Money 4 Nothing

After an eternity of millennial performers with a chokehold on the charts, we’ve finally seen the emergence of a new cohort of gen-z icons. Chappelle Roan and Sabrina Carpenter (building on the foundation laid by Billie...

How did streaming change music? Not like how did it change the music industry (we talk about that plenty, obviously). And not how did it change bitrate. But how did streaming change the nature of the music that you...

NÜ metal sucks. Right? It’s what critics have screamed ever since the taste-defying mashup of funk-metal, rap, industrial, and post-hardcore stormed onto the charts in the mid ‘90s. When bands like Slipknot, Linkin...

This summer, the other shoe finally dropped on Ticketmaster/Live Nation. After decades of complaints by everybody from Pearl Jam to Zach Bryan (and after several years of increasingly intense Post-Swifty scrutiny), the...

In recent months, AI companies like Suno and Udio have been in the news for the incredible promise of their text-to-tunes tech. Just type in a few phrases, and… an original piece of music of your very own, created in...

Live music continues to evolve in our post-covid, pre-bird flu world—and nothing even approaching a new normal has yet to appear. To try and get a handle on the complexities of a constantly-moving situation, Saxon and...

Although rap currently stands at the center of American music, for much of the genre's history, its relationship to the charts was...fraught. Radio was notoriously reluctant to play the brash new style, and major labels...

Sure—Fans have always driven popular music. That’s what it means to be popular in the first place, you know? To have fans? But if you look around today’s sonic landscape, it feels…different out there. Forget clubs and...

Drake vs. Kendrick was about more than personal insults or verbal one-upmanship—it was a referendum on the most dominant figure of the last decade of rap (Drake), as narrated by the only classicist with the critical...

This past March, Shigeichi Negishi passed away at 100. While you might not know his name, you’ve certainly enjoyed the musical world he helped create. Negishi has long been credited as the inventor of Karaoke—pulling...

Dear Listener, Have you found yourself coming down with more consistent cases of nostalgia lately? Do you consider yourself a millennial? Well, if so, you might be soon buying a pricey concert ticket to one of the...

This week, we take a roundabout tour of the platform power that drives our musical landscape. First up is Neil Young, whose one-man stand against Spotify for its support of Joe Rogan just ended in….well…total defeat. We...

Much of the time, it feels like almost nothing could shake up the streaming status-quo. This isn’t one of those times. Over the past week, Congressperson Rashida Tlaib (with support from the Union of Musicians and...

Is rock dead? Not according to Imagine Dragons. You know the band with 10 different billion-streamed songs? The one that’s sold 46 million records? You’ve definitely heard of them, but....have you ever really HEARD...

This past week, negotiations broke down between Universal Music—the biggest and most powerful of the three major labels—and Tik Tok, the world’s most viral social media platform. The result: Universal’s music has been...