This free event covered everything from booking and artist development to local government, funding, event production, and social strategy, with Miami artists, talent buyers, business owners, and cultural leaders sharing lessons from their own careers ahead of III Points’ return to Miami this month. The programming was also broadcast through Miami Community Radio.

What stood out most was how practical a lot of the advice was. There were no magic formulas or shortcuts. Again and again, the conversation came back to doing strong work, being part of your community, building relationships early, and understanding what it actually takes to execute an idea.

These are the five lessons that stuck with me most.

1. The Music Still Has to Come First: Inbal Lankry

With all of the attention placed on branding, content, networking and building a team, Inbal Lankry of PRISMA Artists brought the conversation back to the most basic part of an artist’s career: “the music is #1.”

It sounds obvious, but it is also easy to lose sight of when artists are expected to operate as content creators, marketers and entrepreneurs at the same time. Lankry also encouraged artists to ask questions, connect directly with people through DMs and build relationships outside of their immediate market, including internationally.

My takeaway was not that those other pieces do not matter. They do. But none of them can compensate for music that is not connecting. The foundation still has to be solid before everything else can amplify it.

2. Getting Booked Starts Long Before You Ask for the Booking: Carlos Saavedra

For emerging DJs, Club Space Head Talent Buyer Carlos Saavedra gave some of the weekend’s most immediately actionable advice.

Instead of treating booking teams like email addresses you contact when you need a gig, Saavedra emphasized showing up to venues and events, meeting the people involved, supporting other artists, and becoming an active part of the scene. Send the demos and mixes, bring an idea to the table, and do not be afraid to follow up.

There was also a less glamorous detail that stood out: organization. Saavedra stressed how valuable it is when an artist arrives with a clear, specific rider and knows what they need from a venue.

Taken together, it reframed booking as something built through participation, consistency and professionalism rather than a single pitch.

3. Build the Relationship Before You Need Something: “MJ” Green

One of the most useful conversations for anyone trying to build events or creative projects in Miami came from “MJ” Green, Executive Director of the Miami Downtown Development Authority.

“Don’t wait to get to know your government,” Green advised. “Reach out early.”

The larger lesson applies well beyond government. Relationships become much more valuable when they are built before there is an immediate ask attached to them. Green encouraged creatives to understand who the relevant people and organizations are, establish those connections early, and approach them genuinely rather than transactionally.

He also made an important point about funding: sometimes you need to prove the idea works first. A successful event, visible community support and evidence that people will actually show up can become the proof of concept that opens doors later.

4. Triple the Budget. Triple the Timeline: Nick Katz

Nick Katz, Owner of Andrew Skate Shop and Founder of Skate Free, gave perhaps the most memorable piece of practical advice of the weekend: “Anytime you think a business or project is going to cost X, triple it.”

His point extended to time as well. Whatever timeline you think a project will require, prepare for it to take considerably longer and enter the process overfunded and overprepared.

That landed with me because creative ideas are usually easiest to imagine at their finished state. The difficult part is everything between the idea and execution: permits, budgets, buildouts, delays, and unexpected problems.

Katz paired that realism with another message: resilience. The yeses will often be outnumbered by the noes. Being prepared matters, but so does continuing to push when the process becomes harder than expected.

5. Being Resourceful Is Part of Being Creative: MOKIBABY

During The Art of Production: Building Live Experiences, MOKIBABY, aka Veronica Gessa, approached creativity from the side people in the audience usually never see: how an experience actually gets built.

Her budgeting advice boiled down to being crafty. Fabric, lanterns, foam scraps, used props, and inexpensive materials can go a long way when the idea behind them is unique. However, resourcefulness goes far beyond saving money.

MOKIBABY also talked about paying attention to how people move through a space, including the value of having somewhere to decompress, and how initiative, attention to detail, and anticipating other people’s needs can get you noticed behind the scenes.

That was one of my favorite lessons of the weekend. Creativity is not only having the vision. It is figuring out how to make the vision work with the people, space, budget, and resources you actually have.

What I appreciated most about Points of View was how little of the strongest advice depended on having perfect circumstances. Make the work better. Show up. Ask questions. Build relationships before they become transactional. Budget for reality. Learn how to execute with what you have.

None of those ideas are shortcuts, which is probably why they are the ones worth taking home.

The post 5 Things I Learned From III Points’ Points of View 2026 appeared first on Magnetic Magazine.

An artist might build attention on TikTok, sell music on one platform, move merch on another, collect emails somewhere else, send fans to a ticketing page for shows, then hope all of those pieces somehow turn into a real business. That can work, but it is messy. It also means the artist is often renting attention from platforms that do not give them much control over the next step.

EVEN STUDIO is trying to bring more of that fan relationship back to the artist’s own property. The product gives artists a destination built on their own domain, where they can release music or content, sell tickets and merchandise, host livestreams, build community, offer special access, and shape whatever kind of fan-facing experience makes sense for the campaign.

That last part is the real angle. This is not a standard album page with a buy button dropped on top.

EVEN is positioning STUDIO as a flexible home for the campaign itself. An album can sit at the center. So can a tour, a merch drop, a ticket onsale, a comedy special, a piece of content, or a longer-running fan community.

For artists and labels, that changes the question from “where do we send people?” to “what do we want the fan experience to be?”

The Pre-Order Gets a Better Reason to Exist

The most interesting music-specific piece is how EVEN STUDIO handles album pre-orders. Traditionally, a pre-order asks fans to pay early, then wait. That can help with chart timing and campaign planning, but it does not always feel great from the fan side unless the artist has a highly committed audience.

EVEN STUDIO changes that by letting artists give purchasers immediate access to up to four tracks before the full release. Instead of buying an album and waiting until release day, fans can start hearing the music as the campaign rolls out. The company also says qualifying redeemed album sales can be reported under applicable chart rules.

That is a better value exchange. Fans get music right away. Artists get direct revenue earlier in the campaign.

Labels and managers get a clearer read on who is engaged before release day. The wider album can still go to streaming, but the deepest fans have a reason to buy before everyone else gets access.

EVEN CEO Mag Rodriguez frames it as “EVEN and streaming, not EVEN or streaming,” which is the right way to think about this kind of model. Streaming gives reach. Direct purchase gives revenue, data, and a fan relationship the artist can carry into the next release.

I covered a related idea in my conversation on digital merchandise and modern music income, where the key point was that fan commerce works best when it feels tied to the artist’s identity rather than tacked on at the end.

Merch Lives Inside the Same Fan Destination

The merch piece is especially important because it turns STUDIO into more than a pre-order product.

EVEN says merch can live directly on the STUDIO site rather than sending fans away to a separate store. Carrie Davis also clarified that EVEN can facilitate production and fulfillment with a number of partners, which means artists are not limited to using STUDIO as a simple outbound link hub.

That is a meaningful distinction. A link page can point fans toward merch. A real fan destination can make the merch part of the campaign. That difference matters when the goal is to connect album buyers, ticket buyers, merch customers, and highly engaged fans in one place.

For independent artists, merch is often one of the clearest ways to turn attention into income, but the production side can get annoying fast. Sourcing products, managing fulfillment, dealing with delays, keeping track of inventory, and linking everything to the actual release campaign can become its own job. If EVEN can lower that barrier while keeping the commerce on the artist’s own domain, that gives STUDIO a much broader use case.

