Episode 56 – “I’m still clean up my side of the street…”

Welcome to Songs That Don’t Suck, with your host Mark Bradbourne.

Welcome to episode 56 of Songs That Don’t Suck, this is the one where everything changed. To paraphrase the Beatles, I read the news today, oh boy, my podcast platform is going to change. And though the news is rather sad, well, I just had to laugh.

So I got an email from Spotify, which is where I record and host songs that don’t suck, and they let me know that in June, I would be experiencing a change in their platform. They are discontinuing the feature known as Talk Plus Music, and basically what that feature allows me to do is embed music into my podcast episodes. Now, if you listen to the Cliff Notes version, you don’t hear any music anyway, because it’s only licensed for Spotify listeners, and it’s only licensed in full for premium Spotify listeners. So about half of my listener audience is on a platform other than Spotify, and I have no idea the breakdown between premium listener and free listener. So while I’m kind of bent out of shape that they’re changing the feature, because in my head I have this vision of what I want the podcast to be, and I want everybody to be able to hear the music when I talk about the music without having to go through extra steps, the reality of it is when I look at the data behind who is listening to the podcast, the majority don’t get that. So I’m making a change, right? For those who do not listen on the Spotify platform, you won’t see anything change except the episode title will no longer have Cliff Notes in it. For those on the Spotify platform, you’re not going to see two episodes anymore, because I’m only going to be putting out one, and that one will not have any music in it.

So this sucks, right? But here’s what I’m doing to kind of continue to give you access to the music. I found this really cool service called Songwhip. It is free for me to use right now. Hopefully that doesn’t change, because what it does is it generates links to all of the music platforms where you can stream and purchase music. So Spotify, Apple Music, Title, YouTube, Amazon Music, Bandcamp, YouTube, did I mention YouTube? I think I did, but literally like any music platform that you can think of, it will generate a link to that platform. So go stream them where you want, go buy them where you want, go crazy, support these artists any way you want to, and those links will all be in the show notes for each episode. So you just kind of got to click into the episode and see the notes, and you’ll see the links to go and find the music. I’m also going to be making a running playlist of all the songs from 2024. Now that will only be on Spotify, unfortunately, but I feel like this is the best that I can do with what I’m being offered, and I don’t have the money to license the music, and I certainly don’t have money to pay the lawyers when I get sued for not having licensing.

So it is what it is, but that’s what I’m going to do. Because in the end of the day, I can’t complain, right? Spotify is giving me a free platform to create this podcast. And while it’s frustrating that I don’t get my vision, whatever, what can I do? But it does make me wonder, it’s like what happened, right? So if you’re unaware, there was a huge kerfuffle the last week or so on TikTok, where the Universal Music Group removed all their music from TikTok, and they basically accused the platform of being unfair to the way they compensate artists, and they want TikTok to pay the artists more. Because they basically say that without music, your platform won’t exist. TikTok was like, yeah, you’re not going to do that, and Universal Music Group said you want to bet, and there’s no music from minor artists like Taylor Swift, and basically any large musician that you can think of, part of me wonders that based on this, Spotify is kind of preemptively pulling the licensing use and kind of saying, well, it’s just going to be streaming only, it kind of muddies it when it’s in podcasts, who knows. All I know is that if UMG left Spotify, that would take a huge chunk of their library away. The other thing that I was thinking about is that I know that Spotify is very data-driven, and I feel like if the feature isn’t being used the way that Spotify thought it was going to be used, or how much it was being used, that between the layoffs that have happened in that company, they’re probably just moving resources around to support other things, so it’s easy to take away something that’s not being used a lot. So whatever it is, it is what it is. The good news is that I have no plans to stop the podcast. I’m going to continue finding new music, and I’m going to continue sharing it here.

