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.

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Money 4 Nothing is created as a labor of love by Sam and Saxon. Consider a paid subscription so we can keep the lights on.

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.

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