Money 4 Nothing

In the last few years, "Spotify Wrapped" has ascended the seasonal pantheon for music lovers. Come December, our social media feeds are inundated with detailed numerical statistics from friends and relatives, breaking down their yearly listening habits. It’s inescapable. But why do we love it? And what does it tell us about where we are as listeners? Saxon and Sam dig into the jolliest form of surveillance capitalism since Santa Clause, unpacking the ideology–and the business—of this musical elf-on-a-shelf. Also—some heavy memorials, first to the brilliant music writer Greg Tate, and then the King of the Low-End, Robbie Shakespeare. May their memories be a blessing.

One of the the biggest music stories of this past year is Universal Music Group going public for...billions. If the question wasn't already answered over the past decade, the Majors are back baby. But what does Universal’s ever-inflating valuation tell us about the music business and it's future? What future does Lucian Grainge, CEO of UMG, envision and are all our listening habits and the culture of music guided by his hand? To understand how we got here, Sam and Saxon go back in time to when the label was just the glimmer in a glass of a CEO's Seagram’s whiskey (no, literally). We explore how Universal grew to industry dominance, from the frothy tech boom of the late 90s to the equally frothy tech boom of the late 2010’s, and puzzle through what its Roblox-chain-panopticon stranglehold on the industry holds in store for artists and fans and gamers and Tik-Tok and Peloton riders and...basically anywhere that anyone listens to music now.

It’s been 20 years since Apple launched the iPod and a lot has changed in the music industry…as in everything. The mp3, iTunes, Spotify, penny fractions for streams, UMG's recent IPO, music catalogs as attractive asset class, 360 deals and the list goes on. The launch of the iPod doesn’t explain everything in how we got here, but it's undeniably a major watershed moment for a deeper understanding of this history. Saxon interviews award-winning journalist Eamonn Forde about his recent piece in The Guardian on the iPod's 20th anniversary to grapple with all of this, leading to a sprawling and insightful interview examining the current state of the music business and technology. Also, Saxon and Sam discuss briefly the tragic events around Travis Scott’s Astroworld concert and challenge popular media narratives by asking about the responsibility of Live Nation in this horrifying incident. 

Read Forde's piece in The Guardian

How is music made? Not how do record companies work, but how is music made? And where does it go after we're done with it? According to Kyle Devine, a professor of Musicology at the University of Oslo, we’ve all been paying far too little to this story, closing our eyes to the environmental implications of our favorite sounds. Kyle talks to Saxon and Sam about his book “Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music,” an eye-opening exploration of the material infrastructure that lies behind vinyl disks (and internet apps). The cloud, by the way? It’s a place. And it burns gas just like the rest of us. [Originally Aired 10.27.21]

What happens if you or your band is good, like—really good? You get SIGNED. A record contract! You've made it!....or did you? The fact that major label contracts aren’t particularly fair is well known, but what if they’re doing more than just ripping off artists and an empty promise? In his recent book, “Getting Signed: Record Contracts, Musicians, and Power in Society,” Scholar David Arditi argues that label contracts are actually a key element in an ideological system that structures popular music, one that stretches from the Grammys or The Voice to your local Battle of the Bands and the basic assumptions of friends and family. Taking a long hard look at one of the central building blocks of the modern music industry, Arditi helps Sam and Saxon think through why labels retain their power despite changing technology—and how that landscape could shift in the future.

The streaming economy—and much of the discourse around it—is based on a simple promise: all of the music. Not some of the music, not most of the music, but ALL of the music being available to stream on-demand. But as we all know, the cloud is far from complete. Artists from De La Soul to Aaliyah have long been absent, while entire eras of music blogs, mid-aughts mixtape culture and MySpace emo bands are simply unavailable, perhaps forever (RIP to the glory days of G-Unit, Dipset and your high school's best Dashboard Confessional impersonator). And while there are a few outlets still holding it down (insert prayer emoji for DatPiff), there is a sense that they are consistently under threat of soon disappearing as well. So on this episode, Sam and Saxon decide to take a look at music streaming from its margins, trying to think through what musical erasure can tell us about the future of listening, fandom, history and more.

When Lee "Scratch" Perry left this world on August 29th, we lost a towering figure of 20th century culture as a producer, singer, and trailblazer who spent decades at the forefront of Jamaican music. And while there has been a wave of articles celebrating the legacy of "The Upsetter," Saxon and Sam thought there had been far too little examination of the economic, political, social, religious and cultural background that structured his career, shaped his genius and cultivated his eccentric persona. Just how did Perry go from being born in a poverty-stricken rural part of Jamaica and raised on lasting Yoruba traditions in a post-slavery, heavily-colonized island to becoming a major player in the rise of reggae, Bob Marley, dub and the Jamaican music industry? Along the way they also discuss Jamaican political violence caught in a cold-war struggle, the neocolonial character of a predatory western music industry, Rastafarian politics, the cottage music scene of Kingston, the anti-colonial resonances of Perry’s lyrical style and how the man was to eventually capitalized on the heavily-commodified global reggae market we know today. Come for the legend of Black Ark--stay for Mr. Brown and his coffin. 

Further Reading:

"People Funny Boy" by David Katz

Further listening:

33 Hour Lee "Scratch" Perry Playlist

MTV had a remarkably unheralded 40th anniversary this month. While Music Television (still the channel’s official name) has been out of music videos for decades, it was a truly transformative force for a long struggling record industry back in the early 80s. Diving into those early years, Sam and Saxon go long on this episode and try to figure out how a scrappy little corporation (fully backed by America Express and Warner Media, natch) managed to get a nation of teenagers watching everything from Duran Duran and Michael Jackson to U2—and then pick through what happened next, as a flurry of backroom deals and monopolistic plans quickly strangled the channel’s brief moment of (alleged?) cultural invention. Along the way, we’ll talk about the pleasures of yelling at cable companies, the difficulties of media history, and try to figure out just what it means—both then and now—to mix images and sound.

What would happen if a government took a serious look at the music industry and decided everything wasn’t alright? To our surprise, the UK Parliament has done just that, issuing a blistering report on label consolidation, monopolistic abuses, and streaming payouts—and issuing some interesting suggestions about how things could change. To help us dig in, we're lucky to have David Turner of the must-read of the Penny Fractions newsletter back on the show. We talk about the potential benefits of payola, the systemic oppression of advances, the awe-inspiring power of government-backed research, and why it’s so important to start music biz histories before the year 2000. As imperfect as they are, reports like this suggest a change might be coming. Figuring out what parts make sense—and what parts simply don’t—is vital prep work for the future.

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The Grateful Dead are one of America’s weirdest musical stories, an avalanche of tie-dyed hippies, 30-minute drum solos, acid, and endless, endless touring. But over their 30+ year career, the band also proved themselves to be incredibly prescient, helping to create everything from noise cancelling headphones and concert live-streaming to the “experience economy.” In fact, the idea of distributing free music to enable live shows that they invented has become the basic model of the industry overall. To learn more about how the Dead’s unique approach helped lay the groundwork for the 21st century, we talked to Jesse Jarnow, Author of Heads: A Biography of Psychadelic America, and the co-host of the Dead-Cast. He filled us in on the philosophy of “FREE,” dead-head-tech, and...how much Jerry just didn’t want to be a cop.   

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