Money 4 Nothing
99 episodes - English - Latest episode: 24 days ago -A podcast on music and capitalism hosted by Saxon Baird and Sam Backer. Dropped every other week.
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Episodes
How Hip Hop Conquered the Charts (feat. Amy Coddington)
June 19, 2024 14:53 - 55 minutes - 50.7 MBAlthough 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...
Embracing Our Fandom (W/ Monia Ali)
May 24, 2024 20:10 - 1 hour - 68.9 MBSure—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...
The Political Economy of Rap Beefs
May 12, 2024 13:14 - 1 hour - 64.1 MBDrake 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...
Karaoke and Personal Pop
April 26, 2024 17:29 - 59 minutes - 54.1 MBThis 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 dis...
Karaoke’s Personal Pop
April 26, 2024 17:29 - 59 minutes - 54.1 MBThis 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 dis...
Millennials Nostalgia Tour
April 12, 2024 17:11 - 31 minutes - 28.8 MBDear 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 ...
Keep on Streamin’ in the Free World
April 05, 2024 20:02 - 1 hour - 56.8 MBThis 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 o...
A Living Wage and a Tik Tok Ban: Could…Congress Transform Music?
March 20, 2024 18:48 - 1 hour - 65 MBMuch 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 to...
Imagine Dragons: The Most Popular Band of the Millennium?
February 26, 2024 15:40 - 1 hour - 63.7 MBIs 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 ...
Universal VS. TikTok: The Showdown No One Should Have Wanted
February 05, 2024 19:23 - 29 minutes - 27.3 MBThis 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 w...
Pitchfork, GQ, and the Music Criticism Lifestyle
January 30, 2024 18:53 - 1 hour - 61.3 MBLike 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...
Royalty Rumble at Spotify and a Crisis at Hipgnosis
January 11, 2024 23:13 - 58 minutes - 53.8 MBNew 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 lea...
BMI Sells Out
December 16, 2023 16:25 - 58 minutes - 54 MBWhen 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, an...
Can You Actually Support This Podcast On Patreon? (w/Penny Fractions)
November 21, 2023 22:41 - 47 minutes - 43.6 MBThis 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 a...
E-Zoo and the Future of Nightlife
November 03, 2023 18:36 - 57 minutes - 53 MBOver 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 investigati...
Bandcamp Blues: (Penny Fractions 4 Nothing)
October 20, 2023 22:54 - 44 minutes - 40.6 MBHi 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 ...
Scooter, Baby! The Life and Times of the Most 2010’s Manager You Can Possibly Imagine
October 13, 2023 20:42 - 59 minutes - 54.5 MBFirst 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...
Moog’s World: The Story Behind the Synthesizer Behind Modern Music (feat. Albert Glinsky)
September 20, 2023 15:49 - 1 hour - 75.6 MBIf 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. Think...
State of Pl-A(i) With Cherie Hu
September 02, 2023 15:31 - 1 hour - 64 MBMachine 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 la...
Astroworld and the opposite of ”Utopia”
August 10, 2023 18:46 - 1 hour - 56.2 MBOn 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 “Ut...
Super Fans and Super Strikes
July 22, 2023 00:05 - 1 hour - 58 MBThis 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 infini...
Ambient Music: Functionality and Liberating Potentials
June 30, 2023 17:48 - 1 hour - 61.5 MB"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...
K-Pop Merger Mania (feat. the Idolcast)
June 16, 2023 19:26 - 1 hour - 65.2 MBEarly 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 battl...
Merlin and What It Means (and Meant) to be Indie
June 01, 2023 01:28 - 1 hour - 57.1 MBIt 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 ...
The Great Music AI Contradiction (Live at Wavelengths Summit)
May 12, 2023 01:44 - 48 minutes - 44.9 MBEveryone 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 ...
Blurred Lines and the Future of Copyright
April 24, 2023 22:06 - 1 hour - 61.9 MBFive 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 “Bl...
Inside the Algorithm Factory: Music Recommendations (w/ Nick Seaver)
April 10, 2023 04:08 - 1 hour - 59.3 MBIn 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 simpl...
