For indie musicians like Julianna Zachariou, Spotify has made music more accessible than ever — but at a cost. With payouts that amount to less than a penny per stream, she's had to turn to crowdfunding and direct fan support to fund her projects. She opens up about the personal toll these struggles take and how she's found ways to stay true to her craft while facing these challenges.
"On my bad days, I wake up and think, 'I've already done the best I can do. This is the most people I'll ever reach, and I'm just sinking into anonymity,'" Julianna said of reflecting on an older song that has reached more than 5 million streams.
"But on my better days, I'm grateful for it. I recognize that it was a different time. Spotify's kind of a monster now. There's no room for 'if it's good enough, it'll find its way.' It's just not a thing right now. It's a trap to let metrics determine that you're doing something better or worse than you were in the past," she said.
In this episode, we break down Spotify's business model, the economics of streaming and what it really takes to sustain a career without major-label backing. Julianna's story is a powerful reminder of the need for change in the industry and how we can all play a role in supporting the artists who enrich our lives.
Guests:
- Julianna Zachariou, musician
- Liz Pelly, journalist and author of "Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist"
Julianna Zachariou Track List:
- "church st."
- "Subway Song"
- "Hero of Your Heart"
- "Dreamer, Dreamer"
Julianna Zachariou's musical influences:
- The Commodores
- Earth Wind and Fire
- Toto
- Alison Krauss
- Bonnie Raitt
- The Beatles
- The Rolling Stones
- Led Zeppelin
- The Who
- Taylor Swift
- Kelly Clarkson, "American Idol"
Mentioned in this episode:
- Josh Flowers, songwriter and musical collaborator
- The D Train | NYC subway line that runs from the Bronx to Brooklyn
- United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) | A grassroots union fighting for fairness in music, from streaming transparency to artist pay equity
- H.R.7763 - Living Wage for Musicians Act of 2024 | 2024 bill introduced by Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman, backed by UMAW, pushing for a penny-per-stream payout to make streaming fairer for working artists
- Soda Bar | North Park dive for intimate sets, rising indie acts and vibrant local energy
- Previous GoFundMes: Help Fund Julianna's Next Record and Help Julianna Make Music
Sources:
- "Simulating the emergence of superstar firms: The role of luck vs talent" (A.E. Biondo, A. Pluchino, R. Zanola, ScienceDirect, 2024)
- "Alan B. Krueger | Rockonomics: 7 Key Economic Lessons" (John Murray Books, 2019)
- "How Music Streaming Platforms Calculate Payouts Per Stream 2025" (Royalty Exchange, 2025)
- "The Spotify conspiracy theories about 'Espresso,' explained" (Rebecca Jennings, Vox, 2024)
- "Loud and Clear": 2024 Spotify Annual Music Economics Report (Spotify, 2025)
- "Tlaib Introduces Living Wage for Musicians Act" (Office of Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, March 2024)
- "Data Shows 90 Percent of Streams Go to the Top 1 Percent of Artists" (Emily Blake, Rolling Stone, Sept. 2020)
- "A Brief History of American Payola" (Kim Kelly, Vice, 2016)
- "Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist" (Liz Pelly, Atria/One Signal Publishers, 2024)
- "The Ghosts in the Machine" (Liz Pelly, Harper's Magazine/book excerpt, 2025)
From KPBS Public Media, The Finest is a podcast about the people, art and movements redefining culture in San Diego. Listen to it wherever you get your podcasts or click the play button at the top of this page and subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, Pocket Casts, Pandora, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Episode 4: Julianna Zachariou Transcript
Anthony Wallace: So I'm out here, just outside the KPBS studio on the San Diego State campus, asking mostly students: Hey guys, my name's Anthony. I work for KPBS. I'm a podcast producer. Can I ask you one question really fast? OK. So imagine you are an artist, a musical artist. And you have a song on Spotify with 5 million plays. That's a lot, like that song would be in the top 0.3% of songs on Spotify. And so, say you don't have a manager or a record label. So you get all the royalties, like you get all the money that Spotify pays out for that song. How much money do you think you'd make off that song?
Julia Dixon Evans: OK, think about it a second. Come up with your own guess. Here's what people said.
Passerby: 500,000?
Wallace: 500,000?
Passerby: Yeah.
Wallace: What do you think?
Passerby: Like 700,000?