I wrote about physical merch options for musicians in my roundup of physical merch creation platforms producers should know, and EVEN STUDIO appears to sit one step closer to the full artist business stack. It is not only about making the item. It is about connecting the item to the fan relationship.

The Real Product Is Fan Continuity

The launch copy talks about music, merch, livestreams, ticket access, waitlists, hospitality, presale registration, content, and community. That might sound broad, but the thread is simple: STUDIO wants to keep artists from starting over every time a fan does something.

A fan buys an album. That fan can later be shown merch. A merch buyer can become a ticket buyer. A ticket buyer can register for presale access. A livestream viewer can join a community or buy physical music. Each moment can feed the next one instead of disappearing into a different platform.

For managers, labels, distributors, promoters, and ticketing partners, that is where STUDIO becomes more than another artist website. It connects commerce to fandom in a way that can carry across a campaign, and possibly across an artist’s larger business.

That does not mean every artist needs a full STUDIO build immediately.

The product is invite-only, and the best fit is likely artists with enough audience activity to justify a deeper direct-to-fan destination. But for acts with fans willing to buy early, buy merch, show up live, or pay for added access, the model is easy to understand.

It also lines up with where artist income has been heading for years. I wrote about this larger shift in my article on creative ways record labels are making money, and the same logic applies here. Revenue is no longer one thing. It is music, merch, tickets, data, access, community, and the ability to move fans from one part of the business to another without losing them.

The post EVEN STUDIO Gives Artists Their Own Shopfront appeared first on Magnetic Magazine.

You have one finished visual: a square cover that shines in a feed but leaves black bars on a vertical phone screen.

Hiring a motion designer for an eight-second loop each time you drop a track is neither cheap nor practical, especially if you run a steady stream of singles.

Most of us fall back on three quick moves instead: re-frame the existing artwork, trim a clip we already own, or build a fresh scene from stock or AI.

The six tools below handle those moves in different ways, so we ranked them by how fast they take you from finished art to a compliant Canvas without derailing release week.

What Spotify Asks For

Spotify treats Canvas as an eight-second mini-billboard that replaces your static cover in the Now Playing view. It plays silently, loops endlessly, and fills the entire phone screen.

If this is your first release, learn how to put your music on Spotify before you plan the visual. Canvas only appears on a track that your distributor has already delivered to Spotify.

To keep uploads smooth, Spotify publishes clear specs. Your file needs to run for three to eight seconds, sit in a vertical 9:16 frame, and measure somewhere between 720 and 1080 pixels tall. Accepted formats are MP4 and JPG.

The guidelines also push you toward abstract or atmospheric motion. Because the clip is so short, visible singing or rapping drifts out of sync and looks off-beat.

How We Chose These Tools

We focused on the finish line, not the feature list. Every pick had to turn a finished cover or clip into a compliant Canvas with minimal fuss.

Five factors steered the ranking:

1. Distance from upload to export. Fewer clicks wins.
2. Spec alignment. Defaults must land inside Spotify’s current 3-to-8-second, 720-to-1080-pixel window.
3. Crop and loop previews. If you can’t see the trim and the restart, the tool drops down the order.
4. Editing overhead. Quick tweaks beat timeline gymnastics.
5. Headroom for growth. Bonus points for an optional path to richer motion when a slow zoom feels flat.

Neural Frames tops the list because it nails the essentials: drag in the art, preview the vertical crop, and download a ready-to-upload MP4. The other tools fill different niches—from stock-driven textures to full keyframe control—but they start a step or two farther from that urgent upload button.

1. Neural Frames

Neural Frames leads this list because its Spotify Canvas maker starts where most of us already are: with a finished square cover and a looming deadline. Drag the artwork—or any short clip—into the browser window and the tool instantly shows a live vertical crop. You can nudge the frame to keep logos or faces centered, then set the exact length between three and eight seconds. Editing and export run in the browser tab, and your media is not uploaded.

The Neural Frames Spotify Canvas maker takes MP4, MOV, WebM, JPG, PNG or WebP files.

The export is laser-focused on Spotify. You get a silent H.264 MP4 at 576 × 1024 pixels, locked at 30 fps and capped at eight seconds. Those numbers sit neatly inside Spotify’s spec window, so the file sails through the upload dialog without a second resize check.

Two source paths cover almost every release scenario. A still image receives a gentle zoom that adds life without distracting from the art, while a video can be trimmed and reframed in the same interface. Accepted inputs span MP4, MOV, WebM, JPG, PNG, and WebP up to 50 MiB, so you can reuse phone footage, stock loops, or the label’s promo clip without format gymnastics.

The real headline, though, is the crop preview. Square artwork often hides key detail near its edges—text, artist portraits, even a catalog number. Seeing the vertical frame before export stops that detail from vanishing on fans’ phones.

Neural Frames is honest about its scope. The Canvas maker reformats existing media; it does not invent brand-new motion. When you need a wilder look, the same platform houses a separate AI music-video generator that spins fresh scenes from your track, but that workflow lives outside the quick-turn Canvas tool.

Limitations are deliberate. The zoom animation is restrained, and the output resolution tops out at 576 × 1024. For most electronic releases, that restraint is a strength: the loop supports the song without hijacking attention.

If you want the shortest, safest route from cover art to compliant Canvas, Neural Frames is the button to press.

2. Rotor Videos

Rotor takes a different tack: instead of coaxing subtle motion from a still cover, it drops nine million video clips on your desk and says, “Pick a mood.” You start by choosing a style template—its site shows looks such as Cinematic, Hard Cut and VHS Vision—then audition footage that fits the palette.

The library is the draw. Landscapes, neon streets, particle flows, even visualizers; all pre-cleared and ready to loop. Select a clip, trim a seven-second slice, and Rotor snaps it into a vertical 9:16 frame. The editor previews the loop so you can catch a jarring cut before export.

Why rank it below Neural Frames? Because Rotor shines when the artwork itself is static or unsuited to motion. If you want the cover front and centre, you will need to layer it in post or choose another tool. Rotor’s strength is fresh texture that sits behind the music rather than the literal sleeve.

Use Rotor when you crave moving atmosphere—a stormy coast behind a trance lead, skyline b-roll for a melodic groove—without spending hours on a stock-site treasure hunt.

3. Adobe Express

Adobe Express slots neatly between heavy-duty editing suites and drag-and-drop design apps. Open a new project, switch the canvas to a vertical 9:16 frame, and drop your square cover into place. A single click applies a slow zoom, pan, or dissolve that turns static art into a living backdrop. You can fine-tune speed and direction, then set the clip length to anything between three and eight seconds.

If your label already works in Adobe’s tools, Express keeps the release artwork, type and colors in one familiar place. That continuity matters when you run a label catalog and need every single to share the same typographic DNA.

Export is straightforward. Toggle “mute,” choose MP4, and confirm the height lands at or below 1080 pixels.

What holds Express back from the top two slots is hands-on time. You make the decisions, not an AI template, so the workflow is a touch slower. Still, for artists already living inside Adobe’s ecosystem, that familiarity offsets the extra clicks and delivers a polished result that feels on-brand every time.

