For the Record
Streaming has carried Latin music to the top of the Billboard charts, but the magazine covered it for more than 100 years before Bad Bunny hopped to No. 1. From genre architects like Xavier Cugat to current hit-makers such as Karol G, and from “Bésame Mucho” to “Despacito,” the many subgenres of Latin music have for over a century added flavor to U.S. airwaves — and the pages of Billboard. What’s living without La Vida Loca?
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Lingo Duo
“A great artist most certainly,” raved the Aug. 24, 1926, Billboard about Raquel Meller, a Spanish-born Broadway headliner. “These are folk songs, street ballads of her Barcelona…. For all the talk of not needing to know the language to understand there is frantic searching of librettos to appreciate” it. Billboard got the rhythm for the Nov. 2, 1940, cover story on Cugat, which described the bandleader as “aiding and abetting the present craze for the conga and tango,” and credited him for the “skillful integration of Latin American syncopation into the daily lives of the American public.”
‘Apple’ Music
“Pérez Prado’s waxing of ‘Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White’ has passed the 1,000,000-mark in sales,” reported the May 21, 1955, Billboard when the Cuban orchestra leader’s single was still No. 1 on various pre-Hot 100 singles charts. (When the Hot 100 debuted on Aug. 4, 1958, Prado’s hit “Patricia” was No. 2.) By the Aug. 18, 1956, issue, Tito Puente was big enough that his Cuban Carnival was reviewed alongside the new Frank Sinatra album. It “should attract some jazz fans as well as the more conventional Latin-American buyer.”
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Latin Calling
“The U.S. Latin market had been a widely scattered field with radically different musical tastes,” reported the Sept. 6, 1986, Billboard. To make sense of it, the Oct. 4 issue introduced a new chart to address “the growing needs of the Latin market.” That chart, now called Hot Latin Songs, was compiled by staffers by “calling the top 70 Latin (Spanish-speaking) radio stations in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.” (Don’t ask about the phone bills.)
Big ‘Mac’
A multipage package in the Aug. 17, 1996, Billboard covered the “exploding regional-Mexican market,” which grew because of “down-to-earth, hard-gigging performers” such as Los Tigres del Norte and La Mafia. That same year, Los de Río’s “Macarena (Bayside Boys Mix)” topped the Hot 100 for 14 straight weeks. “ ‘Macarena’ was largely a Top 40 event, and a sorely needed one,” noted the Sept. 7 issue. An article the following week declared that the dance craze had become a staple at “weddings, bar mitzvahs and family reunions nationwide.”
Nuevo Mundo
“English isn’t the only language of value” J Balvin told Billboard in an April 29, 2017, cover story. Prophetic words: On May 27, Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” began its 16-week run atop the Hot 100 — an unheard-of feat for a song in a foreign language. Since then, many Latin artists have gone mainstream en español. “When I came into this industry,” Bad Bunny said in an article in the Feb. 16, 2019, Billboard, “I was never afraid to be myself.”
It’s all about the artist, music executives say (and say and say). If you really look at the industry over time, though, it’s really all about the formats — the health of the business may have more to do with how people listen to music than what they actually listen to. For the last decade, that has been on-demand streaming, and the music business has boomed — from total revenue of $6.7 billion in 2014 to $17.1 billion last year, according to the late-March RIAA report. In inflation-adjusted dollars, the industry is worth almost double what it was at the beginning of the streaming boom. Internationally, the story is broadly similar — the business was worth $13 billion in 2014 and $28.6 billion last year, according to IFPI statistics.
In the U.S., at least, growth is slowing — revenue rose from $15.9 billion to $17.1 billion last year, and it hasn’t grown much in the last two years, accounting for inflation. The reason is simple: There are only so many streaming subscriptions to sell, and the U.S. now has a 12-month average of 96.8 million on-demand subscriptions in a country of 127 million households. It’s hard to know when we’ll reach Peak Subscription — 105 million in a year? 110 million in two? — but slower growth in the number of subscribers seems inevitable. This is one reason record companies are cutting back. It’s the end of hypergrowth for creators and rightsholders — at least in some places.
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Those places also include most of Europe, where the recorded music business grew 8.9%, according to the IFPI’s 2024 Global Music Report, compared with 7.4% in the U.S. and Canada. In the developing world, where the music business is much smaller, the figures tell a very different story: Asia was up 14.9%, with much of that growth coming from China, which was up 25.9%; Latin America grew for the 14th consecutive year, by 19.4%; and revenue from sub-Saharan Africa rose 24.7%. These increases are taking place in smaller businesses, but they mean that there’s plenty of room for growth — it’s just moving south and east.
We’ve all heard the simple and optimistic version of what comes next: Just wait until everyone in China, India and Brazil subscribes to a streaming service! (I hope they subscribe to Billboard Pro while they’re at it.) But this assumes a world where the global middle class continues to grow, trade and prosperity continue to expand, and developing economies stay relatively stable. Alas, as the small print says, past performance is not indicative of future results. Over the past two years, Russia has gone from a developing market into a geopolitical adversary, and tensions between the U.S. and China are heating up. (Whatever you think of globalization, it will be far worse in reverse.) If the U.S. forces a sale of TikTok, could China retaliate by imposing limits on American music? Could inflation in Latin America hurt consumer purchasing power in a way that stifles a streaming business that still depends more on advertising? Whatever happens is beyond the control of the music business. The potential is incredible — it’s just not reliable.
