Just Jaded Weekly

05/07/2021

Written By: Jade Zalevsky

New Music Monday: Sophia Rose

The “New Music Monday” artist this week is very special to Jaded Productions. It’s our very own Sophia Rose! Sophia Rose is a 20 year old singer-songwriter from Los Angeles. She has been in the music world for her entire life and always hoped to create something bigger from her music. 

We at Jaded Productions found Sophia Rose through our TikTok Creator position. She had applied to the position and we were checking her social media and found some spectacular covers that she has done. In fact, there is a duet of her singing Hallelujah on TikTok that was so amazing, it gave me chills. I highly recommend checking that out! I was so extremely impressed that I asked our Jaded Productions VP, Joanna, if we should go into the interview and ask her if she’d like us to represent her. As you may have guessed, Sophia said yes, and she became the first artist on our roster at Jaded Productions. 

We’ve been celebrating Sophia Rose here at Jaded Productions all week, and we’re so excited that she’s here with us. Sophia has a lot of new things in the works, and she has a cover out right now of Demi Lovato’s “Anyone”, which is posted on her SoundCloud and our Youtube. You can find that link on our website under the “artists” page or using the YouTube link in the corner of the home page.

We look forward to assisting Sophia Rose in her journey as an artist, and we hope that you’ll join us in watching Sophia live up to all of her amazing potential! Cheers to Sophia Rose! 

Artist Rec Friday: Catie Turner

As I had stated above, this is Sophia Rose Week here at Jaded Productions, and part of that is Sophia deciding which artist will be our “Artist Rec Friday” for the week. She chose Catie Turner!

Catie Turner is a spectacular young artist, and you may remember her from season 16 of American Idol. She blew the judges away with her original song, “21st Century Machine”, which highlights the challenges of being young and female in this day and age. Each judge complimented her insanely good songwriting skills, and her unique and quirky style. She earned a yes from each judge and was quickly off to Hollywood. She placed top 7 in the show that season, and has since been writing her own songs. 

If you like artists that stick to their guts, and have a strong will, then Catie Turner is the artist for you! Sophia’s favorite song from Catie Turner is “Home”. My favorite song from her is “21st Century Machine” because it feels so relatable and real to the times that we’re living in. 

If you like artists like Julia Michaels, we’re sure that you’ll love Catie Turner. Be sure to stream her on any streaming platform, and also don’t forget to check out Sophia Rose! Her cover of Demi Lovato’s “Anyone” is so amazing, and she was influenced by artists like Catie Turner! 

Are You Paying Close Attention To Your Listeners? 

Fans. They're hard to get, and, with the plethora of musicians out there in the very same genre as each other, those fans can sometimes be hard to keep. They determine whether an artist will be successful in their music career or not. The big question is: how important is it to keep fans and listeners satisfied in this streaming dominated industry? And if it is as important as everyone says, how do you keep them?

Every artist starts out with only a couple of listeners (most of the time it's just their parents or friends). And there is nothing wrong with that, of course. Everyone has to start somewhere, and they'll be very loyal listeners. However, if you're talented enough, and you understand the importance of social media in this age of the music industry, with a bit of luck, you'll gain more listeners. Only with consistent effort and valuable content will you eventually gain so many listeners, that there is bound to be a couple of fans in the mix. To me, there is a big difference between fans and listeners. Listeners might see your Instagram post about your new song dropping on Friday at 12am, and will get around to streaming it whenever they remember, usually within the next couple days or maybe a couple of weeks. Fans, however, not only saw your Instagram post, but saw your post from Twitter, retweeted and reposted on both of their social media accounts, and were waiting patiently for the clock to strike 12am on that Friday night to be one of the first to hear it. Listeners are great; they sometimes turn into the fans, and they'll get you the extra streams. But fans are unbeatable in their loyalty when it comes to giving you free promotion on social media, and streams and downloads on streaming platforms.

To be able to understand the importance of listeners and fans, we have to first understand the impact of a song stream vs a song download. Streams and downloads happen on streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music. As of this moment, approximately 150 streams of a song equals one sale of that song. Considering that there are usually 10 tracks per album, that is about 1500 streams that equate to the sale of an album. 10 single-song downloads are also equivalent to the sale of one album. With those numbers in mind, does it make more sense from the business perspective to convince someone to stream a song 150 times or download it once? Exactly.

Now, back to the fans and listeners topic. While you hope that people are listening to your songs, you more-so hope that they're listening and downloading, such as fans would do. As I said before, listeners are people who like your music, but fans love it. How do you turn these listeners into fans? How do you turn song streams into song downloads into album downloads? That is a loaded question (there are university courses that dedicate an entire semester to that question), but I see it as putting out as much content as you possibly can, and interacting with everyone that you can. It baffles me the amount of musicians that pay little to no attention to their listeners and fans. Yes, the record label is in charge of the business side of your career, but if you think about it, your fans are in charge of the record label. If the fans' tastes change or you upset them, the label won't have anyone to market your songs to, and there goes your career. Depending on your amount of clout, a single reply to a fan could make them pay more attention to your song release dates, or, if you're really famous, make them loyal for life. Very rarely does it work out for musicians who are awful to others. I've spoken with many fans who all have many different artists that they like and each one said something along the lines of "he/she/they are so nice to people, they treat everyone with kindness, and they have a genuine connection to their fans".

Thanks so much for reading! Check out @jaded.productions on Instagram for more content!