There’s been a lot of discussion this month about what it takes to be heard as a musician in 2026. Eliza McLamb’s article on digital marketing agency Chaotic Good went viral, drawing commentary from musicians about the wider implications of their “fake fans” marketing strategy. Hiroki Tanaka’s Reddit post about his album’s failed PR campaign was picked up by Stereogum, stimulating further debate. We’re about to embark on our own DIY PR campaign for our forthcoming album and it’s hard to know what, if anything, will make anyone actually listen to it. The PR landscape for musicians has changed radically in recent years, how should artists approach music marketing in 2026?

Fandom as contagion

When Eliza McLamb heard this interview with the founders of Chaotic Good Projects on Billboard, she was shocked to discover that an artist and track she thought was her own “perfect, beautiful little secret” actually came from them as a part of a “narrative campaign”.

“I thought this was the kind of thing that was only deployed in service of mass-market, commercial pop... But [Chaotic Good’s] roster runs deep, far past the predictable internet sensations one could expect... Geese and Cameron Winter, but also Dijon and Mk.gee. Laufey and Wet Leg. Oklou and Jane Remover.”

Chaotic Good works by, in their own words, “controlling the discourse”.

“I think in the past, let’s say like a label and a management team do a great job. They get their artists on SNL or Tiny Desk or Triple J or something like that. Then they post it and then they kind of wait for the comments […] what we do at Chaotic and with our management clients is, the second SNL drops at midnight, you should post a hundred times saying that was the best performance of the year.”

Chaotic Good doesn’t just share content, it creates accounts to respond to that content and simulate trends, which will ideally snowball into real, organic users jumping on the trend and amplifying it. They’re simulating until the simulation becomes real.

It’s different from the traditional method of “the waterfall” release and media saturation. Share music incrementally over a long period of time through as many channels as possible, get articles written, pay for plays, do tours, be omnipresent. But people aren’t using traditional media to find music anymore, they use social media. And they don’t even watch the content themselves, they read the comments to gauge the value of something. Chaotic Good point this out in their interview:

“I think most people see a video or see something about an album that came out and it’s like the first thing that they see or that first comment that they see is their opinion even when they haven’t heard the whole album.”

In behavioural psychology this is known as social proof. Part of what made Eliza McLamb’s article go viral is the way it exposes how our behaviour is manipulated by the marketing machine. We know about propaganda but for some reason assume social media is immune to this kind of manipulation. We think we’re interacting with real people online, people we subconsciously infer guidance from, but we’re not. Much of what we see has been infiltrated by external agents to shape a particular opinion.

However, the underlying issue is not just the fact that the opinions we thought were our own have been subtly shaped by an expensive machine, it’s that if artists today can’t afford to pay for that expensive machine, no one will hear their music.

The False Promise Of The Social Media Democracy

Once upon a time there was a social media platform called MySpace. It gave everyone their own web page connected to other MySpace users. They could customize it to look however they wanted, people could comment, and send messages to each other. There were no ads. There was no algorithm. Just the free flow of information.

Many bands in the ‘00s blew up because of MySpace. Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, Calvin Harris, to name a few. Our very own Chris Black’s previous band Katsen landed record deals through MySpace. The early days of social media are responsible for the persistent myth of going viral then making lots of money. The two halves of that equation have never been more disconnected.

MySpace succumbed to algorithm-driven platforms and the gatekeeping emerged again, this time with the tech titans controlling the interactions between musicians and fans. I remember discovering for the first time that even though we had a few hundred followers on Facebook, they wouldn’t see our posts unless we paid to “boost” them. That was just the beginning.

As the algorithms evolved, the content that rose to the top was not just the most liked and shared but the most consistently and frequently posted. To be seen on social media one has to spend hours, daily, posting and engaging in other people’s content. Most artists don’t want that job and moreover, don’t have the capacity. Kamola Atajanova of Tape Wounds articulates it perfectly in their response to the Chaotic Good furore:

“Not every artist is built for social media. Not every artist wants to make their life into a performance. Some people are better at writing songs than posting clips. Some people’s work comes from privacy, patience, or introspection. That should not make them less valid. But this system does make them less visible. It filters them out before the music even has a chance. So when people say “it’s just marketing,” what they really mean is: this is the cost of entry now. And that’s exactly what makes it feel so hostile. Not everyone can afford that cost. Not financially, not creatively, not psychologically.”

Hiroki Tanaka’s candid Reddit post about the failure of his “by the book” album PR campaign sparked a wave of recognition across the music world. After two decades in music and awards with his previous band he decided to release his solo album, his “last hurrah”, with management, a label, and a professional PR campaign. He even started a TikTok account posting show videos, behind the scenes and goofy memes all around managing a job and family life.

Tanaka watched the release arrive after eight months of promotion to little more than “a weak trickle” of attention. For most musicians, Tanaka’s story didn’t feel exceptional, it felt familiar.

“I was told, under no uncertain terms, that my lack of a social media presence and streaming metrics meant that certain media outlets that had reviewed my work (highly, I might add) in the past could no longer spend money on paying a writer and editor to review my work… I would have preferred if they had said they didn’t like my album. Being rejected because of my metrics is a slap in the face for art.”

Social media has become the driving force behind a release, and while it is accessible to anyone, there’s actually a huge price to pay in both time and mental health. The volume of content required to feed it is beyond most musicians, who are generally holding down full time jobs to survive. The underlying purpose of all this extra content is to feed a machine, and it doesn’t feel good dedicating your precious little free time to feeding a machine.

Jumping Jacks For Clicks

Soon after reading Tanaka’s post, we got an email from YouTube Creators prompting us to “Get Creative With Goals” on our livestreams.

They’re encouraging us to “set goals that encourage your community to collaborate,” and suggest celebrating those goals by “doing something unexpected – whether that’s jumping jacks, making up a song, or playing a prank.”

Yes, you read that correctly. YouTube is telling artists that the path to success involves performing arbitrary physical tasks to generate engagement.

It’s sad how often life imitates an episode of Black Mirror these days but this is almost exactly the scenario in season seven’s episode “Common People”. A man who needs money for an enshittified service ends up performing increasingly degrading stunts on a streaming platform for money. What was meant as dystopian satire has become platform policy.

Like Watching A Car Crash

If you want to see where this road ends, look at Joshua Block.

For those unfamiliar, Block a.k.a. WorldofTShirts, is a TikTok creator who rose to fame during the pandemic by posting videos of himself doing silly dances and reviewing boba teas. After turning 21, he developed a taste for alcohol rather than boba tea, and a controlling manager stepped in to steer Josh’s content towards more extreme behaviour and increasingly degrading acts.

Theodore Gary wrote an in depth study of this phenomenon of what are essentially “freak shows” for the algorithm in The New Critic in February this year. In Postscript, the New Critic’s author interviews, editor Rufus Knuppel ruminates on the relationship between Josh and his viewers:

“When you’re watching body-cam footage of a police officer, you don’t form this parasocial relationship — it’s an anonymous police officer. But with Josh, he’s your friend, almost. But he’s a friend that you’re torturing, a friend you’re watching get tortured.”

This is what happens when “content” becomes separated from art and human connection. When engagement is the only metric that matters. The algorithm doesn’t reward what’s “good” it rewards what’s most compulsively watchable. And sometimes that means watching someone’s dignity erode in real time.

There is an easy way for musicians to avoid all this of course. Hire a company like Chaotic Good.

What Comes Next?

We may be reaching an inflection point. As McLamb notes, the more ubiquitous manufactured virality becomes, the more artists will resist it entirely, pulling back from streaming and social media in favour of hyper-local, scene-based growth. A return to the tangible, the real, the unmediated.

While this sounds good in theory, it’s probably not going to work for unusual artists in small towns. They’d have to go to a city to have more of a chance of finding their people, and with the cost of living, moving to a city isn’t possible for everyone. By the time I left London in 2009 all the artists I knew were leaving, it just wasn’t sustainable anymore.