The truth is that there’s still plenty of opportunity in developed markets, including plenty of room to raise streaming subscription prices, but creators and rightsholders don’t have to just sit around and wait for that. Other opportunities are emerging, and growth could be fueled by licensing music for AI training, as well as for social media, video games, and the next iteration of the technology formerly known as the Metaverse.
Some of the most exciting opportunities might come from a traditional business model: Selling stuff. Yes, I know, it’s all so unbearably dreary compared to the “Free” future we were told to expect. But consider that, adjusted for inflation, the U.S. recorded music market is still only two-thirds the size of its 1999 peak. Back then — how old does that sound? — much of that revenue came from serious fans who bought a couple of albums a month instead of a couple of albums a year, mostly for more than the cost of a monthly streaming subscription today. Such dedication explains the fantastic growth in the vinyl market, which rose from $243.8 million in 2014 to $1.4 billion last year — almost a sixth the size of the music business of a decade ago in 2023 dollars. (I am proud to say that I have done my part.)
Sure, vinyl growth is slowing, too — the format isn’t for everyone and I am running out of shelf space myself, but consumers have demonstrated a willingness to spend more on their favorite artists, which is why music executives are so excited about superfans, which could be the most exciting opportunity available. The last decade of the music business was about making a hundred dollars a year from millions of people. The next 10 years will be about making millions — OK, probably thousands, but you get the idea — from hundreds of people. That won’t be easy, though. The music industry has always been, pardon the pun, a volume business. Making money from superfans requires finding that, figuring out what they want to buy, and marketing that, presumably online, better than live promoters or dedicated startups.
This could also solve one of the biggest problems with the recorded music business: it’s not making stars fast enough, and the new ones it has don’t shine for so many people. But what is a big problem in the hit-driven streaming business doesn’t matter so much when it comes to monetizing superfans — older acts still do big business, and there are riches in niches. From a financial perspective, K-pop is essentially a high-margin merchandise business focused on an audience that’s dedicated but not quite mainstream. And if labels are going to keep growing in the U.S. and Europe, at least some of their business might look a lot like that.
Let me start this column the way I ended the last one: Private equity isn’t destroying the music business. But it’s worth wondering: How will so much outside investment change the way the music industry works?
Obviously, we’re going to see more documentaries, Broadway shows and box sets, both to make money and to promote catalogs. But will this lead to significant changes to royalty distribution or the industry’s balance of power? And is there even a small chance of what might be called a subprime publishing meltdown?
As Cyndi Lauper sang, though, money changes everything — and that was before her recent rights sale. So I spoke with a half dozen serious players — music publishers and private-equity-backed catalog buyers of rights, plus lawyers and consultants who have been working on these deals since investment started flooding into the music business at the end of the 2010s, about how these new players are changing the business. Any new investment sector will have successes and failures — a new report from Shot Tower Capital says Hipgnosis Songs Fund overstated its revenue and overpaid for catalogs, although Hipgnosis has said it disputes this — but what does all of this mean for music in the long term?
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One of the few points of agreement is that this has been great for creators so far, especially songwriters. These deals involve creators who are already making money, but the ability to sell their catalogs lets them replace a steady stream of revenue with a one-time cash infusion — it’s “allowed artists the ability to have more liquidity opportunities,” according to one buyer. This is helpful if they need cash, want to diversify their assets, or have to think about estate planning. The emergence of outside buyers has also spurred traditional music companies to buy more publishing assets, especially in cases where they already own related rights, for reasons that can be either strategic (“we can bundle rights”) or defensive (“we can monetize this without interference”). That competition implies that prices will rise, which is good for creators.
It also means that potential investors will bid for a wider range of catalogs, including more recent songs in more genres — which is already happening. So what happens when some of the world’s biggest investment entities own so many catalogs? They will push — using the various tools at their disposal — to raise the value of their assets. They will not do this out of goodwill, of course; they will do it out of self-interest. But any move that raises the value of the song catalogs that they own will also raise the value of the song catalogs that they do not, and this could be very good for songwriters.
“Investors now stand in the shoes of the songwriter,” as one buyer of catalogs told me, “and will use their political clout to help make how a songwriter is paid fairer.” An executive who works for another company that buys catalogs is skeptical of some private-equity-backed ventures, because “their incentives are misaligned with those of creators.” But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. To the extent that some aspects of copyright regulation involve political power, the influence of private equity could counter that of the big technology companies that generally lobby to undermine copyright. Two executives even suggested that private equity could serve as an engine of reform to make collective management organizations more transparent. “We put up with all of this,” the argument goes, “but Wall Street won’t stand for it!”
Right now, some of the catalog acquisition business rests on the idea that new buyers can do more to promote songs than the current owners, especially with film or theater projects. Eventually, though, at least some of that advantage could disappear. Executives can see what works, and some of them will inevitably bring that knowledge to other companies. Plus, as we reach Peak Rock Doc, catalog owners — traditional publishers and private equity players alike — could start to see diminishing returns.
What about the downsides? The reason private equity has such a bad reputation is that it usually buys assets with considerable leverage and holds them for a limited amount of time, which can often result in layoffs at companies in which they invest. Although deal structures vary, a source familiar with many deals told me that buyers generally don’t borrow more than half the purchase price of copyright assets, which seems reasonable.
