Howdy,

Welcome to my blog! My name is Josh and I am a student at North East Scotland College. The purpose of this blog is to publish posts about how I feel the internet and online platforms in general have altered music promotion for both recognised and fresh artists. In other words, my mixtape is fire but why is nobody listening to it and how do I get people to listen to it. Shameless Soundcloud plug incoming. 

Now, hands up how many of you use YouTube to play music in the background while doing your studies, laundry, workout, cleaning, whatever?

One, two, three, yeah, okay pretty much all of you.

“But Josh I prefer to use Spotify instead” you may be thinking.

Perfect, hold that thought. Now, how many of you have stumbled upon a song on YouTube, or even just an artist, but couldn’t find a trace of them or the song on Spotify? I know I have. That soul crushing feeling that your personal playlist will forever be incomplete and that no other song can fill that silent void happens on a weekly basis for me.

Don’t fret however my little cub. Almost every obscure cover, remix, bootleg, flip, you name it, will be posted on Soundcloud more often than not by the original producer. The way music promotion works online is not dissimilar to how it is physically, it’s just all interconnected on a much broader scale to the point where online promotion is done more by the people promoted to than the promoter itself. On top of this, the entire virtual aspect allows for producers and artists a like to collaborate almost immediately either in person or on the other side of the world.

Let’s take a look at Chance the Rapper’s track “No Problem” on his Grammy winning mixtape “Coloring Book”. Chance enlisted the creative minds of Brasstracks, a duo comprising of Ivan Jackson and Conor Rayne that work around genres from electronic, funk, rap, R&B or anything that comes to mind.

Based in Brooklyn, New York Brasstracks are particularly known for their incorporation of brass instruments to provide melodies that pierce through groovy bass and drum lines. Seriously, give them a listen if you haven’t. Even if they aren’t your thing I’ll give you a sticker for trying.

Brasstracks’ first song off of their Good Love EP

The duo stated that the collaboration with Chance came about due to the high demand from fans commenting on every single song on their Soundcloud account asking for the Chicago based MC’s vocals. Ivan then tweeted the fans demands and tagged Chance not really expecting anything to come from it. Chance retweeted it and in January 2016 the duo met up with him in L.A. to record what eventually became the track “No Problem”.

If you’d like to read further on Brasstracks themselves as well as the collaboration with Chance check out this article by XXL.

http://www.xxlmag.com/news/2016/05/brasstracks-interview-making-chance-the-rapper-no-problem/

While Chance won 3 Grammy’s in total, Brasstracks shares one of those Grammy’s for “No Problem”. It’s amazing to think that if that one single tweet had not been sent and had there not been a constant flow of comments from their fans on their Soundcloud posts, Brasstracks would be one track short of a Grammy and international acclaim. I mean, Zane Low played the track four times in a row on Beats 1 when it dropped. This is but one example of how the internet has resulted in a wonderful collaboration between artists who want to work together to make the music they love and the music that their fans love to listen to.

THIS SONG WAS BIRTHED FROM MUSIC FANS WHO FIND NEW SHIT ON SOUNDCLOUD THATS SO DOPE THANK YOU FOR PUTTING THIS IN MOTION

— brasstracks (@brasstracks) 13 February 2017

In further posts to come, I will be focusing on more specific aspects of online platforms that have allowed music promotion to evolve while hopefully providing you, the reader, a light insight into the music production world as well as introducing you to some artists and genres you may never have heard of.

Stay tuned.