Last Week in DIY & Indie Music: TikTok • Bandcamp • Playlist pitches • Threads • MoreThis week, our news, tips, and advice for independent and DIY artists covered TikTok, playlist pitching, Bandcamp updates, how to optimize your email marketing, what's changed with the Latin Grammys, and more.....
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New Music Industry Week In Review: Spotify news • TikTok ultimatum • MoreIt was a busy week by any definition, and the music industry was no exception. There was the news from Spotofy, the TikTok ultimatum, copyright regulations run amok, Mark Mulligan. Continue reading
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RandRobin Is A FREE Round-Robin Plugin For Windows
Fanan Team released RandRobin, a free round-robin plugin for Windows. Sample libraries and virtual instruments come in all shapes and sizes. Some are very dynamic, and the more advanced ones even have round robins (meaning there are multiple recordings/variations of every hit/note) to achieve that realistic sound closer to the real deal. But let’s say [...]
View post: RandRobin Is A FREE Round-Robin Plugin For Windows

Acustica introduce Sand 4 Ultra Sand 4 Ultra comes loaded with compressor, EQ and channel strip plug-ins based on the company’s Hyper technology and new Aria engine. 

Country Artist Alli Walker And Manager Brad Turcotte Join Vector ManagementNashville’s Alli Walker, a rising country artist, has taken another significant step in her career as her manager, Brad Turcotte, signs with Vector Management. 

"Signing with Vector Management is an incredible milestone for my career,” shares Alli. “I'm thrilled to join their esteemed roster and work alongside Brad and the entire team. This partnership marks an exciting new chapter, and I'm looking forward to what lies ahead.” 

"We are excited to have Brad and Alli  join our Vector family,” says Jason Murray, President of Vector Management.  “We are looking forward to doing some great things together!” Brad Turcotte adds “Joining forces with Vector is the fifth gear that Alli needs, and the team that Ken and Jason have assembled are second to none.”

(L-R): Vector Management’s Brad Turcotte, Alli Walker, Jason Murray (President, Vector Management)Photo credit: Vector Management

In conjunction with this exciting announcement, Alli’s latest single, “Creek,” is available today via RECORDS Nashville. Fans can watch the visualizer, directed by Justin Key, HERE. Co-written by Alli along with April Rose Gabrielli, Jacob Kulick, and Gigi Rich, and produced by David Fanning, “Creek” captures the essence of Walker’s dynamic rock/country style, offering listeners an infectious anthem about embracing the country lifestyle, perfect for the summer season.

Alli is currently working on new music and gearing up for more tour dates. For additional information visit www.alliwalker.com 

‘Lost’ Yuga Labs restructures again, with layoffs, new executiveThe creator of the Bored Ape Yacht Club has been struggling with a changing market and still plans to focus on its Otherside metaverse project.

Photo-sharing community EyeEm will license users’ photos to train AI if they don’t delete themEyeEm, the Berlin-based photo-sharing community that exited last year to Spanish company Freepik after going bankrupt, is now licensing its users’ photos to train AI models. Earlier this month, the company informed users via email that it was adding a new clause to its Terms & Conditions that would grant it the rights to upload […]
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Build Your Own Class-E Musical Tesla CoilWe’ve all seen a million videos online with singing Tesla coils doing their thang. [Zach Armstrong] wasn’t content to just watch, though. He went out and built one himself! Even better, he’s built a guide for the rest of us, too!
His guide concerns the construction of a Class-E solid state Tesla coil. These are “underrated” in his opinion, as they’re simple, cheap, and incredibly efficient. Some say up to 95% efficient, in fact! It’s not something most Tesla coil fans are concerned with, but it’s nice to save the environment while making fun happy sparks, after all.
[Zach]’s guide doesn’t just slap down a schematic and call it good. He explains the theory behind it, and the unique features too. He uses an adjustable Schmitt trigger oscillator for the build, and he’s naturally given it an audio modulation capability because that’s a good laugh, too.
If you’ve ever wanted to convince you’re friends you’re incredibly smart and science-y, you can’t go wrong with a singing Tesla coil. This beats out Jacob’s ladder and most other plasma experiments for sheer mad scientist cred.
Have fun out there! Video after the break.

2024 Home Sweet Home Automation: Spray Bottle Turret Silences BarkingAh, dogs. They sure like to bark, don’t they? [rrustvold]’s dog likes to bark at the door when a package arrives. Or when someone walks by the house, or whenever the mood strikes, really. To solve the barking issue, at least near the front door, [rrustvold] built a spray bottle turret to teach the dog through classical conditioning.
As you can see from the image, it’s all about pulling the trigger on a standard spray bottle at the right time. This machine only sprays when two conditions are met: it hears noise (like barking) and detects motion (like overzealous tail wagging). It also has heat-seeking abilities thanks to a Raspberry Pi thermal camera.
To do the actual spraying, there’s a DC motor mounted behind the bottle which turns a pulley that’s mounted to its shaft. Around the pulley is a string that wraps around the spray bottle’s trigger. To complete the build, everything is mounted on a lazy Susan so there’s nowhere for Fido to hide-o.
If you’ve a dog whose bite is worse than its bark, consider building a custom dog door to keep it out of the cat box.
The 2024 Home Sweet Home Automation contest has officially wrapped — we’re counting the votes now, so stay tuned for an announcement about the winners shortly.

