Show Notes
What happens when a private equity company takes over a music festival? For this Critical Listening live taping at the ESNS Conference in Groningen, we spoke with Dutch investigative journalist Henk Willem Smits to unpack this very question. Smits works with the community-supported outlet Follow the Money, specializing in tax avoidance by multinationals and wealthy individuals in music, and the intersections of private equity and electronic music culture. His 2025 piece "Loud Music, Silent Takeovers" specifically looked at the 1.3 billion euros spent by U.S.-based private equity firm KKR on music festivals in recent years. In his reporting, Smits has found that after private equity buys festivals, they can be subject to higher ticket prices, more commercial partnerships, and homogenized lineups driven by Spotify and TikTok data—in order to "tailor lineups more precisely to audience demand," he wrote last year. "A lot of festivals, especially smaller dance festivals, don't have big margins," Smits told us. "It's a very small margin business. So what you see now is management layers getting fired... That is something that happens a lot, but that is not something the audience notices. What also happens is you see some festivals not being organized. Or they skip a year." Below, see some more highlights from our conversation with Smits, which also covered his reporting on the connections between KKR and Israel, and how pop stars use the Netherlands as a tax haven. How else do festivals change when they are acquired by private equity?"They have to increase the margins because they paid a lot of money [for these festivals]... One financial analyst said that if they want to get that money back and also make a profit the [margin] has to raise with 10s of percents a year. That is very ambitious, very, very ambitious.... There is pressure here." What has been the biggest takeaway from your festival reporting?"There is logic to going up into a bigger structure. But when you sell your company, you really don't have anything to say about the ownership anymore... I heard from a manager in music and he said what he learned from the story was that you have to check the whole chain. So you have to check who is behind the festival, but also who's the owner of the festival, and who's the owner of the owner." Are there any open questions for you, still, regarding the relationship between private equity and live music?"I would love to speak to KKR. I would love to know if they regret buying Boiler Room. But they have a sort of policy that they don't talk with the press... which I find strange, because this is a company that has $600 billion of investments. But then you also have, of course, responsibilities. They invest in a company that rents out houses in occupied places in the West Bank. It would be interesting if they could explain, at least, why they think they have to do that. But it's a responsibility they take. They don't see themselves as part of society. They just have to make money."
More from Critical Listening
We're back from Warsaw, Poland, where we recorded this episode live at the 24th edition of Unsound Festival. Our guests are the Polish composer Piotr Kurek, visual artist Wilhelm Sasnal, and Unsound co-founder Mat Schulz, who joined us to discuss a piece commissioned for this year's festival titled WARSZAWA. It's a wide-ranging and fascinating conversation involving David Bowie, the Polish state folk ballet, the nature of music influence and interpretation, and more. As the story goes, in 1976, David Bowie wandered off a train in Warsaw and was captivated by a record of local folk music, which he would go on to reinterpret with Brian Eno on the Low track “Warszawa.” Fifty years later, Unsound commissioned Kurek and Sasnal to again reinterpret the original folk song through music and visuals, accompanied by the Slask Song & Dance Ensemble, who made its original recording. As it turns out, the story of "Warszawa" itself has now become a piece of local legend, and there was much to unpack. On one hand, Unsound's WARSZAWA reclaims a Polish song that Bowie tended to describe more like a hazy, distant dream than actual source material for his composition, raising questions about crediting, co-optation and the creative process. On the other hand, today’s music business has become litigious to the point of misunderstanding how artistic ideas are created and exchanged. We were intrigued by where this work fits into those conversations, and making connections to how contemporary AI products invisibilize lineages and boost ahistoricism. Across an hour with Kurek, Sasnal and Schulz we reflected on all of the above, and took questions from the crowd too. Hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did, and thanks again to Unsound for having us. Below are some links to Polish music referenced in the intro, too. Piotr Kurek: https://piotrkurek.bandcamp.com Slask Song & Dance Ensemble: https://www.youtube.com/ZESPOLSLASKOFFICIAL Traditional Polish village music archives on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@muzykaodnaleziona Radical Polish Ansambl: https://radicalpolishansambl.bandcamp.com/album/nierozpoznana-wie-2 Tercet Imperial: https://instantclassic.bandcamp.com/album/prymat
Earlier this month, Suno unveiled its new "v6" model, advertising it as the first product created with material licensed from Warner, BMG and Believe. But it also says the model is trained on the "creations" of its users, opening up new conversations in the gen-AI licensing discourse. If a so-called legal model is trained on user "creations" that were in-turn made using an old, unlicensed model, what is materially different? We get into all of the above, as well as Suno's claims that its "v6-wild" mode can help make user generations more "wild" and "weird". What does that say about the state of popular gen-AI music apps? For our second headline we're looking at a new "artist incubator program" Spotify announced tied to its Fresh Finds playlist, wherein 10,000 artists will get comp access to AI-assisted music platforms such as Splice, LANDR and (checks notes) Better Help. What is an artist incubator program to a streaming service? Why might the world's biggest streaming service be trying this out now? All this and more in the September edition of Headlines, our subscriber-bonus series where Max and Liz each bring a story from across the music-tech and biz press to summarize, contextualize and discuss. If you ever want to hear these convos but can't swing the 5 bucks a month, send an email, no questions asked, to [email protected] and we'll send it your way. But if you can afford it, consider becoming a subscriber here on Patreon to support our efforts to keep having critical conversation about music, technology and culture industry hell. Thanks for listening.