Passerby: Somewhere around $300,000 to $500,000 ?
Passerby: 5 million.
Wallace: 5 million?
Passerby: Yeah, I think.
Passerby: Like 50K.
Passerby: Maybe like 80K.
Wallace: OK.
Passerby: Yeah.
Passerby: I don't know, maybe like 300,000.
Wallace: OK.
Passerby: Yeah, that's my guess.
Evans: We'll reveal the answer soon, so stay tuned. But one minor spoiler: We crunched the numbers with a San Diego musician who's had that exact kind of hit. And the answer? Not a lot.
Julianna Zachariou: Honestly, doing that math in front of you just makes me so angry and emotional. I think that's why I don't engage with it too often because it's so heartbreaking. I had the luck of getting one song into those numbers. It's really hard to get those numbers. It's the shooting star kind of thing.
Evans: Julianna Zachariou has been one of my favorite local artists for years.
[Music: Julianna Zachariou's "church st."]
Evans: As a songwriter, she's able to capture this mix of anthemic melody and relatable, honest and sometimes strange detail.
[Music: Julianna Zachariou's "church st."]
Evans: Today we'll hear her story: How she's persevered for over a decade as a musician. She's had a taste of breaking through, of making it in a big way, but the way the music industry works has shifted beneath her feet. And like most musicians today, she has to be scrappy to get by.
Streaming is a huge part of her career. She has to think about it all the time. We'll dig deep into the world's leading streaming company — Spotify — with a journalist who's covered the company for nearly a decade. Because Spotify has changed a lot in recent years. You may have noticed that using the app has recently started to feel more like TikTok: more algorithm-driven, fewer choices to make as a user. That's a calculated shift by Spotify, and it's impacting not just artists like Julianna, but also listeners like us.
From KPBS Public Media, this is The Finest, a podcast about the people, art and movements redefining culture in San Diego. I'm Julia Dixon Evans.
[Theme Music]
Evans: Can we start? Yep? OK. Just a heads-up: There's one very well-placed bad word in this episode. OK, back to our interview.What kind of music were you surrounded by growing up? What did you discover when you were a young person?
Zachariou: It was pretty eclectic in my house. My dad kind of primarily listened to a lot of early funk stuff like Commodores, Earth, Wind and Fire. But also my dad really, he really liked Toto. It's just like white guy bands that are really tight, like really, really excellent studio musician white guy bands that — and then my mom introduced some like Alison Krauss and Bonnie Raitt early on and I did love them. And then my sister took me aside and she was like, no, no, do this. And then she introduced me to The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. She was really into The Who. A lot of that classic rock era. And that blew my mind. And that was like, 13, 14, 15. She and I sort of found our own niche together.
Evans: Do you remember when you first decided to seriously set out to make music professionally?
Zachariou: Yeah. I made my first record when I was 14. And I made a second record at 16. I was selling it from my locker in high school. It's not available online or anything, but it was pretty, pretty cool stuff at my high school.
Evans: In that moment, were you thinking big? Were you thinking like record labels, more, more, more?
Zachariou: I am ambitious. I always think big. The image I was working off of was like a Taylor Swift. I didn't understand like independent musicians. So the model I'm given is like, oh, I'm 16, I'm going to make this record and then I'm going to hit it big. And I also had a semi manager at the time and he wanted to pitch me to Disney and do that whole thing. And he was talking about all of these ideas and scaling up and stuff.
So yes, I would watch "American Idol" and be like, oh my god, maybe I could be Kelly Clarkson.
Evans: We know those Taylor Swift and Kelly Clarkson stories are exceedingly rare. Julianna didn't become a teenage star, but she kept getting better, little by little. She eventually moved to Nashville for college to study songwriting. Just after graduating, she struck gold. She wrote "Subway Song" — that shooting star song with 5 million plays we mentioned earlier.
Zachariou: "Subway Song" and I have had a relationship. It came out in 2018, so that's, oh god, seven years ago now. And it was back when the Spotify algorithm was more like true and really led by if people were just enjoying it, it would just sort of bloom.
And I made that record while I was in New York, I was there for an off Broadway gig. I was playing a live score, and it was the first time I got to do music full time for six weeks in Manhattan. It was life changing, really. I was so poor. The rate was crazy low. I wanted to do anything but scoop ice cream in Nashville. I just wanted to go.
