How So Much Music Ended Up Online w/ Milana Lewis

24:33Milana Lewis:Yeah. And for some artists, it does help because there are some artists who you don't really know much about that. Seeing them being a little bit more casual and funny on a Jimmy Kimmel show matters, right? It does matter. I don't want to say it doesn't matter. It's part of building the narrative, but it's not a launching pad anymore. Yeah. Well, it's not going to make or break your career overnight, but it is. I think all of those elements are still important, especially I think a lot of people are talking about clipping right now, which has been a thing for a while. But clipping up a late night show is more valuable than being on the actual broadcast of the late night show.

25:10It has more reach.

25:11Milana Lewis:Yeah. And I think clipping is powerful when a song needs to be heard in a bunch of different contexts before it fully resonates with someone. Because that used to be the case. Like radio used to do that for us. You used to be out shopping, listening to a song. You were stuck in traffic and listening to the same song on the radio. You were at home getting ready or cooking dinner or passing by a store you were shopping at, right? Like you heard the same song in so many different contexts. And maybe the first five times you heard it, it like went over your head and you weren't conscious of it. But then maybe there was a context at a restaurant when you were on a date and like you heard a song and it like suddenly like resonated because it imprinted in your brain as a memory of that connection.

25:50And then later you hear it and it has a totally different emotional response for you. And I think we're probably going to get into sort of some of that music in the questions later. We don't have that as a society anymore in the same way. And so I think what clipping is doing is it's creating and testing a bunch of different context, both visual and lyrical or melody, I guess, in lining up all three of those elements into one piece of content and testing the shit out of it to see if they can get it to resonate with a certain audience. OK, one thing that people always like to say, these kind of music industry pundit types will say is that, you know, it's never been better to be an artist than today.

26:32You have all these tools at your disposal. You can release your music by yourself. Everything is so cheap. I do think that that point is up for debate, though. What do you think? Do you think that this is the best time to be an artist or not? No, because you can't just be an artist.

26:45Milana Lewis:You have to be a media creator and you have to be a marketer and you have to have a point of view on who you are and how you position yourself. And you have to think about that in the context of various ways that you appear. Because before I used to think about how you appear in press versus how you appear in a live show versus how you appear when you're recorded. Now you have to think about that so many different ways because even when you look at social, it's so different. the way that you would talk on a TikTok versus the way that you would post content on Instagram versus a YouTube or Reels or keep naming it, right?

27:19Like there's so many different places

27:21Milana Lewis:that you're expected to appear. And sometimes you don't want to appear yourself and you don't want to do it at all. And then you have to rely on other people and your fans to create that content for you because if you're not on there, you're not relevant is the unfortunate reality. And we have these conversations with our clients all the time. There are some clients we work with who are not active on social media. Then it's a matter of like, do you have a rabid enough fan base that's gonna be amplifying everything that you do without any effort on your end? And if you don't, then we have to rethink about that.

27:50Then we have to rethink that and get creative and how we do that. And that's where things like clipping agencies become helpful or managing fan accounts. Like it guts me so much. I was reflecting on a call that I had last week with an artist who we just signed

28:05Milana Lewis:and they're going to be touring internationally, but they don't have fan accounts in those territories where there's other, they're not native English speaking territories they're going into. And part of me hated the fact that my recommendation was that we need to create those accounts and manage them and amplify the content because it needs to be translated. And this is an artist who's not active on social media. This is an artist who doesn't want to be hosting a bunch, but they're also so curated in what's out there about them. And it's really challenging to come up with strategies for the various types of artists that exist today.

28:45And you end up having to either, yes, it might be less to produce content and to make music today, but it's a lot more expensive to cut through and to market. Yeah, that's a very good point. on a recent episode of this podcast I had on the founders of Chaotic Good. I don't know if you've met them yet. But yeah, that went more viral than I expected. And it sparked a very big conversation about digital marketing. And I think a lot of people felt like they had been duped, that record labels are doing all this nefarious stuff to manipulate algorithms that no one had any idea that they were doing. I think the rebuttal to that, though, is for certain artists, like you're describing, they might be a very curated person.

