emwhitenoise is a monthly essay exploring the future of music through the lens of fandom, technology and culture—from Emily White, a music product builder and Spotify and Billboard alum.

🆕 The fan-first music startup database just got 20+ new additions this week, including: an app to track the raves you’d been to, a “whisper network” for great recs, a virtual turntable widget, and (throwing my own hat in the ring!) RIYL.fm, a wrapped for college radio.

My favorite book on product management isn’t a book on product management.

It’s How to Write One Song by . A 158-page, practical guide to songwriting.

I’ve spent the last decade building music products, including nearly 8 years at Spotify, and I’ve read most of the product management canon: Inspired, Sprint, Good Strategy Bad Strategy, (I loved this recent edition with a visual guide to getting out of a creative slump.)

Nothing has had a bigger impact on my craft as a PM than Tweedy’s advice to aspiring songwriters.

I view product development as a fundamentally creative process, and constraints are one of the most powerful tools for creativity we have. I return to Tweedy’s book often when I’m feeling stuck.

And I’ve been circling the same idea for more years than I care to admit: a new home for music curation.

This spring, instead of trying to solve the entire problem, I gave myself permission to tackle a narrower challenge: What could I build in one month that a college radio DJ would think is cool enough to share?

It’s now live: RIYL.fm, a “Wrapped” for college radio stations, exploring the artists, songs, and albums that defined 12 student-run station’s sounds this semester (“RIYL” is short for recommended if you like, the tag DJs add to record reviews.) I wrote about why I built RIYL here.

This essay is about how I made it, and what Tweedy’s advice for aspiring songwriters has taught me about how to build products in a world where it’s never been easier to build software (or “prompt” a song, for that matter).

Anyone can write code.

Anyone can write a song.

The challenge with songwriting or building software is creating something that connects with people and stands the test of time.

Tweedy believes the mysticism around songwriting and inspiration are overrated.

That same mythology gets attached to startups: the genius dude in a garage with a napkin sketch.

But great songs and products don’t come from a divine lightning strike, they are the result of practice, constraints, and showing up daily. Neither songwriting nor building products are limited to “creative geniuses”.

The best way to learn is to just start. Build something small, specific and unscalable for real people you can talk to.

Two of Tweedy’s ideas on songwriting particularly shaped how I built RIYL:

1. Write one song, not song(s).

The instinct most of us have when we start something new is to want it to be everything. But a huge vision can make it paralyzing to move out of your head and into action. You have to lower the stakes, let go of your ego and just do the thing.

The build for RIYL itself was completed in one month, but years of conscious and subconscious rumination informed it.

“Inspiration is rarely the first step,” Tweedy writes. “Most of the time, inspiration has to be invited.”

I'd already done much of the invitation: Last fall I surveyed ~100 college DJs. At the start of April, I ran an experiment in this newsletter rounding up album recommendations from college radio DJs. Back in 2024, I caught up with my former station, WVAU, and learned about Spinitron (which came in handy later on). The raw material was there, but I needed a forcing function.

The spring semester for most schools was ending in early May. That gave me a hard constraint I didn’t have to invent.

The rest was a lot of deeply unscalable work: sharing quick and ugly prototypes with stations I’d spoken to previously for feedback, cold-emailing and DMing student DJs in the midst of finals and graduation to invite them to participate, pitching the idea to Spinitron for a time-tight partnership, my partner Rie (who did all of the data work for the site) and I passing the same Macbook Pro back and forth when my Air decided it no longer wanted to participate in development.

2. Find and share a core truth.

The other Tweedy passage I keep coming back to is this one:

“Writing songs is about searching for, finding and sharing some truth (...) Something people walk by all the time, something so ingrained in our environment that it’s become invisible, something so obvious nobody sees it anymore, but then someone figures out how to say what it is or how to see it and everyone else says, of course! Why didn’t I say that? That’s exactly right. I always knew that was there.”

It’s exactly how I think about product discovery.

It is not asking users what they want. Customers think in solutions, they want a “faster horse”.

The job is to find the tension people live with but can’t articulate. The workarounds and hacks they already do to accomplish their goals. Something that feels obvious only once it’s finally articulated.

“Most of my favorite songwriters stick to common, simple and precise language but they don’t use it in a common or simple way within a song or melody,” Tweedy writes. (One of my favorite recent examples of this is James Blake’s “I’m an eyesore, you’re a sight for.” in “Trying Times.”)

The best works of art are universal because they’re specific, same with products.

The “core truth” RIYL is built on is simple:

Music curation is a creative act.

94% of the DJs I surveyed joined college radio as a creative outlet. The feature they’d be most excited about in a music discovery platform? Customizable profile pages that showcase their taste.

Most of the context, creativity, and cultural value created by DJs disappears once their show ends. There is a huge “swag gap” between the creativity of these student-run stations and the tools they have to promote their curation.

Curation is not only an expression of taste, the act of curation is how you develop your taste.

While every major platform is investing in hyper-personalized content, I see signals pointing in the opposite direction: the students flocking to college radio, refurbishing iPods, buying vinyl even though they don’t own a record player, following independent curators and creating Oscar-award-winning level quality fan edits mixing their favorite music and shows.

No work of art (or MVP) is ever finished.

Tweedy quotes the line near the end of the book: no work of art is ever finished; it can only be abandoned in an interesting place.

RIYL is in an interesting place. It is not finished. That bigger, broader vision: “a new home for music culture” is still the thing.

~50 college radio stations are on the waitlist for the next RIYL recap, you can join that list here.

Join the Waitlist

I’m also in the process of writing my next “song.” This one is about the music that fans associate with their favorite fictional couples…if #hollinov, conrad fisher yearning or the plot of Off Campus S2 mean anything to you, reach out! I’d love to show you a prototype: hello@riyl.fm

RIYL is also a reminder to myself that you can use free will to create something you want to exist without permission from anyone. As Tweedy put it in a recent interview:

“Maybe the most powerful I ever feel is in those moments where I’m reminded on a daily basis that I can make something out of nothing, and I have the power to reject the world I disagree with, and in a small way, I can make my own world.”

P.S. Tips for writers block:

Adapted from Tweedy’s suggestions in the book, here is what works for me:

1. Have a conversation with someone you trust, ask them to ask you questions about the thing you are stuck on. Record and transcribe the conversation. Pay attention to what you said off the top of your head without any premeditation!

2. Go on a walk. Ride the subway. My best thinking happens when I’m in transit, when my body is engaged but my mind is free. You need to give your unconscious time to process info and emotions!

3. Find your soundtrack. Some the albums that kick my brain into “get shit done” mode are: Demon Days by Gorillaz, Discovery by Daft Punk, A Cross The Universe by Justice, and Microcastle by Deerhunter.

emwhitenoise is a monthly essay exploring the future of music through the lens of fandom, technology and culture—from Emily White, a music product builder and Spotify and Billboard alum. Welcome to the 566 subscribers who joined since April’s essay!

Explore what’s playing on college radio at RIYL.fm. Listen to the artists, tracks, and releases that defined 11 station’s sounds this semester:

RIYL.fm

We have access to more music than any generation in history, yet discovery increasingly feels worse.

The algorithm is your private Top 40 radio station, endlessly tuned to only you. AI song generators pump out the equivalent of Spotify’s entire catalog (100M tracks) every two weeks. Spotify wants you to “take control of your listening and describe exactly what you want to hear” by prompting a playlist of countrygaze classics you haven’t heard:

I don’t want to “prompt a playlist.”

As a college radio DJ, I spent hours each week painstakingly curating playlists for my weekly show, emwhitenoise. Those acts of curation are what developed my taste, my judgement, my musical identity.

Why let a robot tell you what to listen to when you can discover Ora Cogan’s “Honey” from a student DJ in Toronto who hand selected the song to play on air? That signal is 100x more meaningful to me than autoplay ever will be.

So I built a way to explore music through the college radio DJs who meticulously select tracks for their communities on a weekly basis: RIYL.fm.

RIYL.fm

“Recommended If You Like” is a phrase college radio DJs and record reviewers have used forever to describe similar artists. Pronounced rile (verb): to make agitated and angry.

The spin data is from playlist logs submitted by college radio stations to our partner Spinitron, the playlist-management system used by many non-commercial community and educational radio stations in the country.

College radio is idiosyncratic, imperfect and deeply human. So is RIYL.fm. It’s a little rough around the edges, created with a lot of love and late nights over the past month to coincide with the end of the spring semester for students.

That’s the deal with college radio: you exchange some dead air, static and friction for magic, surprise and community.

While the music industry bets on AI, fake fans, and TikTok trends, student participation in college radio is surging. Driven by more than analog nostalgia:

“You can’t scroll on reels and run a radio station at the same time,” WRFL’s Aidan Greenwell told me when I interviewed college radio stations last fall, “You have to be in the present.”

Every tech oligarch wants you sitting alone with a blinking cursor and a prompt box, generating your own personal songs, software, and entertainment on demand, into oblivion. Your own version of culture. Your own version of the truth.

In an individualistic world that constantly demands more more more, faster faster faster faster, it’s not hyperbolic to say that music is one of the last things that truly connects us.

Music pulls people out of isolation and into community.

So, go explore a station. Dig through the stacks. Some of these artists will be shockingly familiar to you (see: old art is strangling new art.) Some will be brand new.

Explore RIYL.fm

A special thank you to Rie McGwier (data), Carrie Walters (art), the DJs at KANM for testing the earliest version of this, and to Tom and Eva at Spinitron for their collaboration.

A few of my personal favorite artists I discovered while exploring the data:

32 DJs at Colorado State University’s KCSU playlisted Annabelle Chairlegs’s “Waking Up” RIYL: disaffected vocals, Ty Segall production, Dum Dum Girls

58 DJs at Texas A&M University’s KANM spun Gustavo Cerati’s 1999 album Bocanda. RIYL: genre bending Argentine “alt-rock”, fucking masterpieces

10 DJs at WNYU played Brooklyn’s own Julian McCamman’s Victoryland. RIYL: Myspace, jangly bedroom-pop, 2000’s indie

emwhitenoise is a monthly essay exploring the future of music through the lens of fandom, technology and culture—from Emily White, a music product builder and Spotify and Billboard alum.

Today marks one year since I published the first edition of this newsletter about the next generation of independent music tastemakers. Thank you to the 4,200 subscribers who have joined since then! 🥳

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Every college radio station has a music library.

At WVAU, we called this the rack: a black wire shelf stacked with promo CDs curated by the music staff, with mini reviews and recommended if you like (“RIYL”) tags lovingly taped onto jewel cases. Sometimes I’d play a song on air for the first time based solely on those notes!

“Our music directors have been writing comments on the records and CDs since the seventies,” Marcus Rothera, general manager of Boston College’s WZBC told me last year, “It’s like an analog Internet comment section.”

I surveyed 80+ DJs in 2025 who say student interest in college radio has surged in recent years, driven by algorithm fatigue, analog nostalgia and a desire for “third spaces.” The New York Times followed with a fantastic profile of KXLU, capturing college radio’s “unpredictability, uniqueness and random brilliance.”

In search of some fresh music recommendations, I asked college radio stations across North America to share their favorite albums of 2026 so far. Many new releases are now submitted and reviewed digitally, so I asked Dusty Henry of KEXP and Another Thought to illustrate the picks.

This isn’t an official chart. It’s a snapshot of the wide-ranging, deeply human and often surprising taste of college radio DJs right now, in no particular order.

Enjoy digging through the stacks. College radio, forever <3

Heel, Segmentation (KANM)

Deep shoegaze distortion coupled with vulnerable, echoing lyrics, Segmentation can piece together the heel-wounded parts of any listener with its heavy sound. The album transcends its mainstream counterparts, taking you on a journey with swirling liminal riffs. An alternative album for an alternative station: Segmentation is the debut album of Heel, who are also active members at Texas A&M’s KANM Student Radio.

Favorite Tracks: “Through me,” “August”, and “Waste.”

RIYL: narrow head, trauma ray, starflyer 59, grungegaze, Gregg Araki films, limerence, wildflower honey, driving in Texas at night, skateparks, the sound of frogs croaking at the lake after sundown, cyberpunk

—DJ playlistmachinemaker (Natalia Silva), Onda Fresalternativa, KANM, Texas A&M (College Station, Texas)

Buck Meek, The Mirror (WCFM)

Bouncy, down-to-earth love songs. The Mirror, fittingly introspective, feels both chronological and retrospective, distinctly Meek, yet totally relatable in its romantic storytelling.