Eventually, of course, some buyers will become sellers, presumably because their funds have run their course, or perhaps because they do come under pressure. In some cases, operators will be able to attract other investment. In others, “secondary sales will just expand the field for what is in play,” a publishing executive pointed out. A market for publishing assets inevitably means that not everyone will succeed — but it should also provide other buyers. A certain amount of consolidation may be inevitable, but it might not be so bad. Some writers will worry about how the new owner of their songs will treat them, but realistically — and this might sound cold, but it’s also true — that’s something creators need to think about before they sell.
Is there any chance of a broader market failure — a subprime copyright crisis, of sorts? Music copyrights generate steady cash the way mortgages once did, but while individual investments can rise or fall, it’s harder to imagine that a financial squeeze would lead to a selling frenzy that would send prices downward across the board. This isn’t a massive liquid market the way housing is, plus there’s less leverage and far more due diligence about the assets being purchased. (One lawyer said that this market is encouraging creators and publishers to improve their contracts and document-retention practices.)
Although it might seem counter-intuitive, the market for music copyrights might actually be more solid than that for housing. So far, on-demand streaming has proved pandemic-proof, and it seems recession-proof, so the only danger would be a collapse of the copyright system — and it’s hard to imagine how that would happen, especially now that the music business survived illegal file-sharing. Outside investment in music rights will change, like everything else in the business, but it looks like we’re going to see steady, long-term change — most of which creators have good reason to be optimistic about.
Over the past few years, we have been living in a music business in which, it’s often said, hits can come from anywhere around the world. Often, however, the hits we’re talking about have musical and production elements of pop, hip-hop and R&B — only with a twist or in another language. This is great. Unless you want the world to sound a little weirder, in which case it’s still great but you might wonder what else is out there.
As it happens, there’s a country that often seems to specialize in arty, off-kilter music — Iceland. Ever since the Sugarcubes emerged as what we used to call “college rock” darlings in the late 1980s, the Nordic country has exported more than its share of adventurous music: Björk, who emerged from the Sugarcubes as a solo act; Sigur Rós; Gus Gus, and more recently Laufey and Daði Freyr. (I originally heard this as “Daddy Feyr,” which says something about how our musical world is shrinking — but it’s actually his given name.)
The challenges of exporting acts from Iceland are significant: Few international music companies have offices there, the language isn’t spoken much outside the island, and there isn’t exactly much of a touring market in a country of 372,000 — far fewer people than saw Taylor Swift in Los Angeles this year. One of the important investors in the music business there is actually the government.
Last week, at the Iceland Airwaves festival and conference in Reykjavík, I got some sense of how that works and saw some a handful of Icelandic acts that could build solid global careers. (The festival flew me to Reykjavík to moderate a panel, with no expectation that I would cover the event, and I didn’t plan to do so.) None of them sound like they’re chasing the next streaming hit, which I found refreshing.
Since 2006, in fact, former Sugarcubes drummer Sigtryggur Baldursson has played a significant role in the international marketing of Icelandic music — first as part of Iceland Music Export, then since 2012 as managing director for its successor organization, Iceland Music. The organization coordinates grants and provides support for acts “to help people market music from here on their own terms,” Baldursson says. “We help labels and independent artists market their music better, but also to create better support for it.”
The direct results have been encouraging. But music has also helped brand Iceland, drawing tourists to a country with a vital culture as well as beautiful landscapes and hot springs. Björk is the most famous person in the country — by a kilometer.
Starting in January, Iceland is amping up its efforts. During the pandemic lockdown, the music business created a coalition to lobby the government for support, which eventually resulted in the creation of a new office that will fold two smaller organizations into the existing Iceland Music. As part of that change, Baldursson will step down as CEO in favor of María Rut Reynisdóttir. “The establishment of the new office,” Reynisdóttir says, “is a major milestone for the Icelandic music scene.”
All of the Nordic countries have “music export” organizations, and the ones in Finland and Norway are bigger because there’re less private investment in music than in Denmark and Sweden. “Formally opening the music center is an important milestone for music and musicians in this country,” says Lilja Dögg Alfreðsdóttir, Minister of Culture and Business Affairs. (Iceland, uniquely as far as I can tell, has one combined ministry for both business and culture.) “The music center can become one of the cornerstones of music life and industry.”
It’s hard to imagine this kind of government investment in music in the U.S., where it would quickly become a political clusterf—, with the disciples of Kid Rock facing off against those of Maren Morris. European countries are also more accustomed to public funding of the arts, including television and high culture institutions like opera. This isn’t necessarily the best solution overall — the U.S. still drives pop culture. But it works for them. One reason the U.S. drives pop culture is that it’s a big enough, rich enough country that private investment can pay off.
That’s one reason smaller countries subsidize their culture businesses — so they don’t get overwhelmed. France, famously, protects its film business, and many countries have radio airplay regulations that reserve a certain amount of time for local artists. Iceland even funds its book business to prevent local-language literature from being swamped by English authors.
That kind of thinking puts Iceland in an interesting situation. On one hand, most of the country’s pop music isn’t in Icelandic — it limits the potential audience. But much of it still has a certain spare kind of artiness — what’s Icelandic for je ne sais quoi? It’s often pop but not poppy, arty but not inaccessible. It’s too diverse to be considered a definable style but much of it has a certain aesthetic.
Iceland Airwaves is also a music festival, so I was able to check out some artists as well. Along with some acts from elsewhere, I enjoyed the off-kilter pop of local star Briet, the haunting electronic soundscapes of Kónguló, and, especially, the furiously arty punk of Gróa, which reminded me of the Raincoats.
