POW Mag digs into Come to Brasil, a documentary about global fandom that refuses to gawk. You know the stateside version: multi-night pit runs, "getting barricade" as a flex, shitting yourself in the front row treated as a badge of honor. But when an international act plays your country once a decade, camping outside a stadium for two months reads differently.
If you've watched a Bieber or Queen catalog sell for nine figures and wondered where all that money actually comes from, musicben at STVDIO maps the plumbing. The answer is streaming turned royalties into predictable yield, and now sovereign wealth funds, pension money and PE giants like Apollo, Brookfield and Bain are writing billion-dollar checks to music companies who know how to buy the rights. Four layers, and this piece names the players in each.
Read →First Floor's Shawn Reynaldo has spent years tracking how electronic music talks about itself, and here he turns to a word the scene treats as sacred: independent. Somewhere in the 2010s, being unaffiliated and DIY became shorthand for being principled, as if going it alone were proof of virtue. Reynaldo pushes back. Independence, he argues, describes a business structure, not a moral position, and mistaking one for the other lets plenty of bad actors off the hook.
Read →Macklemore's removal from Ed Sheeran's Loop Tour, after his 'Free Palestine' remarks at MetLife, has cascaded into an opener exodus: Finneas, Lukas Graham, Aaron Rowe and backing band Beoga all walked. Billboard maps the logistics and the precedent, noting that stadium owners banding together to force an act off a tour, reportedly led by Gillette's Robert Kraft, hasn't happened at this scale before. The tour itself may not survive.
An opinion piece critiquing Ed Sheeran's response to Macklemore's removal from his tour over pro-Palestine statements. The essay argues that Sheeran's refusal to publicly support Macklemore and his silence on the Israel-Palestine conflict constitutes complicity and cowardice.
An analysis of Drake's limited acting career despite his early success as a child actor on Degrassi and his position as a major Hollywood player. The piece explores why Drake, unlike many other rappers-turned-actors, has not pursued significant film or television roles as a lead or supporting actor.
An essay examining Fab 5 Freddy's cultural influence and legacy through the lens of business strategy, tracing his role in hip-hop history from early graffiti culture through his work with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Blondie's 'Rapture,' and Yo! MTV Raps, and his impact on global fandom.
The horse-headed gimmick was always a cover for real conviction, and NME's profile of HorsegiirL (Stella Stallion) makes the case that her major-label debut 'Nature Is Healing' is where it shows. Berlin techno snobs sneered at her happy-hardcore roots, so she leaned in: trancey, downtempo tracks sampling birds and rivers, mocking AI by marveling at slime mould. She opens for Robyn in LA this week.
Heavy metal has quietly become a form of folk music, argues @michaelahann, tracing a British microgenre back to early-80s totems Witchfinder General and Pagan Altar. Green Lung and Druidess mine cemetery railways and druidic ritual over organ-heavy hard rock closer to Fairport Convention than Black Sabbath. The pull, they suggest, is screen-fatigue and a reach for the natural world.
An essay examining the changing role of large wattage tube guitar amplifiers in modern music. The author argues that tube amps are not dying but rather evolving to meet different needs, with smaller, simpler amplifiers becoming more practical for contemporary musicians.
An essay examining The Coup's 2001 album Party Music and the conservative backlash it provoked when the Washington Post ranked it as the year's best album. The piece explores the political context of post-9/11 America and the controversy surrounding the album's anti-capitalist messaging.
The White Panthers (UK) were never a band so much as a manic South African polymath's fever dream: Robin Farquharson hired session players with a dodgy cheque to record a 1970 single he was certain would spark a revolution and free hijacker Leila Khaled from Ealing Prison. This Quietus book extract, from M. Syd Rosen's International Freak, tracks the lost record and its doomed creator.
Sam Hockley-Smith's newsletter pairs American exceptionalism in recent sports-adjacent novels with a genuinely strange find: The Stoned R.E.M.'s 'Red Eye Music,' a cassette from All Night Flight made by a store regular who likes to lie in a bush, get stoned, and listen to R.E.M. It slows down and cut-ups the band into hypnotic outsider art. Skip it if you need songs or structure.
