Swedish singer-songwriter LOVA unveiled her debut album Grown-ish and dropped Dance For The Hell It via Republic Records.

Growing up she listened to Florence + The Machine, Gavin Degraw and Lauryn Hill.
When speaking about her new single LOVA says, “I find myself often at parties wanting the ‘cool’ kids to acknowledge me but they’re too busy caring about themselves. “Dance For The Hell of It” is the realization their opinion is irrelevant and you’d rather have fun and dance in your own company.”
The 20 year is moving up the Swedish ranks. Following the release of her debut EP Scripted Reality, she became a blog favorite, the single “You Me and The Silence” totaled over 20 million streams, and she received a nomination of “Best New Artist” at the P3 Guld Awards. YouTube Music dubbed her an “Artist to Watch” for 2019.

Chicago-based singer songwriter Adam Curry, going under the moniker of SOCIALS shares the new track Harlem.

“I just want to write songs that can become a part of somebody’s personal soundtrack. A song can claim a moment in our lives or a feeling that we might just forget if there wasn’t a melody tied to it. SOCIALS music is about coming face to face with these moments, hopeful or bleak, and embracing them” shares the indie pop artist.
His debut single “Oxygen” was released in February 2020. Check out Harlem on KOAR’s Indie Invaders Playlist.

Belgium based singer songwriter Hunter Falls released All I Never Wanted. Fans of Lewis Capaldi will like the mid-tempo piano heartbreak track. Having experienced different cultures, the brand new artist blends r&b, soul and pop. Check out the lyric the video and give it a listen on KOAR’s Indie Invaders Playlist.

On your mark, get set, go!

JESSIA WINS with her new track I’m Not Pretty. Not only is she on the cover of Pop Rising, Spotify also added the song on Today’s Top Hits which launched the indie artist to new heights with 27 Million listeners. The song was released on Jan 8th and quickly exploded to 8 Million Spotify streams. I’m sure a deal will be wrapped up in few weeks with this Canadian unsigned talent.
The viral track quickly came together and it’s about body positivity.
JESSIA says: “I heard a quote saying, ‘I’ve never seen two pretty best friends’ and it got me thinking that all of my friends are gorgeous so maybe I’m not the pretty one. Maybe I am just the fun one? I was feeling frustrated and bitter one day, so I wrote this hook to get me through. People related to it and the positivity started rapidly spreading and then having Elijah Woods onboard to produce and be a part of it, made it all the more special. We are both so proud of what has come out of this song and it’s just the beginning!”

I just read a brilliant piece by Mark Mulligan that talks about the attention economy, consumption and culture.

When you’re promoting a new song, trying to find listeners along the way, you’re competing against a machine that is fed constantly with useless content just to steal your attention.

He notes, “The increasingly fierce competition for consumers’ attention is becoming corrosive, with clickbait, autoplay and content farms degrading both content and culture. What matters is acquiring audience and their time, the type of content and tactics that captures them is secondary. It is not just bottom feeder content farms that play this game, instead the wider digital entertainment landscape has allowed itself to become infected by their strategic worldview.

The algorithmic machine is designed to consume content. It has nothing to do with quality or the type of content. It’s calories in and calorie out. Artists, entertainers, influencers, and laymen feed the machine minute by minute and with each calorie consumed, it becomes bigger. The machine is like Pac-Man eating everything in its path.”

“Do not for a minute think this is a media-only problem. The corrosive impact of the attention economy can be seen right across digital entertainment, from hastily churned out scripted dramas, through to music. Artists and labels are locked in a race to increase the volume and velocity of music they put out, spurred on by Spotify’s Daniel Ek clarion call to up the ante even further. In this volume and velocity game, algorithm-friendly A&R and playlist hits win out. Clickbait music comes out on top. And because music attention spans are shortening, no sooner has the listener’s attention been grabbed, then it is lost again due to the next new track. In the attention economy’s volume and velocity game, the streaming platform is a hungry beast that is perpetually hungry. Each new song is just another bit of calorific input to sate its appetite.”

“In this world, ‘streamability’ trumps musicality, but it is not just culture that suffers. Cutting through the clutter of 50,000 new songs every day also delivers diminishing returns for marketing spend. Labels have to spend more to get weaker results.”

The only way to break free from the machine is to stop feeding it. It will eventually starve itself. It will still exist but it won’t be an overpowering force and content and culture will have value and meaning again.

“The music industry has developed an attention dependency in the least healthy environment possible.

“This is not one of those market dynamics that will eventually find a natural course correction. Instead, the music industry has to decide it wants to break its attention dependency and start doing things differently. Until then, consumption and content will continue to push culture to the side lines.”