When Bandcamp announced a few weeks ago that it had been sold, it came as a deep shock to the wide audience of music fans who had come to appreciate its artist-supporting activities and (relatively) equitable financial policies. When they read that it had been sold to Epic Games, the multi-billion dollar creator of the Battle Royale mega-game Fortnite, the widespread reaction was...huh? To try to make sense of the sale, and to figure out what it might mean going forward, Saxon and Sam dig into t...
Mar 15, 2022•59 min•Ep. 49
As soon as you hear it, the term "neoliberal jazz" makes sense—hip urbanites, attending concerts in revamped art-spaces sponsored by banks and financial services companies. But how did Jazz—a counter-cultural music if there ever was one—get there? And how have its evolving aesthetics enabled these developments? To learn more, we spoke to Dale Chapman, author of "The Jazz Bubble," a mind-bending book about urban culture, market forces, and...Wynton Marsalis. Come fly with us, as we trace Jazz fro...
Feb 23, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 48
While the boom and busts have come and gone, NFTs haven’t disappeared. A set of crypto based technologies, and speculatively disruptive companies are still out there, working to create a new, on-chain future. We have thoughts. Especially when it comes to how music intersects (or doesn't). And to try to make sense of them, we have on David Turner of Penny Fractions. Moving from specific projects, and working theories to broad-based analysis of tech ideology we... go out there. But to create a fut...
Feb 08, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 47
On this short bonus episode, Sam and Saxon discuss Neil Young's decision to take down his music from Spotify in protest of the Joe Rogan Podcast...except did Neil even have the rights to make this decision? And how does this impact his $200 million publishing rights sale to Hipgnosis last year? Also, why did Spotify buy Joe Rogan's podcast in the first place? And how does Eve 6 fit into all of this? Turns out this #CancelSpotify feud can tell us a lot about how the music industry works, how it's...
Jan 29, 2022•25 min•Ep. 46
Sync is pretty much what it sounds like—the act of connecting music to visual images. But it’s also a whole lot more. Thanks to the VERY specific contours of American music, it’s a complex set of negotiations and pay-outs that structures pretty much everything you hear on TV, at the movies, or in video games (and maybe, someday Tik Tok?). It's also one of the more viable revenue streams for artists. To dig into how sync works, and what it might mean for music, Sam talks with artist, taste-maker,...
Jan 25, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 45
We thought that the best way to start the new year would be by…clearing up the various misconceptions, random questions, playful hassles, and outright stumpers generated by the old. Our listeners have hit us with a series of questions in recent months, and we’re going to do our best to answer them. Radio stations and advertising? Got you. State-owned Russian streaming service rivaling Spotify? Got you. Curated histories via new tech platforms and how that impacts musical preservation? Got you. I...
Jan 11, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 44
Money 4 Nothing goes to the movies! With the holidays upon us, Sam and Saxon decided it would be a nice to time to kick back, pull out the popcorn, and watch one of the more intriguing music docs in a year full of them. That’s right folks—in a fit of accurate choices, we’ve decided to spend an episode talking Sparks, the legendary cult band whose lengthy, make-no-compromises career is the subject of the recent film “The Sparks Brothers.” Ostensibly the story of the best band that never made it…t...
Dec 28, 2021•59 min•Ep. 43
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...
Dec 14, 2021•52 min•Ep. 42
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 t...
Nov 27, 2021•59 min•Ep. 41
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 Th...
Nov 12, 2021•53 min•Ep. 40
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 d...
Nov 01, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 39
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 m...
Oct 15, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 38
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 sc...
Sep 23, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 37
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 perso...
Sep 04, 2021•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 36
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 fr...
Aug 18, 2021•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 35
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 p...
Aug 03, 2021•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 34
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 overa...
Jul 08, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 33
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?...
Jun 22, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 32
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 Subscribe to the Money 4 Nothing newsletter...
Jun 14, 2021•25 min•Ep. 31
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 econ...
Jun 07, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 30
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...
May 25, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 29
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 ma...
May 06, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 28
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. Sign up for our newsletter!
May 03, 2021•33 min•Ep. 27
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 p...
Apr 20, 2021•55 min•Ep. 26
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 ...
Apr 06, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 25
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. Co...
Mar 23, 2021•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 24
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. Subscribe to our newsletter!
Mar 16, 2021•40 min•Ep. 23
Christian music and especially Christian rock is a world of its own, a self-contained universe that mirrors the trends and styles of the mainstream. But how does it work? And what can it tell us about the interactions between audiences and industries that structure popular music? We talk to Andrew Mall, the author of “God Rock Inc.: The Business of Niche Music” to explore everything from the Jesus People to Christian Metalcore, while discussing how the complex relationship between sacred and sec...
Mar 09, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 22
When we first covered the vast amounts of cash that companies like Hipgnosis were throwing into the music publishing market, we thought things had hit some sort of insane peak. Well were we VERY wrong. In the months since, the press has been filled with one enormous deal after another, peaking (at least for now) in the reported sale of Dylan’s entire catalog for 300+ million dollars. But does…any of this make business sense? Or is it just rank speculation? And how will it shape the future of mus...
Feb 22, 2021•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 21
We talk to writer and critic Liz Pelly who has long been one of the most astute critics of the modern musical economy. But while we all know that streaming is broken—what comes next? Liz has recently been exploring a set of new platforms that are seeking to create alternatives to existing industry structures. We dig into everything from public library-based programs that support local music to swing-for-the-fences proposals for government intervention in the streaming markets. Tomorrow’s ethical...
Feb 08, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 20
