Dada Drummer Almanach lays out the structural absurdity facing recording musicians: streaming platforms dodged the royalty frameworks that radio had to follow, and the result is 84% of recorded music income flowing through a system that pays almost nothing. The Living Wage for Musicians Act would close that loophole. Five major city councils have passed resolutions backing it.
Zinstrel tracks the flood of AI-generated political anthems now filling platforms — pro-Trump country, anti-Trump hip-hop, resistance ballads in multiple languages. The insight isn't that partisans make propaganda; it's that the gatekeepers who once mediated political music are gone. No label approval, no artist alignment, no licensing friction.
Read →James O'Sullivan dissects the Commonwealth short story prize controversy, where a Caribbean winner was flagged for AI use. His close reading is brutal: negation staged as revelation, aphorisms with the cadence of profundity but no meaning. If you've ever read something that felt polished but hollow, O'Sullivan names the pattern. The judges praised it. That's the problem.
Read →A critical essay examining Olivia Rodrigo's aesthetic choices for her new album 'You Seem Pretty Sad For A Girl So In Love,' specifically analyzing the disconnect between her stated grunge and riot grrrl influences and her baby doll dress styling in the 'Drop Dead' music video, questioning whether…
Leonard Nevarez maps Black Akron's R&B ecosystem — talent shows, school bands, cabarets — as dense social infrastructure running parallel to the white rock scene he's chronicled elsewhere.
Documentary featuring over 50 artists and figures from the vaporwave scene, including Daniel Lopatin and Cat System Corp., exploring the genre's origins, the role of anonymity, and its cultural impact. The film is available to watch for free on YouTube.
Patti Smith recounts performing a stripped-down acoustic version of "Fireflies" in Vienna with Jackson, Seb, and Tony Shanahan, discussing the challenges and importance of attempting new musical interpretations and the broader experiences from her Vienna visit.
Profile of a musician trained classically on violin who blends classical tradition with R&B and hip-hop influences, creating dark, ambient, orchestral music that emphasizes space and emotional weight through lower registers.
Part 3 of a series tracing Miles Davis through the 1960s, exploring the collapse of his first great band, his search for new musical chemistry, the rise of the Second Great Quintet, and his artistic transition toward electric music.
An interview and essay by Grayson Haver Currin about how Peter Frampton's music influenced Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, with Morello recounting his passion for Frampton Comes Alive! and the guitarist's impact on his musical development.
Cherie Hu got access to a private Udio + Kobalt webinar and reports the first concrete details on Udio's upcoming consumer remix app, Starstruck — walled-garden architecture, four interaction modes (Cover, Reimagine, Remix, Create), royalties flowing to rights holders on every generation. Hu's analysis flags the structural weakness: closing the ecosystem solves licensing but kills the social sharing that drives fan creation, with Udio's top tracks already trailing Suno's by orders of magnitude.
Music Business Worldwide covers Warner Music COO Armin Zerza making the case at JPMorgan's TMC conference that music is structurally under-monetized — and that his Activision Blizzard background isn't just résumé texture, it's the actual framework he's applying to fix it.
Sam Backer routes through the Geese / Chaotic Good marketing scandal into a wider essay on 'clipping' — the chains of content middlemen whose repackaged versions of material now eclipse the originals. The spine is the collapse of music criticism: reduced to another voice in the same algorithmic feed as the material it would otherwise examine. Closes by sketching whether smaller AI models on personal devices could return some grip on the algorithmic flow.
John Chapman, who manages the family office behind Chord Music Partners, has expressed optimism for the future value of premium music catalogs. He says music is undergoing a seismic shift driven by a new source of capital: the insurance sector.
An essay examining Drake's evolution as a recording artist and how his shift toward releasing longer, more frequent albums reflects broader changes in music promotion and curation in the streaming age.
Zadie Smith takes on the oldest deflection in crisis politics — why talk about art when people are suffering? — in a lecture delivered at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She anchors the question in E.M. Forster's 1949 address to the same room, post-WWII wreckage and all. The parallel does the argument's heavy lifting before she's made it.
Rafia Zakaria uses a Karachi neighbor's rage at overflowing water as an entry point into what scarcity actually does to a city of twenty million — how it breeds resentment, reshapes daily life, and exposes who the infrastructure was never built to serve. Personal and structural at once.
A personal Substack dispatch on the annual NYT 100 Best Restaurants list — framed as an athletic challenge, not a criticism. Light, self-deprecating, and off-brief for TBC.
A collection of short stories and dispatches exploring Kafkaesque themes, including visits to a train station in Moldova, an unexpected inheritance, and figure skating scoring calculations. The author writes about the Swedish experience of seasonal change and creativity.
A critical essay examining Stephenie Meyer's Twilight novel, analyzing its unreliable narrator technique and how the book differs from the film adaptation. The author discusses Bella's characterization and Edward's portrayal in detail.
Curaçao qualified for the World Cup as the smallest nation by population and geography ever to do so, breaking Cape Verde's record set just five weeks prior. The island's squad is built almost entirely from players born, raised, and trained in the Netherlands.
An exploration of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard graduation speech on the difference between modern and ancient conceptions of freedom, examining his argument that true liberty means knowing what and how to choose in accordance with the good, true, and beautiful.
An essay examining shifts in media consumption across formats—from books to podcasts to online articles—and arguing that long-form non-fiction books offer unique benefits like ownership, footnotes, and sustained narrative attention that newer media cannot replicate.
People vs Algorithms uses the Granta AI-authorship controversy as a lens on a coming normalization: AI as creative partner is already here, and the holdouts will just be disadvantaged.
Digital Culturist argues that content overload is producing the same conditions that killed cable — and the response will be identical: people will outsource the sorting. The piece's sharpest claim is that curation is no longer optional infrastructure, and whoever captures that value shapes what…
The Media Copilot argues that Google's stumble into the AI era was a feint, not a fall — and that after I/O, the post-search era still belongs to them. Worth a read for anyone thinking about discoverability, since 'findable' now means something different than it did two years ago.
An essay by Noah reframing common narratives about AI and writing, arguing that blame for AI-generated work is misdirected at young people handing in slop. The piece suggests the real issue lies with systems and education rather than individual misuse.
AI as Normal Technology pushes back on the case for extraordinary government intervention in AI, arguing that resilience-building through normal policymaking is both sufficient and less distorting than targeted restrictions on AI companies.
Marc Andreessen argues that the true AI moat is not the model itself but what companies build around it, discussing how technological moats decay rapidly, why the 'wrapper' critique is outdated, and how winning AI apps scale to multiple specialized models with proprietary intelligence from…
Alex Heath's piece surfaces a candid prediction from Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora: AI will eliminate 80% of software UI as on-demand model-generated interfaces replace hand-built ones.
Luiza Jarovsky's newsletter argues that Thinking Machines Lab — Mira Murati's post-OpenAI company — released an interaction AI model that deserves more attention than it's gotten. The piece frames it as a genuine architectural shift in how humans and LLMs collaborate, with governance risks…