Realistically, their combined potential to go viral seems pretty low, but that’s fine — Baldursson points out that most Icelandic acts depend more on playing live, anyway. These kinds of acts, Baldursson says, “they shoot from here out into the stratosphere.”
Why is the music business picking on Brewster Kahle? All the technology activist wants to do with the Internet Archive, which he founded in 1996 and still chairs the board of, is create a digital library that offers “universal access to knowledge.” Isn’t that the promise of the digital age — that anyone with an internet connection can access anything ever created?
Turns out it’s more complicated than that. On Aug. 11, Universal Music, Sony Music and Concord Music filed a lawsuit, managed by the RIAA, against the Internet Archive, Kahle’s foundation, Kahle himself and an audio archivist who worked on the project, for infringing the copyrights to old recordings that the Internet Archive makes available through its “Great 78s” project to digitize old recordings originally issued as 78rpm records.
Already, in June 2020, four big book publishers had sued the Internet Archive for making available for a limited time copy-protected digital versions of books — first as many as it had in its collection or those of its partners, then during the pandemic, with its National Emergency Library, as many as users wanted. The publishers won on summary judgement, although the Internet Archive has said it will appeal.
The Internet Archive does lot of worthwhile work: its Wayback Machine tracks old web pages, offers access to considerable information in the public domain, and boasts an expansive collection of live Grateful Dead recordings. The Great 78s project makes available some old recordings that might otherwise be lost, but according to the RIAA lawsuit it also offers streaming access to plenty of recordings that are big business, including Bing Crosby’s iconic version of “White Christmas” — by some measures the most popular recordings of the 20th century — plus Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue,” Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” and Frank Sinatra’s “I’ve Got the World on a String.” The 78, may be an obscure format, but some of the music originally released that way is still relatively popular.
The Internet Archive responded in a blog post that it’s a “lawsuit targeting obsolete media.” “When people want to listen to music they go to Spotify,” Kahle said in a statement on the blog. (The Internet Archive did not comment other than pointing to this post.) “When people want to study 78rpm sound recordings as they were originally created, they go to libraries like the Internet Archive. Both are needed. There shouldn’t be conflict here.”
Except that many of those “78rpm sound recordings” aren’t obsolete at all — they’re the exact same recordings that are on Spotify, plus Apple Music and other streaming services. The versions available on the Internet Archive sound scratchy, but the recordings themselves weren’t originally created that way, and the wear on the particular 78s that were digitized by the archive is less about the history of recorded music than about how careful a particular person was with his or her records.
Kahle presents himself as a “digital librarian” who’s making books — and music and other media — available the way libraries always have. But it’s worth remembering that the legal arguments for the Internet Archive’s book-lending program aren’t based on the provision of copyright law that provides exceptions for libraries. Instead, the archive’s legal claim is that copying and distributing books temporarily is fair use. Which means that, if the Internet Archive had won, any library — or, importantly, perhaps any nonprofit entity that defined itself that way, or maybe any entity at all — could copy books it had purchased in order to distribute them. (The archive, in turn, says that its loss is a disaster for libraries, since they have to license books from publishers; but shouldn’t libraries — an essential public good — be funded by the public in a way that’s fair to creators and rightsholders?) Kahle, who has campaigned for years against what he sees as the excesses of copyright, seems to want to change the law.
“The fact that you own a particular copy doesn’t mean that you can make and distribute copies of that copy — this is basic copyright law,” said Maria Pallante, chief executive of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which helped to guide the publishers’ lawsuit. “They were trying to bloat fair use, while also asserting a first sale defense that applies only to tangible goods, not bootleg digital files.”
The RIAA is suing at least partly to establish case law behind the part of the 2018 Music Modernization Act, which extended federal copyright protection to recordings made before 1972, which were previously only covered under state law. The labels may also want to collect damages: Since statutory damages for willful infringement can be set by judges or juries at up to $150,000, this case could potentially cost the Internet Archive as much as $412 million. “This is the kind of egregious behavior that the Music Modernization Act was intended to address,” says RIAA CEO Mitch Glazier.
Recordings were only covered under state law until the Copyright Act of 1976, but it wasn’t retroactive. And although some opponents of copyright characterized the Music Modernization Act as a land grab by media companies, that doesn’t hold up: Some state laws made it unclear whether copyright protection ever lapsed at all. Indeed, one reason that sound recordings copyrights were federalized in the first place was to help libraries and archives take advantage of the exceptions and limitations that exist in federal copyright legislation, including fair use and specific exceptions for libraries and archives.
As it happens, the subject of federal copyright protection for pre-1972 recordings was studied in a 2011 report by the Register of Copyrights, and substantial attention was devoted to “challenges of preservation and access.” “Substantively,” the report recommended, “the use of section 108 and the fair use exception should encourage more preservation and public access because they provide time—tested rules with which libraries and archives have experience.”
The law under which the Internet Archive is being sued was actually set up partly to help it and other archives, especially in its “orphan works” provision, the result of a compromise between Music Modernization Act proponents and opponents, that allows organizations to use pre-1972 recordings for non-commercial purposes after checking to make sure they’re not in commercial use. (There’s a procedure for this.) If the Great 78s project really intends to make available music that is in danger of disappearing, the law allows for that. Why aren’t Kahle and the Archive following it? It’s hard to imagine that Kahle doesn’t understand the law.
