Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Money 4 Nothing

This past week, the first (although certainly not the last) person was sentenced to US prison for a new form of streaming fraud. Apparently, over the past several years, a man named Michael Smith had been using tens of thousands of AI bots to stream thousands of AI songs by made-up artists in order to earn millions of (real) dollars—money that should rightfully have been distributed to hard-working artists. Via the systems set up by the music industry. Which…are fair? Right?  

Smith’s story, it turns out, is about MUCH more than just fraud. Instead, it represents the dark side of the contemporary industry, reflecting the tactics of the mainstream but…just a bit beyond the pale. Payola. Clipping. Viral Marketing. Bundling. Where does promotion stop and crime start?

But first! We dig into the cRaZy collab between (of all people) The Kings of Leon and The Weather Channel, while Sam convinces Saxon that this story is actually interesting. Conspiracies! Algorithmic Culture! Rolling Stones Branded Fragrances! It’s a stacked episode, for sure. Come for a tiny, tiny guitar in a great big truck. Stay for Snoop Dogg being willing to sign onto literally anything.

Also, don’t forget, if you do the YouTube, you can watch our pretty faces now.

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What’s the connection between the Mark Walters sports-teams-insurance-money scandal, the underwhelming GTA6 crypto leak rug-pull, and the Fenix Flexin’ AI hit fallout? It might not seem obvious, but to us it all seems to be a big, neon flashing sign of the times. Move aside 16th century France, we’re rolling out a new kind of modern, smash and grab oligarchy—but with an added dash of nihilist, fake-it-till-you-make-it anti-legalism.

Come for Sam and Saxon freewheelin’ through the current mask-off oligarchical all-American vibe, as they try to pull together a unified field theory of why the money talk is so much louder now—everywhere from sports to gaming to music—and what it might mean for culture to more accurately reflect our unequal times. Stay for some stray thoughts on the death of humanity at the hands of a super-intelligent AI God that still doesn’t know what shoegaze is. Let them eat slop.

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You knew it was bound to happen—an AI generated song, released by a human, hit the Billboard charts. But who could imagine it would happen like this? A retro-80s jam too embarrassing for Chromeo, “Rubberz” is a piece of icily alienated new romanticism, pretty catchy in a very robotic way which…well..makes sense. The humans ostensibly behind the song (Rapper Fenix Flexin and producer Purp On The Beat) denied it at first but…the truth will out. Especially when it came out that its possible to basically remake the track if you give the program they used (AI Music Startup Treblo) a handful of basic prompts.

It’s a moment, for sure. The starting pistol for…something. To try to make it make some sense, we explore Rubberz’s meaning in the context of its makers’ careers—and the potential contextlessness of its existence in the wider world beyond them. We wonder about the history embedded in the music (software glitches as cultural time-stamps?) and about how all of this might fit into the longer story of commodified culture. We argue about whether using AI to make new wave is actually perfectly in tune with the aesthetic of new wave. And we ask the literal million dollar question: if this was made by a machine….who owns the copyright? Come for “The People V. Fenix Flexin.” Stay for a weirdly optimistic take on our techno-future.  

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We set out to do a music and sports episode but the patchwork, saccharine Chris Martin produced World Cup halftime show was so terrible that we ended up spending half of this episode breaking it down. But it did get us thinking about the relationship of music and sports, how we got here and can it ever change? Along the way we consider the death of American culture, the growing irrelevance of time and how sports seems to be one of the few major components of global culture that maintains some continuity and consistency, resistent-ish our niche-laden algorithmic feeds. But can it last? We got thoughts.

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Obviously, we talk about streaming a lot on this show. It is, after all, the 3,000-pound gorilla determining the basic political economy of the contemporary music industry. But all too often we—and let’s face it, pretty much everyone else in the Anglo media-sphere—are actually talking about a handful of geographically focused companies, rather than a truly global ecosystem. You know the ones, and you know the places.

But what does streaming look like outside the U.S./Western Europe—or beyond Spotify? To learn more, we talked with Ryan Blakeley, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Northeastern University, whose research focuses on a wide variety of locally-oriented streaming services, from state-affiliated systems in Greenland to fast-growing (Chinese-backed?) African startups. He also digs into the business infrastructure that makes such services possible, shedding light onto the firms that connect local companies to global rights-holders—and in doing so, pull them into the structural logic of the streaming industry. Come for a discussion of how streaming works in the Middle East. Stay for the ways in which nationally-organized streaming could remake the artistic economy.

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Looking at the current state of the Billboard charts, it seems like reports of Drake’s demise at the hands of Kendrick Lamar may have been a bit premature. Storming out of whatever supervillain ice-cave lair he’s been inhabiting, Drake dropped THREE new albums into the top three slots of the charts, reminding the world that he remains the most successful rapper of the streaming era. But what does it mean to be this type of industry anchor in 2026? How has superstardom changed since Drake first grabbed the commercial crown? We talk lawsuits, record contracts, wallpaper music, playlist manipulation, and digital casinos—all on the trail of an artist who is still, somehow, too big to fail.