But I ended up meeting this brilliant writer, Josh Flowers, who is a big collaborator with me now, and we fell in love with each other's catalogs. We spent every waking moment together. I wrote that song sort of based on all of our commuting that we had to do to and from the theater on the D Train.
[Music: Julianna Zachariou's "Subway Song"]
Zachariou: And we just did a lot of that and a lot of late night train nights — and he'd be OK with me saying this — I did have a big crush on him, like big, big time. Who wouldn't? He's super charming and really good at what he does. And he's really cute. And so, I started kind of writing the song about him. And kind of the romance of us training around Manhattan together, working, sharing coffees — cause we have no money, kind of stuff. And then he ended up helping me finish it. And he was the one who was like, wouldn't it be so funny if we had dance moves in the chorus? And then we came up with the sway left, sway right, slow dancing in the middle of the subway.
[Music: Julianna Zachariou's "Subway Song"]
Zachariou: And I had some perk time at a studio, which is just like a free studio day for working on my friends' music, and I literally wrote the song to have something to record that day. So it all happened in like a week. I was finishing it on the way to the studio. And then what is out on the internet, it's just a demo that I was going to come back and make again. And he did like this low pass filter thing on it and said, I think it's done.
And then I just put it out and, of course, it's the thing I spent the least amount of time on in my life has done the best. I think it's just a lesson to me to not take things so seriously, and also just be grateful, you never really know what's gonna work.
Evans: Do you have an estimation of how much you've made off of that song just from streaming, just from Spotify?
Zachariou: Yes. Well, I could do one, a live estimation for you. One second.
Evans: Ooh. This is a math show.
Zachariou: This is a math show, which will require a calculator. OK, and I'm the sole writer on most of my catalog, which means that I'm getting 100% of the pie.
Evans: And that's unusual?
Zachariou: That's unusual. OK, I think I'm at like five million, right?
Evans: Mm hmm.
Zachariou: OK, so 5.123 or whatever, times .003, which is what I'm getting. I've made $15,000 on it over seven years.
Evans: 15,000?
Zachariou: Yeah. Not great. Honestly, doing that math in front of you just makes me so angry and emotional. I think that's why I don't engage with it too often because it's so heartbreaking. We shouldn't be so desperate all the time. We should be able to be comfortable enough to keep making the thing we can make and feel safe and taken care of, and we can hire people for what they're worth. It's just, I'm sick of being so savvy and pinching so many pennies and being so scrappy. I'm the scrappiest person because of it. Making a living would be, I have an idea and I can do it. Right now, I have an idea and I'm like, how can I make that ten times smaller so I can do it?
Evans: We've talked about Spotify before, and it's hard to, right? We have to talk about it because it defines so much about music.
Zachariou: Oh, Spotify. Oh, Spotify. I can start with the thing that we're all meant to say, which is: Spotify is open to, anybody can upload music. Anybody can have an opportunity to gain an audience. But it hasn't really done the work to sustain independent artists, especially when you deserve it. I'm part of a union now. There's a new musician's union happening. UMAW, I think is how you say it, United Musicians and Allied Workers. And basically, all we're trying to do is get one cent per stream. And if we did that, I would be able to make a living.
I'm making now $300 a month, and that's pretty good. That's pretty good all things considered. In my best playing days was during COVID, strangely enough. I had a 100,000 listeners a month during that, which is the most I've ever had. I have like 30,000 right now. During COVID, if I was receiving a cent per stream I would have $30,000 a year in royalties to live off of, which is huge, which would have changed my life.
Evans: The numbers can be baffling. On the one hand, there's how much artists are getting paid per stream, and that number is not a constant. It varies based on complex factors and how many people are taking a piece of the pie. Then on the other hand, there's the number of streams they get and how those numbers fluctuate — and that can be perplexing in its own way.
Julianna made an album in 2022 called "Hero of Your Heart." It's a total evolution in her songwriting and musicianship: the complexity and texture of the music, the nuance and detail in the lyrics. And within each song, and the album, as this whole work of art, she mixes sadness with a little hope.
She invested $9,000 of her own money into it, which she scraped together by working at other artists' shows selling merch, teaching for brief stints when she's not on tour and saving whatever she makes from streaming — by eating a lot of frozen peas and peanut butter sandwiches. She couldn't afford to hire musicians, so she played every instrument on the record herself. She poured everything into it. But still, for whatever reason, despite all that effort and accomplishment, the album didn't take off like her earlier hit, that demo she made in just one day.
