Spotify Boycotts, Solidarity, and Jet2 Rage: Our Top 3 Moments of 2025

0:00Welcome to part two of Drowning Sounds, Stories of the Year Rundown. Our little look at the biggest news stories, themes and topics of 2025. I'm joined once again in this episode by the brilliant music journalist Emma Wilkes and we talk through what we think are the three biggest stories of the year in this episode. If you missed part one, there's two topics in that episode. Megagigs was one of them. You can go back and find that in our podcast feed. and in this episode as well as our picks of the year we share some related interviews brought you in partnership with kobuzz the music streaming service which has music in very high quality with human curation and they were two of my absolute favorite things we're thrilled to be partnering with them so much so we're making a playlist to go with every episode of our podcast so you can listen to the music that we're talking about if you head to dranninsound.org forward slash playlists you can hear songs from artists that we talk about on this show you can also find our albums of the year sampler playlist with a song from each of our favorite albums of the year and there is a special festive alternative music playlist which has some Sophie and Stephens in as you might expect and some low um but a few things that you might not expect so um if you're looking for a festive playlist I thoroughly recommend popping it on whilst you're wrapping some presents or something.

1:23I am, yeah, a little bit happy with that one. It's been a few years in the making with some of the choices in there, but there's definitely some very silly picks. Anyway, this is part two of our review of the year. I will leave me to hand over to me and Emma at Shaw Studios in central London, and I'll see you at the end of the episode.

1:58there was no song of the summer number three in the top five stories of the year i kept seeing people say this and i was like oh i must just be out of touch surely there is surely there's some like brat thing happening right now like i was like sabrina carpenter's everywhere there must be a song of the summer there yeah and then you realize the song was like a year old yeah but even but even then obviously she did have she did have music out and then she put out man child maybe in the hopes that that would become the song of the summer but i don't think that quite took off maybe we were just really spoiled last summer when last summer was the summer of chapel rhone and sabrina carpenter and obviously brat um and now it's uh nothing but to jet to holiday um as i've heard some people suggest and i mean i'm not really sure what the explanation for it what the explanation for it is are we all too busy being angry but then again i can also see how brat was very much belonged to the era it was in because it obviously offered a hedonistic space my take from that meme was that most people couldn't really afford a holiday so a budget airline advert fits the moment of a cost of living moment it certainly does actually yeah and i think that people could have a laugh about the fact they couldn't really afford a holiday so they were creating clips of doing stuff that was really stupid and boring or um and i think that it speaks to a moment of when we've got influences and millionaires and billionaires jetting off and doing all these funds like maybe i'm overthinking it but i think sometimes like fashion and hairstyles and memes follow a moment they absolutely do culture can always say something about the times that we're in um even something like jeans for example i'm wearing some straight leg jeans now i definitely would not have owned them before the pandemic but because everyone was sitting around in pajamas and tracksuit bottoms that obviously changed the style of jeans that people bought um the uh are we gonna get into sydney sweeney that's not oh no please no i think there's there is enough there is enough sydney sweeney discourse out there and there's probably loads right now because a new film has not done very well at the box office at all um well on the relationship between the song of the summer we had a discussion at reading about the sound of the summer being rage and to me i was just really excited about loads of music that was just really angry and really um like Lambrini Girls, for instance, really felt like they met a moment.

4:40Even Marina in the Diamonds' new record was just quite sweary and passive-aggressive with Contissimo, which hopefully doesn't get picked up by the... That's absolutely sung. That's almost as good as the Lambrini Girls song Contology 101. Yeah. The C-bomb was used effectively, I think, this year. In a year of actual bombs. don't use bombs use the c-bomb instead um it's much more fun especially when you put like a bit of a flair on it like what they like what they did in that song which basically just lists a load of things that count as cunty from going to therapy to i think my favorites include having autistic meltdowns and doing a poo at your friend's house we might have to we might have to beep that just for youtube that we live in an era of suppression puntology 101 i don't know maybe I should have just referred to it as that because I mean nobody's gonna censor big long boats yeah exactly um but for me like my favorite artist I've discovered this year is Sophie Urizzella um we interviewed her at Reading what would you put on a playlist it could be one of your own songs that's just like a rage summer playlist doesn't have to be from this year we're gonna make a playlist for everyone's picks nice uh well the doll people is one that makes me most rage to perform uh but something that's not mine the lighthouse by halsey