29:25They're not necessarily great I'm making a TikTok video every single day or multiple TikTok videos a day. And this is one of the only ways it feels like the industry is found to combat or to help an artist like that. Because we're in an age, not just a volume on streaming services, but also volume on social media. So much slop. Yeah, it's like fighting volume with volume, basically. Which is only possible in a world where posting and distribution is free. Yeah. But I do wonder, though, we're finding volume with all these clips, all this more volume on social media. Where does this end? Like, because we're contributing to the volume.

30:02Oh, yeah. And then it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And so the cost to participate in artist marketing is now getting more and more and more. I don't. Where do you think it ends? I don't know. And that's one of the reasons why I'm really frustrated right now. Like, it's really hard to set and be intentional and incredibly authentic in an environment like this. And I also wonder how AI is going to increasingly play a role to help everyone keep up with the volume that keeps mounting and mounting and mounting in digital marketing.

30:31Milana Lewis:Well, it's making it worse because you can clip a thousand different videos now in a matter of minutes using AI. Yeah. Before you needed a human editor that was carefully clipping it out, which I mean, obviously there still is a benefit to having a human being carefully clip those out. but there are some people who just don't care they're just as many clips as we can make of this one performance let's just put it out there and i've heard tiktok is coming down on this like they're a lot more conscious of all it like these clipping accounts or the ones that post mostly clipped content and i think if there's not real authenticity behind it like they'll shut it down um but i can't like get over the fact that i like i've started paying a lot of attention on who follows me and my social media accounts and i click through so i i don't block my account because i don't want to um but i do review every person that follows me and i'll block individual accounts that do not seem human to me really yes wait what's the benefit of doing that i just don't want i just don't want yeah that i'm also a little bit cautious of um the security issues around being public on social media and i've been hacked in the last year and i've had shit stolen so i'm super sensitive to that wait not physically stolen no i had my car stolen in front of my house wait are you serious in january yeah it's a bizarre story i've had my um i've had a lot of money stolen also what i've been hacked yeah okay this is good for me to know as i continue to post on social media every day yes like don't reveal where you are don't reveal personal images about yourself i mean there's i have a whole like i lesson i've learned i do feel like i learned actually a lot from kim kardashian's incident in paris where she was robbed and it was because she had just posted I believe I believe this is the story sorry if I'm wrong but I believe the issue is that she had posted that she was in Paris and so people tracked down what hotel she was staying at and caught her there yep I now implement a policy of I'm only posting a story after I've left correct the place that I was at yeah um but yeah you just never know people are really really talented at doing bad things which I guess brings me to another point with this whole discussion about how much music there is out today there are also people out there who are not putting out music with good intentions so they will put out uh maybe like a spam equivalence worth of content just tons of music in the hopes of running a bot farm on it artificially streaming it which ultimately does steal money from a royalty pool which is divided up among real artists.

33:10Correct. So I'm wondering, when did you notice that streaming fraud or artificial streaming was starting to pick up on streaming services and become a real problem for artists like the ones you work with?

33:22Milana Lewis:It's interesting because we haven't felt that pain as much as a lot of other distributors, because again, we're curated. And so we choose to work with our artists. We're not that hands off. We're pretty hands on the marketing strategy. So we typically have an idea of who they're using as vendors and what they're doing. There are definitely cases where the artists and their management team are ignorant to who they hire and who those people are hiring to execute some other work. And I think that's where we've been the most able to witness that, I would say. So true. Don't hire someone on Fiverr to put you on playlists.

33:56Milana Lewis:Or like a lot of these marketing companies that just do marketing services also inflate their ROI by hiring you know yeah various strategies and firms and like I've heard as much as like that some of our competitors or one of our competitors um has uh bought like over a million iPhones and handed them out a million yes huge investment to make wait a distributor has hired or has has bought a company a company is a company has bought a million iphones and hand them out but like as a distributor it's not really like on you how many streams well i guess no it is because you're also marketing distributors have to be marketing agencies now yeah well it's okay let's break this down the higher tier ones like stem where it's like you're doing playlist pitching people and like these other and marketing services i think let's clarify right there's delivery services i okay would put companies like distro kids city baby and tune core under the brand tune core as delivery services to get your music up there some of them like two lost and tune core i would say have a new tier of service i think distro kids experiments with this as well where they have more hands-on artist services right oh yeah distribution call it and then there's distributors whether it's companies like us or the major label own distribution companies like the virgins and the orchards and the whatever ada used to be in whatever it is now of the world delivery services wouldn't care because they're getting paid up front for whatever music so they just care about volume but distributors care because again your job is to find not only deliver but to distribute and distribute means drive attention and awareness and positioning in the marketplace of music and they're economically aligned because they're participating in a part in the part of the revenue as well.

