Money 4 Nothing

Hi folks! As part of our collaboration with Penny Fractions, we are bringing you the first episode of a new format—David, Saxon, and Sam, thinking through our moment in an off-the-cuff convo about current events. We hope you like it!  The music industry was recently shaken by news around beloved marketplace/web-magazine Bandcamp, where half of the staff was recently let go (or, as press release fr...

First off—big news in Money 4 Nothing-land. We’ve just OFFICIALLY joined forces with the amazing Penny Fractions newsletter to create a new and almighty Voltron (Sailors Moon?) of critical coverage on the music industry. We’ll be rolling out exciting new projects over the next few months, so please stay tuned! And now, on with the show…    When news broke that a wave of Scott “Scooter" Braun’s cli...

If you listen to essentially any piece of contemporary music, you’re likely—more than likely—to hear the influence of Bob Moog. Moog invented the first modular synthesizer, a device for creating electronic sound simultaneously more powerful and more accessible than anything that had come before. Initially adopted by the avant-garde, Moogs were quickly scooped up by the elite of rock and pop, layin...

Machine Learning. It’s in the news, and increasingly, it's in our tunes. Somehow. Maybe? Given the ravenous hype cycles of tech, it can be extremely difficult to separate the real, the potentially real, the squint-and-maybe-you-can-see it, and “the SEC wants to speak to you now” of it all. To try and get a better sense of how AI is factoring into the present-day music industry as it actually, you...

On Nov 5th, 2021, the first night of Travis Scott’s Astroworld festival collapsed into horror—a terrible crowd crush at the Houston event killed 10, and reportedly injured thousands. In the wake of the catastrophe, fingers were pointed at Scott, at Live Nation, at the Police, at Rap music, at “the kids.” And then? Silence. We didn’t really know what happened, and no details emerged for a long, lon...

This week, the crew digs into two timely stories providing some new perspective on this crazy little thing called music. First, they dig into the rising influence of so-called “super fans”: folks who consume content from their favorite artists along 5 or more distinct channels. According to recent research they are not just a thing—they’re increasingly driving the industry. What does this rampant...

"Ambient Music" has seen a renewed interest for reasons that we can only speculate. 2016 election? Increased atomization of individuals? The multi-headed hell-scape of pandemic + climate change + economic woes? Sure. Whatever the reason, the past decade as seen a revival of soundscapes and synths that is both helping us escape from the toils of our everyday and also, more darkly, making us more fu...

Early this year, K-pop was the site of some truly Succession level drama, as Hybe (the company that launched BTS) attempted to steal SM Entertainment (a longtime mainstay of the industry) out from under Kakao (a Facebook + Spotify level media conglomerate). The story had it all: legendary businessman refusing to go quietly, alleged stock market manipulation, patricidal nephews, alleged corruption,...

It used to be so simple. There were the major labels (all 6 of them, or whatever) and there were the independents or "the indies." Over the 80’s and 90s, a position initially adopted out of economic necessity grew into a distinctive cultural mode, with a host of aesthetic and political dimensions. Now things have changed and being "indie" no longer means the same. To understand this shift, we take...

Everyone is talking about AI—and that includes the music biz. No one is disputing the wide-ranging potential of these new tools, but is our rapidly-approaching deep-fake future really (or at least, FULLY) being driven by technology? Sam and Saxon offer a dissenting voice to the cloud of excitement hovering around our up-and-coming machine overlords—arguing that the entertainment landscape we end u...

Five years ago, Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams finally lost the (musical) lawsuit of the century. Their song, “Blurred Lines,” had been an inescapable summertime hit, a wedding-DJ-standby, and the center of a very Obama-Era debate over whether it was creepy to have a song called “Blurred Lines” in the first place (it was.) Now, it was also found to have violated IP owned by Marvin Gaye’s estat...

In the digital economy, recommendation algorithms get…a LOT of attention. To some, they’re the special sauce behind everything from Spotify’s personalized playlists to Tik Tok’s “For You” page. For others, they represent a dark, vibe-generating demiurge slowly sapping music’s social power. But for all the discussion of how these programs are transforming our world(s), there’s surprisingly little a...