Favorite tracks: gasoline (1), can I mend it (3), worms (8)

RIYL: Big Thief (of course), acoustic guitar, lavender marriages, if Licorice Pizza is your favorite movie.

—Ella Hegarty, Filet of the Day, WCFM, Williams College (Williamstown, Massachusetts)

Cities Aviv, EVEN COLDER SPRING (WCBN)

Memphis rapper & producer Gavin Mays continues his foray into the digitally-scarred, sample heavy, and increasingly abstract annals of internet-born hip-hop with EVEN COLDER SPRING. Featuring his signature philosophically-inclined stream-of-consciousness lyricism and lo-fi, often drumless production style. A great atmospheric and heady record which continues Mays’ legacy of being one of the most interesting forces in underground hip-hop.

Favorite Tracks: Even Colder Spring - Parts 1 & 2, the élan vital, Tribeca, Concrete Masks, Closing Door

RIYL: cLOUDDEAD, Armand Hammer, SpaceGhostPurrp, walking around the city at 3am after you left the party

—DJ Nick (Nick Staudacher), Sonic Valhalla, WCBN, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan)

Baby Keem, Casino (KPSU)

Some fans were reluctant to welcome Baby Keem back after a 5 year hiatus, but the return album is very energetic! Unfamiliar with Baby Keem? His style is similar to Kendrick Lamar, who alongside being an extended family member of Keem, was also featured on the song “Good Flirts”. Turn on this album when you feel like bumping your head…perhaps on your way to the casino.

Favorite tracks: “Dramatic Girl,” “Sex Appeal,” “Birds & the Bees”

RIYL: Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, Travis Scott, ASAP Rocky, Rae Sremmurd, rap/hip hop reflective of relationship trials and tribulations

—DJ Goof aka Blake Brabo, Hectic Eclectic, KPSU, Portland College (Portland, Oregon)

Potions, potions95 (CFUV)

Lovely, textural “freak-folk” from Toronto. I’d say more cute than freaky but there are definitely moments. The songwriting is incredible, but I’m really drawn to the way everyone interacts instrumentally.

Favorite track: Stumbled Across

RIYL: sun shining on dusty wood floors

—Rowan Grice, Bench Mob, CFUV, University of Victoria (Victoria, British Columbia, Canada)

Bruce Springsteen, Streets of Minneapolis (WMCN)

A timely track of rebellion speaking to the heart of the nation, Bruce Springsteen’s single, “Streets of Minneapolis,” is one of WMCN’s most-streamed “albums” of 2026 so far. If anyone is equipped to write a patriotic protest song, it’s Springsteen; yet, unlike his infamously misinterpreted “Born in the USA,” the anti-ICE message of “Streets of Minneapolis” is impossible to misread. From his direct quotations of the national anthem to his signature harmonica solo, Springsteen’s track speaks to WMCN’s local community and our DJs with an ear for the political.

Favorite track: “Streets of Minneapolis (Radio Mix)”

RIYL: building community, fighting occupation, and Bruuuuuuuuuuce.

—Sarah Tachau, a.k.a. DJ Sarah, Velvet n Knitted Things, WMCN, Macalester College (St. Paul, Minnesota)

friends&, folx (MET Radio)

Spanning 100+ songs, this is the wildest fever dream of an album you’ll hear all year. A huge leap forward in internet music. Through all the hysterical irony poisoned aspects there is still a deep theme of introspection and societal critique at its core. If you choose to listen and recognize most of the samples from this project, maybe it’s time to get offline for a while.

Favorite Tracks: (kinda n/a since you really need to listen to this one in order but…) #33 I walk the line, #106 can the circle be unbroken, #14 Jolene

RIYL: Frost Children, Tommy Fleece, doomscrolling, internet deep dives, those weird people you only find on tiktok live, sonic the hedgehog, my little pony, Nirvana The Band The Show The Movie copyright law

—Megan Curry, The Man Cave (emo radio show) and Worms of the Week (music discovery radio show), MET Radio, Toronto Metropolitan University (Toronto, Ontario, Canada)

cootie catcher, Something We All Got (WRBB)

A sweet spot between 90s Indie Rock and 2020s Laptop Twee. Consistently striking arrangements teaming with ear candy yield unlimited replay value. The tweevival is upon us.

Recommended Tracks: “Loiter for the Love of It,” “Quarter Note Rock,” “No Biggie”

RIYL: The first bike ride in spring, feeble little horse, making collages out of old cloth

—DJ Eli Ehrlich, Get Me Out of Here: It’s Time to Get Crankier, WRBB, Northeastern University (Boston, Massachusetts)

Endive, Under Lies (WCBN)

A 90s Indianapolis band that only lasted a few years before disbanding, with no officially published material made available---until the Numero Group assembled this full-length. Melodic, sweet-and-bitter, fuzzy second-wave emo, edged with angsty depression, Endive have finally got their work out there.

Favorite Tracks: “Sink,” “Dying Eyes,” “Choice (Solemn)”

RIYL: Everyone Asked About You, Mineral, Sunny Day Real Estate, warm August nights, high school romance, stepping over cracks in the sidewalk, shitty camcorder videos

—DJ hsudonym (Alex Hsu), junk, WCBN, University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan)

Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Laughter In Summer (CJSW)

In a world saturated with phony-baloney-ism, hearing an ailing octogenarian’s perspective on vulnerability, mortality, and genuine love on Laughter In Summer is as honest as it is refreshing. Canada’s iconic trans elder, Beverly Glenn-Copeland has released one of the most deeply touching albums in years. The use of space and restraint in the arrangements, including contributions from Glenn-Copeland’s wife, Elizabeth, reflects the tone of peace and intimacy found throughout the record. A fitting dénouement to a wholly original career in music and an inspiring story of a life lived on one’s own terms.

Favorite tracks: Prince Caspian’s Dream At Hotel2Tango, Let Us Dance (Movement One)

RIYL: ANOHNI, David Sylvian, people that need to call their grandparents

—Adam Kamis, The Failed Pilot show, CJSW, University of Calgary (Calgary, Alberta, Canada)

Honorable Mentions:

loopcinema, My-Lovely-Yellow-Kombi

RIYL: Space travel, long-form Magdalena Bay, the club in slow-motion—DJ Eli Ehrlich, WRBB

Slayyyter, WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA

RIYL: Azealia Banks, Charli XCX, Ayesha Erotica—DJ PJ (Paul Cirillo), WCBN

Joost Klein, Kleinkunst

RIYL: horsegiirL (featured on “Farmcore”), Ski Aggu, GFTOY—toile (Eliot Schlaack), WCBN

Charli xcx, Wuthering Heights

RIYL: all-consuming love, cultural controversies, and Gothic themes—Elle Setiya, a.k.a. DJ Elle Woods, WMCN

Deathcrash, Somersaults

RIYL: Sadness, Horse Jumper of Love, wallowing in sorrow, never letting go of anything that’s ever happened to you, long walks as the sun sets, british guys—Megan Curry, MET Radio

Bennett Mitchell, rearranging

RIYL: Father John Misty, Nick Shoulders, indie rockers discovering country for the first time—Adam Kamis, CJSW

EXEK, Prove Mountains Move

RIYL: The Fall, Brian Eno, Total Control—Adam Kamis, CJSW

Sleep Tight Tiger, Plum Something

RIYL: Saturday Looks Good to Me, Horsegirl, Belle and Sebastian—DJ anja (Anja Sheppard), WCBN

Album recommendations submitted by CFUV, KPSU, KANM, MET Radio, CJSW, WMCN, WRBB and WCBN. Lightly edited by me.

Playlist of recs is here (however, several of these picks aren’t available on Spotify!)

Illustrations by Dusty Henry, a writer, producer, illustrator, and editor based in Seattle. He leads editorial at KEXP and co-creates stories about music and culture. His book 20th Century Ambient is out now via Bloomsbury. He also writes the newsletter Another Thought.

Another Thought

Why Write About Music?

I’m going on multiple decades of people telling me that going into music journalism is a bad idea…

Read more

6 months ago · 103 likes · 19 comments · Dusty Henry

emwhitenoise is a monthly essay exploring the future of music through the lens of fandom, technology and culture—from Emily White, a music product builder and Spotify and Billboard alum. Welcome to the 1,000+ new subscribers who joined since December’s essay on the iPod revival!

Subscribe now

On the surface, Heated Rivalry—a queer hockey romance produced in Canada with unknown leads and a modest budget—seemed to come out of nowhere and take over the internet.

But when you look closer, its trajectory follows the same arc we’ve seen with so-called “overnight” success artists like Chappell Roan, Doechii or Geese:

1. Genuine talent

2. Staying weird and ditching traditional formulas

3. Years of authentic audience-building

The simple (but reductive) explanation for Heated Rivalry’s breakthrough success is easy: sex sells.

Yes, the show is undeniably horny. Show creator Jacob Tierney has called it “premium smut.” But horniness alone doesn’t explain its success.

Rachel Reid’s Game Changers book series (of which Heated Rivalry is the second installment) has sold more than 650,000 copies, topped Kindle charts across all categories, and landed on the New York Times bestseller list. There are 3,000 people on the waitlist to check out Heated Rivalry just at the New York Public library.

The show’s lead actors, Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams, jumped from thousands of followers to 2.7 million each in two months, and from waiting tables to Golden Globes presenters and Olympic torchbearers.

All from a 6-episode TV series that premiered on Thanksgiving with minimal traditional promotion and a publisher that underestimated demand so badly it failed to print additional copies of the book ahead of release, make a promotional cover or ship extra stock to retailers (much to the annoyance of fans and independent book stores).

Amazon Studios reportedly passed on the project despite sitting on a goldmine of Kindle and Goodreads data signaling exactly how large and mobilized this audience already was.

None of this should have been all that surprising.

Romance is the highest-grossing fiction genre in the world and sales are at an all-time high. Hockey is its largest sports subgenre. Sales of queer romance novels have more than tripled between 2021 and 2025.

The audience was already passionate, organized, and deeply invested.

Heated Rivalry succeeded because it trusted its existing fandom and refused to stray from what made it unique or dilute what fans loved most about the story.

The show’s success is a case study in what happens when fandom is treated as core infrastructure, not a side effect.

1. Fandom is a distribution engine.

What we call “overnight” success is usually when fan-driven distribution and traditional distribution begin reinforcing each other.

The Game Changers series first debuted as an e-book in 2018, after Reid shared early drafts on the fanfiction site, Archive of Our Own. It spread steadily through word of mouth, selling hundreds of thousands of copies before it was ever stocked in physical bookstores.

We’ve seen this trajectory before in music. Chappell Roan spent years building a passionate fanbase before the right sequence of events—her standout Tiny Desk Concert performance, opening for Olivia Rodrigo on tour, and single “Good Luck, Babe!”—broke through to the mainstream, making years of work, and an already invested fanbase, look like it came out of nowhere (Heated Rivalry and Chappell Roan have more in common than Saskatchewan!)

By the time the Heated Rivalry TV show was set to premiere, fans were already mobilized: making TikTok edits with only a 90-second trailer to work with and strategizing how to watch a show launching exclusively on the Canadian streamer, Crave (VPNs? Piracy? Fake a Canadian billing address?)

That visible fan momentum is what led to HBO Max picking up the show for distribution in the US and Australia at the last minute, like an indie debut album suddenly getting major-label distribution: “The fans’ involvement in this experience has very much led to these amazing opportunities,” executive producer Brendan Brady told the Hollywood Reporter.

Once traditional distribution kicked in, fan activity only intensified: a subreddit pulling 800K weekly visitors, an absolute flood of meme-caps, Oscar-winning-quality fan edits, in-depth analysis of the show and its press tour, thousands of “Hollanov” playlists and corresponding streaming boosts for the show’s soundtrack, and even sold out Heated Rivalry club nights.

It’s “a sort of Cambrian explosion of a new fandom” writes Katie Notopoulos at Business Insider, “The posts are not tucked away on Tumblr or fanfiction site Archive of Our Own, existing purely for the superfans who seek it out like horny Gollums; it’s taking over the TikTok and Instagram feeds of normies who post under their real names.”

Fan-driven growth is hardly a new concept, but it’s getting more professionalized. Studios now hire “clippers,”—often superfans themselves—to create social content.

Rather than trying to copy fan edits, Lionsgate’s digital marketing team has hired a roster of TikTok editors, “We’re going to the artists that fans are already obsessed with and saying: ‘We want you to create what you’re already doing; we just want to work together,” Felipe Mendez, who manages the Lionsgate account, told Variety.

