How Music Charts

On this episode, we talk to Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Ian Urbina about the course he's charting for The Outlaw Ocean Music Project as he navigates the choppy waters of the music business.

Show Notes

Our guest today is Ian Urbina, the director of The Outlaw Ocean Project. The project is a non-profit journalism organization based in Washington, D.C., that produces investigative stories about human rights, environment, and labor concerns on the open seas.

Urbina won a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News and a George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting. Several of his stories have been adapted into major feature films, and his reporting for a New York Times Magazine article called The Secret Life Of Passwords was nominated for an Emmy Award.

He has degrees in history and cultural anthropology from Georgetown University and the University of Chicago, respectively. Before joining The New York Times for roughly 17 years as a staff reporter, he was a Fulbright Fellow in Cuba, and he also wrote about the Middle East and Africa for various outlets including the Los Angeles Times, Harper’s, and Vanity Fair.

On this episode, we talk to Urbina about the Outlaw Ocean Music Project, an offshoot of The Outlaw Ocean Project that's "[a]imed at people who might not otherwise have encountered this reporting." According to the project's website, "[T]he music renders stories more viscerally, and delivers them to the public through different channels. The music project’s goal is to raise awareness and stoke a sense of urgency about the human rights, labor, and environmental abuses that occur at sea.”

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What is How Music Charts?

Welcome to How Music Charts, a music business podcast by Chartmetric. Join the music industry's brightest minds as they bridge data, culture, and creativity in real time. Looking for more? Sign up for a free account at chartmetric.com, subscribe to Beats & Bytes at blog.chartmetric.com, and reach out on our socials.