Money 4 Nothing

It can feel hard to believe, but it seems like live music in the US might be coming back (finally). Which also means that bands and fans are getting ready to line up and spend a LOT of time and money with the concert behemoth that is Live Nation / Ticketmaster, a massive public corporation with a lock on the American concert industry. But how did these companies achieve their position? What exactly does a promoter do anyway? And what was the deal with that whole Pearl Jam vs. Ticketmaster thing? Sam and Saxon celebrate the return of the road with a deep dive into the touring industry—from the secondary-market-formerly-known-as-scalping to the unexpected heroism of Garth Brooks. Turn the page, baby. Turn the page.  

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Time Stamps

0:20 - Live music is back and the economy of music gets rolling.

2:10 - Sill work to be done: Small indie venues haven’t re-opened, Save Our Stages still hasn’t paid their government bail out money  and the behind the scenes jobs are yet to be filled.

4:30 - Rewriting the Pearl Jam vs. Ticketmaster narrative.

8:30 - The most popular rock band in America tries to go on tour without Ticketmaster.

11:00 - How event ticketing originally work and why it was a mess.

12:30 - Ticketmaster changes the game on the back of new technologies and becomes central to the music industry.

14:30 - The rise of the “service fee.”

15:15 - Breakdown of where  the money goes in the price of ticket.

19:40 - How Pearl Jam  wanted to lower ticket prices without putting a dent in their cut.

21:00 - Was Pearl Jam full of sh*t??

24:00 - The tension of what live music is worth, who should get paid and the difficulty in assessing what is appropriate price of a ticket.

28:30 - Are Pearl Jam and Ticketmaster on the same side of the coin?

30:50 -There are endless shades of grey in the big complicated machine that is the music industry. 

32:00 - Beavis and Butthead interlude.

33:25 - How today’s ticketing industry became the monster it is.

37:30 - How Live Nation changed the game  and started throwing its weight around.

43:00 - An elite class of venues and bands develops.

44:30 - As the biggest artists begin to squeeze Live Nation, the company looks elsewhere for profit in ticketing.

46:30 - How the industry that Live Nation built out is deleterious to music and monopolistic.

49:00 - Is the current state of the music industry unsustainable, even for Live Nation?

50:30 - The rise of festivals.

52:00 - How the price of the ticket can reflect on an artist’s brand and its relationship with fans.

55:10 - The development of the secondary ticket market and Live Nation’s move into this market to supplement a lack of profit.

59:30 - The inefficiencies of an industry focused on extracting profit in new ways might be its dead end.

01:01:00- How big artists have reacted to keeping tickets at a fair price.

01:04:00 - The stakes at play and is there a more fair and livable alternative?

01:05:15 - Understanding the complexities of this live music industry and its inequalities.

Award-winning poet Morgan Parker talks with Saxon Baird about Fugazi, having a DIY ethos and how to navigate being an artist in the tangled web of an exploitative, capitalist system.

Further Listening: Can Fugazi help us imagine a better future for music?

Follow Morgan Parker @morganapple

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When talking about West Coast gangster rap, the focus is usually on the era-defining stars who reigned during 1990s—Dr. Dre, Tupac, and Snoop Dog foremost among them. In her new book, “To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangster Rap Changed America,” Professor Felicia Angeja Viator argues that starting with the success of Dr. Dre's The Chronic or even N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton leaves out half the story. The aesthetic and cultural innovations of gangster rap were deeply rooted in the political economy of Black L.A., a space defined by entrepreneurial DJs, omnipresent police brutality, deindustrialization, a thriving gang culture, and the tantalizing access to the power and prestige of Hollywood. This history is essential for understanding how West Coast rappers were able to snatch New York’s spotlight, transforming Hip Hop into a national musical form, and laying the groundwork for...pretty much all of the pop culture produced since. Come for a revaluation of Eazy-E. Stay to find out which Parliament track is best suited for stopping a teenage brawl.  

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Time Stamps:

02:40 - How Los Angeles plays a special roll in hip-hop and is instrumental in the genre crossing over 

06:00 - LA Mobile DJ crews from the early '80s lay the groundwork through massive parties and DIY networking with local radio stations and gangs

11:20 -  Egyptian Lover and what early LA “hip-hop ”sounded like

15:20 - What early '80s LA mobile dance parties played and how a Parliament song was used to keep the peace

19:35 - The relationship of early LA hip-hop to gang culture and the underground economies of South Central   

21:00 - How cash from the drug trade can support underground music and that gets racialized 

25:20 - Eazy-E saw music as a way out of the drug trade and a more sustainable income

26:30 - While punk wanted to stay on the margins, hip-hop was on margins and wanted to be part of the mainstream for inclusion and monetary reward

29:00 - The malevolent presence of the militarized LAPD in black communities, and its negative impact historically on black arts in LA 

32:00 - The use of “the batteram,” a military vehicle bought by the LAPD to bulldoze crack houses in an effort to catch drug dealers in the act 

34:30 - Toddy Tee’s song “Batteram” and the fear of the vehicle in south central LA

38:00 - The use of popular hip-hop beats and parody by Toddy Tee and Ice Cube to localize hip-hop in LA

40:40 - The use of explicit blue material and its legacy in music and hip-hop

41:30 - How Run-DMC’s sound influences up and coming Los Angeles hip-hop artists to create something uniquely local

43:20 - The beginnings of Eric “Eazy-E” Wright and how he carves out a space in the local LA hip-hop scene

47:45 - Ruthless Records and NWA attempt to walk the line between embracing the fears of growing gang culture in LA while expressing their grievances in an effort to gain notoriety and publicity

48:46 - The complicated politics of the “Straight Outta Compton” music video

51:00 - Ice Cube goes on a press tour that is both political and publicity — calling out MTV for banning their video while criticizing the LAPD

54:00 - Was the PR savviness of NWA related to being in a major American media center ?