Music works the same way. Marketers often rely on social tastemakers to drive streams, build communities and shape taste.

As always, the fangirls, gays and theys are the most powerful distribution engine in the world.

The pattern looks like this:

❤️‍🔥 Fans create signal

👀 Traditional distribution notices and kicks in

📈 Scale gives fans more raw material to remix and share

🔀 Remixing generates new audiences and new press

🔁 The cycle repeats

are you a gen z music fan who loves sharing and curating music? answer a few quick questions to try something new:

take the survey 💿

2. You are not smarter than the fans.

Heated Rivalry demonstrates what happens when you find an underserved audience and pay attention to and value what that audience specifically loves about something instead of trying to “elevate” or water it down for mass appeal.

When Tierney and Bell Media, which owns the Canadian streaming service, Crave, pitched various partners for additional funding for Heated Rivalry, “We had a lot of people telling us why this wouldn’t work,” Tierney told the WSJ.

Executives wanted to add a female main character, dilute the core storyline with an ensemble cast or delay the central romance until the season finale.

“If these books have become valuable because the fan base is rabid and enthusiastic and you think you’re smarter than the fan base because you’ve made three procedurals, I don’t know what to tell you.” Tierney told The Ankler. “You have to respect the audience.”

Ultimately, to protect the show from outside interference and “death by a thousand studio notes,” Bell Media decided to take a big swing and fully fund the production.

“I knew that if you changed this book, you’re losing the audience that is built in,” Tierney told Evan Ross Katz. “And if you want to betray them out of the gate, I don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t know what the benefit is.”

SHUT UP EVAN: THE NEWSLETTER

'Heated Rivalry' Creator Jacob Tierney Answers My Litany of Questions

A lot of my job is collecting data. I post quite a bit of content about various media and am always deep in the backend, scouring the analytics like an archeologist, digging to find what instigates the biggest response. The “likes” tell the most obvious story, but for me it’s always been about the reshares and the comments. This data helps give me a sen…

Read more

7 months ago · 258 likes · 1 comment · Evan Ross Katz

“Part of the reason that the romance industry does not get taken seriously is because people don’t care about what pleases women,” Tierney says. “One of the things that is so untapped in culture is our interest in women’s interests. I think that we just don’t listen to women.”

LGBTQ+ audiences and interests are also profoundly underserved, especially amid escalating political attacks, rising anti-LGBTQ violence, and declining on-screen representation.

GLAAD recently released a report finding that more than 200 (41%) of the LGBTQ+ characters on TV across all major platforms will not return, due to series cancellations or endings, limited series format, or a character dying or leaving the show.

Stories of queer joy where no one dies still feel rare and radical.

The lesson for gatekeepers is to stop dismissing what queer audiences and women love as “not serious” or “too niche.” They are almost always early indicators of where culture is going.

3. Attention spans are actually a lot longer than you think they are.

There is a persistent belief that audiences are distracted, half-watching, second-screening and incapable of focus.

Netflix producers reportedly instruct screenwriters to make plots as obvious as possible and have characters announce what they’re doing in dialogue to avoid confusing viewers who are half-watching while they scroll through their phones.

This two-screen trap is a misreading of the data.

How Not to be a TV Writer

The Two-Screen Trap

A Medium in Crisis…

Read more

a year ago · 131 likes · 29 comments · Jon Stahl

People are not on their phones because stories are too complex to follow.

We are on our phones because your show is boring and speaking to us like we are twelve.

The rise of clipping, fan edits, and second screening shouldn’t lead writers to over-focus on “TikTok-friendly” stories because our attention spans are shot.

When the world-building is excellent, fans want to spend more time and attention immersed within it: easter eggs, callbacks, symbolism and worlds they can inhabit, dissect and discuss.

On Crave, a third of viewers rewatched Heated Rivalry episodes, and more than 15% watched an episode five times or more (dubbed the “re-heated” rivalry).

A TikTok account that does scene by scene breakdowns weaving in commentary comparing the book and the show has millions of views. So does Valentina Vee, a cinematographer and director who breaks the show down shot by shot, analyzing the creative use of blocking, camera work and lighting on a limited budget.

This reminds me of another recent “slow burn” show, Severance, that succeeded in part because it was not “two-screen friendly.” If you’re not watching intently, you’re going to miss something.

People crave worldbuilding, story and meaning. Music fans spend hours creating playlists, making edits, analyzing lyrics, re-listening and building entire worlds around artists they love.

4. Niche is universal.

LGBTQ+ programming is often considered too niche by television buyers, so a queer hockey romance was certainly considered EXTRA niche by many.

But when done right, the niche can become universal.

“What we have found with shows that cut through is that the minute you try to water it down to make it more mass-appeal, you lose some of the magic.” Justin Stockman, Bell’s vice president of content development and programming, told the Ankler.

“When you get specific, it can bring out the universality of whatever that topic is (...) You really feel like this story could be real and you feel the intensity and their emotions and you can relate that back to whatever your identity is or whatever your life situation is.”

Deep specificity creates universality. Flattening for mass appeal destroys the very thing that makes the work resonate.

Nobody knows this better than Taylor Swift, who built an empire on hyper-specific storytelling. Or Charli XCX, whose “niche” album with a specific point of view, brat, far outperformed her more “mainstream” pop play, CRASH.

Sinners is also a very “niche” movie on paper: an original (!) period piece (!) horror movie (!) with a complex racial story (!) is now the most Oscar nominated film of all time.

Heated Rivalry leans into specificity and breaks a lot of TV conventions in the process:

• The first episode skips traditional world-building exposition and trusts audiences to keep up with significant time jumps and emotional subtext.

• The romantic leads get together almost immediately (like, in the first 15 minutes)

• The season spans 8 years of a relationship in just six episodes.

“I know it doesn’t start like a normal show, so it’s been so interesting to see people’s reactions to the idea of how you’re supposed to structure TV, especially with regard to world-building,” says Tierney.

Episode five alone contains multiple plot points that each could have been a season finale moment in a lesser show: a coming-out, a death, a reconciliation, a love confession, a critical sports injury, and a big emotional release set to a swelling soundtrack. It reminded me of seeing Chappell Roan perform live and thinking every single one of these songs could have been a closer or encore performance.

5. What can the music industry (re)learn from Heated Rivalry?

So what does all this have to do with music?

The music industry has spent the last decade:

• Chasing algorithms

• Cutting artist development budgets

• Focusing on songs over of artist legacies

• Flattening songs into interchangeable TikTok sounds

Then wondering why there are fewer lasting superstars.

Today’s 16-24-year-olds, typically the drivers of music culture, are less likely than 25-34-year-olds to have discovered an artist they love in the last year (!!!) according to MIDIA. And even when they do discover artists, they are less likely to stream that artist’s music.

That doesn’t mean young people don’t care about music anymore. But they might be bored of how music is being marketed to them.

As astutely observed last year, despite plenty of great releases from big artists, there was no “song of the summer” in 2025 because “no one can serve the masses anymore.” Instead, artists should focus on “serving your people”.

The algorithm may be the gatekeeper-final-boss, but culture is still breaking in places outside of the For You feed: Reddit threads, independent and college radio stations, Discord servers, fan edits and niche playlists.

The audience is there. Take them seriously. Serve your people. Invest in fandom.

are you a gen z music fan who loves sharing and curating music? answer a few quick questions to try something new:

take the survey 💿

emwhitenoise is a monthly essay exploring the future of music through the lens of fandom, technology and culture—from Emily White, a music product builder and Spotify and Billboard alum.

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Over three years since Apple discontinued the iPod, and almost a quarter-century after Steve Jobs first introduced it on stage, the iPod is quietly making a comeback:

• Google searches for “iPod” have spiked over the last year, driven in part by students scrambling for alternatives to smartphone bans in classrooms.

• Total sales of refurbished iPods have grown an average of 15.6% per year since 2022 according to BackMarket.

• “Vintage” iPods sold out at Urban Outfitters for $349 each. Original iPod classics can sell for thousands on eBay.

• Youtube is full of recent videos like “i stopped streaming music and got an ipod instead” and “Using this iPod for 30 Days Changed My Life,” alongside entire channels dedicated to modding and restoring old devices with new storage and bigger batteries (DankPods has 1.8M subscribers).

• TikToks of young people obsessing over their iPods have millions of views:

  

  @torokuroooMy iPod against life #ipodnano #apple #music #retro #brat

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Who Has an iPod, and Why?

To understand what was driving the renewed interest in iPods, I surveyed 70+ people currently using an MP3 player.

I was surprised that a large share of respondents (40%) started actively using their current device within the past year; another 26% started only 1-3 years ago:

26% of respondents now use their MP3 player instead of streaming services.

39% have modified, customized, repaired or refurbished their device.

And beyond Gen X and Millennial nostalgia, 32% of respondents were Gen Z.

The reasons respondents cited for using iPods were consistent:

• Portable and distraction-free listening

• Ownership and control

• Intentional listening

• Nostalgia and emotional connection

• Frustration with streaming, algorithms, and phones

Looking for a modern iPod alternative? Sleevenote is a handheld square music player with full screen album art, artist-supplied additional sleeve art and a beautifully minimal user interface. Modern specs include Bluetooth, USB-C and of course a headphone jack. The Sleevenote team has prototyped a Day One Edition available to Pre-order now (UK/USA), which includes access to the exclusive prototype owners’ Discord. In partnership with Sleevenote.

More than Y2K Nostalgia

I keep my own old iPods (a silver Classic and purple Nano) as shelf trophies in my office. They are by far my most-commented-on items in any Zoom call. I assumed the resurgence in interest in iPods was mostly driven by nostalgia and aesthetics.

But the more iPod owners I spoke to, I learned it’s actually something more interesting: iPods are a practical solution to digital overwhelm. A reaction to the infinite, frictionless, algorithmic slot machines in our pockets.

Compared to our smartphones, the iPod is mercifully stupid:

No ads.

No wifi.

No notifications.

No algorithmic feed.

No feeling of picking up your phone to listen to music, but ending up five scrolls deep on TikTok wondering, “How did I get here?”

Freedom from the Phone

When I asked people what motivated them to start using an iPod again, the most common responses were practical: the battery lasts a long time, it’s small and lightweight, and you don’t need an internet connection to use it:

“I want to own more of the music I love but I also wanted a music player that wasn’t connected to the internet for long walks and unplugging”—Christina Casillo (burger diva), Brooklyn

“I like having a dedicated music device for long trips so I don’t always have to rely on my phone.”—Keith Walpole, NYC

It was also viewed as a form of “digital detox” by some listeners:

“It’s healing to use something that is not connected to the internet, isn’t plagued with software updates or subscription services. Something tangible and well designed that just does one thing, and does it well.”—Max, Europe

“I think there’s real value in segregation of devices, especially when our current smartphones are connected to the online casino that is social media”— , Hoboken. Chris wrote about his own experience restoring his old iPod recently:

Can't Get Much Higher

Can I Save My 20-Year-Old iPod?

I want to thank everybody who has purchased my book Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves thus far. So many people came out to support the book that it is sold out everywhere but Amazon. If your copy still hasn’t arrived, I promise it is coming. If you’re an early bird, I will also be on CNN’s…

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8 months ago · 38 likes · 11 comments · Chris Dalla Riva

“I want my own music library not the entire world’s music library.”

When the unlimited choice of streaming starts to feel like no choice, the simplicity of a finite library and a click wheel feels radical:

“I wanted to regain a sense of agency over the music I listened to, bring back some intent to an art form that’s near & dear to my heart.”—Jason Dorn (analog evenings), Alberta, Canada

“Complete control over song names, featured artist groupings, and genre naming. Knowing that I own the album if it gets removed from streaming.”—Eddie Caamano, Atlanta

Intentional Listening

At a moment when younger audiences are less likely to discover new music, but simultaneously craving community, taste and meaning, the iPod represents a shift back towards intentional listening:

“I got into the habit of saving one song from an artist and would never listen to anything else. But when you buy a CD, you listen to the whole thing, in order, the way the artist wanted it to be consumed. I love how it has changed my relationship with music!”—Stella Triebsch, Atlanta

“I wanted my daughter to have a more personal connection to music than just listening to what I listen to, and a more direct relationship that choosing from infinite options on Spotify.”—, Spain

The Time Capsule

“I love the little guy. Its scratches and dents resemble my scratches and dents. We’ve been through a lot together and we’re still going.”—Bryan Veronneau, Maine

“It’s tiny and purple and reminds me of fun filled days from when I was younger. Basically it has character and makes me feel nostalgic.”—Charlotte Botterill, UK

“I use it as a time capsule. Songs that I always revisit, albums that remind me of that time, poorly labelled Limewire downloads. It’s like listening to a record, it comes with nostalgic value.”—Sarah Wilson, Melbourne

A Pendulum Swing

For many, the iPod is a reaction and rebellion to the frustrations of modern life:

“Everything is for rent through subscriptions, and nothing is ours anymore. It seems like a way to fall back in love with music again, which has always been a rebellion to the everyday monotony of life.”—Eddie Caamano, Atlanta

“The limitless choices of streaming aren’t exciting anymore.”—Anonymous, England

A device with no internet and a finite library might look like a step backward, but it provides something that infinite streaming and social feeds don’t: the ability to curate your own personal music world and focus on listening, uninterrupted.

