The Industry Connection

Music News

• 🤩 Jungkook (BTS) breaks Spotify record for fastest song in history to surpass 1 billion streams, reaching that mark on his track ‘Seven’ in just 108 days.

  • The previous record? Miley Cyrus’ single ‘Flowers’ which hit 1B streams in 112 days.

• 🎤 Universal Music revenue hits $3B in Q3, driven by releases from Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift.

  • That Q3 revenue figure was up 9.9% YoY.

• 💰 Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek just banked $64M selling Spotify shares.

  • This comes 3 months after selling an additional $100M worth of Spotify shares.

  • Although he doesn’t take an annual salary from Spotify, he holds 31.93 million shares in the company, or around $5.17B.

Entertainment News

• 🤝 Studios and SAG-AFTRA are “closing in on a deal,” according to multiple sources. The sticking point? AI of course.

  • They will meet again today, and our fingers are crossed for good news…

• 🤖 Scarlett Johansson took legal action against an AI App that used her name and image in an online ad without permission.

  • The 22-second ad posted on AI-generation app “Lisa AI:90s Yearbook & Avatar” has since been pulled down from Twitter (not calling it X).

• 💸 The Walt Disney Company has bought out Comcast’s stake in Hulu for a staggering $8.6B.

  • The 33% stake’s value could be higher based on bankers’ assessments of the fair market value for the streaming service.

• 🏈 Paramount Global backed CBS has “virtually sold out” of all its Super Bowl ad inventory.

  • 2024’s price tag for a 30-second ad will fall between $6.5M and $7.5M.

Interview with LP Giobbi: Artist, Activist & Icon

This week we caught up with LP Giobbi shortly before she took the stage with Swedish House Mafia in Bogotá, Columbia. Leah Chisholm is a DJ, producer, pianist and activist who is quickly rising to superstar status. She’s earned over 102M streams across platforms, and was recently named DJ Mag’s 2023 Producer of the Year. Since emerging in the dance scene in 2018, she has performed her “one-woman jam band” DJ sets, blending her decks with her live piano, at high-profile festivals including Coachella, EDC, Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo, and Tomorrowland. She's also supported Pete Tong, Swedish House Mafia, Fatboy Slim, Diplo, Dead & Co, John Summit and Sofi Tukker.

Almost equally as important as her musical acumen is her philanthropic work. She is the founder of FEMME HOUSE, a non-profit organization that has one mission – to lift up, celebrate, and create equitable education and opportunities for women and non-binary individuals in the music industry. FEMME HOUSE offers free online production classes, scholarship opportunities and hosts a recurring SiriusXM show on Diplo’s Revolution, which has broadcast nearly 150 hours of music by non-male DJs since its launch in 2021.

Our conversation is below:

AvA: When did your interest in music begin? 

LP Giobbi: I was lucky enough to be born into a music loving family. None of my parents played instruments, but there was always music in our house: jazz, blues, jam band, folk, which developed my love for music. Grateful Dead was our church. 

In second grade, I begged my parents to get me piano lessons. One of the best things that has ever happened to me is my parents finding my piano teacher, Carolyn Horn. I studied with her from second grade all the way through graduating high school, and stayed in touch with her after. She cultivated creativity, and was a wildly important person in my life. She was just an amazingly talented player, and such a remarkable teacher, which are two very, very different gifts.  She unfortunately passed away a week before I was going to release the album, and I just feel lucky to have been in her sunshine.

AvA: Can you talk to us about your journey from a Jazz Piano student at UC Berkeley to being voted DJ Mag's Best Producer of 2023?

LP Giobbi: I was playing a jazz piano gig every Saturday after I graduated while I was working for Another Planet Entertainment, a concert promoter in the Bay Area. I would do this solo jazz gig for a few hours at Madrone Art Bar in SF, and this gentleman Peter Franco, who is an engineer and producer with the Daft Punk team, was putting together an all female electronic band. All of the artists had jazz backgrounds. I said “I don’t think I’m qualified to join this band, because I've never even touched a synth in my life.” He said to me “if you know music theory, the electronic stuff will be easy.” Thank God I believed him. 

