Gen Z’s take on the future of new music discovery

2020 marks yet another tumultuous year for music media. One moment, major legacy music publications including Billboard, Variety and Rolling Stone are consolidating under the same umbrella; the next, influential alt-weeklies in music culture like Minneapolis’ City Pages are shutting down due to financial pressure. Meanwhile major labels like Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment are buying up music blogs and starting their own music podcasts and local music publications around the world are halting their print operations — teetering ever closer, in the words of Douglas McCabe, “on the edge of sustainability.”

As the music media establishment continues to be upended time and again, a new generation of music tastemakers are building editorial brands from scratch on a perhaps unexpected platform: Instagram.

A new, eager group of Instagram-native music discovery brands run by and for Gen Z — including Off the Cassette, Early Rising, Shit You Should Be Listening To and Sheesh Entertainment — have emerged and found captive audiences amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. These channels all share a similar format: Bold, Instagram-tailored graphics and videos focused on highlighting rising, often unsigned artists across all popular genres. According to Instagram analytics obtained by Water & Music, 18- to 24-year-olds account for between 50% and 60% of these channels’ followers. And most importantly, their founding teams reflect their audiences — consisting mostly of college students and recent graduates who are hoping to gain a foothold in the industry during a time of historic job loss.

“Without quarantine, I really don’t think this would exist.” Those are the words of Allie Gray, Co-Director of Music and Creative for Early Rising and a member of Belmont University’s 2020 graduating class. She launched the brand on Instagram in April 2020 alongside CEO Sam Morrison and Co-Director of Music and Creative Corinne Dolan, whom she did not know prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. “I was finishing up my final semester of college online, and was just trying to network with people in the music industry by DMing them and asking them to get on the phone with me,” says Gray, who studied in Belmont’s Music Business program. “Then I talked with Sam Morrison, and we totally hit it off.”

Gray, Morrison and Dolan first met as internet acquaintances over Instagram DMs, discussing their music taste and swapping songs, but their relationship quickly grew into something much more concrete. Morrison, a longtime writer and editor at Lyrical Lemonade, told Gray and Dolan of his idea for a music publication dedicated to featuring unknown acts. “He had a name and vision for it already and within a few days, we decided to launch it on Instagram,” Gray remembers.

Off the Cassette, founded by current USC student Caroline Grace Vein and soon-to-be graduate of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts Sophee Loftus, launched just five days after Early Rising on a similar concept. “We had been developing the idea and its rollout for weeks beforehand,” says Vein, who had no prior knowledge of Early Rising’s plans. “When I saw Early Rising’s page, I was definitely taken aback by how similar it was.” On the bright side, she admits, “it did push me to try to really distinguish our brand.”

Like with Early Rising, Vein and Loftus met while networking online at the start of quarantine. “I was sitting at my parent’s house in March and decided to try to connect with Sophee, who I felt might be interested in this new idea I had,” Vein notes. “We both went to USC at the same time, but we are years apart and didn’t know each other. I honestly don’t know if Sophee and I would’ve met if COVID didn’t happen.”

Although the initial concepts behind Early Rising and Off the Cassette are inherently similar, the two pages have grown in separate directions. For Off the Cassette — which features a pastel, more whimsical aesthetic, a stark contrast to Early Rising’s demure, black-and-white look — the founders have leaned more into their femininity. “We wanted to focus on being a woman-lead team and making sure people knew that,” Vein says. In fact, different channels in this category of IG-native music brands will have different audience demographics. For instance, around 70% of the followers of Early Rising and Sheesh are male, while that gender ratio is flipped for Shit You Should Be Listening To, which also has an all-female founding team.

Off the Cassette also feels distinctly less industry-focused than its Early Rising counterpart, in part because of Loftus’s background outside of the music industry and Vein’s younger age. “I know I’m one of the youngest people doing this,” Vein notes. “I think that definitely makes a difference.”

Such brands are proving to be one of the most positive side-effects of COVID-19, rethinking the traditional paradigms of music media and tailoring it to younger audiences. That said, these new publications do face competition from more established music brands that are looking to invest in Instagram-based content as well. Take Rolling Stone, for example, which launched the “In My Room” performance series on IGTV amidst the early pandemic outbreak, or Pitchfork, which created a dedicated IG brand for daily hip-hop coverage called The Ones.

Although these established music outlets may be investing more in IG, they still rely on print magazines and digital advertising to make their bread-and-butter, using social media merely as a promotional tool to drive traffic to their own websites. In contrast, the new generation of Gen Z-run music brands are flipping that concept on its head, beginning directly as Instagram pages that offer quick, simple content around artists. In fact, many of these brands still do not have any long-form written content at all, instead relegating their commentary to Instagram captions.