6:16i love the rage in her music like there's something really special about and again like bits of her music have gone viral um and again it's feminine rage pretty much central to the reason why her music's so powerful i mean it's rare that taylor swift and i have and agree on an artist but she opened for taylor swift at wembley stadium last year and she's playing grassroots venues she's smothering herself in mud and playing at festivals um she after i interviewed her she ends up performing with halsey and she talked about halsey being one of her major influences so i was really excited for her and it's like um and i think i think like billy eilish and a few other artists are being supportive of her work she's got a really big following already so i would put my hands on my heart and say she'll be one of the biggest artists of next year and i will be thrilled because she adores nine inch nails like who she got into through halsey which i find like really cool yeah exactly i think she did i think did it was it trent resner who worked on yeah yeah if i can't have love i want power but no that makes a lot of sense and i absolutely am on board with you because i saw her for the first time at reading and thought she was absolutely memorizing she's doing something really really clever blending all these styles together and actually making points and exploring issues in a way that's actually genuinely feels really you can tell where she comes from i think especially in the song out in the guard which was one of our track of the weeks there is i jokingly said to the others she's billy eilish harder than Billie Eilish does because there's some very sort of Billie Eilishish whispery bits yes and but but it makes sense and it works and she she absolutely makes it her own and the fact that she can support Taylor Swift but then also there's a slight gothic side to her music and she can appeal to filthy emos like me I think that would probably really really work in her favor if it's that much of a broad church that anybody from no matter their musical background can get invested in what she's doing interestingly when you were talking then i was thinking i didn't write in my notes about jade at glastonbury and how one of the unexpected members of little mix making this amazing rant about farage in the far right um because i was about to say we should talk about nova twins who've been one of the bands of the year and there's some amazing rage to their music um but they've also been the ambassadors for um amnesty international they've been involved with something that they've done i went to see them a few weeks ago and they had this big love over hate flag that i think is related to an antinistia international campaign they're working with music minds matter they're working with independent venue week um i am so so happy to see them get absolutely everywhere because they've been grafting for such long time they've been around for a lot longer than most people realize i think they formed the band in 2014 and like they've been they had a spread in cosmopolitan and everything and it's amazing to sort of see them take they've sort of very much been champions of grassroots music and sort of starting up in that really organic way and to see them sort of go as far as they have I think definitely speaks volumes just how amazing British rock music is right now but how much people are latching onto them and all the sort of the change that they've vouched for they've spoken up for trans rights of Palestine for Sudan and everything so I am I've got a lot of time for them I always have and I probably always will and they're interviewed i've interviewed them a lot fun fact they are my most interviewed band your most interviewed how many times you've interviewed them five wow okay the uh we still haven't had them on dronin sound we need to remedy that we've got to do we've got to do that yeah no they'd be absolutely they would be absolutely perfect they were like the second band i ever interviewed for money i thought that i wasn't at glastonbury but i watched their set on tv and i thought it was amazing so i need to go see them live oh you absolutely do like they are so consistent live they always absolutely bring it and you should have come you should have come to kentish town for him a few weeks ago i should have done um can we talk about my one of my favorite clips of the year um mannequin pussy i love them so much missy de beecher can i be you when i grow up please and their set of reading was phenomenal um and but this clip i don't need to introduce it let's just play it i just like i care so much and maybe too much about like rock music standing for fucking something i care so much about rock music and punk music standing for fucking something i care so much about rock and punk music having something to fucking say having the ability to articulate human emotions human rage the breath of the human experience.

