Music is upstream from politics.Drowned in Sound investigates how the music industry shapes society and how fans, artists, and workers can organise for systemic change. Hosted by Sean Adams, we decode streaming economics, sustainable touring, climate and tech, workers’ rights, and collective solutions with musicians, researchers, and changemakers.
Site
RSS
Apple
Data updated on 09/09/2026
Recent rankings
Latest chart positions across Apple Podcasts and Spotify rankings.
Shared links between episodes and podcasts
Links found in episode descriptions and other podcasts that share them.
Meet The AI Rapper Beloved By The Far-Right - Part 2
Season 6 · Episode 17
Tuesday, September 8, 2026 • Duration 43:22
In part two of our conversation with journalists Effie Webb and Harriet Williamson, we move beyond who created Danny Bones and ask what his existence means for music itself.
We discuss the irony of a far-right AI rapper borrowing from Black music, the response from musicians, and what happens when technology can imitate creative work at scale with little to no consequence.
We get into copyright, the devaluing of human creative labour, Spotify’s response to AI artists, whether Danny Bones is an outlier or an early sign of what’s coming, and finally, what music fans can do to help musicians, songwriters and artists to remain at the centre of music.
The Drowned in Sound podcast is presented in partnership with Qobuz, the pioneering high-quality music streaming and download platform for music enthusiasts and audiophiles.
Each week we curate playlists on Qobuz, featuring our favourite records, artists, and the themes we explore on the show.
Visit drownedinsound.org/playlists to discover new music in rich Hi-Res lossless quality and start your 30-day free trial of Qobuz.
This week's playlist is songs that give you a bit of pride in where you are from. Amongst the picks, Harriet chose 'White Man in Hammersmith Palais' by The Clash and Effie chose 'LDN' by Lily Allen, two London songs, one of them about race and punk and reggae and the other about what the city actually looks like underneath, which is a fairly pointed answer to a record trading on national pride.
What would you add? You can email us on podcasts@drownedinsound.org
‘Harbu Darbu’ by Ness and Stilla, the track mentioned in the episode, which calls for the deaths of Bella Hadid, Dua Lipa and Mia Khalifa and topped the Israeli streaming charts:
Harbu Darbu
Meet The AI Rapper Beloved By The Far-Right - Part 1
Season 6 · Episode 16
Tuesday, September 1, 2026 • Duration 46:37
What does it take to rack up five million YouTube views in ten months? In this case: a rapper who doesn’t exist, a political party paying thousands for AI-generated videos, and algorithms remarkably good at turning anger into attention.
This week, Sean is joined by Effie Webb of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Harriet Williamson of Novara Media, who have spent months investigating Danny Bones.
So, who is Danny Bones? An AI-generated British rapper created by the Node Project, whose songs and videos mix nationalism, immigration politics and visions of a broken Britain. He’s amassed millions of views and streams and "performed" at a Tommy Robinson rally. This manufactured persona has begun bleeding into real-world politics.
In part one, Effie and Harriet explain how they uncovered the Node Project’s links to far-right party Advance UK, and ultimately discovered the real people behind it: a music producer and a video producer working in the arts. We discuss what far right actually means, why those described that way reject the term, and Harriet’s theory that the Danny Bones aesthetic looks like somebody watched This Is England, thought it looked cool and missed everything else about it.
We also get into Danny Bones’ extraordinary algorithmic growth, whether reporting on him risks boosting his platform, the economics of streams versus political commissions, and what happens when an entirely fictional "artist" starts intervening in real elections.
The Drowned in Sound podcast is presented in partnership with Qobuz, the pioneering high-quality music streaming and download platform for music enthusiasts and audiophiles.
Each week we curate playlists on Qobuz, featuring our favourite records, artists, and the themes we explore on the show.
Visit drownedinsound.org/playlists to discover new music in rich Hi-Res lossless quality and start your 30-day free trial of Qobuz.