Fans returning to iPods are telling us they want a more direct, personal and intentional connection to music. Or as one anonymous iPod owner put it: “I want my own music library not the entire world’s music library.”

Welcome to the 300+ new subscribers who joined since last month’s essay!

emwhitenoise is a monthly dive into the future of music through the lens of fandom, technology and culture—from Emily White, a music product builder and Spotify and Billboard alum.

In October, we explored how Gen Z’s college radio revival has turned campus stations into third spaces where students build community, have a creative outlet and discover music together.

The following week, Cleveland State University’s beloved WCSB, was abruptly shut down, replacing 100 student and community DJs with smooth jazz. Police escorted students out of the station as they scrambled to pack up 50 years of music history. The community is fighting back: here is how to help.

This month, we’re exploring a very different kind of third space—entirely digital, massively scaled—but also a place for community, expression and fandom as identity: Fortnite.

The Daft Punk Experience

Everything the music industry says it wants more of—superfan experiences, community, co-creation, fandom as identity—already exists on Fortnite.

On September 27, Epic’s latest artist activation, the Daft Punk Experience, launched in Fortnite. More than another virtual concert (like the blockbuster and oft-referenced Marshmello and Travis Scott Fortnite shows in 2019/2020) this interactive arena is a standalone hub world that blends nostalgia, discovery, and play.

Beyond cool marketing activation, this experience could be a blueprint for the next big shift in recorded music consumption: evolving catalogs into immersive, participatory, and alive experiences. Like albums you can walk through.

After a detailed and lore-rich intro sequence, the main chamber reimagines Daft Punk’s Alive 2007 tour. There are five themed rooms with different ways to experience Daft Punk’s catalog, including:

• Dream Chamber Studios: a remix “jam stage” where you can dynamically live-mix elements, adjust the tempo, and emulate a stutter effect with tracks across Daft Punk’s discography. (For all the conversation about remix apps, Epic already has a compelling solution with Jam Stages, it’s just tucked inside a platform still unfamiliar to many.)

• Robot Rock Arena: a mini-game where weapons fire in time with the beat. Hitting targets triggers loops and stems from Daft Punk songs.

Players can also purchase a Daft Punk-themed bundle or individual in-game accessories, including a variety of skins of the duo’s iconic helmet outfits, instruments, weapons that react to music, dance emotes set to “Get Lucky” and “Around the World” and jam tracks that can be used as your personal intro music, played in Fortnite’s rhythm game, “Fortnite Festival” (developed by Rock Band and Guitar Hero-maker Harmonix) or remixed with other tracks in Jam Stage.

The experience peaked at 1.5M concurrent users, pretty massive for a duo that hasn’t released an album since 2013 and broke up in 2021.

According to , a music and gaming newsletter by Mat Ombler (more from Ombler below), Daft Punk saw a corresponding boost in Wikipedia views (66%), YouTube video views (47%) and Spotify monthly listeners (11%) following the launch.

MusicEXP Newsletter

Game Music Digest | Daft Punk's Fortnite Boost & Rock Band 4's Licensing Woes

Game Music Digest is a weekly wrap-up of the most interesting stories at the intersection of video games and music, brought to you by the music and gaming newsletter, MusicEXP…

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9 months ago · 4 likes · 4 comments · MusicEXP

Even if you’ve never played Fortnite before or don’t own a console, try it out. It’s free to play on your phone (or at least watch a walkthrough on YouTube. My favorite is this superfan reaction video.)

Players loved the authentic world-building, detailed references, quality visuals and immersive experience: “This doesn’t feel like a random promo for a band in a popular video game, this feels like an important bit of the band’s history. Like a genuine epilogue and love letter to their entire discography,” writes one player on Reddit.

The arena was filled with easter eggs and lore for hardcore fans (“The attention to detail is insane. Little things like the EL Wire outfits from the 2007 Grammy’s appearance in the main hall, the throwback to Electroma,” Reddit) but still fun for casual and new listeners (“Having only got into Daft Punk lately, this experience really showed me what Daft Punk is all about,” Reddit)

Some of my favorite comments were from parents who played the experience with their kids: “I heard [my 9-year-old] in the headset, literally screaming with glee and running around his room dancing to the music.”

“What Music Can Learn From Gaming”

For years, we’ve heard that the music industry should “be more like gaming.”

After all, the global games market ($182.7 billion in 2024) is 5X the size of global recorded music revenue ($36.2 billion), despite music’s arguably greater cultural reach.

Gaming offers music a lot of what social and streaming platforms lack:

• Community-driven ecosystems

• Virtual goods monetization

• Interactivity

Gaming can offer a more contextual, emotional, and shared space for fandom than streaming or social. Fan behavior when gaming is active, not passive like lean-back listening or doomscrolling.

I asked Mat Ombler, head of music and gaming partnerships at Laced and the writer of MusicEXP, why gaming works as a discovery channel for music:

• Repetition + Emotion: Players hear songs repeatedly while doing something they love, “naturally associate the feel good feelings of that game with the song,” creating the kind of emotional connection that can lead to fandom.

• Intentional placement: Songs are synced to specific gameplay moments (“needle drops at very specific moments where the lyrics of that song are just perfect”) giving music meaning and memory.

• Longer engagement + Repeat exposure: Game sessions can last hours, giving songs multiple exposures in one sitting.

• Fandom as Identity: Players express fandom via in-game purchases of skins, emotes and jam tracks, actions that feel like supporting the artist.

Streaming flattened music. Gaming makes it 3D.

Over the last two decades, music shifted from ownership → access.

The next shift is access → expression.

Streaming turned music into a background task, quietly moving music from ritual to routine.

“Social” media has increasingly become a-social: only 7% of time spent on Instagram in 2025 is spent viewing content from friends, says Meta.

Viral hits on social media aren’t translating into lasting fandom. TikTok is more of an entertainment platform than a place to hang out.

Meanwhile, gaming has become a virtual third space where young audiences hang out, build culture, and express identity together.

85% of U.S. teens play video games and 72% of teens who play video games say that a reason why they play them is to spend time with others. Almost half (47%) have made a friend through gaming. (Pew Research 2024).

Music’s Virtual Third Space

Music needs a virtual third space—a place where fandom, identity, and self-expression mean something.

We don’t need more songs, we need spaces where music has meaning.

Recorded music was pushed into it’s own “free-to-play, pay-to-flex” model by piracy and streaming, but unlike gaming, never developed it’s version of high-value virtual add-ons (“in-game purchases.”)

When you buy a skin or emote in Fortnite, you’re not buying access or utility. You’re buying identity.

It’s kind of irrational—like buying vinyl without a record player—but that’s the point.

It’s precisely why vinyl, a format from the 1940s, is now growing faster than streaming subscriptions (7% vs 5% in 2024), not because people need physical media to listen to music, but because they crave meaning, self-expression and context.

In a survey of Gen Z vinyl buyers, 56% find vinyl appealing for its aesthetic value and 53% express a desire for more vinyl community events or a more social experience in vinyl spaces, according the Vinyl Alliance.

A decades old physical format just happens to still be the best artifact for identity as a music fan we’ve got.

Skins and emotes matter because they affect your avatar in a digital world you return to daily. “Pay to flex” only works if fans have meaningful places to flex.

Music doesn’t yet have that persistent environment where virtual identities really matter. For music to adopt gaming’s emotional economy and identify our version of a virtual skin or emote, we need shared spaces where self-expression has social visibility.

The music industry’s mistake would be to “gamify” music superficially—points, leaderboards, competitions—without addressing the real opportunity:

Make recorded music feel alive and participatory. Turn listening into play.

We can’t just slap badges into DSPs and call it a day.

The Next Music Format: Albums as Playable Worlds

What if an album was a virtual world you could explore?

The digital evolution of gatefold artwork, colored vinyl and liner notes.

Imagine immersive spaces, a la the Daft Punk Experience, to not only play music but to play with music. Explore songs, lore, visuals and connect with other fans.

Rightsholders could open up IP and visual assets (via tools like Epic’s UEFN or Roblox’s License Manager) that let artists and fans co-own the experience, facilitating licensed, fan-made experiences with revenue shares and content rules in place.

Not every artist needs a playable world, but for those with strong visual and narrative identities and digital native fandoms (like a Tyler the Creator, Ghost, Charli XCX or Magdalena Bay) imagine offering a “toolkit” of music stems, visual assets, 3D objects and story elements that fans could remix or use to build their own spaces.

The Risks

We’ve been promised interactive, virtual music experiences before, most fail.

Just like monthly artist subscriptions, persistent artist “metaverses” are at high risk of becoming tumbleweed zones with low traffic, high upkeep costs, and no strategy after an initial launch.

Music is an expensive side-quest for gaming companies, a nice to have growth lever but not a strategic center.

Fortnite isn’t alone in experimenting with music as world-building, Roblox recently quietly launched The Block, a persistent social and entertainment hub designed for concerts, artist experiences, and user-generated events.

Right now, most game activations are PR moments rather than immersive worlds. But the best integrations, like the Daft Punk Experience, succeed because they feel like artistic extensions of the music, not marketing gimmicks. Authenticity comes from lore, storytelling, and identity.

Common pitfalls to avoid:

• Treating fandom like something to “win”

• Over-gamification that feels manipulative or inauthentic

• Inaccessibility (long download times, limited sharing, locked ecosystems)

• Stigma around “gamers” that can limit diversity and reach

A Playbook for the Industry

Ombler’s advice for music leaders on how to integrate with the gaming world:

1. Hire people with genuine video game knowledge and technical experience.

   The gaming market is massive, diverse and complicated, gaming expertise is necessary. “You cannot teach someone who has never done anything with video games 50 years of video game history and culture,” says Ombler.

2. Stop Treating Gamers as a Monolith

   Don’t treat gamers as a catch all audience. 4 billion people play video games across different demographics worldwide. Each game has its own culture and demographics.

3. Look beyond Roblox and Fortnite

   Explore wider ecosystems, indie games and regional platforms. PUBG Mobile alone has 80 million daily active users (3X Fortnite) and runs massive K-Pop and J-Pop collaborations with integrated merch, in-game currency (“Blackpink coins”), and IRL rewards. “Japan and Korea [are] leading the way on the music front. Agencies like Hololive and HYBE have games divisions now. They are years ahead,” says Ombler.

4. Build Dedicated Music-First Games

   Instead of focusing exclusively on expensive, temporary activations, Ombler suggests the music industry should “be working with development partners to build video games” around artist IP.

The Takeaway

The lesson from gaming isn’t “add points and badges.” It’s that participation and world-building create meaning.

Music does not need more “content,” it needs meaningful places—shared, persistent worlds for fandom, identity, and creativity.

It’s been a weird summer for the music industry.

The fewest new hits in U.S. history. No song of the summer. An AI artist just signed a $3M record deal. The biggest band on the charts? HUNTR/X, a fictional K-pop girl group from a Netflix movie. The vibes are off.

In September, a bombshell report from MIDiA Research crystallized the mood: “music discovery is at a generational crossroads,” it argues:

“Music discovery is traditionally associated with youth, but today’s 16-24-year-olds are less likely than 25-34-year-olds to have discovered an artist they love in the last year.”

Read that again: Younger consumers, typically the drivers of cultural trends, are less likely to discover new artists compared to 25-34 year-olds.

And even when they do discover artists, they are less likely to stream that artist’s music, according to the report.

If you stopped reading here, you might conclude young people just don’t care about music anymore.

However, one unexpected source of music discovery is quietly booming among Gen Z listeners: college radio.