56:40 - The success of Dennis Hopper’s LA-based cop film “Colors” and its effect on America’s perception of the gang culture in South Central Los Angeles

1:00:00 - The Rodney King uprising, Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic” wrestles the spotlight on rap, and  hip-hop crosses over

1:02:00 - LA opens the door and offers a model for regional rap in places like LA and elsewhere.

1:06:00 - Gangsta rap goes commercial without losing its commitment to being deliberately rooted in local black experiences, and how that opens the door for other hip-hop artists to go in other directions

1:08:00 -  Hip-hop can uniquely stay committed to a local scene while still having an eye on the national mainstream

Ever since they appeared in the late 80’s, the legendary D.C. rock band Fugazi has stood as the absolute pinnacle of stick-to-your-guns DIY success. Holding prices to $5 shows and $10 albums, refusing to make merch or sign to a major label, the group still managed to sell hundreds of thousands of records and created diehard fans across the world. Since they went on “indefinite hiatus” in the early 2000’s, the group’s reputation has only grown. But what—if anything—can their way of running a band teach us in the utterly transformed and technologically-driven musical landscape of the 2020’s? More than you might think. Saxon and Sam dig into what Fugazi did and how it worked, in an effort to try to tease out some lessons and possibilities for the present-day underground.

This episode has been brought to you by #lessbummer2021, a no-profit organization dedicated to bringing uplifting, invigorating stories of non-dystopia to the Money 4 Nothing podcast. Did we succeed? Drop us a line at [email protected] or subscribe to our newsletter at money4nothing.substack.com.

You know what Top 40 radio is. But…think about it for a second. Top 40 what? Songs? Albums? Bands? And top for who? Once you get started, the supposedly homogenous “mainstream” at the center of American listening is actually pretty complicated. To help us explore the past of pop, we talk with Eric Weisbard, music critic and professor of American Studies, whose book “Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music” examines how radio formats and the artists that populated them helped make modern music. We go from the bizarre pan-ethnic brass band sounds of Herb Albert to the Cleveland station that invented classic rock—with a stop along the way for some Dolly.

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Buy Top 40 Democracy: The Rival Mainstreams of American Music by Eric Weisbard

Metallica recently got trolled by Twitch when the gaming platform dubbed over a live performance. The Internet LOL'd considering the metal band's history with suing its own fans and taking down Napster. But there's so much more behind this move that is more important and could shape the future of music copyright. 

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Plenty has been written about the music and legacy an artist leaves behind when they pass prematurely. But there hasn’t been much of a discussion on how the obligatory posthumous album is handled and marketed. Sam and Saxon discuss the different ways the music an artist leaves behind is handled by taking a critical look at Nirvana, Elliott Smith, the red-tape legal battles (and exploitation) of Jimi Hendrix and Tupac and the head-scratching collaborations of a deceased Michael Jackson. Also, a passionate defense of Sublime’s self-titled and the good work the majors can (sometimes) do if they choose to put on the white gloves.

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When people talk about music piracy, it almost always carries a 21st century slant— Napster, Pirates Bay, iPods and so on. As it turns, battles over who has a right to make and sell music has a FAR longer history, one that stretches from the jazz loving Hot Record Society in the 1940s to acid-fried hippies trying to take Dylan to the people, and the battles around sampling that reshaped hip hop in the 90s. To learn more, we talked to Dr. Alex Sayf Cummings, whose book “Democracy of Sound” dives into the long and messy story of how folks on the outside of the industry (and often, the law) remade the systems of copyright and ownership that define our favorite sonic commodity. Come for the Basement Tapes and Biz Markie. Stay for the story of Modular Records, owned and operated by FBI undercover agents. 

In the last month, the music world has gone positively gaga for NFT’s, the blockchain-based goods that (some say) promise to transform basic dynamics of the industry, bypassing major labels, reversing decades of artistic austerity, and basically doing everything short of reuniting the Beatles. We…aren’t so sure. Saxon and Sam dig into the phenomenon, trying to separate pump-and-dump tech-bro scams from the genuine potentials of technology. Are NFTs digital beanie babies? Almost certainly yes. Could the blockchain remake music forever? Also… yes. More importantly, some version of this future is coming. And if we don’t figure it out, Elon Musk wins.

On this **Bonus** episode, music journalist Stephen Thomas Erlewine talks with Saxon Baird about the death of the greatest hits album, the encyclopedic glory of Allmusic, The White Stripes and more.

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