10:56I care so much about rock and punk music poking at the establishment, poking at conservative culture, poking at the traditions that should be burned down. I care so much about rock music actually standing defiantly in the face of fucking mediocrity, violence, misogyny, sexism transphobia homophobia racism all that fucking shit free palestine so at number two in drannan sounds top five stories of the year was the protest movements we had a summer of big speeches on stage of members of parliament getting upset of boycotts of kkr who bought superstruct who owned most of the grass well not even grassroots festivals like big festivals across europe um artists pulling out because of their connections to israel their connections to fossil fuel um and basically them being this like big private equity company buying into various different industries that musicians don't want the profits of their work to be funding i think that's pretty fair enough um and the protest really were asking the organizers to divest or basically asking the private equity company to divest its money like to put it into things better suited to the values of the people they're trying to profit from the work of um i think that's a simplified way of explaining because i think boycotts end up being mis-framed as being people just being anti something and actually no most people want the companies and organizations to operate better like the fossil free books movement that boycotted hay festival and edinburgh books festival literary festival um that was over the sponsor and asking the sponsor to stop putting its money into both the military and into fossil fuels and it's like when your huge organization is propping up these businesses it's not that difficult to change two percent of your business activity because it's not 90 of your business activity to shift like how the world operates and that's what people are like well we're just going to pull out of this event if you're the sponsors of it and it makes you as a company in the public mind you sponsored this event to art wash your brand or whatever the the topic might be but it's slightly different with the ownership of an event versus the sponsors of an event but i think that as we saw with the band boycott barclays movement um which previously was like a boycott of barclays at things like wimbledon which brian eno was part of a few years ago and barclays it's about how they invest their money it's not about oh you're a bank you're a big business you're bad it's you give your money to these militaries and fund weaponry and without that funding and investment these organizations these organizations perpetuating war wouldn't have the funds they need in order to i might be oversimplifying slightly but i followed these movements closely

14:20Hi there, it's Emma here. I'm gatecrashing the podcast to quickly tell you about the Drowned in Sound newsletter. Every Wednesday, I invite myself into your inbox, with permission, of course, to share opinion writing and resources, tell you about cool things that you should be involved in within the world of music, activism, etc. I also bring track of the week and a little bit of hopeful news for you, because we all know that the news cycle can be grim at the best of times. Drowned in Sound newsletter every Wednesday in your inbox. Sign up now.

14:59To me, it was a summer of really deep protests, people losing thousands of pounds to pull out of events, people making a stand in public spaces like the Merry Wallopers being pulled off stage. I was about to mention them, yeah. And we had that, I really liked the interview with Iona from Clifford that I recorded at Reading, where she talked about why the Irish solidarity is the way it is. Because the same soldiers, British soldiers that were in Ireland, were the same soldiers that went to Palestine. Could you explain to people sort of why an island is such a big thing? Absolutely. I mean, I might not be able to give the best historical overview.

15:42But basically Irish people, we've always kind of seen the Palestinians as their brothers and sisters. We've experienced the same fate by the same oppressors. There's actually like, I was reading a story recently that some of the exact same British soldiers that were, that did an ambush like basically five minutes from my house, were the same British soldiers that went over to Palestine. So we're being fucked over by the exact same oppressors. And they're doing the same thing. They're taking away lands, they're taking away languish. they're taking away people's lives and then they're cutting off the food and they're calling it a famine.

16:16It's not famine, it's genocide. They did the exact same thing to us. We didn't have a famine. We had food. They cut it off from us. That's why, and we're just watching history repeat itself once more. Irish artists have driven that a lot. People like Bambi Thurg, people like Sprintz and obviously Fontaine's as well. So I don't know. I guess that what I'm trying to say is that nuance and being in solidarity with everyone in a movement. And I know the left is great at seeking traitors rather than seeking kind of the right base are united around who they hate. Whereas on the left, we fragment and fracture and we don't get behind.

17:00and like and i think it's in a way it's kind of reassuring that left can kind of like but also when you look in america at the moment it is people on the right that are also calling for a ceasefire and calling for the end of spending like marjorie taylor green is talking about stopping sending us she's america first so she doesn't want so much money spent and like i'm not i wasn't sure i knew about that but then if you can get if you can get her on side and you've actually found something that you and her might have in common then that really speaks volumes But then you've got Nick Fuentes, the like really extreme right winger, who is really deeply anti-Semitic.