4. Canva

If you designed the sleeve in Canva, staying in the same workspace saves a ton of context-switching. Duplicate the artwork, switch to a vertical 9:16 size no taller than 1080 pixels, and you are already halfway to a Canvas.

Canva’s photo-animation panel gives you gentle moves like Pan, Tumble, or Zoom, while the “Create an Animation” tool lets you draw a custom path. Keep it subtle. A slow drift or a background texture pass works better than a rapid bounce that screams for attention.

The timeline along the bottom trims the clip to a six- or seven-second loop, and the MP4 export button lives one click away. Remember to mute audio and double-check that the height sits at 1080 pixels or below before downloading.

There is one caveat. Canva’s editor plays a straight preview, not a loop, so you need to scrub the playhead back to frame one and watch the cut yourself. Make sure the final frame and the first frame feel like a continuation, not a jump.

Overall, Canva is less prescriptive than Neural Frames and less adventurous than Rotor, but that middle ground is a sweet spot when you want the cover, type, and palette you already approved, only taller and gently breathing on a fan’s phone.

5. CapCut

CapCut is the tinkerer’s playground. Fire up a vertical 9:16 project, drop the cover in, and you are looking at a full timeline complete with keyframes for position, scale, rotation, opacity, and even color filters.

A slow push, a gentle tilt, or a soft opacity pulse is only two keyframes away. Because CapCut interpolates movement, the animation glides rather than stutters, which helps the loop feel seamless when it restarts.

A simple recipe:

1. Duplicate the cover onto two layers.
2. Blur and enlarge the bottom layer to fill the vertical frame.
3. Add a three-keyframe zoom on the top layer—start at 100 %, creep to 105 %, then drift back to 100 %.

Trim everything to a six-second span, mute the audio track, and export an MP4. Double-check the settings panel: if the export height reads above 1080, drop it to 1080 or below before rendering.

The downside is temptation. Dozens of transitions, filters, and stickers sit a click away, and it is easy to over-edit a loop that is only going to play behind the Now Playing metadata. Discipline pays off. Keep moves slow and single-directional so the jump back to frame one stays invisible.

For producers who enjoy hands-on control, CapCut is a flexible workhorse that turns a plain cover into a finely tuned animation. Just budget an extra ten minutes for keyframe tweaks and a loop test on your phone before you call it done.

6. Kapwing

Kapwing markets a one-click “Spotify Canvas Maker,” and the template does feel welcoming: a seven-second timeline, vertical frame, and drag-and-drop media slot. Drop your cover art in, add a mild pan or zoom, and you are already looking at a preview that loops in the editor.

The browser timeline is the star here. You can add extra layers—lyrics, texture overlays, subtle flares—and nudge their in-points to line up with musical moments. Keyframes let you dial in precise motion rather than rely on broad presets.

Now for the important catch. The default Canvas template sits at 1080 × 1920 pixels, which exceeds Spotify’s current height ceiling of 1080. That one detail bumps Kapwing to sixth place. The fix is painless—open the “Canvas Size” panel and set the height to 1080 or 1024 before exporting—but forgetting that step can trigger an upload error on release day.

Kapwing’s Spotify Canvas template, shown on its own site at 1080 × 1920 pixels.

Once resized, the export options are solid: MP4, H.264, and a mute toggle to kill inherited audio.

Kapwing suits artists who want a layered, time-synced look yet still prefer a friendly browser UI over a full NLE. Just build “resize before render” into your routine and you will walk away with a polished loop that behaves on every phone.

Before You Upload

Play the loop back-to-back a few times and watch the reset point. The transition should feel like a single, endless move, not a jump cut.

Next, give the edges a once-over. Song titles, artist names, and faces love to wander toward the border during a zoom. Keep every critical detail inside a comfortable margin so different phone crops never nibble it away.

Glance at the inspector and confirm the ratio reads 9:16—not a square stretched tall. Then check the runtime. Anything shorter than three seconds or longer than eight fails the upload test.

Open the finished MP4 on your own phone. Rotate, pause, and scrub to spot any banding or artifacts that didn’t show up on your desktop display.

Finally, upload through Spotify for Artists, preview the crop one last time, and hit publish. Make these checks part of your regular release routine and you will never scramble for a placeholder visual again.

The post Best Tool to Make a Spotify Canvas From Album Art: 6 Picks for Producers Releasing Singles in 2026 appeared first on Magnetic Magazine.

Rather than argue about which platform is best in the abstract, we went through five of them the way a careful buyer would, opening product pages, reading pricing sliders and FAQs, and noting what one unit of growth costs, how quickly it tends to arrive, and what the vendor promises if it disappears again. Every figure in this article was read from a public page in September 2026. Where a platform does not publish a number, we say so instead of guessing, because that is itself useful information.

The number that matters: what one unit of growth costs

Landing pages are written in the language of real fans and organic reach, which sounds good and compares to nothing. Product pages are written in units and dollars, and those you can line up side by side. That is the language the table below uses, and it is worth reading before any of the descriptions that follow.

All prices come from product and pricing pages checked in September 2026 and are in US dollars. Bundle contents are as the page listed them at the time.

Two patterns are obvious once the numbers sit next to each other. The storefronts, Promosound and Artist Push, price growth in cents per play or follower, while the review platforms price it in dollars per opinion, and that gap is not a trick but a difference in what is being sold. A play is a play; a review is a person’s attention, and attention has always cost more. The other pattern is that only the storefronts publish what happens when numbers fall. The rest sell something that cannot really drop in the first place, which is reassuring if you wanted feedback and a warning if you wanted a bigger follower count.

Four budgets, four plans

Here is what we would actually do at four spending levels, using only products that exist at the prices in the table. The plans build on each other, so a bigger budget does not replace the smaller plan; it adds to it.

With nothing to spend

Open a free Daily Playlists account and use the ten weekly submissions it gives you, every week without fail, on playlists that were updated in the past month. Set up a free Hypeddit smart link and put it in every bio you have. Pitch the release to Spotify’s own editors through Spotify for Artists at least a week before it comes out. None of this costs money, all of it costs discipline, and together it makes a better foundation than most paid campaigns are built on.

Under fifty dollars

In release week, put twelve dollars into either a Promosound Spotify Basic bundle or an Artist Push Starter Mix. They are close cousins: each delivers around three thousand plays and a few hundred followers and saves, which is enough to give the recommendation system something to react to. If the track has a hook that works in a fifteen-second clip, the nine-dollar TikTok Starter at Artist Push is worth adding. Hold whatever is left for a second push on whichever platform actually moved, because that is the point of the first one.

Fifty to two hundred

This is the range where a Promosound Artist Basic pack earns its keep. For forty-nine dollars it spreads one campaign across five platforms, lists about eleven thousand plays and views and just under two thousand followers, and states that delivery starts within a day. We think of it less as a purchase and more as a test, because when the report arrives you learn which surface the track belongs on before spending real money there. With the rest of the budget, run a SoundCampaign campaign at its eighty-dollar minimum so a handful of curators hear the song while the numbers are moving, and move Hypeddit up to the Basic plan so that traffic lands on a page you control.

