Artist Focus: Alana Sukul

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Artist Focus: Alana Sukul

Stirring together funk, dancehall and electronic ingredients, Alana Sukul is rapidly building momentum with her unique take on modern pop.

Brand new to Jeeni, Alana Sukul has contributed five new tracks to several of our channels due to her music casting such a huge stylistic net. Born and raised in Fulham, Alana is currently studying Popular Performance, Vocals at BIMM, London where she continues to hone her already impressive skills as a vocalist, instrumentalist, producer and songwriter. Only recently, for her more dancehall inspired tracks, has Alana used external talent in the form of a producer to help her capture the tone and intention she has in mind. Aside from that, Alana is a total DIY bedroom pop artist and has done extraordinarily well for herself, particularly with her recent track, ‘Closer’ which currently has over 50,000 listens. Check out Alana’s Jeeni showcase here: https://jeeni.com/showcase/alana-sukul/

The poeticism in Alana’s lyrics is perfect for expressing emotive imagery that plain language simply can’t. ‘Emotions, heavy like water and you let me drown’, this particular line from ‘Healing’ seems reminiscent of the Mexican idiom, ‘blood is thicker than water’ meaning that family bonds are stronger than that of friends or love; the connection between the two adages is especially relevant considering the heart-broken yet regenerative narrative of this stellar track from 2020.

Although it would seem that the double single of the aforementioned ‘Healing’ and ‘IDNYT’ is Alana’s first release, she actually created a since-deleted concept project in college, as Alana puts it herself, “I made my first EP called ‘Genesis’ purely based around the struggle of mental health and how it can take a toll on one person.’

Nobly, Alana decided that the EP could be too honest and beak a project for fans to initially be exposed to, “I decided at 19 to remove the EP since I wanted to become a better inspiration for those who listen to my music and encourage them more lightly”. Ironically however, the ‘Genesis’ project and the creative decision that it inspired still formed her origin as an artist as is inspired her to begin again with a new mindset. This is when Alana began to work on ‘Healing’ and ‘IDNYT’ from her bedroom.

Alana’s broad sense of style is of no surprise when you consider the colourful collection of inspirations that she collected growing up. Motown, soul and hip-hop have influenced a lot of creative choices from Alana, however Caribbean-originated genres literally run through the veins of her more recent singles. Alana grew up with a variety of Caribbean styles thanks to her parents, “dancehall, soca and bashment have greatly influenced me since my parents are from the Caribbean”.

Alana also has an extensive list of artists she looks up to and dreams to collaborate with, “Vocally, my favourite artists nowadays who have impacted me would be Ariana Grande, Jennifer Hudson, Kehlani, H.E.R, Beyoncé and so much more.” Alana specifically credits Korean group, BTS for inspiring more in-depth meaning behind her music and lyrics.

The newest track from Alana, ‘Good to you’ is an atmospheric and stunning single and is available on streaming platforms now. Check it out on Jeeni here: https://jeeni.com/good-to-you-alana-sukul/?channel=alana-sukul&rtn=btasc&artist=alana-sukul

How can Jeeni support artists like Alana Sukul?

JEENI is a multi-channel platform for original entertainment on demand. We’re a direct service between creatives and the global audience.

artist biography

• We give creatives, independent artists and performers a showcase for their talent and services. And they keep 100% of everything they make.
• We empower our audience and reward them every step of the way.
• We promise to treat our members ethically, fairly, honestly and with respect.
• Access to artist liaison and a supportive marketing team.

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05
Jun

Black equality - in and out of music.

