Spotify's Billions Club and the Future of Criticism
In the wilds of music streaming lurk eldritch terrors—perhaps few more strange, preposterous, and sanity-shattering than “the Spotify Billions Club,” a constantly updated list of tracks that have well and truly hit the big time. We pierce the post-temporal, post Tik-Tok veil and ask…what in the world is going on here? What are some of these bands? How did they get here? And what can the failure of any one narrative to contain them all tell us about how we understand music?But this is all just a springboard to try and make sense of the atemporal onslaught of content that characterizes our contemporary moment and the lack of critical engagement with what we are experiencing. This leads us to Kelefa Sanneh’s recent article for the New Yorker which made some major waves by asking “when did music critics get nice?” Beyond poptimism and soft payola, we think the answer lies in how Spotify works and reflects greater trends in popular culture, and how a potential return to a sharper journalistic form will only hold if this is all taken into account. We go long and deep on this one, folks. How else are we going to shake off the cynicism in an attempt to envision a genuinely idealistic vision of what criticism could do. Money 4 Nothing is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Money 4 Nothing at money4nothing.substack.com/subscribe
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1:18:08
SkyDunce: Billionaires Vs. The Media
There’s been a conspicuous uptick in the past decade of billionaires buying up media companies. Elon and Twitter. Bezos and the Washington Post. Laurene Powell Jobs and The Atlantic. Forbes, Fortune, LA Times and a slew of other major newspapers are all now controlled by…very rich folks who didn’t make their money in media. But why? We thought print (and honestly, anything NOT a born digital streaming service) was…if not dead, than dying? It’s almost as if these billionaires see more value in these media platforms than the market. It certainly it has nothing to do with the continual ability of these media companies to shape narratives, ideologies and stories reifying our ever increasing death drive towards a modern oligarchy that full aligns with the billionaire class. (Coughs)And then, the latest nail in the 20th-century-media-coffin: The sale of Paramount (which also includes CBS, MTV, Comedy Central and many others) to Skydance Media. You might be asking yourself “Who?” But don’t worry—Skydance, owned by David Ellison, son of billionaire and Oracle founder Larry Ellison, is the little media shop that could...raise billions via private equity and family funds.To try and suss out the political, economic, and cultural stakes of this new era, Sam and Saxon set their focus on Paramount and ask: What in the literal f*%k is going on? How is a nepo baby movie studio buying out a major media legacy brand like Paramount and more importantly: Why? And how does this all relate to a Trump quid pro quo, Colbert getting canceled and David Ellison’s horrific vision of a utopic world where a surveillance state keeps the world a more morally virtuous place?Come for theorizing of major music labels as the plural bipartisan black sheep of billionaire media industries. Stay for our overuse of the word barbarity because Sad Adorno. Get full access to Money 4 Nothing at money4nothing.substack.com/subscribe
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1:08:07
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1:08:07
What is the Value of Music?
What is the value of music? We often think of this question in economic terms, but it doesn’t always have to do with money. After all, there’s a value difference between someone strumming a guitar at home, playing in a band, or trying to land a major label deal in that band. Each has its own kind of “value,” but these values are not the same.Parsing out these different kinds of values is the focus of Making Value: Music, Capital and the Social, a recent book by our guest, Timothy D. Taylor, Professor of Ethnomusicology at UCLA. In the book, Taylor takes a novel approach, using anthropological value theory to examine how people’s ideas about value shape both the production and consumption of music while theorizing on the relationship between music’s economic and noneconomic forms. The result is a more a more comprehensive and complicated look at life and music under capitalism, one in which supposedly non-commodified, utopian spaces outside the market turn out to be far messier and more entangled within its overarching structures that we’d often like to admit.Sam and Taylor dive deep into this topic, tracing threads from Echo Park’s indie scene of the 2010s to Franz Liszt’s 19th-century star power to broad conceptions of gift-giving through the work of Marcel Mauss. Get full access to Money 4 Nothing at money4nothing.substack.com/subscribe
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No Ethical Music Streaming in a Streaming World
Daniel Ek, overlord of Spotify, recently lead an investment round of $600+ for a private German defense tech company. Despite Ek having invested in this kind of military technology since 2021, it seems to have suddenly reached everyone’s attention. As a result, lovable indie weirdos Deerhoof are leading Ek’s recent round of bad press with claims that they’ll be pulling their music off Spotify because they don’t support war, drones, American imperialism, A.I. and a number of other things detailed in multiple text-only posts on Instagram (whose parent company Meta definitely doesn’t invest in anything terrible that’s also accelerating the rise of T-1000s coming soon to a battlefield near you.)Ironic joking aside, it’s an interesting and unique case of music intersecting with geopolitics which feels ….rare? After all, since the commodification of music, have fans ever faced so many ethical quandaries? And how to even begin dissecting Ek’s investment under the shadow of Trump demanding Europe start footing more of their defense bill? And what difference would getting off Spotify actually make in the world (none), but maybe we should do it anyways (sure)?Sam and Saxon bring out that ole dog and pony show of ethical consumerism and consider that maybe those nice music listeners who are just trying to do right in a wrong world should strain to rethink where they locate politics. In the end, Sam gets hopeful, Saxon remains skeptic and both consider the real potentials of a federated streaming service that includes both Cyndi Lauper and Sun City Girls …plus blockchain.Money4Nothing is a podcast and newsletter on music and capitalism produced solely by Sam Backer and Saxon Baird. If you dig what we do, consider a (very cheap) subscription. Get full access to Money 4 Nothing at money4nothing.substack.com/subscribe
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55:17
Hardcore Superstars and a Sly-less Future
This past week saw the passing of legendary musicians Sly Stone and Brian Wilson at the (relatively) ripe age of 82. While both men had grappled with the challenges of fame and mental health over their long careers, their deaths weren’t the result of these struggles—but rather the inevitable march of time. And they aren’t alone. The stars of the 60s and 70s are all slowing down: Aerosmith, Kiss, Billy Joel, Elton John…the list of musical pillars hanging up the spandex and rhinestones suggests the true end of an era. But what does our inevitable future look like as we come to what is beginning to feel like the final close of a generation? We think through the economic implications, but settle on the totemic possibilities. When did we last agree on anything the way we agreed on the greatness of Sly and Brian? And what will mass culture look like in the wake of those shared touchstones?In the second-half, an alternate possibility is demonstrated by the (former?) hardcore (rock?) superstars-in-training Turnstile, who just released their long-awaited 5th album—but not before playing an absolutely massive free show in Sam’s beloved Wyman Park Dell in Baltimore. This is a band you either are sick of hearing about or have literally never come across—a dichotomy that reflects our contemporary musical landscape…particularly in comparison with the era of the ‘60s and ‘70s. We try and wrap our head around the phenomenon, figuring what it means to be a “big” band in 2025, who cares about whether or not anyone is a “sellout,” and….if this music makes literally any sense to us. Come for the breakdowns. Stay for the Bluenotes.Money4Nothing is a podcast and newsletter on music and capitalism produced solely by Sam Backer and Saxon Baird. If you dig what we do, consider a (very cheap) subscription. Get full access to Money 4 Nothing at money4nothing.substack.com/subscribe
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