The problem is systemic. Musicians don’t typically make a living from their music. This means their time is diverted to day jobs. Their dwindling leisure time is necessary for making and performing music. There isn’t time to also produce a volume of “content” for social media. On top of that the mental health cost of interacting with addictive apps as a performing monkey is not appetising. This creates a class system in the music industry. There are those who can afford to pay to be heard and those who can’t. And those who can’t are either paying with their souls, or they’re opting out altogether and not being heard at all.

The only real solution to this system is a culture change. When people stop inferring opinions from social media and start connecting directly with other people again. When networks of local scenes connect up and exchange information unmediated by third parties. Music journalists were also gatekeepers, but at least you could reach them, maybe have a conversation with them. At least they were human.

Artists have some power here too, in how we choose to show up for people. Do we focus on posting constantly to externally owned platforms or build something slower and stronger? For us, that means connecting with our fans via a monthly livestream. We talk about our challenges and experiences making and listening to music. We ask and answer questions. We share stories. We do not do jumping jacks.

We continue to use social media as that’s where so many live, but I’m imagining a future where we don’t have to post several times a day to five different platforms to push a new release. A future where discovery is driven by real-world connections; at gigs, by email with DJs and reviewers and from our fans out to their networks of friends and family. We’ll continue to share our work on our website, mailing list, livestream and with our beloved subscribers to connect directly with the people who care about our music.

You can’t manufacture authenticity forever before people start seeing through it. You can’t ask artists to be everything; musician, videographer, copywriter, performer, brand, without burning them out or pushing them out of the industry entirely.

The question for listeners is: what kind of music culture do we want? One where discovery is orchestrated by marketing agencies and every trend is potentially manufactured? Where our favorite artists spend more time strategizing TikTok hooks than writing songs? Or one where we have a human to human connection which grows organically. It might be slow, but just as good lumber is grown slowly with its rings closely pressed together, it will be strong.

Enjoy all this and more in BOOcast #43!

Here's April’s BOOcast featuring the Intellijel Cascadia, music industry news, a potential AI collab (not!) and how musicians go viral in 2026. Pretty chuffed we beat the excellent Price of Music podcast on that story!

Join us for the next show from 7pm UK time Monday for a big announcement!

It'll be at: Tinyurl.com/boocast43

x Brigitte and Chris x

In case you haven’t heard yet, recent viral hitmakers The Velvet Sundown aren’t a real band. What’s interesting about this AI band is their appropriation of many signifiers of authenticity. They’re an all guy folk-rock group with a warm vintage 1970s ambience. There are guitars, beards and AI-softened denim. Song titles include Dust On The Wind, End The Pain and Where The Rebels Meet.

These superficial aesthetic choices are connected to a profound and meaningful history in Western music culture. Real rock music is full of raw, human emotion. Real folk music has driven actual revolutions. This music carries power and connects with humanity through generations. It’s telling that AI artists are finding success with the most reputedly “authentic” genres of music. People almost expect pop to be manufactured by machines, but folk-rock? Who would have suspected that?

Stop The AI Slop

I support the theory that there will be a backlash to the banal, puréed qualities inherent to AI art and music with a new romanticism and zeal for humanity and human creations. So when I was sent a link to a music video called “Stop The AI Slop” I clicked.

It begins with some diverse, AI-smoothed talking heads preaching that we must “Stop the AI Slop” then, in scenes reminiscent of The Blob, snotty globules chase and envelope their running human prey. I chuckled then stopped watching after a minute because AI art is like that. There’s not enough humanity in it to sustain interest and it tends towards cliché. I liked the message but was confused by it’s hypocrisy. What was this all about? Was it some kind of AI-generated spam music video made entirely without human intervention?

I clicked on another video from the channel, uploaded in June, “Bubble Brain Helmet Girl”. This one blatantly steals imagery from the artist-driven 3D/AI project from French production company Meat Dept. for Igorrr’s latest song ADHD. They’re not just appropriating artists through AI but through actually copying subject matter.

CORRECTION: It was brought to my attention by Arika and The Amoebas that their “Bubble Brain Helmet Girl” video was previously uploaded to a different YouTube channel which I was unaware of on May 4, 2024, meaning it was released before Meat Dept. released ADHD . The accusation of plagiarism is fully retracted in light of this fact, which was not known at time of publication.

Left: Igorrr - ADHD Right: Arika and the Amoebas - Bubble Brain Helmet Girl

Arika and the Amoebas have a real Bandcamp page. It features a wall of pulpy, faux vintage album covers stretching back to their first upload in April 2025. Their Bandcamp bio plays up to the idea that this is a real band. “Arika & The Amoebas haunt rock’s uncanny valley. Arika fronts every song and video.” This is in stark contradiction to their YouTube profile which clearly states otherwise.

“Arika & The Amoebas is an independent music, video, and art project—an ongoing attempt to manifest a personal vision that couldn’t exist through conventional channels. I’m a lifelong artist with a Master’s in Fine Art: a painter, sculptor, digital painter, writer, musician, videographer, and now, AI artist… I make it all with a laptop, a phone, my voice, some acting, and persistence. I am not Arika [she’s my creation], and I don’t sing or play the instruments you hear… I write all my lyrics, and everything is produced independently.”

As suspected it’s completely AI-generated art and music, but so far it appears there is a human being behind it. It’s not AI-driven AI. This is a kind of creative act, but to what end?

The bio states that “I write all my lyrics” so I explored them in search of answers. Early Arika and the Ameobas songs follow B-movie themes with songs like Surfing Cyborg Girl (Cuz she's a surfing cyborg girl / A gnarly tubular girl), Martian Attack and Bride of Frankenstein. Then there’s a distinct shift with Tears for Billionaires, when the movie monster becomes the tech bros.

I'm weeping tears for billionaires

Bawling my eyes out for scum

Game The System and F The Algo follow suit. Game The System sounds like it could be the artists’ own playbook:

Give the people what they want

Feed the lowest common denominator

Serve them derivative pablum pap

Market tested milk-toast drivel

Game the system

Rig the algorithm

Whether these emotions are genuine or not, the artist is using signifiers of authenticity (what could be more human than hating AI and the tech bros?) along with the punk and metal stylings of the music to lend their project cultural clout.

Interestingly, YouTube recently changed their monetisation policy wording around AI and authenticity. Content that is mass-produced or repetitive, which viewers often consider to be spam, cannot be monetised on YouTube. The term “repetitious content” has now been changed to to “inauthentic content”. A much more ambigous term, and one which they clarify does allow the use of AI as long as it is disclosed as such. So YouTube thinks some AI is authentic.

Arika and the Amoebas clearly disclose that their work is AI content below every video and in their bio. The channel has 1.2k subscribers on YouTube but it only launched two months ago. That’s not bad. What’s more, people are actually buying their music on Bandcamp.

“This is not ‘music,’ it’s ‘instant music’”

Arika is not the first musician, cynical of the current tech-driven music system, to rebel against it by manipulating it to work in their favour.

Ever heard the music of Callous Humane? Or maybe Calvinistic Dust? It’s more likely you’ll have heard of North Carolina musician Michael Smith who hit headlines last year for stealing $10 million in royalties through AI-generated songs.

Initially Michael wrote his own music, uploaded it to the streaming platforms, then artificially inflated their play counts by creating thousands of “bot accounts” which would play his tracks over and over, continuously. At its peak, Smith’s operation allegedly had “as many as 10,000 active bot accounts” running.

But when he kept being detected by the anti-fraud systems on these platforms he realised he needed to increase the volume of tracks to keep flying under the radar.

Smith enlisted an AI company who supplied him with 1,000-10,000 songs per month, giving him the full IP rights to the tracks. In turn, Smith provided the AI company with metadata and the “greater of $2,000 or 15% of the streaming revenue” generated from the AI songs.