17:36And you've got Kanye putting out Nazi t-shirts and like, anyway, I feel I don't know whether this basically I think the protest movements this year were really moving. They really were. And I think you really summed it up really well after Glastonbury with how you felt. And like, I spent a lot of time working in kind of climate projects and seeing the intersection of military missions and the conversations are happening. But what isn't necessarily happening is that click through to a wider audience. Like I thought Billie Eilish making that speech about billionaires in front of Mark Zuckerberg.

18:13I'd say if you have money, it would be great to use it for good things and maybe give it to some people that need it.

18:25And love you all, but there's a few people in here that have a lot more money than me.

18:33And if you're a billionaire, why are you a billionaire? No hate, but yeah, give your money away, shorties. Love you guys. Thank you so much. This is extraordinary. Billie Eilish will be donating proceeds from her Hit Me Hard and Soft tour to support organizations, projects and voices dedicated to food equity, climate justice, reducing carbon pollution and combating the climate crisis. That donation, ladies and gentlemen, will be$11.5 million.

19:07Really powerful moving. And like it might not seem brave from the outside, but I suspect there was a long moment of her thinking am I actually going to do this and say this yeah props to her for that and actually while we're on that note as well actually it's slightly different but I think it would be a miss to not mention No Music for Genocide as well just how much traction that has managed to build up how many artists have gotten involved in geo-blocking the music in Israel that's brought everybody together people from all over the world actually creating meaningful action almost a little bit like the cultural boycotts of south africa yeah a few decades ago so yeah i think that project is i heard that the organizers of it speak at an event recently i think it's a really powerful unifying project i think it allowed a lot of people that haven't spoken up to join in like to say okay yeah we agree we've pulled our music um i don't know in a weird way i think there are other more powerful ways of showing that solidarity but if that showed like for instance i thought it was interesting listening to samia the dj who pulled out sonar quite late because originally um her boiler room session from amala is really amazing i'd really recommend people watch it um but there's this kind of like artist looking to the palestinian artist on the bill at sonar to decide if they're going to pull out or not and i think that was quite important yeah people didn't just it's like if you're pulling out but the artist who wants to go there and make a statement isn't um i don't know i think that a lot of this stuff is really complicated and i know that some people can disagree with some of what i've said over the last 10 minutes or so um but i think that there hasn't really felt like there's been space to have those conversations and i think anything less than full solidarity is often seen as kind of criticism or that you're not with the movement or those kinds of things and i think that actually as with my journalist hat on stepping outside of things trying to bring attention to topics and more people into something which i know isn't necessarily the job of a journalist it's a job of an activist but as a job of a communicator you want to make it so that people don't feel like oh i i agree with you but i can't do this because i'll get this kind of criticism or lose me this opportunities but going back to last january 2024 there was a yougov poll that said 80 of people in the uk wanted a ceasefire but if you paid attention to the uk media the establishment media corporate media it felt like the other way around it felt like 80 of people wanted the destruction of gaza which was not necessarily a and that wasn't to say the 20 of people that didn't want to cease fire wanted that um it was i just think don't think that we have the cultural environment like i think it's something like 82 of people working in the media are from like middle upper middle class and upper class backgrounds and they come at the world from a very different viewpoint generational wealth family members that might be profiting from fossil fuel industries and people that are profiting from the war industries and like and that's not to say that um i don't know i just think that there's a lot of very wealthy insulated people that don't necessarily understand the need for liberation of different groups that don't want to talk about the reasons their family has so much wealth yeah because i mean that's the thing it is comfortable for them but going to back to what you were saying earlier as well this very much this year and especially this summer is very much affirmed the power of culture as a battleground culture is a background you cannot separate it from what else is going on in the world and but ultimately i think it can actually also be a really accessible way for people to find out about this sort of thing become involved you hear a band talk about it what else is there you go you go in search for resources that might actually be able to tell you more why did so many people care about this thing what does this relate to so i think i don't think its role can be underestimated really obviously there's far bigger things going on in the world but i think it's still such an important site of being able to find that sense of solidarity and also actually be in a space with people who actually are on the same page as you as well.

23:51This episode of the Drowning Sound podcast is presented in partnership with Cobus, the platform that pays artists four times more than the industry standard, that has high quality audio, that has human curation, which as a human curator is something that I truly value over the kind of algo slop that you get on some platforms. And I really like the fact that you can really hear the difference. I know lots of places talk about the audio qualities and as soon as I moved across it sort of felt like I was rediscovering music which is one of the platform's slogans. If you're worried about your playlists you can use Soundiz.