Streaming in the Dark: No One Knows Anything (w/ Meredith Rose)
March 24, 2023 16:42 - 59 minutes - 54 MBNo 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 example.....
Spotify Redux (Quiet Threats + Desperate Flailing)
March 08, 2023 02:08 - 1 hour - 65.5 MBFor this episode, Saxon and Sam check in on Spotify, which is…not in great shape. Even in the best of times, the company was handcuffed to the majors, and threatened by mega-sized competitors like Apple & Amazon. And these, my friend, are no longer the best of times. But it’s okay! They’ll get...faster! And more efficient! And, um, remake their homepage? That’ll do it. Definitely. Meanwhile, the majors are starting to make noise about the need to change the streaming ecosystem. It used to ...
From Houston to the World: The Political Economy of DJ Screw (with Lance Scott Walker)
February 18, 2023 19:26 - 1 hour - 71.7 MBIn the '90s, a remarkable sound was being developed in Houston—its cavernous drums, booming, crawling vocals, and distinctive, hiccuping rhythms reflect the indelible influence of DJ Screw. During the latter half of the decade, the hardworking musician produced hundreds if not thousands of tapes, mixing regional classics with on-the-fly freestyles to develop a new template for southern rap. While Screw's life was cut tragically short, his musical style has lived on, influencing everything fro...
Metadata Errors in the Lime Green Lamborghini (With Kristin Robinson)
February 01, 2023 17:30 - 1 hour - 55.7 MBThe success of YouTube has been inextricably linked to the music business. Initially a remarkably effective streaming pirate, recent years have seen the site pivot to industry ally, paying out millions in royalties for the copyrighted material played on its platform. But who gets the money? And how? And…who is making sure it goes to the right people? These are the questions opened up by Billboard journalist Kristin Robinson in her fascinating discussion of a remarkable YouTube scam that saw...
Reggaeton Gets Sued
January 16, 2023 17:04 - 59 minutes - 54.7 MBIt was revealed just this past week that basically all of Reggaeton is being sued. No, really. As you may or may not know, the massively popular genre from Latin-American and the Caribbean is actually based mostly on a few Jamaican riddims (the instrumental background or “rhythm” in contemporary Jamaican music). Now the production duo of Steely & Clevie, who wrote the riddim behind the massively popular early '90s hit "Dem Bow" by Shabba Ranks, want their bag for the riddim's use in Reggaeto...
A.I. in Der Klub (And Your Next Playlist)
January 02, 2023 23:04 - 1 hour - 64.8 MBThe music industry is becoming increasingly disenchanted with Tik-Tok, finding it difficult to bend the wildly popular app for its own profitability...let alone find the next mega-star. Does that mean we might see the big three start to put the squeeze on Tik-Tok for dipping into its massive catalog without much of a payout? It worked well with Spotify for Lucian Grainge and co. But can the same sort of profit be siphoned? Also, Sam and Saxon dive into the the coming A.I. apocalypse. Well, o...
What Taylor Swift Tells Us About the Billboard Charts
December 19, 2022 12:46 - 1 hour - 59.4 MBTaylor Swift made headlines recently by grabbing all top 10 spots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart — a first in its 64 year history — with the release of her latest record Midnights. Cool. Good for Taylor and her Swifties. But….what does that actually mean? You might think it's a simple answer, but actually the Billboard charts are a complex beast with a long and winding history that didn’t even start in music. On this episode, we ask how the charts help us narrativize music in a consumerist s...
The Rise and Fall of SST Records with Jim Ruland
December 01, 2022 19:30 - 53 minutes - 48.7 MBThe modern music industry is defined, in large part, by major labels and centralized digital services. To try and imagine a world without (or at least around them), we’ve been looking backwards to the 1980s, when a thriving underground economy enabled a remarkable flood of American rock. If one label could be said to define that moment, it would be LA’s SST Records. Founded in Hermosa Beach by Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn, SST would spend the decade releasing an unbeatable string of albums...