The majors' doomsday framing is the tell, argues Cyril Vetter's response brief to SCOTUS, obtained by Billboard: publishers only cry chaos when asked to compete on an open market. Vetter won a January ruling letting terminating authors reclaim foreign rights, not just American ones, and his lawyers note the majors buried 'circuit split' on the petition's penultimate page.
All four openers plus Sheeran's backing band walked off his Loop tour after Macklemore was dropped for pro-Palestine remarks at MetLife. The Guardian traces who actually pulled the trigger: stadium owners including Patriots owner Robert Kraft, who refused their venues if Macklemore stayed. Sheeran called it the promoter's decision, but the exits from Finneas, Aaron Rowe, Beoga and Lukas Graham show where the artists landed.
Oasis playing eleven nights in one stadium, half a million tickets, and a registration form that routes around Ticketmaster: this Substack post reads the reunion as proof that the roving world tour is now a bad business. Build the production once, sell it eleven times, and costs flatten after night one. Adele in Munich, Coldplay at Wembley, the Sphere, and Eras all ran the same math. Residencies aren't a retirement plan anymore.
Demonetizing tracks below 1,000 annual streams was supposed to starve the fraud. ORCA argues it hasn't: 106,000 tracks now hit DSPs daily, Deezer takes in 90,000 AI uploads a day, and 85% of AI streams were fraudulent in 2025. The fix ORCA wants is a per-track upload fee, charging bad actors at the point of entry rather than chasing them after the flood.
An analysis of the tech industry's devaluation and its implications for music startups, SaaS companies, and the music industry's consolidation, with discussion of AI's role in operational efficiency.
While AI investment transform recorded music, its greatest untapped potential lies in helping live event pros manage bookings, payments, and workflows.
The 2026 festival season turned cancellations into routine, and NME tallies the damage: Bright Eyes storm-halted at Forest Hills, Defqon.1 evacuated under a Dutch heat code-red, Primavera and Bonnaroo battered, the latter now dark for 2027. A Met Office study found the UK's heatwaves 130 times likelier from climate change.
Live music is becoming a loyalty reward across banking, retail, and delivery — but this trend also reveals how the geography of fandom is changing.
Streaming has opened global platforms to African artists, but sustainable careers (especially in countries like Togo) depend on stronger strategies.
Nate Amos follows the magpie dazzle of Box for Buddy, Box for Star with scuffed, twang-perky songwriting, and this cut conjures what Pitchfork calls the hell of fearing yourself. Where Box denied redemption, this gutting track sits inside that dread on the album's gospel-sketching road-record theme of whether you can outrun your true nature.
Flow State frames this as a collection of impromptu pieces recorded on pianos while touring, from a USC-trained jazz pianist who's played on records by Blood Orange, Solange, and Frank Ocean. The pieces are delicate and intimate, carrying the tender, whimsical flavor that defines Kirby, a step quieter than the quirky jazz/funk of 2021's Septet.
Zen Sounds calls this Oakland producer's first solo album since 2022 already one of the year's most durable electronic records. It works the deep techno and Balearic house lineage of Larry Heard and John Beltran, channeling the nostalgic atmosphere of PS2-era game soundtracks into feel-good house, ambient and downtempo cut with a sweet, aching melancholy.
The standout from David August's Argento side project, a homecoming for the German-Italian producer who pieced together Miraggi between Berlin and the Tyrrhenian coast steeped in '70s and '80s Italian library music. Per Pitchfork, 'Ritmi Marini' is hypnotizingly dramatic, a wash of iridescent marimba arpeggios and piano chords cruising down the coastline, Lorenzo Setti's tactile hand drums grounding August's delectably cheesy synths. Closer to As Falls Wichita-era Metheny and Mays than any Ibiza drop.
A raw and unfinished collab with D'Angelo, the neo-soul icon does falsetto Sister Nancy lines here, a nice flashback to the Voodoo days. It's a highlight moment on Dillagence II, though Busta's soggy 'I Love My Chick'-style love-rap around it lands mostly cornball. Pitchfork frames the whole record as Busta recording brand-new raps over 19 never-released vintage Dilla beats.
Badu's first body of work since 2015, and she's adamant she's executive producer, not just the singer over Alchemist's beats: she reconstructed his production with her own vision. Sixteen tracks of smoke-thick boom-bap and 1970s jazz-rock, with Steve Lacy, Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, Westside Gunn and Earl Sweatshirt. The closer 'Black Box' is the peak: Afrofuturistic psychedelic jazz built on a 1978 Mickey Baker sample, threaded with some of her best spoken-word lyrics yet.
