1. Diddy Bop – Noname, Cam O’ Bi
   We love this track because it gives you that “down to earth” real feeling. The barely out of tune synth in the background and KRS-one like backbeat give it that old school feel that is sure to put you back in your old neighborhood.
2. Agnes – The Glass Animals
   Our friend Bill recently told us about this album’s release – and we’re thankful. Agnes is the last album on the track and tells a compelling story in a radio ready, pop-infused dreamscape with themes of drug addiction and loss. Give the whole R&B / electronica / indie album a listen.
3. Hero – The Asteroids Galaxy Tour
   More known for their song featured in a Heineken commercial – “The Golden Age”, The Asteroids Galaxy Tour have a few more tricks up their sleeve. Hero is an end-of-the-day slow jam. The lead vocals are haunting and the big-band instrumentation in the background give this a late 70s feel.
4. Mystery Fish – Aesop Rock
   Mystery Fish is the first single from Aesop Rock’s newest album ‘The Impossible Kid’. This guy’s words and rhythm fit each other like a glove. Sometimes he raps about intricate scenes and stories, this time it just seems to be a bunch of badass technologic and multi-syllable words. He’s purported to have the highest vocabulary in hip hop, and if you give it a listen you won’t be disappointed. See for yourself.
5. Wait – M83
   We have always imagined this song in a movie. We can picture this playing just as all seems lost and the protagonist builds up the strength to keep moving. It could be a sci-fi movie, a film about war, or even a rom-com. It still fits!
6. Express Yourself – Jon Batiste
   After that M83 song you may need some tissues – or this song. What a happy and upbeat tune this is. We heard this song when Jon Batiste featured it on a late show. He now plays with his band on Stephen Colbert’s late show.
7. As We Ran – The National Parks
   Folkiness, mentions of geographic locations, and a chorus of trumpets – what we need for good music. You’ll find all of ’em here. The instrumental parts make this song and are what attracted us originally. They refrain is “We belong here in the Grand Tetons”. We had to look it up ’cause we both thought it was the GREAT Tetons.
8. 4×4 Ever – Morgon Dorr
   This song says “4×4” way too much. It’s true. But it’s a song with enough build to psyche you up, especially if you’re going to be building something with 4x4s.
9. Our Apartment – Aaron West And The Roaring Twenties
   This song tells a sad story, and it tell it very well. Guy and girl get into an argument: but it’s the small details like having lunch with her family that draws us in.
10. Simple Song – The Shins
    Just about every part of the melody is something that sticks with you. The verse, bridge, and chorus combine in a great way and build on each other to create a really memorable song. Match that with The Shins sharp lead vocals and awesome songwriting ability and you have one of their greatest pieces of art to date.

Local Artist: Don Kim
We met Don playing a We Are the 9 show where he brought his video camera and started recording everything. Before long, he started threatening to beat children at the zoo during his music and we were hooked. We bought a couple of CDs, and went out to find him on the internet one day and we found out that he’s a legit internet personality! Check him, and the Queen of Akward Louisa Hall, out below and make sure you visit Don’s website!

A spotify playlist with this month’s songs is available right here!

1. Monkey Tree – Mother Mother
   Monkey Tree is a super fun tune with an amazingly intoxicating melody. What exactly is a monkey tree, and where can I find one? The world may never know.
2. The House That Heaven Built – Japandroids
   This song reminds us a little of, brand new mixed with motion city soundtrack? Anyways. This song features a high energy tempo and reminds us of our high school – teenage angst days.
3. Next Year – Two Door Cinema Club
   We know – this song just got added to your 2017 new years eve party playlist. We won’t judge. We love the upbeat feel along with the use of a – marimba perhaps?
4. Open Season – Josef Salvat
   This song is hot. This song is so hot right now. It’s like making out while your are floating in space – will probably never happen, but has probably felt like it happened. I don’t know what that means. It’s just a hot song.
5. Pressure – My Brightest Diamond
   The opening is like that one Beyoncé song with the marching band. It’s a good song that varies up the phrasing and has some memorable elements to it. Definitely unique.
6. Venice – The Lighthouse And The Whaler
   That moment when…. We told ourselves we would never open a sentence like that. Damn. Anywho – we like the guitar in the verse and the swelling strings. It really can make everything seem like a movie.
7. Closer Than This – St. Lucia
   Something about St. Lucia sounds so retro – but also modern at the same time. This is not the first St. Lucia track we have featured and for good reason. This song has so many good elements it was too good to not include it.
8. Burn – The Temper Trap
   Admittedly, we only really knew that sweeeeeeeet diiiisssspooooossssiiitttion song by them. We were jamming out before we realised – “oh man – this is that band!”. The singer has a great voice that reminds us a bit of Band of Horses.
9. Dancing With The DJ – The Knocks
   Reminiscent of the disco era – Dancing With The DJ brings the 70s into the 2070s. If Napoleon Dynamite was made when this song was on, perhaps his famous dance scene would be to this song and not to Jamiroquai (although that song is still dope).
10. Guns Out – Young the Giant
    We felt the need to let you cool off after listening to the hypmachine 2016 that was the last song. Guns Out has a nice melody with a wide vocal range including awesome falsetto parts.