College radio killed the TikTok star

I spoke to seven student general managers and surveyed 80+ DJs at stations across America: ACRN (Ohio University), WCBN (University of Michigan), WEGL (Auburn University), WHRW (Binghamton University), WRFL (University of Kentucky), WVBR (Cornell University), and WZBC (Boston College).

They told me student interest in college radio has dramatically increased in recent years. Stations that once struggled to fill airtime are now turning people away, shortening shows, alternating time slots, and running training programs just to keep up with the demand from aspiring student DJs.

For decades, college radio championed underground artists before they hit the mainstream. Against all odds—COVID shutdowns, FCC regulations, and the long decline of FM radio—college radio is thriving again.

A wave of Gen Z demand

Ten years ago, WCBN (Michigan) was struggling to fill three-hour programming blocks, says GM Anja Sheppard. Today, it’s the “fullest schedule we’ve had in recent memory,” with shows reduced to one-hour due to “such demand from students to be on air.”

At WRFL (Kentucky), “we’ve had some of the most exponential growth this station has seen in its 37 year history,” says GM Aidan Greenwell. “We’ve gotten to the point where we simply don’t have enough time to allow everybody on the show schedule,” with 350 signups at the student interest fair this year, 100 shows on the schedule and around 120 people currently staffing the station.

Event attendance at WRFL has also doubled year after year: the station’s 37th birthday bash headlined by Geese drew a packed crowd “from across Kentucky and out of state” in February.

Demand for on-air slots is out-pacing “hours in the day” at WEGL (Auburn), GM Rae Nawrocki says. The station has grown from roughly 30 members four years ago to 120 students and 60 on-air shows today.

Some stations have so many aspiring student DJs, they have internships and apprenticeship programs for those waiting for their chance to go on-air: WHRW (Binghamton) has 150–200 active DJs and another 80 apprentices, WZBC (Boston College) counts 70 interns for its online stream in addition to 90 FM DJs.

When Anna Loy, the president of the student media guild at WVBR (Cornell), first got involved with the radio station there were about 15 student DJs. “I’d sit around with my friends and kind of joke, ‘should we try to save the radio station?’” she says.

But now the station is thriving, with 80 DJs, 170 people applying to DJ just this semester, and a student-run record label. Even with minimal marketing, “people were ready to join,” Loy says.

What’s Driving the College Radio Renaissance?

1. Algorithm fatigue

Students consistently described radio as an authentic, community-driven refuge from the passive, isolated, algorithm-driven digital experiences that have defined their adolescence. “You can’t scroll on reels and run a radio station at the same time,” says Greenwell (WRFL) “You have to be in the present.”

In our survey of 80+ DJs, students under 25 years old named “friends/word of mouth” as their favorite way to discover music (69%), with TikTok (21%), YouTube (10%) or other social media (16%) relatively low-ranked.

When asked “Who is your favorite artist you discovered recently, and how did you discover them?”, open-ended responses were split almost evenly between friends/word of mouth (27%) and algorithmic/streaming discovery (26%), with smaller shares citing live shows, radio, online communities (Bandcamp, Reddit, RateYourMusic), or physical media.

• “I’m 21. I grew up in the age of algorithms. The way music is right now scares me because of the rise of AI. Not even AI made music (I hate it) but even just ‘Daily Mix, 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 5.’ It’s not made by someone. It’s made by an algorithm. I wish more of that stuff was person curated.”—Mari McLaughlin, WHRW (Binghamton)

• “What attracts a lot of people to college radio is the idea of putting somebody on. Showing them a new song they haven’t seen before, outside of the algorithmic nature of streaming.”—Aidan Greenwell, WRFL (Kentucky)

• “I’ve started learning a lot more about music from other people’s recommendations than I ever had before. These experiences are shaping me more than algorithms or Spotify.”—Anna Loy, WVBR (Cornell).

• “Diehard music lovers are shifting away from Spotify. The trend I am seeing is people want ownership and community instead of this vague green app.”—Rae Nawrocki (WEGL)

2. Analog Nostalgia

The resurgence of interest in physical media is a significant driver of Gen Z’s attraction to college radio.

Millennials embraced technology for its convenience and accessibility, which reduced the friction in media consumption. Gen Z, in response, is seeking out experiences that are more tangible, personal and inconvenient.

This manifests in a return to high-friction analog media like vinyl, flip phones, film cameras and radio.

• “We have a cassette deck that just broke, and I’m getting emails asking, ‘when is the cassette deck going to get fixed?’”—Rae Nawrocki, WEGL (Auburn)

• “I think the love for radio comes from the analog part of it. There’s this tendency for nostalgia amongst young people of things we didn’t get to participate in.”—Anna Loy, WVBR (Cornell)

The physical libraries at many stations, with massive collections of vinyl and CDs, offer a tangible connection to music history that can’t be replicated online:

• “Our music directors have been writing comments on the records and CDs since the seventies. It’s funny to see how opinions change over time. It’s like an analog Internet comment section.”—Marcus Rothera, WZBC (Boston College)

• “WHRW has a massive physical music library. I’m pretty sure it’s one of the biggest on the east coast. We have somewhere in the ballpark of 8,000 CDs and vinyls in there.”—Mari McLaughlin, WHRW (Binghamton)

3. Community, Creativity & Belonging

College radio stations serve as vital “third spaces” where students can find a community of like-minded people outside of classes and social media, said several GMs. Community was cited as a top reason for joining college radio (79%) by DJs under age 25 in the survey (second only to “creative outlet” at 94%).

• “Everybody just wants to feel like they belong somewhere. And having radio is another place for people to feel like they belong,”—Wami Osikanlu, WZBC (Boston).

• “It’s an opportunity to tinker around, there’s no grades, nobody’s watching you. You find community that way.”—Roman Salomone, ACRN (Ohio)

• “When I was a freshman, I had no friends…to tune in and hear some weird guy babble in the middle of the night and play one of my favorite songs, that’s how I knew I was going to be okay.”—Aidan Greenwell, WRFL (Kentucky)

  

A Hopeful Counter-Model

Skeptics might point out that college radio audiences are small, but the real story isn’t who’s listening—it’s that so many young people want to DJ, dig into music history, share discoveries, and build community around music.

The revival of college radio isn’t a signal that FM is back; it’s proof that Gen Z still cares deeply about music, discovery, and culture.

In a moment when the wider industry is betting on algorithms, AI, and fleeting TikTok trends, these college radio DJs remind us that young people aren’t bored of music—they’re bored of the shallow, virality-obsessed way music is marketed to them.

Gen Z has been caricatured as the “doom-scrolling generation.” But several students emphasized to me that they desire more substantial and hands-on experiences as an antidote to the loneliness and passivity fostered by algorithm-driven platforms, especially in the wake of the pandemic.

As Anna Loy (WVBR) put it: “For a lot of people, myself included, there is this lightbulb going off of, I want to participate in harder things and figure things out and not just lay in bed and watch TikToks all the time and be alone.”

Far from tuning out, young people are showing us what a more intentional and community-driven music culture looks like: “We had a Geese album listening party last night that a ton of DJs went to, and we’re driving to Brooklyn to go to a Geese show,” Loy (WVBR) tells me.

Even the MIDiA report supports this: More than half of 16-24-year-olds surveyed (55%) say they have become more interested in finding new music over the past five years, and half say they expect their interest to grow.

In our survey, 91% of DJs under the age of 25 rated themselves as optimistic about the future of music culture:

• “I feel like music culture is always going to exist in some shape or form. It might not be the old school zine, but I’ve seen hardcore Discord servers have just as much passion in cultivating a music culture with a widespread audience.” - ACRN DJ, 21 years old

• “Things have definitely changed a lot, but people still love music, creating it, listening to it, and talking about it. No matter what, I don’t think music culture is going anywhere even if it looks a little different every day” - WHRW DJ, 22 years old

College radio offers a hopeful counter-model for the music industry. Instead of chasing virality: cultivate community, discovery, and fandom.

Why listen to college radio DJs?

The last time the music industry felt this existential and uncertain, I was a college radio DJ and general manager myself.

By the time I entered American University, the student-run station WVAU was online-only, with a mostly digitized library instead of walls of vinyl and CDs. I was trading MP3 files with fellow DJs on a Subsonic music server and building my weekly playlists on iTunes. In 2011, I got an invite code to some Swedish app called Spotify that changed my life.

I went viral for saying the quiet part out loud: the Napster generation wasn’t going to start paying to own music. But maybe we would pay for access. I was right: streaming became the dominant model.

More than a decade later, today’s college radio DJs are living through another inflection point, on the cusp of a big shift in how we listen to and connect with music.

When asked in the survey what they would change about music culture today, college radio DJs requests were clear:

1. Sustainable income for artists

2. Champion human curation and creativity

3. Invest in local community spaces

4. Build lasting culture instead of relying on fleeting trends

I humbly suggest we listen to what they have to say.

Thank you to Aidan, Anna, Anja, Marcus, Roman, Wami, Mari and Rae and the 80+ DJs who took my survey.

Are you a college radio exec board member? Think your DJs would be interested in taking my survey? Reach out, I want to hear from you!

Five months and 2,000+ subscribers into writing this newsletter, I am reflecting on what I’ve learned and where we're headed. But first—updates!

Updates & Highlights

🎧 Fan-First Music Startup Database
I just updated the database with 40+ additional startups—now at over 120 companies building for artists and fans. If you’ve already downloaded, just hit refresh for the latest version. If not, you can purchase it here ($20 minimum) or get it included with a paid subscription to this newsletter ($8/month):

Subscribe now

A few highlights from this batch:

• Sleeve.fm, a fan community platform “with a touch of MySpace vibes”

• mpfive, a genuinely cool AI co-creation experience that works with artists, not at their expense

• Soundlink, music marketing with actual streaming attribution (!)

• Freakscene, retro haven for DIY shows

📺 Future of Music Interview
I joined from MAD Records for a Substack Live conversation about where music is headed. We talked fandom, AI, new models, and why he runs a label that takes 0% from artists while releasing his own music directly on Substack:

The MAD Records Monologue

The Future of the Music Industry (ft. Emily White)

If you don’t know Emily White, you really should…

Listen now

10 months ago · 43 likes · 3 comments · Michael Gilbride and Emily White

Why I Started this Substack

We’re on the precipice of another big shift in music. Streaming has matured, but still leaves many artists and fans dissatisfied. I created this newsletter to explore the post-streaming era through the lens of music fandom and culture.

My intentions were:

• User research. As a product creator, it’s essential for me to be where the people I build products for (music fans, artists, and their teams) are to deeply understand their needs. There is a unique and exciting community of artists and music lovers on Substack I wanted to be a part of.

• Build a reachable audience. After a decade+ of writing online in places where I could easily lose access to my followers, it felt important to build my own reachable audience and develop a future distribution channel for the products I build.

• Follow curiosity. I wanted an outlet to follow natural waves of interest and curiosity, experiment and enjoy the process (something I’m still learning to embrace as an outcome-driven person).

How it’s Going

Five essays and 2,000+ subscribers later, I’m enjoying the process, having rich conversations, getting valuable feedback on prototypes and learning a ton (like the fact that Gen Z music fans are buying MP3 players!) Thank you for being here, it’s been energizing.

What’s Next

This newsletter was never intended to be a revenue stream—it’s a lead generator and a place to learn. For me, Reach > Revenue.

But my next experiment is turning on paid subscriptions, precisely because I want to expand my reach. That may seem counterintuitive but here’s my reasoning:

1. The Substack growth engine is more incentivized to promote publications that generate revenue.

2. I have leaderboard FOMO (+ charts are a great discovery tool)

Nothing is changing for free subscribers:

1. No paywalls. All posts will stay free.

2. Same publishing cadence: first Wednesday of every month.

Paid subscribers will get:

1. Instant access to the fan-first music tech database ($20 value)

2. 5% of subscription revenue donated quarterly to music related charities 💖

   1. First up: Give a Beat, a California 501(c)3 organization that offers DJ, music production, and educational programs inside and outside youth and adult correctional facilities.

   2. $250 = 3 months of music mentorship for a formerly incarcerated individual.

   3. $1000 = the cost of one incarcerated person to join the prison electronic music program.

3. Founding members only: One complimentary 60 minute Office Hours session with me ($375 value)

4. Support my work and keep it free for everyone to read ✨

   Subscribe now

Coming Next Month

October’s essay will be about the resilience and future of college radio. As a former college radio GM, I’m fascinated by how student-run stations continue to thrive against the odds and what lessons they hold for the future of music discovery.

