Welcome to The Sound Business, Switzerland’s first independent and editorial music business briefing. Starting today, this monthly newsletter features the most important headlines, deeper perspectives, open jobs and opportunities, network updates, and recommended stories from around the web.
The Sound Business will hit your inbox on the last Thursday of every month. The introduction and the headlines are free to read; for everything else, you’ll need the Negative White Pro subscription. Today’s first edition, however, is completely free to give you a taste.
Why do we start a business briefing?
Switzerland’s music industry features impressive diversity, high quality, and interesting developments. However, we see similar challenges arriving here as in other countries: consolidation driven by international giants, a worsening club crisis, and the constant struggle to find fair and sustainable business models in the age of streaming.
While there are dedicated offers for other markets and global music news platforms, such as Music Business Worldwide, Switzerland lacks an editorial counterpart that accompanies these developments critically and aggregates news from the various actors within the industry. Our goal is to fill this gap, especially since legacy media companies have mostly abandoned such reporting.
We hope you’ll stick around and find value in our upcoming briefings.
The Future of Music Curation
In today’s edition, we explore the challenges posed by algorithm-exclusive curation and the decline of editorial playlists. For Switzerland, it’s particularly devastating as neither Spotify nor Apple Music have an adequate editorial staff with boots on the ground.
While there’s no way AI-driven curation is going away anytime soon, it clearly lacks personality and emotional connection. It’s time to move away from vanity metrics and focus on building smaller, yet highly engaged, communities and trusted voices who actually show up to gigs as well.
Best,
🗞️ Headlines
- Mouthwatering Records launches new sublabel
With „Home Crowd Recordings“, the indie label Mouthwatering Records launched a new sublabel as a home for national and international artists in hip-hop, afrobeats, baile funk, reggae, or trap. Oriana Wilkinson is the product manager for the sublabel. - Ikan Hyu's Anisa Djojoatmodjo awarded with Culture Prize
The city of Winterthur is awarding the 2025 Culture Prize to the musician Anisa Djojoatmodjo. The city council is honouring a versatile, courageous artist who is known far beyond the city's borders. Read the full press release (in German). - Festi'neuch cancelled on the last day
Heavy thunderstorms rolled across Switzerland on Sunday, June 15. The open-air Festi'neuch had to cancel its last day. In a short statement, the organisers wrote: „After an assessment of the situation by our teams, the state of the festival site means that it cannot be reopened. All festival-goers are invited to return home. The organising team has a heavy heart to end the 24th edition of Festi'neuch in this way and thanks you for the support you have already shown.“ - Standardised Artist Fees
After SONART—the largest professional association of freelance musicians in Switzerland—published their guidelines on artist fees, the independent club and festival association PETZI published a kind of rebuttal. Although they welcome a standardised system for artist fees, PETZI states that „the proposed approaches are particularly problematic due to a lack of consideration of the complex music ecosystem and a lack of feasibility in the diverse non-profit environment.“ They further write that „the ill-considered and indiscriminate introduction of fee guidelines, without clarifying responsibilities and funding options, poses major, even existential, problems for PETZI club and festival members, who are responsible for a large portion of performance opportunities for national contemporary music artists.“
PETZI published their full arguments in a PDF document here.