KPOPALYPSE INTERVIEW – AZODi
It’s time for Kpopalypse Interview! This time, Kpopalypse is interviewing k-pop producer AZODi!
It’s good to be back with another interview for you to enjoy, especially since so many of my old interviews are getting removed by ‘external forces’ these days. It’s tough to find people willing to talk to Kpopalypse, and even tougher to find people who don’t reconsider their choices down the track! Such is life as Kpopalypse “the most controversial writer in k-pop” but never fear, I will continue to bring you the interviews you crave, when good fortune allows!
I originally got in touch with k-pop producer AZODi through a reader who kindly put us in touch with each other. AZODi was very friendly and keen to have a chat and I was equally keen to have a word to him, as I’ve always wanted to talk directly to someone in the k-pop production world. However most of the questions that I wanted to actually ask a k-pop producer were ones that I felt like he wouldn’t have the answers to, as he was at that time still pitching k-pop songs and hadn’t had anything released yet, so I told him to touch base again when he had a song out. Fast forward a few years, and his goals came to fruition – Kim Woojin’s “On My Way” is AZODi’s debut k-pop production!
AZODi is no newcomer to music however, and he has a long history of songwriting and production in many fields over decades. Enjoy the following interview as AZODi talks to Kpopalypse candidly about his history of songwriting, pitching songs and his current place in the k-pop music world!
AZODi at Brighton Pier, UK – February 2023
For those who don’t know you, please give readers a bit about your background.
I first started playing the piano at age nine and my first major two music influences growing up were Michael Jackson and Nobuo Uematsu, who was a Japanese composer for a lot of the Final Fantasy video games. I played piano at school, and then I moved into learning the steel pans in a group outside of school hours. I used to practice every Saturday morning with the group and it was my first foot in the door to performing music. We would end up playing festivals, counties (English states if you like), competitions, playing on the back of massive lorries or ‘floats’ driving around our hometown, which led to us playing very prestigious venues in the UK such as the Royal Albert Hall.
How do you get from playing drums on the back of a truck to the Royal Albert Hall? Does someone in a hat just flag your vehicle down and say “hey, we’ve got this hall, and…”
I think when it comes to education, it’s all about who knows who. I don’t know to be honest, it just kind of happened, all the teachers were organising this stuff for us because we were minors, young children.
I hit fifteen and all I wanted to do was play Pop-Punk and Ska. My entry point was a lot of Ska music, Less Than Jake was one of the first live bands I saw. I just wanted to play in a band, so I traded the steel pans in for a guitar. I didn’t really have any luck playing in bands around then, I had a few Punk bands with friends over about a five year period but it didn’t lead to anything. I moved to Brighton which is quite an arty, musical, liberal city on the south coast of the UK. This is where I studied commercial songwriting after college, this is where I really started to find my calling, my path. This was around 2005, peak MySpace era! I had the best year ever, I learned so much about songwriting, the lecturers were amazing, everyone was on such a high the whole year, it’s the first time away from home, a really exciting time. I set up a band at the end of the year called MiMi Soya, this was my first foot into the actual music industry.
If you see the branding and art from years ago, it’s quite a weeby, anime aesthetic, because this was what I was going for with the branding. I wanted it to be a Pop Punk sound that was American, members from the UK with an anime aesthetic! That took us into some really big things, we ended up landing support from a big management team and legal team, we had help from artist development at Atlantic Records in New York. They found us on MySpace because I knew someone who knew someone initially, that sort of thing, very lucky to get that. That opened doors to a lot of opportunities and tours around the UK and Europe, we ended up performing at the Wembley Stadium car park… I tell people “Wembley Stadium” but you have to add “car park” on the end because it’s not quite there, but it’s kind of cool! The management got us on the Nike Human Race…
Nike Human Race? Describe this for people like me who are a bit out of the loop…
Nike did a massive event across the planet where they had people take part in a marathon across major cities in several countries. It was really random, but we got the London one, so we played on a stage outside, and then they had a huge gig inside with Pendulum and Moby. The way they set up the stage was to have the runners running towards the stage, so we had about 25 thousand people watching us temporarily running around, then running away and running back and temporarily watching us again! That was one of the high points of my general music career overall.
