Music Biz Features

This story appears in Rolling Stone‘s 2021 Future of Music issue, a special project delving into the next era of the multibillion-dollar hitmaking business. Read the other stories here. Musicians dip into the movie industry all the time; the opposite is more of a rarity, for whatever reason. But for …

Ben Winston can finally sleep again. Sort of. After producing the Grammys for the first time last Sunday, he crawled into bed around 4 a.m., only to be jumped on by his young daughter, Ruby, two hours later; he also went right back to work in the morning, taping three …

Jess Benko, a singer-songwriter based in Toronto, started uploading spare, plaintive acoustic ballads to SoundCloud in 2019. Tracks like “Maybe You Miss Me” began to pick up thousands of streams, “but no managers and lawyers were reaching out,” Benko says. “I really wanted to take that next step, not just …

Kanye West gave the world a rare glimpse into the music industry‘s labyrinth of recording contracts last week when he tweeted out his own paperwork with Universal Music Group —and then lambasted those agreements as exploitative and unfair, demanding his copyrights be returned to him. As far as the actual …

Boy, Tencent is smart. If you want to get a handle on just how smart, consider this: Last Thursday (July 9th), entertainment-and-electronics giant Sony Corporation announced it was buying a minority stake worth $250 million in Epic Games, maker of Fortnite. Epic recently nailed a $17 billion valuation, meaning Sony’s …

At Workis a Rolling Stoneseries exploring how decision-makers in the fast-changing music business spend their hectic days — as well as what burgeoning ideas they’re keen to explore, what advice they’d give to industry newcomers, and more.Readearlier interviews here. When Justin Lubliner gets on the phone, he’s somewhere in the …

“Being a musician in 2020 was already hard,” synth-pop singer-songwriter Caroline Rose says. Then came the coronavirus pandemic, which has shut down all live music and touring for the foreseeable future, thereby drying up the primary source of income for the vast majority of working musicians. For countless touring artists …

You don’t have to be Gordon Gekko to see how spiraling anxiety over coronavirus has already wrought damage upon global industries. The arrival of James Bond’s latest outing, No Time To Die, is being delayed by six months after its backers decided that stay-at-home corona precautions could damage its box …

What used to be a checklist for avid music fans is now a multiple choice question: Should you go to Coachella, Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, Governors Ball, or one of the litany of other massive music shows that all feel more or less the same? But those who made Stagecoach Music Festival, …