As many of you know by now, yesterday Spotify removed XXXTentacion and R Kelly from their playlists. “We don’t censor content because of an artist’s or creator’s behavior, but we want our editorial decisions — what we choose to program — to reflect our values. When an artist or creator does something that is especially...

Yesterday, I wrote about home runs, but I didn’t define what a home run is. Similar to baseball, one home run doesn’t make for a successful month or album cycle (season), and definitely not an entire career. However, since I didn’t take the time to explain what I meant by “home run”, the brilliant...

Home runs… The times you swung the bat and hit it out the park. Think of “home runs” as the real wins for your artist – The building blocks for their campaign which propel immense growth. When I look at the home runs we’ve hit the past couple months, it’s amazing how many of...

At 3B, we consistently write “run of shows” for various project rollouts for our artists. At any given time, there could be a music release, merch line drop, and tour announce within days of each other. In addition to organizing the actual rollout to the fans, managers are also tasked with ensuring creative assets...

Last week Instagram rolled out a third party integration with Spotify via Stories. Today, a potential leaked code discovered by TechCrunch has potentially revealed instagram’s next big step in music: the ability to soundtrack stories with music via “music stickers”. Major label and publishing champions, such as Evan Lamberg (happy birthday brother!) at UMPG,...

It’s a running joke at TH3RD BRAIN that my fiancé Rachel Springate is our “head of A&R” – Earlier this week, she showed me this acoustic version of Shallou’s Begin, which was recorded last year as a Spotify single. When the best electronic music is stripped to its core, great songs remain. The most...

I saw an instagram post this week I ignorantly didn’t save which had a list of the top headlines from the past couple weeks. The photo’s mission was to make clear how difficult it is to make the news, which is clouded by Kanye West, Donald Trump, LeBron James, Michelle Wolf, Avicii, etc. Earlier...

When I was a recording artist, any “small win” would have me feeling as I had won the world over… Small wins reminded me of the potential for my career. I just graduated college and was living with my parents – There was nothing more exciting than going home to champion my latest co-sign...

The dedication, persistence, and vision required to excel at the highest level in sports is identical to the grit necessary to succeed in business. AoaM community member Kelly Benini wrote these two powerful analogies comparing sports and business on her blog – In tennis, the game is never won hitting the ball into the middle of...

Yesterday, Instagram rolled out a new Stories integration in collaboration with Spotify. The integration will allow Spotify users to easily share songs to their story with a deep link, which will drive the viewers directly to the song in the Spotify app. This news was first shared with me by Matt Stanton, the Senior Strategist...