This week's playlist is songs that give you a bit of pride in where you are from. Amongst the picks, Harriet chose 'White Man in Hammersmith Palais' by The Clash and Effie chose 'LDN' by Lily Allen, two London songs, one of them about race and punk and reggae and the other about what the city actually looks like underneath, which is a fairly pointed answer to a record trading on national pride.
What would you add? You can email us on
Referenced In This Episode:
Blood Red Shoes on their 7th LP, Support Bands, Crisps and Two Decades As a Band
Season 6 · Episode 15
Wednesday, August 26, 2026 • Duration 56:25
In this week's episode Sean sits down with Steven Ansell, the singing drummer of Blood Red Shoes.
They have known each other for around twenty five years now, since Sean first saw Steven's old band Cat On Form playing to a room of skinny, topless Fugazi obsessives in Brighton.
Blood Red Shoes formed in Brighton in 2004, Steven on drums and vocals, Laura-Mary Carter on guitar and vocals, and released one of their first singles on the Drowned in Sound label. Twenty years on, they're still one of the more interesting duos working in guitar music, a band whose sound has been chased by plenty of others since (Royal Blood, for one, used to come and watch them). Their songs keep finding new listeners in places that have nothing to do with the traditional music industry, the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack years ago, more recently Directive 8020, the horror game that features their track 'Dead Air'.
However, delves into their seventh record. Stay Lonely, which is out 18th September on V2 Records. The record features the single 'Screams', and it's the first Blood Red Shoes album the two of them have made entirely on their own, no outside producer, no outside mixer, nobody else touching it.
The conversation gets into how a band that's been almost wordlessly instinctual for two decades actually functions day to day, who sings what and why.
Steven also produces for other artists, including Brighton duo Arxx and Circe, and co-runs the Jazz Life label with Laura-Mary, who records solo too (her debut album, Bye Bye Jackie, came out last year).
As with every episode, Sean asks Steven the question he now puts to every guest: how would you spend five hundred million pounds to improve music?
The Drowned in Sound podcast is presented in partnership with Qobuz, the high-quality music streaming and download platform for music enthusiasts and audiophiles. Each week we curate playlists on Qobuz, featuring our favourite records, artists, and the themes we explore on the show.
Gig Yap: Robyn, My Chemical Romance, Matt Berninger and Los Campesinos!, and Where to Stand
Season 6 · Episode 14
Saturday, August 15, 2026 • Duration 50:15:03
What's the best place to stand in the Electric Ballroom if you're under five foot five and don't fancy a six foot stranger appearing in front of you two minutes before stage time? Helena Wadia has worked this out for pretty much every venue in London, and this week's episode exists mostly so Drowned in Sound founder Sean Adams could catch up with his co-host to to yap about gigs.
This week's episode is a bit of a format experiment for us (we'd love you to send your feedback to podcasts@drownedinsound.org) because Sean's been buried in The Anchoress album campaign and Helena's been living her best gig life.
Helena co-hosts the Media Storm podcast, and normally you'll find her asking sharper questions than she gets asked here. She also, by her own admission, keeps a proper mental log of every National setlist, twenty two shows and counting, which is why she was drafted onto Gig Pigs, the podcast where comedians take a comedian to a gig, for their National episode with Stuart Laws. Worth a listen for the fuller history: S2 Ep7: The National with Stuart Laws and Helena Wadia.
The conversation also gets into Los Campesinos! twenty year celebration at the Electric Ballroom, Robyn selling out the O2 without being an obvious household name, My Chemical Romance's Black Parade in full at Wembley Stadium and the tears that came with it, and Matt Berninger's solo show with RonBoy in tow.
Along the way the pair discuss obstructed view seats that turn out to be the best seats in the house, the ethics of a no-view audio-only ticket, seeing Prince, and why nobody's worked out how to tell you your friends are stood four rows in front of you.
The Drowned in Sound podcast is presented in partnership with Qobuz, the pioneering high-quality music streaming and download platform for music enthusiasts and audiophiles. Each week we curate playlists on Qobuz, featuring our favourite records, artists, and the themes we explore on the show.