[Music: Julianna Zachariou's "Hero of Your Heart"]
Evans: So after "Subway Song," you have done such great work, but without as many plays. Do you still look at it as like, it is a gift to have a song that stuck? Or is there some feeling of it being a letdown that you're not still reaching that? Is that something that you think about?
Zachariou: Oh, I mean, of course. On my bad days, I wake up and think, I've already done the best I can do. This is the most people I'll ever reach, and I'm just sinking into anonymity. But on my better days, I'm grateful for it. I recognize that it was a different time. Spotify's kind of a monster now. There's no room for if it's good enough, it'll find its way. It's just not a thing right now. It's a trap to let metrics determine that you're doing something better or worse than you were in the past.
And obviously I want my numbers to get better, but the tools we have to get that done, basically it's based on your finances, and if you're not making enough in the first place, you can't invest the money to get preferential treatment in the algorithm or whatever. So, yeah, f--- numbers, honestly. Can I say that? I'm sorry. Forget numbers. They're just, you can't let them get in your head.
[Music: Julianna Zachariou's "Hero of Your Heart"]
Evans: Today compared to 2018 when "Subway Song" came out, Julianna feels it's harder to get traction on Spotify without big marketing money. And as a listener, I agree that Spotify has changed in recent years.
My main complaint is that Spotify got boring. I used to love the playlists and radio stations, but it feels like I'm not finding new stuff anymore. Now, the songs it serves to me are repetitive. So I called Liz Pelly, author of "Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist." I wanted to see if Liz could explain my concerns — and Julianna's.
Liz Pelly: What you're saying, I think is something that is a common observation about the way that Spotify in particular has evolved in recent years. Something that I really tried to trace in looking at the way in which the company had evolved is in the early days of their algorithmic recommendation and personalization, they had Pandora-like radio stations that mostly relied on this algorithmic recommendation system called collaborative filtering, which is basically, if you like music that's similar to me, it'll show me stuff that's in your library that I've never heard of before.
Previously, the emphasis was really on the word discovery, showing you music that you hadn't listened to before. Their first big success story in personalization and algorithmic recommendations was Discover Weekly, which was meant to be this algorithmic mixtape every Monday of music that you never heard before. At a certain point, when you open Spotify, when you were looking through the browse page, it almost became hard to even find the Discover tab, which had really taken a backseat to what they started calling Made For You. And I thought this was so interesting because, in some ways, Discover and Made For You can kind of seem similar, but they're actually completely different.
Evans: So I was not imagining things. And Liz pointed out that this is really just Spotify doing what many tech companies are doing now: designing their products so that we, as users, don't have to make any decisions — a frictionless experience.
Pelly: A lot of it seems to really have to do with the influence of TikTok, proving that there was almost a consumer desire to have this extremely leaned back experience, where you just open the app and the interface is immediately showing you this hyper-personalized feed of stuff that is based on your listening habits that is tailored directly to the kinds of stuff that you're interested in. But on Spotify, it seems like that is mostly meant that people are often being served back their music taste or they're being served back what they already have listened to — much more tailored towards just engagement, retaining you on the platform, showing you stuff that you're likely to hit play on and not hit skip on.
Evans: It does take some effort and curiosity to give a new artist a chance. However, it takes very little cognitive energy to listen to "Espresso" by Sabrina Carpenter for the 100th time.
[Music: Sabrina Carpenter's "Espresso"]
Evans: And Spotify counts on that. They feed us those kinds of songs, which is bad for discovery, making it much harder for lesser-known artists like Julianna. That's one factor. But as she suspected, there's something else going on.
Payola is the age-old practice of a record label or anyone else paying — or bribing — a radio station to play a particular song. In the U.S., it's illegal. But Liz's reporting has raised concerns that what Spotify is doing now is getting dangerously close to a kind of digital Payola.
Pelly: They're not exactly the same as Payola, but Spotify refers to itself as a two-sided marketplace, where on one hand, it says that it's selling a product to listeners — subscriptions — and on the other side, it says that it's selling a product to artists, which is promotional opportunities. Things like banner ads, things like Discovery Mode, which is a part of the business model that asks artists to accept a lower royalty rate in exchange for algorithmic promotion.
