Storytelling – Establishing Platforms for Independent Voices

Dee Sada, Melissa Perales, Judith Wajsgrus, Amy Zayed (Mod.)

What role do grassroots initiatives play in a musical ecosystem that is increasingly shaped by platform logics, reach metrics, and algorithmic visibility? Those who do not fit into the templates of recommendation engines often fail to appear at all – too bulky, too local, too experimental, too unprofitable. While streaming platforms and social media increasingly organise careers around data, trends, and attention, spaces that discover, support, and contextualise music beyond the marketable are coming under intense pressure.

And yet the countermodel persists: small independent platforms, community radio stations, self-organised festivals, and carefully curated programmes run by people who do not merely distribute music, but research it, contextualise it, and communicate it with conviction. Spaces where cultural work is still understood as a social practice – slow, subjective, passionate, and often precarious.

This conversation focuses precisely on these structures: how can independent scenes be sustained today? What forms of public visibility can grassroots initiatives still create? And how is cultural curation changing in a time of permanent digital acceleration?

Dee Sada knows both sides of this tension. As a musician, she performs with An Experiment On A Bird In The Air Pump at the Pop-Kultur Festival, while also hosting »For The Lost« on Resonance FM and working across workshops and research projects focused on independent cultural practices. Moving between performance, radio, and collaborative work, she operates within precisely those in-between spaces that algorithmic systems tend to overlook.

Offering a Berlin perspective is Judith Wajsgrus. As station manager of the Wedding-based radio collective Cashmere Radio, she has spent years developing a model of radio as an open cultural space – collectively organised, experimental in approach, and deeply connected to local scenes. With a background in literary and audiovisual studies, she combines curatorial practice with media-cultural reflection.

From the live side of independent cultural work, Melissa Perales reflects on the realities of sustaining musical communities. Whether at Schokoladen, through Music Pool Berlin, or within her own festival projects, she has spent years working persistently at the grassroots level of independent music culture. Her practice brings together booking, curation, consultancy, and political organising, grounded in a distinctly intersectional feminist understanding of cultural labour. Or, as she puts it herself: »festival curator, music promoter, consultant, & supervisor, mama, intersectional feminist, child of immigrant, global citizen & kickass dinner party host.«

The discussion is moderated by Cologne-based journalist Amy Zayed. As a music journalist, radio presenter, and podcaster, she engages extensively with questions of digital public space and accessibility. As a media expert with a visual impairment, she has spent years working on digital accessibility and leading workshops on inclusive media practices with and for blind people. In doing so, she expands the conversation with a perspective that remains far too absent from debates around technology, platforms, and cultural participation.