PODCAST · music
Money 4 Nothing
by Money 4 Nothing
A podcast on music and capitalism. Dropped bi-weekly.
Episodes
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Spotify Culture (Featuring Liz Pelly + David Turner)
This week? Heavy Hitters. As you may (or may not) have heard, journalist/Daniel Ek tormenter/friend-of-the-pod Liz Pelly is making waves with her wonderful new book “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.” It’s easily the best thing yet written about the company…
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"Homeboy Need a Subpoena": Drake Sues UMG
Look. Times are dark. So this week, we decided to tackle a somewhat lighter topic and look into Drake’s remarkably tone-deaf lawsuit against Universal Music Group—the label to which both he and (beef opponent) Kendrick Lamar are signed. In essence, Drake alleges that UMG used all their influence…
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What Trump Could Mean for AI and Music
The second Trump administration will impact pretty much everything, but we decided to take some time and focus on the specific conjecture of industry + culture + technology that is AI. After all, when Biden came to office, LLMs were just really starting to get going—while the last 12 months have...
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Financializing Everything (W/ Andrew deWaard)
As you might have noticed, we spend a...fair bit of time talking about the three labels at the heart of modern music—and tracking what their unprecedented centralization has done to the industry. And while that’s important, it’s only part of a far larger trend, one that cuts across pretty much…
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TikTok VS….Music? (W/ Kristin Robinson)
This past January, Universal Music went to war. Or at least, it tried to. Shocking both listeners AND artists, the major label announced that it was cutting ties with TikTok, the short-form giant, over payout rates and copyright infringement. Its artists (and publishing)—completely pulled from…
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Roan Rising: The zoomer soft coup and the future of mass culture
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 + Olivia) are suddenly everywhere—headlining festivals, topping the charts,...
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Streaming Music, Streaming Capital (W/ Eric Drott)
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 listen to? How and why and does it matter that you now pay a limited rate for an...
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NÜ METAL FOREVER (w/ Holiday Kirk)
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 Park, System of a Down, Korn, or Limp Bizkit dominated the charts, the take was...
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Taking on Ticketmaster (W/ Kevin Erickson)
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 Justice Department has filed a lawsuit accusing the massive firm of being a...
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AI Music VS. The Lawsuit Tsunami
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 seconds. It’s a revolution! At least that’s the narrative being pushed by the...
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Are you Ex-Sphere-enced?
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 Sam decided to go...both big and small. By small, we're talking about the…
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How Hip Hop Conquered the Charts (feat. Amy Coddington)
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 took over a decade to embrace its commercial potential. So how did hip hop…
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Embracing Our Fandom (W/ Monia Ali)
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 message boards. Fandoms now have entire worlds, complete with enemies, economic...
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The Political Economy of Rap Beefs
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 clout and popular cred to issue the judgement. But while the conflict was...
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Karaoke and Personal Pop
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 together consumer electronics, post-work drinking culture, and a love of pop…
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Millennials Nostalgia Tour
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 hottest trends in live music: The 20 year Anniversary Album Tour. Yes, your…
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Keep on Streamin’ in the Free World
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 explore why Ol' Neil was unable to escape the musical monopsony that defines...
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A Living Wage and a Tik Tok Ban: Could…Congress Transform Music?
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 Allied Workers) released the Living Wage for Musicians Act—a fascinating piece of...
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Imagine Dragons: The Most Popular Band of the Millennium?
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 them? Probably not. And that’s because despite being the most successful band of…
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Universal VS. TikTok: The Showdown No One Should Have Wanted
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 pulled—almost entirely—from the mimetic app. It’s a show of raw muscle the…
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Pitchfork, GQ, and the Music Criticism Lifestyle
Like the rest of the increasingly small world of music criticism, we were shaken by the news that Pitchfork had not only been more-or-less gutted by publisher Conde Nast, but pulled into GQ. Gentleman’s Quarterly. Of all possible things. G-freaking-Q...? We’re not gonna lie—this one feels grim....
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Royalty Rumble at Spotify and a Crisis at Hipgnosis
New year, same old music business. To get things kicked off right, we circle back to check in on two of our favorite industry players, and things….well, we hate to tell you, but things aren’t GREAT, you know? Regarding Hipgnosis, the once high-flying music fund is very much in hot water—conflicts...