From Paris Hilton to Andy Burnham: Sean & Helena's Lord Brennan Interview Debrief
Season 6 · Episode 13
Sunday, August 2, 2026 • Duration 41:32
Did Sean ask a member of the House of Lords whether the House of Lords should even exist? No. Did he get into proportional representation? Also no...
Helena Wadia returns to co-host, and rather than a straight interview this is proper yap of an episode, with Sean thinking out loud about everything that didn't make it into last week's conversation with Lord Kevin Brennan on the fan-led review of live music, and why, when you've got fifty recommendations and about an hour, you have to choose your battles.
They get into why Andy Burnham becoming Prime Minister changed the shape of the conversation, and what it means that he's a shareholder in Music Venue Properties. They compare how differently society treats football fandom versus music fandom, from workplace leniency during the World Cup to Germany's cultural vouchers, and ask why a nighttime economy built around music doesn't get the same institutional understanding.
Along the way: Bill Drummond's old campaign for a "no music day", Paris Hilton's unlikely transformation into a genuine political force, and a proper, honest conversation about how they each actually prep for an interview, what questions to ask first, how much to assume the listener already knows, and why every job now seems to come with the shadow of "but will it clip."
The Drowned in Sound podcast is presented in partnership with Qobuz, the pioneering high-quality music streaming and download platform for music enthusiasts and audiophiles. Each week we curate playlists on Qobuz, featuring our favourite records, artists, and the themes we explore on the show.
This week, Sean and Helena share their midyear playlists. Sean's has got Massive Attack and Tom Waits, Sofia Isella, PVA, and Art School Girlfriend on it. Helena's has Matt Berninger's strange, brilliant new solo single 'Martini Me Fatso', Naomi In Blue's debut, and Olivia Rodrigo's new record.
What can music fans expect from the PM Andy Burnham era? DiS meets Lord Brennan
Season 6 · Episode 12
Saturday, July 25, 2026 • Duration 01:01:22
Four thousand, one hundred and forty four music fans responded to a single Parliamentary survey, more than any committee inquiry has recorded before. What they said, over and over, is that going to a gig isn't a transaction like any other, it's closer to a communal, sometimes quasi-religious experience, and that's the starting point for this week's conversation.
In this week's episode, Sean talks to Lord Kevin Brennan about the fan-led review of live and electronic music, the report he was commissioned to lead by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee. We discuss what's happened since it was published, get his reaction to the Starmer government's response, and what we can hope under new our music-loving prime minister Andy Burnham.
Kevin Brennan was the Labour MP for Cardiff West for twenty three years, from 2001 until he stood down at the last election, before being appointed to the House of Lords as Lord Brennan of Canton. While in the Commons he chaired the CMS committee's inquiry into the economics of music streaming and introduced what became known as the Brennan Bill, a private member's bill that never made it into law but helped push the government towards hosting streaming remuneration talks through the Intellectual Property Office.
However, Brennan is also a musician himself. He was a founding member of MP4, the cross-party band of sitting MPs that has raised over a million pounds for charity (Andy Burnham, now Prime Minister, has played live with them), and in 2021 he became the first sitting MP to release a solo album, The Clown and the Cigarette Girl, produced by Gerry Diver with Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols on bass. He's currently recording a follow up.
The conversation covers the origins of the fan-led review, which built on last year's Music Fans Voice Survey (8,108 respondents), and the resulting Fans' Charter, built around seven "essentials of live": celebration, ticketing, grassroots, safety, accessibility, transport and voice.
They also talk about Andy Burnham's own history as a shareholder in Music Venue Properties, which has taken venues including The Snug in Atherton into community ownership. And yes, we discuss where AI and copyright fit into all of this.