Penny Fractions Live with Cherie Hu and Liz Pelly
November 16, 2022 19:58 - 1 hour - 57.1 MBOur good friend David Turner celebrated five years of Penny Fractions earlier this month with a live show at Nowadays. On stage, David was joined by our very own Sam Backer along side heavy-hitters Liz Pelly and Cherie Hu. Enjoy this live recording from the show as the crew run through everything you'd expect from a M4N discussion on the current state of the music industry: criticisms, hot takes, laughs, shade, shout-outs...oh and lollipops. Subscribe to our newsletter! Follow us on Twitte...
Dan Ozzi on the Political Economy of Selling Out
November 01, 2022 11:02 - 1 hour - 65 MBIt’s a tale as old as Nirvana. A band (ideally punk or punk influenced) forms and gets some buzz. Major labels swarm. The kids sign on the dotted line…and are promptly thrown to the wolves. Fade to black. And while that often-repeated story isn’t exactly false, it doesn’t do much to capture the shifting dynamics that shaped the economies of rock over the 90’s and 2000’s—an era when the relationship between independent artists and the major label mainstream was central to American musical cul...
The Music Catalog Acquisition Cool Down
October 18, 2022 19:28 - 57 minutes - 53 MBIn the past few months, the insane flood of money that has been flowing into the purchase of music rights (and really, into financial and tech related firms of pretty much all stripes) has begun to slow down. Crazy what rising interest rates will do, huh? These changes have prompted a wave of takes about the potential collapse of a host of music rights firms that overpromised, overpaid, and now seem poised to underdeliver—Hipgnosis, the industry leader, first among them. But…is all lost for ...
Damon Krukowski on Unions, Streaming, and Musical Labor
September 23, 2022 20:19 - 51 minutes - 47.4 MBYou might know Damon Krukowski from his role in the groundbreaking indy band Galaxie 500. Or maybe you’ve listened to his podcast, “Ways of Hearing” or read his excellent newsletter, or his widespread journalism. More recently, however, he’s put on another hat, as an influential rabble rouser for Union of Musicians and Allied Workers. A new group that emerged from the disruptions of Covid, UMAW has worked to change the conversation about everything from streaming and touring to major label c...
The KLF: A Foolproof Way To Hit No. 1
September 08, 2022 07:33 - 1 hour - 70.2 MBA foolproof way to hit number 1 is what the Time Lords—AKA the JAMS, AKA the KLF—promised the readers of “The Manual,” their 1988 book. After all, they had just done it, with the insipid brilliance of their Gary Glitter Meets Dr. Who mashup “Doctorin’ the Tardis.” And if they could do hack it, so could you, right? But if you did…would it even matter? Today, we’re talking through the careers of Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, following them on their remarkable journey into the dark heart of pop...
Born to Sell: Springsteen’s Tickets + Meta Makes Moves
August 12, 2022 09:31 - 1 hour - 55.3 MBAt this point, you’ve probably seen headlines about the insane (like $5K+ insane) prices for some tickets to see The Boss on his latest tour. It’s the type of music-biz story that breaks out into the wider world—legendary poet of blue-collar post-industrial collapse, selling out to the I-95 yuppies with the help of the hated Ticketmaster. To try to better understand why Bruce (and his fans) did what they did and felt what they felt, we put the story into the broader context of a live industr...
K-Pop Histories Beyond BTS (Featuring The Idolcast)
July 18, 2022 19:07 - 1 hour - 75.1 MBOver the last few years, K-Pop has taken the world by storm. Groups like BTS and BLACKPINK have reached pinnacles of music-biz success both traditional (selling out stadiums worldwide) and distinctly modern (see: serving as the center for a vast and dedicated online community of fans across the globe). But while such groups have received mountains of breathless hype from the western media, this coverage has consistently failed to explain what K-Pop really is—or how it works. To help us lear...