That same logic did not help Ticketmaster/Live Nation—the live music mega-corporation that, despite the chicanery, despite the current administration, despite the track record, managed to LOSE a major monopoly trial through the sheer unmitigated volume and pungency of its bad behavior. And yes, while you did already know Ticketmaster was rotten, unless you’ve dug through the court filings, you really have NO idea how much anti-consumer sleaze you can fit in one company. Don’t worry—we go through it. With freakin’ PLEASURE. Beyond the general schadenfreude and kvelling, we also try to imagine what might come out of this…actual good thing that occurred? Honestly, we were caught a bit off-guard, because nothing like this has really occurred since we started the show. Maybe…things could…get better? Weird for us as it is for you.

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Early last month, billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square made an offer to purchase major-label heavyweight Universal Music Group. Ackman, already a major investor in the company, believes that despite consistent success in the business of making and selling music, UMG hasn’t been doing nearly well enough for its customers—i.e. the shareholders. Could a “New UMG” organized by his hedge fund unlock higher valuations while finally giving those hardworking investors the dividends that they deserve? Saxon and Sam dig into this unquestionably great news, exploring the exciting possibilities that a music industry even less interested in artists—and with its financial worth tied to stock market returns based on income-only-ever-go-up assumptions—will offer for everyone. Two Thumbs Up!

BUT FIRST: we have some bad news. Geese—your favorite band to argue about whether or not they should be someone else’s favorite band—hired a viral marketing firm. And then that firm (gasp!) did viral marketing using potentially-fake user accounts to drive online conversations. It’s a scandal that’s consumed the ever-shrinking world of indy rock. But what does the kerfuffle tell us about our contemporary digital imagination—not to mention the media ecosystem that supports it? Why did it make people (both those who were horrified and those mocking those who were horrified) so upset? And what should we do with the unpleasant feeling that our minds are being colonized—and our knowledge that they…kinda always were? Come for a historically situated analysis of current projections that music could be constituted as a reliability counter-cyclical cash flow. Stay for tin-foil-hat takes on The Discourse.

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Did you know that the U.S. military is the largest single employer of musicians on earth?

But...how did this happen? What does it tell us about war? Or, you know... about music? These questions are at the heart of David Suisman’s new book Instruments of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers. From Civil War battlefields to WWI training camps, Vietnamese bars, and Iraq-era iPods, he traces how performers, songs, and recordings have served to maintain energy, sustain emotional balance, and shape new, powerful collective identities among fighting men and women. All the stuff that we love on the dancefloor? It turns out that it also works pretty well on the battlefield and training camp. Come for country-vs-soul jukebox battles, submarine pianos, scatological marching songs, and Drowning Pool supercuts. Stay for an entirely new perspective on what the power of music can accomplish—for better and worse.

To learn more about David’s work—and listen to some amazing recordings—be sure to check out his website here ==> https://www.davidsuisman.net/instrument-of-war

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It’s an attractive silver-lining of an idea—“At least bad times make good punk.” Reagan begets…Reagan Youth, you know? Looking around at our rapidly deteriorating world, we decided it was a good moment to put this theory to the test, subbing punk for the broader category of “political music,” and applying it to the last hundred years of popular performance. But what are bad times? And what makes good political music?

What follows is a deep dive into our thinking on materialist cultural criticism—from the imagined traditions of the folk revival or the escapist fantasies of 1930s Hollywood musicals to self-contradictory rebellion in the 1960s and the hauntological possibilities of Nirvana’s anti-corporate idealism in the TikTok present. Come for the false futures being asserted by our corporate overlords. Stay for the fact that those futures, despite everything, are still unwritten.

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If you live in the United States, you probably know the college radio feel—scrappy vibes, student DJs stumbling over liner notes, great station interstitials, even better music. That music tends to be a very specific mix of bleeding edge up-and-comers, critically-acclaimed (yet relatively low-selling) classics, and occasional forays into genres like reggae, funk, jazz, or (help us) ska. But despite this, the actual boundaries of what makes college radio, well, college radio aren’t so clear. Are hits disqualifying? Does it—is it supposed to—reflect the tastes of the students? And why do colleges even have these stations in the first place?

The questions are important because, as Katherine Rye Jewell, the author of “Live From The Underground: A History of College Radio,” explains, college radio has been influential on both the development of underground music and the reimagining of academic life over the last 50 years. Perched between commercial training and educational anarchy, stations gradually developed a strange middle ground—tied to the systems of power but apart from them. Maybe not so different from underground rock more generally? Come for FCC shenanigans, battles with administrators, fights over rap, and the creation of the indy-industrial complex. Stay for a deep history of a rarely-considered pillar of the American music landscape.

Live From The Underground by Katherine Rye Jewell

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A two topic special for you this week. First—we explore the strangely under-reported story that Elon Musk is suing…basically the entirety of music publishing. The reason? They (gasp!) want him to either pay for music on X or, you know, stop allowing it. The mechanics are a lot weirder, though. We briefly run through consent decrees, blanket licensing, and Silicon Valley’s vision for intellectual property.