Why Your Favourite Band's Fans Might Not Be Real
Season 6 · Episode 11
Tuesday, July 7, 2026 • Duration 01:18:33
There's a marketing agency that will build your band a small army of fan accounts for about a dollar per thousand views. They post the clips, they seed the captions, sometimes they write the comments underneath too. Until a Substack essay by the musician Eliza McLamb and a run of stories in Wired, New York Magazine and The Verge this May, most of us assumed - unlike MAGA and Reform supporters - the people posting about our favourite artists actually liked them.
In this week's episode, recorded at the Shure Experience Centre in London, Sean is joined by returning guest Hanna Kahlert for a properly wide ranging mid-year check-in on where the music industry actually stands. It covers radio, playlists, spatial audio, AI, third spaces, and at some length, what's really behind the clipping campaigns turning fan accounts into an ad product.
Hanna Kahlert is a senior social analyst at MIDiA Research, where she heads up the company's coverage on social media, cross-entertainment audience behaviour, the creator economy, and the platforms all of it lives on. She was our guest before Christmas talking about the year in tech, which makes her one of a very short list of returning guests on this podcast.
However, MIDiA isn't her only hat. Hanna also mentors at Abbey Road Red, the studio's startup incubator, where she's currently working with founders building spatial audio for VR worlds and, more usefully for touring musicians, something like an Airbnb for recording studios.
The conversation moves through Apple's rumoured smart glasses, why an AR filter over a headline slot might one day save a band three trucks of touring production, and why last year's poolside advert for Meta's camera glasses, endorsed awkwardly by Peggy Gou, has aged badly.
This conversation also gets into how little has actually changed about the mechanics of a live show since Sean was a teenager, wireless guitars aside, and why a crowd full of phones sometimes means an artist is genuinely growing an audience and sometimes just means nobody real is in the room.
The bulk of the episode is about the clipping economy: the marketing model behind fan accounts that turn out not to be run by fans at all. Sean and Hanna work through the Billboard interview with Chaotic Good that started it, Eliza McLamb's essay Fake Fans, and what it meant when that essay led to a month of think pieces asking whether the band Geese were, in the discourse's own phrase, an industry plant psyop. Hanna's own MIDiA research covers the same ground, and it's linked below.
Gomez's Tom Gray: How to Fight Spotify in Parliament and Why One Difficult Conversation a Day Is Enough - Part 2
Season 6 · Episode 10
Wednesday, July 1, 2026 • Duration 57:40
Spotify paid Joe Rogan over $200 million for his podcast. Then, in 2024, they did it again. Tom Gray has spent the last five years thinking about what that kind of money could do for songwriters instead and his answer at the end of this episode is fascinating.
In this week's episode, DiS founder Sean Adams is back with Tom Gray for the second part of a two-part conversation. Part 1 was about the music and the person. This one is about the fight: where the #BrokenRecord campaign came from, how it works, what it has won, and where it keeps hitting walls.
Tom Gray is a Mercury Prize-winning songwriter and founding member of Gomez. Since 2020 he has been the founder of the Broken Record campaign, which began as a Twitter thread during the first lockdown and grew into one of the most significant efforts to change how songwriters and performing artists are paid in the streaming era. He has been Chair of The Ivors Academy since 2022 and stood as a Labour candidate for Brighton Pavilion in the 2024 general election.
The episode opens with the origin of Broken Record: a tweet, a discovery that UK music copyright law was last substantially reformed in 1988, and the realisation that performing artists have no right to the equitable remuneration that has applied to radio play since the 1930s, because streaming platforms treat a stream as a sale rather than a broadcast. Tom explains how the (Kevin) Brennan Bill came together, including the ten-minute phone call in which it was named, and why the word "remuneration" nearly derailed the whole thing.
From there it goes into Labour's relationship with tech, Daniel Ek's visit to Downing Street, the AI consultation process that Tom describes as a failure, and what it feels like to run for Parliament when you have spent four years arguing with the government about copyright law. The metadata problem gets a sharp section of its own: no regulation currently requires streaming platforms to record songwriter information at the point of upload, which creates conditions for fraud and erases the attribution chain entirely. And there is a significant exchange on Spotify's AI remixing feature, Nick Clegg's position at Meta, and what Tom calls "the copyright gang" and "the tech gang" operating in direct opposition inside Whitehall.