So I made the leap, joined the band, and it was a really, really sharp learning curve for me.  Luckily I ended up loving it, and what kept me going was realizing there weren't very many female producers out there. I wanted to fill that role in the band. 

AvA: What does it mean to you to have played the Dead & Co. afterparty shows for their final tour, and how much of an influence have The Dead played in your life? 

LP Giobbi: When I found out that was happening, I called my parents and my mom dropped the phone and fell on her knees sobbing. I'll never forget that. [The Dead] have had a profound impact on me. Growing up, they were my parents' music, and I understood the community aspect of them before I understood their music. I also understood how important they were in the specific time period’s culture. There's a lot of similarities between jazz and jam bands: the improvisation and following a form, but really having to listen and play off of each other. 

My parents gave me 50 vintage Grateful Dead shirts that they had collected, and during the Pandemic, somebody saw that I was wearing one of them and told me that he was working in a studio and he got some stems from some Grateful Dead sessions… which is insane. 

So I started taking Jerry's guitar stem and re-pitching it and re-warping it and putting it in my sampler so I could chop it in different ways and layer it over house beats. I was putting just drums on one CDJ and instrumental loops on another, and then sometimes Jerry's acapella on another. I really started seeing myself as a one woman jam band.

I was live streaming all the time, and the same people were on the virtual Twitch day after day. Children of Deadheads, who are ravers, would find me on these livestreams and hearing it in a palpable form was exciting to them. A lot of families would watch the streams together when I started incorporating that stuff, and I guess Bob Weir’s manager got wind of it and I got an offer to play Dead and Company's festival Playing In The Sand the first year it came back. 

Part of the deal was taking care of my parents and having them come out. As a kid who had their parents pay for piano lessons every single Monday for a decade or more and then supported me through music school in college, I just felt so happy I could do that for them.

AvA: You have remixed and collaborated with some of the biggest artists in the world including Taylor Swift, Jerry Garcia and Diplo. Can you talk to us about your creative process when approaching those projects?

LP Giobbi: It's always a little bit different. I usually have an idea of where I think it should go and a creative idea for the vocal. At this point I’ve met a lot of wonderful vocalists and will send tracks their way. Oftentimes, I'll get a vocal back that's better than the track and so then I'll scratch the track and then rebuild around it. 

For remixes, I try not to even listen to anything, and throw everything away except for the vocals. I think “what would I do if I just got this vocal,” which is a helpful process in remixes.  

AvA: Who is on your Mount Rushmore of artists (past or present) you'd want to work with? 

LP Giobbi: I'm so glad you asked this because I have a very specific answer, and I'm going to try to manifest the shit out of this. Anytime it gets asked, I'm gonna put this out in the world as big and wide as I can. The artist is Patti Smith. I know that doesn't seem like an obvious match, being that I'm a dance artist and she's.. I don't even know what we call her because she’s too big for a genre. 

She's also an incredible writer, and what she stands for, how she carries herself, what she's done with her platform, what she cares about.. it's just like another level of artistry. I think sometimes in this industry you can “play the game” and maybe lose sight of that, and she never has. She's just meant so much to me in my artistic development.

AvA: We are huge fans of FEMME HOUSE and what you've built. How did that project start, and what are your goals with it? 

LP Giobbi: I was in the studio one day waiting to record, and I read this article from Grimes where she is very clear that she is the producer. She's the one producing and feels that it's important to mention because there aren't that many female producers out there. The statistic was 2% of producers at the time, and it's still 2% today. 

I had this lightbulb moment. I was raised by the most loving humans on the planet who told me I could be anything and I could do anything and I really believe that. It wasn't until I saw somebody who looked like me, doing what I wanted to do, where I thought I could have that role too. That is when my whole world blew up. I thought “what else do I not think I can do because I don't see myself visually represented?” So that is what that led me to decide I want to be a producer, and hopefully one day someone will hear what I'm doing and be inspired to try it too. 

Do I think having more female producers changes the world? I don't know. But having more people who believe they can do anything does change the world.