Kate Bush is Running Up Those Charts
July 06, 2022 17:54 - 31 minutes - 28.9 MBIf you’ve been anywhere near…really, any music playing device lately, you’ve probably noticed that Kate Bush (Misty-Moored British Chanteuse and Big Boi’s favorite artist) has a full-blown new-old hit in a way that we really haven’t seen before? Her song “Running up that Hill (A Deal With God)” was featured heavily in the latest season of the hit Netflix show Stranger Things and it’s sort of taken on a life of its own. As Ms. Bush busts through chart-record after chart-record, we take a step...
Independent Labels and Electronic Music with Chal Ravens
June 20, 2022 23:24 - 1 hour - 75 MBThe music industry isn’t a monolith and few scenes have a more distinctive structure than electronic music. As it developed from house and techno to today’s endless array of genres, the music traded the artist-heavy focus of rap or rock for constellations of high-profile DJs, faceless producers, and—most importantly for today’s episode—a host of iconic independent labels. In a hyper-consolidated, major label world, these indies have not only survived but (sometimes) thrived, defining the aes...
Hard Landing: The End of Free Money and The Future of the Music Industry
June 07, 2022 19:57 - 54 minutes - 49.8 MBIf you haven’t noticed, things have gotten...hairy in the economy. Inflation is up, the stock market is down, and the fed’s money machine? It stopped going “brrr.” All of this suggests that we might be leaving the VERY long, frothy period where companies (looking at you Uber!) didn’t need to muddy their hands with things like “earning profits” in order to reshape our lives, cities, communities, and consciousness. But if that’s REALLY happening…what does it mean for the music industry? Saxon ...
What Makes a Hit in 2022? (with Andrew Unterberger)
May 24, 2022 01:12 - 50 minutes - 45.9 MBWe all know that the musical landscape has changed in recent years. Tik Tok, Youtube, playlist culture, social media, and on and on and on—they’ve all remade how we listen, and what we listen to. But when folks (including us?) discuss those changes, they all too frequently focus on the big picture at the expense of the details. Streaming is over a decade old now. How…has it changed? That’s why we were so excited to talk to Andrew Unterberger, a journalist at Billboard who recently wrote a fa...
Mike Park of Asian Man Records
May 05, 2022 11:38 - 51 minutes - 47.4 MBMike Park has been running Asian Man Records out of his mom’s garage for over two decades with a refreshing approach that might seem unusual by today’s standards: there’s no advances and every release is a handshake agreement. “I do this for the love of music,” writes Park on the label’s About page. “Not for capitalist gain or status recognition. I try my best to do the right things ethically and to believe in helping others instead of striving for profit over people.” Somehow its worked, wi...
New vs. Old Music
April 21, 2022 21:20 - 1 hour - 55 MBIt’s a debate that’s all the rage. New data suggests that catalog recordings (anything released over 18 months ago) had begun to outstrip new music in the streaming economy. Is this the end of pop as we know it? Is it because the kids just don’t like culture? Is it because….the INTERNET? Well, maybe. But first we need to look at how we get those stats and dig into some quick boomer-listening habit history. From the vagaries of Tik Tok virality to millennials leaving the pop zone, a lot is go...
Mat Dryhurst and the Case for Crypto in Music (Part 2)
April 04, 2022 17:35 - 40 minutes - 36.8 MBPart 2 of our conversation with Mat Dryhurst on Crypto’s evolving place in the music industry, both major and independent. Dryhurst has long been one of the most active and articulate proponents of these technologies (and the social formations developing around them) and has a deep well of experience and knowledge in this fast-moving space. While we don’t agree on everything, it was very much the kind of conversation that’s needed to push forward our understanding of the billionaire-backed, ...
Mat Dryhurst and the Case for Crypto in Music (Part 1)
March 28, 2022 20:08 - 1 hour - 61.3 MBOver the past year, we’ve devoted more than a few episodes to discussions about Crypto, NFTs, and Web3—projects that we’ve been, it feels safe to say…fairly skeptical about. Given that skepticism, we were delighted to have the chance speak to Mat Dryhurst, who hosts the Interdependence podcast with Holly Herndon, for a discussion about Crypto’s evolving place in the music industry, both major and independent. Dryhurst has long been one of the most active and articulate proponents of these te...