35:42Oh yeah. So true. Yeah. The economic model is different. It's not just a flat fee. It's you're taking a percentage and interesting. If you're releasing music, you should be collecting publishing royalties. Get over 1 billion and publishing royalties go uncollected every year. That's where Cosign comes in. Cosign powered by Cobalt gives artists and songwriters access to Cobalt's best in class global publishing administration services, but in a highly streamlined format and with the flexibility to cancel on a rolling quarterly basis. In just one year, Cosign has grown to represent over 65 ,000 songs.

36:19This includes songs from Billboard Top 10 Producers to Rising Artists and Industry Veterans. And unlike other publishing administration services, Cosign is available via application and invite only, allowing them to stay focused on delivering premium service along with world-class collections. Applying to Cosign is quick and easy and applications are open now. Learn more at cosignmusic.com. That's K-O-S-I-G-N music.com. I also wanted to ask you about how this increase of volume has led the major music companies to increasingly get interested in distribution. Can you tell me a little bit about that evolution and how they've continually invested in these distribution services?

37:04Milana Lewis:I think it's because they just want to be in earlier. You just don't know what's going to stick, right? And you want to be on top of the trend and you want to be early. And so what a better way to be early, in their opinion, than to open up the funnel. We did the opposite. We closed our funnel. We were super early and we, I don't know if you remember this. So STEM has never been a long tail distribution service. is we've always been invite only. There was a moment in time where on STEM, because we always paid out multiple parties for a song, so you would get an invite into STEM if you were my collaborator getting paid on a song.

37:36Milana Lewis:And there was like a four-month period where you then also had access to upload your own music. And so by nature of that network effect, we grew exponentially because our collaborators were then uploading new music. And so we had a lot of volume. And it was a range of artists that were well known for us to be working with that are now huge mega superstars to your friends from high school's cousin making music in their bedroom. And that just didn't serve the problem we were looking to solve, right? It made things a lot more difficult for us because I don't wanna be in the volume business, right?

38:11Milana Lewis:We're here to serve a very specific segment of the market, which are career artists who wanna be autonomous. I can't even say independent because they might be independent for one project or two, but they might choose to work with a major for something else and have them feel like they can be successful doing it on their own terms. So for us, being in the volume business just doesn't work. And we thought that it was a big distraction. It was also very costly. We looked at our unit economics and our cost to serve, and we said that that's just not how we want to structure our business. Because we didn't want to charge a flat fee.

38:42Because, again, we want to be aligned in incentives with our clients to help them make more money and help them reach more audiences. We shut down the ability for people to upload content and we went as far as to even help them migrate their music over to another distributor and moved it off our platform. And we consistently revisit our client base and we have honest conversations with them whether or not with the right partner going forward. It's an ongoing conversation that we have because we want to manage our volume. So when did you make this move? So the first change, the big announcement around like ending the call it like virality and like the top of funnel access was back in 2019, I want to say.

39:22Okay. Yeah. And it was really controversial at the time. Yeah. And then it turned out it wasn't so controversial because Spotify shut down their long tail initiative too when it came to direct distribution. Can you explain that a little bit more? Yeah. So there was a moment in time where Spotify wanted to enable anyone to release their own music on Spotify. And they were a little bit more curated with it. And they ran the experiment. And then they realized that, like, it was not a great experiment. So they shut it down. Yeah. I think there were others that tried that too and said it wasn't right for them.

39:51Milana Lewis:And what we realized is that, like, we can still drive the right type of referrals and business without having to catch everything just by being intentional with their relationships and having great tastemakers in the business, in the building. So we have our artist relations team whose job it is to get to know all the managers and all of the sort of pockets of all like creator groups that are happening. Largely domestically, because that's where we focus. We're not really in an international company yet. And being smart about like what we bring in and what we double down on, what we bet on. Well, I think another thing to discuss in this conversation all about volume ending up on streaming services is that now with streaming, because there is no pay wall behind or preventing someone from listening to any given song.

