#38 — Shane Morris

Hello! And welcome to another edition of the Inside The Newsroom podcast newsletter! Today’s guest is... Shane Morris, former music label all-rounder for Sony, who now runs his own digital media company. I came across Shane on Twitter after his thread on country music’s problem with racism vent viral, and he turned out to be even more knowledgable about the industry than I thought.

We got into a host of interesting stuff about the Lil Nas X ordeal, who runs music and what’s exciting about the industry today. Below I’ve provided more context on everything we talked about. Enjoy!

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I Saw This in the News, What Actually Happened?

When 19-year-old Lil Nas X — real name Montero Lamar Hill — dropped his single “Old Town Road” a few years ago, he struggled to get any traction. Finally, on the video sharing app TikTok (more on this later), the song categorized as “Country Trap” exploded in popularity and surged on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart. But as it neared No. 1, Billboard pulled it, citing that the song “incorporates references to country and cowboy imagery, but does not embrace enough elements of today’s country music to chart in its current version.” Uh oh is right…

Andrew R. Chow, Time

The Song In Question…

Tell me it’s not catchy… but is it country?

Does Country Music Have a Race Problem?

It’s easy to sit on the sidelines and speculate in a newsletter. So let me say this as an avid country music listener (I’m listening to Florida Georgia Line as I write this): I’m not ready to brand the entire country genre racist. Sure there are racist individuals working for the labels and even some artists, but to give it a blanket label is unfair. I think it’s more about the lack of access into the industry, and transcendent artists such as Lil Nas X will do a great deal for breaking down boundaries for the future.

Marissa R. Moss, Los Angeles Times

Why Do We Even Have Genres Anyway?

The real question we should be discussing is how to mitigate the importance of music genres, which are archaic functions exacerbated by the rise of iTunes, Spotify and others. Ultimately, genres satisfy deeply rooted human traits wired into our brains that allow us to stay in control to make sense of new experiences. As much as I don’t like it, I won’t be able to stop humans from putting things into categories, so I guess music genres will have to stay.

Scott Barry Kaufman for Psychology Today

Before I Forget: What the F*** is TikTok?

Good question. As a 27-year-old, it’s not every day I call myself an old fart, but there’s no way I’ll ever make it onto TikTok. Anyway, to better understand how Lil Nas X blew up, we must know where the kids hang out. Similar to Snapchat, TikTok is apparently an app known for users lip-syncing and acting-out memes over music. Videos using ‘Old Town Road’ as backing music have been viewed more than 67 million times. #Yeehaw.

Sarah Perez, Tech Crunch

So Who Does Control the music industry?

Depends on who you ask. Thirty years ago the ‘Big Six’ gripped the industry, i.e. Warner Music, CBS, MCA, BMG, Capitol-EMI and PolyGram. Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, we now have a ‘Big Three’ who account for three-quarters of global recorded music: Sony, Universal and Warner. But according to Rolling Stone, the five most powerful people in music don’t even work in the industry…

Tim Ingham, Rolling Stone

What’s Myspace up to?

Once the go-to platform for streaming and uploading music, Myspace has been extremely busy as of late, but for all the wrong reasons. It was announced a couple of months ago that the platform had “accidentally” deleted 50 million songs, the result of a server migration project. But don’t fret, they apologized for the inconvenience.

Niraj Chokshi, New York Times

And finally…

Here are all the reasons why we don’t need music genres…

Related Podcasts

#32 — Blues Music Special with Giles Robson and Aaron Phillips

#16 — Rodney Carmichael (NPR Music)

Next up…

Later this week we’ll have Jeff Zeleny of CNN on the podcast. Jeff is CNN’s Senior Washington Correspondent and we got into his journey to the top of political journalism, as well as Joe Biden’s record $6.3 million in donations in the first 24 hours of announcing his Presidential run.

Last time…

#37 — Josh Morgerman from the TV show ‘Hurricane Man’

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