Essy  released a video for the track Cry For Me. A good “guilty pleasure” song/video that has Essy dancing around with a snake. If you love 80’s, you’ll like this uptempo pop track. The song is about the craziness of online dating during the pandemic.   Before moving to Nashville, Rachel Braig aka Essy, studied at Berklee College of Music and collaborated with songwriters before writing with electronic duo Ship Wrek.

Check out Favorite Boy by the 20 year old Cate Tomlinson. It’s reminiscence of Taylor Swift’s newer material. You’ll love if you like bedroom / indie pop. Originally from San Francisco, she’s now based out of Boston spending time at Northeastern University. Last year she dropped a track Before I lose You which  we compared to Ellie Goulding. Give it a stream on KOAR’s Indie Invaders.

Red Hot Chili Peppers sold the rights to their song catalog for $140 million. Who was the buyer? You guess it, the London based firm Hipgnosis.

The band’s catalogue generates about $5 million a year for publishers, according to insiders, and was sold for about 25 times as much.

Hipgnosis has bought Neil Young’s 1,180 song catalogue as well as Shakira, Fleetwood Mac’s guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and producer and music exec Jimmy Iovine.

Can any Joe Schmoe go viral on TikTok? Yes and no.

The folks at TikTok determine what goes viral. It makes sense. A system left by itself will collapse. It needs guiding hands.

Which songs, trends, and videos go viral? TikTok execs help determine that.

Just like Spotify throws their muscle behind an artist, so does Tiktok. Bloomberg revealed that TikTok was behind the clever marketing campaign of the song Savage by Megan Thee Stallion.

TikTok worked with Megan’s label 300 Entertainment and tested a few of her songs on the platform looking at which song got the most reaction. Savage it was. Then TikTok gave the song top shelf space placing it on recommended songs and advertisements.

It goes even deeper. According to Bloomberg, TikTok assigned managers to thousands of ‘app’ stars to help them navigate trends, tags and features, while the connecting app stars with brands and musicians.

What’s the bottom line? Any platform needs a guiding hand, and TikTok is no exception. While anyone can go viral, it’s the users that constantly deliver high quality that have the most chance of reaping financial awards and maybe free college tuition paid by TikTok.

The Grammys Awards are trying to fix things up after a year of controversy, a ratings crash, and accusations of a rigged system. The Grammys are dumping the secret committees that had the ultimate say who would be nominated. The Weeknd among other artists became a thorn in their flesh. The Grammy Awards were forced to change after an onslaught of bad press.

Former Recording Academy Boss Deborah Dugan has called the secret committees corrupt with insider dealing.

Dugan claimed the committees promoted the artists with whom they have relationships and rigged the process that catapulted certain songs and albums to nominations.

Even though Grammys are trying to clean house, the Weeknd still won’t submit his music despite the ending of the secret review committees.

“Even though I won’t be submitting my music, the Grammys’ recent admission of corruption will hopefully be a positive move for the future of this plagued award and give the artist community the respect it deserves with a transparent voting process,” the Weeknd said.