Show Notes
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.
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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.