24:30It's a really good tool that's part of the sign up process when you join GoBuzz. it just transfers everything across. If you'd like a free trial of this platform that's independently owned and made for music enthusiasts, head to drownedinsound.org forward slash playlists, where you can hear not only our playlists, but get a free trial. You can also find these details in the show notes to this episode. And now back to this episode of the Drowned in Sound podcast brought to you in partnership with Kobuz.

25:06so one of the most moving conversations we had this year we did it together as a one interview we've tag teamed on was chatting to ral reynolds for immense shikari and i thought what he had to stay on stage at reading and what he said to us backstage was really moving so i'd just like to quickly play a little bit of that and you can click and watch the full interview and listen back to the full episode when you go on stage today there's a lot of things happening in the world how do you decide what to talk about that is one of the we used to joke about the hardest thing to do is pick a set list you know we've got seven albums it's really difficult and it is genuinely but now there's that as well like well what what do you use your platform to try and express um i don't know how to answer that because i don't know we just sort of um you know we try and do it by what songs we're playing so this song is about this should we speak about this one today or should we speak about this one and just try and like keep it varied um i mean obviously at the moment like i think gaza takes precedence because it's just so horrific and and it seems to be no end in sight um but then also you know you i was speaking to a climate scientist just last week and it's like jesus christ like we are on a terrifying trajectory and it and i it's hard to speak about that on stage because a lot of people especially here in this festival we don't realize it you know it's such a slow moving beast um but that really is the most important thing in human civilization there was also a really great resident advisor podcast with sama he's from palestine her live boiler room set from ramallah is worth watching though boiler room I'm now owned by KKR, who people are boycotting.

26:56But I'd just like to play you a little bit of what she had to say in that interview, because I thought it was far more important than anything I would have to say. After 7th of October, for me, techno shattered. I stopped seeing it the same way. I stopped listening to it the same way. I stopped dancing to it the same way. I stopped playing it the same way. It completely, kind of the community that I always thought had my back, kind of disappeared for me, especially that they stood by my side when I went to prison and they're the reason, like, they're a big reason of why I got out of prison. And I really had this, you know, I came out of there saying how much it is a community that will stand with each other no matter what.

27:36But when, you know, the gun came to the head, everything changed in a really drastic way that it kind of, for me, it shattered everything and it really broke my heart. But at the same time, it kind of opened a blank new page and I had nothing I was you know I was working towards something in the industry and then all of a sudden I stopped having that that I'm working towards you know now I'm more focused on the crowd and the people I stopped being focused on the industry itself and started being trying to focus on different things on the people on the unity of the people on you know the organizers that actually want to do something with their gigs and have a purpose in they're doing and that is kind of giving me fulfillment again in a way i went to the together for palestine show at wembley um arena um i sat behind the um ambassador for um the west bank i think it is um or palestine in general i'm not too sure and um jeremy corbyn was sat a little way along for me.

28:44I listened to Louis Theroux make amazing speeches. I saw Paul Weller and Brian Eno play on stage together with Hot Chip and Nadine Shah and it was a really moving and uplifting event. But when Mehdi Hassan came on stage he made one of the most moving speeches I've ever heard. Really powerful. I was like how can anyone follow that? And this journalist called Yara Eid came on spoke and this clip about the impact on journalism and the impact on journalists like I've got goosebumps even just thinking about it Hi everyone my name is Yara Eid I'm a Palestinian journalist born and raised in Gaza

29:33I was, my family and I are among some of the few survivors of the Black Friday massacre in 2014. And my whole life was completely changed because I survived. And that's why I became a journalist. I'm standing here today because I was fortunate enough to survive another brutal genocide. Just because I wasn't there when it started. Just because I was lucky and I was living in London. But a lot of people in Gaza weren't lucky enough to survive. 90 members of my family were killed. in our family home. My cousins, my aunts, my uncles, their grandchildren, their children, almost everyone from my father's side.

