—pay homage to his Black heritage, and they’ve made him a distinct voice in the world of electronic music. Currently signed to R&S Records, he made his Mutek debut in 2022, and can frequently be found DJing around his hometown of Berlin, including the illustrious Panorama Bar. This May, he'll release the EP Maxi Single, a gleaming constellation of dance-floor thrills. 

In this Q&A, Parker — who became a Third Bridge client this year — talks to us about how he connects with the people who love his music, why he thinks opening up about his creative process deepens that connection, and why keeping his professional biography up to date is as important for him as it is for his fans. 

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One of the hardest parts about making music for a living is finding out where your fans are and how to reach them. How did you find yours?

For me, it was really trial and error, and it remains so. I'm doing my market research in public. When I was younger, it was just a matter of, “I’m making music, I want to put it out and let's see what happens.” And then I was able to see from that, “Okay, well these are the DJs who like my stuff, these are the radio stations that like my stuff.” Social media gives this really amazing, detailed look into the characters and the sort of scenes that really [click] with you. But you really never know what people are going to totally resonate with, especially if you're taking creative risks.

So then I think a lot of the art becomes getting more data in a way that is on brand. So figuring out a way to kind of like, tease stuff or tease ideas and get kind of constant feedback from your fans in a way that doesn't water down your brand or undermine your quality. For me, that's been recently doing more videos and stuff on social media, because it gives me a chance to say, "All right, I made this track and maybe this track is never gonna come out, but I can do a cool video around it and tease it." I deepen my relationship with my fans because they are part of the creative process. 

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What do you think is the most important thing for you or any other artist to communicate to fans? 

I think that people learn a lot more from seeing how you go about your creative process than they do from the resulting work, especially now. You might have a song that pops on Spotify just algorithmically, but nobody knows who you are. I think what really distinguishes an artist nowadays—and I say this as an artist but also as a fan of so many artists—is giving people something to invest in, in terms of the story behind the work. Because I think that [it's important] for fans to recognize that their feedback is an essential part of the process of creating art. 

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Let's talk about album rollouts and music promotion. When putting together your album covers, your press releases, or anything else, what do you think is the most important thing to consider? 

I think the most important thing to consider is the tone. It’s very easy for the content tangential to the release of a piece of music to get out of your control and end up being totally off-brand with what you're actually trying to express. And the hard thing about it is, it could be exactly the [right] information, but just presented in the wrong way.

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Obviously, your music is personal, and it says a lot about you, but there’s a different kind of journey when you don’t use a lot of lyrics to tell your story. With that in mind, how important do you think it is to have a bio that really says what you’re about? 

Instinctively I feel like it's something that's always been missing from my operation. It's always been a bit of an afterthought, like, “Oh shit, we need a bio. Oh shit, the bio needs to be updated.” The further you get into your career, the more difficult it is to really sum it up. And I kind of want a nicely written bio for myself, as well, to just remember what I've done. 

It can be difficult to keep that sort of throughline for your own career when you do so much. And when you start to get to a point where you're constantly busy with different projects, with different people, [it's necessary] to really make the decision of what's important, and what actually needs to be represented and what are the key principles that bring your project to life. I think that having all of that stuff written properly is invaluable when you're trying to keep multiple stakeholders and press aligned.

I used to have the thought, earlier in my career, that people would take the press release and I thought they would dive deeper and they would come up with their own interpretation. I don't wanna count on anyone anymore to get my story across. I wanna tell my story, and know that whatever people are working with, based on the story that I'm telling, at least my story has been told fully from my perspective. I think that's an artist's responsibility, you know?

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‍Interested in working with Third Bridge to help tell your story? We create a variety of editorial and marketing materials for the artist and label community. Hit us up if you'd like to discuss your project.

My career in music journalism began back in the fall of 1998, when I did a two-month unpaid internship at Eye Weekly (RIP), an alt-weekly in my hometown of Toronto. During that time, I was given the opportunity to realize my dream of writing articles and reviews for the paper’s music section, which I had read religiously throughout my teens. But I also performed a whole bunch of other tasks, including, but not limited to, proofreading, research, sorting incoming faxes for the concert-listings editor, sourcing file photos, and covering celebrity Scrabble matches for front-of-book news items.

