Tom Satchwell is a Campaign Executive at Live Nation, artist manager of Fitz and a contributor to Fortitude Magazine. He contributed his Harkive story in July 2015.
It took me reviewing this post to realise how much Spotify is just an everyday thing for me now. Sure I flick between straight up audio and music videos throughout the day and the lesser established acts I work with will generally occupy space on Soundcloud but it is probably fair to say 80% of my time is spent listening to music on one streaming platform across various devices – at least when I am out of the house.
7.30am – Walk into the kitchen to what I think is Selena Gomez playing from my housemate’s phone. I can’t remember if that’s exactly who it was but it sounded ‘Disney’ to me.
8.30am – I leave for work, headphones plugged into my iPhone running the Spotify app and playing my ‘New Music’ playlist, which I update regularly. I let it run of shuffle more often that not as it is my most listened to playlist so shuffle tends to keep it fresh.
10am – I get to the office and plug the office speakers into my laptop, again running Spotify but through the desktop app this time. I’d saved down a few debut albums that had recently come out that i wanted to listen to including; New Yorkers Joywave, Glasgow’s finest PRIDES and another band from the US Bleachers. I’d recommend for your easy going synth-pop and US indie-rock.
12pm – I get sent a link to To Kill A King’s video premier on The 405 for new single ‘World Of Joy’ from their brilliant record… ‘To Kill A King’ – the video of which features a few well known names in the form of Bastille, Keston Cobblers’ Club and Fitz, an artist I manage.
12.30pm – A large part of my daily music listening is down to research for tours, luckily I’m fortunate enough to work with acts I genuinely enjoy. Such is the case with Saint Raymond, today I spent a fair amount of time listening to his debut album ‘Young Blood’ on Spotify and for the first time today switching to the iTunes library on my phone for a short while to listen to some of his earlier EPs.
2.30pm – After lunch I put my Sennheiser headphones on and switch back to Spotify to start curating Fortitude Magazine’s ‘Best In New Music’ playlist which I do monthly. With a team of contributors it generally takes a good few hours to get a nice mix of genres and a well laid-out playlist – hopefully the work pays off.
5.30 – I take off my headphones and joint the office community again to find Beats 1 is playing, with the female American DJ who I haven’t been able to find the name of yet, because I still don’t know how to use the bloody app. I only remember Taylor Swift playing throughout the time listening to the station but that seems to be the general theme of Beats 1 so far.
6pm – The office starts to clear out, so my headphones go back on and I shamelessly chuck on Spotify’s own ‘Walking Like A Badass’ playlist to try and smash out my last bit of work.
7pm – After adding Bring Me The Horizon’s new belter ‘Happy Song’ to the Fortitude Magazine playlist, I crank up ’Sempiternal’ on the way home (again on Spotify, luckily I have these playlists and albums saved offline).
9pm – While writing this I’ve stepped away from my digital music drip that is Spotify and chucked on a bit of vinyl in the form of Enter Shikari’s ‘Mindsweep’ (it has a lovely white, blue and purple paint splash design) to drown out the pub over the road’s Rod Stewart obsession.