👉 If you’re involved in a station or know one I should talk to, let me know.

The Best Things I Read in August

From Dorm Room TikToks to Industry DMs

“I was just a girl in my college dorm posting videos with absolutely no connections to the music industry,” says Carly Bogdajewicz, a 26-year-old music curator who started posting on TikTok in 2019, right before the platform’s pandemic-induced boom.

Suddenly, record labels and artist managers were reaching out to Carly for guidance on how to navigate TikTok, “I was like, ‘Why are you asking me for advice when I'm just a big fan?’”

Carly is more than the archetypal “lean-forward” listener, she’s a professional superfan who has built a community around her passion for indie folk and pop music: with over 83k followers and 6.8M likes on TikTok and over 66k followers on Spotify. With her audience of music lovers comes influence and a direct relationship to the music industry.

The Rise of Fan-Driven Discovery

Carly’s story represents a broader shift from centralized music gatekeepers to fragmented, fan-driven discovery. Curators like Carly—armed with a playlist and a camera—are driving streams, building communities and shaping taste.

TikTok is the top of the funnel for music discovery for many listeners: 82% of Gen Z discover music through social media or user-generated content, compared to just 33% via recommendations on streaming music services (Source: Deloitte’s 2024 Digital Media Trends study).

In some ways, TikTok has become less of a social media app and more a new kind of entertainment platform. Music marketers are increasingly reliant on influencer campaigns and user-generated content to go viral and break new artists.

The paradox is: The same formats that can flatten music into anonymous soundbites and background noise for trends can also be used by passionate tastemakers like Carly to build interactive communities around music discovery.

Building a Taste-Driven Music Community

Carly’s content is less focused on trends and more on taste and connection.

Most of her TikTok videos center around the over 280 public playlists she’s curated on Spotify, using her own comprehensive syndicate system: her playlist of recent discoveries filters into genre specific playlists including indie pop or alt/pop. Then she sorts tracks into color & mood inspired playlists like viridian hue or chartreuse. Some of her most followed playlists are themed lists like cherry / wine (42k saves), black coffee drinker’s ego (18k saves) and cool girl on aux (7k saves).

If you are also a person who makes lots of playlists, I’m working on something I’d love to show you! Reply to this email or DM me on Substack 👀

On TikTok, Carly shares videos to promote her prolific and hyper-specific playlists, but also posts vinyl unboxings, lists of artists she thinks are about to blow up, her favorite lyrics, concert vlogs and interviews with artists including FINNEAS, Flipturn, and Maude Latour.

She’s been early on artists like Leith Ross, who she first posted about in 2021 when they had one EP and 57k monthly Spotify listeners (now at about 2M) and Samia, whose song “Pool” is currently going viral on TikTok, an artist Carly has been playlisting and championing since seeing her open for Hippocampus back in 2019.

Carly also curates a newsletter for the music festival All Things Go called Dear Besties, that keeps fans up to date with new music, fashion, and pop culture. “The artists that All Things Go book align with my music taste (Lucy Dacus and Clairo are headliners this year), and they're also huge advocates of the LGBTQ+ community, which is important to me.”

Getting Paid Without Selling Out

Carly is part of a long lineage of tastemakers who sit between the artist and the listener: radio programmers, music magazine journalists, MTV VJs, bloggers. The job has always involved walking the line between organic coverage and payola, editorial and advertising. One constant is there is always clear demand from artists and marketing teams to get heard, and audience demand from listeners for discovering new artists.

The big question is: Who pays for music curation? Music marketers? Brands? Platforms? Fans?

“The main way I monetize is from TikTok videos,” Carly says, through a combination of the creator rewards fund (“I don't get much because they've changed it a lot over the years,”) paid partnerships with brands and “artists reaching out to me to promote their songs.”

That model comes with ethical friction. She’s cautious about what kind of promotion she accepts and works with her manager to filter through submissions and negotiate rates. “It's been a learning curve of what I feel comfortable doing and what feels authentic to me,” she says. “A lot of times it's a small indie artist reaching out and I don't want to take your money when you're a struggling artist.”

Paid marketing campaigns on TikTok have become standard for the music industry, but are often undisclosed to the listener. According to a digital marketing agency CEO interviewed by Billboard, payment can range from $25 for a micro creator (at or below about 10k followers) to $10,000 or more for larger creators.

The FTC requires consumer disclosures like “#ad” when brands pay influencers or give free products in exchange for product placement in online content, but that isn’t the standard for the paid promotion of songs. When Billboard asked a representative from the FTC about song recommendation promotion specifically, they declined to comment on whether or not disclosure is needed.

Limited Tools for Music Curators

Streaming services like Spotify don’t offer monetization tools for music curators. Independent playlisters like Carly have tens of thousands of followers on the platform, but no way to reach them, attribute streams, or directly monetize their playlists.

“It’s a weird place of being so reliant on Spotify and also being very independent from Spotify,” says Carly. “[Spotify] does do some creator outreach” but they don’t do much in the way of influencer brand deals, partnerships or share ad revenue with curators.

The disconnect between TikTok and Spotify is also frustrating: If a TikTok user wants to check out a playlist she talks about in her video, they have to go to her TikTok profile, click the link in bio to get to her directory of links, find her Spotify profile and find the playlist among 280 others.

And vice versa, many of her Spotify followers do not know her TikTok exists: “I'll get comments a lot of the time like, ‘Oh my gosh, I follow you on Spotify. I didn't realize you had this whole other page!’” She is excited about a new TikTok feature that enables users to save a song from a video directly to Spotify, Apple Music or Soundcloud.

With limited feedback from Spotify beyond playlist saves, “TikTok is the biggest indicator of [what music my audience likes] just because you actually get feedback and comments. You can see what does well and what doesn't based on how you promote it or post it.”

A More Inclusive Era of Music Media

The decentralization of tastemaking is creating space for voices that historically have not had as much representation in traditional media or industry roles, especially women, queer people, and people of color.

Carly’s favorite part of what she does is connecting with fellow music fans: “It’s fun to give all these young teenage girls more of a voice and make them feel like their opinions, passions, and all the things they really love are important and meaningful and valid.”

“That drove me forward,” she says. “[They] were so excited to see someone like them talking about the music they liked, from niche indie artists to Harry Styles and Taylor Swift.”

Carly doesn’t position herself as a critic or expert—“I think first and foremost, I'm a big music lover. I'd like to think of myself as a tastemaker. It is an interesting place of being, kind of an influencer, but not an influencer.”

“Becoming a [curator] is a lot more accessible now,” she says. And that’s a good thing.

Continue reading below for more Q&A with Carly + a bonus section of insights from my Gen Z readers!

Deep Cuts with Carly:

Advice to artists trying to break through on TikTok?

Carly: I get so many song submissions, I can always tell when an artist is just trying to become viral or get those sound bites. It's really easy to tell when an artist is actually being authentic to themselves. And that's something I really value. All of my favorite artists who have blown up from TikTok, it's because they've built this brand that is true to who they are and isn't trying to make trends.

Favorite album of 2025 so far?

Carly: Jake Minch’s George. It's produced by Tony Berg, who produced Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers, my favorite album of all time. His vocals are so raw and stripped and the production creates this crazy atmosphere that I just love, love, love.

Do you and your peers pay attention to how artists are making a living?

Carly: I've seen a lot of conversations about how especially small artists don't make a lot of money from Spotify. That was something a lot of people were really surprised about, because how does that make sense? How do you not get money from people listening to your music? But I don't know if people are super aware. Before I started doing music curation, I didn't know any of that and I wouldn't have unless I followed these [artists] who talk about it.

What’s next for you?

Carly: I've recently taken a step back from [working as a chemical engineer] and I'm starting to look at jobs in the music industry. I am taking my influencing career more seriously and seeing what I can build from that. Getting to share all the music I love in a bigger way through an artist interview show is definitely the big dream.

Before doing all this, I knew absolutely nothing about what kind of jobs you could even get [in the music industry]. I'm leaning towards digital marketing because I love that side of it all: social media, making videos and spinning things to make people engaged and interested and have it be relatable. I'm also interested in scouting or A&R because finding new artists is something I'm already doing.

How is Gen Z’s relationship to music different?

Carly: The relationships between artists and their fans are so different now because fans have so much more access to [the artist] that they almost feel entitled to it. It's a weird mix of artist and fan relationships getting more parasocial, but also because there's so much access to music, [fandom] can be spread out across lots of artists.

 Is Gen Z more community oriented or individualistic in fandom?

Carly: Technology is obviously such a critical part of Gen Z. It creates community because you're finally able to connect with people who you can relate to or see yourself in that you might not have met in your day to day or in your small town. But also because people are spending more time on their phones, trying to build their own brands it also creates a sense of individualism. It's a weird dynamic.

Bonus: The Gen Z Perspective

I asked some of my Gen Z readers for their opinions on music discovery, trends and AI music. Here is what they had to say (emphasis is my own):

Do you spend money on music? How?

“The top two things I spend money on music-wise are Spotify and Suno. I use both apps everyday. Spotify because listening to my favorite artists elevates me emotionally. And Suno because creating music has unlocked a new kind of therapy for me.”—, New York City, 27

“I spend a lot of money on concert tickets and vinyl. I do this partially because I know this is the best way to support artists, but also because I love the experience of live music. It's a feeling streaming could never replicate. I love collecting vinyl. I feel like my record collection is an extension of my personality. It's one of the first things I show off when I have new people coming over. The joy of finding a gem in those crates gives me a dopamine hit that's hard to replicate. I don't really listen to my vinyl records, but only because I don't currently have a working turntable.”—, the Netherlands, 25

“The most I spend on [music] right now is Spotify Premium, because I want to be able to listen to albums in order.”—, Nigerian-American, 16

“I currently have 14 records total. Listening to records is a whole other experience in which you set time aside to sit and listen through an entire album and take in the vintage and raw sounds of a needle's feedback and the quirky audio warping of a disc”—, Syracuse, New York

“I spend money on music via a Spotify Premium subscription, a NTS Radio subscription, and vinyls”—, New York City, 22

What do you think of AI generated music?

“I think it sucks. It turns music into this moneymaking machine, rather than the art it's supposed to be. AI music isn't created out of a love for music, but out of greed. The intention is just to make Muzak, background noise that only exists to generate streams. I feel like virtual artists are a different breed, though, like Hatsune Miku? That's an AI voice, that's actually being utilized by people in a really creative way. I think that's fine, as long as the intention is to have fun making music.”—, the Netherlands, 25

“From the perspective of making music I love it (...) I understand it’s way easier to make a song with AI, but what’s beautiful to me is the accessibility of pouring your emotions into music and sharing that widely. The downside is the industry is going to be flooded with AI generated music. But the artists that will stand out are the ones that create community for their listeners, have standout performances, and create a compelling visual world with their music.”—, NYC, 27

“I am absolutely against AI-generated music. It's not about whether there is creativity in curating elements using AI or not, it's about not taking the time [to] sit with one's self to learn the skill to create.”—, Nigerian-American, 16

“AI can be used in healthy, creative amounts to produce good results (i.e. The Beatles) as well as used in heavy, semi-abusive amounts to generate milktoast results (i.e. Playboi Carti). Will [AI] 102% dominate the music industry and throw all human artists in the gutter? No. But do I believe it will take part in shifting the landscape of music in a lot of ways, both good and not-too-good? Most totally.”—, Syracuse, New York

What is different about how Gen Z connects with music compared to older generations?

“I encounter a vast amount of [GenZ music fans] that sing and do trends with [music] without even any knowledge about who made the song or even what it's called. But on the other [hand], I see a smaller, but bigger than previously, number of [GenZ music fans] that engage with music like I do: immerse into the quality of a song, explore and keep in touch with the entirety of their career and discography, build a collection of personal favorites, and search for opportunities to experience these artists in real time”—, Syracuse, New York

“The "mainstream" doesn't really seem to exist anymore. Everything is niche, and nothing is niche at the same time. I might find an artist I'd never heard of before, and they turn out to have millions, if not billions of listeners. TikTok has created this new dynamic in music, and decentralized it basically.”—, the Netherlands, 25

“I love seeing Gen Z’ers remix songs that go well together and then pairing that with visuals to post on social media. For example, when folks remixed Taylor Swift songs with the 1975 songs, it unlocked a whole new understanding of her album TTPD for me. I felt more emotionally invested in the storytelling.”—, New York City, 27

“The music we listen to has increasingly become something we choose to display—whether in the background of social media posts, reflected in the ways we dress, or through the concerts and festivals that we attend. There are many ways to visibly share what we’re listening to online—think of Spotify’s “Friend Activity” feature, and other social apps like Airbuds and Superfan.”—, New York City, 22

At the turn of the music streaming era, I said the quiet part out loud:

The people who grew up downloading music for free weren’t going to start paying to own it. But maybe they would pay for access.

