Flashlight Daily: Steven “Steve-O” Carless on Prolific and Phabo on Betting on Himself

Good morning. It’s Friday, August 14th, and we have two exclusive stories today, both approaching the same question from opposite angles: what occurs in the gap between possessing something valuable and being ready for the world to accept it.

Steve Carless was in charge of that gap for Nipsey Hussle’s Prolific for nine years. The record was completed in 2017 and had been mixed and was ready, resting on infrastructure which had already been put in place. The only thing that remained was timing, and Carless considers that timing to be the whole of the job; he doesn’t just sit on an asset but manages things when that asset becomes most important.

Phabo is now looking at the same situation from the opposite perspective. “Bet It Up” is progressing at a faster rate than almost any of the songs in his catalog, representing the kind of viral breakthrough that an artist hopes for after waiting for years, and his responses aren’t about the song itself. Rather, they focus on the infrastructure beneath it: keeping the right people nearby, understanding demand before it exceeds the capacity of the system designed to meet it, and risking yourself only makes sense if you’ve created something that can stand up to the win when it actually occurs.

Different catalogs, different decades, same discipline. Knowing when to move matters less than being built to survive the moment you do.

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Steven Carless: The Patience Was the Plan

Prolific wasn’t pulled from a vault; that’s the point that deserves attention. Nipsey Hussle and Bino Rideaux completed the record while Nipsey was still alive, and it was mixed to completion in 2017. Steven ‘Steve-O’ Carless, who was in charge of the release, said simply that the team had mixed it and was still listening to it the day before the changeover. The only thing uncertain was the timing. Nine years after that, the estate had held on to the finished record before deciding it was ready.

Carless explains the role he has: that of a supervisor, someone who deals with both the oversight of the organization and the actual operations: the producers, the samples, the writers, and the clearances. It is work that does not appear in any press release, but that determines whether a catalog is properly managed or left alone. The more interesting point regarding what has changed since 2012 is this. At that time, the advantage lay in owning your copyright and controlling your entire ecosystem, something the industry began to call vertical integration after other artists had come to realize the idea. Nowadays, Carless says, the advantage has shifted one level higher: it is now a matter of controlling the brand and all its derivatives. This includes clothing, burgers, real estate, and philanthropy. Each of these areas can be traced back to the same origin: music.

What distinguishes Prolific from a typical posthumous release is this approach. In this market, most catalog activity is priced according to velocity that is, how quickly something can move and how fast attention can be converted. Nipsey’s team, by contrast, developed a different model: the music itself is the primary asset, and each brand extension is priced relative to it. It isn’t caution that they held the finished record for nine years before releasing it at the moment their team considered most advantageous; rather, it is what it means to actually own something rather than merely monetize it on someone else’s schedule.

There’s a point Carless makes that is easy to overlook: he thinks his greatest achievement was not a song or an album, but rather becoming a blueprint for artists who run businesses entirely outside the music industry. If you read the entire interview, you’ll see that this assertion is logically sound, since all of his answers come down to the same notion, namely that the catalog forms the foundation and that everything else, such as clothing lines, real estate, and the burger restaurant, is built upon it according to the rules that the artist established while he was alive.

In this field, the marathon approach is often used in a broad sense. Carless’s interpretation of it is more precise than the slogan generally receives credit for. It wasn’t merely about running; it was about knowing exactly when to act and having the self-discipline to wait until the moment really demanded it.

Source: Flashlight, Instagram

Phabo & The Economics of Betting on Yourself

Phabo spent years on the other side of the credit. Writing songs other artists put their name on, building rooms he wasn’t standing in the center of. The name on the byline was Prince Graham. When he decided to go full-time as an artist, he found himself reintroducing himself to people who already knew his work, some of them asking if they’d heard of an artist named Phabo. He calls it a kind of Mandela effect, the stage name doing something his given name couldn’t. Not more talent. A different kind of respect.

That distinction is the whole piece. Writing for someone else and being the artist are not adjacent skills pointed at the same outcome. They’re two different businesses with two different demand curves, and Phabo is describing the exact moment he understood that a co-write credit and a fanbase don’t compound the same way.