Welcome back to another episode of Critical Listening, DIY Lifers edition. For our third installment of Listening Habits, our series where we talk to musicians about how they interact with music on an everyday basis, we're joined by Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug of the Lawrence, Kansas group Sweeping Promises. We met on the occasion of their new record, You Say I Romanticize, released in August on Sub Pop, for a truly inspired and wide-ranging conversation. In the first half, we dig into: why Mondal and Schnug decided to move from Boston to Kansas, how they used their record label advance to buy a house and turn it into an affordable recording studio for DIY bands, joining the local all-ages show booking collective, how underground music culture can help teach political organizing skills to young people, and more. Then, in the Listening Habits segment, we talk about cassettes, music discovery parlor games, their love of record stores, and some really great ideas on what it means to be a critical listener. Lira and Caufield said their go-to source for music discovery these days has been email newsletters, and they were nice enough to even send us over a list of some of their favorites, which you can check out below in the show notes. Thanks for listening and thanks again to Sweeping Promises for joining us. This episode is free for everyone, but if you want to support us having more conversations with independent artists about the social power of music, consider becoming a subscriber. Sweeping Promises Recommend These Music Newsletters: Trick Bag → trickbag.substack.com Courtesy Desk → courtesydesk.substack.com YellowGreenRed → yellowgreenred.com See/Saw → see-saw.fun Death Rock Fairy → deathrockfairy.substack.com Chasing Sundays → elienis.com Sound Bites → soundbitesnyc.substack.com The Future is Ours to Make → thefutureisourstomake.substack.com
As usual, this Headlines episode is for paid subscribers only. Head to Patreon.com/criticallistening to access all of our monthly Headlines episodes, as well as our Discord community, and occasional bonus segments. Jimmy Iovine recently told the New York Times that he "doesn't see a downside at all" when it comes to generative AI music, despite that tens of thousands of fully AI-generated recordings are reportedly flooding streaming services every day. Is he being sincere as a legendary producer, or is he speaking with his wallet as a billionaire? We dive into this question and much more in this episode of our Headlines series. Alongside our discussion of the much-talked-about Times interview with Iovine and Dr. Dre, we also discuss the new "AI Persona" badges that Spotify has announced in order to label non-human artist profiles on the platform, and whether or not this approach will make a difference in the long run.
For Episode 22, we spoke with songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer, and curator Taja Cheek, on the brink of her group L’Rain’s fourth record, fata morgana, out today on Mexican Summer. Taja is a lifelong New Yorker with roots in underground cultural organizing and the institutional art world alike; in addition to her work as a musician, she is also currently the Artistic Director at Performance Space New York. In the first half of the show, we spoke about the new album and what it means to challenge an audience in today's political and social climates. For the second half of the show, we return to our Listening Habits series to learn about how Taja listens to music on a daily basis, her relationship with music technology, how her work as a curator influences her approach to music discovery, how a music recommendation text message from Kyp Malone of TV On the Radio changed her life, and much more. Lastly, Max and Taja go way back, so we also talked at length about the makeshift venue they used to run together out of Taja's basement in Brooklyn, how that period shaped her creative trajectory, and DIY politics in general. That will be available for Patreon subscribers as a bonus segment early next week, so please sign up to hear material like that, our monthly Headlines episodes, and access our Discord community. Thanks again to Taja for joining us and thanks for listening!