The AI company’s CEO emailed Smith saying: “Keep in mind what we’re doing… this is not ‘music,’ it’s ‘instant music’ ;)”

A broken system

To me this is a sad story. Smith started out as a real musician trying to make it in streaming. The process of doing PR for any music release involves trying to get playlisted. It can take months. There are services like Submithub and musosoup which claim to help automate this process but it’s still a slog. We found that musosoup (report below) basically works essentially like payola. You submit your release to an unknown selection of curators and influencers, many of which are spam accounts, then they offer you paid placement.

In the music world, it’s extremely difficult to get your music heard without spending a lot of money to promote the hell out of your work. For independent artists, PR and plugging typically costs many times more than what you’ll actually make from selling your music.

When Michael Smith found he couldn’t make a living from his music, he saw a way to use his skills to game the system for himself. If found guilty, he has committed fraud, but it’s the streaming platforms who created this system, who reward this behaviour and who continue to go unpunished themselves.

Spotify promotes banal background music which has no rights holders, therefore no-one to pay out to. They refer to it internally as “Perfect Fit Content”(explosively uncovered by Liz Pelly in Harper’s in January this year). This maximises their own profits and minimises payments to real artists.

There has always been bland and clichéd popular music, but it has never threatened to overwhelm the industry so completely as AI music does. The popularity of this new, tech-driven muzak is a sad symptom of the way music has become wallpaper for many people, a background decoration rather than a central human experience.

Navigating the sea of slop

In this sea of AI and human-made musical slop the real question is, who’s listening and do they even care how it was made?

While Spotify is known to promote inoffensive drivel to the top of its playlists, Arika and the Ameobas’ YouTube videos are full of supportive comments, presumably from real human beings.

“I have been an artist over 45 years and enjoy all aspects of it, this is the new stuff and truly enjoy it. Keep up the good work.”

“Surreal performance punk. This is so refreshing, engaging, and interesting.”

”The haters are incapable of making art - only criticizing something they do not understand…. Run...you cannot escape the future of art.”

Not only do these people like the music, they believe in Arika as an artist challenging our perceptions of what it means to create art. This is in stark contrast to my personal experience of listening to AI music, perfectly articulated by Saeed Saeed writing in The National recently about The Velvet Sundown:

Pulp have their own tounge-in-cheek take on AI-generated music videos in their recent video for Spike Island, in which they dabble in AI with dismal results. The take home message is that the photos they used to feed the video prompts were created by real artists Rankin and Donald Milne, “Human Intelligence at it’s best.”

It takes all sorts, the old saying goes. There are passive listeners who are happy with generic background music, there are others for whom clichéd ideas are novel, but there will always be a devoted group who champion original human art and music.

If AI-generated content continues to flood into the platforms where we listen to music, the segregation between these groups will become more intense. Those platforms will be dominated by pedestrian music while human music lovers will find their sounds elsewhere, on Bandcamp and other niche music sites, through people, in the real world. The subculture will find a new space to thrive in.

Listening to music can be a transformative experience, deeply connected to our bodies, our souls, our communities and our culture. Those who know music’s true power will always fight to make it a central part of their life. It doesn’t matter what kind of wallpaper we see everywhere, real art will always command our attention and stand proudly in the middle of the room.

New music finds its way to me in many ways. I collect tracks here and there like dust, until I eventually have enough to roll into a disc, which happens only once or twice a year.

These discs are stamps in time, each one a ring in the tree trunk of my musical life. They don’t include my roots, that is I don’t add any songs which I already know. So they always bring up memories of my first experience of these songs and where I was in my life when I heard them.

I’ve given these compilations many different titles over the years. They were originally recorded on my tape deck so I still can’t help calling them mixtapes even though the medium has changed. The latest title comes from a term I heard Paul Morley used to describe the genre “New Pop”. Weary of rock and post-punk genre imitators by the end of 1980, he called for artists to push towards an “overground brightness”.

“But there is definitely a new mood spreading: not something that gives in to crass commercialism. A mood that picks up and re-models the dreams and themes of the original punk groups… Teenagers who are picking up on pop for the first time should have a fresh, changing choice not a stiff handed-down one. The rock jumble sale, those seventh hand emotions, those worn out tricks, those cracked egos. The mood is there… Change of images. Towards an overground brightness, fighting for the right to bring life back to radio, to make the single count, to be let through to their natural audience. Modern excitement… “Democratic dance music!” For choice and value.”

— Paul Morley in the NME, 20th December 1980

These compilations are eclectic, but to me these songs are essentially pop. They have melodies, hooks, unique vocals or delicious sound design. They won’t be everyone’s idea of pop, and this particular mix leans into some pretty noisy stuff, but sometimes we need that sort of noise in our lives. Sometimes good noise really helps.

You can listen over on Mixcloud.

Notes follow below.

1. Arlo - Diamond (Buy), 2024

I discovered this track when I was scouring the YouTube channel of the incredible French production studio Meat Dept. Apart from the naturally next-level music video, this song has an irresistible dirty groove and sparkling crisp production through which Lola Delon’s soulful strains empower. The duo is Art Bleek and Lola Delon both born in France and collaborating between LA and Burgundy. Vive la France!

2. Hypsoline - Space Babe (Buy), 2022

A few friends mentioned this all-woman Brighton band to me after loving their live show at the Prince Albert last year. I really enjoyed watching some of it on Youtube but couldn’t find the same track. No matter, I found this one and it’s great. Nobody seems to know them right now but I don’t think they’ll be secret for long.

3. Santigold - Shake (Buy), 2022

In all honesty we’ve actually been listening to Santigold’s live version of Lights Out a lot recently, but it’s a track I already know so is disqualified from the compilation! We were also energised by her awesome Tiny Desk concert during which she performs Shake. This year has not been without it’s hardships and this is the kind of song that helps you get back on your feet.

4. 6161 - Prowl (Buy), 2025

This band was another recommendation from a couple of friends who got to see them play live at ALPHABET in Brighton. When I looked them up I found this lightning in a bottle recording session and had to buy the album right away. The bombast of those horns mixed in with intricate synth textures and the unpredictable patterns in the music makes them truly exciting to listen to. Incidentally I love the way that session is shot, it really captures the feeling of what it’s like recording music, that odd combination of the somewhat dry, technical world of the studio plus a heightened flow state (if you’re lucky).

5. J.C.R.G. - World I (Buy), 2024

I avoid Spotify as much as possible, but hanging with a friend recently he provided background music via a playlist on his phone. When his playlist came to an end Spotify queued up this little ditty. I jotted their name down and subsequently found them doing an epic performance on KEXP and had to get the album.

6. Kugelschreiber - (me x u) ≠ (u x me) (Buy), 2024

It means ball point pen in German. I discovered these guys because of vocalist/bassist Sharron Fortnam’s connection to Cardiacs and William D. Drake. I’m a sucker for science-themed music and I love the lo-fi pop here with those very Cardiacs-y syncopated beats keeping you on your toes.

7. Cindy Lee - Diamond Jubilee (Buy), 2024

I heard about Cindy Lee’s magnum opus Diamond Jubilee simply because of it’s uniquely un-marketed release. The album came out via a geocities website —yes, apparently they still exist! I just love the way this track builds and releases into it’s incredibly languid groove. It’s like I’m flying on a magic carpet through clouds with a tiny transistor radio straining to get a clear signal.

8. Loaded Honey - Over (Buy), 2025

I looked up Loaded Honey after reading a brief review in the Observer newspaper. Damn these guys are amazing at emulating that 60s soul sound. J Lloyd and Lydia Kitto’s main band is Jungle so it’s no wonder, they really know what they’re doing.

9. Pigmeat Markham - Who Got The Number (Listen), 1969

One of my main sources of tracks I’ve never heard before is the incredible free internet radio station Vintage Obscura. Originally a crate-diggers’ reddit thread, it plays a constant stream of discoveries in all genres from Japanese city-pop to punk. The only rules are the tracks must have fewer than 30,000 views on YouTube at the time of discovery and be released before the year 2000.

