July 2022

HA Sign-Up, Feng Shui Mix + Member Spotlight feat AJ - Product Manager @ DISCO

Jul 01, 2022

My new weekly newsletter The Human Algorithm officially launches on Monday! If you would like to continue to receive these, upgrade your Music Club membership today.

You can read more about its backstory here or dive back into June’s sneak peak emails: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3 & Week 4.

LAST MONTH TODAY *updated monthly*

Featuring my favorite tracks (all genres) from June ~ 4hrs

FENG SHUI SOUNDTRACK *new mix*

My latest mix is in collaboration with my Aunt Suzee who is a Feng Shui master. She describes Feng Shui as the study of ENERGY, and how "positive" energy enriches and empowers our lives and careers. This is the 1st mix in a new series that is perfect for when you need to zen out a bit - feat. beautiful instrumental only tracks by Fred Again, Jon Hopkins + more!

In Feng Shui, each person has an element which tells you a lot about who you are when in & out of alignment and your power directions (ie the best direction you should face when sleeping or working). In next month’s newsletter, I will share a custom mix for each of the 5 elements. In the meantime, you can find out what your element is here!

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT *AJ Weaver - Product Manager @ DISCO*

What is DISCO? Who is it best suited for and how does it help them? DISCO is essentially the operating system of the music industry. Think about it like Dropbox meets Spotify - it has all of your basic file storage and sharing needs but designed specifically for music - with a growing marketplace offering to connect the people creating & representing music with those looking to use the music in film/tv/ads.

It’s really designed to support anyone interfacing with audio professionally - from an independent artist, to a radio promoter, to a major record label.

So as an indie music producer you can use DISCO for organizing your WIPs, sharing new bounces/instrumentals of tracks with artists you work with, and housing really nice looking pages for sample packs. As an A&R at a record label, DISCO allows you to auto-tag (our AI is smart 🤖) your whole catalogue of music and receive new music submissions or deliveries. As a supervisor, DISCO allows you to powerfully search your own catalogue or all of the supervisor-facing catalogues on DISCO by genre, mood/feel, BPM, time period, etc. to find the right music for a brief.

What is your role at the company? What excites you most about what you do? I’m a product manager leading DISCO’s core product and marketplace offerings. My job is to combine a deep understanding of our users, the market landscape, and the capabilities of our team in order to prioritize, design, and build new features and improvements.

It’s thrilling to have a small but important seat at the table when it comes to shaping the future of one of the most illusive, infamous, beloved, contradictory, and complicated industries of all time - especially given DISCO’s centrality in the world of synch, a massive revenue generator for creators (but very boom & bust!). Every day I get to think about what it means to democratize access to opportunities, break-down siloes between stakeholders in the music industry, and support anyone who is passionate about creating a legitimate and organized music business. It’s niche but so cool!

There is also the added perk of encountering unreleased music/a diverse catalog outside of Spotify through every day research and troubleshooting with users :)

What are the challenges you face? The other side of the coin of the mysterious, esoteric nature of the music industry means that no two users works the same and their goals often conflict. A rights holder’s desire to get insights about a music supervisor’s activity exploring their catalogue contradicts a supervisor’s desire and right to privacy.

The product needs to be simple enough for a touring artist who wants to exclusively use a mobile app and complex enough for an administrator who needs to keep track of extensive metadata and writer splits.

We also deal with the classic Saas issue of competing with legacy incumbent platforms that have tons of leftover functionality. It’s a constant balancing act to manage supporting the way things are and nudging users towards new ways of working.

You recently rented a studio in Topanga Canyon to record an album. Can you share more about the album and the process of creating an album? Haha ‘studio’ is a really generous term for my ramshackle in the woods sans plumbing…but it’s serving its purpose! My little corner of the wilderness is truly my favorite place in the world right now where I can just go to tune out the outside world and screw up loud guitar solos at 1am without fear of neighborly ears. I feel incredibly blessed to be getting to carve out a physical space and time on the weekends to prioritize my own musical journey.

I’m really thinking about this as phase 2 of Josephine’s musical evolution (my middle name & artist name that has also increasingly become the name I prefer to go by). I have a collection of WIPs right now ranging from vibey surf rock to sparse, dark post-dub. I’m focused on getting each song to its fully-realized state and then will go from there in terms of how they fit together into an album/ep format. My original self-imposed deadline was May 29th, but we’re being gentle with ourselves #trusttheprocess.

Any other side projects/passions you'd like to share, music or non-music related? My two happy places outside the studio are the ocean and the garden. I try to be in the water whenever there are waves to be surfed. I’m also a regular at the Venice Learning Garden (next to Venice High), where I’m making my thumb a twinge greener and was recently tapped to be our event coordinator. So far we’ve hosted a pretty radical silent disco garden party and Summer Solstice dinner + jam. Would love to have any and all music-clubbers at our next garden event!

What are you currently listening to/recommend? I’m operating on 3 musical speeds at present. Driving up the coast to surf I’ll throw on Her’s (rip:/), Cigarettes after Sex, Pink Skies, or Cannons. Going out dancing I’ll go for upbeat electronic like Bad Tuner or Fred Again… and on a late-night drive home I stick to my all-time favs - James Blake or The Japanese House.