And they did. Renting access to music became the norm.

As a fan, I asked for convenience—and I got it.

The experience of instantly listening to whatever you want, whenever you want and seamlessly sharing music globally is incredible.

But it came at a cost.

Today, I feel the tension building again. The seams of the streaming ecosystem are splitting, and we’re on the brink of another major shift in how we listen to and connect with music.

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Streaming is cracking.

Streaming squeezed passionate music fans, mass music listeners, superstars and working musicians into a one-size-fits all model.

Now, it’s breaking down:

As more music than ever floods streaming services and revenue growth slows, it’s a race to the bottom.

Artists are now competing with AI-generated songs and fake artists for a slice of the same pie, getting squeezed for shrinking returns as the value of each stream keeps decreasing.

The broader music ecosystem is also in trouble: Music has become infinite but forgettable, discovery is a lottery, touring is unsustainable, fan relationships are mediated by opaque algorithms—and there is no safety net.

And for passionate music fans, the cracks are starting to show. Streaming music feels repetitive and bloated. A flattened grid, devoid of magic and context.

AI slop is here.

AI-generated songs already have millions of streams and are being recommended in algorithmic playlists:

• The Velvet Sundown, an AI-generated “rock” band, has over 600,000 monthly listeners on Spotify and is on all other major streaming platforms.

• A “soul” song without a soul, made with Suno, “A Million Colors,” is the first known AI song to chart on TikTok, with over 1 million Spotify streams.

• Aventhis, a “dark country project” is “harnessing the creative power of AI” according to it’s Spotify bio, has over 1 million monthly listeners.

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The Amazon Basics of music

The truth is AI-generated music will be good enough for a lot of listeners.

And corporations are incentivized to promote it. Infinite content at zero marginal cost? A business dream.

We’ve already seen this play out with “fake artists,” also known as perfect fit content, tracks commissioned at cheaper rates for playlists and listed under pseudonyms, covered extensively in Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine.

Meanwhile, all three major labels are simultaneously suing and negotiating licenses with the generative AI music startups, Suno and Udio.

It’s a moment that feels familiar to the late 90's when CD growth was slowing, prices were shooting up and consumer’s were fed up…Then Napster came.

But Napster solved fan problems: free access, no gatekeepers, only the songs you wanted.

AI music solves corporate problems: It's cheaper. Doesn't get sick or old or pregnant. Can’t complain about pesky royalties. Or have opinions about the world.

Why not substitute art by humans with an imitation at a lower cost? If people like it and the result is all the same, who cares?

But AI is not just riffing off of culture, it’s parasitically built on top of it. Without consent or compensation.

AI-generated music will be good enough for background listeners, but for the people who care about the experience of fandom, the “Amazon Basics” of music isn’t satisfying.

Music that matters

Streaming may be a background activity, but being a music fan is a lean forward one—it can define your whole life.

I don’t buy the idea that people simply care less about music today.

If you think I’m wrong, look closer: music culture is happening everywhere, but it’s fragmented across Reddit threads, DIY shows, fan remixes and mashups, independent record stores, Discord channels, group chats, independent radio stations, live streamed music reviews and Substacks of niche playlists.

Fans spend hundreds on live shows, vinyl or merch for all sorts of non-obvious reasons: to signal identity, taste and support.

Vinyl sales have risen for 18 years straight. Half of purchasers don’t even own a turntable.

Independent artists now account for half of all streams. Even pop has gotten weirder and more niche-ified.

Fans are spending $300+ just to see their favorite artists perform live (and sometimes going into debt to do so). Ticketing companies are raking in the profits, but what fans are really paying for is access to the artist’s world, experiences, and story.

Anecdotally, I routinely walk past a Polish community center turned 1,000 capacity music venue in my neighborhood and see a line of young people camped out all day to get a good floor spot to see artists I have never heard of before.

College radio stations have doubled in size in the last decade.

But the young, passionate music fans I follow and speak to today are feeling uneasy about the future of music. They use streaming services reluctantly but supplement with vinyl collections, or are ditching streaming altogether.

These aren’t just scattered behaviors, they’re signals of latent demand.

We don’t need more music, we need music we care about.

Music is no longer scarce. But meaning, storytelling and world-building are.

Music that matters and AI aren’t necessarily at odds.

In the right hands, AI can enable new, immersive and interactive creative experiences—without shaking down artists and stripping songs for parts.

But the systems in place today incentivize flooding platforms with slop, optimizing for scale over depth, and cutting artists out of the loop.

Music lovers don’t need AI stock music.
We need new experiences that work with artists and for fans.

Building a new home for music culture

The next great platform for music won’t be a streaming service. It will be a home for music culture.

The rise of AI generated music will spark a counterculture renaissance.

Built by and for music lovers. Where artists, curators and the most passionate music fans build worlds, share their taste, trade musical lore and create culture together.

A sustainable, profitable business that puts money in the pockets of artists and tastemakers.

That succeeds with its users, not at their expense.

Because the future of music belongs to artists and fans. Not AI. Not billionaire oligarchs.

Technology changes the tools. Artists and fans change the culture. Together, they reshape music.

We are on the edge of a format shift again. Join me here as we imagine and create what comes next.

[Updated: Sept 1, 2025] Since launch, the fan-first startup database has been downloaded 450+ times! The database now includes 120+ startups and to reflect its growing value, the database will have a $20 minimum price to download going forward. Thank you to everyone who has supported it so far!

Get the Database

When I left Spotify after nearly 8 years of building fan engagement and artist tools, I decided to hit pause, take a sabbatical, and put out a call:

Who’s building the future of music?

Over the past year, I’ve spoken with 100+ founders, creatives, technologists and fans working across the music stack, looking for fresh perspective and insights on the problems facing artists and fans today.

Here is a curated and opinionated database of the fan-facing, artist-supporting startups I found:

✅ 80+ music startups, tagged by category

💿 Filter By: GenAI Co-Creation & Remix, Superfans, Discovery & Curation, Direct-to-Fan, Creation & Collaboration, Marketing & CRM and Alternative Streaming Models.

🔗 Links to company websites and products

🌶️ Sharp commentary on startup potential, positioning, and market fit

⭐️ Favorites marked and personally recommended

In this post, I’ve organized my insights into three big themes + my hot takes and a sampling of notable startups in each theme.

A few housekeeping notes first:

1. My focus is on the fan-facing, artist-supporting layer of music tech. There’s a ton of important and interesting work happening in music’s backend systems right now: rights and royalty management, analytics, distribution, or as Water and Music calls it: "boring is back" tools. I spoke to folks building really important and interesting back office tools, but they are not the focus of this post.

2. I focused on music specific startups. Some of the most interesting things in music are actually happening on non-music specific platforms like Substack or Tiktok - I’ve written about those here and here. Today’s post focuses primarily on music specific companies.

   To support my work and keep it free for everyone, consider becoming a paid subscriber. 5% of subscription revenue is donated to music related charities.

   ---

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1. Making Music Interactive 🔀

Shifting recorded music from passive listening to active participation

🔥 Hot Takes:

• More people want to interact with artists than replace them. Americans are literally going into debt just to attend concerts, not to make meme tracks on Suno.

• The consumer market for GenAI music creation will be smaller than the market for fan co-creation and remix tools. Text prompts are the wrong interface for making music.

• The next wave of music tech will look like a toy before it looks like a business.

• That said, most AI remix tools are a feature, not a company.

Why It Matters:

The last thing the music industry needed was more songs—yet here we are. Deezer reports that 18% of tracks uploaded to it’s platform are AI-generated.

Calling Suno or Udio a “Napster moment” for the industry misses the point. Napster, for all its faults, actually solved real problems for fans. The same level of consumer demand for AI song creation isn’t there.

However, fans today expect a level of creative participation, especially generations of music fans who have grown up regularly creating and uploading content of their own. Co-creation and remix apps root the experience in something familiar and more accessible to more types of fans.

Startups to Watch:

• Splash / Kaimix: Roblox-native music creation game where fans pick a beat, sing or hum melodies and vocals, and Splash’s virtual artist “Kai” (or artists the company has partnered with like Phantoms or Bob Foxx) “finish” the track. Created songs get played in game on Splash.

• Mixy: Viral (and almost certainly unlicensed) music remixing app with easy share flow.

• Ampollo: Makes rough drafts feel less precious and more social. A platform for producers, artists, and fans to remix, collaborate, and share works-in-progress.

➡️ App links + my commentary + more startups in the database here

2. Music Discovery & Curation Beyond the Algorithm 💿

Breaking up the echo chamber with context, taste, and human curation.

🔥 Hot Takes:

• Most social music apps fail because they focus on your IRL friends, not your taste graph. I don’t really care what random people in my contact list are listening to, sorry!

• The demand from artists to get discovered is obvious. The harder question: what’s a compelling discovery experience for fans?

Why It Matters:

Music culture is happening online, but it’s fragmented: Twitch livestreams, TikTok comments, Discord channels, group chats, online radio, niche playlists, and paid Substacks.

It’s also unpredictable for artists. There are few consistent tools or channels to tell your story and build the kinds of fan relationships you need for a sustainable career.

Startups to Watch:

• NTS Radio: Organically cool, taste-driven, community-powered global internet radio station

• Music League: Genuinely fun social music game you play with friends or friends-of-friends

• Nero: Tool for tastemakers, DJs, and producers who review tracks in livestreams and get paid to boost songs in the queue. Nero handles submissions, queue management and payments.

• Shelf & Housewarming: Both of these apps let you showcase your media consumption (music, books, TV, movies, etc.) and tap into the vibe-based self-expression

  ➡️ More apps in the database here

Bonus: TikTok & Substack: Not music-specific, but dominating music discovery and fandom at the edges.

• TikTok is the top of the funnel for music discovery

• Substack is where curators and niche communities go deeper.

• Neither is designed for music, but both are shaping its culture.

3. Fandom as a relationship, not a transaction. 💖

Direct-to-fan sales are the backbone of a sustainable career. But fans want to self-express and support, not just be sold to.

🔥 Hot Takes:

• Most “superfan” apps are CRM tools, built to maximize LTV, not build community. The novelty of “a text from your favorite artist” fades fast when every message is selling you something.

• Fans still want the same things: cool merch, great concert tickets, and VIP moments to interact with the artist. We don’t have to totally reinvent the wheel. The opportunity is in making it cooler, easier, and more sustainable.

• There’s too much focus on artist-specific superfans and siloed experiences, and not enough on music superfans—the ones who love the culture itself and care about many artists.

• The physical album or digital downloads aren’t a delivery mechanism anymore—they are proxies for fan enthusiasm.

Why It Matters:

For artists with niche fanbases, streaming is great for reach, not revenue.
If artists want sustainable careers, real connections with fans and direct-to-fan income—merch, concerts, interactivity and community—is the foundation.

Having fans who care about you + you can reach is the bigger challenge than figuring out what to sell to them.

Startups to Watch:

• Fave: Social platform dedicated to superfans. Showcase your fan activity, get verified, connect with fellow fans in a safe haven and unlock access to exclusives.

• EVEN: Fans get access to new releases and exclusive content—before it hits streaming. Artists set the price and get paid daily.

• MerchCat: Fans can pre-order merch and pick up at the venue or get it shipped. Helps touring musicians sell more merch with a tool that is more effective than pen and paper and more affordable than existing alternatives.

  

Bonus: Alternative Streaming Models

Seeking an alternative to streaming?

🔥 Hot Takes:

• Most alt streaming startups are doomed from the start—not because their vision for artists is bad, but because they’re not solving real, differentiated fan problems.

• Too many are artist-first in a vacuum, without asking: why would a fan switch?

• Starting with creators to attract an audience is an expensive and uphill battle unless you’ve nailed the value exchange on both sides.

The alt streamers in my database: Audiomack, Audius, Ampwall, Campfire, Catalog, Coda, Foreplai, Lissen, Nina, Popup.fm, Quobuz, Subvert, Sleevenote, Vocana.