A spacious, single-track piano album inspired by past-life regression hypnotherapy. Slow and thoughtful, built for meditation, out on Temporary Residence Ltd.
Florian T M Zeisig's rotating collective treats rock like a beat tape: slow, swooning indie falling between slowcore, shoegaze, and the dreamier end of emo, assembled from three years of file-shared sessions rather than a band in a room. On the opener, more eaze's Mari Maurice Rubio pins Auto-Tuned jazz runs up front while the music hovers like a Galaxie 500 record stuck in a locked groove. Rock as jazz as Drain Gang emo rap.
The Orlando rapper's signature trick is ping-ponging between high and low voices like multiple personalities wrestling for the mic, and across Trapculinary vol. 2 nobody's rapping like him. On "Fish Grease" he intersperses yelped lines between a rambly Juvi flow, building call-and-response with himself; the vision and precision evoke Young Thug's leaked "With That" session. The groovy Florida-via-Michigan production places him alongside Sada Baby and Rio Da Yung OG.
Gary Shteyngart's Substack delivers a love letter to New York's neighborhood joints, the kind of places you roll into for an hour and leave somewhere else. The dispatch moves through Martiny's on 17th, Georgian dumplings at Chito Gvrito, and Passerine on 20th, where a lobster roll with smoked tomato-cardamom gravy and a nihari-reduction pot pie are making the case for a shorter, sharper menu.
Joseph Cox reports that OpenAI has hundreds of contractors reading real ChatGPT conversations, including sensitive personal disclosures, as part of an internal program called Project Lily. The contractors rate and critique responses to improve the model.
SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE uses a broken-down 33-year-old luxury tank and a stress walk through Chicago as the on-ramp to the Driftless region of southwestern Wisconsin, a glaciation-skipped landscape that doubles as the spiritual setting for a book-in-progress. Outsider artists, limestone caves, Balkan techno from Bosnian mechanics, and Lana Del Rey's 'Ride' all share the frame.
A memoir piece about living in a bare college apartment on West 110th Street in 2001, which pivots without warning into the story of Henryk Siwiak: the only person murdered in New York City on September 11th, a Polish immigrant given wrong subway directions on the worst possible night. The juxtaposition is doing real work. Ottessa Moshfegh's Substack, paywalled.
An essay excerpt by John Hodgman from The Believer Issue 6, humorously exploring the challenges and requirements of writing a book, and announcing his completion of a first book collecting anecdotes about fatherhood and his daughter.
The New Yorker remembers Bob Mackie, who died Monday at 87, as the designer who understood that a costume is a comedic and musical instrument first. His decades-long partnerships with Cher, Carol Burnett, and Tina Turner produced work that was structurally rigorous beneath the sequins: Burnett still wears 40-year-old Mackie jackets onstage.
The New Yorker puts Meta's Muse, billed as the 'World's First Personal AI Agent Built for Everyone,' through a weekend stress test and finds it mostly useful for tasks that were already pretty easy: eBay listings, a budget spreadsheet, a restaurant reservation it couldn't complete.
A critical essay examining Rachel Cusk's novel M about a character based on Natalie Portman, exploring the ethics of fictional representation and the distinction between self-representation and representation by others.
The singer is Gabriele Kerner, three years short of '99 Luftballons.' The Stripes were her first band, formed in Hagen in 1979 and finished by 1982. The show is Plattenküche, a WDR variety hour with fountains, a filing cabinet that toppled every week, and a working kitchen where the co-host cooked dinner on air.
Nick Uff, a gardener by trade, drew it frame by frame on 16mm without a storyboard, letting the film go where it took itself. That scratchy hand-made animation sits over an arpeggio Adrian Utley couldn't get a sequencer to play, so he recorded the notes one at a time and edited them into the loop.
Before Tom Rubnitz became downtown New York's patron saint of camp, he helped make this: a performer named Frieda rapping backed by a chorus line of dolls, production values scraping the floor on purpose. 'Plastic Rap' is Lower Manhattan circa 1980 deciding that cheap and ridiculous could be an aesthetic, not a limitation.
