July 7, 2025 | 4:29 PM

WITF Music: MDNGHT DSCO

80’s sunsets and neon lights.

• Joe Ulrich/WITF

  Joe has been fascinated by audio and music since he was a child. What began as a fascination together with his mother and father’ vinyl records and cassette tapes changed into a love of each performing and recording. He grew up in Elizabethtown, Pa. and moved to Pittsburgh in 1999 the place he majored in Photography on the University of Pittsburgh.

  In 2004, he attended the Conservatory of Recording Arts & Sciences in Tempe, AZ. He returned to Pittsburgh to work at a recording studio.

  In 2008, Joe arrived at WITF, the place his expertise have discovered an excellent dwelling as an on-air host, audio engineer and producer of WITF Music. In 2016, Joe earned a National Edward R. Murrow award for Best Use of Sound.

Midnight Disco performs for WITF Music on Sept. 3, 2024. (Jeremy Long – WITF)

Listen to the radio function:

If you attempt to search this native band, ensure you spell it proper. The band is Midnight Disco, but it surely’s spelled with none of the I’s: MDNGHT DSCO. The band started when their lead singer moved from Maine to Pennsylvania and linked with three native musicians. They stopped by the WITF Music studio to speak in regards to the experimentation that led to their sound and advertising and marketing one’s music by way of streaming playlists and social media. WITF Music’s Joe Ulrich sat down to speak to them.

Joe Ulrich: [The music] has a bit of little bit of a throwback, an eighties sheen to it I suppose you might say. How would you describe it?

Darrell Foster: I feel that’s one factor that I’ve all the time struggled with, particularly with this music is style, themes, all that stuff. I positively get so much that there’s some eighties themes. Back once I was making an attempt to determine tips on how to classify them, I despatched that one observe to a licensing firm and the man bought again to me and he stated, it’s nice. He’s like, is the remainder of the album like this? And I used to be like, like what? He’s like, an eighties love anthem. And I used to be like, I don’t know. I suppose we’ll see.

Joe Ulrich: There are such other ways of selling music in comparison with the way it was once again in just like the nineties and even early two 1000’s. You’re not essentially making an attempt to get radio play anymore. You’re looking for playlists, like curators to play your stuff.

Darrell Foster: I feel Spotify playlist by way of SubmitHub is certainly one of our greatest outreach issues that we are able to do for comparatively cheap.

How do I get my music on the market to simply get folks to place it on these playlists? You should pay cash to get them to see it. And even TikTok, it’s like they’ve a listing of influencers and also you submit your observe after which they go on TikTok they usually make movies they usually do stuff like that.

Michael Stipe: Shake their butt to your music.

Darrell Foster: But then once more, you’re nonetheless paying for it. I feel folks suppose that TikTok and stuff like that, they suppose that there’s a pure attain to stuff like that. But I feel that’s like you might be simply the luckiest of the fortunate to have that occur organically. I feel most occasions folks have some huge cash they usually’re paying influencers to make issues go viral.

Joe Ulrich: So the 2 songs had been Endless Skies and Love Is Waiting.

Darrell Foster: We had been nonetheless making an attempt to determine our sound, however we had already written Love is Waiting. And we had been like, I feel that is the path we wish to go in. And so Endless Skies, we had been interested by like neon lights and eighties sunsets and driving some convertible automobile on the seashore and palm timber are flying. That’s like form of what I used to be visualizing whereas we had been writing these items.

Everything’s nice and the band’s making the very best music I’ve ever made, so I’m stoked. It’s like nothing higher may have occurred.

A set of interviews, photographs, and music movies, that includes native musicians who’ve stopped by the WITF efficiency studio to share a bit of dialogue and sound. Produced by WITF’s Joe Ulrich.