Two hundred and up

Now you can afford to specialise. The Standard tier of Promosound’s Artist Pack, at a little over a hundred dollars, roughly quadruples what Basic delivers. A hundred and fifty on SoundCampaign reaches around seventeen curators with written feedback attached to every listen. If you make electronic music, an Artist Push Beatport daily push or a Promosound Traxsource chart push does something that no amount of Spotify spending can. Radio is the expensive door, with starter packs beginning under a hundred dollars at Artist Push and a thirty-day online airplay run at Promosound priced closer to four hundred, and in our experience it only pays off once the streaming side already looks alive.

1. Promosound: one forty-nine dollar order, walked through

Promosound: the Spotify category alone runs to more than twenty separate services (September 2026)

Promosound sits at the top of this list for a reason you can check with a calculator rather than take on trust. Its Spotify menu is both the deepest and the cheapest per unit of the five: a thousand plays for four dollars, followers and saves at two dollars per hundred, monthly listeners at nine per thousand, a single playlist placement for ten. There is even a Top 1 position on a genre playlist with a stated window of one to four days. What matters more than any single price is that saves and monthly listeners can be bought as separate line items, because those are the two signals Spotify’s recommendation system weighs most heavily, and nowhere else on this list lets you target them directly.

The order we would place first, though, is not a Spotify product at all but the Artist Basic pack. For forty-nine dollars it spreads a campaign across five platforms and promises delivery starting within twenty-four hours, and what you are really buying is not the volume but the comparison. When the report comes back you know whether the track drew more on TikTok or on Spotify, whether YouTube viewers stuck around, and where the new followers came from. A second, larger order should be built on exactly that information, and forty-nine dollars is a cheap way to get it. The Standard, Premium and Ultra tiers scale the same idea up to a full release push for those who already know where they are going.

Outside Spotify, the storefront reaches YouTube and Shorts, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Threads on the social side, Apple Music, Deezer and Tidal for streaming, the Beatport and Traxsource charts, Mixcloud and Resident Advisor for the electronic scene, and online and FM radio plus music blog placements for the traditional kind of attention, with a separate line of hip-hop playlist and blog pushes. The company has been doing this since 2010 and lists more than seventy thousand completed orders. Its refund and refill policy is published on the site, and nothing in the checkout asks for an account password.

Skip it if what you want is a human opinion about the song. Promosound sells reach and reports rather than feedback, and the catalogue is big enough that a first visit takes a few minutes to find your way around.

2. Artist Push: the twelve dollar test

Artist Push: Starter, Pro, Digger and Star packs across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Beatport and Spotify (September 2026)

Artist Push has been around since 2015, is run by people who also make music, and carries a catalogue of roughly a hundred and sixty items priced a dollar or two either side of Promosound’s on most units. What sets it apart is how it packages things for someone who has never bought promotion before. Every platform has a Starter pack priced like a sandwich: a Spotify Starter Mix for twelve dollars with three thousand plays, a hundred saves and three hundred followers; a TikTok Starter for nine with five thousand views, a couple of hundred likes and a hundred followers; YouTube for twelve with a hundred subscribers and a thousand views; Instagram and Facebook for eight apiece. Put a second service in the cart and the store takes five percent off.

The FAQ is refreshingly plain about what can go wrong, which is rarer than it should be. Delivery is estimated at one to three days and the page admits it sometimes varies. Followers mostly stick, it says, but nobody can promise they stay forever, so the company commits to refilling them within three months if you notice a drop. If a service simply is not delivered you get a refund or a swap, and because the company is registered in the EU its refund policy spells out the consumer’s right to a proportional refund on a partly delivered order. For a first purchase of twelve dollars, that is more transparency than most of the market offers.

There are two things here you will not find at Promosound. One is a SoundCloud line, including an organic push sold by the day. The other is a media tier that reaches into Mixmag features and Billboard placements at four-figure prices, which is a different conversation entirely but tells you the catalogue goes well past starter packs.

Skip it if your whole plan is Spotify. Artist Push offers one Spotify bundle per tier where Promosound offers more than twenty separate services, and at higher volumes the per-unit prices tip slightly the other way.

3. SoundCampaign: the arithmetic of a hundred and fifty dollars

SoundCampaign: the estimator shows projected curator reviews before you pay (September 2026)

SoundCampaign does not sell plays at all, which takes some people a moment to absorb. You set a budget, starting at eighty dollars and running past five thousand, the platform matches your track to playlist curators and TikTok creators by genre, and you pay only for each one who actually listens and writes something back. The pricing page turns this into arithmetic with a slider: when we checked, a hundred and fifty dollars projected up to seventeen curator submissions, alongside the combined follower count of the playlists involved. A review is not a placement, and the page says so plainly. Some curators will add the song and some will not.

What you get for the higher price per unit is information, and quite a lot of it. Every review arrives with written feedback, so after seventeen of them you know, in curators’ own words, why the track is landing or failing to. The Artist Protection Program credits you back for any review that never materialises, so a budget cannot quietly evaporate into silence. And a single budget can be split between Spotify playlists, TikTok videos and Meta ads, which turns one spend into a small experiment across three channels.

Skip it if the track is not finished or the genre is hard to name. Paying eighty dollars to be told the mix is muddy is a poor use of eighty dollars, and genre matching is what the whole system runs on.

4. Hypeddit: the nine dollar tool you get to keep

Hypeddit: Basic $9, Pro $13, Elite $99 per month on annual billing, plus a free Rookie tier (September 2026)

Everything else on this list is spent and gone once the campaign ends. Hypeddit is the exception, because what you are paying for is infrastructure: smart links that route to every store, pre-save pages, download and link gates that trade a file for an email address, custom domains, tracking pixels. The Basic plan is nine dollars a month on annual billing, Pro is thirteen and adds ready-made ad campaigns for Spotify, YouTube and TikTok along with a readout of your Spotify popularity score, and Elite at ninety-nine brings live coaching. Once the Pro trial ends there is a permanent free Rookie tier with unlimited smart links and gates, which is more than most artists need to begin with.

The line in the FAQ worth underlining is that Hypeddit takes no cut of your advertising spend. You pay the subscription and the ad money goes straight to Meta, Google or TikTok, which makes the Pro plan an honest way to run first ads without an agency margin sitting on top. It also makes Hypeddit the natural landing point for everything else on this list. A Promosound pack sends listeners; a pre-save page keeps the ones who cared.

Skip it if nobody is arriving yet. A gate on an empty page collects nothing, and the ad templates still need real ad money behind them.

5. Daily Playlists: ten free pitches a week

Daily Playlists: Free tier with 10 weekly submissions, Professional at $19.99 a month (September 2026)

Daily Playlists is the only entry here that is useful with no money at all. A free account gets ten standard submissions a week to a directory of more than eighteen thousand independent Spotify playlists, extra submissions and premium credits can be bought in packs of ten, and the Professional plan at around twenty dollars a month triples the weekly allowance while adding playlist recommendations, community feedback on your track and pre-save gates. Curators reply when they reply, and there is no clock on it.

The value is in volume and habit rather than any single result. Ten pitches a week, every week, to playlists you have actually looked at, will over a few months put a new artist on more small lists than one paid blast ever does. The cost is that the lists are small and the curators are volunteers, so it belongs underneath a campaign rather than in place of one.

Skip it if you need something to happen this week. Free submissions are slow by nature, and a track with no activity behind it tends to be ignored even by small curators.

