The Industry Connection

Entertainment News

• 📺 Saturday Night Live Returns

  • October 14^th: Pete Davidson (Host) + Ice Spice (Performance)

  • October 21^st: Bad Bunny (Host + Performance)

    • Note: Our guest interview on October 19^th will be with Jbeau Lewis, who happens to be the agent for Bad Bunny. Great timing!

• 📖 Spotify Premium Will Now Include Access to 150,000+ Audiobooks

  • Spotify is aiming to tap into the growing Audiobook market, which accounts for just 6% to 7% share of the wider book market, but is seeing a 20% year-over-year growth as a category.

  • One VERY important aspect that got buried in the announcement: the service will be time-limited to 15 hours per month, with the ability to purchase an additional 10 hours.

  • The service launched in the U.K. and Australia yesterday, with the U.S. and additional markets to follow later this year.

Interview with Ian Simon, Co-Founder and CEO of Strangeloop Studios

This week, we sat down with Ian Simon who is the Co-Founder and CEO of Strangeloop Studios. Stangeloop Studios is a visual content production company, focused on working with creatives to explore new media and audience experiences. Ian and his team were behind the visual components of BLACKPINK (2023) and The Weeknd’s (2018) iconic Coachella sets and have worked with a laundry list of superstars including Kendrick Lamar, SZA, Flying Lotus, Billie Eilish, Anderson .Paak, Flume, Martin Garrix & many, many more. It’s honestly hard to narrow it down to just a couple as you’ll see when you explore their full list of projects here.

Our conversation is below:

AvA: Let's go back to the beginning. How did you get started in the music industry and more particularly the production side of things?

Ian Simon: I got my start with a classic “fake-it-til-you-make-it” story. I met my co-founder Dave around 2010, and we started working together a few years later, right after I graduated college. He was already doing the live tour visuals for Skrillex and Flying Lotus, and he got an offer to do the same for Zeds Dead. He told their team that he had someone who could go on tour, and subsequently informed me I’d be doing the visuals for Zeds Dead…despite me having little to no experience doing visuals at the time.

But Dave taught me enough to handle that first tour (I “borrowed” a lot of his tour stories to make it seem like I was a true seasoned professional), and he and I both spent the next couple years touring and designing visuals together. We started building a collective of visual artists and designers from there, at a time when LED walls were becoming omnipresent, and artists were rethinking the potential of concert visuals as an exciting creative medium, and that led to the creation of Strangeloop Studios.

AvA: Can you break down Strangeloop Studios as a business? What areas do you operate in?

Ian Simon: Our team is composed of all kinds of creatives: animators, designers, directors, producers; but we specialize in 3D animation, particularly for music. We started out primarily designing concert visuals, but we realized several years ago that as a team of 3D animators with experience in concert production, we have a lot of opportunities beyond the stage as well. We’ve produced music videos, short-form digital content, virtual concerts, digital avatars, and immersive IRL events, but always with a focus on creative collaboration.

AvA: Walk us through your creative process when working with Artists and their teams.

Ian Simon: It’s a fundamentally synaesthetic process, translating sound into image. We try to juggle three guiding questions: What is our collective artistic vision? What is the fan’s experience? And: How tf do we make it happen?

We’re big on “world-building” with artists in the early creative stages, figuring out the visual language and blueprint for the state-space in which the project will exist, plotting the narrative with moodboards, reference imagery, and proposed show flow. From there it makes constraints like setlist changes, venue restrictions, laws of physics, etc, much easier to navigate.

AvA: What have been some of the most memorable projects you've worked on?

Ian Simon: One of my all time favorites was a Billie Eilish acoustic set for the Apple Music Awards in 2019. The show was in the Steve Jobs Theater, this gorgeous underground venue on the Apple campus in Cupertino where they do Apple product launches. The show was designed by Es Devlin and she brought real trees down into the theater, creating a slice of a surreal forest beneath the Apple HQ. She called me to come project visuals on the trees.

All of the attendees were fans who had won tickets by writing in to a contest, so you had this incredible concoction of an intimate, hallowed venue, a bunch of devoted superfans, Billie’s raw talent and playfulness, and a transportive stage design. They also shot the shit out of the livestream, it looked gorgeous. And like most shows, we only had a couple days to throw it together. So that one sticks out!

AvA: Anything upcoming you're able to discuss?

Ian Simon: We just wrapped up the final BLACKPINK shows this past summer, but we’ve got a tour going out today (10/4) for an incredible Korean band, The Rose. We collaborated with another studio, Human Person, who are good friends and some of the absolute top designers and creatives in the concert space, imho. It was a lot of fun, check it out if you get a chance.

We’re also building a real-time motion-capture game show for virtual talent, which I think is a first-of-its-kind project…but I can’t give any more details on that one just yet!

AvA: Everything flipped to virtual, metaverse and streaming during the Pandemic. Can you talk about your experience launching Spirit Bomb and the virtual artist label side of your business?

Ian Simon: We’ve been interested in the potential of virtual music experiences since before the pandemic, including working with WaveXR, designing virtual concerts that you’d experience in VR or streaming platforms. We’d also become intrigued with the idea of “virtual artists,” thinking about what the spiritual successors to Gorillaz and Hatsune Miku would look like in our current digital landscape. So at the beginning of 2020 we raised a round of investment from Warner Music Group, Avex, Sony Japan, and others, to develop a pipeline for creating virtual musicians.

