Episode 71: When Songs Become People

Most new music enters my life in the least romantic way possible.

An email.

A Spotify link.
A Bandcamp page.
A SoundCloud track.
Sometimes a very long press release.
Sometimes three words and a URL.

An artist I have never heard of asks me to listen.

And I do.

Not always immediately,  apologies to everyone currently waiting somewhere inside my inbox, but eventually, I press play.

Most of the time, that is simply what music discovery looks like in 2026.

A song arrives.

You listen.

You decide whether something is happening.

But every now and then, the story doesn’t stop there.

You remember the song.

Then you remember the artist.

Maybe I play it in Le Salon Indie de Mitxoda. Maybe another track arrives a few months later. Maybe we start exchanging messages. Maybe they become one of those names that keep appearing around Mitxoda.

And slowly, almost without noticing it… a song becomes a person.

I think this might be one of my favourite things about running Mitxoda.

And this week, it feels particularly real.

First, some new people are entering the room

Before we get to Germany, there are still songs arriving.

Lots of them.

And one of the dangers of receiving so much music is that everything eventually becomes a list.

Artist.
Title.
Country.
Genre.
Release date.

Next.

That’s exactly what I don’t want Mitxoda to become. – But still, I need these metatags correctly inserted in your next mp3!!! 

Behind every one of those rows is somebody who spent hours, weeks or months making something and eventually decided:

I’ll send this to someone. That deserves at least a little curiosity in return.

So here are a few recent arrivals I want to put in front of you.

And there will be more. There always are.

Some of these names may disappear from my radar after one song.

Others will come back.

Some may end up on the radio.

Some may climb into the Mitxoda Top 100.

Some may send me another track six months from now. And perhaps, somewhere down the line, one of them will become someone I travel hundreds of kilometers to meet.

Because that happens too.

Sometimes a song becomes a train ticket

This weekend, I’m going to Cologne.

Germany.

For the second edition of INDIEpendence Day.

And I realised while preparing this Weekly that the journey to Cologne is actually connected to everything above.

I’m not travelling there because I desperately need another music conference.

There is no panel called How To Get 40,000 Spotify Streams By Tuesday waiting for me.

No networking strategy or badge-scanning competition.

No promise that I will meet the person who will magically transform my musical career.

Thank God. I’m going because there are people there I genuinely want to see.

From usernames to actual humans

I’ll be there from Saturday, surrounded by many familiar names.

To Die In Beauty. Hollow Words. The Kind Machine. Gengvej. Joe Baldi.

And many others.

Some appeared first as music. Some through social media. Some became regulars around the Mitxoda universe.

Some became friends.

And this is where the strange little ecosystem around independent music becomes interesting. Because Spotify would probably consider most of these encounters statistically irrelevant. They’re not.

This is the part Spotify can’t measure

We spend an extraordinary amount of energy measuring music.

Streams. Monthly listeners. Followers.

Playlist additions. Reach. Likes. Completion rates. Skip rates. Conversion rates.

All useful. Really?

I look at numbers too. But they can only measure a tiny part of what music actually does.

There is no Spotify metric for: “I first heard your song two years ago and now I’m taking a train to Cologne to see you.”

There is no dashboard showing how many stupid jokes were exchanged between two musicians.

No KPI for the moment when somebody who was once just a name in an inbox becomes someone you’re genuinely happy to see again.

No algorithm measures trust particularly well.

Friendship even less.

And affection?

Good luck putting that into Google Analytics.

Maybe this is the real indie network

The music industry loves the word networking. I’ve always found it slightly depressing. Networking sounds transactional.

You meet someone because they may become useful. You exchange details. You identify opportunities. You follow up.

Music deserves something messier. Something much less efficient. Someone sends you a song.

You like it or not. You talk. You listen to another. They discover your music.

Someone introduces somebody else. You meet online.

Then offline.

Nothing may ever come from it professionally. And yet something absolutely came from it. You met someone because music existed between you.

That’s already quite a lot.

INDIEpendence Day

Last year came the first INDIEpendence Day.

This weekend, the story continues with edition number two, again in Germany, this time in Cologne.

What I particularly like about the idea is precisely that it doesn’t feel like an attempt to recreate the machinery of the traditional music industry on a smaller scale.

It feels closer to a gathering. Independent musicians, creators, supporters and friends who have gradually found one another.

People coming from different places, different musical worlds and levels of experience.

Different ambitions, too.

But with one fairly important thing in common:

they keep making stuff.