Pigmeat Markham was a comedian, singer, dancer and actor and his 1968 hit “Here Comes The Judge” is regarded as a forerunner of rap. This one is also funky and funny, an excellent combo.

10. Asha Puthli - Love Song of a Divorced Woman (Listen), 1980

When I first heard this song I thought I was hearing early unreleased Kate Bush. Asha is a queen diva in her own right, having studied and played music since childhood. She was part of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, a fixture at Studio 54 and her music has been widely sampled. For some reason she’s on Vintage Obscura! It’s crazy how some artists never achieve wider recognition in spite of their obvious talents.

11. Hard Corps - Je Suis Passée (Buy)

Speaking of overlooked bands, this month Chris interviewed our good friend and live music journalist Nick Linazosoro who spoke to him about Hard Corps. I recall another friend saying he’d seen them support Depeche Mode in the 1988 when lead singer Regine Fetet shocked the audience by performing topless. Band member Rob Doran reflected that Regine’s “on stage controversies” could have been a contributing factor to scuppering their chances of following Depeche Mode to the US on tour. By the time they released their first album in 1990 they had split up.

Great electronic sounds, classic melancholy 80s Euro-synthpop.

12. Edwards & Armani - Up Your Bum, 1988

I can’t resist a bit of 303 combined with hard EBM beats. Throw in a cheeky lady saying “Up Your Bum” over and over and as far as I’m concerned you’re onto a winner. Edwards & Armani were Belgian duo Ferre Baelen and Rembert De Smet. Discovered via Vintage Obscura.

13. Igorrr - ADHD (Buy), 2025

We occasionally have nights in with mates where we take turns showing each other the coolest or weirdest music we can find on YouTube. One particular friend showed us Igorrr’s Very Noise. If you’ve never seen the videos produced by French studio Meat Dept, strap yourself in for some visceral body-horror combined with laugh-out-loud weirdness. They are uniquely brilliant at achieving a heightened realism in 3D that is all the better for being tilted towards humour and surrealism rather than staid literal representations.

Meat Dept aside, Igorrr’s music is equally rollicking violent comedy. There’s a kind of mad glee in the completely unbridled, nay unhinged release of it’s force. ADHD is his latest and Meat Dept certainly stepped up to the plate for the video too.

14. Pozer - Malicious Intentions (Buy), 2024

We watched the 2024 MOBO music awards in the UK and Pozer has such an impactful sound we both liked him right away. He also seems to have a sense of humour and theatricality, which counts for a lot in a genre often dense with po-faced gangsterism.

15. MC Ma’at - Pharma Sickness (Buy), 2020

Came across this on James Evan Pilato’s radio show Media Monarchy. The retro beats remind me of Nas circa 1999 and I like the anti big-pharma message. “Will the doctor tell me about fruit and good nutrition? / Will they ever find a cure or simply fight the symptoms?” Bring back political rap!

16. Odeal - Blame u (Buy), 2024

Another standout 2024 MOBO winner. Odeal nearly made us cry with every track we listened to. This man seems to have lived beyond his years and he articulates it beautifully.

17. Kazushi Inamura - Free Flight Girl (Buy LP), 1977

I heard this on Vintage Obscura at a time when I really needed some good music to escape into. It was and is melllow, funky bliss.

18. Colin Stetson - The Love It Took To Leave You (Buy), 2024

I credit Ted Gioia for bringing this to my ears first, but subsequently friends have also recommended the album. Colin Stetson’s abstract, aching saxophone played in a former metal foundry is voluptous and resonant. These tracks are slow and deep, they simply move the heart.

19. Laurel Halo - Belleville (Buy), 2023

Another track found written in my phone’s notes app without lineage. Laurel Halo is a DJ and electronic artist but I love this piece performed on a broken piano, recorded in one take.

20. Loaded Honey - Don’t Speak (Buy), 2025

This is a “bonus track”. I love when CDs wind down slowly to a quiet fade out then bring in something completely unexpected. I’m breaking my one track per artist rule here but this song is so utterly joyous I couldn’t resist it adding it as a closer.

Those repeated catchphrases are a symptom of the wider problem with the news, which, once noticed, is impossible to unsee. The major broadcasters are all reading from the same script, and that script has a simple purpose: to distract you and to make you afraid.

The life support machine
That keeps you asleep
The food that makes you hungry
The prize for being weak

— Except from the lyrics for Clown

We weren’t the first to notice this we won’t be be the last, but that period felt a bit like peak TV news. It was just before people started shifting from getting their news on broadcast television, radio and newspapers to getting it from their smartphones. In fact in 2009/2010 Charlie Brooker (Black Mirror) was running a news review show called Newswipe, exposing the ridiculous hysteria it would impose and taking apart it’s format.

“When I tune into the news I often feel like I've wandered into episode 389 of the world's most complex soap opera.”

— Charlie Brooker

Making Clown

In 2011 we moved house, which brought two important changes in our life; 1. We now had a studio (spare bedroom) in which to make music and 2. We got rid of our TV.

We first released Clown on the four-track EP Observatory, so named after our new studio space with it's Velux ceiling windows, perfect for stargazing. Soon after, we released our debut album Incomplete Until Broken which includes a remastered version of the song. We also gave it a music video.

The music video for Clown makes use of various news title sequences. US news titles especially, with their focus on the glamorous anchors, are designed to be almost comforting, like you're seeing old friends. Beautiful, smart friends who you can trust. The glitz and the rictus smiles of these anchors feel intrinsically sinister, like a pushy car salesman handing you the pen to sign away your savings. But amongst these flashing masks was an unexpectedly genuine moment of humanity. Brian Travers.

Brian's guileless smile radiated an honest friendliness which lacked the slick practice of the other newsreaders’ confident grins. He just seemed happy to be there and we liked that. Every time we watched the video we would cheer when he appeared.

After one such cheer I determined to find out more about this man. Who was he? Why was he so different from the others? I needed to know more about him as a person. I needed to see that we were right, he was a wonderful human being. It didn’t take long for me to find him, because in 2002, he was suspected of murder.

“Channel 3 weatherman Brian Travers was the last person known to have seen TV reporter Jennifer Servo before she was found bludgeoned to death, the report said.”

— The Chattanoogan

I couldn’t believe it. Not Brian, no way. But as I read on, the story revealed a more complex picture, so I’ll share it with you here.

Who was Jennifer Servo?

Jennifer Servo was an up-and-coming anchor on KRBC news, based in Abilene, Texas. Brian, then 23 years old, was the weatherman there and they became good friends. When interviewed, he said they were briefly intimate, but that she "told me that she just wanted to just be close friends."

When Brian met Jennifer, she had just come out of a difficult relationship. She had recently moved from Montana to Abilene to work at KRBC, and she’d brought Ralph Sepulveda with her.

Ralph, a former Army ranger, met Jennifer when her first long-term relationship had come to an end. He represented something different from her last boyfriend, something edgier. "Ralph was more the bad boy, wild child, charming guy," said her best friend Dara Riordan. He was 34 and she was 22.

Once in Abilene, Jennifer discovered that Ralph had a fiancee when they met, whom he left when he started seeing Jennifer. She also found out he had a child whom he never saw. "That was pretty much a deal-breaker for her," said her sister, Christa.

Jennifer Servo told her colleague and friend Jennifer Loren something else she didn't like about Ralph. "He had wanted to choke her while they were having sex."

Three weeks into their life together in Abilene, Jennifer kicked Ralph out. He moved to another apartment complex in Abilene and found a job while Jennifer settled into her new life at KRBC news.

“I think we’re being followed”

After reading the news on Sept. 15, 2002, Jennifer drove with Brian to pick up a coffee table from a friend and do some late night shopping at Wal-mart. During the trip, Jennifer told Brian she thought they were being followed.

"She's like, 'I'm pretty sure, Brian. That's the same car.' And I was like, 'You're just imagining things,'" he said.

When Jennifer dropped Brian at his apartment he offered to walk her to her car. She declined, but he insisted. It was the last time anyone saw her alive.