I wouldn’t say we were “ready” for the pandemic, but we leaned into the opportunity to focus on that pipeline once our IRL concert work disappeared. We designed a virtual concert for The Weeknd that premiered on TikTok. We moved our production stack to Unreal Engine, so that we could design for real-time and more gamified experiences. And we launched our own characters, one of whom (LV4) has over 100k TikTok followers and has played real-world shows, including opening for Zeds Dead at The Shrine twice - all while being a fully virtual character!

We’re just as excited about helping other creatives move into the virtual artist realm, and have been actively talking with people about utilizing our pipeline to help them create all kinds of content in digital space. Ultimately, I’m working to unify our virtual pipeline with our live event experience to help virtual talent tour in the real world, and provide digital AND physical touchpoints for fan communities to come together.

AvA: What does the future of streaming and virtual look like to you?

Ian Simon: Our lives have become increasingly mediated by digital technology, and I don’t see that slowing down anytime soon. Digital spaces allow for unprecedented creative freedom, anonymity, and play. Right now we’re still seeing a lot of skeuomorphic approaches to designing digital spaces, resulting in “lesser-than” imitations of their physical counterparts.

Younger digitally-native generations won’t be burdened with those preconceptions, and I foresee an explosion of creativity from younger users/fans/artists. As tools for 3D content creation and creative expression become more democratized through knowledge-sharing and AI-driven ease of accessibility, I think we’ll see the digital realm become just as robust a creative space as the physical world (if it’s not already!).

AvA: What is one piece of advice you'd give to someone just starting out in the business?

Ian Simon: I would advise anyone getting started in the industry to speak up, and not be afraid of your ideas being wrong or dumb. When it comes to creative endeavors, my biggest regrets are all things I didn’t say, not things I said.

When you’re trying to build your skills and your portfolio, you have to be able to see yourself in your work at the end of the day, and that doesn’t happen if you’re constantly deferring to clients or collaborators. It can be uncomfortable but also highly rewarding, and the risk is lower than you’d think. I have had plenty of bad ideas over the years and they haven’t kicked me out of the industry yet.

Note from Ian: I blame Anthony Kiedis’ autobiography ‘Scar Tissue’ for making me want to work in music, so I’d avoid that one. 🙂 

Week of October 2^nd Open Jobs and Internships

🎒 = Internship | 💼 = Job

🎒Marketing & Communications Student Associate Program - Madison Square Garden Entertainment - Hybrid (Burbank, CA) - Must be available to work 35 hours per week. Apply here by December 1st.

🎒Intern - Honua Music - Hybrid (Studio City, CA) - Honua Music is seeking interns who love EDM/Pop/HipHop/K-Pop and are very knowledgeable of current trending artists. Interns must be available for 20-30 hours/week. To apply, email [email protected] a resume by October 31st.

🎒Intern - Warner Bros. - Hybrid (Burbank, CA) - Positions include WB Music Library, WB Pictures Music, WB Television Music, and WaterTower Music. Must be able to able to read/write musical notation and have experience playing an instrument in an orchestra/composing music for orchestra (preferred for WB Music Library role). Apply here by October 23rd to be considered.

💼 Assistant, Business Affairs - UTA - LA - Qualified candidates should have a JD degree and an active bar license. Apply here.

💼 Communications Coordinator - MTV Entertainment Studios - NYC - Must have 1+ years of previous experience in publicity at a streaming platform, network, studio, or agency with accounts. Apply here.

💼 Artist Relations & Operations - Red Light Management - LA - Ideal candidates must have previous experience in artist management, talent agency, or related roles within the music or entertainment industry. Apply here.

💼 Manager, Digital Marketing - BMG - Hybrid (LA) - Must have experience in digital marketing preferably in the music industry, with technical understanding of social media platforms (inc Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Tik Tok, etc.). Ideal candidate must also have practical experience with digital music tools inc smart-linking (e.g Linkfire), analytics (e.g Chartmetric, Crowdtangle), and charting (Nielson). Apply here.

💼 Coordinator to the CEO - Sundance - LA - Ideal applicant must have 2 years of experience providing high level administrative support to an executive. Apply here.

💼 Festival Agent - Sundance - LA - Individuals with experience in Zendesk, Eventive or another ticketing system are preferred. 1 year of relevant experience required. Apply here.

💼 Sales & Digital Coordinator - Disney Music Group - Hybrid (Burbank, CA) - Must have 1+ year experience working in the entertainment industry, preferably music. Apply here.

💼 Administrative Assistant - Rare Global - Hybrid (Beverly Hills, CA) - Ideal candidate has 1-2 years of administrative assistant experience in a related field. Apply here.

💼 Sound Designer - Hexany Audio - Bell Gardens, CA - Must have a minimum of 1-3 years experience working in video game sound design. Apply here.

💼 Artist Services Coordinator - StagePilot - Brentwood, TN - Ideal candidate has 3+ years experience in live events. Apply here.

💼 Sports Production Assistant - CBS LA - Studio City, CA - Must have editing experience (preferably with software like Edius Pro and Final Cut Pro) and extensive sports knowledge across all platforms. Apply here.

👋 Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter and see you next week!

This newsletter is written by Warner Bailey (connect with me here). Edited by Malik Figaro. 

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