30:35I still don't believe it, honestly. It's been two years and I don't believe their gun. I think it will hit me when I go back to Gaza. And I haven't been allowed to go and report, even though I have a Palestinian passport only. I cannot report on the killing of my own people in my own home. I've lost more than 270 journalists, colleagues, friends, some of whom were mentors, some of whom were my closest friends, my companions. One of them was my soulmate, Ibrahim Lafi.

31:23so the top five news stories themes topics of this year at number one is the exodus from spotify it's been something we've talked about a lot on the podcast it's been something you've written about on the newsletter why has the fever broken on the biggest streaming platform in music do you think i mean it's a good question i wonder if it was always coming because people's grievances for spotify had already been laid bare in terms of the sound quality and especially in terms of how little it pays artists but firstly they they've been airing ice adverts they have been airing and obviously daniel x investments ice being the people picking up illegal immigrants across america a lot of whom tend to end up being mums at the school gates and people working on taco stands and lots of people who've lived in America their whole life.

32:18But firstly, there's that. But the larger controversy is Daniel X's investments in AI war drone technology. I think it was 600 million euros. $693 million, I think, was the number. And as such, there's been a bunch of artists, including Zuzu, is that how that prince pronounced? Zuzu and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, countless others as well who have left the platform. and that's also probably amounted to users as well. I don't use Spotify anymore as a result. I am a Quobos convert now. But I think it's also kind of reflective of other kind of movements in the streaming world as well where there's more sort of smaller emerging platforms coming forward with actually an artist focus and a community focus.

33:07And I think what that says to me as well, I think it's a reflection of the way I think music is moving as well. there's this sort of more emphasis on like artist-led things community building as well like the artist being sort of the nucleus of a community and there's this sort of shift away from an industry being governed by giant corporations well i think also spotify like i feel like it's they've had the icarus moment of like flying too close to the sun because i think in the story of the wings burn of course yeah and it's the sense of like it's so big it's become central to almost every record campaign conversations in all the major record companies like even though apple is not that much smaller it's not the center of conversations i mean what they i think what they've done with relaunching apple music this year has been really powerful and really good um but there's been some really big groundbreaking like zane low has done some brilliant interviews and like broken international news stories through that and that wasn't happening a while back um but i think with spotify there was also the donations to trump's inauguration um obviously the royalties to artists adding an ai dj no one needed that no like it's everywhere like you just find it infiltrating all of the tech platforms tech platforms you use and I just think go away didn't they do something I can't remember what the exact detail was but I think there's some they've probably got some sort of partnership going on yeah as I can that's my vague recollection anyway and we've seen Daniel X step down as CEO I don't think he's completely stepped away from the company but I think there was so much noise and two other people have stepped into the space so I guess it's harder to focus on two unknown people rather than the founder yeah especially somebody who is i think i think made a lot of headlines from when he sort of started referring to music as content as if to cheapen the actual genuine value of what it is that that um what it is that's basically the building blocks of spotify there was also the discovery mode on spotify which is when a track auto plays after you're listening to something like it's algorithmically driven but to do that you have to opt in to discovery mode as an artist to a record company and that is being they're being sued for payola there's a lawsuit that started this year which is i think will end up being a bigger story next year breaking news spotify payola another lawsuit no spotify is facing yet another class action lawsuit accusing it of running a modern form of payola through its discovery mode feature the same tool the company claims helps artists get discovered.

