Money 4 Nothing

Episodes

• Drake Stream Gaming + LiveNation Are AntiTrust LOSERS 03.06.2026 1h 6m

  Looking at the current state of the Billboard charts, it seems like reports of Drake’s demise at the hands of Kendrick Lamar may have been a bit premature. Storming out of whatever supervillain ice-cave lair he’s been inhabiting, Drake dropped THREE new albums into the top three slots of the charts, reminding the world that he remains the most successful rapper of the streaming era. But what does it mean to be this type of industry anchor in 2026? How has superstardom changed since Drake first grabbed the commercial crown? We talk lawsuits, record contracts, wallpaper music, playlist manipulation, and digital casinos—all on the trail of an artist who is still, somehow, too big to fail. That same logic did not help Ticketmaster/Live Nation—the live music mega-corporation that, despite the chicanery, despite the current administration, despite the track record, managed to LOSE a major monopoly trial through the sheer unmitigated volume and pungency of its bad behavior. And yes, while you did already know Ticketmaster was rotten, unless you’ve dug through the court filings, you really have NO idea how much anti-consumer sleaze you can fit in one company. Don’t worry—we go through it. With freakin’ PLEASURE. Beyond the general schadenfreude and kvelling, we also try to imagine what might come out of this…actual good thing that occurred? Honestly, we were caught a bit off-guard, because nothing like this has really occurred since we started the show. Maybe…things could…get better? Weird for us as it is for you. Get full access to Money 4 Nothing at money4nothing.substack.com/subscribe
• Wild Geese Chase and a $64 billion offer for UMG 05.05.2026 1h 17m

  Early last month, billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square made an offer to purchase major-label heavyweight Universal Music Group. Ackman, already a major investor in the company, believes that despite consistent success in the business of making and selling music, UMG hasn’t been doing nearly well enough for its customers—i.e. the shareholders. Could a “New UMG” organized by his hedge fund unlock higher valuations while finally giving those hardworking investors the dividends that they deserve? Saxon and Sam dig into this unquestionably great news, exploring the exciting possibilities that a music industry even less interested in artists—and with its financial worth tied to stock market returns based on income-only-ever-go-up assumptions—will offer for everyone. Two Thumbs Up! BUT FIRST: we have some bad news. Geese—your favorite band to argue about whether or not they should be someone else’s favorite band—hired a viral marketing firm. And then that firm (gasp!) did viral marketing using potentially-fake user accounts to drive online conversations. It’s a scandal that’s consumed the ever-shrinking world of indy rock. But what does the kerfuffle tell us about our contemporary digital imagination—not to mention the media ecosystem that supports it? Why did it make people (both those who were horrified and those mocking those who were horrified) so upset? And what should we do with the unpleasant feeling that our minds are being colonized—and our knowledge that they…kinda always were? Come for a historically situated analysis of current projections that music could be constituted as a reliability counter-cyclical cash flow. Stay for tin-foil-hat takes on The Discourse. Get full access to Money 4 Nothing at money4nothing.substack.com/subscribe
• Music and War (w/ David Suisman) 31.03.2026 1h 9m

  Did you know that the U.S. military is the largest single employer of musicians on earth?But...how did this happen? What does it tell us about war? Or, you know... about music? These questions are at the heart of David Suisman’s new book Instruments of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers. From Civil War battlefields to WWI training camps, Vietnamese bars, and Iraq-era iPods, he traces how performers, songs, and recordings have served to maintain energy, sustain emotional balance, and shape new, powerful collective identities among fighting men and women. All the stuff that we love on the dancefloor? It turns out that it also works pretty well on the battlefield and training camp. Come for country-vs-soul jukebox battles, submarine pianos, scatological marching songs, and Drowning Pool supercuts. Stay for an entirely new perspective on what the power of music can accomplish—for better and worse.To learn more about David’s work—and listen to some amazing recordings—be sure to check out his website here ==> https://www.davidsuisman.net/instrument-of-warMoney 4 Nothing is created as a labor of love by Sam and Saxon. Consider a paid subscription so we can keep the lights on. Get full access to Money 4 Nothing at money4nothing.substack.com/subscribe
• Do Bad Times Make Good Punk? 13.03.2026 1h 3m