SoundToggle online A/B audio player SoundToggle have announced the launch of a new online audio player aimed at mixing engineers wishing to showcase before and after examples of their work.

Spotify reports record profits amid layoffs and financial changesSpotify claims it has made record profits in the first quarter of 2024, even after making a large number of redundancies last year.
According to a new report, the Swedish streaming service’s gross profits crossed the €1 billion threshold for the first time in its history, with its total revenue increasing by 20 per cent year on year to €3,6 billion.

READ MORE: Spotify working on remix feature which will allow users to alter speed and pitch of songs

Meanwhile, the platform’s number of active users grew by 19 per cent from the first quarter of 2023 to 615 million, while the number of subscribers grew by 14 per cent year on year to 239 million.
“We’ve talked about 2024 as the year of monetisation and we’re delivering on that ambition,” says Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek in a press release. “Now as we’ve shifted to focus on strong revenue growth and margin expansion, we see a clear opportunity to ensure we are also continuing to grow the top of our funnel. I feel good about the changes we are implementing and remain very confident in our ability to reach the ambitious plans we’ve outlined.”
A Spotify logo seen displayed on a smartphone. (Photo Illustration by Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
The streamer’s first quarter success comes after it raised its Spotify Premium prices for the first time ever last summer. In addition, new reports recently emerged which have suggested they could be raising prices again soon.
The streamer also recently implemented controversial changes to its royalty system in a bid to combat “drains on the royalty pool” which involved demonetising songs that had been streamed less than 1,000 times.
Despite this, Spotify said in its annual Loud & Clear Report last month that it “set the record for the highest annual payment to the music industry from any single retailer” despite repeated claims that its rate of $0.003 – $0.005 per stream is inadequate in supporting artists, particularly when it was found that independent artists must rack up 5million streams to make U.S. minimum wage.
Earlier this month, Christian Luiga was announced to have been appointed as the company’s new CFO. He previously worked as the CFO and deputy CEO for Swedish aerospace and defense giant Saab AB.
In December, Spotify laid off 17 per cent of its staff in what it said was a “hard but crucial step” to create a “stronger, more efficient” business. Despite this, the company’s then-CFO cashed out $9 million in shares 24 hours after layoffs were announced.
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Fabiana Palladino is balancing perfectionism and knowing when to let goIn November 2017, Jai Paul’s most dedicated fans received a text from the Paul Institute, the covert and coy record label set up by Jai and his brother, A.K Paul.
It read:
“This is a message from the Paul Institute. Two new releases are now available. Please login at http://paul.institute. Your Cyber Pass is: [USER NUMBER]. Peace.
“We would like to introduce you to two new artists at the Institute:
“Fabiana Palladino and Ruthven”*
Fabiana Palladino. Image: Fiona Garden for MusicTech.
Mystery, Palladino’s first officially released song, immediately set the Paul fanbase alight. Part of the focus was on Jai, whose elusivity remains a mystery to many — it’s usually a big deal when he breaks his silence. But Palladino’s aptly-named track, which was only available to purchase for two days, sold out of physical copies, and her sound left people curious for more.
“I just had to switch off my phone and go offline for a few days because I was just… I hadn’t dealt with any of that before. And it was quite scary.”
Palladino is speaking to us from her home in London, seven years since Mystery dropped. Her follow-up singles, Shimmer and Waiting, arrived in 2018 and 2020, respectively. Much like Jai, her self-proclaimed perfectionism kept an audience hanging on to fragments of material for years before she was ready to release a more comprehensive body of work.
After four years of no new music, her debut album Fabiana Palladino was released this month on Paul Institute, a subsidiary of XL Recordings. Critics and fans are already dubbing it “a masterpiece” and the best debut album of 2024 — does she still disconnect from online discourse like she did with Mystery?
Fabiana Palladino by Fabiana Palladino
“I know how to go about these releases now; how to shut certain things off…I’d said to people at the label that I don’t want to read any [reviews],” Palladino says. “It hadn’t even occurred to me that there would be a Guardian review. But my manager texted me saying, ‘Are you sure you don’t want to read any? I think you might want to have a look at the headline…” The outlet had awarded the album a rare five stars.
Palladino’s sporadic and limited release schedule isn’t strictly intentional, nor has she strived to shy away from an audience. As a session musician like her father, Pino Palladino, Fabiana has recorded and performed consistently in the past decade. She’s joined the likes of Jessie Ware, Sampha, and even Jai Paul onstage, playing as a band member in his debut live show at Coachella 2023. She and her band also opened for Jai in his London, New York, L.A. and Melbourne sets which, I can confirm, were simply excellent. To celebrate her album launch, Palladino and her band also delivered a sublime, intimate performance at Rough Trade East, London — she’s certainly a natural onstage.
Fabiana Palladino. Image: Fiona Garden for MusicTech.
As a producer, though, Palladino faced novel pressures. “I had to keep up the momentum of a career. I hadn’t released anything for, like, a couple of years — you know, there was a big gap,” she says, almost agitated. “I definitely felt like I had to keep things moving, but it was kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy: because I stressed myself out so much, it actually made it even more difficult to move fast.
“People kept saying to me, ‘It’ll happen when it happens,’ and I just found that really annoying. I was like, ‘Well, you’re not the one who hasn’t released anything in five years,’ she laughs. “But it’s true, it will just happen when it happens. And you have to get these things right; it was a balance that I had to strike between perfectionism and knowing when to let go.”
Happily, this internal battle paid off. The album is a considered, lustrous and poignant body of work, with immense production that blends rich, moving neo-soul-style vocals with 80s-style synths, chorus guitars, and swung drum beats.
The album’s opener, Closer, is an elegant, simmering alt-R&B track with a complex yet commanding bassline, with synth pads and bells laying the perfect bed for her layered falsetto. The album’s lead single, I Care, is a Jai Paul collaboration with outstanding mixing and musicianship that allows both artist’s eerie and near-desperate cries to pierce. Meanwhile, I Can’t Dream Anymore hears Palladino channel a 2020s take on soft rock that would make Wilson Phillips proud.
Palladino challenges concepts of love and loneliness in the album, having made the album after seeing out a long-term relationship. But, though she self-produced most of the LP, she had warm support from those close to her.