Against ridiculous odds, sometimes.

To Die In Beauty

There are artists you discover once. And there are artists who gradually become part of the furniture.

I mean that in the nicest possible way. 😁

Maïk belongs to the second category for me.

His music has appeared several times around Mitxoda, and he became one of those names that no longer needs an introduction when it appears in my inbox.

Seeing him again in Cologne is precisely what this Weekly is about.

A musical discovery becoming an ongoing story.

Hollow Words

Another familiar name. Another example of why I’ve become much more interested in the people behind independent music than in obsessing about whether every track fits perfectly inside one genre box.

Music introduces you.

The rest happens afterwards.

I’m looking forward to that afterwards, hosted by the one and only Chris!

The Kind Machine

The same goes for The Kind Machine. Hi Tony! A name that has travelled through Mitxoda already, but this time I won’t be encountering it as pixels on a screen. That distinction may sound ridiculously obvious.

It isn’t.

When so much of independent music now exists online, physically occupying the same room occasionally feels almost radical.

Gengvej

And then there is Gengvej. Another musical path that has crossed mine more than once.

These are precisely the relationships that make me realise how misleading the word audience can sometimes be. An audience sounds like people standing on one side while the artist stands on the other. Remember, Markus was the one who transformed my Echo Plastique into a splendid danceclub hit, touching people from everywhere in the world!

Independent music is often much less tidy than that.

Artists listen to other artists. Listeners become supporters. Supporters become collaborators.

Collaborators become friends.

Roles move around constantly. Good.

Joe Baldi

And yes, Joe Baldi will be part of the Cologne reunion too.

Another familiar face inside this strange constellation of independent musicians that somehow keeps expanding around us.

I could probably draw a huge map showing who discovered whom, who played whose music, who introduced whom to somebody else and how all these little connections happened.

Actually…

Maybe one day I should.

What exactly are we building?

This question has been following me for a while.

What is Mitxoda supposed to be? Tell me in comment!

A music project?

Yes.

A radio show?

Yes.

A newsletter?

Apparently.

A website containing hundreds and hundreds of independent tracks?

Also yes.

A Top 100?

It’s live!

A game?

Why not 😉

A place to submit music?

Of course,  you can.

A community?

I think we reached something after 2 years…

All of those things exist.

But none of them really explains why I keep doing it.

I think the answer may be much simpler. Mitxoda creates excuses for people and music to meet. That’s probably enough.

The Weekly gives me an excuse to tell you about something. About me. About you. About the indie world.

The Salon gives me an excuse to play somebody’s song.

The Top 100 gives you an excuse to support one.

Soundcheck gives us an excuse to play.

Soon, the Mitxoda Board will give people another way to discover your track (more info soon).

And a weekend like INDIEpendence Day gives us an excuse to finally leave our screens and say: Hey. Nice to actually meet you.

From discovery to connection

A few Weeklies ago, I wrote about the difficulty of discovering music in an age where almost everything is available instantly.

Maybe I was looking at the wrong end of the problem. Discovery isn’t necessarily the difficult part. We discover things constantly.

Songs fly past us all day.

TikTok, Spotify, YouTube, Instagram, Radio.

Recommendations, Playlists, Messages from friends.

The difficult part is making one of those discoveries matter enough to stay. Perhaps that’s where people come in.

Because I may forget how Spotify served me a particular song.

I probably won’t forget the person who sent me one saying: “Zoltán, you need to hear this.”

I may forget a playlist. I won’t necessarily forget the artist I later shared a beer with in Cologne.

Context turns sound into memory. People turn music into stories.

And that’s the point

Sometimes music discovery ends with a song added to a playlist and that’s fine.

Sometimes it becomes an artist whose next release you start waiting for.

Even better. Sometimes you exchange a few words, you collaborate, …  you become friends.

And sometimes… it ends with a train ticket to Cologne.

I’ll take that version.

Now go discover somebody

The artists I proposed in my salon are only a few of the hundreds who have crossed the Mitxoda path.

Listen to one.

Click on a name you don’t recognise.

Vote for somebody in the Mitxoda Indie Top 100.

Send a song to a friend.

Leave an artist a message.

Do something tiny that tells somebody on the other side: I heard what you made.

Because streams are nice. But knowing there was actually someone listening?

That’s something else entirely.

I’ll bring some stories back from Cologne. Probably a few photos too. Possibly a hangover.

We’ll see.

Until then,

keep discovering people behind the songs.

❤️