At the end of my term, I somehow convinced our editor-in-chief to pay me a modest weekly stipend—I think it was $100?—to come into the office a few days a week and essentially serve as the staff gofer, in addition to my freelance writing contributions. (This was an era when you could still get a room in a shared Toronto apartment for $300.) One day, our editor was giving somebody a tour of the office, introducing each staff member with their job title. When he got to me, he said, “And this is Stuart. He… uh… he’ll eat glass for 50 bucks.”

Twenty-plus years later, my situation isn’t all that fundamentally different. While music criticism is what drew me to writing, the job of “full-time music critic” has become all but extinct over the course of my career, so the key to surviving has been to find other gigs that complement and support my music-writing endeavors. And just as the music industry has transformed in the digital age, so too have the skill sets that music-media workers use to flex their knowledge.

Here at Third Bridge Creative, my responsibilities range from writing and editing display copy for streaming services, to building playlists and programming niche online stations. And through all that work, I’m in an advantageous position to keep tabs on emerging artists and trends that I can then explore further in my freelance writing work outside of the TBC umbrella.

So in light of all that, when somebody asks me what I do for a living, I’m at a bit of a loss for words. “Music critic” doesn’t really cut it anymore, because traditional music criticism accounts for maybe 10 percent of my workflow (though, still, somehow, roughly 100 percent of the emails I receive). “Writer/editor” feels like it’s tethered to an old print-media model, but then “curator” just sounds, to my ear, way too pretentious to say out loud with a straight face. So for now, I think I’ll stick with Professional Glass-Eater—I may be able to demand a better rate and higher-quality panes these days, but the teeth-grinding hustle is forever.

At Third Bridge, we rarely do the same thing twice. Still, a recent project presented a curveball. Redwoods and Records is a community of nature and music enthusiasts who share the goal of providing soundtracks for redwood trails in Northern California. Ultimately, they hope that this experience will create awareness, foster appreciation, and drive donations to organizations devoted to preserving these fragile ecosystems. They turned to us to help curate these playlists. In order to scale this over a hundred-plus trails, we first created a taxonomy of trail types—old growth, steep inclines, etc.—along with situational variables: morning, sunny-day hikes, and so on. Next, we unleashed our music experts. Below, we chat with project curators Stephanie Garr, Justin Farrar, and Adrian Spinelli about how they approached this most unusual project.

How was this assignment different from a typical curation assignment? Was it more difficult?

SG: I actually thought this would be a breeze. I mean, I love music and I hike a lot. Makes sense. I had a few tracks I knew I had to include, but once I sat down to put it all together, I got stuck. Most curation assignments revolve around a pretty defined theme and audience. This one allowed me too much freedom, so I started obsessing over who exactly I was making these for. Anyone can be a hiker, after all, so what vibe do I want to create? Do I pick obvious tracks? Do people want to hear what they know or do they want to be surprised? Ultimately, I want others to enjoy these playlists as much as I do.

How did you tie your consideration of the setting, and the listener, into the tracks you suggested?

AS: I first imagined the trail I was selecting music for—the way it smells, how it's shaped, how it feels, and how the sun pierces the redwood canopies and hits the trail. I feel like every time I go hiking, I'm looking not only to get some exercise, but also, especially, to be inspired by what nature has to offer in that setting. It felt safe to assume the listener would share that outlook. So the music has to fit into that framework: Something that's going to inspire you to keep going 'til the end, but also to keep opening your mind in different ways from start to finish.

What was your decision-making process around the structure of the playlists?

SG: The ordering of a playlist is as important as the tracks themselves. I want the songs to almost bleed into each other, even if their sound is completely different. There’s no science to it, it’s just about feel. Of course, the first track is everything—that’s your thesis. I picked Caribou’s “Sun” to kick off Songs for Conquering a Difficult Hike, for example. I love the movement of that track. It’s bright and playful and makes you feel like you can conquer the world.