Then: the increased tumult around Spotify has seen many looking for an alternate streaming platform, with Tidal often touted as a more ethical (and higher audio quality) alternative. But…what’s Tidal’s deal, actually? And what can it tell us about the history—and future—of streaming? We talk the bizarre, star-studded, Jay-Z-led launch, Cash-App Takeovers, super-shady pro-Kanye stream inflation, and mission-pivoting techno-babble. Come for a shadow history of music in tech. Stay for the time that Frank Ocean built a staircase to nowhere.

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To ring in the new year, Sam and Saxon pull out both their wayback machine AND their increasingly scuffed-up crystal ball to think through some of the biggest trends from the last year—and to make some predictions about what might be coming in 2026. Was this the year when Spotify finally lost its grip on the PMC intelligentsia? Will Tik Tok’s potential American spinoff release a flood of incriminating music-biz evidence? And what’s up with…rock music out pacing Latin and Country lately? Will anyone write an anthem about work sucking again? Come to hear us tell you how we were right. Stay (and take notes) so you can tell us where we get things wrong.

(and please….excuse the hiss of our radiators. We live in cold places.)

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Well…it’s here folks. From the back roads of the digital countryside to the clubs of London, AI music has finally hit the charts. And the major labels, which had spent much of the last few years promising that they would do everything in their power to protect their artists’ rights and intellectual property and humanity have…signed deals with the major AI companies behind it?

We don’t want to say we told you so but…well…we did. To get a handle on what’s been happening, we consider a bevy of Very Threatening Lawsuits, talk through some recent lawsuit-squashing deals, and unpick the heavy-handed playbook that Universal, Sony, and Warner are running on yet another pack of VC-backed tech bros. Nice generative AI company you got there. Shame if anyone were to accuse it of copyright infringement.

But beyond the revenue streams, cultural influence, and never-to-be-officially-discussed buckets of settlement cash that these tactics promise, the latest developments also reveal hints of what the majors see as the future of AI music: A Walled Garden of user-generated content? A licensing bonanza? A cudgel against Spotify? A slop halo? (Don’t worry—we’ll explain that last one). Come for the rise of the musical replicants and the (potential) fall of the digital squatters. Stay for what all of this might do to a new generation of listeners.

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The Internet, as you know, is a vast and strange place, chock full of subcultures doing all sorts of things. And some of them are…well…curating Vine compilations, putting them onto VHS, carefully crafting distinctive packaging (complete with colored tapes!) and distributing the resulting “art pieces” via Etsy. Just hypothetically speaking, of course. But why would anyone want to do this? Why would anyone want to buy this? And what does the fact that, despite its surface weirdness, the resulting object probably makes a certain amount of aesthetic sense to you…say about our relationship to the media (and the entire digital landscape) in the contemporary moment?

To learn more about this wild, wild world, we talk with Travis Wagner, an assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences at Urbana-Champaign, whose latest research has focused on the “retroconversion” scene in all its tape-dubbing glory. Does 2010s horror deserve VHS-era static? What are the deep urges beneath nostalgia for physical media? Was the ‘90s really the last good time in American culture? Is the ownership of magnetic tape really an act of rebellion against the digital automation of an algorithmically-driven, surveillance capital world? Bust out your Walkman, hit the play button and decide for yourself.

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In the wilds of music streaming lurk eldritch terrors—perhaps few more strange, preposterous, and sanity-shattering than “the Spotify Billions Club,” a constantly updated list of tracks that have well and truly hit the big time. We pierce the post-temporal, post Tik-Tok veil and ask…what in the world is going on here? What are some of these bands? How did they get here? And what can the failure of any one narrative to contain them all tell us about how we understand music?

But this is all just a springboard to try and make sense of the atemporal onslaught of content that characterizes our contemporary moment and the lack of critical engagement with what we are experiencing. This leads us to Kelefa Sanneh’s recent article for the New Yorker which made some major waves by asking “when did music critics get nice?” Beyond poptimism and soft payola, we think the answer lies in how Spotify works and reflects greater trends in popular culture, and how a potential return to a sharper journalistic form will only hold if this is all taken into account. We go long and deep on this one, folks. How else are we going to shake off the cynicism in an attempt to envision a genuinely idealistic vision of what criticism could do.

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There’s been a conspicuous uptick in the past decade of billionaires buying up media companies. Elon and Twitter. Bezos and the Washington Post. Laurene Powell Jobs and The Atlantic. Forbes, Fortune, LA Times and a slew of other major newspapers are all now controlled by…very rich folks who didn’t make their money in media. But why? We thought print (and honestly, anything NOT a born digital streaming service) was…if not dead, than dying? It’s almost as if these billionaires see more value in these media platforms than the market. It certainly it has nothing to do with the continual ability of these media companies to shape narratives, ideologies and stories reifying our ever increasing death drive towards a modern oligarchy that full aligns with the billionaire class. (Coughs)

And then, the latest nail in the 20th-century-media-coffin: The sale of Paramount (which also includes CBS, MTV, Comedy Central and many others) to Skydance Media. You might be asking yourself “Who?” But don’t worry—Skydance, owned by David Ellison, son of billionaire and Oracle founder Larry Ellison, is the little media shop that could...raise billions via private equity and family funds.