And that’s why the music business is picking on Brewster Kahle — because it sometimes seems as though the Internet Archive is as much about pushing the boundaries of copyright law as it is about preserving creative works in the first place. Libraries play a crucial role in any democratic society, and Kahle and the archive do a lot of important work. But so do the performers and songwriters — and, yes, the labels and publishers — who made all of these recordings possible in the first place.
Madonna had the music industry burning up so fast after she released her first single in 1982 that a short item about it in the Nov. 6 issue of Billboard introduced her as “a young New York duo.” (Forty-one years later, we’d like to offer an immaculate correction: Madonna is one person.) Since then, Billboard has lived to tell about the Queen of Pop’s 14 studio albums and 12 No. 1 Hot 100 hits. Now, as she prepares to embark on her career-spanning Celebration Tour, which starts July 15 in Vancouver, we’re sharing some confessions from our dance lore.
‘Borderline’ Praise
By the time Madonna’s 1983 debut album came out, Billboard had figured out she was a person — a “young blonde singer/songwriter whose music is in the R&B/dance mode,” to be specific — and offered qualified praise in the Aug. 27 issue. “The songs here are pretty standard dance tunes,” read a ‘Top Album Pick,’ “but Madonna has the pipes and presence to make them a bit special.”
Lucky Spar
Not all Billboard critics were hung up on the future Queen of Pop. A Nov. 24, 1984, review of the Like a Virgin album clucked that “her come-hither image and vivid video profile have made Madonna Ciccone a pop provocateur regardless of her musical gifts.” On the other many-braceleted hand, however, a May 18, 1985, review of The Virgin Tour in Los Angeles gave her props as a performer: “Those of us who figured that Madonna was strictly a studio creation and would fall apart onstage were in for a pleasant surprise.”
Like a Player
“Controversy becomes Madonna,” noted the April 22, 1989, Billboard, after Pepsi pulled a TV ad that featured her following “complaints by Christian groups upset by the use of religious imagery” in her “Like a Prayer” video. But “with Madonna pocketing big money for an ad that aired twice, she is widely perceived at having beaten Madison Avenue folk at their own game.” That game was up, however, by the time she unveiled her coffee-table book, Sex. “Madonna has been jolting the public so consistently for so long now,” said a piece in the Oct. 31, 1992, Billboard, “that we’ve become almost numb to the juice.
Ray of Might
Madonna returned to her club roots in 1998 with Ray of Light. And in a Feb. 28 dance column, Billboard reported on how she introduced “her latest hippie chick/Earth mama persona” at “New York’s brutally hip Roxy nightclub.” The album set a record for first-week sales by a woman. Interviewed about her follow-up, Music, Madonna admitted in the Aug. 5, 2000, Billboard that “I can’t lie; I care about whether or not this record sells a little or a lot.” She needn’t have worried — it outperformed Ray of Light.
Take a Bow
“I don’t ever think about my age until someone says something about it,” Madonna told Elizabeth Banks for a Dec. 10, 2016, cover story after Billboard named her Woman of the Year. “I feel that I have wisdom, experience, knowledge and a point of view that is important. Can a teenager relate to that? Probably not. But that’s OK.” Besides, “I think the most controversial thing I’ve ever done,” she said, when receiving the honor at a Manhattan event, “is to stick around.”
This story originally appeared in the June 10, 2023 issue.
Right now, our artificial intelligence future sure seems to look a lot like… Wes Anderson movies! Over the past week, various AI programs have used the director’s quirky style to frame TikTok posts, rethink the looks of movies and even, more recently, make a trailer for a fictitious reboot of Star Wars. The future may be creepy, but at least it looks color-saturated and carefully composed.
The fake, fan-made Star Wars trailer, appropriately subtitled “The Galactic Menagerie,” is great fun, and its viral success shows both the strengths and current limitations of AI technology. Anderson’s distinctive visual style is an important part of his art, and the ostensible mission to “steal the Emperor’s artifact” sounds straight out of Star Wars. But the original Star Wars captured the imaginations of so many fans because it suggested a future that had some sand in its gears – the interstellar battle station had a trash compactor, and the spaceport cantina had a live band (and, one assumes, a public performance license).
Right now, at least, AI can’t seem to get past the surface.
“Heart on My Sleeve,” the so-called “Fake Drake” track apparently made with an artificial intelligence-generated version of Drake’s vocals, also sounds perfectly polished precisely in-tune and on-tempo. So do most modern pop songs, which tend to be pitch-corrected and sonically tweaked. (Most modern pop isn’t recorded live in a studio so much as assembled on a computer, so why shouldn’t it sound that way?) It’s hard to tell exactly why this style became so popular – the ease of smoothing over mistakes, the temptation of technical perfection, the sheer availability of samples and beats – but it’s what the mass streaming audience seems to want.
It’s also the kind of music that AI can most easily imitate. AI can already create pitch-perfect vocals, right-on-the-beat drumming, the kind of airless perfection of the Wes Anderson Star Wars trailer. It’s harder to learn a particular creator’s style – the phrasing and delivery that set singers apart as much as their voices do. So far, many of the songs online that have AI-generated voices seem to have put it on top of the old singer’s words, although most pop music is less about technical excellence than style of delivery. And quirks of timing and emphasis are even harder to imitate.