No one knows anything about the streaming economy. Not Really. That’s the stark message at the heart of Public Knowledge’s new whitepaper “Streaming in the Dark,” which catalogs the remarkable “wall of NDAs” operating at every level of the modern music industry. The relationship between labels and streaming services? NDA. The relationship between distributors and streaming services? NDA. and on an...

For this episode, Saxon and Sam check in on Spotify, which is…not in great shape. Even in the best of times, the company was handcuffed to the majors, and threatened by mega-sized competitors like Apple & Amazon. And these, my friend, are no longer the best of times. But it’s okay! They’ll get...faster! And more efficient! And, um, remake their homepage? That’ll do it. Definitely.    Meanwhile, th...

In the '90s, a remarkable sound was being developed in Houston—its cavernous drums, booming, crawling vocals, and distinctive, hiccuping rhythms reflect the indelible influence of DJ Screw. During the latter half of the decade, the hardworking musician produced hundreds if not thousands of tapes, mixing regional classics with on-the-fly freestyles to develop a new template for southern rap. While...

The success of YouTube has been inextricably linked to the music business. Initially a remarkably effective streaming pirate, recent years have seen the site pivot to industry ally, paying out millions in royalties for the copyrighted material played on its platform. But who gets the money? And how? And…who is making sure it goes to the right people? These are the questions opened up by Billboard...

It was revealed just this past week that basically all of Reggaeton is being sued. No, really. As you may or may not know, the massively popular genre from Latin-American and the Caribbean is actually based mostly on a few Jamaican riddims (the instrumental background or “rhythm” in contemporary Jamaican music). Now the production duo of Steely & Clevie, who wrote the riddim behind the massively p...

The music industry is becoming increasingly disenchanted with Tik-Tok, finding it difficult to bend the wildly popular app for its own profitability...let alone find the next mega-star. Does that mean we might see the big three start to put the squeeze on Tik-Tok for dipping into its massive catalog without much of a payout? It worked well with Spotify for Lucian Grainge and co. But can the same s...

Taylor Swift made headlines recently by grabbing all top 10 spots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart — a first in its 64 year history — with the release of her latest record Midnights. Cool. Good for Taylor and her Swifties. But….what does that actually mean? You might think it's a simple answer, but actually the Billboard charts are a complex beast with a long and winding history that didn’t even sta...

The modern music industry is defined, in large part, by major labels and centralized digital services. To try and imagine a world without (or at least around them), we’ve been looking backwards to the 1980s, when a thriving underground economy enabled a remarkable flood of American rock. If one label could be said to define that moment, it would be LA’s SST Records. Founded in Hermosa Beach by Bla...

Our good friend David Turner celebrated five years of Penny Fractions earlier this month with a live show at Nowadays. On stage, David was joined by our very own Sam Backer along side heavy-hitters Liz Pelly and Cherie Hu . Enjoy this live recording from the show as the crew run through everything you'd expect from a M4N discussion on the current state of the music industry: criticisms, hot takes,...

It’s a tale as old as Nirvana. A band (ideally punk or punk influenced) forms and gets some buzz. Major labels swarm. The kids sign on the dotted line…and are promptly thrown to the wolves. Fade to black. And while that often-repeated story isn’t exactly false, it doesn’t do much to capture the shifting dynamics that shaped the economies of rock over the 90’s and 2000’s—an era when the relationshi...

In the past few months, the insane flood of money that has been flowing into the purchase of music rights (and really, into financial and tech related firms of pretty much all stripes) has begun to slow down. Crazy what rising interest rates will do, huh? These changes have prompted a wave of takes about the potential collapse of a host of music rights firms that overpromised, overpaid, and now se...

You might know Damon Krukowski from his role in the groundbreaking indy band Galaxie 500. Or maybe you’ve listened to his podcast, “Ways of Hearing” or read his excellent newsletter, or his widespread journalism.  More recently, however, he’s put on another hat, as an influential rabble rouser for Union of Musicians and Allied Workers . A new group that emerged from the disruptions of Covid, UMAW...

A foolproof way to hit number 1 is what the Time Lords—AKA the JAMS, AKA the KLF—promised the readers of “The Manual,” their 1988 book. After all, they had just done it, with the insipid brilliance of their Gary Glitter Meets Dr. Who mashup “Doctorin’ the Tardis.” And if they could do hack it, so could you, right? But if you did…would it even matter? Today, we’re talking through the careers of Jim...