Spike Jonze gives Ludacris a pair of prosthetic Popeye arms and aims them at a man who won't observe bathroom etiquette. Interestingly enough, the man is Fatlip, the Pharcyde rapper whom Jonze had filmed four years earlier narrating the worst day of his life. In 2004, he is still the one getting hit.
Zürich, 1981. Mother's Ruin had been going since 1978, early enough that Swiss punk barely existed, and director Paul Grau shot 'Lost in Town' for the 'Want More' LP while the scene was still inventing itself. Snarl from a country nobody files under snarl.
Out of Los Angeles, Dorothy Fuzz stack sweet vocal harmonies over trippy psych and title the album 'Mad Art For A Mad Age,' which about covers it. '1 2 3 Understand Me' keeps reaching for connection and dissolving into haze before it can close the gap. Sunshine on top, something woozier underneath.
Jonathan Glazer sends a man stumbling through a tunnel, getting hit by cars over and over, muttering Thom Yorke's looped prayer. Each impact lands harder than the last until the final one doesn't. UNKLE and DJ Shadow built the track from dread and strings; Glazer turned it into a parable that earns its resurrection.
Spike Jonze films it like a pratfall in slow motion: Fat Lip narrating his own worst day, every small humiliation landing square on the beat. It's tragi-comedy played dead straight, an itemized series of humiliations played with a stand-up's timing. The Pharcyde's sharpest tongue turns self-loathing into the funniest, saddest three minutes the West Coast underground ever produced.
A Romanian pop grande dame, who'd spent five decades exploring the outer boundaries of samba, soul, and disco-pop, takes Pulp’s 'Common People' and sings it in her own language. The pairing is the pleasure: a voice raised on the state airwaves wrapping itself around a Britpop anthem about class.
The idea of using music to foster cross-cultural dialogue seems almost inherently good. After all, we’d be better off if we’re sharing and talking, right? But the reality is often more complicated, and the history of these exchanges is littered with instances of power imbalances and even outright exploitation. Our first piece today is one of the morally thorniest examples of this exchange. Before he passed at the age of 37 in 1912, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was probably the best-known Black classical composer of the Edwardian era, though he never saw a royalty from performances of his most successful piece. That piece was “The Song of Hiawatha,” his setting of a Longfellow poem that, according to the piece’s author, Tom Service, now reads as colonialist caricature and a white-empowering fantasy. Every year, from 1926 to 1939, the Royal Albert Hall housed a production of the piece using around a thousand performers decked out in red-face make-up and racialised caricature. Mohawk chief Os-ke-non-ton also performed in it, granting what the piece terms an apparent authenticity, but Service still finds the spectacle jaw-dropping.
Forty years on, people still argue about the ethics of Paul Simon’s mid-period masterpiece, Graceland. Simon cut the core sessions in South Africa, where apartheid meant the Black musicians could not be on Johannesburg’s streets after dark or use public transport. Ashley Kahn, who has a new book on the album, makes the case that Simon paid the South African musicians triple the daily rate of American union players. But the backlash over songwriting credits never stopped, and it came from the album’s own musicians: Los Lobos, Rockin’ Dopsie and the Zydeco Twisters among them, and guitarist Ray Phiri. A young Mark Batson, who would go on to produce for Beyonce and Eminem, confronted Simon at a Howard University Q&A, asking the legendary singer-songwriter how he could justify “taking over this music.”
To say that Max Mix, the Spanish DJ megamix sold as a compilation, was a hit is a bit of an understatement. Its twelve volumes from 1985 to 1992, nearly all from the same label’s catalogue, sold a staggering 32 million copies. Rolland calls the first of them poison and their success a shameful circus show. The Catalan DJs Mike Platinas and Javier Ussia behind the project cited the 1982 DMC championship as their point of inspiration, and Rolland gives the invention to Ben Liebrand, Alan Coulthard, and above all, hip-hop pioneer Grandmaster Flash, whose 1981 Wheels of Steel is the first real megamix in that reckoning. The only problem was that there was no DMC Championship in 1982 (that didn’t start until 1985), and the success of the series did as much to stunt DJ culture as it did grow it.
