Nikki Verda
speaker
160 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Nikki Verda’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
2024 revolutionized the music industry, from breakthrough new artists who had been crafting and practicing for 10 years to some of the biggest in the industry who have had record-breaking sales. I mean, we even saw our new emerging artists who had had a number one song breaking records on Billboard charts.
It seems like there's more new artists than ever, and it has never been more exciting to be a part of the music industry, which got me thinking, why? Why do we have more artists now than we ever have in the past?
I think there's a lot of reasons for this with the innovations of technology and streaming, democratizing the way people discover and consume music, this decentralization of the label structure. And more than anything, I think it's just more possible for an artist to succeed on their own. Simply having social media and these tools for discovery has made it so you can be an artist from your bedroom.
And time and time again, especially I feel like in the pandemic, we saw people How that happened and people were able to build entire careers without these teams around them, especially in the beginning. So how do you do that? How do you grow as an artist in 2025? Well, that is exactly the question we set out to solve here today.
Welcome back to Nikki and I. I'm your host, Nikki Verda, and we have our very first guest. I'm so excited and honored to be here. Kalisha Midlani, my very, very good friend who has worked in music. And I mean, I've known her for a while, but Kalisha, just introduce yourself, dude.
No, that's great. That was pretty good, though. That was great. I love that you came from One Direction Twitter. It is truly beautiful how much One Direction Twitter has like influenced the music industry.
Like it's crazy how many people have had lifelong careers in music because of Stan Twitter and something super, super interesting. So like if you are allowed to share, is there any like artist projects or anything that you've worked on that you were really excited about?
No, it is. And also SoundCloud, another great thing we can talk about too. I mean, I think you think like Billy was like the SoundCloud kid. And that whole era of music was super, super fascinating. So that is so awesome. And diving into the presentation.
For context with audiences, this is actually a presentation I gave at a label recently. So I'm interested also to see what you guys think of it. And maybe a bit of insight into what it's like if you hire Nikki Breda. And please, my email's open. But with that. build a great artist, I kind of place it into three categories. Number one, obviously, is music.
If you're listening to this podcast, you like music. We all know music is important. It is what you create, it is what you output. With that, though, I think the ethos is most important. So it is not just about what you do, how you do it, or why you do it. Like, what is your creative purpose? What is what makes you and your story different from anyone else out there in the world listening?
And then last is the visual. I think that we live in a world now where music is a visual sport. Like it is a visual realm.
I would argue that upwards of 90% of the time you're even discovering new music, you are seeing it in some way, whether that is through social media, whether that is through like watching an artist interview, whether that is you in the club dancing with your friends and like physically seeing how people move when the song comes on. Like,
Music is this visual realm, not even to account for things like music videos and outfits and you know what I mean, like a rollout of an album is obviously extremely visual, but I think that music is a visual medium. And then you can see also how these things intersect, as we'll talk about later on, you know, like lyrics is a great example of, you know,
the music and the ethos of the artist intersecting and how you're telling a story. Or, you know, I always say like references and symbolism is a great example of how the visual and the ethos can kind of overlap, right? Like, you know, someone referencing Lana versus somebody referencing Britney Spears is not going to be the same visual. You know what I mean?
And they are different ethoses, but combined in different ways. So this is kind of how I have always thought about it. Um, and it'll be interesting, I guess, as I like walk you through, uh, to see like how you think similarly or differently or, or things you've worked on in the past.
No, I love that.
I love that. And it's also, it's like, what are the NPCs wearing? Yes. You know, like what restaurants are in the world? How are they behaving? Yeah.
Now that's so interesting. I really like that analogy. That's a good one. We should circle back to that, like the visual part. So talking about ethos, I always talk about this. It's this beautiful TED talk I've talked in the past called The Golden Circle by Simon Sinek. Um, essentially it's talking about how every creative person has three layers to what they do, right?
And your why factor is the most important, the deepest, most inner layer, uh, that builds the deepest community and deepest connection. However, on the outer layer are the things that you do the most or people see the most. So out is what, what you do is you're a musician, you're an artist. Congratulations, you and 1 billion other fuckers on this planet, right?
Like just being an artist is not interesting. And also I think this is interesting when you think about like content, like promoting the music, you know, what you do is somebody like doing a cover of a song, right? Congrats. You're a singer. You have a good voice. Anyone else can cover that song. Then we go how you do it. How you do it is a little bit more interesting, right?
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