“Fabi likes to play her cards close to her chest,” says her dad, Pino, speaking to us from L.A. “Sometimes you get an initial idea and sound, it takes a long time to actually get it into shape. Fabi definitely had a vision…[but] it would take quite a lot to get a version of a demo to listen to if she wasn’t ready to play it. My wife, Maz, has really been there all the way with Fabi and has probably all the versions of every song.”
An acclaimed bassist, with credits on records by Elton John, D’Angelo, The Who and Beyoncé, Pino was also a collaborator on his daughter’s album.
“I will always want to make my music that I have a personal relationship with,” says Fabiana. “It doesn’t make an awful lot of sense to share this very personal stuff[…]with someone I’ve never met before.
“With my dad, it’s the ultimate safe zone to create in or be honest in or whatever.”
Fabiana Palladino. Image: Fiona Garden for MusicTech.
Jai Paul and engineer Harry Craze, meanwhile, played crucial supportive roles in the album, too.
“In terms of the album, it was very natural for me to work with Jai and Harry,” says Palladino. “These are people I have a friendship with and I trust. And because we have a personal relationship, they push me or challenge me in certain ways that maybe someone else might not feel totally comfortable to do and vice versa.”
Though the songs sound slick and polished, they are mostly born in “somewhat of a DIY way” between her bedroom and the XL Recordings studio in London. But Palladino says she “was trying very much to make it sound like it wasn’t [DIY]. It was like a challenge that I set myself — like, how high-end can we make it sound, even though it’s not mostly recorded in special environments. I basically wanted it to sound like a more elevated version of what I’d recorded.”
The Roland Juno-106 and Yamaha DX7 (and Arturia emulation of the latter) were central instruments in the sound of the album, taking care of the lush synth sounds. Her guitars and mics were run direct into her trusty Universal Audio Apollo Twin interface and laptop, and her vocal chain (mostly recorded in XL’s studio) comprised a Neve 1073 preamp and a Neumann U 87.
Fabiana Palladino. Image: Fiona Garden for MusicTech.
“Even in the early demos, stylistically, there was a lot of Juno, [Roland] Jupiter synths and 80s drum sounds, also some 90’s sounds,” Harry Craze tells me of the recordings.
“The songs were well written and, even though they were pretty minimal, they had a distinctive style. So after talking to Fabiana, it was really about building on what was there and making a little world for them. I was shape-shifting between vocal production, sound design, mixing or anything really depending on what the track needed but normally I would talk with Fabiana and discuss the song then make a start. A lot of the time, Fabiana would just jam on an instrument and if I felt she was on to something I’d record it and then she might finesse the part and we would re-record.”
Despite recording music in her bedroom from a young age (“even when she was in school, she was making demos of songs”, says Pino), Fabiana has struggled to identify as ‘a producer’. Mostly, it’s because she’s been under the impression that a music producer is a purely scientific role — one that demands knowledge of “the science and the physics” of sound. Fortunately, she came to the realisation that a lot of music production is just trial, error, and instinct.
There was no fear of experimentation in the recording stages. For Shoulda, Palladino recorded her brother playing drums at home with a “very basic mic setup…almost to just try it and see if I could do it. And it turned out alright,” she says.
Fabiana Palladino. Image: Fiona Garden for MusicTech.
For Stay With Me Through The Night, she enlisted Pino to record bass and drums from an LA studio, with help from Steve Ferrone and Eric Thorngren.
“I’m still not someone that could go into a big studio and really have an understanding of everything that’s going on in there,” she says. “But it doesn’t intimidate me because I just sort of think, ‘I’m not gonna let it intimidate me.’ There’s no reason for it.”
Craze assures us of her skill in the studio, saying that he “took Fabiana’s lead; she knew what she was trying to do.”
The whole album, thanks to the prowess of Palladino and her collaborators, has an upfront, live band feel to it. She says that she didn’t want any of the songs to feel artificial. “It was intentional to keep some kind of live feeling to at least half the tracks. I wanted [the album] to have that side of the music that I love — a lot of which is made with musicians playing together in a room.”
