Do you know what I like about Spotify? That it makes an effort to back the artist community. This time they are doing good in trying to help the songwriting community that generally goes unnoticed. What they did was launch a new feature aimed at songwriters, giving them their own profile pages, complete with playlists of recordings of their songs. You’ll be able to seek out songwriters in the search bar just as you would searching for an artist. Moreover, you’ll be able to click on songwriters’ names in the credits and see the songs on the platform that they’ve written and their most frequent and collaborators. Although still in beta, I hope this ends up fully functioning and becomes apart of the Spotify platform.

I got sucked into the song Broken Parts rather quickly. I don’t know, maybe it’s the voice, the melody, the lyric. It’s just a good simple piano ballad that was written by 20 year old Clide. The Berlin based singer-songwriter has only released two songs on Spotify and kind of reminds me of Lauv and James Arthur. And you know what? He believes in the song because he is wearing a shirt that touts the song title. Give the track a stream on our Indie Invaders Playlist.

Look out for Zachary Knowles. He’s fairly new to the scene without a whole lot of history. The Houston, TX native just dropped Ghost via Fader. It’s a solid track, and I can’t help to hear Khalid, Bieber, and Post. The 20 year old bedroom artist began releasing songs on SoundCloud before releasing his first EP as a freshman in college at Texas A&M. Check out the video here, and yes, we added the song to the Indie Invaders Playlist.

Eminem unexpectedly took the stage at the Academy Awards on Sunday for a performance of “Lose Yourself”. The question is why? Look, the audience was confused as much as I was. The performance wasn’t bad, but if you look at Twitter many were shaking their heads as to why he was there. Some say the performance is reportedly a “do-over” to make up from a missed opportunity when the rapper didn’t perform the song when it was given a nod 17 years ago. To be honest, I think this is a misfire, because the discussion should be about the performance not why-did-he-show-up.

Post-teen pop artist Lee Cole drops ‘I Don’t Wanna Wait’. It’s a fantastic heartbreak song in the vein of John Legend and James Arthur. Before we write off Lewis Capaldi and Dean Lewis as one hit wonders, they could be paving the way for confessional pop artists. That’s Lee Cole. He writes confessional pop. Ironically, none of his tracks have millions of streams, but with nearly 25k monthly listeners, his track Ride Or Die has clocked 50k streams which was mainly driven by user-curated Spotify playlists. I do think ‘I Don’t Wanna Wait‘ is going to do well. Check out the video here.