Fathomless Worlds™

By Justin Newsome
September 4, 2026
Published at fathomlessworlds.com.

Fathomless Worlds exists because I have the ear, the vision, but not the voice.

I can hear a song before it exists. I can hear which line is wrong, which chorus is showing up two bars late, which singer is going to be a problem within minutes of our first conversation. What I cannot do is sing any of it. I am bad to a point where I have been banned from at least one country on six of the seven continents.

So, for twenty years my job was finding the voice for somebody else's world: American Idol, America's Got Talent, major labels including Universal Music and Island Def Jam, boy bands, a search for the next Enrique Iglesias that got shelved after I had already found three of him. One of them may have actually been Enrique. Other people's worlds. My ear, my eye, and a natural knack for spotting the pattern before it was a trend. I still love it. I still do it.

Then, not too long ago, for less than what I paid for the Britney Spears film Crossroads on DVD (released circa July 23, 2002, purchased at 12 a.m. at the Meijer in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan), a machine gave me a voice that would sing whatever I wrote, with a beautiful tone, over melodies and production I had only ever heard in my head.

So I did something that, at first, was just for me. I created an artist who did not exist, because it let me take the lyrics I have always written and the melodies I made up while doing random things like running on a treadmill. I then put them all together, and finally turned them into actual songs.

I built this fake artist out of my lyrics and my melodies. He was always under my direction. I always used the same voice, with vocals that could go from raw and unfiltered to what I made his trademark -- one of the most beautiful falsettos I've ever heard. Well -- at least the most beautiful non-human falsetto. The songs that I wrote for him always centered on melody first and foremost -- across his entire catalogue. Nothing has ever made me feel the way a beautiful, catchy, or achingly heartbreaking melody does, and I refused to lower that bar. Then I realized I was beginning to create an actual world for him -- that was actually my world.

Then I gave him a backstory. I was getting better at writing for him so the songs kept getting better. I kept wanting to make him as human as possible. And as I wrote more and more, he started to evolve.

At the beginning the songs were very much emo/indie/melodic pop. The lyrics were where I modeled something else. I tried to take melodies held to the standard of the best there has ever been -- Max Martin. Then I attempted to unify that melodic sound with the lyrical style of one of my other favorite genres -- folk and Americana. For that I modeled my lyrical approach from a few of my personal favorites within that genre. I used stories and specific references only Josh Ritter can pull off, the heartache and emotional delivery only Ryan Adams can pull off (and if one person reading this confuses him with Bryan Adams... please stop reading now). Finally, I would sometimes incorporate the natural charisma and stage presence of Rhett Miller of the Old 97's.

I chased -- I did not catch. Anyone who catches that is not writing a manifesto. They are swimming in gold coins with Scrooge McDuck.

The more songs I wrote for this fake artist, who had already become a character in his own world, the more I noticed him evolving. He got more optimistic. His production got more polished and glossy when it needed to. It became stripped down again when he felt like it. His signature sound remained constant -- always optimizing for the most melodic sound and incorporating that beautiful falsetto.

Eventually he was writing songs about a fictional character he loved from afar. I named her Avelie. I used AI to give her a face and then her own identity. Avelie was extremely beautiful on the outside, and that combined with the confidence she showed in public made her almost seem unapproachable. Internally she was struggling with her own issues on the inside -- think loneliness, and feeling like no one really knew the real her.

In one of the songs I wrote -- my artist was the only one who noticed, even though they had barely ever spoken. That turned into multiple AI music videos where he finally gets the girl -- and she finally gets the guy who loves her for more than her beauty. She became my creation's muse and sang a few duets I wrote for the two of them.

I did all of this just for fun, because in some small way this was still my world. The majority of the songs I wrote were based on my own experiences and feelings, and of course centered around my love and my never-ending quest to find the most melodic songs possible. In some small way it almost let me somewhat live out my dream -- which really consisted of getting the melodies and vocals I could hear prior only in my head, but now with my ears.

Next, I wrote down the discipline underneath all of it and gave it a name -- Reverse A&R. The concept consisted of building the world first and then finding the human born to inhabit it. My initial essay is on the bladepharoh.com website so I am not going to repeat it. And this time I mean it... anybody want a peanut?

The fake artist was never the point. He is the placeholder. He is the mall Santa, back when malls existed -- and nobody ever expected him to be the real one. His job is to hold the world open, prove the songs work -- until the God who created that world found the human it was actually built for. Then he gets out of the sleigh when the real Santa shows up.

Now, this is the part where somebody in the back yells, "So your slogan is The Human Must Survive the Model and you opened with a robot?"

Yes, random guy in the back. That is the test. The model exists to be survived. If I could not build one, the slogan would be Steve Buscemi holding a skateboard, asking -- how do you do, fellow humans. I built it to prove that. I am already actively doing that behind the scenes with real artists. The Human DID Survive the Model -- starting with mine, which was built for that very reason. The fake artist I created was always just a temporary placeholder until I found the human who had free will, whose world it truly was.

Finding that person is still the job I have always had -- and it still comes down to two questions. Can they, from a talent standpoint, match the fake artist? This means the voice, the songs, and the world itself. And when they see this fictional world, does their jaw drop -- because they realize it was never the fake artist's world at all? They say, "This is the world that I have lived in my entire life. This is my world. My identity."

Fit is a rented tuxedo. Recognition is a Roomba that somehow knows exactly where your locked safe is, so it doesn't knock it over and damage the Britney Spears Crossroads DVD you keep in it.

The software finds them and guards the top secret nuclear launch codes. It does not decide. The software has actually been built and is well past a prototype. Real people are already being run through it. What it looks like and how it works stays behind a closed door. A human gets on a call, explains all of this, and then asks them to sing, alone, no track, no tuning, because I have watched this business make catastrophic decisions with rooms full of actual people, and adding a confidence score does not turn taste into physics. AI software is not the product. Not even close. The only reason it exists is to organize and keep things efficient.

And this is the part that makes Fathomless Worlds more than a "company."

Once the human moves into the world, since the God gave them free will, the world is now theirs. They can scrap a song I love. They can bring in a writer I never would have picked. It keeps its sound, because that was the sound they identified with since birth. But as the human evolves, the world evolves with them, and as they evolve further, it can get to the point where the initial fake world is no longer fake at all. It does not exist anymore. The human is now the one who created the world.

Plenty of people have built a world before they found the human. None of them built it to hand over like this. I did. I am the first to do it this way.

The writers and producers who help them are not staff standing outside the world. They live in it, some for one song and some for good, and their names go into the world's history next to the human's.

The standard survives all of that. The script does not, because there never was one. A standard tells you what made the place worth entering. A script tells you how to behave once you got there, and I did not spend twenty years around artists to build a nicer version of the thing that ruins them.

That is why the name. Every world built here has no bottom to it. There is no limit on how many of them there are, or on who gets to build them. I built the first. One per human. Each one deep enough that the right person can walk in and never hit the floor. And the thing every one of those worlds has in common is that the human inside it was made to disobey. The human is built to disobey the model that found them. Reverse A&R, as I have now defined it, disobeys the order this industry does things in, the same way Kevin Bacon as Ren McCormack in Footloose broke the no-dancing law and changed that town forever. And the company disobeys the way AI music is being made right now, where the AI artist is the product. Here the AI artist is the placeholder, built to be replaced.

Billy Beane did not invent looking at the numbers, or the word Moneyball. He made it a discipline, became the name attached to it, turned it into Excalibur, and Major League Baseball was never the same. I did not invent the phrase Reverse A&R. It has floated around this business for years, unofficially, usually meaning something else. And I did not invent building before casting, which has existed in some form for decades, from Berry Gordy at Motown, to Lou Pearlman with the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC, to HYBE and its K-pop development camps. What I did was coin it: the words were lying around, the meaning was not, and I gave the phrase a definition, turned it into a discipline, and built a company on it. That is further than Beane got. He never named his. A writer did that for him, after the fact. I named mine.

Tech guys are building AI software. I am redefining an entire category, the very one I spent my whole career in.

I have always been a creative first. I have never been the corporate type. I always identified with the artists most, so I guess that made me disobey the rules too. If I had tried to conform, I would have lost my identity, which is the one thing AI will never be able to take from a human artist.

Fathomless Worlds will contain publishing and records and software and, eventually, a physical place where the humans live and the executives visit. Those things live inside it. None of them gets to be its name.

The human must survive the model. When this works, survival will not mean protecting what I built. It will mean the human I found, the one who already knew this world was theirs in the first place, taking ownership of it and evolving it as they evolve themselves.

Justin Newsome is a music and entertainment executive with twenty years across major labels, including Universal Music and Island Def Jam, and television, where he was the first Head Music Scout in American Idol history and head music scout for America's Got Talent.

He is the first person to coin Reverse A&R: build the artistic world first, then find the human who belongs inside it. With the publication of the Fathomless Worlds manifesto, he put on record a process no one had built before: a world created around a placeholder artist, used to find the one human it was made for, then handed to that human as their own.

He is the first to do it this way. He founded BLADEPHAROH and Fathomless Worlds to redefine the category he spent his whole career in, and now builds the technology as well as the company.

More at justinnewsome.com.