Local Artist:
This month’s local featured artist is the awesome and talented Jake Mimikos (aka The Internal Frontier). Hailing from Vienna, VA, Jake has put together some great tracks. You can find a lot of his work on his ReverbNation page. The track we chose for his featured spot is called Jayco – one of his many radio-ready songs. You can view a video of the song below:

A spotify playlist with this month’s songs is available right here!

Banner Ads

This may very well be the first step in most people’s journey. A lot is attributed to the little known and improperly thought of planet called banner ads. People often shoot blanket statements into the air like – “Oh, that site makes its money off advertisement” or “I will slap an ad on there and X will happen”. I would like to correct these ongoing misunderstandings by saying this: It is the people who look at the ads who are important and not the ads themselves. Remember that. Banner ads are not the end all, be all of promotion. It is a sexy idea that doesn’t get the proper attention of most people and is often an afterthought of a, failed from the beginning, marketing campaign.

That is not to say banner ads aren’t useful promotion tools – or they don’t make anyone money. They are only successful if they get in front of enough of the target demographic. Let that sink in for a moment. It may be common sense – but even when this is taken into consideration it is easy to launch a misguided web promotion campaign centered around banner advertisement.

In order to make the most out of an online banner ad campaign, there are a few things you must do. Targeting ads to people who like music should be obvious, but make sure you are also targeting the correct music listener. Who does your music appeal to? If you have Google Analytics set up, a ReverbNation page, or a Facebook page, you should be able to identify the age, sex, and gender of the people who visit your pages. This is key in making sure you are hooking the right potential fan if they so happen to click on your ad.

There are other things you can do to make sure you are pinpointing your ideal fan when serving banner ads. It is important to set up a target area for your ads geographically. In most advertising tools, you are able to serve your ads to a set of countries, cities, and even narrow down to a particular radius. If you are doing most of your gigs in, let’s say, Charlotte, NC – you can make sure you are only serving up ads to people in that city.

And now to the fun stuff.

Our band took the time to create an ad campaign using two popular online advertising vendors: ReverbNation Promote It, and Google AdWords. They both have nice tools for creating responsive banner ads, though we will mention ReverbNation’s won in the looks department. To keep thinks fair we used the default banner ad tools (assuming most DIY bands would rather spend time elsewhere instead of learning how to create responsive and eye catching banner ads). You can view the ads created by each respective tool below:

Reverb Nation Promote It Ad

Google AdWords Ad

We also set up the same budget for both tools – 5$ a day. Below are two charts depicting the results of each respective campaign. In the first chart, you will be able to compare the total impressions of each tool. An impression, by definition, is considered when your ad is served on a given network. The second chart illustrates the number of clicks your ad received by day in each tool.

Analysis

The big takeaway from the information above is the cost per each impression and click is drastically lower for Google AdWords. When you take into account we spent 5$ a day (70$ total) for each tool, it is apparent Google AdWords is significantly cheaper based on the results. It cost us about 1/5^th of a cent every time our ad was served with ReverbNation Promote It, but Google AdWords only cost us 1/14^th of one cent – almost three times cheaper. Overall our ad was served about three times as much with Google AdWords over ReverbNation Promote It (32,959 vs 92,088).

While those numbers look overwhelmingly in favor of Google AdWords, impressions don’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. We care more about who actually clicked on our site (and who hopefully looked at our site for a while). Google AdWords beat out ReverbNation Promote It in terms of cost per click and total clicks. ReverbNation cost us $5.38 per click and Google rung in at 11.5 cents per click. ReverbNation only logged 13 total clicks during the amount of time we spent 70$ versus Google who got us 605 clicks.

