Independent artists have found an unlikely wealthy benefactor willing to bankroll their latest project: Cash App. The mobile payment service today launched Cash App Studios, an initiative designed to help independent creatives, including artists, musicians, directors, and designers, fund their projects. Cash App declined to disclose financial details of their …
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As music companies continue to court hitmakers for their songs, one of the most celebrated catalogs in pop history is on the move. Tina Turner has sold her music rights to BMG, the company’s CEO Hartwig Masuchtells Rolling Stone — marking the latestevent in the trend of major legacy artists …
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When you play a song on major streaming platforms, money doesn’t just zoom straight into an artist’s pocket. But what if it did? That’s how payments are designed to work on Audius, a platform built on a blockchain — yes, the same technological network that NFTs run on. And thisthree-year-old …
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The words above weren’t supposed to be the headline of this column. The headline was supposed to be: “Kanye West just did an album release all wrong. Brilliantly.” I planned to delve into how Kanye, with the new Donda, has clearly learned lessons from heritage acts in how to print …
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Want to hear the most depressing stat in modern entertainment? It was effusively delivered the other month by a beaming Jack Conte, co-founder and CEO of fan-funding app Patreon, which is now worth $4 billion. “A study published a few years ago showed that 75 percent of kids aged 6 …
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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. When the pandemic shut down the live-concert industry last year, Todd Mayo, the founder and operator of the Caverns, a subterranean …
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Last June, protests broke out across the music industry as record executives questioned the business’ long history of racial inequity. Ron Sweeney, a veteran music attorney, offered one proposal that he believed could help labels begin to atone for their past injustices: “With respect to Black artists signed to you …
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Same song, different verse — quite literally, it turns out. On Monday (March 8th), the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Institute released its latest report on music creator demographics, finding that women still make up meager percentages of artists, songwriters, and producers on music charts and award-nomination slates, marking “no …
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If the music business were allowed to write its own history, every year’s chronicle would glow with variations on the same theme — the words “transformation,” “revolution,” and “record-breaking sea change” chief among the lexicon — ad nauseam. But in the peculiar shadow of 2020, these bombastic end-of-year appraisals, for …
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In Rolling Stone‘s series At Work, we go behind the curtain with decision-makers across the fast-changing music business — exploring a range of responsibilities, burgeoning ideas, advice for industry newcomers, and more. Read earlier interviews here. Behind almost every hit song is a team of unstoppable writers. And in 2020, …
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