To try and suss out the political, economic, and cultural stakes of this new era, Sam and Saxon set their focus on Paramount and ask: What in the literal f*%k is going on? How is a nepo baby movie studio buying out a major media legacy brand like Paramount and more importantly: Why? And how does this all relate to a Trump quid pro quo, Colbert getting canceled and David Ellison’s horrific vision of a utopic world where a surveillance state keeps the world a more morally virtuous place?

Come for theorizing of major music labels as the plural bipartisan black sheep of billionaire media industries. Stay for our overuse of the word barbarity because Sad Adorno.

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What is the value of music? We often think of this question in economic terms, but it doesn’t always have to do with money. After all, there’s a value difference between someone strumming a guitar at home, playing in a band, or trying to land a major label deal in that band. Each has its own kind of “value,” but these values are not the same.

Parsing out these different kinds of values is the focus of Making Value: Music, Capital and the Social, a recent book by our guest, Timothy D. Taylor, Professor of Ethnomusicology at UCLA. In the book, Taylor takes a novel approach, using anthropological value theory to examine how people’s ideas about value shape both the production and consumption of music while theorizing on the relationship between music’s economic and noneconomic forms. The result is a more a more comprehensive and complicated look at life and music under capitalism, one in which supposedly non-commodified, utopian spaces outside the market turn out to be far messier and more entangled within its overarching structures that we’d often like to admit.

Sam and Taylor dive deep into this topic, tracing threads from Echo Park’s indie scene of the 2010s to Franz Liszt’s 19th-century star power to broad conceptions of gift-giving through the work of Marcel Mauss.

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Daniel Ek, overlord of Spotify, recently lead an investment round of $600+ for a private German defense tech company. Despite Ek having invested in this kind of military technology since 2021, it seems to have suddenly reached everyone’s attention. As a result, lovable indie weirdos Deerhoof are leading Ek’s recent round of bad press with claims that they’ll be pulling their music off Spotify because they don’t support war, drones, American imperialism, A.I. and a number of other things detailed in multiple text-only posts on Instagram (whose parent company Meta definitely doesn’t invest in anything terrible that’s also accelerating the rise of T-1000s coming soon to a battlefield near you.)

Ironic joking aside, it’s an interesting and unique case of music intersecting with geopolitics which feels ….rare? After all, since the commodification of music, have fans ever faced so many ethical quandaries? And how to even begin dissecting Ek’s investment under the shadow of Trump demanding Europe start footing more of their defense bill? And what difference would getting off Spotify actually make in the world (none), but maybe we should do it anyways (sure)?

Sam and Saxon bring out that ole dog and pony show of ethical consumerism and consider that maybe those nice music listeners who are just trying to do right in a wrong world should strain to rethink where they locate politics.

In the end, Sam gets hopeful, Saxon remains skeptic and both consider the real potentials of a federated streaming service that includes both Cyndi Lauper and Sun City Girls …plus blockchain.

Money4Nothing is a podcast and newsletter on music and capitalism produced solely by Sam Backer and Saxon Baird. If you dig what we do, consider a (very cheap) subscription.

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This past week saw the passing of legendary musicians Sly Stone and Brian Wilson at the (relatively) ripe age of 82. While both men had grappled with the challenges of fame and mental health over their long careers, their deaths weren’t the result of these struggles—but rather the inevitable march of time. And they aren’t alone. The stars of the 60s and 70s are all slowing down: Aerosmith, Kiss, Billy Joel, Elton John…the list of musical pillars hanging up the spandex and rhinestones suggests the true end of an era. But what does our inevitable future look like as we come to what is beginning to feel like the final close of a generation? We think through the economic implications, but settle on the totemic possibilities. When did we last agree on anything the way we agreed on the greatness of Sly and Brian? And what will mass culture look like in the wake of those shared touchstones?

In the second-half, an alternate possibility is demonstrated by the (former?) hardcore (rock?) superstars-in-training Turnstile, who just released their long-awaited 5th album—but not before playing an absolutely massive free show in Sam’s beloved Wyman Park Dell in Baltimore. This is a band you either are sick of hearing about or have literally never come across—a dichotomy that reflects our contemporary musical landscape…particularly in comparison with the era of the ‘60s and ‘70s. We try and wrap our head around the phenomenon, figuring what it means to be a “big” band in 2025, who cares about whether or not anyone is a “sellout,” and….if this music makes literally any sense to us. Come for the breakdowns. Stay for the Bluenotes.

Money4Nothing is a podcast and newsletter on music and capitalism produced solely by Sam Backer and Saxon Baird. If you dig what we do, consider a (very cheap) subscription.

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On our latest episode, Sam and Toby Bennett talk about how the major labels have transformed themselves in the digital era. But, while the UMG, Warner, and Sony are continent-spanning IP behemoths, they are also made of people: people with ideas about themselves, and the work they do, and the industry they do it in. And if the industry was changing between, say, 2000 and 2010, then the people within it were too—a shift in ideology and outlook absolutely integral to the contemporary culture industry.

