It’s boom time for creator-economy music investments. The startup Songfinch, which provides customized songs at listeners’ requests, is the latest music startup to lock down major industry money: The Weeknd, his manager Wassim “Sal” Slaiby and Atlantic Records CEO and chairman Craig Kallman are all investors in the company’srecently closed …
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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 …
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The House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Spotify this week requesting additional information on “Discovery Mode,” a controversial program which allows artists and labels to recommend specific songs to more listeners — via the streaming giant’s algorithms — in exchange for a lower royalty rate. Spotify announced …
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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 …
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Over the weekend, Steve Aoki released a limited art collection via a non-fungible token (NFT) sale. The event brought in $4.25 million, led by a record-breaking single-auction price of $888,888.88 paid by former T-Mobile CEO John Legere, Aoki’s team tells Rolling Stone. Aoki designed his collection “Dream Catcher” in partnership …
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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 …
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Veteran music executive and Lollapalooza co-founder Marc Geiger abruptly left William Morris Endeavor (WME) this summer after 17 years as the company’s global head of music, in the midst of the pandemic’s near-complete shuttering of the concert industry. Since then, he revealed on Wednesday, he has been working on an …
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In response to calls to diversify the mainly white live-music industry, concert giant Live Nation launched the Black Tour Directory Tuesday, October 13th, a new online resource for tour organizers that the company hopes will create more work for black live-industry workers. The directory lists hundreds of black-owned companies and …
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Coachella was supposed to take place in April 2020, but when Covid-19 struck, festival organizers pushed the event to this month— and then again to April 2021 after virus cases in the U.S. climbed all summer. Multiple music-industry insiders now tell Rolling Stone that the 21st edition of the popular …
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Quarantine darling Verzuz is one of the most effective major music promotion shows for artists looking to boost their streams, bar none. Since the pandemic began and Swizz Beatz and Timbaland decide to start Verzuz on Instagram Live (it’s now airing on Apple Music too), what was originally intended to …
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