After two days of being unable to reach Jennifer, KRBC's news director called the manager of her apartment block to check on her. She was found bludgeoned and strangled to death. There was no murder weapon and no sign of forced entry.

The Investigation

Lead Detective Jeff Bell of the Abilene Police Department, looked first to Ralph and Brian. "Those two guys were the ones who we knew had a personal relationship with Jennifer." Their reactions to the news of her death were completely different. According to Bell, Sepulveda was very controlled and never asked how Servo had been murdered. “He was not emotional in any form or fashion, just didn’t ask the right questions,” said Bell. “’Jennifer’s dead,’ and he’s like, ‘Oh, that sucks.’ He never asked, ‘How did she die, what happened to her,’ never asked for the details that you would expect someone to ask.” Travers, by contrast, was distraught.

Brian Travers hired a lawyer almost immediately and cooperated fully with the police, even against the advice of his own lawyers. Ralph Sepulveda initially cooperated with police, but just weeks later ceased contact with them, moved out of town and re-enlisted in the U.S. Army for active duty.

Police didn’t rule out the possibility of a stalker. According to colleague Jennifer Loren, Servo had shown her an article about newscasters being stalked just the week before her death.

Police say that Travers has not been completely excluded, but that he has "moved down a little bit on the list of potentials in this case, just because of the cooperation level and everything that we've gone through the investigation and checking into him."

Brian Travers agreed to be interviewed by "Primetime," and denies any role in Jennifer Servo's death. Jennifer Loren quickly agreed. "He's like our sweet, adorable, couldn't-hurt-a-fly, Brian. There's no way."

Sepulveda wouldn’t talk to "Primetime," and more importantly for Jennifer Servos’ mother Sherry Abel, he didn’t show up for the memorial service which was attended by more than 300 people. She said, "there were no condolences, phone calls, a card and no Ralph at that ceremony."

Sepulveda remained the primary person of interest in the case, and five years after the murder, police traveled to Seattle to question him yet again, but couldn’t bring any new evidence to light. The case has remained cold since.

But then, while editing this article I discovered that just this year, the Abilene Police Department sought help from the television show, "Cold Justice," to hopefully resolve the case.

Resolution at last?

"Cold Justice" brought the necessary budget to fund the Abilene Police Department’s cold case team in reviving the investigation, flying Abilene detectives to Montana to interview Servo's family, to Tennessee to interview former suspect Brian Travers and lastly to Hawaii to interview Sepulveda.

Detective Jeff Cowan from the cold case unit said that while Brian Travers is “a little bit awkward socially," he has no previous criminal record, has shown willingness to help the case at every step and has maintained ties with Servo’s family. Detectives in the show requested to speak to Travers in person, and against the advice of his own lawyers he did. While he declined to appear on camera, it seems he satisfied all of the detectives’ questions.

Cowan gave the final word, saying, "He's cleared in all this."

The investigation brought to light new evidence including entries in Jennifer Servo’s diary detailing her relationship with Ralph, including one in which she stated, "He's mooching off me!" Upon reviewing the timeline of their relationship, show host and prosecutor Kelly Siegler said, "This is an obsession. This isn't just love."

In reviewing Jennifer’s neighbour's original statement about the night of the murder, detectives noted that the neighbour woke up at 2 a.m. and heard "two people were yelling at each other," adding, "it sounded like a two-way conversation."

This key witness testimony meant that the assailant was likely known to Servo. She wouldn’t have let a stranger into her house.

"Based on what we have, all roads lead back to Ralph," Detective Cowan said. Siegler concluded at the end of the show that, "Detectives Jeff Cowan and Shawn Montgomery are going to present their case to their prosecutor seeking charges for the murder of Jennifer Servo against Ralph Sepulveda."

Servo's mother Sherry Abel said, "I finally feel we are going to have some justice for Jen."

News you can trust

It’s thanks to the excellent local reporting at The Chattanoogan and Abilene Reporter News that I’ve been able to share this story with you. People need news, but we news we can trust. Any media company saying “trust me” needs to be looked at with some skepticism.

The news outlets realise that trust is low. In 2018, nearly 200 news anchors read the same script warning people about fake news, and implicitly to trust their own news station as a source for truth.

These stations are all owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group. Scott Livingston, senior vice president of news for the company stated in The Baltimore Sun “We are focused on fact-based reporting. That’s our commitment to our communities. That’s the goal of these announcements: to reiterate our commitment to reporting facts in a pursuit of truth.”

People once believed in the news without needing such assurances. TV stations and newspapers were seen as bastions of truth, but Chris Morris’ satirical recasting of news as entertainment in Brass Eye and The Day Today became reality decades ago. The news became an addictive yet comforting clown show with it’s 24hr cycle alternating between more terrifying reasons not to leave the house today and the soothing panacea of sport and weather.

It doesn’t mean there’s no truth in news at all, it just means we have to work harder to find it. Strip back the layers of vested interests behind each story, find arguments and perspectives from all sides. When a story isn’t just informative, but emotionally charged, ask why. Why do they want me to be angry, or afraid? Why is this clown dancing and shouting and waving their arms at me?

And when the clown says “trust me”? Don’t listen to the clown.

Watch the video for Clown by Battery Operated Orchestra below.

Our song and music video for Always On verges on the horrific. While on the surface it’s about social media, it comes from a lot of different places. The journey of it’s creation takes us from dolls becoming human to social experiments on mice and ultimately the consequences of switching it all off. This is part two of two. (Read part one).

It’s always on. That thing is always on.

The music for our track Always On was born when Chris wrote some audacious synth brass lines that came together in a spiky demo with some doodled lyrics dispersed over it. I quickly tuned into the feeling of it and we bounced the lyrics back and forth between us until we got them right.

Constant stream
You’ve got eyes to feed
Give ‘em what they need
‘till your fingers bleed

— excerpt from the lyrics for Always On

We followed a similar process with the edits for the music video. Soon after we got the track completed Chris was inspired to start making some visuals for it. He pulled clips from Tik Tok and Instagram, ramped and changed the colours and cut them together really quickly. I added some clips to the mix, Chris refined the edit, and it became more and more nightmarish, to the point that we felt it was too much (we eventually released this edit as the lyric video). We needed to give it some breathing space and context.

Chris then envisioned the sinister cube and the test subject who would slowly become distorted and enveloped by its oozing black horror. The final component was the mice.

The Beautiful Ones

In the music video we made reference to American ethologist John Calhoun’s experiments in overpopulation in rodent colonies. He created utopias for rats and mice in order to study their behaviour when the population grew. He made 24 such utopias, each experiment ending prematurely due to lack of space, until his landmark study: Universe 25.

Universe 25 was designed to be a paradise for mice. A huge enclosure with numerous private nesting areas, abundant nesting supplies and unlimited food and water. Into this rodent’s Garden of Eden he placed four female and four male mice.

The mice multiplied and all seemed well, but around a year into the experiment the population hit 600 and growth slowed. The mice were living in a world that was becoming increasingly crowded.

Males found it difficult to defend their territory so they eventually gave up trying. Instead of interacting with their peers they would gather in a large, listless group in the middle of the enclosure and occasionally break into fights. The mice who were attacked would remain relatively immobile during a vicious mauling, having lost the capacity to flee. These mice would then go on to attack others.

The group Calhoun termed “the beautiful ones,” were male mice who weren’t interested in mating and scrupulously avoided conflict to focus on grooming. While the mice around them were scarred and wounded from multiple fights, these mice were oddly pristine-looking. They just ate, slept, and preened, disengaged from the increasingly nightmarish world around them.

Nursing females, now having to defend their own nests against invaders, would become aggressive, even attacking their own young or abandoning them altogether. The mice pups born into this world were neglected and unable to form social bonds or engage in complex social behaviours. They didn’t know how to be mice anymore. Even when removed from Universe 25 and introduced to “normal” mice they couldn’t learn how to behave. Calhoun said that they had already died—a “first death”, a death of the spirit, before the “second death” of their physical body.

