Sometimes All Ways

(Dora Jar)

Last week, my Music Business Trends & Strategies class was focused on music marketing. I wrote a paper brainstorming marketing efforts for a fictional band called Nerve Circus. Sick name tbh.

I have no interest in marketing, but this was a fun exercise. It got me thinking about all the different ways I’ve discovered new music and artists - through friends, through curated playlists, through social media, but also through some more random avenues.

I thought it would be fun to share some of those places. This is a selection of music I’ve been loving recently, along with how I found it.

• Vacant Intimacies by Hannah Frances

  I was looking through an email newsletter from my local folk music school, Old Town School of Folk Music, as I am wont to do. I have attended exactly one (1) show there in the 8.5 cumulative years I’ve lived in Chicago, but I love reading emails that aren’t about work. I almost don’t care what the email is: if it’s not about a podcast I’m making or a student I’m teaching, I love it. I’ll savor every goddamn word. I’ll look up every artist mentioned and click through a song or two at least. No wonder my Berklee course said that email lists are “one of the highest-converting channels based on awareness, engagement, and monetization”! Consider me highly converted.

• Antidote by Chiiiild

  I was editing audio at my office (the window seats near the patio at Andersonville’s Colectivo location). This is an objectively terrible place to edit audio because everyone is loud all the time because it is a public place and not actually my office. Yet I will never stop because I love ascending from my basement cave of gloom to go sit above-ground. Also, I like that I can order on the app and not speak to another human.

  Anyway, I was sitting there in the daylight of the Colectivo window either answering emails or editing audio using mostly my eyeballs and waveforms. Colectivo has famously insane playlists. They have been known to shuffle from present-day Taylor Swift to barely-listenable experimental shit to early 2000s pop to classical instrumental in a 10-minute period. At any given time, my ears are at least 10% tuned into the speakers to hear what weird shit they’re trying to pull this time. (Again, I really should not be editing audio in a place where I’m also partly listening to the cafe music and to the elderly man five seats over who’s playing videos from Facebook at full volume.)

  So, this song was playing and I Shazamed it (or rather, I used Deezer’s Shazam-like tool that is not Shazam for legal purposes) and now I can’t stop listening to it.

• Do you miss me at all by Bedelia

  I love recommending new music to people, it’s one of my greatest joys. I also love reading music recommendations from other people, but it’s hard to find anyone who’s always correct (read: shares all of my opinions). And look, maybe it’s too soon to call it, I’ve only read maybe three of his newsletters, but so far Matt Dial has not missed. I was thrilled to find the perfect balance of a) songs I already know and love, and b) songs and artists I don’t know. I’ve discovered a bunch of favorites already so far and this is one of them! It now lives in a nascent playlist titled “90s rom com” alongside Maisie Peters, Maggie Rogers, and Taylor Swift.

• Turning, Turning by Ally Evenson

  A couple years ago, I went to see The Japanese House at Metro with quinnie opening, plus another earlier opener. If this were today, I might have skipped the first opener, but maybe I was less grumpy and tired in my youth (two or three calendar years ago). Or maybe I did the starting time math wrong. But regardless, I was at the Metro. There’s a part of the balcony that this week at The New Pornographers’s show was VIP-only, so I had to stand at the back of the floor perched in my little heeled boots trying to peer around a man’s head every time he leaned over to talk to his friend (frequent, this man has not heard of the male loneliness epidemic).

  At The Japanese House show, however, the balcony was not roped off for the elite, but rather was a lawless land for working people such as myself to order a ginger ale from a server and then never pay for it because Metro is cash only and I didn’t have any. Ally Evenson was the first opener, only playing a couple shows on the tour. She played in her hometown of Detroit and scooted over for our show in Chicago too and I think that was it: two opening slots at and near home. She played alone with a guitar and absolutely killed it. I immediately saved her EP In My Dreams, You Laugh at Me and continued following her when she released her first and second albums, which are notably weirder than her EP (complimentary).

• MORE by Vania Junco

  You know that hot nurse in The Pitt who has half-black/half-white hair and flirts with Duke, Robbie’s bestie motorcycle guy? The actress who plays her posted this on her Instagram story in respond to an “ask-me-anything” question box request for her favorite songs. She has good taste.

So those are some ways I have discovered new-to-me music! My ears are always open <3 even when they shouldn’t be <3 for example when I’m doing my job which is to listen to things very carefully <3

What’s the most surprising way you’ve found a new favorite song or artist??

<3 Isabel