Getting Songs On Spotify’s Discover Weekly One of the most common goals of any emerging recording artist is gaining visibility on platforms such as Spotify. Today I will focus on one of the most effective ways to achieve that and that is through Discover Weekly. What Is it? Discover Weekly is a crowd sourced algorithmic playlist that Spotify users receive every Monday morning. It is essentially a 30 track mixtape of songs that you’ve never heard before and there are a number of factors that dictate the songs that get sent to each listener. Spotify’s Raw Audio Analysis analyses a song through its machine learning which when paired up with a song’s meta data, provides insight as to listener suitability. When combined with Collaborative Filtering [...]

The Importance of Master Rights for Emerging Recording Artists Let’s start off by actually understanding what master rights are. Often referred to as a sound recording copyright, master rights are the intellectual property attached to the recording of a song. Not the song itself, but the recording. Master rights are often confused with mastering. These are two very different things. Mastering relates to the rendering of your audio files. Master rights relates to who own thats recording. Traditionally speaking, master rights are the property of the record company for which the artist is signed to. If you are a recording artist that is not signed to a record company then who owns your master rights? Let’s try and unpick this subject carefully. Who Owns My [...]

How To Write a Press Release The modern recording artist needs to be multifaceted. Thats a notion which is echo’d all over the world in the early 2020s so let us just stop and think about that for a moment. There is a lot to learn; the mechanics of the business, rights administration, digital distribution, PR and so much more and thats assuming that you are an artist that has already created an artistic and sonic identity for your project. In this blog, I’m going to focus on PR and more specifically, how to create a press release. Firstly, let’s just define PR. It means public relations. In a nutshell, it is the art form of gaining media that communicates you, the artist, and your [...]

The Symbiotic Relationship Between Video Games and Music Making A couple of summers ago, I was in a music venue in Latvia. My father in law was setting up ahead of his gig later that night where my wife and I were guesting on guitar at his show. I was hanging out around the back of the venue during soundcheck when I stumbled across something which caught my attention. It was an arcade machine called WWF Superstars. It had clearly been sat dormant, gathering dust for quite some time. In fact, it looked like it hadn’t been played since its hey day in the early 1990s. It had a picture of The Undertaker on the side of it with his menacing stare, his long black [...]

Creation Vs Detection In an age where the lines between television and the internet get increasing blurry, the same could be said about the grey area that lies between creativity and criminality in the context of sampling music. If a sample is mangled, repitched and replayed into a completely different context than its original source, is that stealing? Or is being creative? I’m not going to debate that narrative in this blog but more so the neurological science behind it. So allow me to put compositional cognition under the microscope for a moment because it might just kick open a new door in your conscious awareness when crafting your next song. A recent paper published by the Harvard Medical School states that “According to conventional [...]

A Summer Focus on Emerging Talent One of the primal values of the Glow Beets brand is the introduction of new and emerging talent that I collaborate with. Before I launched Glow Beets, it was always an intention to introduce the world to new recording artists as it is an integral piece of the tapestry that I am sewing. Finding artists that are suitable is sometimes the difficult part. This entire planet is laced with untapped potential but talent is not always the driving force behind the decisions I make. Talent is a prerequisite. Determination, drive and focus are the key skills that I look for in artists that I work with. Looking back to late 2019, I met 15 year old Aimee Broom. An [...]

What Will Make For a Successful Recording Artist In The 2020s? Top 10 Tips! To make any kind of bold prediction with any sense of accuracy, it is important to look very closely at the state of the present. The IFPI stated in their 2019 Music Listening Report that “This year’s Top 10 paints a diverse picture of music listening” and I’m inclined to agree. Sincerity, truth and authenticity are key ingredients for emerging artists and one of the boldest pictures that any artist can paint is with their honesty; from staying true to their genre to how they portray themselves in social media and ultimately how they connect with their following. “Artists must be multifaceted” the report also states but what does really mean? [...]

How To Choose The Right Distributor For Your Music Traditionally, distribution was always a risky and expensive aspect in the music business both for labels and artists. Flash forward to modern times and its never ever been easier to distribute your music. We’re in an exciting era when it comes to digital distribution and it creates some very exciting options for both artists and labels. Even though we’ve been in the digital age for quite some time now digital distribution continue to evolve at a rapid pace. Let me ask you a question. What is your expectation of a digital distributor? It is a simple enough question but the answer may be more complex than you first think. Firstly, there’s the primal expectation of how [...]

How To Gain Organic Growth On Spotify When it comes to gaining growth on Spotify, don’t you ever wish that the music could do the talking for you? Well, it can. You just need to know how to feed the data to Spotify so that it can happen. I make it sound simple I know. Of course it isn’t simple. Or is it? Spotify’s primal aim is to retain and expand their audience and they achieve this in part through providing an experience which is unique to each listener. In order to provide this unique experience, it is imperative that they know what their listeners’ preferences are. However, in order for emerging artists to strive on the platform a good understanding of the complex nature [...]

How To Pitch For Spotify Editorial Playlists Let's start with simplicity; there is only one way to pitch directly to Spotify’s editorial team and that is through their pitch tool on the Spotify For Artists platform. There are three type of playlist on Spotify and they are outlined in one of my recent blogs. In summary they are User Curated Playlists, Algorithmic Playlists and Editorial Playlists. In this blog, I will concentrate on the latter of those three. Firstly, you need access to your Spotify For Artists account. This can be done by visiting the website and clicking on the “Claim Your Profile”. This can only be done when you either have music already on Spotify or if you have had music delivered to Spotify [...]