After about 1800 days of Calhoun’s Universe 25 experiment, the last mouse died, surrounded by all the space, food and water it could have needed to survive.

Moral decay from excessive social interaction

People have drawn comparisons between Calhoun’s experiments and the collapse of Western civilisation. It’s easy to observe the parallels, but scientifically speaking Calhoun’s experiment was on mice, not humans, and the two aren’t interchangeable.

In the mid-1970s, psychologist Jonathan Freedman recruited high school and university students to carry out his own experiments on behaviour and population density. In 1975 he declared to have found no statistically significant negative effects from population density and psychologists tended to agree. Medical historian Dr. Edmund Ramsden declared in a 2008 interview with the NIH Record that “Rats may suffer from crowding; human beings can cope.”

However, Freedman suggested that moral decay resulted not from population density, but from excessive social interaction. He argued that striking the right balance between privacy and community would reduce social pathology. He believed that it was the unwanted, unavoidable social interaction that drove even social creatures mad.

Is there any way out of this maze?

In 2025 these pernicious platforms still seem to be necessary to our livelihood as musicians. We post nearly every day and it’s definitely helping us grow our audience, but I’m exploring alternatives.

After ten years as a band we’ve found that the most powerful way to get our music heard is not necessarily by shouting into the crowded room that is social media, it’s through connecting directly with people. In-person at shows, on our livestream BOOcast and via our mailing list.

I think the biggest thing we give that can help [artists] is the ability to email your audience and create your own mailing list [off platform]… Particularly going back to social media and the frailty of that, building an email list is just so important... Those are your fans, they’re not ours.

— Bandcamp’s European Artist and Label Representative Aly Gillani being interviewed by Declan McGlynn at Future Filter

Beyond our own efforts to forge these connections, the most powerful force we have to reach more people are our existing fans. I cannot understate the importance of one person sharing our music with someone else who might like it. These direct connections carry much more weight and meaning than a like on social media.

There is a balance to be struck between life online and in the real world. We can prioritize the real world and when we do interact online we should do so mindfully, in ways that give us meaningful connections rather than feeding us distraction.

We can live a life without social media in its current, damaging form. It starts when we cut out the interfaces getting between us and connect directly with each other.

Watch the video for Always On by Battery Operated Orchestra below.

Our song and music video for Always On verges on the horrific. While on the surface it’s about social media, it comes from a lot of different places. The journey of it’s creation takes us from dolls becoming human to social experiments on mice and ultimately the consequences of switching it all off. This is part one of two.

We know social media is damaging us. It can cause a host of personal problems from dopamine addiction to body dysmorphia and has wider damaging effects on our culture, yet we continue to use it. We’d trash these apps in an instant, but social media has become so integral to our society that as musicians, we must post to be heard. If we’re not spending time on these platforms, we basically don’t exist.

It’s not without it’s rewards, dopamine aside. Unique connections with people whom we’d otherwise never have met, keeping in touch with family and friends in far-flung locations (albeit typically in a passive way) and, as a completely indie DIY band, it has enabled us to grow our audience and reach people we couldn’t have without being on a label.

However, those silver linings seem too few when I enter one of these scroll-holes. I can feel it changing the way my mind works while I’m using it, and I instinctively want to get off. I know it’s bad for me, so how can I strike a workable balance? Could I even operate without them today?

Feeding the feed

Doing our band’s PR I’ve had to learn how these platforms work. The algorithms on all social media platforms are designed to reward keeping people in the app for as long as possible. Post every day. Post several times a day. Make sure to interact with other people’s posts. It’s not enough to just post, or like, you should be commenting too. The more time you spend there, the more others will join in, spending their time in the app too. And whatever you do, don’t stop. Consistency is key. If you drop the ball, you’ll get pushed down the feed.

These machines were designed to addict you, to keep you in their thrall. Autoplay, infinite scroll, algorithmic recommendations—each of these was implemented as a means of prolonging and profiting from your time and attention…. How could you possibly blame yourself for getting caught in it?

August Lamm, You Don’t Need a Smartphone

It used to be that once a person followed you on social media they’d be guaranteed to see your posts. This changed long ago. In Meta’s case, so that they could monetise this feature. Fancy “boosting” your post so that the people who are following you will actually see it? That’ll cost you. They’ve taken your valuable connection to people who like what you do and are charging you a ransom to get it back.

If a song is released without a PR campaign, does anyone hear it?

The PR work involved in a release is huge and a large part of it is posting and interacting on social media, on as many platforms as possible. The timeline is traditionally about three months of promotion leading up to release, with at least six weeks of public promotion on social media.

Bigger bands can afford to have a dedicated person or team employed to do this, but as indie musicians it’s down to us. We’ve even created a DIY PR guide to help other musicians in this situation. Between day jobs and the work of actually making and performing music, it sometimes feels impossible to fit this work in.

One day we decided to experiment with not doing the usual social media campaign for a single release. We just emailed it to the reviewers and DJs we had relationships with, sent a newsletter to our fan mailing list and did about 5 social media posts about it. It didn’t go well, barely anyone heard it.

We went back to using the full PR timeline for our subsequent releases. In October 2022 we released the single Nightclub Mishap. Through our promotion efforts it got played on BBC radio. Through further awareness-raising work on social media, so many people contacted the DJ when it was played that we were invited to do our second live lounge in the BBC studio.

The PR had paid off, but we were completely burnt out from being on these platforms constantly. Creating content for the PR campaign meant we’d had no time to create any music for the album. So we announced that we were taking a break from social media and would only be communicating with fans via our newsletter and our monthly livestream, BOOcast.

It feels like everyone has done that “I’m leaving social media” post and eventually succumbed to reinstalling the apps. We felt pretty strongly about leaving for good at the time but had the foresight to say we were just “taking a break”. We knew that if we wanted our next release to be heard, we’d be back.

For five months we only posted once a month to remind people to watch our livestreams and finally got on with making our album. It was completely liberating. We only returned to regular posting to promote release of our next single Always On, along with the completed album Compulsory Games.

Always On is our takedown of the toxicity of social media.

Algorithms in flesh

Aside from our own turmoil in dealing with these platforms, I had been affected by something I’d seen on my commute along the Sussex coast. Between the bus seats in front of me, I couldn’t help seeing the lit screen of a smartphone in a girl’s hand. She was scrolling through reel after reel of women who looked identical, touting affordable plastic surgery options. She hearted several posts and even clicked an affiliate link to browse a surgery website offering filler deals. As I got off the bus I caught a glimpse of her. She must have only been 13-14 years old, with pristine, glowing skin, wide eyes unnecessarily embellished by heavy false eyelashes, accented by perfectly stencilled dark eyebrows. She was only just beginning to grow into her adult form. Surely not a candidate for plastic surgery?

I discovered that the uniform look she was scrolling is known as “instagram face”. Jia Tolentino describes its key features in an article from The New Yorker:

It’s a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips.

She notes the way that even race has been smoothed out of this look:

It was as if the algorithmic tendency to flatten everything into a composite of greatest hits had resulted in a beauty ideal that favored white women capable of manufacturing a look of rootless exoticism.

I couldn't help but notice Instagram face’s resemblance to the hugely popular 2000s dolls Bratz. Beauty culture ate itself in 2023 when Kylie Jenner partnered with the company to release her own series of the dolls. “I have been a fan of Bratz since childhood and I’ve always wanted my own Bratz doll,” Jenner said in a press statement. No kidding.

The attitude to plastic surgery today seems to be a pragmatic approach to upgrading your look to get ahead in the world. The implication is that if you look like this, you'll be successful. Our individual faces are no longer a means of expressing our emotions and our racial heritage, but merely an awkward surface which we must sand all expression away from, to give us a more desirable, homogenized mask of prosperity.