Most big new pop stars are short on quirks, but they might do well to develop them. Whatever laws and agreements eventually regulate AI – and it pains me to point out that the key word there is eventually – artists will still end up competing with algorithms. And since algorithms don’t need to eat or sleep, creators are going to have to do something that they can’t. One of those things, at least for now, is embracing a certain amount of imperfection. Computers will catch up, of course – if they can avoid mistakes, they can certainly learn to make a few – but that could take some time.
Until relatively recently, most great artists had quirks: Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham played a bit behind the beat, Snoop Dogg started drawling out verses at a time when most rappers fired them off, and Willie Nelson has a sense of phrasing that owes more to jazz than rock. (Nelson’s timing is going to be hard for algorithms to imitate until they start smoking weed.) In most cases, these quirks are strengths – Bonham’s drumming made Zeppelin swing. But many producers came to see these kinds of imperfections as relics of an age when correcting them was difficult and the sound of pop changed so much that they now stick out like sore thumbs.
I don’t mean to romanticize the past. And newer artists have quirks, too – they just tend to smooth them over with studio software. But this kind of artificial perfection is easier to imitate. So, I wonder if the rise of AI – not the parodies we’re seeing so far, but the flood of computer-created pop that’s coming – will push musicians to embrace a rougher, messier aesthetic.
Most artists wouldn’t admit to this, of course – acknowledging commercial pressure is usually considered uncool. But big-picture shifts in the market have always shaped the sound of pop music. Consider how many artists created 35-to-45-minute albums in the ’60s and ’70s, and then 60-to-75-minute albums in the ’90s. Were they almost twice as inspired, or did the amount of music that fit on a CD – and the additional mechanical royalties they could make if they had songwriting credit – drive them to create more? These days, presumably also for economic reasons, songs are getting shorter and albums are getting longer.
It will be interesting to see if they also get a bit rougher, too. In Star Wars, at least, the future isn’t all about a sparkling surface.
For the Record is a regular column from deputy editorial director Robert Levine analyzing news and trends in the music industry. Find more here.
For the last week, the most talked-about song in the music business has been “Heart on My Sleeve,” the track said to have been created by using artificial intelligence to imitate vocals from Drake and The Weeknd and uploaded to TikTok by the user Ghostwriter977. And while most reactions were impressed, there was a big difference between those of fans (“This isn’t bad, which is pretty cool!”) and executives (“This isn’t bad, which is really scary!”). As with much online technology, however, what’s truly remarkable, and frightening, isn’t the quality – it’s the potential quantity.
This particular track didn’t do much damage. Streaming services pulled it down after receiving a request from Universal Music Group, for which both Drake and The Weeknd record. YouTube says the track was removed because of a copyright claim, and “Heart on My Sleeve” contains at least one obvious infringement in the form of a Metro Boomin producer tag. But it’s not as clear as creators and rightsholders might like that imitating Drake’s voice qualifies as copyright infringement.
In a statement released around the time the track was taken down, Universal said that “the training of generative AI using our artists’ music” violated copyright. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. Whether that’s true in the U.S. depends on whether training AI with music qualifies as fair use – which will not be clear until courts rule on the matter. Whether it’s true in other countries depends on local statutory exceptions for text and data mining that vary in every country. Either way, though, purposefully imitating Drake’s voice would almost certainly violate his right to what an American lawyer might call his right of publicity but a fan would more likely call his artistic identity. There are precedents for this: A court held that Frito-Lay violated the rights of Tom Waits by imitating his voice for a commercial, and Bette Midler won a similar lawsuit against Ford. Both of those cases involved an implied endorsement – the suggestion of approval where none existed.
The violation of an AI imitation is far more fundamental, though. The essence of Drake’s art – the essence of his Drakeness, if you will – is his voice. (That voice isn’t great by any technical definition, any more than Tom Waits’ is, but it’s a fundamental part of his creativity, even his very identity.) Imitating that is fair enough when it comes to parody – this video of takes on Bob Dylan‘s vocal style seems like it should be fair game because it’s commenting on Dylan instead of ripping him off – but creating a counterfeit Drake might be even more of a moral violation than a commercial one. Bad imitators may be tacky, but people tend to regard very accurate ones as spooky. “Heart on My Sleeve” isn’t Drake Lite so much as an early attempt at Drakenstein – interesting to look at, but fundamentally alarming in the way it imitates humanity. (Myths and stories return to this theme all the time, and it’s hard to think of many with happy endings.) Universal executives know that – they have talked internally about the coming challenges of AI for years – which is why the company’s comment asked stakeholders “which side of history” they want to be on.
This track is just the sign of a coming storm. The history of technology is filled with debates about when new forms of media and technology will surpass old ones in terms of quality when it often matters much more about how cheap and easy they are. No one thinks movies look better on a phone screen than in a theatre, but the device is right there in your hand. Travel agents might be better at booking flights than Expedia, but – well, the fact that there aren’t that many of them anymore makes my point. Here, the issue isn’t whether AI can make a Drake track better than Drake – which is actually impossible by definition, because a Drake track without Drake isn’t really a Drake track at all – but rather how much more productive AI can be than human artists, and what happens once it starts operating at scale.
Imagine the most prolific artist you can think of – say, an insomniac YoungBoy Never Broke Again crossed with King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. Then imagine that this hypothetical artist never needs to eat or sleep or do anything else that interferes with work. Then imagine that he – or, really, it – never varies from a proven commercial formula. Now clone that artist thousands of times. Because that’s the real threat of AI to the music business – not the quality that could arrive someday but the quantity that’s coming sooner than we can imagine.