The two-week check

Whatever you buy, the vendor’s report is only half of the evidence, and the other half takes a fortnight to read. Before the campaign starts, write down your monthly listeners, followers, saves per play and profile visits from Spotify for Artists or YouTube Studio. Write them down again the day it finishes. Then wait two weeks and write them down a third time. A campaign whose numbers held is a campaign that worked; one that slid back to the first line was a rental. This matters for more than pride. Under Spotify’s artificial streaming policy, streams the platform later judges to be artificial can be removed, and repeated removals put the release itself at risk, so a vendor that publishes refill terms is at least telling you it expects to be measured.

Five ways to waste the money

The most common one is buying plays for a track whose profile has no artwork, no bio and no other songs on it. Listeners arrive, find nothing to follow, and leave, and the only number that moves is the one you paid for. Close behind it is ordering the biggest package first: a five-hundred-dollar pack on a song that has never been tested is a five-hundred-dollar guess, and the whole reason the twelve and forty-nine dollar orders exist is to make the big one an informed decision.

Paying curators to review a demo is the third. SoundCampaign and Daily Playlists put your song in front of people whose job is mostly to say no, so give them the finished version. The fourth is sending all that traffic to a Spotify link rather than to a page you own; every platform here can drive listeners, but only Hypeddit keeps their email, and without it the next release starts from zero again. The fifth is handing over a password. None of these five platforms needs one, and anyone who asks is telling you how they intend to deliver.

FAQ

Which online music promotion platform gives the most for fifty dollars?

Promosound, in our reading of the prices. Its forty-nine dollar Artist Basic pack covers five platforms with around eleven thousand plays and views and close to two thousand followers, starting within a day, and nothing else here reaches five surfaces for that money. Artist Push comes second with its eight to twelve dollar Starter packs if one platform is all you need.

What is a fair price for a thousand Spotify plays in 2026?

Between four and six dollars on the storefronts we checked, with Promosound at the lower end and Artist Push at the upper. A vendor charging far less deserves a hard look, and one charging far more should be selling something extra, such as targeting or curator attention.

Is it worth paying for curator reviews when submissions can be free?

If you want speed and written feedback, yes: SoundCampaign guarantees both and credits you back for silence. If you have time and no budget, the free tier at Daily Playlists will get you in front of small curators for nothing. Plenty of artists use both.

Do bought followers stay?

Some leave, as some followers always do. The difference between vendors is what they promise to do about it. Artist Push commits to refilling followers within three months, and Promosound publishes a refill policy of its own. Ask any other vendor the same question before paying.

Can these platforms get a track removed from Spotify?

Spotify removes streams it judges artificial and can act against repeat offenders. The safeguards are the same across all five: real listener activity, no password, no guaranteed play counts, and your own two-week check on the numbers.

What should be ready before spending anything?

A finished master, artwork, a profile with a bio and at least one other track on it, a pre-save or smart link, and a note of your current numbers so you can tell afterwards whether anything actually changed.

Verdict

Priced per unit of growth rather than by the promises on the landing page, Promosound is the platform to start on: the widest catalogue, the cheapest Spotify plays, saves and listeners of the five, and a forty-nine dollar pack that answers the question every later purchase depends on. Artist Push is the nearest alternative and the gentlest first order for someone who has never bought promotion. SoundCampaign is what you buy when you want a curator’s opinion and are willing to pay per opinion. Hypeddit is the only spend on this list you get to keep. Daily Playlists is the free habit that sits under all of it. Pick the budget line that matches yours, run it for two weeks, and let your own dashboard decide what comes next.

The post Top 5 Online Music Promotion Platforms to Grow Your Audience in 2026 appeared first on Magnetic Magazine.

The room feels colder in the morning, the chair starts feeling less forgiving after a few hours, and the quick coffee walk suddenly needs another layer. You still want to feel comfortable, but you do not necessarily want to spend the whole day in heavy sweats that make the room feel sleepy before the track even gets moving.

That is where Astral’s hemp pieces make more sense than they might seem at first.

The High Noon Hemp Hoodie and Kinisi Hemp Pants are technically built with outdoor performance in mind, but the reasons they work outside also apply pretty directly to long studio days. They are breathable, odor-resistant, durable, and easy to move in. That matters when you are sitting at a desk, pacing around the room, playing keys, taking calls, or stepping outside between edits.

The High Noon Hemp Hoodie is made with Astral’s HempTech material, using a majority hemp fabric designed to feel breathable and cooling while still giving you coverage. The raised piqué knit keeps the fabric from clinging to the skin, which helps with airflow. It is a sun hoodie by category, but for fall studio use, it reads more like a light, textured layer that can stay on all day without turning into a blanket.

The Kinisi Hemp Pants bring the same idea to the lower half.

They use a majority organic hemp fabric with a relaxed active fit, subtle two-way stretch, a crotch gusset, articulated knees, a wide elastic waistband, a drawstring, belt loops, ankle cinches, and enough pockets to carry the small stuff you end up moving around the room all day.

Comfort Changes the Way the Room Feels

There is a reason studio people obsess over chairs, lighting, rugs, monitors, desk height, and every small detail around the room. The environment changes how long you can stay focused. Clothing is part of that, even if it sounds too obvious to say out loud.

When clothes are stiff, hot, clingy, or too bulky, you notice them. When they are comfortable without getting sloppy, they disappear. That is the best case for pieces like the High Noon Hemp Hoodie and Kinisi Hemp Pants. They are casual enough for beat-making, editing, writing, and mixing days, but still put together enough that the studio does not feel like a couch you happen to work in.

That is especially important in fall, when the creative day often gets split into different temperatures. Early morning is cold, midday warms up, evening drops again, and the studio can lag behind whatever is happening outside. Breathable layers make that easier. You can stay warm enough without trapping heat every time you start moving.

I made a similar point in my article on Snow Peak’s AW25 fall and winter essentials. The best seasonal apparel for creative people is rarely the most extreme item in the closet. It is the layer you keep reaching for because it handles normal life without asking for attention.

The Pants Are Probably the Daily Wear Piece

The High Noon Hoodie is the headline piece because hemp hoodies are easy to understand. But the Kinisi Hemp Pants may be the item that gets worn more often in the studio.

A good pair of casual studio pants has to do a weird mix of things.

They need to be soft when you sit for hours, flexible when you move around, durable enough for errands and outside breaks, and not so technical that they look like hiking pants in the middle of a workday. The Kinisi Pants seem aimed at that exact overlap.

The relaxed active fit gives your legs room to breathe, while the crotch gusset and articulated knees help movement feel natural. The elastic bungee cuffs at the ankles also make sense for studio use because loose hems can get annoying around pedals, cables, chairs, and under-desk clutter. It is a small detail, but it is the kind of thing you notice once you spend enough time working in a room full of gear.

The storage setup helps too.

Two mesh-lined front pockets, two buttoned back pockets, and a zippered side stash pocket give enough room for phone, keys, earbuds, a small notebook, or whatever else gets carried between rooms. That makes the pants feel less like lounge clothing and more like actual daily gear.

Hemp Is the Quiet Advantage

The thing I like about hemp apparel for studio use is that it sits in a good middle place. Cotton can feel great at first, but it can get damp, clingy, and tired after a long day. Synthetics can work for performance, but they often feel too technical for sitting in a room making music. Hemp has a more natural hand, but it still has enough function to handle real wear.