In other news, last episode, I was talking about this end of the year survey or research that a company called Luminate did. I got more of that data, and I kind of want to share some of the really interesting things that I found. Taylor Swift made up 1.7 of the entire recorded music market in the United States, and that is without including video. Now, when you say 1.7%, you’re like, well, that’s kind of small, but remember how much music is out there, 100,000 tracks a day. And the study basically had to estimate that one in 79 songs that were kind of on-demand streams were Taylor Swift, which is just unimaginable to think about. Music streaming as a whole was up 34% over the prior year. Hip hop being the most consumed genre. K-pop and Afro beats were the fastest growing genres. Female artist representation in audio stream volume within the top 500 most streamed artists in the U. S. grew 4.2 percentage points between this year and last year, or between 2022 and 2023, I should say. This one was really interesting to me. Tracks that were released in the last five years, so 2019 to 2023, made up just over 48% of the U. S. audio streaming when they analyzed the top 500 tracks. So music prior to 2019 is still making up the majority of music that is still being consumed. I really want to see more finite data on this to understand how far back does that go? Like, what is the peak in that majority of music? Like, what years are there? Because I have my suspicions, but I’m sure my suspicions are biased by my Gen X personality, but if I can find the data, I will surely share it here with you. The last thing that I found really interesting is they have this concept of super fans. They estimate that 18% of U. S. music listeners are super fans. So 18% of everybody who listens to music are classified as super fans. Super fans spend money on music, 76% more per month than the average U. S. music listener, and 126% more on artist merch than the average listener. So if I’m an A&R or I’m an artist, I’m trying to figure out what are the levers that I have to push and pull to turn a casual fan into a super fan, because the super fan is where I’m going to see the most revenue. And at the end of the day, while we all want to create art, you also want to get paid for it. All right.

Let’s get into new music. If this is your first time listening to songs that don’t suck, welcome. If this is the hundred and first time that you’ve listened to the podcast because you’ve listened to every episode twice. Thank you so much. I appreciate you more than you know. Basically, what I do here is I listen to hundreds of songs each week. I give each song about 30 seconds for it to impress me enough to make me put it on a review list. I whittle that down and do second and third and fourth and fifth lessons until I get down to usually around five songs. There is a lot of crap being released, and that’s kind of standard every week. But I’ve got five songs to share with you this week that I’m pretty excited about. So let’s get into it.

The first song this week is Burial Ground from the Decemberists. The Decemberists first hit My Personal Music Radar back on their third album, Picturesque, which was in 2005. And then here we are 20 years later, and they are back with more new music. This is the first release they’ve had since 2018. So to me, the Decemberists, if you’re not familiar with them, have always kind of ridden this fine line between Fringe Alternative and Indie Pop. And I think a lot of that has to do, at least for me, with some of their instrumentation. You get violin every once in a while. You get some banjo, horns. It’s just not your typical rock instrumentation. Pretty basic. So it definitely puts them in a category all their own for me. And then Colin Malloy’s vocals are very, very distinctive and frankly very cool. The minute you hear him, you know it’s the Decemberists. And this song in particular feels very retro to me. Like very, very retro. Like if you’re familiar with Merzy Beat Bands from the UK, like Hermans Hermits, like when I hear this song, when I hear Burial Grounds, it feels like something, it’s got this kind of happy pop rhythm, even though the vocals are a little bit, you know, not happy. But it’s just, it gives me that vibe. Some of my favorite aspects of this song, as I was kind of listening to it, the vocals, obviously I love Colin’s vocals. But there’s some really cool layering that happens. And there’s some interplay with the vocals and the backing vocals, which are really cool. Decemberists always come with great arrangements. And there’s like this really great horn part in this song. The overall production, the drum sound, the mix, everything is fantastic with this track. And honestly, like stuff like this is what I feel is missing from a lot of recorded music today because music has become so easy to record. I was interacting with somebody on Reddit, and he had put up his music. He’s an indie artist. And he was asking for feedback. So I gave him feedback. I said, honestly, the recording isn’t great. Like, it’s not mixed well. It’s, you know, and he’s like, Oh, you would hate my, my older stuff because this is by far the best mixed album. Like, yeah, you’re probably right. And then I, we got into it. But anyway, I digress. Everything should be, everything should be mixed as well. It sounds really great. So yeah, the Decemberists burial grounds, fantastic track.

The second song this week is Peter Pan from Supine. These guys are from Norway. And this was a really cool find for me this week. This is the second one in recent memory that was brought to me by Spotify’s AIDJ. They continue to refine it. And while it’s still a little bit annoying at times, every once in a while, it drops a track on me while I’m like, I have not heard this and I really like this. So if you’re not familiar, it looks at my listening history, which because of the podcast is kind of screwed up because I listen to hundreds and hundreds of songs each week. But the ones that I listen to more obviously reflect in what the AIDJ is picking. Anyway, this song, Peter Pan, absolute ripper. Love it. The bassline is fantastic. It’s driving and it drives the entire song along with the drums. The little guitar solo melody line that floats in and out is fantastic. And the band themselves in their bio, they describe their sound as psychedelic pop rock. Absolutely agree with that. And while they don’t list one of my favorite bands as an influence, I hear the band Jellyfish in what they are doing now. It’s kind of a modern take on Jellyfish, you know, really cool vocals, some really cool rhythmic things happening, fun lyrics. There’s this really cool musical interlude and call it the bridge section that separates basically the last two chorus where they change into this halftime feel and there’s some syncopated rhythms happening. It’s really cool and then it falls back into the last chorus. But fantastic stuff from Supine.