40:37Not only are new artists competing against other new artists, they're also competing against every artist from the past. Correct. And so I wonder for you, how do you think that's impacted the frontline music industry? I mean, the first place my head goes to, which is not answering your question, unfortunately, is just how much music's being reimagined. Right. How many samples from the past are reemerging in new music? Yeah. Interpretations, there's more remixes, there's more sampling. Yeah. And I think what's interesting is a lot of people who are not in the music industry wouldn't know that some of that is completely intentional.

41:14So coupled with everything that we're talking about here, the catalog market is really hot right now. And so there are a lot of catalog buyers who are looking to up the value of the asset they just bought. And so there are things called flip camps that are starting to take place where people will say, hey, I just bought this catalog from Def Leppard or whatever. Come here and remix it or interpolate it, meaning like taking the melody of it and make it into a new song. And that actually has done really well. A lot of those songs have ended up on the Hot 100 because I guess it just proves that people love nostalgia.

41:47And we actually don't want something that's too new sometimes. It's interesting just how much the catalog game has coincided with this, you know, emergence of more and more frontline acts. It feels like with streaming's Infinite Shelf, another thing that I've seen start to happen is that there are artists like Morgan Wallen, Taylor Swift, Drake. There's so many others I could name. I'm not trying to single them out. But there are a lot of artists like that that are starting to release extra long albums. So like 30 plus songs on a given album. That was not a thing, really, back in the days of physical.

42:26If it was, then you would need to do a double vinyl. And that's so expensive that why would you do that unless you're a big star? They're all big enough where that would be justified. True, true. Morgan Wallen is doing well. And so is Taylor. So is Drake. So, but I do wonder, do you think that these albums are getting so long almost as a way to combat how much volume there is out there? Does this just give artists more shots at getting a hit? I think it just makes it easier to qualify for RAA milestones as an album versus singles. You have more at-bats. Yeah. So, like, every time the streams are counted, if you count 30 songs, 30 streams.

43:06Yeah. I think that makes sense.

43:08Milana Lewis:I think I don't know if that's like the only thing driving it. It's definitely a benefit of that strategy. But also be that they just made. I mean, the amount of music that's being made, even in these sessions before they put together the album probably makes it harder for people to decide like what actually makes the cut. Yeah. Well, I mean, and also there's just the simple fact that you can put it all out. Yeah, why not? Why not? If you I'm sure it has been historically very challenging for artists to narrow down their favorite 10 songs from their list of 50 that they've made. Yep. And so now you kind of just don't need to.

43:45Maybe. Right. More shots. I think another, you know, interesting thing that kind of goes along with all of this is that we're seeing viral moments happen, both from songs that are brand new and also from songs that are a few years old. Dominic Fyke right now has a hit with Baby Doll, which was released in 2018. Why did that not go viral in 2018? I don't know. But virality is definitely a big thing that is putting small artists on the map right now. Sorry, Dominic Fike is not a small artist, but I guess he was in 2018. He was he was emerging then. But I'm wondering for you, how do you advise artists when they experience these viral moments?

44:22How do you help them make that from a viral moment into a lasting impact and a lasting uplift in their career?

44:28Milana Lewis:You have to understand what is the source of the reality, right? What registered, what hit, what got traction, why? With what community and where do they live? What else are they listening to? What does that tell you about your fans? And how do you double down on that investment? And what is the peripheral fan base next to that? And how do we invest in having that leak over? Which, by the way, is impossible to do if it's manufactured using clipping agencies or farms or anything like that, right? Like that's when you see the big hit, but then it just drops off. because you can't do anything about it because it's not natural.

45:00Milana Lewis:There's no narrative. There's no purpose. There's no intention. So how do you know when a viral moment is actually real? You look at the source of stream. You look for themes. You look for repetition. You look for patterns. And I imagine that's what a lot of these algorithms at Spotify and Amazon and Apple is all using for detection of fraud and streaming fraud, is that there are no clear human patterns. or natural human patterns, I would say. Interesting. I mean, we've talked a lot about AI music in this discussion, and we've talked about how many songs are being uploaded daily. Do you think that the solution for all of this music is essentially algorithms getting better or, you know, essentially more AI in a way to sort through all of the mess that we have?

45:50To detect the AI. Well, to detect the AI, but also to recommend songs that actually do deserve to be pushed through the gigantic volume. No, I think it should be, I think a filter needs to come through. And I think the barrier to entry needs to be brought down so that there's that content with real intention comes through and everything else gets stopped or slowed down. So how would you envision that actually looking in practice? I think the cost to publish should not be free.

46:17Milana Lewis:I think there should be a cost to maybe not pushing content out initially and publishing it, but maintaining it if it's under a certain consumption threshold where it's not generating enough income to pay for itself. Do you have any idea what that threshold should be? No, but there's people much smarter than me that have a lot more knowledge of what the cost to serve is to come up with that threshold. Fair enough. I mean, that reminds me of Streaming 2.0, which was this big push that happened a couple of years ago. I believe the years would probably be 2022, 2023. Lucian Grange, the CEO and chairman of Universal Music Group, was talking about this a lot.

46:55And this is a big initiative for him. And basically, I think, you know, he surveyed what the landscape had ended up being like 10 years into streaming and saw that there were some things that might need to be changed. And so part of his push involved this thing called like adding a threshold. And so you it's different for every platform, but basically you do not earn royalties until you hit that threshold. Sure. Because the long tail had gotten so incredibly long that there are so many people that weren't meeting the threshold, but they got half a penny. Yeah. And so those half a pennies were leaking everywhere.

47:32They're just going all over the place. by the way I do agree with that as one of the strategies that should exist

47:37Milana Lewis:yeah yeah I don't think it's the only one but I think it's one of many it was something that really upset certain people yeah until they fully understood it yeah I think yeah I think mostly I do understand the criticism one of the criticisms that I heard that I thought was pretty fair is just that like you know the world's largest music company is pushing these new policies which ultimately well i didn't finish explaining the threshold but the idea is all of those all of those pennies that would have kind of leaked out to the long tail will be redistributed to people who've been above the threshold so the idea was you know you know umg is pushing something that will benefit them which i don't think it's just them it benefits me too yeah no that that's my rebuttal to it is like i mean anyone who's running a distributor that's not a diy delivery service could benefit from this.

48:31Yeah.

48:32Milana Lewis:And I do think the redistribution will benefit the middle class the most. And I think a lot of those people who are making music that are below that threshold, unfortunately, I'll label them as hobbyists. And if something is a hobby, you're typically spending money on doing it. You're not making money. You could be. That's amazing. But that's when it becomes something that may transition from being a side hobby to something that's more more of a sustainable, call it like not necessarily a career, but a side business or a side ancillary revenue stream for yourself, which I'm all for in this economy, right?

49:10Like I do think people should have the opportunity to create wealth for themselves that's scalable, that doesn't correlate with the time they're putting into something. Another thing that was part of streaming 2.0 was targeting what Lucien called functional music. I think I've also heard terms like non-music. This goes back to noise as well. So basically sounds or audio content that is not music. It's not a traditional song. So it could be anything from a bird sound to white noise. Yeah. And basically the big push during streaming 2.0 is that, you know, those things should not be valued the same as a regular old song.

49:52And so they ultimately are on many services today being paid a lesser royalty. To be fair, there were, I know, I personally know people in the music business that had a side hustle putting out white noise and then using their connections at streaming services to try to like boost up this random white noise album that they put out. So I get it. But I'm curious what your thoughts are on it. Do you think that that was the right approach to deal with this influx of non-music. I don't think you can have that approach unless you're willing to define what value means, like what music is valuable and what music isn't.

50:26Milana Lewis:I know artists who are sitting on hundreds and hundreds of songs that feel like fast fashion to them because they're able to make that music so quickly and so easily without that much effort. And if they put it all out there, it might have a lot less value to a listener than a scientifically backtrack that someone researched to come up with the right sound to put someone in a meditative state or to put them into a flow for work, right? And I think until you define the value and the effort and you're willing to create parameters around that, it's a pointless conversation. I wrote a story about ambient music and kind of this very experimental side of ambient music where I don't even know if it's music at that point, but it's something that someone poured their heart and soul into.