Astral leans into that directly. The High Noon Hemp Hoodie is described as naturally breathable, cooling in warm weather, odor resistant, and durable. The piqué knit adds a honeycomb-like texture that reduces how much fabric is touching the skin, which helps keep it from feeling sticky or flat. The hoodie also has thumb holes, a drawstring hood, ribbed underarm gussets, and an active fit.

That combination makes it a pretty good fall studio layer. It is not a massive fleece hoodie. It is not something you throw on and immediately feel like the day is over. It is lighter, more mobile, and more breathable, which is better if you are moving between a warm room, a cold hallway, and a quick walk outside.

The Kinisi Pants take that same fabric logic and build it into something more versatile than sweatpants. The wide elastic waistband keeps the comfort level high, but the belt loops, buttoned back pockets, side stash pocket, and ankle cinches keep them from looking like pure loungewear. That is the line to walk for studio clothes: soft enough to wear for eight hours, presentable enough if somebody shows up or you need to leave the house.

The post Astral Hemp Layers Make Studio Days Easier appeared first on Magnetic Magazine.

The FiiO CLASS A is one of those desktop audio pieces that looks fairly simple from the outside, then gets a lot more interesting once you start reading the spec sheet. At $379.99 on pre-order via Apos, it is being positioned as a fully discrete Class A headphone amplifier and preamplifier with the kind of power output that should get the attention of anyone using harder-to-drive over-ear headphones.

The headline number is 4,000mW + 4,000mW of balanced output at 32Ω.

That is the kind of output figure people tend to chase when they are tired of small desktop boxes that technically run their headphones but never make them feel fully awake. The CLASS A is clearly not trying to be a tiny desk accessory. It weighs about 7.72 pounds and is built around a custom 60W toroidal transformer, a 20,000μF capacitor reservoir, and a fully-balanced differential architecture.

That puts it in a different conversation than FiiO’s smaller hi-fi products.

I covered the company’s value-focused side in my piece on the FiiO K13 R2R, but the CLASS A is going after a more physical kind of desktop listening setup. It is less about keeping the footprint tiny and more about giving the amplifier stage enough current, headroom, and connectivity to sit at the center of a headphone rig.

That price makes it interesting. Class A desktop amps can get expensive quickly, especially once balanced output, preamp functionality, and serious power supply design enter the conversation. FiiO is keeping this one below $400, at least during the current pre-order window.

The Class A Design Is the Main Draw

The CLASS A uses a fully discrete amplification stage, meaning FiiO is using individually selected transistors, resistors, and capacitors instead of leaning on an integrated power amplifier. The design includes Toshiba twin matched-pair and complementary audio transistors, plus Sanken Electric audio transistors, with quiescent current manually calibrated.

That is the sort of thing headphone people tend to care about because Class A amplification is associated with a continuous-current operating style. In simpler terms, the amp is designed to stay ready rather than switching on and off in the way other amplifier classes can. The tradeoff is usually heat, power draw, and size. The upside, when done well, is a smoother and more controlled presentation.

FiiO is also pairing that design with a fully-balanced differential circuit. Each channel gets separate positive and negative signal paths, and the balanced headphone output can deliver up to 4,000mW + 4,000mW into 32Ω, 2,000mW + 2,000mW into 16Ω, and 1,360mW + 1,360mW into 300Ω. On the single-ended 1/4-inch output, the amp is rated up to 2,850mW + 2,850mW into 32Ω.

Those numbers should give the CLASS A a lot of room for planars and other headphones that like current. For reference, I spent time with a more studio-focused headphone in my Audeze MM-100 review, and amps like this are aimed at the listener who wants to hear what a headphone can do when it is not being held back by a weak output stage.

The Connectivity Covers Most Desktop Setups

FiiO did not make the CLASS A a one-purpose box. The front panel includes 1/4-inch single-ended, 4.4mm balanced, and 4-pin XLR balanced headphone outputs. Inputs include 3.5mm single-ended, RCA, 4.4mm balanced, and XLR balanced. It also includes RCA and XLR line outputs, which means the unit can function as a preamplifier for powered speakers or downstream amps.

That is a smart layout for people building a desk setup around multiple sources. You could run a DAC into the CLASS A, drive headphones from the front, then send line output to active monitors or another amplifier without constantly recabling the whole system.

The five gain levels help too. Low, Medium, High, Super High, and Ultra High give the amp enough range to handle sensitive headphones and more demanding pairs without feeling like the volume control has no sweet spot. FiiO also includes independent bass and treble adjustment with ±10dB of control, which may be a nice touch for people who want small tonal changes without adding EQ software or swapping gear.

There is a safety and integration angle as well. The CLASS A includes DC output protection, power-input overcurrent protection, headphone-amplifier temperature protection, overvoltage protection, output-overload detection, and transformer thermal protection. A 12V trigger input and output help coordinate power with other gear, and USB-C is included for firmware updates.

I covered another specialized headphone amp release in my article on Heritage Audio’s impedance-matching headphone amplifier, and the FiiO CLASS A sits in that same broader category of headphone gear aimed at people who want more control than a basic interface or DAC/amp can provide.

The First Run Is Limited

Apos says inventory is on the way, with limited quantities from the first production run: 40 units in black and 40 units in silver. Orders are listed to fulfill on or before October 5, with Apos noting that buyers above the first 80 units will be contacted about an updated timeline.

That limited first run gives the launch a bit of urgency, but the cleaner takeaway is that the CLASS A looks like FiiO continuing to push into more serious desktop hi-fi territory. At $379.99, it is priced low enough to pull in people who may have been looking at cheaper DAC/amp stacks, but the design language and output specs are aimed at listeners with more demanding headphones.

The FiiO CLASS A is available for pre-order now via Apos in black or silver.

The post FiiO CLASS A Brings Desktop Muscle appeared first on Magnetic Magazine.

The “B-Pushr Frankenstein Mix” takes that idea particularly literally.

Pucher pulled parts from across Amplified and rebuilt them into a new track, then added sounds created with a circuit-bent cassette deck he calls Frankie. Serum 2 handles another part of the sound design, while Cubase’s modulation system and Reason Studios Synchronous are used to keep smaller sounds changing rather than relying on a continually expanding arrangement.

It is an appropriate production method for a record being revisited 23 years later. Some of the source material comes directly from Pucher’s earlier work, while the techniques around it reflect how he produces now, particularly his interest in custom sounds, modulation and imperfections that cannot simply be pulled from the same library by another producer.

Below, B-Pushr explains how he built the “Amplified (B-Pushr Frankenstein Mix).”

B-Pushr’s Frankenstein Monster

Frankie started life as an innocent flat-top cassette deck. Then I took it apart, cracked it wide open and circuit-bent it until it started talking back. I added a couple of LEDs for good measure too, because if I’m going to be cruel to a harmless piece of tech, it might as well look cool while it suffers.

The mission is simple: squeeze out as many weird digital glitch and feedback noises as possible and build a library I can keep coming back to. I use those sounds to dirty up my kicks, claps and hi-hats, or to make percussive flourishes you won’t hear anywhere else. Think of it as turning the gain up on the tiny accidents most gear is built to hide. I love it when my tracks have a grime that nobody else can get, because I made it by hand. It keeps my sound my own. And half the fun is the tinkering itself, poking around until something friggin’ cool jumps out of the speakers.