Third song this week is from The Struts and it’s called How Can I Love You Without Breaking Your Heart. Towards the end of last year, The Struts dropped their latest album Pretty Vicious. And if you’ve been a longtime listener to the podcast, you know how much I love The Struts and how much I love that album. When I saw this song drop this week, I was a little bit shocked, honestly, that they were already releasing new music. And then I was like, well, maybe this is kind of a B side or whatever from The Pretty Vicious Sessions. However it came to be, it’s fantastic. If you like The Struts, you probably love this song. And if you don’t love The Struts or you’re not aware of The Struts and you’re new to The Struts, here is a fabulous song from them. All of the things that make me love The Struts are here in this song. Great guitars and kind of composition of the song. Great vocals from Luke. It’s just awesome all around. They have a great, and I say formula and people will put that in a bad light, but they have a fantastic formula for the way that they write songs and put them out. And it never feels repetitive to me. They’ve always got some different aspect to it, unlike a nickel back where you can overlay their songs and everything lines up. They’re different. And it’s an amazing talent, the amount of music they have put out to date. And it’s just awesome.

The fourth song this week is Once Upon a Time at Texaco, part one from Amigo the Devil. Late last year I featured another Amigo the Devil track called Cannibal Within, which I absolutely loved. This one is another fun, fast road to hell lyrical jaunt through his dark folk landscape. And he weaves it in an amazing way. I’m a bit of a sucker for banjo. I picked the Decembrus earlier. I mentioned their banjo inclusion. There’s some great banjo work happening in this song. This one sounds like there’s some lyrics that would make an epic sing-along at the live show, which hopefully 2024 I actually get to see him. That would be amazing. And the one thing that really caught me with this song is, and I was racking my brain to think if there’s another song that did this, there’s a lyrical cliffhanger at the end. And it’s called part one. So there’s part two coming. But when the song ends lyrically, it says, and then it hit me. What hit you? I am dying to know at this point because the song tells a really, really interesting story. There’s humor, albeit dark humor. And you know, it’s just really kind of goes off the rails from we need more tequila to driving across the Mexican border. So I guess I’ll have to wait, but it’s going to be fun once the second part of this comes out.

The fifth song this week is Don’t Forget Me from Maggie Rogers. There is a trend in female singer-songwriters that I have noticed as I’m listening to new singer-songwriters, at least from a vocal standpoint, where there’s either one or two things happening, right? They’ve got a very similar timbre and tone to their voice. You know, it’s very clean, you know, similar register, or it’s overly breathy. And that’s annoying to me. Maggie Rogers, her voice really stood out to me. And honestly, every female vocalist that I have put on the podcast, and honestly, every male vocalist, to be quite honest, if there isn’t something that makes them stand out, they’re not going to show up here. Maggie has a very strong voice and you can hear it through the verses and the choruses. And when she goes up into her upper register, there is this really subtle rasp that I hear that I just absolutely love. I think it’s like a fingerprint of her voice that, you know, unless you’re really paying attention, you’re not going to notice. Lyrically, I think the song tells a beautiful story. It’s a story that everybody can relate to, or at least most people can relate to at some point in their lives, where they’re searching for someone to really kind of spend their lives with. And the interesting part is that she has no fairytale fantasy, no clouded notion that this may, you know, it might not be forever. And the key to the whole thing is that she just doesn’t want to be forgotten when it ends or if it ends. And it was just kind of like a very interesting take. And it got me thinking about, you know, the number of songs that I have heard over the years and years of listening to music since I was very young, it always amazes me when someone can still put together a fresh perspective on aspects of life. And it kind of made me do a little hope that that can continue for decades to come because it’s such an interesting part of the art of music to me.

That is it for this week. As I said, thank you for listening. I really appreciate it. I hope the change goes well. As always, spread the word to your fellow music fans, if you’ve got someone in your life who loves music and is searching for new music and needs an outlet to find that new music, you have the key, you have the source, share the podcast. You can follow the show on social media if you like, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and threads. We have a website, songs that don’t suck. net. You can send me artist recommendations. You can send me feedback on the show. Yeah, that’s it. Again, thank you so much for listening and we’ll catch you next episode. Thanks for listening and until next week, keep searching for and listening to songs that don’t suck.