JF: I stuck to a basic wave pattern: a couple songs to increase energy followed by a couple that plateau out, then a couple that let that energy draw down a bit. It’s subtle—modulations. I tend to do the same thing with genre and artist popularity. If I place somewhat obscure experimental folk songs back-to-back, I follow them up with something a little more identifiable. Of course, if you find two songs that feel meant to be played one after another, you have to go for it. I’d zoom out, too: on Shadowy Songs for Tall Tree Canopies, for example, I placed Fairport Convention’s “Come All Ye,” an invocation track, at the beginning, and at the end I added Magical Power Mako’s “Sound, Mother Earth,” which was meant to draw the invocation to a close. I was thinking of the hike as a kind of ritual, and that this would be the ceremonial music for it.

“Bob just wants to make sure that some kid has something decent to put on the eight-track while he cruises down Woodward.” — Lester Bangs, Village Voice, 1979

I love writing about music, even when I don’t dig the music I’m writing about. After 22 years of cranking out album reviews, artist features, curated playlists, and everything else you can think of, my mind still races and my stomach still fills with butterflies whenever I tackle a new assignment. If a few days pass without writing about music, I get anxious — tense, even. It’s a feeling I can only describe as a cross between acute caffeine withdrawal and existential woe.

When I tell folks that I write about music for a living they invariably assume it’s wild and romantic. Either I’m chilling at home, blasting my favorite records at all hours of the day (and night). Or, I’m partying backstage with cool musicians. The reality, however, is way less glamorous. Most of the time I’m glued to my laptop, writing about music I don’t even like. I mean, I don’t not like it; it’s just that I wouldn’t listen to it for enjoyment, and that’s a crucial distinction.

Here is the music I do like: the weirder the better. My collection is packed with obscure vinyl and tapes that sound as though they were created in another dimension by freaktastic aliens. As I type these words, Laser Temple of Bon Matin’s Bullet In2 Mesmer’s Brain! soaks my noggin in lo-fi psych-noise that teeters on the edge of gooey chaos and higher-level form. So yeah, that’s what I’m into, as a civilian.

Now here is the music I spend 80 percent of my working life covering: testosterone-drenched rock and metal. I’m talking about all those commercial riff-ragers who climb Billboard’s Top Hard Rock Albums chart week in and week out. These include older bros Nickelback, 3 Doors Down, Linkin Park, etc., but also younger metalcore and post-hardcore acts like Asking Alexandria and Falling in Reverse who incorporate hair metal and EDM into their tunes.

But despite the fact that my relationship to the latter is about as clinically professional as a doctor’s is to his stethoscope, there is a very real chance that you have been super stoked when reading one of my reviews of Linkin Park or rocking out to one of my post-grunge playlists on one of the streaming services. And if this is the case, which again it likely is, then you may be wondering how I can get you so enthused for music that I would never play for myself when off the clock.

Let’s dive into that.

***

I knew music writing was the thing for me as soon as I began working on my first assignment in January of 1994. A couple weeks before, I had walked into the offices of the Western Herald, the student daily at Western Michigan University, and introduced myself to A&E Editor Shirley Clemens, who promptly asked me to write an article on the then-controversial used CD marketplace (ah, the ‘90s). And just like that, I began driving around Kalamazoo, from record store to record store, interviewing owners (including Flipside Records’ Neil Juhl, a local legend who would play a pivotal role in turning me onto Detroit proto-punk and free jazz) for what would eventually become “The Great Used CD Debate.” It was an astonishingly terrible piece, yet I was hooked.

My experiences at the Western Herald helped me snag bylines in a handful of dailies and alt weeklies, as well as an internship at The Boston Phoenix in the summer of ’96. But the bulk of my writing between 1995 and around 2003 actually appeared in punk and indie zines. These included Jeff Bale’s Hit List, Copper Press, Sound Collector, Badaboom Gramophone and my personal favorite Your Flesh, which along with Touch and Go was the Midwest’s go-to zine for hardcore punk, scum, noise-rock and proto-grunge.