Understanding this relationship between large-scale business practices and the intimate social transformations that both reflected AND caused them is the subject of the fantastic new book, “Corporate Life in the Digital Music Industry: Remaking the Major Label from the Inside Out” by Toby Bennett. An ethnographic analysis of bleary-eyed mornings and iPod diplomacy, it sheds light on what was going on inside the major label machine as it struggled to navigate the streaming revolution—and began to repaint itself in millennial pink. Sam and Toby Bennett discuss the social geography of major-label London, the complex hierarchies of office work, and the tightrope debates over what it means to “respect” pop. Also, don’t miss the lightly conspiratorial discussion of habitus-forming corporate education that will change the way you look at those “creative economy” college courses forever.

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As you might have noticed, the global economic system has hit a bit of a…snag—namely, the United States upending almost 80 years of foreign policy with little-to-no clarity on process, structure, or medium-term aims. That’s right, baby…We’re talkin' tariffs! Now, some of the impacts are, to be honest, pretty straightforward: Those Mexican strats? Those Roland 808s? Those T-Shirts at the merch table? Tariffed!

But, in typical Money 4 Nothing fashion, we look past the headlines and try to think through the broader implications of the New World Order. What could a recession do to an industry that’s already seeing a slowdown in streaming growth? How might a stock market crash impact the balance of power between tech firms and “counter cyclical” major labels? Will travel bans hit superfans? And, perhaps most importantly—just how much of our contemporary culture industry is based on the world’s century-long embrace of American identity? Come for a quick tour through “recession pop.” Stay for our totally justified gloating about predicting, not ALL of this, but definitely a LOT of this.

Money4Nothing is a podcast and newsletter on music and capitalism produced solely by Sam Backer and Saxon Baird. If you dig what we do, consider a (very cheap) subscription.

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What is a band? Think about it for a second, and it becomes less obvious. What you see is a couple of people on stage rocking out. But think about it more and it gets more complex. Actually, bands really aren’t really like anything else—part business, part social club, part artistic partnership, part job…operating at the interstitial zone between disciplined employment and liberatory self-expression. This strange, cobbled-together structure—and the conflicts, hierarchies, pleasures, and intimacies it creates—is at the heart of “Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music,” a revelatory new book from Franz Nicolay (who…has been in one or two bands himself). To learn more, we dig into everything from the complexity of (musical) democracy to the political economy of expression—not to mention how local unions might be the answer, the dangerous effects of Romanticism, and how there’s never a escape from the problem of power.

Money4Nothing is a podcast and newsletter on music and capitalism produced solely by Sam Backer and Saxon Baird. If you dig what we do, consider a (very cheap) subscription.

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Late last year, Universal Music shelled out 775 million dollars to snap up Downtown Music, a “global music company” that manages “over 50 million music assets”. Perhaps famously, Downtown owns Cd Baby—a digital distributor that, along with peers like Tunecore and Distrokid, has become central to the infrastructure of the streaming economy. These companies enable artists to upload their music to platforms like Spotify, and their influence has grown alongside the ever-increasing flood of “independent” artists bypassing the label system to share their music directly with the people.

But…is this kind of market-based independence really all it’s cracked up to be? Or is it another example of music serving as a microcosm for the broader structures of capitalism. And if so—what are the potential implications of the biggest of all majors stepping into the distribution fray? To try and understand it all, Saxon and Sam dive into the history of distributors, from their decades schlepping vinyl to their more recent focus on herding ones-and-zeros. We talk streaming 1.0 vs. streaming 2.0, debate the economic purpose of community, and fret about the vast tubes of data that lead directly to Lucian Grange’s voracious maw. What, after all, could possibly go wrong?

Listen to “Digital Distribution and the Ideology of Being Indy” wherever you get your podcasts.

Money4Nothing is a podcast and newsletter on music and capitalism produced solely by Sam Backer and Saxon Baird. If you dig what we do, consider a (very cheap) subscription.

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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 policies have remade how we listen, who we listen to, and what they get paid.

To get a deeper perspective on both the book and the histories it emerges from, we also called up David Turner—of the late (lamented) Penny Fractions—pulling him out of retirement for one last big music + capitalism score. Together Liz, David, and Sam dive into everything from the economics of ghost artists and the aesthetics of vibes-based listening to the intentional destruction of cultural context in the streaming age. It’s a conversation that helps clarify the singularity of Spotify culture—and allows us to better detach its operations from the meaning of digital music. Come for the playlists. Stay for what they’ve done to you.

 

Buy Liz Pelly's book "Mood Machine"

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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 course they did. They are in the business of producing viral mega-hits.

