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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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, laying a heavy sonic signature on the 1970s—and pretty much much everything that has come since....

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 know, exists, we talked with Cherie Hu of Water and Music. We discuss production tools, major...

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, long time. Until now. Coinciding (suspiciously, perhaps) with the release of Scott’s new album...

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 physical consumption tell us about the digital world? Does it follow the endless trend for...

"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 functional subjects in the service of Capital. Starting from the conceptual ideas of John Cage and...

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, Wall Street know-it-alls in WAY over their head, and at least one climactic stock-offering...

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 a look at the Merlin Network, powerful grouping of independent labels that banded together to...

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 up with isn't actually going to be determined by technology in and of itself. And if recent major...

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 estate, specifically the classic song “Got To Give It Up”—a brilliant track that VIBED a lot like...

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 analysis of what—exactly—they are, or how they’re meant to work. Answering these seemingly simple...

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 and on and on. As a result, the most important questions about how the business works—for...