Drowned in Sound

Latest Episodes:

How will the music coverage of the future be funded? Oct 28, 2023

Show notes

Kickstarter's co-founder Yancey Strickler shares lessons from Fugazi's label and Beastie Boys' Grand Royal magazine and discusses the forward-thinking ethos of The Royal Society, a prestigious fellowship of the world's most eminent scientists.

Yancey is a big thinker, a music lover, writer and a 'zine publisher. He wrote about music for Pitchfork, Village Voice, eMusic (with many of the current Bandcamp Editorial team) and more, before becoming a notable figure in creative project funding at Kickstarter and now Metalabel. He shares a wealth of insights on the intersection of music journalism and the quest for authentic creative expression in the digital age.

Discover more about Yancey's work on ystrickler.com or follow him on Twitter @ystrickler.
Learn more about The Royal Society
Read Yancey's viral essay on The Dark Forest Theory
Discover Meta Label, an endeavour aimed at building infrastructure for the creative economy and making collective projects easier.
Read about Grand Royal's fleeting yet impactful existence (The Atlantic).

Some Yancey Strickler quotes from this episode:

"To use the most obvious example, but you know, what if Taylor Swift had a magazine, right? Like, what if? What if Taylor Swift wanted to create a space to platform things that she celebrated, the things that she cared about, things she thought her fans wanted."

"Frank Ocean has been on that, you know, I think a lot of people in the hip-hop space have done a lot of creating wider platforms for themselves through fashion. Through other lines of cultural output that I think have proven to be extremely meaningful."

"...what is music journalism? I'm just gonna say it's ethnography and I'll go to your cartography comment. To me it's explaining lineages... What are the connections? What are the origins? What is the broader sweep in which this work appears? ...like, take me inside a world I wouldn't know otherwise. Help me appreciate that world the way people inside do. And I would say any, any, any piece, anybody that can do that I'm interested and that I think is a, true service and not that music journalism needs to be a service, but if I think it, how do you elevate above sharing an opinion, which is something that anyone can do. And so that has been rendered... Mapping the context, making that context, something that people can appreciate, that I think is maybe the highest form it can attain."

Is music journalism’s future in campaigning? Oct 23, 2023

Show notes

The Big Issue's Culture Editor Laura Kelly on their campaigning work, like Venue Watch to help save grassroots music venues across the UK.

As Laura says, "Across the UK, there was more than two venues closing every single week." Through Venue Watch, The Big Issue is raising awareness of the challenges facing venues and driving action by "telling the story of a venue" each week.

As part of Drowned in Sound's new season of podcasts about where music journalism is headed, we explore how sharing these stories and putting "values to the fore" allows The Big Issue's activist journalism to kickstart national conversations and create change.

We asked Laura how music journalism can go beyond entertainment to activism, and she responds "I think music journalism is about building that bridge between the art and the artist and the world around."

Laura offers an insightful look into The Big Issue's unique social mission and using journalism as "a force for good." We also shoutout James O'Brien, The Skinny, Music Venue Trust, Beyond the Music Festival, Duran Duran, Nick Cave, and Smash Hits.

https://www.bigissue.com/venuewatch

Read Laura's writing: https://www.bigissue.com/author/laura-kelly/

Follow Laura on Twitter: https://twitter.com/laurakaykelly

In this episode we mentioned that 16% of people working in the creative industries are working class, you can find the data behind that study here.

The Big Issue is a British magazine that provides a platform for homeless and vulnerably housed individuals to earn a legitimate income by selling the publication on the streets. It features a mix of social and cultural content, and its mission is to empower disadvantaged people through employment while raising awareness about homelessness and poverty-related issues.

Introduction to S2: The Editor’s Letter / Voice Note Oct 23, 2023

Show notes

Where is music journalism headed? Sean Adams (@seaninsound) introduces season* two of the Drowned in Sound podcast in the style of an editor's letter meets a meandering, unscripted voice memo.

TL;DR? To mark 23 years of Drowned in Sound, I decided to embark on a series of interviews with TikTokkers, rock writers, tech reporters and more to try to figure out whether things could be headed.

* = series?!

DiS008: Live Music And Mental Health Apr 20, 2023

Show notes

Everyone from Radiohead to Sugababes to industry insiders are raving about a new book by therapist and live music expert Tamsin Embleton. It's an extraordinary body of work entitled Touring and Mental Health: The Music Industry Manual, which includes contributions from a series of mental health experts providing insights and advice covering everything from breath-work to nutrition, and resilience to rest.

The book contains interviews with people who live and work on the road, alongside musicians including Pixies, Pharoahe Monch, Nile Rodgers, Radiohead, Four Tet, Lauren from Chvrches, Will Young, Justin Hawkins from The Darkness, and many more.

In this conversation with the author you'll learn more about the realities of the road, how touring with Nick Cave & Anna Calvi fed into the initial stages of this book, and why Live Nation has bought 3000 copies of it to put in dressing rooms. We discussed some of the topics in the book such as dressing room environments, dealing with the media and some simple changes the industry can make.

This is what Nile Rodgers had to say about the book: “The life of a musical artist can be a magnificent thing when you’re on stage experiencing the enthusiasm and appreciation for your work and seeing first-hand the incredible impact it can have…. There are however another 22 and a half hours in the day when you are not performing. Being away from home and the watchful eye of your loved ones can be incredibly hard work mentally as you go around the world at a pace dictated by the tour. Having what is effectively a mental health wellness manual to keep yourself in check is a wonderful initiative.”