  It’s an attractive silver-lining of an idea—“At least bad times make good punk.” Reagan begets…Reagan Youth, you know? Looking around at our rapidly deteriorating world, we decided it was a good moment to put this theory to the test, subbing punk for the broader category of “political music,” and applying it to the last hundred years of popular performance. But what are bad times? And what makes good political music?What follows is a deep dive into our thinking on materialist cultural criticism—from the imagined traditions of the folk revival or the escapist fantasies of 1930s Hollywood musicals to self-contradictory rebellion in the 1960s and the hauntological possibilities of Nirvana’s anti-corporate idealism in the TikTok present. Come for the false futures being asserted by our corporate overlords. Stay for the fact that those futures, despite everything, are still unwritten. Get full access to Money 4 Nothing at money4nothing.substack.com/subscribe
• Creating College Radio (w/ Katherine Rye Jewell) 18.02.2026 58m

  If you live in the United States, you probably know the college radio feel—scrappy vibes, student DJs stumbling over liner notes, great station interstitials, even better music. That music tends to be a very specific mix of bleeding edge up-and-comers, critically-acclaimed (yet relatively low-selling) classics, and occasional forays into genres like reggae, funk, jazz, or (help us) ska. But despite this, the actual boundaries of what makes college radio, well, college radio aren’t so clear. Are hits disqualifying? Does it—is it supposed to—reflect the tastes of the students? And why do colleges even have these stations in the first place? The questions are important because, as Katherine Rye Jewell, the author of “Live From The Underground: A History of College Radio,” explains, college radio has been influential on both the development of underground music and the reimagining of academic life over the last 50 years. Perched between commercial training and educational anarchy, stations gradually developed a strange middle ground—tied to the systems of power but apart from them. Maybe not so different from underground rock more generally? Come for FCC shenanigans, battles with administrators, fights over rap, and the creation of the indy-industrial complex. Stay for a deep history of a rarely-considered pillar of the American music landscape. Live From The Underground by Katherine Rye Jewell Get full access to Money 4 Nothing at money4nothing.substack.com/subscribe
• WTF is Tidal + Musk Vs. The Publishers 27.01.2026 1h 5m

  A two topic special for you this week. First—we explore the strangely under-reported story that Elon Musk is suing…basically the entirety of music publishing. The reason? They (gasp!) want him to either pay for music on X or, you know, stop allowing it. The mechanics are a lot weirder, though. We briefly run through consent decrees, blanket licensing, and Silicon Valley’s vision for intellectual property.Then: the increased tumult around Spotify has seen many looking for an alternate streaming platform, with Tidal often touted as a more ethical (and higher audio quality) alternative. But…what’s Tidal’s deal, actually? And what can it tell us about the history—and future—of streaming? We talk the bizarre, star-studded, Jay-Z-led launch, Cash-App Takeovers, super-shady pro-Kanye stream inflation, and mission-pivoting techno-babble. Come for a shadow history of music in tech. Stay for the time that Frank Ocean built a staircase to nowhere. Get full access to Money 4 Nothing at money4nothing.substack.com/subscribe
• New Year, Same Us 08.01.2026 1h 4m

  To ring in the new year, Sam and Saxon pull out both their wayback machine AND their increasingly scuffed-up crystal ball to think through some of the biggest trends from the last year—and to make some predictions about what might be coming in 2026. Was this the year when Spotify finally lost its grip on the PMC intelligentsia? Will Tik Tok’s potential American spinoff release a flood of incriminating music-biz evidence? And what’s up with…rock music out pacing Latin and Country lately? Will anyone write an anthem about work sucking again? Come to hear us tell you how we were right. Stay (and take notes) so you can tell us where we get things wrong.(and please….excuse the hiss of our radiators. We live in cold places.) Get full access to Money 4 Nothing at money4nothing.substack.com/subscribe
• AI Music Onslaught 17.12.2025 1h 3m

  Well…it’s here folks. From the back roads of the digital countryside to the clubs of London, AI music has finally hit the charts. And the major labels, which had spent much of the last few years promising that they would do everything in their power to protect their artists’ rights and intellectual property and humanity have…signed deals with the major AI companies behind it? We don’t want to say we told you so but…well…we did. To get a handle on what’s been happening, we consider a bevy of Very Threatening Lawsuits, talk through some recent lawsuit-squashing deals, and unpick the heavy-handed playbook that Universal, Sony, and Warner are running on yet another pack of VC-backed tech bros. Nice generative AI company you got there. Shame if anyone were to accuse it of copyright infringement. But beyond the revenue streams, cultural influence, and never-to-be-officially-discussed buckets of settlement cash that these tactics promise, the latest developments also reveal hints of what the majors see as the future of AI music: A Walled Garden of user-generated content? A licensing bonanza? A cudgel against Spotify? A slop halo? (Don’t worry—we’ll explain that last one). Come for the rise of the musical replicants and the (potential) fall of the digital squatters. Stay for what all of this might do to a new generation of listeners. Get full access to Money 4 Nothing at money4nothing.substack.com/subscribe
• RetroConversion Freakout Feat. Travis Wagner 11.11.2025 57m