Zines were (and still are) my favorite outlets: You can curse (underrated perk), be willfully eccentric with story structure and write about extreme underground music without sacrificing its essential undergroundedness, all of which appeals to me because, well, that’s the stuff nearest and dearest to my heart. Writing about an obscure and utterly fascinating weirdo like the late Mikey Wild (a.k.a. The Mayor of South Street) is way more fun than jockeying for an interview with whatever flavor-of-the-year tops Pazz & Jop.

On the flipside, zines don’t pay. And that was a problem for someone who desperately wanted to make a living from music writing as opposed to a normal desk job. So, by 2004 I chose to double down on writing for outlets that paid, including alt weeklies like SF Weekly, The Village Voice and Seattle Weekly. As with many music journalists of my generation, this path eventually led to curatorial work for the growing number of streaming music companies, which — surprise, surprise — can be weird about me even mentioning their names (google “NDA”), but suffice it to say you’ve used at least one of these services, if not multiple.

Actually making a living off music writing and curation had a critical side effect, however: In the words of the Meat Puppets, I split myself in two. The more I found myself working for outlets for actual money, the more I found myself writing about stuff beyond the underground music that was my first love. I began covering mainstream rock, blues, country, EDM, folk, chart pop, jazz, reggae, and even Warped-approved post-hardcore. The list goes on and on, really.

It turns out that developing these two different headspaces is fairly common among music journalists and curators. Many of us write about commercial music, while the vinyl that makes it onto our turntables after work is significantly less mainstream. But because so few of my peers don’t particularly enjoy acknowledging this reality, much less offering in depth examination on the subject (generally speaking, no one pays you for that either), it’s something of an elephant in the room. I can only speak to my personal experiences, and they look something like this…

***

Writing about and curating music I listen to only as a professional can be both more difficult and easier than writing about stuff that appeals to me on a personal level. It’s harder when the music is bland — no unintentional weirdness, no good backstories, just utter blandness. Virtually all indie beyond 1996 fits this mold. It’s mediocre to the point of hideousness and should be banned by Congress (just joking, but not). In contrast, covering metalcore (as well as post-hardcore of the Warped Tour variety) is far easier. Sure, the music can oftentimes be borderline unlistenable, but there’s no denying that it’s packed with character (however absurd). Crank I Prevail’s version of Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” off Punk Goes Pop, Vol. 6. It’s so stupid, but stupid in a way that makes me want to know why these guys would actually want to create such a bizarre chunk of sound. It takes real effort to make something so audaciously loud and dumb and that marries mosh-pit breakdowns to plastic teen pop in such a hamfisted way.

Whenever I’m in professional mode (and it doesn’t matter if the assignment in question is harder or easier) my mantra always is “this isn’t for me.” There’s a part of me that believes all music comprises one giant universe, but there’s another part of me that believes it contains multiple universes. The former me believes I should rail against everything that I don’t dig no matter the cost, while the latter says, “Not so fast. Some stuff simply isn’t meant for your ears.”

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: In the spring of 2010, an editor at Spin asked if I was up for reviewing Boys & Girls, Alabama Shakes’ debut album. I snagged the assignment because it was decent pay, and I know a thing or two about the history and evolution of Southern soul, blues, and rock ’n’ roll, thus it would be a fairly easy assignment. (Bang it out and move on to the next thing.) Now, if I had allowed the universalist in me anywhere near that review, he would’ve insisted on writing, “Seem like nice kids, but don’t waste your time. Go buy an old Eddie Hinton record instead.” But that approach doesn’t work. My editor would’ve made me rewrite it anyway. Plus, I probably wouldn’t have gotten more work had I dismissed the record outright, and those are things I have to consider.

So, I let the other me, the one who believes in many universes, handle the review. This entailed writing a piece geared toward who I thought would even be curious enough to read about the Alabama Shakes. I came up with an imaginary twentysomething who digs The Black Keys, The White Stripes, and maybe some Fat Possum garage rock, but who lacks the knowledge about Southern music to know that the Shakes aren’t totally original. Basically, I created what social media types like to call a “persona” and went about weighing the pluses and minuses of the music while keeping in mind the expectations of this persona.