The Conclusion

The data above seems to be overwhelmingly in favor of AdWords. Every day we were able to get a higher number of views and clicks that reduced the cost per click to our website. Great right?

Before you go out and start setting up a Google AdWords account, let me caution you. The ReverbNation ads are highly targeted – meaning they reach a smaller set of people. This is both a good and bad thing. The ReverbNation tool is set up so the views and clicks are more valuable because they reach a very specific set of music listeners. This causes you to get smaller, but more valuable (and expensive) results. The only problem is there is no way to customize your target. In the targeting aspect, I would prefer to use the Google AdWords promotion. It is a more transparent tool that allows you to tweak every detail of you campaign. On top of all that information – I did seem to notice ReverbNation ads appearing in normal AdWord locations on some of the target sites. While we have no way of knowing how they actually work – it looked like the Promote It tool was a glorified middle man to Google AdWords. With that being said – I am sure ReverbNation has some connections to get your ad in places AdWords will not – but that is pure speculation.

What can we say next? After all of this effort and looking at juicy numbers… Thinking to ourselves “all of those people seeing our name.. clicking on our ad!! We must have a hundred more fans now!”. We have to look at the results. We didn’t see any marked change in our fanbase or feel an added listener presence. What gives? The issue is there is no real way to identify the problem. You are tossing out an ad (of which most people hate and ignore) and hoping to reel someone in. It is like you are fishing – only way less successful than actual fishing. It may simply be the fact people just don’t pay attention to ads – or on the conspiracy side of the equation – ad companies fake results. Or maybe it is because we have an extremely small fan base and people pay more attention to things they recognize.

All in all – this experience has made us come to the conclusion online marketing campaigns using banner advertisement is a relatively weak means of getting new fans. The culmination of the above has lead us to believe these advertisements only work for the big boys that have a foothold in the industry already and have the funds to cast a widely larger net than us.

Thank you for reading the first article in the series Your Band And Promotion. We are working hard to help DIY musicians get the most out of their time and effort so check back to read more about what has and hasn’t worked for us in the promotion realm.

DC Music Download

The local Juggernaut. Alongside wonderful artist interviews and event reviews, and tremendous web design, DCMD offers an amazing array of artist resources that we’re sure local artists don’t take advantage of enough. Hint hint: This includes notices of upcoming festivals. DCMD accepts artist submissions via email and it’s a fairly simple process. They also put on contests from time to time and we won one! This one time, they shared / tweeted some of our posts on facebook and twitter. We were happy since they have a massive audience.

DC as fuck

Fuzzy Logic

Hipster as hell and featuring music (and some art) that’s worth more than a gander. Fuzzy Logic is a one woman show that interviews artists and informs everyone about the music-what-happenin’s goin’ on throughout DC. This blog is high quality and has a serious audience. We visit regularly since it’s got great music and it’s updated fairly often. She accepts music submissions via email. True story – we submitted a couple of times with no luck, possibly proving she has good taste?

The cool kid in class

Chunky Glasses

Chunky Glasses is a very good blog slash podcast. No way around it. They’re pretty heavy on the hipster spectrum, which is doing you a service. They have some of the best design, and they leverage that to cover DMV music and beyond. Don’t worry about the beyond part – you need what they got. Check out their interviews and musings about some of the best local artists.

How local? Even house shows

Dominion Collective

The Dominion Collective is a blog highlighting local culture and flavor, and a large part of that is highlighting DMV musicians. The site has a sleek feel that really showcases their content. Having featured us in a wonderful piece about busking around DC, we’re a “mite bit” partial when we recommend that you go visit their site right now. They do a good job interviewing local artists and make it all worthwhile.

Newest contender sporting the thickest beards

Capitol Sound

Although Capitol Sound is locally produced, it features music from everywhere in a heap of genres. They have great web design and don’t necessarily focus on the new – they’re just fine featuring a track that’s aged beautifully. A cool aspect of their blog is that they sometimes travel to other states to review festivals. Capitol Sound is run by about 5 people, mostly hailing from the DC area. Go focus focus your earballs on them for a while.

Stereotypically DC: Overachievers

This is Our Jam

This is Our Jam is a 3 woman show thanks to Krista, Kristen, and Stacey. Aside from featuring music (both local and beyond) they also include details about local concerts, sports, brunches, happy hours, and much more. They update the site often, and keep a clean site. We think they tend to feature pop, indie, rock, and folk type genres.