📁 Access the full database here

The Takeaway:

Music startups are notoriously brutal.

Licensing is expensive and slow. APIs can disappear. You need fans to attract artists, you need artists to attract fans.

And way too many music startups are generic, un-cool, and exploitative of artists and fans.

The music industry has always been driven forward by the passion and rabid enthusiasm of young fans. Of all the conversations I’ve had in the last year, the most enlightening and inspiring ones were with students and young people.

Follow the fans and you will find the “future of music.”

📋 What startups am I missing in my guide? Tell me what I missed here.

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👋 Hi, I’m Emily White. I help startups build products creators and fans love as a product advisor and consultant.

💼 Whether you need a gut-check on an idea, help turning insights into a roadmap, or clarity on what’s working (and what’s not), I offer product consulting services tailored to the unique challenges of music tech.

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Substack wasn’t built for musicians. So why are so many great ones using it?

What began as an email newsletter platform for writers has evolved into a full-stack audience development engine: live streams, podcasts, video, comments, DMs and a Twitter-like "Notes" feed.

A handful of artists are using Substack to share stories, demos, covers, live recordings, essays and to engage with their communities. For fans, it’s a space to hear from artists directly.

For this small group of indie artists, Substack offers something most platforms still struggle to deliver: both community and income. The big question is: can this format work for more types of artists with less established audiences?

The Musicians Using Substack

Substack’s music leaderboard reads like the lineup of Newport Folk Festival circa 2011-2019: Jeff Tweedy, Patti Smith, Neko Case, Laura Marling, Tegan and Sara, Thao Nguyen, Colin Meloy, Andrew Bird, Margo Price and more.

The artists with the most subscribers on Substack have a few things in common:

• Prominent singer-songwriters in indie rock and alternative scenes with narrative songwriting styles, some of whom are unsurprisingly also published authors.

• Loyal, niche followings built over decades. Typically with DIY roots + major label support at various points of their careers.

It’s also a group that is notably lacking in racial, cultural and genre diversity.

The Limits of Artist Fan Clubs

When artists first started to join Substack back in 2021, I was curious yet skeptical that Substack (or any creator subscription tool) could be a meaningful solution for most artists.

Individual creator subscriptions are challenging for musicians for a few reasons:

• Music is better together. Siloed, paywalled artist centric experiences on disparate platforms are a poor fit for how most fans actually consume songs: over and over again in playlists, collections, or mixes alongside tracks from other artists. It's clunky for music fans to individually subscribe to artists in order to learn about new releases, upcoming concerts, artist merch, exclusive content or experiences.

• More work for artists. Now you’ve given yourself a new full time job of creating additional value for your subscribers every month in addition to making music! It’s hard to keep up with and can lead to burn out.

• Cold-start problem. Individual creator worlds are harder (not impossible!) to attract audiences to and build listener habits around. Artists don’t exactly ask fans to like and subscribe at the end of a song the way podcasters or influencers do.

• Lack of clear value. Email newsletters typically provide more utility than art. The newsletters I’m most likely to pay for are the ones that provide a service by offering unique insights, curation or access to a powerful network. And there is a cap on how many email newsletters/fan clubs people can afford to subscribe to.

Substack’s Opportunity

Despite these challenges, Substack is well positioned to crack something other platforms struggle with—network effects AND revenue in one creator-friendly place.

Most platforms trap artists in a frustrating catch-22: you need an audience to make money, but you need money—or luck—to build an audience. And you need both to build a sustainable creative business.

Social and streaming offer visibility, but little ownership or depth. Creator tools help with monetization, but assume you’ve already built a following elsewhere.

Substack has a growth engine that could potentially help artists get un-stuck:

• Creator-to-creator recommendations help Substacks get discovered through referrals. Writers benefit when other writers recommend them through built-in newsletter recs.

  

• Music curators and tastemakers are joining Substack. As they recommend, review and interview artists, they create an ecosystem of discovery that mirrors the music blog era. I love this quote from ’s smartdumb about the music discourse happening on Substack:

• The Notes feed promotes organic growth as artists and fans share posts and interact publicly, like a slower, more thoughtful Twitter.

• Social proof drives discovery. When fans subscribe to, like, or comment on a post, it signals value to others.

Plus, Substack has some creator-friendly features:

• Email = guaranteed reach: Every post goes straight to subscribers’ inboxes, not buried by a feed

• Portable audiences: Artists can download their subscriber lists and can take them elsewhere

• Predictable revenue: Freemium model with easy to turn on paid subscriptions

• A mix of storytelling formats: Writing, video, live streams, podcasts

• Two-way interaction: Fan interactivity via comments, chat, and DMs

It’s important to note that Substack is a VC-backed company and not immune to the same pressures that have pushed other platforms toward growth and engagement-at-all-costs. It’s not enshitification- or billionaire-proof.

As Substack rolls out new features like short-form video, some creators are weary.

Skeptical users have a point: we’ve seen other platforms throttle reach, prioritize ads and nudge creators toward engagement at the expense of quality.

For now, since Substack makes money when creators make money, the platform is incentivized to make product decisions that help creators gain subscribers.

What Comes Next

Substack isn’t “the future of music”, but it’s worth paying attention to. It can be a direct, intimate, window into your favorite artist. A way to get more of the storytelling and lore around their art.

We need a variety of models to support the multifaceted needs of different kinds of artists and fans. Tools that add more community, context and culture back into our music fandom experiences are good for the entire music ecosystem.

Other music-specific platforms in the fan club space to know:

• On EVEN artists sell their music directly to fans pre-release, giving artists a way to monetize before hitting streaming platforms and without relying on ongoing subscriptions.

  • Artists include: J. Cole, SMINO, ​LION BABE, Mick Jenkins

• Vault is more like a private group chat with your favorite artist than a newsletter. Artists can drop music, demos, and behind-the-scenes moments directly via text to fans in a freemium model with monthly artist subscriptions.

  • Artists include: James Blake, RIZ LA VIE, San Holo

• OpenStage focuses on fan data and rewards, helping artists identify, reach and reward fans without requiring an ongoing content feed.

  • Artists include: Bad Bunny, Oasis, Lana Del Ray, Gorillaz

• Medallion powers white-labeled, artist branded fan clubs, unlike Substack’s centralized ecosystem.

  • Artists include: Jungle, Sigur Ros, Tycho

There’s also several other non-music specific platforms that artists use to run their fan communities:

• The veteran in the space, Patreon, prioritizes membership-based monetization, but largely lacks built in discovery.

• Discord, Whatsapp and Twitch all have been used by artists in interesting ways.

  Thanks for reading emwhitenoise! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

👋 Hi, I’m Emily White. I help startups build products creators and fans love as a product advisor and consultant.

💼 Book office hours with me for feedback on your strategy and product or insights on music industry trends.

🎵At Spotify, I built tools for artists to understand their audiences, connect with fans and earn revenue.

✍️ I write and speak about fandom, community and artist sustainability, drawing on insights from my time at Spotify and Billboard.

💡 My music tech journey started early - I went viral for predicting streaming's impact on music as an intern at NPR Music and college radio GM in 2012.

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Which artists are using Substack in interesting ways?

Any artists you’d want to see on Substack?

There's a counter-movement brewing against algorithmic music discovery.

As streaming services become more repetitive and automated, music lovers seek magic, personality, and human connection. A new generation of independent music tastemakers are utilizing the tools of influencers to fill the void.

In an era where AI can generate endless content, human curators offer something uniquely valuable: distinctive taste, compelling storytelling and communities where music is more than background noise.

The Echo Chamber Problem

Despite access to almost unlimited music, listeners hear the same handful of songs repeatedly on streaming services and social media. No matter where you start a listening session, the same songs keep playing.

Many streaming platforms have intentionally shifted away from human-curated playlists towards algorithmically driven discovery.

The result? A flat experience lacking the context, stories and community around music that dedicated fans crave.

If streaming is the new FM Radio, where is the “left of the dial” counterculture?

Enter the New Tastemakers

A new class of hybrid music bloggers / influencers / content creators are filling the void, building audiences on TikTok, playlists on Spotify and transforming those into music communities on platforms like Substack, Discord, Patreon and Twitch.

Some of my favorite curators that I’ve discovered on TikTok include:

• turned her TikTok account focused on getting people back into the habit of listening to new music again, into , a Substack newsletter of music recs, features and community discussions.

• Annabelle Kline is the founder of That Good Sh*t where she crafts personalized playlists, produces events and champions emerging hip hop artists.

• is a cultural alchemist and audiophile who hosts a private listening club on Patreon and streams a hybrid radio show / hang out / DJ set format on TikTok, alongside podcasts and videos.

• Marg.mp3 built a cult following off her eclectic music taste and content as a tastemaker, interviewer and NTS Radio DJ.

• is a vibe curator, cassette tape collector, playlist creator and writer of on Substack.

• Kelsie of The Yellow Button turned her audience on TikTok and Youtube into a Discord community of emo/lo-fi/indie rock fans and radio show on Sirius XMU.

Resources like The Music Directory created by are curating the curators on Substack, creating rich lists of playlist makers, journalists, radio hosts and more. Even one of Spotify’s best editorial playlists is on Substack now - the indie music playlist Lorem just launched .

There are numerous tastemakers, DJs, and producers who review music submissions in live streams on Twitch or TikTok and monetize the queue through tools like Nero. During these streams, tastemakers listen, react, and provide feedback to audience-submitted tracks.

New independent music publications are emerging too - like Good Call Music from the ex-Noisey team and Hearing Things from ex-Pitchfork folks - creating the infrastructure for a new independent movement in music culture.

And independent, online radio stations like NTS, Openlab.fm or res.radio are thriving too - as recently recapped by MIDiA.

Social’s Paradox

Social media is now the top of the funnel for music discovery, overtaking streaming as the primary driver of music culture. Despite music being everywhere on Tiktok and Reels, it often exists as anonymous, disembodied sound without context. How many times have you heard a snippet of a track repeatedly on TikTok but had no idea who the artist was or what the rest of the song sounds like?

Music tastemakers are the bright spot of social music. The combination of social video’s visual, interactive format + knowledgeable curators with unique taste and perspective = magic.

Ironically, algorithmic feeds often drive the discovery of these tastemakers, matching music fans with the creators who share their interests. Curators are at the mercy of the algorithm too.

Curators face the same challenges artists do - getting discovered, building a reachable audience and earning a living. Independent music playlisters might have playlists with hundreds of thousands of followers, but no tools to reach those listeners, know who they are or attribute streams from their playlists.

Beyond Algorithms

Algorithmic music recommendations can effectively sort through the noise to find new music you love or the perfect suggested track for a playlist - especially when trained on human curation and tuned by humans, for humans. I’ve discovered many songs from algorithmic recommendations on streaming services or in my For You feed.

But lean-in music fans aren't just hunting for new tracks – we're searching for meaning, context, and connection. The story behind the art, the cultural significance of a release, and the shared experience of discovering something special.

What’s next?

Music culture needs a new home to discover artists and the context behind their art.

This return to human curation reflects a broader trend: people, especially younger generations, want to hang out in places that make them feel better, not worse. They are weary of large public platforms and institutions and seeking refuge in smaller, intimate and human spaces.

People want to experience music together. It’s lonely to only watch your personalized feed of content or listen to your hyper-personalized, repetitive top tracks.

Today's music lovers crave chaotic, magical, and fundamentally human spaces.

Some new spaces to try: The music review app Factory.fm, although I prefer social video / audio formats for music curation over text. There are new apps focused on sharing music recommendations with friends like Needle, Disco or Showcase. My favorite place for music recommendations is a game called Music League I’ve played with friends since 2018.

🎧 Listeners: Who are your favorite music curators or sources for new music discovery?

🎤 Curators: What are your favorite tools to reach listeners and connect with artists? What are the biggest challenges you face?

Leave a comment

👋 Hi, I’m Emily White. I help startups build products creators and fans love as a product advisor and consultant.

🎵At Spotify, I built tools for artists to understand their audiences, connect with fans and earn revenue.

✍️ I write and speak about fandom, community and artist sustainability, drawing on insights from my time at Spotify and Billboard.

💡 My music tech journey started early - I went viral for predicting streaming's impact on music as an intern at NPR Music and college radio GM in 2012.

💼 Book office hours with me for feedback on your strategy and product or insights on music industry trends. I’m also open to longer-term work with people building new things for artists and fans, reach out to me here.

Illustration credit: . Thank you for bringing my old purple iPod nano back to life <3