by Cherie Hu. I normally open up these articles with a standard “Happy [day of the week]!” greeting, but that feels inappropriate today.I was going to publish a “normal” newsletter earlier this week featuring my latest music-tech articles, but found it necessary to take a backseat in service of much more important conversations happening around the world. I wanted to share some thoughts on the conversations and realizations I’ve had with people in music this week about the responsibilities that we have, both as individuals and as a collective industry, to do better.Respect to everyone who took time off on Blackout Tuesday. I don’t intend on publishing my opinion on how the day went, because I don’t see that as my role and frankly have a lot more researching and listening to do to better understand all the issues at hand.I personally decided to continue working on Tuesday, but with a focus on gathering data and evidence that could point to concrete areas where the music industry could improve with respect to Black equality. I elaborate on them below with some additional context.The issues that are top of mind for me focus on two actions that all of us can start doing right now in service of Black equality, both in and out of music: Following the money (economics), and tracking what you see (visibility). 1. Only 8% of corporate music execs are Black. Lack of racial diversity in the music industry’s corporate and executive ranks is something that many of us feel intuitively. But we actually know surprisingly little, in terms of being able to point to concrete numbers.So, on Tuesday, I got to work. I wrote down the names of all the board members and C-Suite executives across the top three record labels (Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment) and their biggest imprints, as well as the top two concert promoters (Live Nation and AEG).There are 61 board members on my list. 53 of them are white, and only five of them — or 8% of the total — are Black: Jon Platt (Chairman/CEO, Sony/ATV Music Publishing)Nadia Rawlinson (Chief Human Resources Officer, Live Nation)Maverick Carter (Board Member, Live Nation)Jeffrey Harleston (General Counsel and EVP of Business & Legal Affairs, Universal Music Group)Kevin McDowell (EVP & Chief Administrative Officer, AEG). If we expand our scope to include President and Executive Vice President (EVP) roles as well, the percentage does improve slightly. The total number of executives on my expanded list with President/EVP roles increases to 121 people. 92 of them are white, while 22 (around 18% of the total) are Black. All the additional Black execs on this list work at label imprints, specifically RCA Records, Epic Records, Motown Records, Island Records and Atlantic Records. Contrast this to what we see in the public-facing artist landscape: The USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found earlier this year that underrepresented races and ethnicities actually over-index on the list of top-charting performers compared to the general U.S. population (56.1% versus 39.6%, respectively). The relative absence of Black leadership in the upper echelons of an industry like mainstream music that profits off of developing Black culture and talent is clearly a problem. A similar problem pervades the music industry: We can’t just put Black executives into “urban” roles.As in politics or any other part of business, it’s difficult to effect change around these problems without measurable benchmarks. So consider this a call for music-industry companies to start seriously measuring, and openly sharing, the state of their own racial equity.Trade body UK Music published a diversity report in 2018 covering both ethnicity and sex, which I remember sparked a lot of helpful conversations on a global level. The RIAA has yet to publish any aggregate diversity statistics about its own constituents in the U.S. This needs to change as soon as possible — which requires collective acknowledgement from major music companies that their internal whiteness is a serious issue that needs to be publicly addressed and resolved.Music companies should also take a tip from Google’s Diversity Report and measure not just the absolute number of Black employees, but also hiring and attrition rates across demographic groups. 2. The flow of money is moral, not just financial. It’s often said in politics, and must also be said in business: Budgets are moral documents.You can’t talk about anti-racism and Black inequality in music without talking about how the money flows. But don’t listen to me. Listen to the conversations that Black artists and music-industry professionals are having about what steps need to be taken after Blackout Tuesday — almost all of which involve improving economic equity and opportunity.Every Black person you meet in the industry, and probably many non-Black people as well, will likely have a story about an emerging Black artist they know who got thrown into disproportionately unfavorable contracts, and who had limited access to resources like lawyers, business managers and general industry education that could help them better evaluate deals.Going beyond anecdotes and actually gathering evidence of this rampant phenomenon is difficult, because it requires navigating a complicated web of NDAs and political relationships. But it’s also the first place people are turning in their demands for change.Nothing brings the issue of economic equity to light more than the surreal timing of Warner Music Group’s IPO, which launched the day after Blackout Tuesday.I’m not calling out Warner Music specifically as the biggest culprit in the industry, nor am I saying that an IPO is inherently racist. I’m thinking about more systemic issues in how this money will flow. All of the major label’s $1.9 billion IPO money will go to Blavatnik, an older white man who donated $1 million to President Trump’s inauguration campaign, and to a handful of individual, mostly white Warner Music executives who already had shares in the company. None of it will go to Warner Music on the organizational level, and so none of it will go to the artists whose back catalogs make the label such an attractive investment to Wall Street in the first place.Birdman Zoe, who manages the likes of Taz Taylor and Nick Mira, recommended that WMG shares be included in artist deals, not just a cash advance. Many others have recommended this in private conversations with me as well.In general, Black people's call for a serious, internal reflection on how much revenue from Black artists’ catalogs the labels are keeping for themselves should not be ignored. Also, as Sabri Ben-Achour puts it in a recent episode of Marketplace: “The stock market reflects the corporate economy of the future, not the real economy of today.” Hence why a billion-dollar IPO launching the day after a series of discussions about improving economic equity for Black artists feels so strange. It’s all connected. 3. We need to take equity in online events more seriously. Livestreaming as a format and paradigm is now top-of-mind for the music industry as the live-events sector continues to face an uncertain future. In general, video, not lean-back audio, is now the leading indicator of music culture. So we need to take the equity of what we see in these videos seriously.One area where I know many of you reading this can have an immediate impact is making virtual festival lineups more diverse.Several of the highest-profile virtual EDM festival lineups from the past few months — including Room Service Festival, SiriusXM’s Virtual DisDance and the first edition of Digital Mirage — were only 5% to 8% Black, and around 70% to 80% white. (The gender split for these three festivals also skewed 84% to 95% male.)It hasn’t all been doom and gloom, as there have been many examples of diverse lineups as well — from Bandsintown’s net.werk festival, which was curated by Dani Deahl and featured primarily women and people of color, to Global Citizen’s televised One World: Together At Home event, whose lineup was 35% celebrities of color and roughly split down the middle on gender.Overall, you would expect virtual festival and showcase lineups to be more equitable than IRL events, given that promoters have access to a much wider pool of talent without the logistical burden of having to fly everyone to the same physical location. But recent events have shown that this increased equity is not and will not be guaranteed, unless everyone involved draws a line, speaks out and pledges to do better.Artists with enough leverage need to be selective and turn down opportunities on lineups that are not diverse. And of course, promoters need to put in the work to diversify their curation and talent search in the first place.There also needs to be more collective action and accountability. The PRS Foundation’s Keychange initiative successfully brought together over 250 international music companies — including labels, festivals, conferences, symphony orchestras and more — to pledge towards achieving or maintaining a 50/50 gender balance in their programming, staff and/or artist rosters by 2022. A similar rally needs to happen for racial equality as well, especially for Black people in a time where so many Black artists are shaping popular culture.I don't have an answer for what the benchmark should be, but the fact that one doesn't exist or is not being measured is in itself an issue. Again, measuring and improving surface-level visibility certainly isn’t the only thing necessary for systemic change. But anything less feels insufficient. *** Here at Jeeni HQ, we think that Cheri is a brilliant writer and clearly knows her stuff so we will be curating her work for all our members. #jeeni #unsigned #musicians #performers #cheriehu #water&music #blacklivesmatter

