Artist Community Newsletter: December 2024 - A Year In Review

Welcome to our final Artist Community Newsletter of the year—it's a big one! As 2024 winds down, we’re taking a moment to reflect on the year gone by. Dive into our latest round-up of trends, insights, and tools to help you step into 2025 with confidence and creativity.

Summary of Contents:

• Artist Spotlight
• Trends & Insights
• A&R Team Tips
• Tech & Tools Radar

Get to know one of our most talented Singer-Songwriters

Shane recently sat down for a chat with LA-based Singer Songwriter Lexi Shanley. She discusses her thoughts on authenticity in the social media age, finding your niche in the industry, and why she loves making “music for the girlies.”

Follow Lexi on Instagram and Spotify.

Discover what's trending across Music Vine & Uppbeat

As we look forward to 2025, we thought we’d share some interesting insights across Music Vine and Uppbeat in 2024. Before we get into the nitty gritty, here are some of the big stats from the past year.

It's been a big year across both Music Vine and Uppbeat but what's been hitting the right note with our users? Check out the most popular pages across both platforms, along with the hottest tracks.

The Hit List:

A big thanks to all of you for engaging with our Hit List this year! For those not in the know, the Hit List is the go-to place to look through all our required styles. 

In case you missed it, we’ve added our next batch of styles ready for 2025. Take a look at them here.

A Year In Track Reviews: How Our Process Works and Our Takeaways from 2024

As 2024 draws to a close, we’re reflecting on what drives Music Vine and Uppbeat forward: your music. This year, we’ve reviewed a whopping 3,000+ tracks (and counting!), a number that highlights the incredible hard work from all of you.

For us, the review process is more than a quality check—it’s a way to collaborate with you to help your music reach its full potential. But while the review process plays such a central role, we realized we’ve never shared much about how it actually works - and we thought this would be a good opportunity to shed some light on that. 

The Process:

As a reminder & for those who aren’t aware, every submission we receive is carefully evaluated by your Artist Manager & another member of the A&R team. We assess submissions across 6 key areas:

• Overall production quality - Does the track sound polished and balanced?
• Musicianship - Does it demonstrate skill and creativity?
• Cohesiveness of arrangement - Do the elements work together seamlessly?
• Quality of instruments and samples - Are the sounds authentic and well-chosen?
• Emotiveness - Does the track evoke a strong emotional response?
• Commercial relevance or usability - Is it ‘syncable’? Is it contextually relevant?

If your track ticks all the boxes, it’s approved! If we think it’s ‘nearly there’, we’ll provide some feedback, (which is always agreed by both reviewers).

Where it gets challenging:

As you can imagine, we’re constantly reviewing hundreds of tracks at any given time. It’s exciting to hear so much incredible music, but we have to be extremely focused and efficient in our process to ensure each track gets a fair, thorough hearing! Balancing quality with efficiency isn’t always easy & as you’ll know, the review process can sometimes take longer than is ideal.

Occasionally, we’ll hear a track with too many nuanced issues to address in a clear and actionable way. When this happens, we may decline it rather than spending time giving complex & potentially confusing feedback. While these decisions are difficult, we still recognise the time & effort that goes into every track.

It’s also worth saying that we’re definitely not perfect! However, we always endeavor to give helpful feedback when it’s viable & appropriate. 

Top Writing Tips For 2025

In addition to the 6 criteria already mentioned, we wanted to take this a step further and share a few new years resolutions. Here are 4 ways to see greater success with every submission in 2025: 

Innovate on Existing Trends - Writing in a popular style can be a safe bet but it also comes with more competition to be heard, so don’t be afraid to put your unique twist on trendy styles. Having a track that feels familiar but fresh is what’ll make it stand out!

Capitalize on the gaps - There are still a ton of under-represented music styles across our catalogs. Though niche styles may have lower search demand, it’s also easier to stand out to customers who are interested in this music since there are fewer tracks to compete with - so covering a lot of niche pockets in the catalog can be advantageous! If you can think of something we’re missing, let us know! 

Reference, reference, reference - Always check to see how your mix stacks up against others that are already out there in the world. It can be especially helpful to flick through Styles on Music Vine where you think the track could live to check that your mix & master is sitting comfortably amongst the top tracks.

Focus on Quality Over Quantity - An oldie but a goodie! Rather than aiming to produce as many tracks as possible, dedicate more time to a smaller number of tracks. A few really well-crafted submissions will have way more impact in the catalog than a larger number of tracks that have had less TLC!

Here’s to more great tracks in 2025!

Our round up of some impressive music-making tools from 2024

Our favorite - Transit 2 by Baby Audio & Andrew Huang

Building on the success of their popular plugin Transit, Baby Audio has teamed up with music producer and YouTuber Andrew Huang to release the highly anticipated Transit 2. With its ability to map multiple dynamic effects to the macro knob, the original version of Transit made crafting creative build-ups and transitions effortless—and really weird if you’re willing to experiment!

In this updated version, Baby Audio has expanded the focus beyond transitions, making it a versatile tool for adding cool motion to your mixes. Transit 2 introduces ten additional effects, bringing the total to 28, all controllable via six motion tools: Macro, LFO, Follower, Sidechain, Gate, and Sequencer. These features allow for transformative sound design, adding movement to sounds that might otherwise feel flat or static.

Whether you’re wanting to move away from those same boring royalty free risers you’ve been using recently and make something more unique, or you just want a creative effects box to add some cool motion to your mixes, Transit 2 is definitely worth checking out. 

Take a look at it here. 

Here’s some others we’ve found interesting this year:

• UAD Spark bundle

Although this wasn’t first released this year, they’ve added loads of plugins in 2024 making it one of the best value mix bundles around. Check it out here. 

• Arturia Synthx V

A faithful recreation of the legendary italian powerhouse, the Elka Synthex, with some advanced features added for your DAW. Take a look here. 

• Oeksound Bloom

Continuing on from Soothe 2, Oeksound released another “make better” plugin in the form of their dynamic tone-shaper ‘Bloom’. Have a look here.

Before we wrap up, we do have an announcement to make. At the end of the year, Oli will be leaving us at Music Vine. Over the years, Oli has been instrumental in shaping our catalog into what it is today, and we know many of you have built great relationships with him. Alongside being a vital part of our team, Oli is also one of our contributing  artists, and he’s decided to focus on this, as well as some other musical endeavours, full-time - we couldn’t be happier for him. Feel free to drop him a line and keep in touch!

From all of us—Shane, Matt, Oli, Lia, and Will—we want to extend our deepest thanks to you, our incredible artists, for filling this year with amazing music. We’re so excited to see what you’ll bring to the table in 2025. Here’s to another fantastic year ahead!

👋 What would you like to see from us in 2025?

As we gear up for the new year, we’d love to hear your thoughts on what you'd like to see in our next Artist Newsletter. Is there a topic you'd love us to dive into, someone you think we should interview, or even an idea you'd like to write about yourself? Share your suggestions with us here.