It has been said that 100,000 tracks get uploaded to streaming services every day. What happens once algorithms can make pop music at scale? Will that turn into a million tracks a day? Or 100 million? Could music recorded by humans become an exception instead of a rule? In the immediate future, most of this music wouldn’t be very interesting – but the sheer scale and inevitable variety could cut into the revenue collected by creators and rightsholders. The music business doesn’t need an umbrella – it needs a flood barrier.
In the long run, that barrier should be legal – some combination of copyright, personality rights and unfair competition law. That will take time to build, though. For now, streaming services need to continue to work with creators and rightsholders to make clear the difference between artists and their artificial imitators.
Fans who want to hear Drake shouldn’t have to guess which songs are really his.
For the Record is a regular column from deputy editorial director Robert Levine analyzing news and trends in the music industry. Find more here.
It’s a good thing that there’s a German word for pleasure in the misfortune of others: schadenfreude.
Just before the Grammy Awards, The New York Times published an investigation that revealed that BMG signed, then let go before it released any music, the French rapper Freeze Corleone, who had previously been dropped by Universal Music Group for lyrics in previous music in which he compared himself to Hitler. Then, the following week, on Feb. 9, the German newsweekly Der Spiegel reported that Universal Music had made a distribution deal with the band Weimar, at least some of whose members had extreme right-wing affiliations in their past — and which the label immediately dropped when this came to its attention. (The band has since issued a statement renouncing extremism, xenophobia and racism, and two of the members admitted to a “right-wing-motivated past” but said they had since changed their ways.)
The schadenfreude, directed toward both labels, came from competitors and may have been heightened by BMG’s penchant for criticizing the majors for a business model it deems outmoded. “Look what they did,” some said. “Well, I mean, sure — OK — that last bad thing we did wasn’t exactly good but wasn’t much of a story. But this? This is a story!”
Both companies can claim some moral high ground: BMG’s French operation released Freeze from his one-album contract as soon as Dominique Casimir, who is now the company’s chief content officer, asked for additional checks into the rapper’s history. (BMG’s deal with Freeze gave it the right to reject the album if it included antisemitic lyrics, which it didn’t.) Universal, which wasn’t aware of Weimar’s members’ backgrounds — the musician that Der Spiegel describes as the worst of the band’s members did not have his name on the recording contract and wasn’t in the group as far as the label knew — dropped the act when it discovered its past connections to the far-right.
But I don’t think either has much to be proud of, either. BMG knew Freeze had been dropped by Universal and signed him anyway; a memo sent by an executive in the label’s French office said the rapper “faced controversy,” which is offensive in its understatement. Less is known about the Weimar situation — Universal said in a statement that despite efforts to vet the act, “we were unaware of the band members’ background” — but a group named after the inter-war German government would seem to merit more intense scrutiny. (To be fair, the group’s lyrics, which seem so alarming given the members’ backgrounds, seem melodramatic but cliché taken out of context.) Most people in the music business seem to have an opinion on which of these incidents was worse, but there are no bragging rights for having the industry’s second-worst antisemitic issue of 2023 — especially when it’s only February.
My own opinion on all of this is complicated by the fact that I’m Jewish, and I happen to live in Berlin, not far from the offices of these companies. And I’ve already disappointed some industry acquaintances looking for an easy villain by pointing out that the people involved — Casimir directly and BMG CEO Hartwig Masuch and Universal Music Central Europe chairman and CEO Frank Briegmann far less directly — are decent people who try hard to do the right thing and in both of these cases did so as soon as they fully understood the situation. That’s important.
However unsatisfying it might seem, the villain here may be a gold-rush for streaming market share and an industrywide shift toward single-album deals and distribution agreements. Until a decade ago, most artists signed long-term recording contracts and worked closely with A&R executives. These days, some artists simply hand over finished music — which sounds really cool until something like this happens — and the economics of streaming incentivize grabbing market share now and asking questions later.
That’s an explanation, though — not an excuse. And while both BMG and UMG have admitted they messed up, neither has publicly discussed any kind of plan to avoid making the same kind of mistake in the future. Both companies should do so — and soon. That’s especially important for BMG, which is owned by Bertelsmann, a German media conglomerate that printed books for the Nazi army during World War II. Everyone who ran Bertelsmann back then is dead, and everyone I know who works there now is very nice, but the company’s past gives it a responsibility to do better.
Both BMG and UMG want to put these controversies, and these artists, behind them — but they can’t avoid taking responsibility. (This can be complicated: UMG is still distributing the Freeze album it put out before it dropped the rapper, presumably because he has an ongoing defamation lawsuit against the label. “Universal Music France (UMF) does not work with Freeze Corleone and has not done so since September 2020 when, after one week, we ended our relationship with him with immediate effect,” according to a statement from the company. “Because this is the subject of a pending legal matter, we are unable to comment further, other than to say that we deeply regret that we were unaware of the situation prior to starting collaboration with Freeze Corleone.”) In 2018, when BMG faced another controversy about rappers with antisemitic lyrics, it donated 100,000 euros to a campaign against antisemitism, which is a significant gesture — but situations like this can’t be solved with an expensive swear jar. Companies need to think about how to keep this kind of thing from happening again.