10
Mar

Artist Pairing Success with Ariana May and Daisy Chute

Pioneers of Jeeni’s new artist pairing initiative, Daisy Chute and Ariana May sit down with Jeeni’s Ella Venvell to trade advice, take notes and reflect on the ups and downs of an independent music career. The aim of Jeeni’s artist pairing initiative is to create a supportive connection between like-minded musicians as a platform for them to encourage and uplift each other during their ongoing journeys in music. Last week, singer-songwriters, Ariana and Daisy provided a perfect blueprint for the initiative. Having already worked on six projects spanning from 2005, award-winning singer-songwriter Daisy Chute had reams of invaluable tips and experience. Despite occasionally claiming that she had ran out of decent advice, in actuality, Daisy’s insight was vast and clearly very helpful to theatrical pop prodigy, Ariana who seemed to hang on to every word. Daisy recommended that Ariana should embrace promotion tools, merchandise, CDs, social media techniques and live streaming, all of which has proved to be effective devices for Daisy’s journey in music. We listened together to Ariana’s enchanting ‘Suffolk Bay’, a moving, transportive new single featuring Ariana’s delicate, flickering vocal performance, reminiscent of The Cranberries’ late Dolores O’Riordan. A more prominent influence, as pointed out by Daisy is art pop royalty Kate Bush who, like Ariana, also began her career at just 16 years old. Daisy currently opts for more traditional, folk acoustic instruments for her newest project, ‘Songs of Solace’, a heartfelt and sentimental EP which guides the listener ‘through the beginning, middle and end of a relationship’. The two artists overlap in their tendencies for poetic story-telling and embrace of traditional instrumentation, however a key difference in their styles is the tone, or mood that these artists convey. Daisy presents an acoustic warmth and comfort with sweeping folk strings and guitar plucking, whereas Ariana’s singles currently have an almost chilling tone of drama and theatre whilst also being a pleasant listening experience. With our first venture into the initiative, Daisy Chute and Ariana May provided a model example of how it should pan out; constructive and invaluable support between artists. As Daisy put it, “It was lovely to meet Ariana and hear her music and story. I told her a bit about my music and journey in the industry and gave her any tips I’ve picked up along the way. I hope it will help her with her own musical journey and that she’ll find success now and in the future.” We at Jeeni can’t wait to bring more artists together and form a stronger collaborative and supportive community with our platform. Both of these Jeeniuses have brand new EPs, out now. How can Jeeni support artists like Ariana and Daisy? JEENI is a multi-channel platform for original entertainment on demand. We’re a direct service between creatives and the global audience. • We give creatives, independent artists and performers a showcase for their talent and services. And they keep 100% of everything they make. • We empower our audience and reward them every step of the way. • We promise to treat our members ethically, fairly, honestly and with respect. • Access to artist liaison and a supportive marketing team Check out Daisy Chute's page on Jeeni: https://jeeni.com/?s=daisy+chute Check out Ariana May's page on Jeeni: https://jeeni.com/?s=ariana+may