  The Internet, as you know, is a vast and strange place, chock full of subcultures doing all sorts of things. And some of them are…well…curating Vine compilations, putting them onto VHS, carefully crafting distinctive packaging (complete with colored tapes!) and distributing the resulting “art pieces” via Etsy. Just hypothetically speaking, of course. But why would anyone want to do this? Why would anyone want to buy this? And what does the fact that, despite its surface weirdness, the resulting object probably makes a certain amount of aesthetic sense to you…say about our relationship to the media (and the entire digital landscape) in the contemporary moment? To learn more about this wild, wild world, we talk with Travis Wagner, an assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences at Urbana-Champaign, whose latest research has focused on the “retroconversion” scene in all its tape-dubbing glory. Does 2010s horror deserve VHS-era static? What are the deep urges beneath nostalgia for physical media? Was the ‘90s really the last good time in American culture? Is the ownership of magnetic tape really an act of rebellion against the digital automation of an algorithmically-driven, surveillance capital world? Bust out your Walkman, hit the play button and decide for yourself. Get full access to Money 4 Nothing at money4nothing.substack.com/subscribe
• Spotify's Billions Club and the Future of Criticism 03.10.2025 1h 18m

  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
• SkyDunce: Billionaires Vs. The Media 08.09.2025 1h 8m

  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
• What is the Value of Music? 12.08.2025 44m

  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
• No Ethical Music Streaming in a Streaming World 16.07.2025 55m

  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
• Hardcore Superstars and a Sly-less Future 18.06.2025 1h 3m

  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
• Welcome To The Machine (but with more succulents) Feat. Toby Bennett 28.05.2025 1h 1m

  On our latest episode, Sam and Toby Bennett talk about how the major labels have transformed themselves in the digital era. But, while the UMG, Warner, and Sony are continent-spanning IP behemoths, they are also made of people: people with ideas about themselves, and the work they do, and the industry they do it in. And if the industry was changing between, say, 2000 and 2010, then the people within it were too—a shift in ideology and outlook absolutely integral to the contemporary culture industry.Understanding this relationship between large-scale business practices and the intimate social transformations that both reflected AND caused them is the subject of the fantastic new book, “Corporate Life in the Digital Music Industry: Remaking the Major Label from the Inside Out” by Toby Bennett. An ethnographic analysis of bleary-eyed mornings and iPod diplomacy, it sheds light on what was going on inside the major label machine as it struggled to navigate the streaming revolution—and began to repaint itself in millennial pink. Sam and Toby Bennett discuss the social geography of major-label London, the complex hierarchies of office work, and the tightrope debates over what it means to “respect” pop. Also, don’t miss the lightly conspiratorial discussion of habitus-forming corporate education that will change the way you look at those “creative economy” college courses forever. Get full access to Money 4 Nothing at money4nothing.substack.com/subscribe
• How Tariffs Could Impact Music 25.04.2025 1h 7m

  As you might have noticed, the global economic system has hit a bit of a…snag—namely, the United States upending almost 80 years of foreign policy with little-to-no clarity on process, structure, or medium-term aims. That’s right, baby…We’re talkin' tariffs! Now, some of the impacts are, to be honest, pretty straightforward: Those Mexican strats? Those Roland 808s? Those T-Shirts at the merch table? Tariffed!But, in typical Money 4 Nothing fashion, we look past the headlines and try to think through the broader implications of the New World Order. What could a recession do to an industry that’s already seeing a slowdown in streaming growth? How might a stock market crash impact the balance of power between tech firms and “counter cyclical” major labels? Will travel bans hit superfans? And, perhaps most importantly—just how much of our contemporary culture industry is based on the world’s century-long embrace of American identity? Come for a quick tour through “recession pop.” Stay for our totally justified gloating about predicting, not ALL of this, but definitely a LOT of this.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
• Every Band is a Foreign Country (With Franz Nicolay) 28.03.2025 1h 4m