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BMI Sells Out
When we heard that BMI, an organization designed to collect money on behalf of songwriters, had decided (on its own?) to drop its non-profit status and go for the cash, our response was confusion. Like—can they even do that? What does that even MEAN? But then BMI sold themselves to a private…
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Can You Actually Support This Podcast On Patreon? (w/Penny Fractions)
This time Sam and David Turner dig into the financially rocky patch in which Patreon—the name that launched a thousand podcasts—has recently found itself. Looking at the longer trajectory of the fan-funding platform, they try to piece together how it moved from a replacement for YouTube ads to a...
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E-Zoo and the Future of Nightlife
Over the summer, New York’s premier EDM festival Electric Zoo descended deep into the Fyre Fest zone—that magical place combining blatant rip-off and profoundly unsafe conditions. Purchased by by owners of Brooklyn mega-club Avant Gardner the previous year, the latest edition of the three-day…
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Bandcamp Blues: (Penny Fractions 4 Nothing)
Hi folks! As part of our collaboration with Penny Fractions, we are bringing you the first episode of a new format—David, Saxon, and Sam, thinking through our moment in an off-the-cuff convo about current events. We hope you like it! The music industry was recently shaken by news around beloved...
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Scooter, Baby! The Life and Times of the Most 2010’s Manager You Can Possibly Imagine
First off—big news in Money 4 Nothing-land. We’ve just OFFICIALLY joined forces with the amazing Penny Fractions newsletter to create a new and almighty Voltron (Sailors Moon?) of critical coverage on the music industry. We’ll be rolling out exciting new projects over the next few months, so…
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Moog’s World: The Story Behind the Synthesizer Behind Modern Music (feat. Albert Glinsky)
If you listen to essentially any piece of contemporary music, you’re likely—more than likely—to hear the influence of Bob Moog. Moog invented the first modular synthesizer, a device for creating electronic sound simultaneously more powerful and more accessible than anything that had come before....
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State of Pl-A(i) With Cherie Hu
Machine Learning. It’s in the news, and increasingly, it's in our tunes. Somehow. Maybe? Given the ravenous hype cycles of tech, it can be extremely difficult to separate the real, the potentially real, the squint-and-maybe-you-can-see it, and “the SEC wants to speak to you now” of it all. To try...
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Astroworld and the opposite of ”Utopia”
On Nov 5th, 2021, the first night of Travis Scott’s Astroworld festival collapsed into horror—a terrible crowd crush at the Houston event killed 10, and reportedly injured thousands. In the wake of the catastrophe, fingers were pointed at Scott, at Live Nation, at the Police, at Rap music, at…
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Super Fans and Super Strikes
This week, the crew digs into two timely stories providing some new perspective on this crazy little thing called music. First, they dig into the rising influence of so-called “super fans”: folks who consume content from their favorite artists along 5 or more distinct channels. According to…
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Ambient Music: Functionality and Liberating Potentials
"Ambient Music" has seen a renewed interest for reasons that we can only speculate. 2016 election? Increased atomization of individuals? The multi-headed hell-scape of pandemic + climate change + economic woes? Sure. Whatever the reason, the past decade as seen a revival of soundscapes and synths...
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K-Pop Merger Mania (feat. the Idolcast)
Early this year, K-pop was the site of some truly Succession level drama, as Hybe (the company that launched BTS) attempted to steal SM Entertainment (a longtime mainstay of the industry) out from under Kakao (a Facebook + Spotify level media conglomerate). The story had it all: legendary...
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Merlin and What It Means (and Meant) to be Indie
It used to be so simple. There were the major labels (all 6 of them, or whatever) and there were the independents or "the indies." Over the 80’s and 90s, a position initially adopted out of economic necessity grew into a distinctive cultural mode, with a host of aesthetic and political…
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The Great Music AI Contradiction (Live at Wavelengths Summit)
Everyone is talking about AI—and that includes the music biz. No one is disputing the wide-ranging potential of these new tools, but is our rapidly-approaching deep-fake future really (or at least, FULLY) being driven by technology? Sam and Saxon offer a dissenting voice to the cloud of…
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Blurred Lines and the Future of Copyright
Five years ago, Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams finally lost the (musical) lawsuit of the century. Their song, “Blurred Lines,” had been an inescapable summertime hit, a wedding-DJ-standby, and the center of a very Obama-Era debate over whether it was creepy to have a song called “Blurred…
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Inside the Algorithm Factory: Music Recommendations (w/ Nick Seaver)
In the digital economy, recommendation algorithms get…a LOT of attention. To some, they’re the special sauce behind everything from Spotify’s personalized playlists to Tik Tok’s “For You” page. For others, they represent a dark, vibe-generating demiurge slowly sapping music’s social power. But…
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Streaming in the Dark: No One Knows Anything (w/ Meredith Rose)
No one knows anything about the streaming economy. Not Really. That’s the stark message at the heart of Public Knowledge’s new whitepaper “Streaming in the Dark,” which catalogs the remarkable “wall of NDAs” operating at every level of the modern music industry. The relationship between labels…
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Spotify Redux (Quiet Threats + Desperate Flailing)
For this episode, Saxon and Sam check in on Spotify, which is…not in great shape. Even in the best of times, the company was handcuffed to the majors, and threatened by mega-sized competitors like Apple & Amazon. And these, my friend, are no longer the best of times. But it’s okay! They’ll...