35:53Filed in Manhattan federal court, the 39 page suit claims that Spotify deceives paid subscribers by secretly selling playlist visibility through undisclosed promotional deals with the labels. Say it isn't so, creating the illusion of personalized recommendations when in reality money drives the algorithm. There was also some misreporting. I kind of want to flag and again this is not something that I really want to flag but lots of people got very excited showing a picture of Spotify share price dropping but if you zoom out it's not dropped very much in a very it's like in a short period of time it's dropped a bit but actually long over long term it's still up from where it was in like February this year or something and I think it's pretty important that we don't get complacent oh yeah putting pressure on like most people would want spotify to be a really great healthy platform that's beneficial to the music ecosystem what people don't want is the argument we can't pay better royalties we can't pay songwriters more because songwriters still get paid more than the if you do a cover the original songwriter gets less and i think that um that just feels like there's so much broken with spotify and we've done some really great episodes like well i think they're really great i've asked the questions it's the guest that did the great work um talking about spotify's exodus and i really recommend going back and listening to the episode i did with laura from minor birds who put out the disarmed spotify video that had millions of views um she's currently on tour at the time of recording across america playing community spaces inviting organizers to be on our guest lists and then we did a follow-up interview with cut off the spigot and kajibonet and we talked with laura as well kind of about the ethical alternatives the choices that fans can make the choices that artists can make and i think that just had a lot in it i really liked that they'd all done loads of research and it all cohered with the research i'd done and like you i've moved across the kobas with my music consumption so that was our top five stories of the year we've probably missed something really obvious we might kick ourselves later but hopefully not and i think that all of them are kind of linked to corporate power very much so and i think all of them reflect wider inequalities in society i think the rise of the far right is exploiting the cost of living crisis i think that the boycott and protest movements are because these companies are making so much money out of war out of fossil fuels i think with spotify again like that money that daniel x spent on ai war drones didn't go back to artists it didn't go from the fan into the music ecosystem um and i think that ai is there's an amazing graph of just the money going backwards and forwards between nvidia microsoft chat gpt or open ai is then they're called and it's just this like or a borealus i think you pronounce it the way a snake eats its own tail and it's just like a site recycling of like a trillion dollars apparently going through a system of companies investing in each other and um yeah i think that i think that increasingly people realize that they're not benefiting from the systems and the infrastructure that's there and i think we're seeing people build new things so i think that i hope that all of the different solidarity movements all the different boycott movements can all become accessible to people and become something which doesn't feel like a career-ending risk to make an ethical choice and as a consumer doesn't feel like laboring a point if you're streaming music all the platforms have almost all the same music so where you choose to put your time intention and money makes a difference because it means that platform can get better it means that if they're paying better royalties then that sets a new normal for the industry like if where you go to shows and the festivals you choose to go to like if the lineups are reasonably similar and you can go to an independent event that's supporting a community-driven project rather than a private equity owned event like i know that's not always a choice that consumers can make but i think that it's i don't know i have hope yeah this is literally what i was just about to come on to in the sense that i have been to a lot of shows where an artist has made reference to the world being on fire or something like that or the need of sort of unity etc but and that is very much true but within all of this and within those communities they build and with what people are trying to build now that works better for the majority of people as opposed to having our lives governed by corporate power there is a lot that you can take from that and find a lot of hope i know that music in itself and gives me a lot of hope it's massively massively responsible for actually keeping me going rather than sort of feeling like everything is doomed everything is not doomed and that is something that i've always tried to tell people and that is something i will very much in part now but this actually there is potential kind of simmering under the surface with some really exciting things to happen that actually could be far more beneficial for the for like the majority of artists as well we've seen we've seen platforms rise and fall like we've seen twitter become a much smaller thing than it was oh yeah it's a waste it's a wasteland now but that also kind of means with in and of itself that it well it seems like these companies are all powerful and too big to fail that might not be true we can dismantle them brick by brick yeah brick by boring brick yes yes a paramour reference in there in the end in fact you know what i might want to play out with i know it's not from this year but can we just play the clip that elon musk got upset about with uh hayley williams talking about the trump regime please do yes thank you for listening this has been a dronin sound podcast i've been sean adams i've I've been Emma Wilkes.

42:17And You've Been You. We'll see you next time. Project 2025 is Donald Trump's playbook for controlling and punishing women, poor people, people of colour, and the LGBTQ plus community. It is time for all Americans to band together and to finally defeat the Trump agenda.

42:48Well, thank you for listening to part two of our review of the year. Emma and I had a lovely time chatting. We didn't get into too many arguments, which is interesting. I think there's a self-selectedness in hiring someone whose taste and opinions I really value and admire. And Emma has such a great way of way of the words. So I hope you enjoyed that episode. And I thank you all for listening this year. we've got a couple more episodes still to come. We've got a special chat with Hannah who is a strategist who works at a brilliant company called Midia and we talked about the creator economy which is so central to everything and you might think creators of YouTubers and influencers but actually pretty much everything now is part of the creator economy.