MiMi Soya
During my time in MiMi I started to develop my production skills, because our band needed demos recorded and this is how I started getting involved in music production. I basically just kept going, doing more demos, moving into video game and film scoring, shortly after leaving the band, landed a few small indie Horror movies and one big movie in the UK and elsewhere, did a game with Square Enix, one of their smaller indie titles. The whole time I was listening to a lot of J-Pop, I didn’t know what K-Pop was a thing until 2012 when “Gangnam Style” came out. I had a lead from a producer friend in Norway saying “I’m too busy writing for my boy band to look at this, I know you’re into this ‘weeb stuff’, do you want to give the Korean pop thing a go?” and that’s when it started, in 2013. I’ve failed for about a decade at K-Pop, I just wasn’t good enough, the information to learn K-Pop songwriting back then was practically non-existent, there was one video I had sent to me from a Korean publisher that had a couple of hundred views on it. It was a western guy telling western writers how to write K-Pop, a very casual thing. What’s funny is that guy in the video is called Drew Ryan Scott (SQVARE), and I ended up co-writing the song that I did with Kim Woojin that just got released, a decade later! Full circle moment! I failed for a decade, kept going back to K-Pop, giving up, going away, getting better at my skills, going away and it wasn’t until 2018 when I tried again, I wrote a song, filmed it as one of those crappy mobile phone recordings and uploaded it to Facebook. The right person saw it at the right time, and ever since then I’ve been constantly K-Pop pitching up until today.
AZODi, “peak MySpace” era
I’ll get back to the pitching process, but let’s talk about the song itself. Do you start with the guitars when you write a song? This one is very guitar-based.
Generally no. Every song starts differently, it depends on your mood on the day. With the Kim Woojin one it did start with guitar because I wanted to write a song that was Pop-Punk. Initially when I started K-Pop pitching I was told a good amount “Rock genres aren’t popular in Korea, no-one wants it, it’ll always be an underground thing, it’s more popular in Japan” so I had that mentality when I wrote it. I even titled the demo “J-Rock track”. To answer your question, yes this particular song, I started with guitars.
I thought the song was quite good, it reminded me of one of my favourite songs from last year, which was Dami’s “Beauty Full“…
Oh yeah! I have that on my Spotify playlist! It’s a very good song.
It has a similar feel in some ways. The only thing that bummed me out a bit was that I felt the drums and guitar in your track could have been louder. It’s a very vocal-focused mix.
This is all down to the mix engineer and the team. Because Dami’s from Dreamcatcher, Dreamcatcher are all about the guitars and metal, generally having a heavier guitar sound. I personally think due to the branding of her they would have made certain decisions in the mix, to have a louder guitar and drum sound like a live band for example, that’s just my speculation on it. It’s interesting because as you said in Pop music everything is sacrificed for the vocal generally so in the case of most K-Pop productions guitars and drums are generally quieter. I agree with you, but with mixing it’s just down to that person in the team, the mix engineer, and what they feel like on the day.
So once you’ve done the track, what state do you give it to them in? Do you give them the final mix, and they are changing things in mastering, or…?
Every song is different. Sometimes I’ll finish the song completely, sometimes I’ll finish half of it and give it to another producer to put their mark on it, and then another scenario could be the producer will build a whole song out of a simple riff I created. It’s a variable that changes on a song by song basis. For this particular song I practically finished the song, then left the bass, bridge, some extra elements and mix to one of my co-producers who I work with Phil Schwan. If you search Phil Schwan, all his stuff, he’s written a lot. He recently wrote for Le Sserafim, he’s a very good producer. I sent him this song in a rough demo format, he puts it into his DAW [digital audio workstation] software and he’ll add all his parts, and then he mixes the song to sound really good and professional, because before that point it sounds messy. Then when we finish the song and we both agree with how it sounds, we pitch it to the topliners [separate songwriters/producers who specialise in writing vocal melodies (toplines)]. Because me and Phil both have good relationships with Sean [Avenue 52] and Drew [SQVARE], they ended up writing together in LA for the vocal topline, and then they mix in the vocals together, slap it on top of our track, then they mastered the entire song and that’s the demo. Once that demo’s done, we send it to all of our publishers and contacts in Korea, Japan, China and they say if they want it or not, and if they accept it they’ll start sending it out to the record labels and pitching it out on our behalf, in exchange they’ll take a percentage of money if it gets released, and probably a bit of reputation boost as they’ll pick up their name on the track as well. That’s generally how it works in a nutshell.
I’m starting to understand why it took four years!
Yeah! Three and a half years ago we wrote it, before COVID! I’ve been wracking my brains for the last five to ten years about how this all works. There’s no logic to it! It’s so diverse and interchangeable, all the different A&Rs [“artist & repertoire”, label staff responsible for talent scouting and artist development], all the different trends happening in the world and the marketplace. You can’t possibly predict any of it and why it’s going to happen or not, it’s a completely random occurrence, like winning on a lottery ticket.
Like throwing it against the wall and seeing if it sticks?