 

While the context of the lawsuit—namely, multiple violent attacks on Drake’s house—is quite serious, it’s hard not to find the whole thing ridiculous. After over a decade of industry machinations, Aubrey really had the nerve to sue UMG for…hurting his feelings? [Yes, it’s actually for defamation of character, but in the court of public opinion, those two are pretty much synonymous] Despite this, the actual content of the legal filing is fascinating—offering readers a guided tour of exactly what UMG is doing out there, hosted by someone who really knows how the sausage gets made. Payola? Selective copyright enforcement? Contract negotiation hardball? You betcha. THEN: Saxon and Sam get a little loose and take a jog through the Grammys. Album Of The Year? Sure. But also…who did you have for Immersive Audio?  

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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. Given the rate of both change and adoption, the next 4 years will almost certainly be crucial, potentially locking us into a long-term pathway with both these machines AND the companies that make them.

So…what might happen? And how will it impact music, given the massive copyright lawsuits currently working their way through the courts? Saxon and Sam put on their tinfoil hats, got out their crystal ball, and…did their best. The resulting conversation moves from big (contradictory impulses between protectionism and libertarianism within the Trump coalition?) to bigger issues (War? Stock market crash?) to the generally intangible (shifting relationships between Americans and the ideologies of cultural authority?) Come for a connect-the-dots conversation that links Elon Musk and AGI to the possibility of earning a living by making art. Stay because at least we’re all doomed together.

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For more background, check our our episode on AI + Copyright Lawsuits in Music.

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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 financialization—a profit-driven effort to increase global capital’s hold over the workers who create culture.
 
But…how did this happen? When did it happen? And how has it impacted not just the firms that produce music and films—but the actual music and films themselves? To help us through this complex history, we’re joined by Andrew deWaard, author of “Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture,” taking us through a wide-ranging conversation about derivatives, the geopolitical implications of "financial discipline," mergers, acquisitions, board-member kickbacks, 30 Rock, play-listing Drake, modern cultural analysis, and more. Come for the doomerism you know and love. Stay for a better understanding of how our corporate overlords get it done.  
 
If you want to read Andrew's book--it's free and open source here! Also some sick charts to accompany the discussion.
 

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Music: Crumb - Ghostride

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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 profoundly opaque statement), the two corporations suddenly announced they had come to terms. The fight was a massive gamble for both sides—a test to see, when push came to shove, who really had the leverage in one of social media’s most important relationships. But…what actually happened? And what, if anything, was the fallout? To learn more, we talked to Kristin Robinson, a senior writer at Billboard, and the author of the excellent "Machine Learnings" newsletter. Fractured solidarity between artists and labels? The impenetrable veil of music biz secrecy? Slowed and reverbed copyright infringement? The crushing power of monopoly exerted, step by step, against indy labels? All that and more.

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Music: Kyozo Nishioka - "Gypsy Song"

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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 precisely zero cultural lines are being drawn. Instead, the newest wave of big-tent pop is, quite intentionally, for everyone—teens, college kids, aging millennials, gen x-ers still watching SNL, etc.

To celebrate the return of the mainstream (and to suss out the role played by the major labels who had…started to miss it), we put on our media theory hats and start investigating. How do careers function now that new music doesn’t need to be new? Has digitally based fragmentation started to produce its opposite? Is the culture industry—with all of its coercive power—back? Come for the socio-technical implications of the Chappelle timeline. Stay for what it says about the nature of post-post-modernity.

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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 fundamentally different system of copyright and finance and technology than…say buying? And how does that all service data collection, listening habits, personalized feeds and everything else? These questions are at the heart of Eric Drott’s wonderful new book “Streaming Music, Streaming Capital,” which starts to grapple with the fundamental questions of what streaming is exactly—and what it’s done to us.

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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 tasteless trash—the worst of rockism, utterly beyond the pale. Why though? Could the last truly successful (from a chart perspective) rock movement REALLY have no redeeming qualities? And if it did…why hasn’t anyone been thinking about them? Well—one hero has. It’s Holiday Kirk, the “CEO of NÜ Metal,” whose remarkable twitter-project “crazy ass moments in nu metal history” has brought welcome attention back to the style—and shone a spotlight on a new generation of artists reimagining the sound. We talk to Holiday about why he fell (back) in love with the style, the mixture of dumb and brilliant that defines its output, And why Korn were the best sellouts of all time. Then we get heady, and try to think through the political implications of the genre’s white male rage—and what it means that it was so thoroughly rejected by the tastemakers of the Obama era. Come for a validation of the musical trauma of throwing away your copy of Hybrid Theory. Stay for a discussion of the class, politics, taste, and the meaning of Rock in American history.

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Music: Uniform - "Permanent Embrace"

 

 

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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 harvest vast profits, prevent the emergence of meaningful competition, and damage the interests of both artists and fans. If the DOJ wins? That monopoly might get broken up. And what happens then is anybody’s guess.

Given the importance of live performance to the music industry, all of this is…a really big deal. Which is why we were delighted to talk all things restraint-of-trade with Kevin Erickson, the director of the Future of Music Coalition. Crucially, it’s not just that any major regulatory move could shatter the long-standing, “convenience-fee”-driven status quo. Turns out, Ticketmaster/Live Nation has its fingers in a LOT of pies. Even the lawsuit itself could go a long way towards revealing the hidden influence that the powerful company has exerted on everything from touring schedules or merch practices to advertising cultures and venue sustainability. Discovery? Can’t Wait.