Six-piece Chilean boy band Q_ARE were assembled through online casting and trained for six months before they debuted in 2024. They sing in English, Spanish and Chilean slang over a production aesthetic that borrows heavily from K-pop. The piece traces how the Korean wave reached Chile through anime and widened into food, television, and skincare. The Rey Sejong Institute in Santiago has quadrupled its Korean-language students since 2019, and the Patronato neighbourhood now holds more than fifty Korean restaurants, many of them Chilean-owned. One member of Q_ARE says the obvious part aloud for NPR: though they take inspiration and influence from Korean music and culture, they are clearly not K-pop, because they are Latinos.
For years, Remezcla argues, K-pop leaned on outdated, caricatured takes on Latin rhythms and language. Samuel Arredondo Kim could be the corrective for that. He grew up in Bakersfield, born to a Korean mother and a Mexican father from Michoacan, and then moved to South Korea at ten to train as an idol, debuted at thirteen. He made a public career based on the Korean half of his inheritance, and his new four-track EP SAMUELiTO connects the dots to the Latin side. The production borrows from reggaeton and K-pop, and its lead single is sung in English, Korean and Spanish. “I didn’t want to fake it,” Samuel says. “I didn’t want to fake anything.”
In the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and the ceasefire that followed, the boundary sliced right down the middle of Balti-speaking country, leaving Baltistan under Pakistani administration and Kargil on the Indian side. Movement across it was nearly impossible for the better part of eighty years, and this piece tracks the effects of that rupture. Balti folk music is an oral tradition, and the broadcaster Kaleem Balti reckons maybe a tenth of the childhood musical gatherings survive, displaced by Bollywood and western music. Zahra Banoo, who is 23, frames it as language loss: when a language disappears, identity disappears with it.
Ugwu begins the piece by focusing on the well-understood truism that after all these years, the genre remains regional. Cities listen to rappers from those cities. But what’s really interesting about the analysis is the finding that rappers from overseas do particularly well in cities that serve as influences for their particular style. And a clear majority of American hip-hop fans now say they want cross-border collaborations. This is a compelling look at what happens when culture travels, and when it comes home.
Shabaka Hutchings is a generational talent. As the saxophonist leading groups like Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming, Hutchings approached music with an unparalleled ferocity and raw velocity, redefining the boundaries of jazz for an entire new generation of fans. Later, picking up the flute, Hutchings funneled his intensity into music that was deeply quiet and meditative. Hutchings grew up in Barbados and came up in Birmingham and London. Wisdom of Elders, his 2016 record with The Ancestors, was recorded in Johannesburg with South African players. All Things Jazz explores the jazz tradition of that country, and calls it one of the deepest outside the United States, tracking the musicians who transformed American swing, bebop, and modal improvisation through local rhythm and melody, and developed jazz as a spiritual practice and social witness during apartheid. The piece argues that authentic diasporic British jazz must engage with African and Caribbean lineages beyond London itself.
Maybe Fenix Flexin won't be remembered as the Elvis Presley of AI music, but his track "Rubberz", which delivers street-rap verses over '80s synth-pop, reached the Hot 100, drew months of accusations, and ballooned into one of the biggest stories of 2026. We track the story's twists and turns, and consider where we're going (and where we've been).
Between a billion dollar Michael Jackson biopic, a blockbuster Madonna album, and the return of "Wonderwall" and "Mr. Brightside" to the charts, 2026 could be defined not so much by what we created, but by what we remembered. We survey the landscape, and consider what it means when culture turns into a hall of mirrors.
For years, the labels sued to stop fans from generating AI covers of licensed content, and then Universal and Spotify signed the deal for a tool that does just that. Beneath the product announcement lies the story of how billion dollar catalog acquisitions have created incentives for the industry to recycle the catalog rather than invest in new music.
Miles was the avatar of cool who kept detonating his own styles, a privileged Black artist who declined every story offered to him about privilege or suffering, and both an undeniable genius and a man who hurt others, particularly women. And a hundred years on, he remains a mystery and a contradiction, which is probably what he would've wanted.
In a forecasting report for August 2026, the esteemed MIDiA Research projects $121.1 billion in recorded-music retail revenue by 2033, with much of the fastest growth occurring outside of the subscription model. Fan-economy segments reach $18.5 billion, expanded rights become the industry's second-fastest-growing revenue source, and retail outruns trade across the projection. Streaming remains dominant, but listener ARPU gains come from pricing, new tiers, add-ons, and fewer free trials.