As a millennial who only had glossy magazines, celebrities and billboards to influence my body image as a teen, it's easy for me to reject the idea of Instagram face as dehumanising in the extreme, but for a person who has grown up scrolling, more immersed in the world online than the world around them, it could be impossible to contemplate living with the imagined disadvantage and hardship brought about by one's own, embodied physical reality.

Everything seen through a mirror
Can’t touch reality
Why would you want to be
flesh it decays so easily
Pixel vitality is immortality

— excerpt from the lyrics for Always On

Read about The Beautiful Ones and discover if we can find a way out of these systems in part two.

This song began it’s life with Chris having a tough day in the studio, which at the time was our living room in a small flat in Brighton. He recorded loads of different ideas on the Teisco 110F and Roland SH-01, but none of them were quite working. Frustrated, he ended up playing them all at the same time and this is the sound you hear from about 26 seconds into the song.

We thought that sounded pretty cool so we built on it. It felt so completely joyful and chaotic it put me in mind of ticker tape parades with thousands of people bouncing up and down.

The Canyon of Heroes is the name of the route which ticker tape parades travel along in New York City. I wrote the words thinking about astronauts returning from space with their cosmic perspective for humanity and everybody celebrating. I remember an unused lyric I wrote was “ticker tape, ticker tape, tickling your face”.

This song is so high energy and celebratory it’s always loads of fun to perform live. Fun fact: it’s also Hearty White's (of Hearty White's Miracle Nutrition on WFMU) favourite BOO song.

Lyrics

Riding through the Canyon of Heroes
To the sound of a thousand radios

To the whistling of ships and tugboats
Brought home on a two-tonne pink rose

We stand on the shoulders of giants

Imagine yourself
Here with me
Uncounted points of light Sparkling

Staring at us
From up in the air
Are Felix the Cat
And Yogi Bear

Riding through the Canyon of Heroes
To the sound of a thousand radios

To the whistling of ships and tugboats
Brought home on a two-tonne pink rose

We stand on the shoulders of giants

In 2011, our band Battery Operated Orchestra didn’t even have a name yet. We had only recorded one song together, a cover of The Crystals’ He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss). Chris had a few demos kicking around on his computer and shared some of these with me. They had all been composed with various soft synths in Making Waves on his clunky old DELL laptop. One in particular immediately transported me. It was called Diagram of a Human Eye, after a poster he’d seen on the Northern Line for some London museum exhibition.

Listening to the dusty blooping arpeggio and skittering percussion cantering over those warm chords, it spirited me away into two parallel tales. One of a young woman on the cusp of adulthood, about to venture into the wider world, but also of the empire of Japan at the turn of the last century, once cloistered but suddenly facing inevitable intrusion from Western culture.

This song taps into my deep love of Japan through history, poetry and legend. To tell the story of this song I have to share some of Japan’s history with you.

Sixteenth-century Japan was gripped by civil war. The old hierarchy of power was torn apart when the shogun, appointed by the emperor and based in Kyoto, lost influence over the daimyo, or local lords, and they began fighting between each other for control over Japan.

At this time Japan was very active at sea. The daimyo used piracy and free trade to consolidate arms and power, while battle-worn ronin and exiled Christians sought new lives abroad, even founding Nihonmachi or “Japan Towns” in other countries.

This all changed once Tokugawa Ieyasu reunified Japan under a single shogun rule. After his historic victory at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, he established a new capital in Edo (now Tokyo) marking the beginning of a 200 year period of peace and prosperity for Japan.

To help maintain his power, Tokugawa introduced a foreign policy known as “sakoku”, which translates as “locked country”. Sakoku was a series of policies that essentially cut off contact between Japan and the rest of the world.

1636

No Japanese ship ... nor any native of Japan, shall presume to go out of the country; whoever acts contrary to this, shall die, and the ship with the crew and goods aboard shall be sequestered until further orders. All persons who return from abroad shall be put to death.

Sakoku had many benefits for Tokugawa. It restricted the ability of the daimyo to trade, which ensured they would never become powerful enough to challenge the shogunate. It hindered the destabilising spread of Christianity and colonialism from the Spanish and Portuguese, and lastly it enabled him to control commerce between Japan and other nations, collecting taxes and levies on the limited trade it did make with the Dutch and neighbours Korea and China.

So for over two hundred years, visitors to Japan were generally either turned away or executed, while it’s own culture flourished in peace.

This lasted until 1853, when US Commodore Matthew Perry sailed his kurofune (Black Ships) into Edo Bay. These four heavily armed steamships made an intimidating display of Western technological advancements and naval power.

Calling himself an admiral, Perry refused to obey Japanese orders to leave and sent word that if Japan did not accept delivery of his letter from the President via an envoy, he would deliver it by force if necessary. Japan had no choice but to accept his letter. Within 15 years ‘unequal’ trade agreements were made with the US and other countries, forcing an end to Sakoku and to the Edo period, with the eventual restoration of the emperor Meiji.

To me, this tale of Japan hiding from the rest of the world to nourish itself and develop, echoed the quiet preparation of a girl, alone in the country, growing into adulthood, becoming ready to explore the city and the world beyond. There is a certain excitement but also trepidation at the unknown. Once the knowledge of that wider world is uncovered there is no going back.

With all this swirling around in my head, the lyrics for the song came to me quickly. I wanted to include some Japanese lyrics at the beginning, something of the girl’s thoughts drifting around. I knew basic Japanese but I couldn’t say much more than ‘how are you?’ So I searched for something appropriate and discovered Rin Ishiki’s poem Plucking Flowers.

I plucked wildflowers at Marunouchi in Tokyo.

At the end of the 1920’s

I was in my mid-teens.

On my way to work

To the Bank

The hem of my kimono-trousers flapping

Just a dash up the embankment beside the footpath

Before my eyes an open field.

Clover

Dandelions

Philadelphia fleabane

Wildflowers too poor

To decorate my desk at work.

Its been about half a century since then

Days came when the buildings blazed in the flames of war,

Around the postwar Tokyo Station

Just like a graph of the economic boom

Tall skyscrapers bloomed.

I retired at the mandatory retirement age,

I don’t suppose any firms are left which take

Girls straight from primary school.

Even women are questioned about their market value

And ranked accordingly.

Women bloom in competition

But the day has finally come when they cannot possibly be wildflowers.

Farewell Marunouchi

Now no open fields anywhere

The thin green stem that I once squeezed

Was my own neck.

It perfectly encapsulates all the promise of the future before the destruction of war and disillusionment of adulthood.

I didn’t want to focus too much on the latter part, for me this song was all about that feeling of a liberating and untold future about to begin after being isolated and locked away in childhood for so long. She yearns for freedom, in her mind she’s already gone.

The final piece of this song is a reference to a favourite childhood book of mine, the legend of Urashima Taro.

It’s a Japanese legend about a man who rescues a sea turtle from some cruel children who are torturing it. The turtle takes him to an underwater palace where he is entertained by princess Otohime. After spending what he thinks has been just a few days there enjoying the wonders of the palace, he tells the princess he must get back home to care for his elderly mother. The princess doesn’t want him to leave but lets him go, giving him an ornate box to protect him, telling him that he must never open it.

When he returns to his village he discovers that over a hundred years have passed and all he knew is gone. In his desolation he opens the box and is flooded with all the experiences of his magical visit to the palace, the taste of peaches, the colourful dancing fish, the exquisite rooms of the palace, and as the memories ripple through him he ages all those years that have passed and crumbles into dust.

“If you look back you’ll forget what you said” is a direct reference to that tale and to not looking back once a decision has been made, because it could corrupt your resolve, or even destroy you completely.

A song can be like that box that Otohime gave to Taro. It can unlock a complete sensory experience connected to a lifetime of history and memory. Great songs do this even when you don’t know what they’re about, but you feel their riches unfold through you like magic.

Sparrow’s Dance was the first BOO song I remember experiencing that with, and it still does this to me today.