What “Bet It Up” is doing right now makes the case in real time. Phabo says he’s never had a viral reaction like this from a snippet in his entire career, and he’s careful to note he can’t fully control where it goes from here. That’s the part worth sitting with. A song moving faster than the infrastructure built to catch it is a good problem, but it’s still a problem, and Phabo’s answers keep circling back to the same instinct: protect the system before the moment demands more from it than the system can give.

He talks about keeping level-headed people around him who understand his needs as a human and not just an artist, because water seeks its own level and he wants to be surrounded by people who keep him there. He talks about learning, only after fans told him directly, that there was real demand for consistent drops and consistent merch, and that stepping away from the work only made that demand sharper. None of this reads like an artist chasing a moment. It reads like someone building the plumbing before the pressure hits.

The advice he’d give anyone watching his run is that originality wins even when it takes longer, and that every song is a lotto ticket toward the life you’re trying to build, whether or not any single one hits. Bet It Up might be the ticket that does it for him. He doesn’t know yet. What he does know is what happens to an artist who bets on themselves without first building something that can hold the win when it comes.

Source: Flashlight, Instagram

Music

• Friday’s release slate is led by KATSEYE’s Wild EP, Becky G’s Baraja Bendita, The Script’s The User’s Guide to Being Human, and Benny Blanco’s Hermoso, alongside new albums from Trippie Redd, Phoebe Bridgers, and Marilyn Manson, plus singles from Natasha Bedingfield, 5 Seconds of Summer, Troye Sivan, and James Blunt. A K-pop group headlining a Friday next to Phoebe Bridgers and Marilyn Manson is what the release calendar looks like once genre stops functioning as a scheduling constraint. (DraftKings Network)

Business & Legal

• Live Nation’s merchandising arm, Merch Traffic, filed suit in the Northern District of Illinois on August 5 against unnamed overseas sellers of counterfeit Nirvana, Bruno Mars, Harry Styles, Notorious B.I.G., Avenged Sevenfold, Eazy-E, and The Cure merchandise, seeking injunctions on Amazon, eBay, Temu, and Walmart plus statutory damages up to $2 million per mark. Merch has quietly become IP enforcement’s front line - the same catalog-defense instinct running through this week’s Beyoncé and BMG stories, aimed here at knockoff T-shirts instead of song rights. (Music Business Worldwide)

• Spotify and Kobalt signed a licensing deal bringing Kobalt’s songwriters into Spotify’s forthcoming AI remix-and-cover tool, on an opt-in basis with revenue sharing- joining prior agreements with Universal and Merlin, while Warner remains unsigned. Every AI licensing deal this month has the same shape: opt-in, artist-level consent, payment tied to participation. BMG’s Suno deal set the template two days ago; Spotify’s remix tool is now running the identical play. (Digital Music News)

Technology & AI

• Suno launched Studio 2.0, a browser-based DAW with MIDI support, a wavetable synth, stem separation, and a session-aware chatbot, wrapping AI generation inside a traditional production workflow instead of replacing it. Suno spent the summer building trust with rights holders through licensing deals; Studio 2.0 is the parallel move to build retention with musicians by handing them tools they already know how to use. (Digital Music News)

• Spotify introduced Premium Rewards in India, bundling brand discounts (MakeMyTrip, Nykaa, Airbnb) and invite-only live sessions into its subscription tier. In a price-sensitive market, Spotify is betting that engagement built outside the app is cheaper to buy than growth built inside it. (Music Ally)

• Erykah Badu and The Alchemist finally locked a release date for their long-rumored joint album, out August 28, and shared the first single “Witch Doctor.” (Stereogum, The Fader)

• Mastodon shared “In the Ruins,” the first single off Marrow Deep - their first new album in five years. (Stereogum)

• The Chicks are marking 20 years of Taking the Long Way with an expanded edition featuring a previously unreleased demo, plus new 2026 tour dates. (MusicRow)

• Tinashe’s new single “Melatonin,” off her upcoming album Popstar, samples a viral TikTok sound - the loop is now officially closed on where songs get born. (Just Jared)

“If you don’t own your masters, your master owns you.”

— Prince

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