Though Palladino clearly had the expertise to become ‘a producer’, she also felt there was another hurdle to accepting the title.
Fabiana Palladino. Image: Fiona Garden for MusicTech.
“A lot of it was a gender thing, as well…You know, just that it was a very male thing and seen as a thing that mainly men did,” she says. “And there weren’t many women producers around [the time I started making music in my bedroom]. Well, I wasn’t really seeing it anywhere. So that representation wasn’t really there as much. But now I understand that a lot of my favourite female artists, like Kate Bush, were very much in control, very much producing their music.”
With the production done, the 10 songs written for the album, and the support of her loved ones all locked in, Fabiana Palladino was ready to take on the world. But there was one more thing that stuck in Palladino’s mind.
In her early 20s, she met with a record label executive, still before a time when she’d even considered becoming an artist. They made a passing comment that they’d never sign an artist who’s over the age of 25. Was Palladino going to be well-received as a new artist in her 30s?
“It definitely did affect me. It wasn’t directed at me,” she says, “but there is just that thing in the industry of [being excited by] young, new artists. How often do you see someone in their 30s, female or male, being a new artist or putting out their first album? It’s just, like, very rare…There’s so much value placed on like, being young and fresh and cool, and not that much value placed on like experience, maturity or wisdom and stuff like that.
“It was just always on my mind. And I let it hold me back, for sure. And then, eventually, I just thought, ‘This is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. I’m not going to let this stop me anymore.’
Fabiana Palladino. Image: Fiona Garden for MusicTech.
Pino still remembers that day: “I remember that person saying that…But it worked to Fabi’s advantage, I think. And that’s very much her character, too. If you tell her she can’t do something that she wants to, she’ll find a way. She’s very determined.”
As strong as Fabiana may be, she’s still found herself in a surprising position. Until she received a mysterious message, she was still just making demos in her bedroom and wasn’t considering pursuing a career as an artist.
After publishing some tracks to SoundCloud, Jai Paul reached out to her, out of the blue, asking her if she wanted to join the Paul Institute. “We didn’t really have any mutual connection at all,” she recalls. But being part of the Paul brothers’ gang has been “massive”.
“It’s just a genuinely positive group of people. We’re all just friends, really. There are definitely plans to do more music together — more releases and stuff like that. It’s just been amazing to have this community of people.”
Like Jai Paul, Palladino has faced pressure from both the music industry and loyal music fans — not least thanks to modern streaming culture and the demand for more music, more frequently. But ultimately, the time it’s taken to create the album is a key part of its appeal, with one critic calling Fabiana Palladino “a pop masterpiece a lifetime in the making.” With her debut, Fabiana Palladino has shaken off the mystique and emerged as an artist and a producer, making her music on her time.
Fabiana Palladino. Image: Fiona Garden for MusicTech.
*Retrieved from a Reddit post published in 2017
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Is it time to look for alternatives to TikTok to market music?There's a year and many lawsuits between now and when TikTok may be banned in the U.S. But a new report that TikTok owner ByteDance will shut down the app before it sells it does underscore the possibilty that this effective music marketing tool could disppear.....
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From the bidding war for Hipgnosis Songs Fund to ByteDance’s battle for TikTok in the US… it’s MBW’s Weekly Round-UpThe five biggest stories to hit our headlines over the past seven days…
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Bandcamp improves its Music DiscoveryBandcamp has added robust tag search and tag combinations as well as dark mode support to improve music discovery on the platform.....
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