Evans: And then, there's Spotify's editorial side, which is basically playlists they curate themselves. These are hugely popular and can launch artists' careers. That's where things start to get murky. Liz told us that the lines between paid promotion and editorial decisions can start to blur, even if there's no official pay-for-play system.
Pelly: Something that people who work at independent labels were starting to tell me is that when you both have the editorial ecosystem and this paid for marketplace ecosystem happening in the same company, these conversations started to bleed into each other where it's not like you have to buy the advertisements on Spotify in order to get editorial placements. But it starts to get looked at like, well, if you're not spending money on ads on this song, it can't possibly be that big of a priority for you. So why should we promote this in our editorial ecosystem? So I think that what maybe in the past seemed more like a pure editorial ecosystem has started to be impacted by these other conversations that also happen between the labels and the marketing teams in the realm of marketplace.
Evans: We reached out to Spotify to run some of the ideas in Liz's book past them. Overall, they said the book contains, quote, "inaccuracies and misinformation throughout." Specifically, they told us that their editorial team operates entirely separate from marketplace and strongly disputes the comparison between Discovery Mode and Payola. Spotify claimed it's a transparent system, and those songs still need to perform well with listeners to take off.
One thing they can't dispute is that on Spotify, the top artists rake in an enormous portion of the streams and income. A Rolling Stone report found that in 2020, the rapper DaBaby got more streams on his own than the bottom 90% of artists on the platform combined. And in a system where top artists dominate, it's easy to feel like money talks.
In California, an artist needs over 700,000 streams per month to earn the equivalent of minimum wage from their streaming income. That's a lot. Even at her most successful period, that's still about three times as many as Julianna was getting.
In this system, if you don't have big money, uploading a song to Spotify is kind of a roll of the dice.
Pelly: It's really unpredictable, and that's totally unsustainable, trying to have a career in music or any field shouldn't feel like playing the lottery, but often it does.
Evans: And for most independent musicians, you don't hit that jackpot. Relatively speaking, Julianna is actually doing pretty good. She said she earns about $300 a month. The bottom 97% of artists on Spotify average just $14 a month.
Still, Liz is optimistic that UMAW, the musician's union Julianna is a part of, could help reform Spotify's payout system. We know what the world loses when musicians can't afford to make art, but Liz writes about all kinds of other ways that the modern streaming system impacts our cultural landscape. There's more bland, short, inoffensive songs just good enough to not be skipped. There's cheap stock music that's been rebranded under the name of fake artists, and Spotify can pay even lower royalties for that. But there's also a way in which it makes music more individual, less communal. It disconnects music from where it came from and reduces it to individual songs that basically just serve as background noise for your daily routine.
[Music]
Evans: The first show I went to after COVID lockdowns was Julianna's at Soda Bar in City Heights. It was emotional, of course, the first time I'd been in a crowd in months. I went alone, but I felt so connected with that room full of strangers. It was such an overwhelming and unexpected intimacy. I approached the merch table that night and met Julianna, and I've followed her career closely ever since. I'd call her a friend.
That show was basically the complete opposite of turning on an automated playlist where you listen somewhat absentmindedly and know very little about most of the artists.
Zachariou: When you spend time with an artist and you spend time with a catalog and you hear their songs over and over again, it's hard not to love them. People in this community who I've gone to support and watch their live show around town over the years, you start to create a relationship with the music that they make and their stage persona and the kind of energy that they bring. I love to heckle my friends while they're, in a positive way. And sing along and feel them do the thing and, I don't know, I'm just so grateful that people are willing to spend the time to go out and do this over and over again. On a small scale, the glory isn't really there, but the community really is. Go find these people, spend some time with them.
[Music: Julianna Zachariou's "Subway Song"]
Evans: OK, a healthy music economy: What can consumers of music do to make an impact and bring that, anything close to that healthy music economy?
Zachariou: It's not their job. It's not their job. They're not the reason why we're struggling. It honestly pisses me off that I have to be pleading with the community to care. Obviously, go to shows. Go to shows, especially local shows, 10, 20 bucks a ticket. That kind of level, that makes a huge difference. I don't know. The impetus really isn't on the listener. Obviously, I was saying people are trained to not value music — and I understand why you're asking that — but that's not their model that they created. That's a big business model that's been created.