51:15And I kind of use that story as exploring the edge cases of some of the stuff might be automatically flagged by whatever detectors these streaming services have as non-music, but also it might have been someone's artistic intent to make it that way. So you have, unfortunately, this category where there are people who are trying to game the system to earn extra money on the side. That's probably the majority of those people. By the way, there's people doing that with human artists. Yes, for sure. And then when you get into the AI stuff, it allows you to make a supply of content much larger, much faster.

51:52So then you can spread it out and be even more sneaky about the weird manipulation you're doing. I thought that story was really interesting to do because it allowed me to talk to some ambient artists who are like, I made a Nature Sounds record and I'm extremely proud of it. and I traveled all over the world to collect bird sounds and this is my artistic intent and now it's worth, I forget what it is, maybe an eighth of a regular stream or something like that. Okay, so we've talked so much about volume here and how it makes it increasingly hard for a young artist to break through with their music.

52:27I'm wondering though, what advice you would give to a young artist who is exasperated by this issue? They really want to find a way to break through. Do you have any tips or advice for them based on what you've seen? I think the biggest thing is figure out who you're making music for. What is their, call it, customer journey, like fan journey?

52:49Milana Lewis:How are they behaving in the world? What else are they doing? Like, how do you reach them where they already are and tell them something that they need to hear? Because that's what I think the purpose of music is, is that the fans who relate to something, it's because they needed to hear it in that moment, in that context. So I think you just have to focus on like the intention behind what you're saying and who you think needs to hear it and focus on how you can get it to them in the most efficient way possible. Well, that's great. OK, so everything else just amplifies it. Everything else is like if you can get the core going, then you can start thinking about like how do you double down on what's already working and then how do you spread that to like adjacent fan communities or adjacent audiences?

53:31Yeah, I think that's great advice. so as we wrap up this episode we always play a couple games so are you game for a game always okay so my beautiful diy wheel this is a segment that we call spin the record and i have a bunch of fun questions on here relating to our conversation and relating to your work at stem so if you could just oh you already wrote that many questions oh yeah oh yeah okay we come prepared here great um so just spin the wheel and let's see what it lands on i'll read it out it's actually a pretty good spin well it's kind of in between two What are your tips for picking the right distributor?

54:07Milana Lewis:Figure out what you need help with. Some distributors are really good at digital marketing. Some distributors are really good at content creation. Some distributors are really good at international. Some distributors are really good at, I wouldn't call it ANRing a project, but getting more involved in the earlier point of creation, having a real thought partner in the process and because you need the money, right? And some are just really good at giving you money and getting out of your way. Decide what it is you're looking for and map to that. And I think the other point that's really important is don't sign with the company, sign with the person.

54:41Because every distributor at this point has a point person, a point team will be working with. And just making sure that they're the ones that you'll be working with through the duration of your release and that they're actually going to be there still because there's some that have a lot of turnover. You read my mind. I was about to say, what if your person leaves, though? unfortunately that is the music business right now that is speaking of what you were saying earlier at the very top of the conversation about how there was this time period around piracy when so many people at major labels got laid off and it led to this growth of independent of the independent sector the amount of people that i know who have been laid off in the last two years is insane i'm i'm hoping that it leads to this like beautiful resurgence of independent music companies and stuff but there's been a lot of consolidation there's going to be a lot of fragmentation as a result of it, as always.

55:29Yeah. I don't know what form it takes. I don't either. I don't either. But it's funny. I like I pitched the idea of a story about like, you know, could all these layoffs lead to this beautiful resurgence of the independent sector? And one of my co-workers was like, I think I've written about that before. She's been a billboard for like 20 years. And I was digging through the archives to see if I could find it. And I found she wrote the exact same story in 1998. In 1998. That's her days. Yeah, it was like right before Napster. This was where UMG became what it is now. Essentially, there was a bunch of consolidation and a lot of people lost their jobs and she posited the exact same thing back then.

56:09So the more things change, the more they stay the same. But let's give the wheel one more spin. What is the biggest lesson you've learned on the job at STEM? This is one that I say all the time, and it really is the simple for me.