Exactly! And even if you’re told “this particular sound is trending now”, that can change so fast. What writers generally do is just write as much as possible and see what happens. For example ‘On My Way’ I thought was going to go to Japan, and then three and a half years later everything aligns and the 10x team thought the song would be best to represent Kim Woojin’s new album. The process is so diverse and intricate, it’s really hard to put a finger on it really. You can’t predict this stuff!
This reminds me of what Frank Zappa said about the record label process. He said the reason why he felt that music was good in the 1950s and 1960s is because the people who were writing and approving songs behind the scenes didn’t know what they were doing, so they were just taking chances on all sorts of different things randomly in the hope that something would work, and that’s how a lot of stuff that otherwise wouldn’t have gotten out there got out there. Someone would just give it a chance and hope like hell that it worked. He said that later on in the late 1960s and 1970s music got worse because the old people at labels who didn’t know what they were doing got replaced with younger people who thought that they knew what they were doing, and those younger people would just push forward what was trendy.
Yeah, it’s a weird one. That sounds accurate to be honest. I didn’t really think about it like that.
It certainly explains why so many different sounds are coming out of K-Pop and why it is so random, because I think it maybe is a little bit like that in some way.
I think as well it’s infused with the way Korean business is done as well, and “what’s the next thing, how quick can we fire it out?”, this quick turnaround mentality as well. It’s a really interesting place to be and that’s why I find it so exciting to be here. You can just sit at home in the UK and fire out a random idea, and there’s a possibility it could get cut. Whereas in the west it’s very…. I don’t know, I just find western Pop stuff a little bit more reserved. I watched a really interesting video on this by YouTuber Punk Rock MBA, about why music is sounding a bit dull and unmemorable. He says that obviously TikTok is a massive part of that, but a second part is that the stuff that gets put on TikTok is music that he calls more of a vibe than an actual song, more of a feeling. He described it as western music being a lot more like a film score, where it’s accompanying an image, the image is king and the music’s there to support what’s going on, and that’s what’s happening with TikTok now. He uses a Taylor Swift example where she has this angelic type of bridge that’s kind of ethereal and spacey, and it’s being used to accompany some wedding videos on TikTok, or videos about how men propose to women. It’s such an irrelevant part of the song… a bridge? A bridge is nowhere near as important as a chorus! It’s interesting how music now in the west is more vibey, a lot more in the background. Look at Lo-Fi, Lo-Fi is all about vibes and being in the background. I think that’s what is so good about K-Pop, it’s like “No! You WILL pay attention to what we’re doing with this music, and our fashion, and our music videos!” It’s still music at the forefront, I think that’s why it’s doing so well, it’s just different.
So if I was a producer and I had a track, how would I go about getting to the situation where you’re at where you’re getting something out? What steps would I have to go through?
I get asked this all the time! I think there’s a few ways. There’s no right or wrong answer, everyone’s different. My experience is very limited, I have a 0.001% view of this planet at this particular point in time, so what I’m telling you is my experience and may not work for you. Overall, I’d say having more than one song would be a start. Aim to have about five songs to start with, to show that you’re a consistent producer who can consistently produce results in music. That would be the first step. The second step I think would be – the publishers and A&Rs, and what’s great about the Korean industry is that they are just so open into you just going into the DMs in Instagram and saying “hey, how’s it going, do you mind if I send you some songs, and see if we can work something out”, it’s so awesome in that way. Whereas in the west, everyone is very closed off, you have to jump through five hoops just to get a chance to send someone an email. Find an established writer on Instagram for example, a lot of them will tag their publishers in the cut announcement, because everyone’s involved, then you can go find that A&R or publisher’s info on Instagram and message them. Be friends, you know. Try not to be someone who goes in there and says “do this thing for me” as your first message to them, you can say “hey, I wasn’t sure if you’d be open to having some music sent to you, are you free to get on a call next week”, a lot of these A&Rs are up for just jumping on Zoom and having a chat with you. There’s a few ways. Just doing the research, finding cuts, finding who’s responsible, finding through Instagram and the writers, and then just messaging them privately. Another way is you could join my Discord community! We have A&Rs in there, we have publishers in there, we have one of the A&Rs from Attrakt Music who did Fifty Fifty. The algorithm’s good like that – if you add one of those A&Rs or publishers, Instagram automatically recommends other people to follow who are related to that person. So you start getting a snowball effect where you start to accumulate A&Rs info, publishers info very quickly. So I’d say have five songs, and then go do the research, find out who’s getting the results, find them on Instagram, send them a message and follow a few more. Keep engaging with them and commenting and being human, they are humans at the end of the day, don’t treat them like a robot who is there to serve you like a lot of people do. It’d be something like that I’d recommend. I’m confident one of the first things they’ll ask is “how many songs do you have?” so that’s why you want to have a handful of tracks ready to go.