Updates twice before you can click refresh

WRGW District Radio

A number of GW students run this music blog and it has an internet radio station associated with it. The blog’s focus seems to be getting the noise out about local shows and they do interviews with artists every once and a while – and their concert reviews are impressive! They accept artist submissions via email.

The Hogwarts of the local scene

A Note Two Self

We’d say A Note Two Self is a blog that’s quite similar to our music blog. They’re a local band of the same name who also likes to write every once in a while. Although they might not be as prolific of writers as we are (which is prolly a good thing), they post shows and artist interviews. They were kind enough to feature us a while back, so make sure to return the favor and send them some web traffic. Much like the Lannisters, we pay our debts!

Feels like home

DCist

DCist is one of the best locations to go to for DC related news and their Arts & Entertainment section often has great stories. They’ll have reviews of concerts with very high quality pictures taken with nice SLRs. And you’re just one click away from great local news. Remember to sign up for their daily email blast featuring the best DC has to offer.

More than you bargained for

Showlist DC

We know this isn’t a normal blog, but Showlist DC is doing God’s work in terms of constantly updating their site. All a musician needs to do is send them a show and it’s added to their giant showlist that’s insanely up to date. We’d say it’s the go to spot for what music is going on around the DC metro area on any given evening.

The gift that keeps on giving

Hometown Sounds

More of a podcast than a blog per se, but Hometown Sounds is definitely one of the best known local DC podcasts. Featuring most genres, they play songs and then offer banter between the hosts about the track. They also feature local music news that is really useful to DMV musicians. They have a loooong memory of who played in what band and can often provide context among new bands forming from older artists. We listen to what they put out via Soundclound. They accept submissions, but we ain’t got anything accepted yet. Maybe next time!

Always has the backstory

The Circus Life

A project by local artist Justin Trawick and company, The Circus Life podcast typically interviews local DMV artists and other folks from the DMV with projects. The podcast is recorded in a professional studio where they ask guests to lay down live tracks for EACH PODCAST, which are then posted to YouTube. Great show notes are included with links back to the artist’s page. That’s a lot of work. All of this coupled with some great web design makes this one of the best places to get your DMV music fix.

Frequent, original, and high quality

Capital Bop

Here’s our first genre specific entry, where DC jazz blog Capital Bop fills some very big shoes with our fair city’s history of jazz. Their slick design tag-teamed with professional writing packs a serious one-two-punch. You’ll often see posts here about local jazz musicians, festivals and other concerts. Time to get familiar with the local Jazz venues folks.

It’s bebop, not Mmmmbop

DC Heavy Metal

When we found this blog, we were excited! The DC heavy metal / hardcore scene is a murdertrain that doesn’t sleep and we were excited to see someone like Metal Chris giving it its due. Chris seems to be a huge fan himself that showers other fans with how to best experience metal in the area. He’s got interviews, album reviews, news, and also covers events. He even dives deep into merchandise. This guy loves what he does, and if you’re a metalhead you’ll love it too.

Gives new meaning to Lincoln Park

Bandwidth.FM

Bandwidth.fm is a new-ish site from WAMU 88.5 FM that’s reviewing and publicizing DC area music. Bandwidth is run by WAMU 88.5, which is DC’s NPR station (thanks!). Their site is phenomenal and has a great use of color. Many local bands premiere their content on Bandwidth.fm, and historical pieces are often posted. They’re big on video. They actively want local artists to get in touch with them, so make sure you do so.

They have a pedigree

Glory in Sound

Glory in Sound is a local music blog focusing on supporting emerging artists in the DC area and beyond, featuring album reviews, interviews, video and single reviews as well as hosting shows and events to support the local music scene. They frequently interview often overlooked local acts and seem to really pay attention to the little, yet just as important, voices.

Focusing on the artist

Blisspop

Blisspop is written in DC, and features house, techno, and other electronic music from all over the world. They have a pretty big following that loves to read this blog’s featured music and artist interviews. Many of the blog’s contributors are musicians in their own right, and the Blisspop staff sometimes hosts events where their writers go and perform.

Like the beat, we can’t wait for their posts to drop

DC Rock Live

We were contacted after we posted this article by a few fans of this blog wanting to ensure that we include it. After some review, we can tell that David Hintz runs DC Rock Live with great care. There’s artist reviews and music recommendations here dating back to 2008. Also, this blog has a cool calendar feature that we like where they keep a list of recommended events for their readers. Help bring this blog into the spotlight!

