“Koz has seen the inside of the star-maker machine. And he wants out.”
That’s the lede for a story I wrote in SOCAN’s magazine recently, about Stephen “Koz” Kozmeniuk, a producer behind many of Dua Lipa’s biggest hits, many other big pop singles, and even “The Blacker the Berry” from Kendrick Lamar’s landmark 2016 album To Pimp a Butterfly.
I barely know anything about Dua Lipa or most of Koz’s mainstream clients, but I was excited to peek behind the curtain of a part of the music industry where I clearly do not dwell.
I did know that he began in an unGooglable rock band called Boy, which had the distinction in the early 2000s of being the only rock band to bust out of Whitehorse, Yukon. Boy signed to Maple Music, bore a slight sonic resemblance to Sam Roberts, and at one point hired my friend Nathan Lawr (Royal City) to be the drummer. They were also on a legendary 2003 bill at the Phoenix with Broken Social Scene, the Dears and the Stills; BSS recently released a live album of their set that night.
For paid subscribers, in the full transcript below we discuss a music industry run by people who hate music, producers who can’t play, social media pressures, what it means to cowrite with five other credited people, why Toronto is an international pop powerhouse, NDAs, why the decimation of the industry might be better, and why the human touch has to—and will—prevail.
Off the record, we talked a lot about how labels buy bots to inflate streaming numbers, but you can read about that here or here.
Koz put out records this year with Ellie Goulding and Hailee Steinfeld, but he’s most excited about his work with a British brother duo called the Flints, a band with old-school talent who do not have a label or machine behind them. This is a wonderfully breezy summer pop song:
Here’s my conversation with a lovely guy and fascinating subject:
Stephen Kozmeniuk
May 15, 2023
How did an indie rocker from Whitehorse end up producing the biggest hip-hop and pop acts in the world?
I don’t come from what I’ve been doing: hip-hop, or pop. It’s not that I dislike it, but it’s not my natural home. Especially hip-hop, I feel quite out of place like an outsider. Even in pop, I feel like an outside in the pop industrial complex, this machine that is so screwed up. Coming where I come from, I watch it wrap its tentacles around people and the way they think they have to work. It’s so fundamentally wrong to me. It’s hard on songwriters. The strain it puts on people, the constant competitiveness. It was never like that until quite recently.
Is that true, or are you talking about a more idealized past?
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