Come for platform monopolies slowly strangling your favorite local venue. Stay for…that too, because it's SUPER real. But also for a pragmatic perspective on our musical ecosystem—and the rare chance to change its trajectory for the better.

 

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Music: King Tubby - "African Roots"

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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 better understand what these companies are promising—and what they could do to the music industry—Saxon and Sam think through some possible futures, from the mind-bendingly good to the vast universe of echoing slop.  

 

But even if the tech is there, the world might not follow along as smoothly as the CEOs would like. In particular, the major labels, incensed at what they believe was the wholesale theft of their copyrights, have launched a series of lawsuits aimed at kneecapping the wannabe unicorns. This past week, Suno and Udio responded in startling fashion. Yes, it turns out, they did indeed train their models on recorded music. But it wasn’t stealing, because… the recordings were already online? At stake is more than just the future of not having to learn Garageband in order to make mediocre house. Instead, the battle over audio is shaping up to be a defining moment for generative AI more generally—a conflict with billions on the line. Come for our new theme song. Stay for the techno-social dynamics of copyright within sonic capitalism.

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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 (lookin' at you Coachella) that have kicked up all manner of concern among the music press. What's happening? Well, it's some combination of the internet, the resale market, rapacious monopolies, inflation, and...mimetic vibes? That all? We discuss.

And if that's not heady enough, we try to wrap our heads (if not our eyes) around The Sphere—James Dolan's energy-draining, future-baiting, Knicks-helping monstrosity in Las Vegas. Is it the logical endpoint of digital-age concerts? Berghain for Baby Boomers? A utopian use of finance capital in a dark age? An inevitable tax write-off? And...who can actually fill it?

Come for The Sphere in the age of mechanical distraction. Stay for The Orb.

 

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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 Coddington, the author of "How Hip Hop Became Hit Pop: Radio, Rap, and Race." Her work recovers rap's tortuous path through the financialized complexity of the '80s music industry—navigating around established Black radio stations that refused to play it, as a key part of multi-racial dance music coalitions, and through eye-catching MTV videos that reimagined the white-coded mainstream. The results push past the "authentic-or-not" dichotomy that defines hip hop history, revealing how rap was shaped—and driven forward—as much by pop trifles as hardcore truth tellers. After all...you STILL can't touch this.

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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 major label money machine. To try to understand what has changed, Sam talks with Monia Ali, from the excellent Fandom Exile newsletter. They explore the cultural genealogy of contemporary fans, tracking how a set of practices built around conventions, Buffy, and shipping percolated into the musical universe, reshaping what it means to listen—or to love—your favorite artist. The difference between Revealed and Experienced Truth? The political economy of fan fiction? The centrality of LiveJournal? It's all there—from One Direction to the world or, at the very least, a Swiftie near you. 

 

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Music: Jon McKiel - "Still Life" 

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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 deep to its genetic code. What does a rap battle mean? How has it evolved? And why does it carry so much importance? To explore the question, Saxon and Sam go through the history of rap beef, tracing changing conventions and their relationship to both the music industry and the aesthetic structures of feeling that surround it. Then, they try to figure out what made this battle so intense—moving from Drake as 21st century Bowie to the "contentification" of music in the social media era. The Bridge to Gucci to the Grahams….with a few detours. 

 

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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 interesting). Negishi was actually just one of a handful of simultaneous inventors. Far from a distinct commercial product, Karaoke might be better understood as the necessary, albeit somewhat-off-key, shadow of the modern music business.

To celebrate this legacy, Saxon and Sam dig into one of the most fascinating elements of our contemporary musical…practice? Industry? Culture? Karaoke has a way of blurring all those the lines. And so, in addition to the history, we explore the big questions: What does it mean to imagine yourself a star? Why do we want to perform Katy Perry songs in front of friends and strangers? How has Karaoke’s meaning in American culture changed over time? Where does all this fit into the history of folk music—and what does it mean for our social-media future? A first pass, and definitely not a final say. Just hoolllddd onttooo that feeeellinnnnn....

 

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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 venue near you. But why is this becoming such a trend? Is it the pre-packaged social media ready presentation? Or that Millennials got deeper pockets now and will shell out big bucks on tickets (and a babysitter) to hear their favorite album played live? Or is it just Hollywood risk-aversion bleeding into the touring industry? As a jumping-off point, Saxon and Sam discuss an excellent recent article on Passion of the Weiss wondering on this very subject and then suss out whether Earl Sweatshirt really is touring ...too...much? 

 

Read: We Outside: Congrats, Your Favorite Album is Old Enough to Go on Tour by Pravash Trewn

 

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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). Then, we look at what Universal Music has been up to, more specifically, by examining a set of recently announced partnerships with Spotify (they have videos now?) and K-Pop powerhouse Hybe (everyone, quick, into the WeVerse!) If platforms were already inescapable, what does it mean when the major labels start doubling down on them? Come for the secret, dollar-drenched sound of Scooter Braun and Taylor Swift burying the hatchet. Stay for how we LOST THE UNIVERSE.