Everybody knows that Spotify is bad for musicians. Right? I was manning the merch stand at our last gig in London, tempting a woman with a discount on buying two CDs by the main act when she said, “Oh thanks, I’ll just find them on Spotify.” I said “Did you know that artists don’t make any money from Spotify? It means a lot to musicians when you buy their CDs directly from them.” She honestly had no idea and immediately, eagerly bought two CDs.

I had thought that The “Cost of Living” in Spotify Streams article (2019) and David McCandless’s How Much Do Music Artists Earn Online? infographic (2010) were pretty widely known, but I realise now that people not involved directly in the industry or people who aren’t hard-core music fans simply don’t know.

It’s not just the pitiful payouts that make Spotify a problem for the music industry. There are a litany of transgressions by the company listed publicly on Wikipedia, but a better introduction to their nefarious doings would be to read the incisive and deep articles from Liz Pelly on Spotify for The Baffler. In “The Big Mood Machine” she writes about how Spotify re-shapes the listening experience for its users:

“The decision to define audiences by their moods was part of a strategic push to grow Spotify’s advertising business in the years leading up to its IPO — and today, Spotify’s enormous access to mood-based data is a pillar of its value to brands and advertisers.”

This article goes into alarming details about Spotify’s surveillance of user data, their emphasis on placing relevant ads through monitoring, predicting and manipulating user emotions and importantly;

“In appealing to advertisers, Spotify also celebrates its position as a background experience and in particular how this benefits advertisers and brands. Jorge Espinel, who was Head of Global Business Development at Spotify for five years, once said in an interview: “We love to be a background experience. You’re competing for consumer attention. Everyone is fighting for the foreground. We have the ability to fight for the background. And really no one is there. You’re doing your email, you’re doing your social network, et cetera.” In other words, it is in advertisers’ best interests that Spotify stays a background experience.”

Spotify has 600 million monthly active users and over 60% of those are aged 18-24. It is actively changing the way people listen to music by monitoring and manipulating users’ moods and turning music into a background experience driven by advertising.

If this wasn’t bad enough, Spotify then began to disseminate stock or “library” music throughout these background music playlists in an effort to reduce their royalty payouts. This was known as the “Fake Artists” controversy of 2016/17 (which we reported on in BOOcast #24).

These library musicians work under pseudonyms and typically aren’t part of performing rights societies, so Spotify benefits financially from not having to pay these royalties. The side effect of Spotify sidelining real artists for library or AI-generated music in playlists also means that real artists don’t get heard, therefore paid.

Spotify encourages the myth that playlist placement can change an artist’s life by giving massive exposure, while behind the scenes they curate playlists to include only the most profitable tracks for the company instead.

Spotify isn’t just bad for musicians, it’s bad for music. At its best, music is a transcendent experience, deeply connected to our bodies, our souls, our communities and culture. Music is not just a background experience, it’s central to the human experience on this planet.

Given that we knew all this and remained on the platform for so long, you may ask why.

As independent musicians, our defence of being on Spotify has always been its ability to connect artists with their audience. When it comes to promoting a new release, most music review sites demand a Spotify link (though this is changing). For many people, Spotify is the only way they listen to music. We didn’t want to prevent people from accessing our music because we disagreed with the platform in principle, so we compromised. We left our singles up on Spotify and only released albums on Bandcamp. Our Spotify bio contained the following notice:

“BOO only make singles available to stream on Spotify, not albums. While we understand it’s economical and convenient for people, we don’t wish to encourage support for a platform which we feel is inherently anti-music, from their handling of user data to their unfair distribution of royalties. We prefer to promote platforms that value music and musicians, like Bandcamp.”

So why change now?

I could point to Liz Pelly’s newest article “The Ghosts in the Machine” from her forthcoming book, in which she confirms that Spotify did have an agenda to promote fake artists. Their internal program to spread more profitable tracks across the platform, usually library music, was dubbed “Perfect Fit Content”. Spotify paid fewer royalties and increased their advertising revenue with mood-based playlisting.

I could say it’s because I recently discovered that in 2024 Spotify introduced a minimum threshold for payouts, 1000 streams per year for any song. While I can see the benefits of this to the company, it is punishing to independent artists and labels.

It doesn’t help either that Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek has invested heavily in Helsing, a European AI military technology company.

But really, this was a long time coming and we’ve simply had enough. It’s easy to accept things we don’t like by increments when we think there’s a greater good being achieved. We never liked being on Spotify but we stuck with it because we thought we had to. But that complicity corrupts, and one day you realise that if anything is going to change, you need to do something different.

I’ve seen people argue that Spotify isn’t profitable because streaming can’t be profitable. The streaming model of business just doesn’t work. If that’s true, then we need a new way of doing things. Music is important, no matter how much Spotify may try to turn it into a background experience, an incidental element of advertising, mere content.

I believe people want to pay for things that are important to them. I believe it because that’s how I feel about the music I buy. If it’s not true of you and your friends then it’s something we need to inculcate in society. When I told the woman at that gig that the musicians she wanted to support would not be supported if she just streamed on Spotify, she wanted to do something meaningful instead, buy their CDs. Education is key.

We need a societal change, whereby everyone understands how to support the arts they love. The best way to support a musician is to buy directly from the artist. People can use fairer platforms like Bandcamp, or a band’s own website shop or buy music at gigs, or maybe even pay a subscription service to continually support the artists that matter to them.

When you support musicians, you support the whole industry, a vast ecosystem encompassing all sorts of professions, from mastering engineers to lighting technicians, venue owners, instrument builders, bar staff, festival organisers and more. It’s a living, breathing community made of millions of people across the world.

With cuts to the arts, and a squeeze on all creatives, I foresee the patronage model becoming more widely accepted and promoted. It feels good to support good causes. It’s a badge of honour to be a part of helping these things happen. Where government and capitalism fall down I trust people to rise up and help each other to support the things that matter.

That’s partly why we’re here on Substack now. We want to find our people and build things together. We want to make great music and share our joy and wonder at the world. These are the things which make us human, which give life meaning. We don’t need Spotify to do it.

Subscribe now

When the wonderful music and culture writer Ted Gioia took a break from Twitter to launch The Honest Broker on Substack, we followed him. Over time, Substack’s weekly magazine-style digests have inspired us with articles from other great writers and artists, and yes, even bands. Lately its shape is changing from a simple email newsletter service to a place where people can share conversations with creators, and each other.

As an indie band we generally need to be on all of the things (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, Bandcamp, etc.) so people can find us, no matter where they like to be. Posting to all these places is quite a big job. So why are we launching a Substack in addition to all this? Well, a few reasons:

1. It’s growing

Growing platforms are good for discovery. Being an indie band and not having a PR team we need to harness all DIY possibilities to get exposure. We recently started posting to TikTok for this reason and it has proved successful.

2. It’s creator-led

We like creator-led platforms. In order to ditch the tech overlords from the likes of Meta and Alphabet, we need new platforms! The CEO of Substack has already turned down Elon Musk’s offer to buy Substack—and potentially put him in charge of the entire merged Substack and Twitter business. The management appear to have integrity and that trickles down. Substack is a friendly, intelligent space full of interesting articles, and gives a fair deal to creators.

3. Long-form expression

It enables us to bypass posting limitations on other platforms. Here on Substack we have no character limit, and we can even share GIFs. Currently we can only express long-form ideas on our monthly livestream BOOcast, but now we can post them on Substack too. Here on Substack you can expect posts from us about the music industry, the creative process, culture and more.

Our Substack is completely free. If you’d like to support us monetarily you can join the BOOsters on Bandcamp where you’ll get tonnes of bonus content, including things like:

• unreleased EPs (x17 at time of publishing!)

• stems

• exclusive demos

• exclusive merch

• 10% off merch

• credit on every BOOcast

Veteran BOOsters are even awarded the esteemed BOO Peter Badge!

Join the BOOsters

After a hectic 2024 we feel optimistic about 2025. Places like Substack promise a nicer place to be online, allowing us to connect with you without interference from algorithms. We look forward to seeing you in the comments!

x Brigitte and Chris x