When you’ve got your handful of tracks, what sort of state do you want them to be in? People worry about ‘what if I submit my nice finely mastered recording and it just gets stolen’ but then you don’t want to submit anything too rough either because then people think you can’t produce stuff. So where do you position it?
Always do your best. If you’re scared of people stealing it, it’s just a risk you have to take, and at the end of the day these A&Rs are listening to thousands of songs per month, they would not benefit from stealing your music at all. People talk and reputation, especially in the music industry and online is important. If you’re really terrified of it, what I would suggest is open up your DAW, get your five choruses of your five songs and merge them into one track, so you’re just showcasing the choruses in one file, then put it on Soundcloud, make it private, and then send them a private link. That way you know who’s clicked it, so if something did happen you can trace it back, but ultimately it’s useless to them anyway, they don’t have the full song. So that would be one way around it. But always do your best, because it’s competitive, you can’t afford to cut corners with it, you’ve just got to do your best.
AZODi with a 14-page spread he wrote for K-pop Stars Magazine
One massive error I made years ago was I didn’t have a topliner and I thought that the A&R would be able to interpret my vision for the song by just sending them the instrumental. I know other producers do that – it doesn’t work. It won’t connect with them, they’ll just be like “why isn’t it finished, why haven’t you sent me a full song?” so that’s something to watch out for too.
When putting toplines on tracks do you use guide vocals, or just an instrument?
I don’t know, I just send the track to the topliners and they cover the whole thing themselves.
So you’re not involved in your own toplines?
No, not really. Every now and then, I’ll do a Zoom session and I’ve got a few songs I might topline on, and I’ll sit with a singer. I’m not a singer, but I can still write melody, like I did with my band, so that’s possible, but to be honest, I just don’t enjoy it as much.
Toplining is a very different art to track writing.
It’s a whole other skillset, and vocal mixing is another skillset. Topliners are much harder to find, you’ll find that there’s way more producers than topliners. At the same time, topliners will get a lot more cuts, but they make less money than a producer because they didn’t provide the track. However that is shifting, topliners are starting to take more of a cut on the track now, so that imbalance is evening out.
So if you’re thinking about being a producer, consider being a topliner, as there’s less competition?
I’d say it’s still competitive, don’t get me wrong, but just from my narrow perspective of the world, there’s a lot more producers than topliners. I’m seeing in my community of about 1400 people on Discord, the years of giving feedback on other peoples music, I’d look at it as 80/20. Topliners will get more cuts but less of a percentage, but they don’t create the track, which is a separate payment for producers.
AZODi, Summer 2023, photographed by Heartwork Visuals
Tell us a bit about the song itself and how it’s been going.
It’s like a dream. I can’t really describe it any other way. I’ve been working towards something like this consistently for five years and on and off for about a decade. I had a couple of tracks in the past, I had a track with a Chinese v-tuber girl group called A-Soul in October 2021, that was the first cut I ever got, and it was really cool. It had a virtual reality MV and it didn’t do much in the western world but on Bilibili the Chinese video platform it got over a million views on that and the comments were crazy. It was really cool to see all the A-SOUL fans creating videos in various cities in China, that was awesome. Then I got a cut with an anime show in Japan, but the Korean one was the real focus. I can’t believe it’s happened, I’m still reeling that in. When it got announced, my phone didn’t stop blowing up. Everyone was really supportive, especially the people who’ve been following the YouTube channel and the AZODi Discord for a long time, because they know how long it’s been going for, because of all the content I’ve been putting out with my journey and story with all of K-Pop. That was really cool to see. It’s been amazing, and the Kim Woojin fans are finding me and messaging me, it’s all great and highly appreciated, I really appreciate it. It’s the most rewarding thing I’ve experienced since I can remember – something you’ve worked so hard for with zero return and result, to finally happen – it’s absolutely unbelievable.
I assume you’re definitely going to be doing more of this stuff, then?
Yeah, absolutely.
Do you think it’ll get easier now that you’ve had that one come out?
I don’t know, in all honesty. People say that. Maybe? I just don’t know. Again, you just can’t predict anything. One thing that really blew my mind was that I wrote the song in January 2020. I’ve been writing consistently for three and a half years after that point, so I have a lot more music, I’m technically more experienced, but – that doesn’t matter. Your experience level doesn’t match the result, because the song that was cut was three and a half years old. That was something that I had to reel in as well, because it didn’t make sense – you just assume your newer stuff is going to be more successful but it’s not true at all! I’ll absolutely be carrying on and in theory have a backlog of songs that may get on a cut in the future!