This is the very mindset I’ve used to become a know-it-all in modern hard rock, alt metal,  metalcore, post-hardcore, and beyond. I’ve put together in-depth playlists on virtually every aspect of grunge, from proto- to post- to neo- to stripper- (yup). I’ve created sprawling album collections that offer consumers the full breadth of the nu metal movement, both the landmarks and obscurities. I’ve written reviews of every Linkin Park album, twice.

The sheer amount of research and listening I’ve devoted to these genres is bonkers. I can list five electronic producers who have remixed Korn tracks off the top of my head. I can explain the minute sonic differences between all three of Creed’s key spin-offs: Alter Bridge, Projected and Tremonti. I can even go into great detail on precisely why PVRVIS and Blaqk Audio are harbingers of the forthcoming Goth/industrial revival that will sweep through mainstream post-hardcore.

I initially claimed this turf out of professional survival. It’s hugely popular music both in terms of sales and streaming, yet the number of my peers willing to even acknowledge it is incredibly small. Finding writers, curators, and digital merchandisers with the knowledge and desire to craft content in hip-hop, pop, indie pop, and even classic rock is easy. They’re a dime a dozen. But not so when it comes to modern hard rock. Chew on this: Nickelback never made it onto the cover of Rolling Stone despite selling in excess of 22,000,000 records between 2000 and 2011. The freakin’ Boston Bomber made the cover, but not one of the biggest selling and most influential rock acts of their generation — which isn’t an endorsement of their music; it’s just a fact.

So yeah, it was a no-brainer move to begin covering this stuff, but after a while I actually began to grow an attachment to it. Strange, I know. But I figured that if I was going to be the content producing guru for the modern hard rock demographic, then I was going to own my work. I even developed a persona for myself when crafting this content, and it’s one that’s best captured by the line quoted above: “Bob just wants to make sure that some kid has something decent to put on the eight-track while he cruises down Woodward.”

Rock critic Lester Bangs wrote that in his 1979 review of Bob Seger’s Stranger in Town album for the Village Voice. We don’t need to cite a lot of statistics to more or less agree that the average fan of this music clearly isn’t living in Williamsburg or the Mission or Silver Lake; they’re living in flyover country, in the Rust Belt and in the South. They’re the very kids who back in the late ’70s popped a Seger eight track into their car, only nowadays they’re texting while earbuds fill their ears with Asking Alexandria or whatever. There certainly exist varying shades, like between those who are more Warped/alternative inclined and those who go for more of a 3 Doors Down/meat-and-potatoes sound. But the point is: The audience for my curator persona was the kids and young adults of what they call Middle America. That’s who I write and curate for.

This persona is not an abstract concept for me. I draw from personal experience. I myself am working class and from the Rust Belt (Syracuse, New York). And while I logged numerous years in New York City and San Francisco, the bulk of my life has been spent living in medium-sized cities in Middle America, including my present residence in Grand Rapids, Michigan (the adopted home of Sleeping with Sirens (see what I mean?)). I grew up in a shabby neighborhood flanked by factories, all of them slowly dying. The kids in my neighborhood were working class troublemakers whose walkmans always blasted some mixture of hard rock, thrash, and hip-hop in the years directly before all three merged into nu metal. Not only that, but Syracuse was an early breeding ground for metalcore, including one of the genre’s pioneering acts, Earth Crisis.

To this very day, some of my nearest and dearest friends are hard rocking bros. One hauls trash for a living and worships groove metal. Another is a former skater turned drummer turned massive bodybuilder. So, whenever my work takes me to the land of Kroeger, Chino and Weiland, I imagine a composite of all my childhood friends. If I’m creating a playlist of alt-metal anthems, then I craft it as though my goal is to give one of them the absolute best listening experience. I ask myself, Would they want to make the windows in their cars rattle with these jams? Would they hit the weights while cranking them? Would the tracks I’ve selected stand up to hours of repeated listening as they indulge their video game addictions? My sincere hope is that they do, because it’s not likely that Laser Temple of Bon Matin is gonna do the trick anytime soon.

Third Bridge contributor Justin Farrar has written for Spin, Village Voice…actually, his resume is outlined pretty extensively above. Follow him here: @JustinFarrar