They sweat the small stuff

In addition to music blogs, there’s a collection of DC facebook groups that can be wonderf’ly helpful to musicians and fans alike. Folks post shows, event reviews, instruments to sell, and provide general knowledge about playing music in the area. Rumors fly about what venue isn’t paying their musicians or how you can get a gig playing at your favorite venue. There are four main groups that we think folks should take a look at. Keep in mind that some of these are closed groups, so you may have to ask for attendance before they allow you entry.

There’s tons of variety out there in terms of DC blogs, and they each have different audiences, motivations, and goals. Some are a platform for promotion while others just wanna bring you great music. Still others seem to serve a smaller, more niche population, such as DC artists or a specific genre. If there’s one thing for certain, there’s definitely more content out there than you have time to consume. You are what you read – choose wisely.

Note: If you know of any blogs that we missed, add a comment below or shoot us an email to let us know!

1. Photomaton (Jean Tonique Remix) by Jabberwocky
   Get up and dance. You know.. In a way you would dance at a Cake concert – above shoulders only with a duckface. That’s what you have to do when you turn this one on.
2. Polite Dance Song by The Bird and the Bee
   Imagine this song had a choreographed dance like the Cha Cha Slide. I bet it would look something like a college art film. Only speculating.
3. Animal by Miike Snow
   The beginning gets us off beat – Every. Damn. Time. Try to not imagine flying a kite as the chorus kicks in.. Now you can’t unthank it, can you?
4. Compliment Your Soul by Dan Croll
   What a tune. We are jealous of the brass. We are like Christopher Walkin – we need more cowbrass.
5. Let’s Go by Matt and Kim
   I guess we are in a dancey mood. This upbeat song has catchy written all over it! The ooOoooOos will stick with you don’t listen to it in the morning or you will be busting it out at your morning meetings.
6. Black Rock by The Infamous Stringdusters
   Bluegrass without vocals. You can put this on and just work away the same way you can with techno / EDM.
7. The Story of My Life by Astronautalis
   This Astronautalis track has another artist on that effortlessly weaves their words back and forth. It’s a great song that really makes you think hard on when they’re actually speaking in metaphors. Plus – They mention DC!
8. Vagabond by Caamp
   This band will really make you think of a slightly more southern version of Mumford and Sons. When they scream “YIP” is when they go full Mumford.
9. The Hymn of Acxiom by Vienna Teng
   This might be our first a capella choral tune that we’ve featured. Vienna definitely channels Imogen Heap throughout this song with her slight use of vocoder.
10. Birds of Broken Wings by Ben Caplan
    Emo, gothic, gypsy, folk? All of those words apply here but we’re not sure exactly what to call it, but it features clarinets and fiddles. Give it a listen and let us know.

A Spotify playlist with this month’s songs is available right here!

First thing we did was google the radio show, and we were astounded to find very little information about it online. We found a Youtube video with gospel singers with the similar title and we both gulped, and wondered what we’d gotten ourselves signed up for. Turns out, Voices from the DMV is a very new local radio show produced by Antonio Villaronga. The show airs on WERA-LP 96.7 FM in Arlington, VA every Friday at noon. Each week, Antonio invites a new local artist to showcase their talent. The show is pre-recorded live in the Audio Production Suite at Arlington Independent Media, although some folks play pre-recorded music.

The Arlington Independent Media building is in Clarendon, right around the corner from Galaxy Hut and Iota Club. That means its geographically close to some neighborhoods with very good taste in music. Josh used to live a few blocks away from this building and jogged past it thousands of times (okay, okay, jogged by it a few times). Each time Josh ran by, he thought it was a place that sold tickets to music events for some reason. I guess the giant satellites on top of the building just weren’t enough of a clue, but it leads to a nifty fact: This building actually broadcasts on a local FM station. It’s the only local station that actually gets picked up at the FCC’s headquarters across the pond in DC. Noice.

We learned all this when we met our new best friend Antonio. We walked into the studio and found it to be remarkably posh. This place has state of the art recording equipment that’s available to rent at shockingly low prices to Arlington County residents. So if you’re local – look into it.