Despite years of hype, the superfan subscription already failed, at least according to Bruce Houghton. The author tallies the wreckage: Vault dropped paid subscriptions inside two years, Patreon's free memberships now outnumber paid four to one, and Spotify's promised superfan tier stalled out before achieving liftoff. Subscriptions force artists into a schedule that doesn't match how they create, Vault CEO David Greenstein says. Instead, discrete high-intent moments (the release, the listening party, the merch drop) are what matters.
The playlist playbook is losing its grip, argues George Ergatoudis, a former Spotify and Apple Music curator who spent years running that playbook. The evidence he presents is operational. Irish band BABYRAT delayed streaming releases to collect fan contacts at shows; Ren's team leaned into reaction videos, while Ren built Discord communities, Patreon memberships, and merch; and Compost Compost Compost, managed by Jamie Oborne, chooses mastery over momentum. As AI makes music abundant, the truly scarce goods become fans' attention, trust, and identity. More than anything, fans need to feel a sense of ownership.
Fans are paying for scarcity and connection now, Jeremy Young reports at Hypebot, and the trend of limited-edition merch is the evidence. Chicago's Surge Iconics launches crystal tickets and gold-plated collector cards in collaboration with KISS, Styx, and the Lost Lands Festival, while artists at every level ship hand-numbered lyric notebooks, signed test pressings, limited-run cassettes, behind-the-scenes zines, and monthly mystery packages. Many of the objects cost little to produce. Patreon normalized paying for access; the same instinct now buys handwritten lyric sheets and personalized videos.
While the titans of recorded music theorize about superfan monetization, Live Nation is building the physical version. Music Business Worldwide covers Michael Rapino's plan to remake venues along the lines of sports arenas, with premium experiences taking up to 30 percent of venue capacity. People will pay for a better experience, Rapino says. The early results are on-site spending above $100 a head at the Hollywood Palladium and a 30 percent lift at Amsterdam's Ziggo Dome.
Spotify's Reserved went live in June with a specific mechanic: engagement signals identify an artist's top listeners, and the platform holds two concert tickets for each ahead of public sales. Role Model was the first artist, with the rollout running through Live Nation and Ticketmaster for US Premium subscribers. Eligibility watches for bot inflation, and background listening won't tip the scale. Sarah Perez notes at TechCrunch the detail that gives the strategy away: Spotify takes no fee on the transactions. The product is the funnel from stream to seat.
Booking agents read Spotify Reserved as a data play, and Ciaran Donnelly captures their concerns in a recent piece for IQ. The anti-scalping pitch masks the real prize: keeping tour data inside Spotify's walls, with the platform deciding who counts as an artist's top fans. One agent warns it is infrastructure, not a pilot. At stake is the streaming, location, and purchase intelligence that shapes touring decisions.
The recording stopped being the product the moment it became infinitely available, Donny Slater argues, and the industry keeps trying to solve the wrong problem. The alternative Slater offers is to treat the master as a loss leader for an artist-owned universe, the way Nipsey Hussle used his music to propel his lifestyle brand, The Marathon. The barrier Slater names is traditional advances, which buy up tomorrow's guaranteed cash flow and are incompatible with genuine entrepreneurship.
The add-on economy showed up in Spotify earnings. On Spotify's Q2 call, per Billboard Pro, co-CEOs Alex Norström and Gustav Söderström told investors the much-hyped AI remix tool has strong momentum ahead of launch (Universal and Merlin licensed, covered artists opting in to be remixed for compensation and credit). Meanwhile, Reserved held nearly 100,000 tickets since late June, selling through full allocations on some tours until Live Nation upsized them mid-run. For Spotify, it's not just about the streams anymore.
The closer: growth's next markets pay artists only if the plumbing works. Downtown Music Publishing Africa reads IFPI's last two Global Music Reports side by side: global recorded revenue accelerated to 6.4 percent growth and $31.7 billion, while Sub-Saharan Africa gained 15.2 percent on revenues of $120 million, with South Africa taking 78 percent of the region's share. The regional table moved too, with Latin America overtaking Africa as Asia rebounded. The essay's argument is deliberately unglamorous: sustained growth depends on covering the basics of accurate metadata, clean splits, and proper registration. It's the rights infrastructure that decides whether expanding markets pay the people who make the music.