56:24Milana Lewis:do what you say you're going to do when you say you're going to do it and if you can't get ahead of it and tell people why that is great advice it is just like it's that easy in this business and it is not to be taken for granted because it's so freaking rare it drives me up the wall yeah i need to take that advice unfortunately that is like the lesson everything comes back to that and actually the other thing is if it's an if it's a maybe it's a no every mistake I've made in decisions and that decision could be everything from partnering to hiring to putting something out in the product to something I've said in the press if it's a maybe it's a no like follow your gut your gut has been oriented with you for as long as you've been alive and it has the ability to make decisions or guide you when you're entirely subconscious.

57:20Like I think your brain is not the only thing that guides you. That's great advice. Okay. So we're moving on to what would you cue, which I ask every time I do a podcast here. Okay. So what would you cue to take you back to your childhood? What's one song thing that comes to mind are my first few CDs that I ordered off bmg right which were tlc boys to men and all for one and then shortly after spice girls

57:47Milana Lewis:and the amount of time that i spent in my childhood making up dances trying to recreate the costumes off the music videos that i saw on mtv that is my childhood right that is what i spent all of my free time doing so it's any of those songs on any of those albums will cue that for me at those memories. That's great. Okay. What would you cue to represent your favorite era of music? Like my late teens into my early twenties, which was the resurgence of dance music. So I grew up in Detroit. I was really close to Windsor. There were really fun raves that were being thrown by Richie Hahn and Derek May.

58:23And that's really when I fell in love with music, was just sneaking into Windsor and like going to those parties. And then after I moved to LA, it was very much like the pop emo scene here which was fine and fun and like i love paramore i love a lot of the bands that came out of that era um but i still loved dance music and i think in the call it early 2010s in the 2000 teens is that we call it i guess so how do you describe the 2012 13 14 15 of the world 2010s 20 teens yeah which was dominated by like the dutch djs I thought that was a really fun era Yeah Is there one artist in particular That we should check out from that era?

59:07Everything that was Avicii and Afrojack, right? Because it was like dominating the festivals It was the beginning of like the Calvin Harris Not the beginning, but like that's when Calvin Harris And Steve Aoki and Dylan Francis And all these guys were emerging It's funny, the DJ who I loved back then Who's now like becoming the cool guy is Solomon Oh, nice Early on Solomon There we go I love that Okay, what would you cue to remember your favorite concert i'm gonna give a shout out to my husband's artist in this one um and because it's top of mind right carol gf coachella one of my favorite shows i've ever been to was her show in colombia um in medellin in her hometown the energy the venue the music the dancing was just so much fun um i also loved seeing war on drugs i don't listen to their music that much but I like loved their show that I went to that was either and I can't remember now if it was at the Greek or the Hollywood Bowl but it was in one of those like outdoor theaters I love that so fun you can't be Greek or Hollywood Bowl to me no the ambience is just incredible so much better

1:00:11Milana Lewis:than anything else yeah but it doesn't work for every artist no no no you have to be a certain type of artist otherwise it feels a little bit too like I'm sitting in my seat I'm removed from the experience some people are standing room only type people but um I will say one other show that I thought was super fun that I went to this year which was entirely unexpected I saw one of our up-and-coming artist masterpiece in Brooklyn at a small venue with like 100 people and I've never seen kids jumping so high for so long they were just like so into him and I loved watching every minute of it I feel like that's what this is all about you know is actually seeing the legitimate impact that the artists that you work with yeah have in real life and also seeing their fans react When I go to those shows, I'm watching the show, but I'm more watching the fans because I'm so curious as to like who's showing up.

1:00:56Milana Lewis:What is the demographic? Why are they here? What are they wearing? Who are they with? How are they moving? Like all of those elements I think are really important to absorbing when you're deciding on how to help position an artist. Yeah. Well, Milana, thank you so much for coming to On The Record. Thank you for having me. Such a great conversation as always. All right. Thank you so much to Milana Lewis for joining me to talk about the crazy amount of songs that are being released every day and how that has impacted the music industry. And thank you for listening to this week's episode of On The Record.

1:01:22If you liked today's show, give us a follow on Instagram or on our brand new TikTok page at Billboard On The Record, where you can find new clips of the show every single week. We'd also appreciate it if you rated us on your favorite podcast platform. All of these things help On The Record grow bigger and better than ever. Again, I'm your host, Kristen Robinson, and tune in next week for another peek behind the curtain of the music business. I'll see you then.

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