Arizona Zervas just dropped the official Roxanne video after dominating Spotify the charts as an unsigned artist. Now signed to Columbia, the track is currently sitting at #5 on Spotify’s U.S. Top 50. I like the video and I’ve always like the song the first time I heard it – it’s just fun. The 24 year old will perform at The Echo on 2/24 in Los Angeles. He just wrapped up a guest appearance during Swae Lee’s set in Chicago.

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.