Learn much more about the book over here touringmanual.com and you'll find @TamsinEmbleton on Twitter here.

Host: Sean Adams (@seaninsound)

DiS007: AI, AI, AI! UK Government’s War on Copyrighted Music?! Beatles AI song! - Dr Hayleigh Bosher explains it all Mar 21, 2023

Show notes

Our series of conversations about Artificial Intelligence and music continues with a look at the ethics and legal implications of these new forms of technology that inhales creativity and spits out creativity using everything that has been fed into it. And not everything has gone in with permission, let alone consent.

At the spring 2023 budget, the UK government announced that they would be allowing AI firms to more easily access copyrighted material.... this seemed somewhat alarming to us as people who run a record label, manage musicians and care about the creative industries. Should be be worried?! We asked Dr Hayleigh Bosher, a leading expert on intellectual property to help us understand the law and the bigger philosophical issues with Artificial Intelligence technology using existing music to create new music.

Dr Hayleigh Bosher (@BosherHayleigh) is the author of Copyright in the Music Industry, is a senior lecturer in Intellectual Property Law at Brunel University, and hosts the brilliant Who's Song Is It Anyway? podcast.

Related Links

DiS004: Tune in, AI Out - the co-founders of Endel on music’s potential futures Feb 21, 2023

Show notes

The robots are coming, and people are fearful and excited about the potential for AI and music to collide. It's hard to escape the discourse surrounding artificial intelligence, with various projects launches or low-level things reaching critical max in 2023.

As someone who is pretty cynical and emo about everything, Drowned in Sound founder Sean Adams is oddly optimistic about some of AI music's potential futures, especially surrounding the collision of science, technology and more 'functional' strands of music. As a lover of Sigur Ros, side two of Bowie's Low and contemporary composers like Poppy Ackroyd and Grouper, he's been a heavy user of the Endel app, which composes/generates music in real time, using sounds, textures, samples and frequencies, to create a soundscapes to listen to whilst you focus, relax, walk, sleep and more.

In this episode, two of the co-founders Oleg Stavitsky and Dmitry Evgrafov (listen to some of his non-AI music on bandcamp here) discuss everything from circadian rhythms to their love of Brian Eno. They also explore the science and tech behind the launch of an 8-hour Sleep Science playlist (listen here) with Amazon Music, which opens with an Amazon Original track featuring electronic duo Kx5 (Kaskade and deadmau5) that was produced using the hit EDM track “Escape”. The source material, including synths and chill vocals, was processed by Endel Pacific to create a high-quality, relaxing soundscape activating the parasympathetic nervous system and getting the listener ready for sleep.

Using this link, you can get a free month trial of Endel to better understand what we're talking about: https://code.endel.io/?code=drownedinsound (worth getting it just to hear the James Blake soundscape)

Also mentioned in the intro to this episode was Bronze Format, Max Richter's groundbreaking SLEEP album, and toward the end Oleg encourages you to join Endel's Discord community, which is here.

As always, if you have any thoughts or ideas, contact our host @seaninsound on your social platform of choice and subscribe to our mailing list here.

DiS003: TikTok, ”Authenticity” and Music with Eleanor from Crystal Fighters Feb 16, 2023

Show notes

TikTok is so important, but what on earth are you meant to be doing on it? Here at Drowned in Sound we have not had a enough of experts, so we found one who can help us and you get our heads around TikTok. Our guest this week is musician and producer (and soon to be stand up comedian) Eleanor Fletcher, who's also a member of festival favourites Crystal Fighters, to find out how she's garnered 900k like on the platform and found a new audience in just a few months. Give her feed a scroll and follow her here tiktok.com/@eleanorkishere

This is part of a sub-series of podcasts, looking at the foundations of where the music industry is at. It's sort of a mini masterclass for musicians but the advice applies for anyone who wants to have a better understanding on creating "content" for the platform.

There's some really simple tips about how to introduce a video (the first few seconds are known as the 'hook' to 'hook people in', rather than the melody of a pop song...) and Eleanor mentions the key things of being "interesting and intriguing", keeping a list of ideas in your notes app, and makes the whole thing feel a lot less daunting.

Would love to know what you took away from this episode and anything you feel I missed to cover in future episodes.

Links to bits mentioned in the show

The clip by TikTokker ToLiveWithIntent
Recommended musician to follow: KiraLise
Hemingway App

For more, join Drowned in Sound's new Substack newsletter.

DiS002: Discover... The Faux Faux (Faith Vern from PINS) Feb 09, 2023

Show notes

Faith Vern has collaborated with the likes Iggy Pop and Maxine Peake, and played huge sets on main stages of festivals such as Reading with her band PINS.

In this episode, Faith tells us all about the debut single of her new solo project The Faux Faux, which is the first release on the rebooted Drowned in Sound Singles Club (drownedinsound.org).

Drowned in Sound founder and podcast host Sean Adams (@seaninsound) introduces the podcast with a little history of the Drowned in Sound label and asks questions about how this solo material is different to the fun party punk that PINS were known for, what it's like writing music for big HBO, Netflix and Apple TV shows, how a mixture of Plath and moving out of Manchester inspired the track, and in a world where liner notes are rare, there's credits and more background to the track.

Watch the music video shot in the North of England using 500ft of film and find out more here https://www.thefauxfaux.co.uk/music

Go deeper and hear tracks by acts involved in this track on this Spotify playlist.

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