How Gomez's Tom Gray Ended Up Taking On Spotify in Parliament - Part 1
Season 6 · Episode 9
Tuesday, June 23, 2026 • Duration 55:58
How do you go from winning the Mercury Prize to writing music for a CBeebies series about a pig named Hector and a very glamorous chicken named Pru? The answer takes in a Tim Buckley obsession that lasted five years, years of touring America with bands like Frightened Rabbit, and a Brighton theatre company you've almost certainly never heard of.
In this week's episode, Sean finally sits down with Tom Gray, songwriter, founding member of Gomez, and the person behind the Broken Record campaign that took on Spotify. This is the first bit of a two-part conversation.
This episode stays close to the music and the person: what it meant to make Bring It On in 1997, before home recording was what everyone did, and what it felt like when it won.
Tom Gray is a songwriter and composer and a founding member of Gomez. The band's debut album Bring It On, recorded in bedrooms and back rooms when its members were 22 and 23, beat Massive Attack and Pulp to win the Mercury prize.
He went on to write music for theatre and film, including the CBeebies animated series Tilly and Friends, based on Polly Dunbar's books.
However, since 2020, Tom has been at the centre of one of the most significant debates in the British music industry. He founded the #BrokenRecord campaign, which started as a Twitter thread during the first lockdown and became a movement that put music creator rights onto the parliamentary agenda.
Alongside the campaign, Tom has been Chair of The Ivors Academy since 2022 and stood as a Labour candidate for Brighton Pavilion in the 2024 general election.
The conversation covers how Gomez happened: what making records at home without a budget or a studio actually does for the music, and the aesthetic of limitation that defined the band's early sound. Tom talks through the years he spent chasing down a slice of Tim Buckley's back catalogue, the anticipation of finally hearing the Starsailor album, the disappointment of actually listening to it, and the one track, 'Dolphins', that made the whole rabbit hole worth it.
The conversation also gets into what the other Gomez members have been up to, including an Empire of the Sun connection, and the first threads of the streaming frustration that becomes the whole of Part 2.
Geoff Barrow (Portishead) Made a Film with a Sleaford Mod and Every Penny Invada Had
Season 6 · Episode 8
Tuesday, June 16, 2026 • Duration 01:07:39
What do you do when everyone tells you that you can't make a film without the right connections, the right funding, the right people saying yes? If you're Geoff Barrow, you spend everything Invada Records has on proving them wrong. And the result is a fantastic watch.
In this week's episode, Sean Adams sat in the sun outside Geoff's home near Portishead to talk about GAME, the debut feature from Invada Films, a gripping rural thriller set against the backdrop of the 1993 British rave scene. It stars Marc Bessant and Jason Williamson from Sleaford Mods as a dealer and a poacher locked in a tense standoff deep in the Somerset woods.
It was shot for £150,000 (essentially all the money Invada had), and it was written, produced and distributed from Bristol, by people who actually lived in that world.
Geoff Barrow started out as a tape op for Massive Attack before co-founding Portishead. He runs Invada Records in Bristol, which has released soundtracks for Drive, Stranger Things and Red Dead Redemption alongside records by Gazelle Twin, Billy Nomates, Beak> and more.
Alongside Ben Salisbury, Barrow has scored Ex Machina, Annihilation, Civil War, Black Mirror and many more.
However, GAME is something different: his first credit as producer and co-writer of a feature film.
They talk about why making GAME felt like a reaction to being told no, and how a five-hour session with a friend who had been both a poacher and a countryside rave supplier in the early 90s shaped the script.
The conversation also gets into why casting Jason Williamson was an obvious call the moment it came up, why Geoff stripped the score back to almost nothing (he has spent enough years watching low-budget films drown themselves in music to know what it does), and how a football teammate called DJ Smudge ended up making the period-accurate 1993 bangers on the soundtrack.