The catch is that circuit bending is a treasure hunt. You’ll spend hours and hours prodding circuits, and most of what comes out is noise with nothing to say. But every so often a whisper comes through, and your job is to catch it and crank it up until it fills the room. That’s an investment. Every good sound you find goes into YOUR library, and nobody else on the planet has it. It’s one of the best ways I know to sound completely unique, a signal only you are broadcasting. If you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, it’s a seriously fun way to find sounds that are digital and organic at the same time. Plug in, turn it up and see what screams back.

Serum 2

I adore Serum 2. I’ve played with a ton of digital synths, but never one this complete and versatile. I’m a tinkerer, and nothing lets me tinker like Serum 2, without ever burying me in menus. If you want to learn how to deep dive into synthesis, this is your door.

My approach is to build completely unique oscillators and go easy on the FX. I don’t want effects doing the shouting. I want sounds that feel alive, so I automate my oscillators to keep them evolving, until the textures seem to breathe rather than compute. That’s my sweet spot: digital control with organic imperfection turned right up.

Try it yourself. Set up micro automations that keep nudging small parameters on your oscillators. Every tiny movement is a heartbeat, and turn up enough of them and your synth starts to feel alive.

Cubase Modulators

I’ve been through a lot of DAWs and built-in modulation tools, but never a set this complete. In Cubase, you can modulate anything you can click on which, for a tinkerer like me, makes it an endless playground.

Listen to the glitches in this track, the ones I pulled out of Frankie. I hit them with fast panning modulation so they get flung wildly across the stereo field, then stack modulated flangers on top. Suddenly one tiny click becomes something multi-layered and multi-textured, blown up to full size.

Try to sweep a subtle distortion drive, shift delay times by a few milliseconds, let reverb tails swell and shrink in real time. Every small movement pumps a little more air into the mix until the whole thing breathes, and adds ever evolving textures the simplest sounds.

Reason Studios Synchronous

Synchronous is a beast. Nothing else hits quite like it. It’s a bit unwieldy at first, but once you get past the learning curve, the sheer power is insane. It’s easily one of the most underrated plugins around for giving pads and FX real texture.

The presets alone are super punchy, but the magic starts when you get into the weeds and draw your own automation curves. Move filter cutoffs, delay times and distortion all at once, and a flat sound suddenly stands up and roars. You get total control and wild, unpredictable motion in the same package. In this track I reached for it for one-off FX moments, when a section needed something funky and out there turned up to eleven. It’s PERFECT for that.

To try it, draw multi-stage curves for the delay and reverb, then lock a rhythmic LFO to a filter. Your own patterns pump so much extra life into a sound that the whole track gets louder in spirit.

Quick Fire Tips For Making Minimal Techno

Tip #1

In minimal, the complexity lives in the sound, not the arrangement. Before you reach for another layer, turn up the detail in what’s already there and let it grow over time.

Tip #2

Push a single sound as far as it’ll go, and don’t flinch when it gets weird. The weird stuff is often where the magic is.

Tip #3

To me, minimal is an aesthetic, not a genre, and the energy level is whatever you choose. Think textures instead of layers and blow small sounds up until they feel huge.

Tip #4

Most minimal tracks pick one mood and stick to it, but I love starting in one place and ending up somewhere else. Do that, and you’ll have more than a track DJs play; you’ll have a story.

Tip #5

Build a sound library, instead of an FX library. Your own sounds will amplify your signature style more than having every plugin in the world.

Do you like this personality?

The post How It Was Made: Brian Aneurysm – Amplified (B-Pushr Frankenstein Mix) (Iron Box Music + Minimal Techno) appeared first on Magnetic Magazine.

Set for Saturday, November 28 at Midline Miami in Wynwood, this year’s event will partner with Food For Life Network, the Miami-based nonprofit organization that provides food and nutritional support to individuals and families living with chronic illnesses throughout Miami-Dade County.

Turning the Dancefloor Into a Fundraising Platform

Rather than attaching a single donation to the event, Wonksgiving will support Food For Life Network through several channels. One dollar from every ticket sold will go directly to the organization, 50% of Wonksgiving merchandise revenue will benefit the cause, and guests will also be able to contribute through an onsite food and clothing drive.

“I love that the dancefloor can also be a place for giving,” WonkyWilla says. “That’s really what being Wonky is all about.”

Founded in 1987, Food For Life Network operates under Care Resource and offers free groceries, medically tailored meals, emergency food assistance, nutritional education, and home delivery services for eligible clients. The partnership gives Wonksgiving a distinctly local focus, with funds and donations supporting people in the same community hosting the event.

The concept has precedent. Last year’s edition in Austin welcomed more than 500 attendees while incorporating donations through ticket sales, merchandise, and a food and clothing drive. Previous Wonksgiving efforts have also raised more than $8,000 for Feeding America.

On the music side, the Miami edition will feature rSUN and Sloth alongside WonkyWilla at Midline, a 10,000-square-foot, two-level venue in Wynwood. The lineup will bring together the heavy bass, disco, house, and left-field production that have helped define WonkyWilla’s recent live sets.

The show arrives as his audience continues to grow across North America. His current “Wonking On Sunshine” Tour spans more than 30 dates, while a recent Phoenix stop sold out the 1,500-capacity Walter Where?House. His 2026 Lost Lands appearance also became a notable moment for the project, including an onstage engagement during the set.

For the Miami stop, that growing visibility is being redirected toward a local cause through a format that makes participation part of the night itself.

Tickets for Wonksgiving are on sale now.

FOLLOW WONKYWILLA: INSTAGRAM | SPOTIFY | SOUNDCLOUD | TIKTOK | FACEBOOK 

The post WonkyWilla Brings Annual Thanksgiving Charity Concert to Miami appeared first on Magnetic Magazine.

Cyclops and ATLiens have officially released their latest collaboration after months of live previews and social media circulation, giving fans a full version of the track behind one of the summer’s most recognizable bass music vocal moments.

The record first began appearing in sets in July, with early plays including Das Energi Festival and Echostage. Its popularity quickly centered on the pre-drop line, “Call me erectile… the way I’m… at dis function,” which spread across social platforms and became an inside joke among fans before the release was formally announced.

That humor is only half of the equation. Once the vocal clears, “DIS FUNCTION” descends into a dense combination of low-end pressure, warped dubstep textures, and deliberately bizarre samples. The production reflects a shared instinct between Cyclops and ATLiens for making heavy music without stripping away personality.

A Collaboration Built From Memes and Weird Bass Music

Cyclops describes the track as a natural result of the overlap between both artists’ interests.

“There are two things ATLiens and I both really like: memes and weird dubstep, so making a song that combines both was right up our alley,” he says.

After hearing the now-central vocal in a TikTok, Cyclops built an initial idea around it and sent the track to ATLiens. The concept clicked quickly, and the record came together soon after. Months of live plays then gave “DIS FUNCTION” time to develop organically with fans, rather than arriving without context.

This rollout fits neatly into Cyclops’ broader 2026. His year has included a recent Lost Lands Crater Stage appearance, “Final Bonk” with TYNAN, and collaborations with BARELY ALIVE, NGHTMRE, and Wooli. Each release has reinforced a style built around unconventional sound design, humor, and an increasingly recognizable approach to modern bass music.