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Music: Chromatics - Fade to Black

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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 REALLY change things, in ways both obvious and subtle.

While it’s hard to see an immediate path towards it being signed into law, the act demonstrates a genuine hunger for large-scale structural change—and helps to lay out an imaginative framework for what that could look like. We dig into the details, but also explore what this newfound sense of possibilities might mean for the future—a question that also connects to current, racially-coded attempts to ban music-biz-hotbed Tik Tok. Connecting such seemingly disparate events, we wonder what this emergent energy means, and where it could go next. Come for the 12-Million Stream Cap—stay for the beautiful dream of major label transparency.

 

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Music: La Sécurité - "K9 Freaks Mix (Freak Heat Waves Remix)"

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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 take-down, let alone a serious examination. 

And that’s honestly a mistake. Because the group has a tremendous amount to tell us—about our changing musical tastes, about the psychic landscape of modern America, and about the trajectory of rock in a post-genre future. Come for Sam listening to the entirety of the ID catalog for the sake of science. Stay for a new perspective on the merits—and singular focus—of an act that’s defined an era of angst.

 

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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? Why are two of the biggest forces in the music business in a battle that neither should have wanted?

To better understand the story, we dig into the payout structures that define the conflict, the inter-sectoral strategies that shaped it, and the negotiations that led to everything falling apart. Once again, it’s a fight about the future of sound—and which type of business is going to own it. Come for everyone talking about AI without anyone talking about AI. Stay for a KILLER data-science research project.

 

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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 confusion and brand-based failure, while Sam tried to pull some (desperate) fragments of sense from the seemingly nonsensical plan. Is music criticism lifestyle reporting? Is there an economic base for the record review? Will a thousand newsletter flowers bloom? This week we have questions, not answers. And definitely no good vibes. Insert your own "Wintour is the cruelest season" joke here.

 

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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 could have possibly seen this coming? Certainly not us…

And then Spotify, where the times—or at least the streaming payout structure—are a-changin’. On the surface, new rules regarding monetization (under 1000 plays? No cash for you!) might seem relatively minor, but they reflect a more fundamental set of shifts within the power-structures of the industry. Everyone is gearing up for a fight about the next 25 years of music—moves like this are the first steps towards a new world order. And if recent events are any indication, Spotify doesn’t seem like it’ll be the one calling the shots…

Music: Black Lips - "Bone Marrow"

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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 dig into the history of BMI—exploring how it emerged from battles between publishers, Hollywood, and the rising forces of radio, and what role it has played in the  industry ever since. A fair and neutral arbiter, with no interests of its own...but of course. Then we try to understand what impact the privatization might have on the future of music. Bundling other people’s copyrights? Maybe. A foot in the door for AI legislation? Probably. Come for an argument about why songwriters should borrow tactics from the mob. Stay for tomorrow’s IP battles today. 
 

Re-Listen: "Consent Decrees" Episode 

 

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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 broader implications of the division it (implicitly) draws between the filthy-lucre of commerce and the pure connection of community. Come for Sam not knowing the basics of indy-streamer cultology. Stay for the fundamental question of whether fandom is a zero-sum game. 

 

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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 control with rampant overselling, producing a potentially deadly crowd-crush and an NYPD investigation. Fascinated and horrified, we decided to dig a bit deeper to figure out…who ARE these guys? And what in the name of Frankie Knuckles is their deal? As we dug into the often insane specifics (Superfund Halloween Rave, Best Friends With Mayoral Staffers, Etc.), we realized that the question shed light on a deeper issue: as dance music and nightlife become big business, how do are events and venues balancing the desire for profits and the demand for safety? And could the finance money pouring into the space change things for the worse?

Read:  Clubbing is Becoming Big Business. What Does This Mean for Dance Music?  - Resident Advisor 

 

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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 from definitely-not-shady new owners Songtradr put it "After a comprehensive evaluation...50% of Bandcamp employees have accepted offers to join Songtradr”). It’s…not great. Unfortunately, it’s also not entirely unexpected. To try to get our heads around what’s happening, we talk union-busting, the decline of music criticism, the death of tech optimism, the rise of the influencer economy, the zombie-like survival of grifting, and what the future might hold for a synch-happy tech-bro Bandcamp. Somedays, it feels like it's their world, and we just live in it. Today might be one of those days. 

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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 clients were leaving him—including mega-names like Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber—it seemed like it might be the beginning of the end for the most successful music manager of the 2010s. But…who is Scooter exactly? And why should anyone care?
 
While most know Braun for his era-defining beef with Taylor Swift, we decided to go a bit deeper, exploring his remarkable ascent amid the shell-shocked chaos of the music biz during the early Obama Era. As we dug in, we realized that Scooter’s success actually provided a fascinating vantage-point through which to understand the distinctive era that ran from early Youtube to the launch of Tik Tok—a moment of disruption, change, and platform power that we might just be coming out of. Come for the Asher Roth (yeah, THAT Asher Roth). Stay for the T-Swift conspiracies. 

 

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