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From Houston to the World: The Political Economy of DJ Screw (with Lance Scott Walker)
In the '90s, a remarkable sound was being developed in Houston—its cavernous drums, booming, crawling vocals, and distinctive, hiccuping rhythms reflect the indelible influence of DJ Screw. During the latter half of the decade, the hardworking musician produced hundreds if not thousands of tapes,...
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Metadata Errors in the Lime Green Lamborghini (With Kristin Robinson)
The success of YouTube has been inextricably linked to the music business. Initially a remarkably effective streaming pirate, recent years have seen the site pivot to industry ally, paying out millions in royalties for the copyrighted material played on its platform. But who gets the money? And...
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Reggaeton Gets Sued
It was revealed just this past week that basically all of Reggaeton is being sued. No, really. As you may or may not know, the massively popular genre from Latin-American and the Caribbean is actually based mostly on a few Jamaican riddims (the instrumental background or “rhythm” in contemporary...
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A.I. in Der Klub (And Your Next Playlist)
The music industry is becoming increasingly disenchanted with Tik-Tok, finding it difficult to bend the wildly popular app for its own profitability...let alone find the next mega-star. Does that mean we might see the big three start to put the squeeze on Tik-Tok for dipping into its massive...
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What Taylor Swift Tells Us About the Billboard Charts
Taylor Swift made headlines recently by grabbing all top 10 spots on the Billboard Hot 100 chart — a first in its 64 year history — with the release of her latest record Midnights. Cool. Good for Taylor and her Swifties. But….what does that actually mean? You might think it's a simple answer, but...
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The Rise and Fall of SST Records with Jim Ruland
The modern music industry is defined, in large part, by major labels and centralized digital services. To try and imagine a world without (or at least around them), we’ve been looking backwards to the 1980s, when a thriving underground economy enabled a remarkable flood of American rock. If one...
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Penny Fractions Live with Cherie Hu and Liz Pelly
Our good friend David Turner celebrated five years of Penny Fractions earlier this month with a live show at Nowadays. On stage, David was joined by our very own Sam Backer along side heavy-hitters Liz Pelly and Cherie Hu. Enjoy this live recording from the show as the crew run through everything...
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Dan Ozzi on the Political Economy of Selling Out
It’s a tale as old as Nirvana. A band (ideally punk or punk influenced) forms and gets some buzz. Major labels swarm. The kids sign on the dotted line…and are promptly thrown to the wolves. Fade to black. And while that often-repeated story isn’t exactly false, it doesn’t do much to capture the...
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The Music Catalog Acquisition Cool Down
In the past few months, the insane flood of money that has been flowing into the purchase of music rights (and really, into financial and tech related firms of pretty much all stripes) has begun to slow down. Crazy what rising interest rates will do, huh? These changes have prompted a wave of…
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Damon Krukowski on Unions, Streaming, and Musical Labor
You might know Damon Krukowski from his role in the groundbreaking indy band Galaxie 500. Or maybe you’ve listened to his podcast, “Ways of Hearing” or read his excellent newsletter, or his widespread journalism. More recently, however, he’s put on another hat, as an influential rabble rouser for...
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The KLF: A Foolproof Way To Hit No. 1
A foolproof way to hit number 1 is what the Time Lords—AKA the JAMS, AKA the KLF—promised the readers of “The Manual,” their 1988 book. After all, they had just done it, with the insipid brilliance of their Gary Glitter Meets Dr. Who mashup “Doctorin’ the Tardis.” And if they could do hack it, so...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
A podcast on music and capitalism. Dropped bi-weekly.
HOSTED BY
Money 4 Nothing
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A podcast on music and capitalism. Dropped bi-weekly.
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Money 4 Nothing has 100 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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