To the old school music fan, this approach might feel reductive — but it’s actually more in line with how Gen-Z fans discover music today. According to a 2019 survey from YPulse, Gen-Z and millennials count social media as one of their top sources of music discovery, neck-and-neck with YouTube, word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and pushed recommendations from streaming platforms. And among social sources of music discovery, Instagram takes the leading spot with 71% of 13- to 17-year-olds and 67% of 18- to 24-year-olds mentioning the platform, outpacing Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and even TikTok.

“We chose to start on social media because of the ease of interaction and feedback with our followers. You don’t get that from a website,” says Sabrina Finkelstein, co-founder of Shit You Should Be Listening To. “If a bunch of people are commenting how much they love a Spanish rap song we post, for example, it helps us learn that maybe we should find more Spanish rap songs. It’s really interesting for me to watch as an A&R.”

A member of USC’s 2020 graduating class and an A&R consultant for Sony Music imprint RECORDS, Finkelstein hopes to build out Shit You Should Be Listening To as a platform for what she calls “digestible taste making.” Founded with fellow USC classmates Emme Lehmann Boddicker and Georgia Bundschu, Shit You Should Be Listening To veers away from clunky, 1,000-word writeups to introduce new artists, instead hoping that a 30-second clip of a song is all you need to know. “For Gen Z, our page gives them bragging rights of saying they heard of an artist first, but they don’t have to go out of their way to find it,” Finkelstein explains.

Shit You Should Be Listening To and its counterparts say that they also try to make the submission process simple and easy. The publications handpick their featured artists themselves by sifting through Spotify and through submissions sent to them over text, email and DM. Far more accessible to new artists than most traditional media sources, the founders claim they really try to listen to everything they are sent. “We really do try our best,” Gray says. “The reason we started Early Rising was to give a platform to anyone trying to break through… it’s important to us to make sure all those voices are heard and pitches are listened to.”

Though these entrepreneurs have mastered the art of quick communication, convenience and discovery, what about the business models? Most of these Gen Z-focused music brands are still relatively new, with around 11,000 social followers or fewer. It remains unclear whether they can make the transition from quarantine passion projects to profitable companies in the long term, a challenge further exacerbated by a global pandemic.

“We have already started to monetize a little, but it’s not enough to 100% sustain us yet,” says Perry Avgerinos, Co-Founder of Sheesh Entertainment alongside Noah Schwartz. Both recent graduates of the University of Miami, Avgerinos and Schwartz have a concert promotion background, and initially founded Sheesh as a social media page to promote their live shows and post event recap videos.

At the onset of COVID-induced quarantine, the duo quickly pivoted the project into a more full-fledged digital media company, which they are now working on full-time. While crossing their fingers for the return of the concert industry as a revenue source for the brand, the team hopes to model themselves after Lyrical Lemonade — “we want to sell merch and make videos in partnership with artists,” says Avgerinos — as well as expand into artist management for long-term revenue.

Other IG music brands are looking to diversify in their own distinct ways. Off the Cassette plans to expand its multimedia presence as it grows, using videos to build brand recognition, attract sponsorship dollars and drive consumers to the new music they feature. Both Early Rising and Shit You Should Be Listening To have already attracted the attention of labels and distributors who would like to hire their teams for A&R consulting work, and both outlets mentioned an interest in creating a label imprint in the future. This mirrors the well-charted path that many others have taken over the years from music blogging to A&R, as those two worlds share overlapping skill sets of discovering, describing and cultivating talent.

Only time will tell if these new platforms can become financially sustainable and if so, which methods are most effective. For now, most of the platforms are content to be passion projects, pioneering a new movement around social media-based publications that foster interest in new artists.

As Spotify increases their editorial offerings to include Gen Z-focused, genre agnostic playlists like Lorem and Pollen and older publications to grow their presence on social media, it is clear that the music industry at large is also beginning to invest in content that targets the next generation of fans. Finkelstein notes that she has seen some of the more unknown artists they have featured end up on Spotify’s editorial playlists months later, though she does not claim to be the reason for such placements.

“It makes us happy to be an artist’s first feature. We are just excited to be a part of their journeys from the beginning,” she explains. This is a common sentiment held by the founders: They all hope to stand as early champions of great talent that will go on to achieve success on Spotify and beyond, and to act as some of Gen Z’s first media entrepreneurs.

“Sure, there’s always going to be competitors, but doing Off the Cassette doesn’t ever feel like a competition.” Vein notes. Though many of these platforms have similar concepts, she says, “at the end of the day, it’s a bunch of people who love the same thing – new music.”