ATLiens bring a similarly surreal sensibility to the collaboration, making “DIS FUNCTION” feel less like a one-off pairing and more like a continuation of a creative language the two projects already share.

FOLLOW CYCLOPS: INSTAGRAM | SPOTIFY | SOUNDCLOUD | TIKTOK

FOLLOW ATLIENS: INSTAGRAM | SPOTIFY | SOUNDCLOUD | TIKTOK | WEBSITE

The post Cyclops and ATLiens Release Fan-Favorite Dubstep Collaboration ‘DIS FUNCTION’ appeared first on Magnetic Magazine.

The San Francisco-based DJ and producer built the entire project on an MPC Live III, often working from a hookah bar that became his makeshift studio and a place where he could reconnect with memories of listening to house music with his mom.

“CHURCH!” gets particularly specific with those references.

Bey sampled pieces of Louie Vega’s “How He Works,” Geoff C’s “This Is Hot (Yes Indeedy)” and Funky Dogs’ “FIRED UP,” then chopped and reworked those sources inside the MPC rather than simply recreating the records that influenced him. Piano chords, vocals, bass and additional processing gradually turn those references into something rooted in his own experience of gospel and house music.

That process is also tied to Bey learning production almost entirely from scratch. The MPC Live III was his first piece of production hardware, F9’s Origins Classic House expansion helped him understand how house music could be built inside it, and Ozone 12 became part of how he learned to control the increasingly busy layers inside “CHURCH!” Below, Malik Bey explains how the track came together.

MPC Live III – Sampling

This was the first piece of hardware I bought in February. I taught myself how to produce music on it by watching countless videos on YouTube and learning mostly through trial and error. After doing a lot of research, it was the first piece of equipment that felt really instinctive to me. I was already familiar with using drum pads and cue buttons while DJing, so the transition to the MPC Live III was super easy. I think this is a really great middle group for people who have found that using DAWs and the workflow just doesn’t work for them. This is literally a DAW in mobile form.

One of the main features I relied on when creating “CHURCH!” was the Sample & Sample Edit functionality on the MPC Live III. It made it incredibly easy to take the sounds and ideas I had in my head and immediately turn them into something that could live in the music I could sample anything; from acapellas and small pieces of records I’d heard to sounds from my own recordings; and isolate exactly what I needed to build the track.

The MPC Live III’s ability to create stems from anything recorded directly into the hardware opened up even more possibilities. Whether I was sampling a record or recording my own voice, I could break the sound down and turn it into individual one-shots that became building blocks for the track. For example, I sampled the bass from “How He Works” by Louie Vega because I loved the snap of the sound and used it as the foundation for the low end, then pushed its punch even further with a combination of effects with the Soft Clipper.

Sampling became a way for me to connect the past with the present. I pulled vocal samples from some of my favorite moments in “How He Works,” “This Is Hot (Yes Indeedy)” by Geoff C, and “FIRED UP” by the Funky Dogs. I wanted to pay homage to those records while still giving the sounds a completely new energy and context. Rather than simply recreating what I heard, I was taking pieces of the music that influenced me and reimagining them through my own perspective.

One of my favorite moments happens during the drop. I took a distorted vocal from “How He Works” and ran it through a stutter effect, creating this almost chaotic background vocal that runs throughout the section. That moment really captures what I was trying to accomplish with “CHURCH!”; taking the feeling of an old-school house record and pushing it somewhere new. The result sits somewhere between a praise dance at church and a late-night club. That tension is really the heart of the song: spiritual, familiar, nostalgic, but still completely alive in the present.

Ozone 12

I was first introduced to Ozone 12 by one of my friends; big shoutout to FUZZ. When I was first learning to produce, he always emphasized the importance of mastering your tracks and getting each layer to do exactly what you want. That advice stuck with me, and Ozone 12 became one of the tools that helped me do that.

What I like about Ozone 12 is that it doesn’t limit the creative process. It gives me the flexibility to experiment and sometimes find punch and clarity in sounds that I didn’t even know were there. For “CHURCH!,” that was especially important because there are so many elements competing for space.

There isn’t really a strict method to how I balance my layers. I think more about how I want the track to feel. With house music, the groove and bass have to cut through; I’m always thinking about how to make the low end shake the room and get people out of their seats. On the high end, I wanted something nostalgic but immediately attention-grabbing. The piano chords sampled from “This Is Hot (Yes Indeedy),” layered with claps and reverb, became the centerpiece. I wanted all of those elements to exist together without overpowering each other. That controlled chaos is what a praise break feels like to me: so many things happening at once, but everything somehow complementing each other while maintaining the energy of the moment.

Ozone 12 helped me find that balance. While the one-click mastering feature can be a great starting point, I found that going into the individual layers and making intentional adjustments gave “CHURCH!” the punch and energy I originally heard in my head.

For me, the biggest lesson I learned with Ozone was: use the tools to support your vision, not dictate it. Take the time to make every layer do exactly what you want it to do.

F9 Origins Classic House

When I was first learning how to use the MPC Live III, I stumbled across an expansion pack that became a major foundation for how I started developing the sound of SCOOBIE.

At the time, almost every MPC Live III tutorial I found on YouTube was focused on rap, hip-hop, or trap. I was trying to make house music, so it was difficult to visualize how I could take the hardware and the ideas in my head and turn them into something that sounded like SCOOBIE. This expansion pack became a kind of playground; it showed me what was possible.

Working with it taught me how to edit instruments, make one-shots grittier, manipulate sounds, and sequence different elements into a complete track. A lot of the sounds are heavily quantized, but that actually made it a great starting point for learning the hardware. From there, I could experiment and start bending the sounds into something that felt like me – less robotic and more like myself

My advice to anyone learning new equipment or trying to find their sound is to find something that already exists within the genre or world you’re trying to create in. Use it as a starting point, but don’t just learn how to press the buttons; learn the cause and effect of different modulations, filters, and ways of shaping sound. That’s where you start developing your own language.

I’m especially grateful for this expansion pack because it came at a point when I was close to giving up on production. It showed me that house music was possible on the MPC Live III, and that realization became a huge part of how I found my way toward SCOOBIE; and ultimately, “CHURCH!”

Quick Fire Hot Takes on the Scene + Production

Hot Take #1

House music was born in the underground, and I still see glimpses of that spirit alive today. I think we keep the underground alive by continuing to be unapologetically ourselves.

Hot Take #2

You don’t need to know what every button on a piece of hardware does or what every feature in a software program can do. You don’t need to be the best to make something that is unapologetically you. Sometimes, the imperfections are what make a song even better.

Hot Take #3

Artists need to pay attention to the history of the genres they love. There are so many people and things that came before us that could broaden our perspectives.

Hot Take #4

I think too many artists are scared to be themselves because we are too worried about being who people expect us to be. Thats limiting as f*ck

Hot Take #5

I think we’ve lost some of the essence of what music has always meant to communities around the world. House music, especially, was born as a way to heal, connect, and bring people together; not as a means of serving the artist alone.

The post How It Was Made: MALIK BEY – CHURCH! (Gospel House) appeared first on Magnetic Magazine.