I partnered with Lauren Spaulding, and we have worked tirelessly on FEMME HOUSE, turning it into a 501(c)3. We are creating an online curriculum and online workshops that teach production. We partnered with Alicia Keys’ nonprofit, She Is The Music for one of them, which blew it up. We had women from all over the world tune in. 

AvA: What happened next? 

LP Giobbi: Our next step was creating more opportunities of visual representation. Our first stage takeover was with Insomniac doing a stage takeover at EDC. We did one at Hulaween, Elements, and other festivals. 

What has blown my mind is these big, big players like Insomniac, who is one of the largest electronic promoters in the world, are coming to us to say “our lineups aren't even (in terms of a gender balance), how can we fix that?” It’s been so cool to see, and has given me a lot of hope and belief in the future. The industry does care.

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

LP Giobbi: The thing about this industry is that there is no one blueprint. There are as many blueprints as there are artists. That's a really, really exciting thing. Focus on what your initial skillset is and what you feel really confident in, and start to build on top of that.

Week of October 30^th Open Jobs and Internships

💼 = Job | 🎒 = Internship

💼 Tour Marketing Associate - Ground Control Touring - Hybrid (NYC or Los Angeles) - Applicants with 2-3 years music industry experience are preferred, and prior office/administration experience is required. Interested applicants can apply here or submit a cover letter, resume and social media handles to [email protected].

💼 Coordinator, Commercial Partnerships - Sony Music Entertainment - Los Angeles - Must have at least 1 year experience with working knowledge in the music industry, preferably in physical and digital music sales/distribution. Apply here.

💼 Booking Producer, The Megyn Kelly Show - Red Seat Ventures - Remote - Ideal applicant will have 3-4 years of booking experience; familiarity with broadcast and sound editing equipment is a plus. Apply here.

💼 Event Specialist, Youtube Theater - Hollywood Park - Inglewood, CA - This position requires a minimum of one (1) year of related work experience in event coordination, with overall knowledge of the production process. Apply here.

💼 Principle Content & Editorial Manager - Sonos Inc. - New York City - Interested applicants should have a deep understanding of the music industry and the dynamics of streaming platforms, artists, and the industry, be creative, and possess strong editorial judgment and experience. Applicants with experience in content programming, development and/or production in the audio or music space are preferred. Apply here.

💼 PR & Marketing Coordinator - SEQUEL - New York City - Candidates must have 1+ years of PR and marketing experience in the music or lifestyle field. Apply here.

💼 Logistics Manager, Brooklyn Bowl Philly - Live Nation Concerts - Philadelphia, PA - Live Nation is looking for a Special Events Logistics Manager that will be responsible for coordination and execution of all events contracted by the Sales Department. Having a minimum of two years management experience in sales / marketing / catering; public speaking experience is a plus. Apply here.

💼 Administrative Assistant, Digital Marketing - Universal Music Group - Santa Monica, CA - The ideal candidate must possess excellent writing and oral skills and demonstrate the ability to manage multiple assignments under tight deadlines. Apply here.

💼 Coordinator (Various Teams) - Insomniac Music Group - Calabasas, CA - Insomniac Music Group (label) is looking to hire coordinators on the following teams: A&R, Operations, Promotions & PR, and Marketing & Content. Ideal applicants will have at least 2 years of music/entertainment experience. Apply here for A&R, here for Operations, here for Promotions & PR, and here for Marketing & Content.

💼 Script Writer - Artistic Linkages - Remote - Artistic Linkages is looking for script writers to develop concepts, create immersive storylines for their upcoming dramas, and write scripts. Apply here.

💼 Digital Designer, Concerts - 24 Seven Talent - Remote - Ideal candidates have experience within entertainment, music, concerts, etc (things with movement) and should be skilled in Photoshop, Figma, light Aftereffects, and some Premiere. Apply here.

🎒 Multiple Spring 2024 Internships - Roc Nation - New York City or Los Angeles - Applicants must be able to work on-site either in Los Angeles or New York City. Internships offered in various teams. Apply here.

🎒 Multiple Spring 2024 Internships - HeadCount - New York City - Internships available in Partnerships & Events, Social Media, Artist Relations, and more. 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. 

Get in touch! Email us at [email protected].

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