05
Jun

6 of the best music related sites and blogs

We have been scanning the internet and asking members what they think are the very best music-related sites and blogs. Basically, what's hot and what's not! Our choices may well differ from yours, so let's have the debate. Many things have changed in recent years and will change at an even greater pace now. With online streaming services we can enjoy our music for free or a low cost. So let's get started with the ones we love. We love Vampr. Vampr is an app that helps you discover, connect and collaborate with fellow musicians, the music industry and music lovers alike. Vampr stats show 33,798,736 swipes and 5,017,135 connections made in 198 countries worldwide. Pretty impressive stuff, so check them out here. https://vampr.me/ We also love Pitchfork. Pitchfork has some awesome features such as best new music, and we really like the music reviews. The writers seem to be in the know and very much "thought leaders" in the music industry. They are continually updating the website with the latest information related to the music industry. Unfortunately one of Pitchfork's main features is that they have their own music festival, this year to be held in Berlin which would have hosted over 40 bands across three different stages, but now cancelled. Check out Pitchfork here: https://pitchfork.com/ We also love Hypebot. Hypebot is one of the most well-known online music sites in the industry, and there is good reason for that! This site is updated very regularly so you know you are getting all the latest information possible. They also cover other areas such as “Music Tech”, “DIY” and “Charts”. You can also sign up to the Hypebot newsletter to get the daily lowdown on everything happening straight to your inbox! Hypebot covers a wide variety of topics in the music industry, so no matter what you are looking for, you’ll probably be able to find it here. They also have a charts section where you can filter by “emerging artists” or “established artists” as well as the country and city. And of course you can play artist tracks. Check out Hypebot here: https://www.hypebot.com/ Our next site is Your EDM, dedicated to Electronic Dance Music. Everything you need to stay up to date with the latest in this music genre can be found here. This includes all the latest news as well as featured articles and sub-sections/ genres of EDM, like house and bass. On this site you even have the ability to download free songs, from a variety of different artists trying to make a name for themselves in the industry. All the different sub-genres are listed on the site as well, so even if your taste is really narrow in EDM, you can still find some great information. New info is updated almost daily. Make sure you follow them on social media as well, so it is even easier to get updated on the latest information. Check out Your EDM here: https://www.youredm.com/ Next on our it's-gotta-be-hot list is All Music. All Music doesn’t really have as much news on the music industry as the others listed here, but their focus is mainly on providing information in new music and helping visitors discover their next obsession. They also provide recommendations if you create an account, and once you have rated albums, you will get recommendations on what to listen to next. They cover music from all common genres including pop, rap, electronic, classical, blues, country and more. They provide an in-depth review of all the latest albums and give options on how to stream the tunes, if you want to. There are three different ratings available to view, “All Music Rating”, “User Ratings” and “Your Rating” so you can have a more detailed view on what people think about a particular album. Check out All Music here: https://www.allmusic.com/ Last but not least we love Jeeni. Jeeni is a new platform that we are developing for Independent Musicians and Performers and is in beta testing phase. JEENI is a multi-channel streaming service for original and unsigned talent. Jeeni provides a showcase for musicians and performers to put their talent in the spotlight, giving superfans the power to make them stars. The Jeeni promise is to treat their creative talent ethically, fairly, honestly and with respect. Most importantly Jeeni is committed to – No hype. No adverts. No rip-offs. No Fakes, and making sure that the artists get 100% of their direct sales. Jeeni is presently looking for beta-testers to help us improve the site. A beta-tester simply registers for a FREE account, then designs their own showcase by uploading their music and videos and give us feedback on their user experience. Please contact Shena@jeeni.com or call 07703567196 if you are interested and want to find out more. Check out Jeeni today: https://jeeni.com/ That's all Folks!

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