At a bare minimum, record companies need to spend a few hours learning about artists they sign or distribute. (Going out to lunch or dinner: Not scalable, usually inefficient, often worth the time.) If they release controversial music — which may well be the right move when it comes to music that’s political, rather than racist or antisemitic — they should put their brand names on it. (BMG planned to release Freeze’s album without its logo, which the label has done for other acts, for reasons that have nothing to do with controversy.) If you’re not proud of it — not necessarily as politics but at least as art and expression — don’t put it out.
And if you take antisemitism and fascism seriously, don’t just drop acts that cross the line. Tell Spotify that Joe Rogan went too far when he said on his podcast that “the idea that Jewish people are not into money” is “like saying Italians aren’t into pizza.” (I like both, as do most people I know, but crudeness aside, no one has threatened Italians with genocide for their alleged food preferences.) Try to get Roger Waters to criticize Israel in ways that don’t play into antisemitic conspiracy theories. Ask Jay Electronica why he started the 2020 album A Written Testimony by sampling the notoriously antisemitic Louis Farrakhan asking, “Who are the real children of Israel?”
These won’t be easy conversations, but it’s time to have them. Then, maybe, we can try to go the rest of the year without anything like this happening again. We only have 10 and a half months to go.
For the Record is a regular column from deputy editorial director Robert Levine analyzing news and trends in the music industry. Find more here.
Years ago, when the music business was at its low point, devastated by online piracy and struggling to sell one-dollar downloads, tech pundits used to ask why the major labels hadn’t just started their own online store. There are a few answers: They did (anyone remember PressPlay or MusicNet?), and a more serious effort would have outraged other retailers, which were still generating considerable revenue. Besides, consumers would have been reluctant to embrace a service with a limited selection, and getting too many labels together presented logistical issues (who would run it?) as well as legal ones, in the form of potential antitrust concerns. The result has been a business where technology companies have more control than rightsholders would like over pricing, promotion, and relationships with consumers.
That was then. It’s still hard to imagine any label creating its own mainstream streaming service – the kind that would compete with Spotify or Apple – but what about a smaller one, focused on a particular genre? It would be a tough sell now that consumers are used to getting all their music in one place, but the payoff – in profit, information about consumer preferences, and control of a direct marketing channel – could be significant.
As it turns out, there actually is such a service. On Nov. 21, Universal Music Group’s Deutsche Grammophon launched Stage+, which for $14.90 a month offers music from the label’s archive and that of sibling Decca Records, plus video programming and a new live performance every week. In terms of popularity, Stage+ can’t compete with mainstream platforms, but it’s not meant to – and it doesn’t even need to. It could make money with a number of subscribers in the low six figures, partly because it costs more than other services, and it gives Deutsch Grammophon a way to market other products directly to consumers.
Stage+, which was developed by Deutsche Grammophon president Dr. Clemens Trautmann under Universal Music Central Europe chairman and CEO Frank Briegmann, faces any number of challenges – consumer disinclination to subscribe to multiple services, existing specialist streaming platforms, even a rumored new project from Apple. But the product looks great, and it’s worth thinking about how a genre-focused, label-owned service might develop – and the issues it raises for the streaming model that has relatively quickly come to dominate the music business.
Right now, Stage+ only offers Universal Music content. But there’s no reason other labels couldn’t license it music. (Trautmann says he’s open to this, although he’s not seeking it out now.) Presumably, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group would be reluctant to license their classical music repertoire to a service run by their rival. But it might make financial sense to do so, since the subscription price for Stage+ would imply a better payout. Perhaps just as important, the Stage+ policy of dividing royalties according to listening time is fairer to classical performers than the standard number-of-tracks model. If you had spent decades mastering an instrument, how would you feel about hearing that your 20-minute recording was only worth a tenth as much as 10 two-minute pop songs that played for the same total amount of time.
This model could also work for other genres, which is where things really get interesting. The obvious candidate is jazz. Like classical music, it appeals to aficionados, many of whom might be willing to pay a premium price for a well-curated service that offers high-fidelity audio and video. As it happens, Universal has a substantial market share there, too: It owns Decca, Blue Note and Verve (which controls Impulse! Records) and has distribution deals with ECM Records and Concord Records (which owns the catalogs of the Prestige and Riverside labels). That’s far from everything – Sony has the important Miles Davis recordings, for example – but it would be one hell of a start. After that, who knows? Could there be room for an Americana platform, a service for independent punk, even one for jam bands?
The truth is that subscription streaming saved the music business, but the dominant model just isn’t great for some genres. Neither are the dominant services, which offer a mind-blowing selection of music but are aimed at a general audience. That has helped the music business grow, but it hasn’t always served fans focused on specific genres. Classical aficionados want better metadata to find specific performances of classic compositions, for example, while jazz devotees could use more information about which musicians play on certain recordings. Jam-band fans might want help figuring out the coolest versions of “Dark Star.”
These kinds of services probably won’t cost mainstream services many subscribers, but they could put a bit of pressure on them to reconsider some of the rules that favor pop at the expense of other genres. Why don’t services double-count songs that are more than 10 minutes long, for example, or create an easy and reliable way to search for albums based on the musicians that play on them instead of just the named artist? For the last few years, the music streaming market has been extremely competitive based on marketing and discounts – all the mainstream services offer the same music for about the same price, with a fairly similar experience. What would help record labels, as well as creators, is more competition in terms of business models, where services that offer different features face off against others that are aimed at different audiences. And who better to spark that competition than the labels themselves?
For the Record is a regular column from deputy editorial director Robert Levine analyzing news and trends in the music industry. Find more here.
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