We need it to be codified. We need an actual streaming rate to be codified and this is something that has happened that I learned about when I went to school for music, I had to take some music tech history, whatever. And most things, the phonograph is created, and then people are bootlegging records, and then the law catches up and is like, hey, actually, copyrights exist. You can't do this. You can't just sell somebody else's music, or just take it. There are certain things you need to do, and this person makes this much money, and that's been, that's followed all of the tech advancements. We have yet to have anything codified. The streaming rate is different per platform.
Yeah, I mean we need laws, baby. We need big guns. We need something that we can point to and be like, this is illegal. What you're doing is illegal. The fact that there are people who are recognizing the actual labor rights issues, it makes me feel legitimate in my job. And doing music isn't just a privilege, it's a job that I do. It's a service that I provide. And it's something I've put my whole life into.
Evans: Julianna's right that any solutions are way beyond the consumer. In order for lesser-known musicians to be able to make a living off their recordings, we need legislation.
UMAW has helped create that legislation — The Living Wage for Musicians Act. It was introduced in Congress last year. It aims to get artists a minimum of one cent per stream by adding a new 10% tax on streaming service providers and capping royalties for artists at 1 million streams per month. So, some of the superstars would give up some of their income for everyone else. Also, it would increase the price of a streaming subscription by about 50%, so our Spotify monthly payment might go from $12 to $18. But it'd mean that Julianna's monthly income from streaming, for example, could go from $300 a month to $1,000.
But beyond legislation, there are things that we, as listeners, can consciously change about our listening habits to better support artists and just deepen our own connection to the music we're listening to. Liz Pelly says buying physical and digital media and building your own music library helps, or she suggests starting listening clubs, kind of like a book club but for albums. And of course, there's speaking out about the facts. This is a democracy after all, and when people hear how much streaming really pays, it can strike a chord.
So, remember those passersby we talked to at the start of this episode? When Producer Anthony revealed the real answer — how much an artist actually makes from a song with 5 million streams — people were pretty shocked.
Wallace: It's about 15,000.
Passerby: Oh.
Passerby: That's not… 5 million plays? My god, I never knew that.
Wallace: Yeah.
Passerby: 15,000?
Passerby: Damn, that's crazy.
Passerby: That's it? Oh.
Passerby: My god, that's low.
Passerby: Yeah, that's pretty low.
Passerby: That's hella low.
Passerby: Are you serious? That's terrible. I was way off. If you're beginning a career to be an artist, you'd have to have two jobs, three jobs to make a living.
Evans: This year, Julianna will release her third studio album. To make it, she turned to GoFundMe. With the help of her wife, who shared the link shamelessly with everyone they've ever known, Julianna was able to crowdfund $30,000. This time she was able to hire musicians. They recorded everything in eight days. How will it do on Spotify is anybody's guess.
If Julianna and UMAW, the union, are successful in securing better pay from streaming, luck will play less of a role in her ability to get by financially. But for now, even with the way the system is, she remains devoted to making music and sharing it with us.
[Music: Julianna Zachariou's "Dreamer, Dreamer"]
Evans: She brought her guitar to the studio and played the title track on her new album, "Dreamer, Dreamer."
Zachariou: So yeah, taking stock. I'm going to be 30. This is my third commercially-available, full-length record. I'm in the career zone. I do want something to change with this record in the like moving towards this is, I feel like I can do this for a bit longer. I just need every record to feel like I can do this a bit longer.
Evans: Do you think of yourself as a dreamer?
Zachariou: Big time. Big time. Look at me. I mean, I'm surviving on like a penny a day. And somehow, I'm thriving.
[Music: Julianna Zachariou's "Dreamer, Dreamer"]
Evans: A special thank you to Julianna Zachariou and Liz Pelly for their help with this episode.
You can find videos and more songs from Julianna's in-studio performance at our website, KPBS.org/TheFinest.
[Theme Music]
Evans: Next Thursday on the Finest, when better sleep and a CPAP machine steal a painter's muse, how does she find her way back to art?
Mary Jhun: And in wanting to have a better relationship to sleep health, I was losing the thing that gave me my paintings.
Evans: The Finest is a production of KPBS Public Media. I'm your host, Julia Dixon Evans. Our producer is Anthony Wallace, who also composed the score. Our audio engineer is Ben Redlawsk, and our editor is Chrissy Nguyen.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness.