Money 4 Nothing

This week? Heavy Hitters. As you may (or may not) have heard,  journalist/Daniel Ek tormenter/friend-of-the-pod Liz Pelly is making waves with her wonderful new book “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.” It’s easily the best thing yet written about the company at the center of modern music, insightfully reconstructing how Spotify’s shifting interests and polici...

Look. Times are dark. So this week, we decided to tackle a somewhat lighter topic and look into Drake’s remarkably tone-deaf lawsuit against Universal Music Group—the label to which both he and (beef opponent) Kendrick Lamar are signed. In essence, Drake alleges that UMG used all their influence to make Kendrick’s Grammy-winning diss track “Not Like Us” a viral mega-hit. Which, like…yeah. Of cours...

The second Trump administration will impact pretty much everything, but we decided to take some time and focus on the specific conjecture of industry + culture + technology that is AI. After all, when Biden came to office, LLMs were just really starting to get going—while the last 12 months have seen a mind-bending set of developments, both in terms of corporate activity and technical possibility....

As you might have noticed, we spend a...fair bit of time talking about the three labels at the heart of modern music—and tracking what their unprecedented centralization has done to the industry. And while that’s important, it’s only part of a far larger trend, one that cuts across pretty much all of the culture industries. Crucially, this is a process, not just of mergers or consolidation, but of...

This past January, Universal Music went to war. Or at least, it tried to. Shocking both listeners AND artists, the major label announced that it was cutting ties with TikTok, the short-form giant, over payout rates and copyright infringement. Its artists (and publishing)—completely pulled from the platform. T-Swift viral dances? Tragically silenced. The breakup lasted until May, when (in a profoun...

After an eternity of millennial performers with a chokehold on the charts, we’ve finally seen the emergence of a new cohort of gen-z icons. Chappelle Roan and Sabrina Carpenter (building on the foundation laid by Billie + Olivia) are suddenly everywhere—headlining festivals, topping the charts, defining the zeitgeist. You might call it a moment of generational turnover…except for the fact that pre...

How did streaming change music? Not like how did it change the music industry (we talk about that plenty, obviously). And not how did it change bitrate. But how did streaming change the nature of the music that you listen to? How and why and does it matter that you now pay a limited rate for an unlimited amount of music? Within capitalism, how does it matter that "streaming" functions under a fund...

NÜ metal sucks. Right? It’s what critics have screamed ever since the taste-defying mashup of funk-metal, rap, industrial, and post-hardcore stormed onto the charts in the mid ‘90s. When bands like Slipknot, Linkin Park, System of a Down, Korn, or Limp Bizkit dominated the charts, the take was muted by raw success. But the second the acts slipped…the entire movement was (more or less) decried as t...

This summer, the other shoe finally dropped on Ticketmaster/Live Nation. After decades of complaints by everybody from Pearl Jam to Zach Bryan (and after several years of increasingly intense Post-Swifty scrutiny), the Justice Department has filed a lawsuit accusing the massive firm of being a monopoly. In it, lawyers argue that the company is built around size and market-share—allowing it to harv...

In recent months, AI companies like Suno and Udio have been in the news for the incredible promise of their text-to-tunes tech. Just type in a few phrases, and… an original piece of music of your very own, created in seconds. It’s a revolution! At least that’s the narrative being pushed by the world of venture capital, which has thrown hundreds of millions of dollars at the fledgling firms. To bet...

Live music continues to evolve in our post-covid, pre-bird flu world—and nothing even approaching a new normal has yet to appear. To try and get a handle on the complexities of a constantly-moving situation, Saxon and Sam decided to go...both big and small. By small, we're talking about the ticket sales for the Black Keys (very canceled) stadium tour—one of a raft of recent underselling events (lo...

Although rap currently stands at the center of American music, for much of the genre's history, its relationship to the charts was...fraught. Radio was notoriously reluctant to play the brash new style, and major labels took over a decade to embrace its commercial potential. So how did hip hop make it? How did it grow from a regional fluke into a global phenomenon? To learn more, we spoke to Amy C...

Sure—Fans have always driven popular music. That’s what it means to be popular in the first place, you know? To have fans? But if you look around today’s sonic landscape, it feels…different out there. Forget clubs and message boards. Fandoms now have entire worlds, complete with enemies, economic strategies, and complex referential mythologies—dense communities increasingly integrated into the maj...

Drake vs. Kendrick was about more than personal insults or verbal one-upmanship—it was a referendum on the most dominant figure of the last decade of rap (Drake), as narrated by the only classicist with the critical clout and popular cred to issue the judgement. But while the conflict was ultra-current, the chosen forum dates back to the very beginning of rap, a symbolically charged space tied dee...

This past March, Shigeichi Negishi passed away at 100. While you might not know his name, you’ve certainly enjoyed the musical world he helped create. Negishi has long been credited as the inventor of Karaoke—pulling together consumer electronics, post-work drinking culture, and a love of pop tunes into an era-defining mix. A deeper dive, however, makes the story more complex (and honestly more in...

Dear Listener, Have you found yourself coming down with more consistent cases of nostalgia lately? Do you consider yourself a millennial? Well, if so, you might be soon buying a pricey concert ticket to one of the hottest trends in live music: The 20 year Anniversary Album Tour. Yes, your favorite album of 2004 (or perhaps 2014) can soon be heard live, in its entirety, front to back at a concert v...

This week, we take a roundabout tour of the platform power that drives our musical landscape. First up is Neil Young, whose one-man stand against Spotify for its support of Joe Rogan just ended in….well…total defeat. We explore why Ol' Neil was unable to escape the musical monopsony that defines our streaming age (with a few detours into the terrors of lo-fidelity audio and the dream that was Pono...

Much of the time, it feels like almost nothing could shake up the streaming status-quo. This isn’t one of those times. Over the past week, Congressperson Rashida Tlaib (with support from the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers) released the Living Wage for Musicians Act—a fascinating piece of legislation that (if passed) would completely transform the contemporary music industry. Like…really REA...

Is rock dead? Not according to Imagine Dragons. You know the band with 10 different billion-streamed songs? The one that’s sold 46 million records? You’ve definitely heard of them, but....have you ever really HEARD them? Probably not. And that’s because despite being the most successful band of the past 25 years, Imagine Dragons has received next to no critical attention. Not even a proper 0.6 tak...

This past week, negotiations broke down between Universal Music—the biggest and most powerful of the three major labels—and Tik Tok, the world’s most viral social media platform. The result: Universal’s music has been pulled—almost entirely—from the mimetic app. It’s a show of raw muscle the likes of which we haven’t seen for years, and the implications are fascinating. But how did it come to this...

Like the rest of the increasingly small world of music criticism, we were shaken by the news that Pitchfork had not only been more-or-less gutted by publisher Conde Nast, but pulled into GQ. Gentleman’s Quarterly. Of all possible things. G-freaking-Q...? We’re not gonna lie—this one feels grim. But, what kind of grim? Events split the team, with Saxon spinning out a narrative of corporate confusio...

New year, same old music business. To get things kicked off right, we circle back to check in on two of our favorite industry players, and things….well, we hate to tell you, but things aren’t GREAT, you know? Regarding Hipgnosis, the once high-flying music fund is very much in hot water—conflicts of interest flying, shareholders revolting, and board-members unceremoniously shown the door. Who coul...

When we heard that BMI, an organization designed to collect money on behalf of songwriters, had decided (on its own?) to drop its non-profit status and go for the cash, our response was confusion. Like—can they even do that? What does that even MEAN? But then BMI sold themselves to a private equity fund. Backed by Google. And now...we’re concerned.   To get a better sense of what’s going on, we di...

This time Sam and David Turner dig into the financially rocky patch in which Patreon—the name that launched a thousand podcasts—has recently found itself. Looking at the longer trajectory of the fan-funding platform, they try to piece together how it moved from a replacement for YouTube ads to a supposed panacea for the value collapse of musical (and cultural) production—and try to understand the...

Over the summer, New York’s premier EDM festival Electric Zoo descended deep into the Fyre Fest zone—that magical place combining blatant rip-off and profoundly unsafe conditions. Purchased by by owners of Brooklyn mega-club Avant Gardner the previous year, the latest edition of the three-day rave took the Bold and Forward Thinking step of mixing abrupt cancellations and incredibly poor crowd cont...