43:37People trying to transition their audiences from one platform to another so it's a really insightful interesting conversation. She's got so much knowledge and wisdom. And I think given the themes of this year on the podcast, we're kind of looking forward to 2050. I really liked her answer where she was talking about what she would do if she had huge sums of money to spend and to address some of the bigger problems in the industry. So it's a really interesting chat. On New Year's Day, there's a special episode of the podcast, which I recorded at Manchester Museum, which is the Natural History Museum in Manchester.

44:11and I spoke to some people that you wouldn't normally expect to hear on a music podcast. I spoke to two amazing ladies from the RSPB which is the Royal Society of Protection of Birds and yeah they told me which bird is this slipknot of the bird world which might not might surprise you actually and yeah we just talked about the power of nature for both your mental health and as a source of inspiration so there's a couple of other people on there. there's another Hannah who previously was the A &R person for Phoebe Bridges. She now works at Warp Records but she was involved in organising this amazing event called Earthsonic Live which took place at Manchester Museum which basically brought music and nature and climate all together under one roof.

44:57There were some amazing talks and I can't wait to share that with you and the reason why I'm putting out on the year's day is I thought well most people have a few days off at the start of the year. If you're lucky to have that time off because I know that's not something that everyone has grab your wellies get out into a wood find a nice park go for a walk and have a listen I just thought it's an excuse to get out into nature and that is one of the things which is great for my mental health which is why it's the first episode of a new season of the podcast which season five is going to be all about resilience and I think there's a lot of conversations about mental health and music and what I wanted to do was try to put together a series of conversations where resilience was like not the theme to the fore but a theme to the to the kind of definitely in amongst the conversation and for me I feel like the interviews I've done already I've just been thinking so much about the struggles that people are going through and some of the big crises and challenges economically as well as culturally that we're going through and taken a lot of inspiration.

46:05I've had conversations so far, which will come out in January with Charles Bidder from 101 Part-Time Jobs. That conversation, if you want to start a podcast, will give you a ton of ideas of how to make it your podcast that only you can make. He's such a great character. And even though he's done over 500 interviews, he said this was like the third or fourth interview he's ever done. So I can't wait to share that chat. he was so open and thoughtful and we just talk about the love of the medium of podcasting as much as anything else um i've also got a chat with kelly lee owens who was one of my favorite electronic artists and yes i did ask her what it was like to talk depeche mode and now i didn't ask her too much about charlie xcx in fact i don't know if i even asked her anything about charlie she dj'd at the big ibithra event that charlie put on so yeah that's that's coming in january and And the resilience part of that was a lot of talking about taking music and culture and music and club music, especially into places where it isn't normally.

47:09So she's been putting on events in kind of small towns in North Wales, community centres and such an inspiring chat. She's an ambassador for the Music Venues Trust as well. So we get into a little bit of that. Thanks for listening this year. Thank you to everyone who's DM'd or WhatsApp'd or emailed a link to the podcast to a friend. that's how the word of mouth spreads about this podcast really it's how all podcasts spread really it's not people posting them um around the place i'm not expecting to go make flyers for me and share it with people but if you hear something that resonates with you and you know the person that would appreciate it then it's great when you pass that on um thank you to josh crags who has been helping him massively radically improve the audio quality of our podcast this year um you will notice.

47:59I've been much more consistent. I think there's been over 40 episodes this year, whereas last year it was nowhere near that many because partly like the art of making a podcast sound good is spending the time and attention on editing and getting things right and scripting and all those things. And often the last thing I was wanting to do was sit down and listen to my own voice, which I'm sure most of you listening right now are thinking this guy does sound like a nice the sound of his own voice um but no it's like sitting and editing yourself especially video is quite a it's not great for your brain so thank you josh for all your great work this year thanks to tom fenval who's come on board to help with some of the business development and we've been doing some other projects together um to keep the bills paid and uh thank you to emma wilkes who's been writing our newsletter this year and has been a great guest on these special episodes stay tuned for our predictions for 2026 which is also coming before christmas and uh yeah i've been sean adams you've been you this has been the dronin sound podcast and i will see you next time bye for now