It’s an interesting insight. I’ve been listening to K-Pop for some time and have noticed that when a new musical trend will appear in the west it’ll usually turn up in k-pop about two or three years later. I always thought “why are they always a little bit behind” but now you’ve given the context of that which is that there’s this very long process that happens and that it can take several years to get a track out, so in fact a lot of producers are probably right up with the times but it’s a long process.
It’s a long process absolutely, but it’s also a fast process. I got notified about the cut with Kim Woojin at the start of July! So that’s fast, real fast, they must have crushed it. If they announced it at the start of July and got it out at the end of August, they did the whole thing in two months. Turnarounds can be really quick, and sometimes really slow. I know some people who have had cut notifications a year ago, or two years ago, and the song still hasn’t come out yet. Sometimes it’s quick, sometimes it’s slow, sometimes they’re ahead of the times, sometimes they’re behind the times, it’s hard to spot these things because you think one thing and then a completely opposite thing is also true.
Do you think that someone who has an inside producer, say someone like Blackpink who almost always use Teddy Park and no-one else, have a bit of an advantage because they have that one person right there who does something in house?
I think so to a degree, but they’re not fortune tellers either. What I mean by that is, the record label, the producer, the group, can only do so much. They can’t control the fans’ reaction – as much as they’d like to, so it’s scary for someone as big as Blackpink, Teddy Park and their team, with that many eyes on them. They have to create a song that is innovative and different enough to be interesting and fresh, but it can’t be so left-field that it alienates the existing fanbase and sounds weird. On the other hand, they can’t do something too familiar as it will get written off as boring and predictable. It’s like walking on a tightrope… and then you can’t predict what the reaction’s going to be like from the crowd. So yeah, they definitely have some pros in being able to be more efficient and quicker, but they can only do so much, they can’t control the whole thing.
How does the money side of it work for you? With the new song have you seen any monetary result yet?
This varies from label to label, company to company. With Yuehua Entertainment they were fairly quick in paying for the A-Soul cut. I think that’s because China doesn’t really have a main focus on royalties. I remember being paid an extra amount to compensate for that, which was great.
You got more upfront in lieu of royalty?
Yeah we got paid a month or two after the song was done, and then a second payment four to six months later, which was cool. I’m still waiting for that payment on the Japanese one, I don’t know what happened to that! With Kim Woojin, it’s been confirmed since July, it came out this Wednesday, a couple of days ago, I haven’t been paid upfront for anything yet but I have just signed off a split sheet for the backend royalties. I imagine the payment will be quite soon. It’s just the nature of it, it’s about how organised the business is, business to business, their priorities etc. I landed a TV pitch for a Gatorade commercial that went out in the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand, and I got that confirmed in March and I just got paid last week for that. So it’s not specific to K-Pop, it’s a general music creator thing, it just depends on the company and how hard they push.
With your experiences in the business so far, is there anything you’d like to see done differently? If you could change something in the business, what would it be?
[long pause] I think some form of communication… the hardest thing about this whole thing is just not knowing, and I don’t know if that’s because I’m at the end of a long email chain… I don’t know off the top of my head to be honest. Let me get back to you on that!
A more opaque system?
Yeah, but on the other hand – there’s always a “yeah, but” – there has to be a certain amount of secrecy, because if they start announcing stuff too early…it could mess things up, I think a lot of people have to say “yes” before anything happens. I think it would be good to have more transparency and communication in regard to what the verdict of a song is sooner, or if you can see that your song made it to a certain stage… I can’t really tell you right now!
Good luck with the song, and thanks very much for talking to me!
I appreciate you having me on, and great questions, I really enjoyed them!
BONUS SM ENT PLAQUE SECTION
I had been creating K-Pop rock flips of trending songs on TikTok. They were a lot of fun to make, I would show the process behind making the music with fast paced editing. They pulled in good numbers and engagement generally and one of the videos, my flip of NCT127 “Hey Yo” landed more interest than usual.
I received a comment from ‘Pink Blood’ telling me they enjoyed the flip. Pink Blood are the community team within SM Entertainment. One thing led to another and over the course of 3 days, they shared my video on their TikTok account, DM’ed me on Instagram telling me my video had won the “Creator of the Month” for February! Couldn’t believe it, yet again another surreal moment that had happened this year. Very appreciative of it!
AZODi’s “Pink Blood” plaque
AZODi, September 8th, 2023
AZODi’s linktree – relevant social links here
Thank you for reading this interview! Are you someone relevant to the world of k-pop? If you are, or know someone who is and would like to be featured on Kpopalypse Interview, please get in touch!
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