April 2023

Member Spotlight feat Donya & Chis of Sunlighter 🌞

Apr 03, 2023

Welcome new members that joined in March to the monthly edition of Music Club! You’ll receive Last Month Today (a playlist that gets refreshed monthly), a Member Spotlight (a Q&A with a member in the music space) and albums from this year I highly recommend.

This month’s Member Spotlight features Donya and Chris who work in tech and run Sunlighter, a music newsletter that spotlights the latest in industry news, tours & festivals in addition to featuring a new album & artist reco. They reached out to Music Club in February and excited to have another music community part of Music Club.

LAST MONTH TODAY *updated monthly with my favorite songs from March*

(songs 1-16 = non-electronic / songs 17-31 = electronic)

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT *Donya & Chris of Sunlighter

You two run a music industry newsletter called Sunlighter. How do you know each other and how did it come to life?

Thank you for featuring us! We first met about 8 years ago right after college when we both started working at a large tech company in Austin, Texas. Initially, Sunlighter was a wedge for me (Chris) to get press access into shows to see my favorite artists for free. To prove legitimacy, I bought a DSLR camera to provide photo coverage of the shows. Over time, it became a long-term hobby after I realized how thrilling and challenging it was to get a perfect shot of an artist as they were performing. Not too long after I started spreading the word on Sunlighter, Donya reached out to me about wanting to be involved. We met at a local coffee shop (Houndstooth), she expressed her passion about music, and the rest was history. We initially positioned Sunlighter as an online editorial and a creative passion project. As a side project outside of a demanding primary job, it can be difficult to stay committed, so for a year or two, Sunlighter went on hiatus. However, we picked it back up last August and changed both our medium and consistency of writing, which has really helped bring Sunlighter back to growth.

Running a weekly newsletter takes dedication and commitment. What are your favorite parts? What challenges do you face?

It takes a ton of commitment. Our favorite part is knowing that we’re providing something unique and valuable to any reader, whether it’s learning about an up-and-coming artist or keeping track of developments in the music industry. There’s something exciting about being the first to discover an artist before they make it big, and our goal is to build a community around that. Writing each week helps keep us accountable for expanding our music knowledge and music taste.

The biggest challenge we face is time, especially as we’re looking to grow our subscriber base. Another challenge is finding a unified voice with two unique writing styles. While we’ve found that having two distinct voices adds depth and personality to our newsletter, it can be hard to gauge whether our audience is receptive.

You just came back from SXSW. What were your highlights? Any new artists you recommend to readers?

It was great to be back in Austin, TX — the city where it all began! SXSW is always an incredible experience from an A&R perspective. You get exposed to so many talented artists before they hit mainstream appeal. In the past, we’ve seen countless artists like Khalid, Billie Eilish, Saweetie, 21 Savage, Lil Yachty, in small, intimate venues, which is unthinkable nowadays. That’s the allure of SXSW. We did a recap of artists we saw at SXSW here, but our favorite day was definitely the BOSE x NME showcase. We think JVKE has incredible staying power in the industry as a multi-instrumentalist, singer, and storyteller. Balming Tiger gives off outrageous energy while putting a unique spin on traditional K-Pop and sadie is probably our dark horse artist who’s very reminiscent of a combined Charli XCX and A.G. Cook production.

In Sunlighter, you have sections dedicated for Industry News, Tours & Festivals. What are you most looking forward to this year?

One of our primary goals is to try to cover artists that we think have a real chance of getting mainstream attention. In a way, we think of ourselves as A&R reps who focus on artists that are either in the early or mid stages of their careers. This year, we’re excited to discover whether we’re right about the artists we cover.

Since they’ve been the most disruptive platform impacting music within the last few years, we’re interested in seeing what happens with TikTok. If there’s a wide-scale ban on TikTok, it won’t just hurt its value as the king of short-form video, it will also hurt its longer-term strategy of leveraging its SoundOn platform and becoming a legitimate music streaming competitor. We also think it will put a swift end to the overdone bedroom pop and one-dimensional emo hip-hop sound trending on TikTok. On the bright side, we think this might also improve live music performances as TikTok has caused an unintended proliferation of fair-weather fans and lip-syncing artists.

Where to find Sunlighter 🌞