When it became time for us to use the studio, we all got to work. Antonio setup mics, stands, and other recording equipment that was needed. We got our instruments out of cases and into working order. First things first, Antonio asked us to do some self-interviews, where he’d ask us to describe our music, our influences, and the local music scene – and we’d ramble an answer his way. We’re not sure how, but we ended up talking to ourselves for like an hour, and thankfully Antonio chopped this down to a few minutes. After we got done talking – it was time to make some noise!

We came prepared to play 2 songs. Turns out… Dan had played like 6. So we were already behind. But whatever, we setup our video camera, pushed play and did a few takes. Antonio ended up mixing and mashing a few takes together via his workstation to get the best outcome. He was really cool about all of it and we had a great time playing. We’ll admit we were a little nervous at first, but Antonio cheered us on and we got into the swing of things. As we were all packing up, Antonio said that we could’ve played a few covers if we were worried about it being a short show… D’oh! Since we didn’t have a lot of original material to offer, we followed up afterwards with our home recorded track Sequestered Together to help make our set a little longer.

With everything packed up, we left the studio, and headed over to Galaxy Hut for some camaraderie. A few days later, Antonio got back in touch with us after doing a little bit of mixing, and voila! We had finished tracks. The results were astounding. The Voices From the DMV setup is amazing and the quality is just as good as professionally recorded live albums released by big name acts. Do yourself a favor and be prepared to feature the best originals from your catalog. Listen to our show below.

Once the show aired we asked if we could put the tracks on Soundcloud and YouTube. We took a still from the video and used it to create some simple album artwork. The album was called Live on WERA 96.7 FM. We hated not using Voices From the DMV in the album name, but we thought it was useful from a marketing standpoint to show that we had played live on the radio. In our Youtube videos we made sure to feature ‘Voices From the DMV’ loud and proud.

If you get the call to be on this radio show, we really recommend that everyone come ready to play LOTS of songs, bring a video camera to turn it into a Youtube video, and offer up some desserts to Antonio for his time. He’s a great guy doing a wonderful service for the local music community. He’s also got a huge sweet tooth. He informed us his favorite dessert is apple pie. Bring that too.

See below for us playing Spec, VA, which is hosted on our Youtube channel.

Here’s the Soundcloud album, and both tracks are downloadable!

1. Redshift by Darwin Deez
   If you don’t understand all of the scienc-y / Bill Nye-y references … Go watch an episode of Cosmos and give this a listen.
2. Euphrates by Town of Saints
   Lots of fiddle and mumford-ish leanings, quick lyrics, upbeat. Yeah I can listen to this. I wanna “Say hello to people born in a different time.”
3. 24-25 by Kings of Convenience
   This one is a nice acoustic easy-listening tune with two guys harmonizing. Kinda sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
4. Take These Thoughts by Chris and Thomas
   This one is a nice acoustic easy-listening tune with two guys harmonizing. It’s like Deja-vu all over again, only this time it also has mandolin.
5. Mr. Blue Sky by Electric Light Orchestra
   It took me till the second chorus to realize this song was sampled by Common (go check that out too). It’s hard to believe this song was made in 1977 with all of the synthesizers and whatnot.
6. Heroes Get Remembered… by Four Year Strong
   Yes we do listen to music with electric guitars – we promise! The vocals in this song are mixed … differently. They are more in the background, and the rhythmic guitar chills right in your face the whole song. These guys remind me of Mayday Parade + New Found Glory.
7. We The Common by Thao & and The Get Down Stay Down
   Nothing crazy unique about this indie / folk / pop song except it gels sooooo well. The odd banjo used in a pop setting and layered over itself is interesting. Also – weird name.
8. Left Alone by Native Kinds
   No idea how we found this song. This band has like < 1000 listens on all their songs, but they sound like a less goth-emo version of Ghost Town. The dropout at 1:23 always gets me.
9. Lava Glaciers by Riff Raff
   So, one of us was working while listening to Spotify and quietly thought – damn this is gangster. Little did we know the song was by Riff Raff. Who cares – it’s dope – the world should know. (plus it features Childish Gambino!)
10. Could Have Been Me by The Struts
    The song doesn’t start out strong, but as it goes on, they bring the thunder. They’re very anthem arena rock taking a touch of Fun. It took a while to grow on me, but this track is diggable.

A big thanks to Gema for the track recommendation! If anyone else has somethin’ special they’d like to share, shoot it our way.

Local Artist:
No local track this week – we’ve been holed up in a room working on a very special project…

A spotify playlist with this month’s songs is available right here!