  What is a band? Think about it for a second, and it becomes less obvious. What you see is a couple of people on stage rocking out. But think about it more and it gets more complex. Actually, bands really aren’t really like anything else—part business, part social club, part artistic partnership, part job…operating at the interstitial zone between disciplined employment and liberatory self-expression. This strange, cobbled-together structure—and the conflicts, hierarchies, pleasures, and intimacies it creates—is at the heart of “Band People: Life and Work in Popular Music,” a revelatory new book from Franz Nicolay (who…has been in one or two bands himself). To learn more, we dig into everything from the complexity of (musical) democracy to the political economy of expression—not to mention how local unions might be the answer, the dangerous effects of Romanticism, and how there’s never a escape from the problem of power. 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
• Digital Distribution and the Ideology of Being Indy 12.03.2025 1h 3m

  Late last year, Universal Music shelled out 775 million dollars to snap up Downtown Music, a “global music company” that manages “over 50 million music assets”. Perhaps famously, Downtown owns Cd Baby—a digital distributor that, along with peers like Tunecore and Distrokid, has become central to the infrastructure of the streaming economy. These companies enable artists to upload their music to platforms like Spotify, and their influence has grown alongside the ever-increasing flood of “independent” artists bypassing the label system to share their music directly with the people.But…is this kind of market-based independence really all it’s cracked up to be? Or is it another example of music serving as a microcosm for the broader structures of capitalism. And if so—what are the potential implications of the biggest of all majors stepping into the distribution fray? To try and understand it all, Saxon and Sam dive into the history of distributors, from their decades schlepping vinyl to their more recent focus on herding ones-and-zeros. We talk streaming 1.0 vs. streaming 2.0, debate the economic purpose of community, and fret about the vast tubes of data that lead directly to Lucian Grange’s voracious maw. What, after all, could possibly go wrong?Listen to “Digital Distribution and the Ideology of Being Indy” wherever you get your podcasts. 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
• Spotify Culture (Featuring Liz Pelly + David Turner) 19.02.2025 1h 28m

  This week? Heavy Hitters. As you may (or may not) have heard,  journalist/Daniel Ek tormenter/friend-of-the-pod Liz Pelly is making waves with her wonderful new book “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist.” It’s easily the best thing yet written about the company at the center of modern music, insightfully reconstructing how Spotify’s shifting interests and policies have remade how we listen, who we listen to, and what they get paid.To get a deeper perspective on both the book and the histories it emerges from, we also called up David Turner—of the late (lamented) Penny Fractions—pulling him out of retirement for one last big music + capitalism score. Together Liz, David, and Sam dive into everything from the economics of ghost artists and the aesthetics of vibes-based listening to the intentional destruction of cultural context in the streaming age. It’s a conversation that helps clarify the singularity of Spotify culture—and allows us to better detach its operations from the meaning of digital music. Come for the playlists. Stay for what they’ve done to you. Buy Liz Pelly's book "Mood Machine"Subscribe to our Newsletter!  Get full access to Money 4 Nothing at money4nothing.substack.com/subscribe
• "Homeboy Need a Subpoena": Drake Sues UMG 04.02.2025 54m

  Look. Times are dark. So this week, we decided to tackle a somewhat lighter topic and look into Drake’s remarkably tone-deaf lawsuit against Universal Music Group—the label to which both he and (beef opponent) Kendrick Lamar are signed. In essence, Drake alleges that UMG used all their influence to make Kendrick’s Grammy-winning diss track “Not Like Us” a viral mega-hit. Which, like…yeah. Of course they did. They are in the business of producing viral mega-hits. While the context of the lawsuit—namely, multiple violent attacks on Drake’s house—is quite serious, it’s hard not to find the whole thing ridiculous. After over a decade of industry machinations, Aubrey really had the nerve to sue UMG for…hurting his feelings? [Yes, it’s actually for defamation of character, but in the court of public opinion, those two are pretty much synonymous] Despite this, the actual content of the legal filing is fascinating—offering readers a guided tour of exactly what UMG is doing out there, hosted by someone who really knows how the sausage gets made. Payola? Selective copyright enforcement? Contract negotiation hardball? You betcha. THEN: Saxon and Sam get a little loose and take a jog through the Grammys. Album Of The Year? Sure. But also…who did you have for Immersive Audio?  Subscribe to our Newsletter! Get full access to Money 4 Nothing at money4nothing.substack.com/subscribe