From there the conversation goes wider: the inside story of how Invada came to release the Drive soundtrack, why Mica Levi's Under the Skin changed what Geoff thought a film score could be, why Kangding Ray's Sirāt gave him a similar jolt more recently, what it was like working with Alex Garland and Ben Wheatley, why Low's Double Negative is one of the most important records of the 21st century, how the people who went to those countryside raves in 1993 ended up voting Reform, what he'd do with £500 million if he had it, and what all of his records would taste like.
Recorded, engineered and hosted by Sean Adams (seaninsound.com) at Polygon Portal, Soho. Polygon Portal's immersive listening room is back for Season Two from October, with Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, Pixies' Bossanova and De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising among the album playback sessions on their listings, well worth a look if you're in London.
00:00:00 - Cold open: the things we never thought we'd cover 00:00:16 - Welcome back, Helena 00:00:41 - Recapping the Lord Brennan interview 00:09:17 - Qobuz and the midyear playlists 00:12:10 - Bill Drummond's No Music Day 00:16:33 - What if music was treated like football 00:19:39 - Andy Burnham's DJ sets and Paris Hilton 00:26:42 - How we actually prep for an interview 00:34:32 - Idea: politicians' favourite bands on election flyers 00:39:00 - Wrap up and thanks to Lord Brennan
The Drowned in Sound podcast is presented in partnership with Qobuz, the pioneering high-quality music streaming and download platform for music enthusiasts and audiophiles. Each week we curate playlists on Qobuz, featuring our favourite records, artists, and the themes we explore on the show.
It also gets into third spaces, pubs, youth clubs, and Geoff Barrow's argument that five hundred million pounds would be better spent reopening youth clubs than almost anything else the industry could fund. It ends on why proper research, done slowly, might matter more to a working musician right now than any dashboard full of streaming data.
The Drowned in Sound podcast is presented in partnership with Qobuz, the pioneering high-quality music streaming and download platform for music enthusiasts and audiophiles. Each week we curate playlists on Qobuz, featuring our favourite records, artists, and the themes we explore on the show.
The episode also gets into the EU Copyright Directive and why the UK failed to implement it, the CMA's 2022 music streaming market study, and what Chicago School economics has to do with how governments think about music monopolies.
But the last twenty minutes are about hope. The per diem proposal for songwriters has gained real traction. Tom's belief that one difficult conversation a day, with whoever is in front of you, is more useful than waiting for systemic change. And the case for cautious optimism from someone who has been fighting this for five years and can see things starting to move.
The Drowned in Sound podcast is presented in partnership with Qobuz, the pioneering high-quality music streaming and download platform for music enthusiasts and audiophiles. Each week we curate playlists on Qobuz, featuring our favourite records, artists, and the themes we explore on the show.
Part 2 is next week: more on the Broken Record campaign, the Kevin Brennan Bill, and AI.
The Drowned in Sound podcast is presented in partnership with Qobuz, the pioneering high-quality music streaming and download platform for music enthusiasts and audiophiles. Each week we curate playlists on Qobuz, featuring our favourite records, artists, and the themes we explore on the show.
GAME has its live stream premiere on Thursday 18 June at 7:30pm BST. Tickets are £5 and available everywhere except North America. Geoff, director John Minton, Marc Bessant and screenwriter Rob Williams will all be in the live chat taking questions, hosted by Paul Weedon. Get your ticket at https://watch.eventive.org/invadafilms/play/69c69adff08307d6b404d921
🎧 The Drowned in Sound podcast is presented in partnership with Qobuz, the pioneering high-quality music streaming and download platform for music enthusiasts and audiophiles. Each week we curate playlists on Qobuz, featuring our favourite records, artists, and the themes we explore on the show.
Discover shows related to Drowned in Sound, based on actual content similarities. Explore podcasts with similar topics, themes, and formats, backed by real data.
