[MUSIC] I want to pull back a little bit and and ask you about popular music today in the digital age. So, I think it's undeniable that across the last decade, two decades, the way that artists create and share their music, the way music is distributed and disseminated. The way conversations about music and pop music happen have all changed in really dramatic ways, the industry has transformed over the past couple of decades. So, I wonder just to keep it, keep it general, what does it mean from your perspective to be a music fan in the 21st century? And how has pop music evolved alongside these industry changes or resisted these industry changes, how are those two things been in dialogue with one another? >> Wonderful question, couple things come to mind, one is the nature of the genre has shifted. One thinks of genre as a category, most useful for fans and listeners to identify, okay, this is broadly speaking, the kind of music I'm into. So, there may be other kinds of music that are related to that. If you transported yourself back to the late 80s and you said, you know what, I'm a fan of the Los Angeles Rock Scene or something. And then you have the up and coming bands that soon become worldwide famous like Guns and Roses or something. And that might lead you to Alice in chains and might lead you this and there and the other thing, that kind of constellation grows out of a sense of genre. Now, for the industry, they often talk in terms of format, in terms of different kinds of codification of sound that can work in a commercial setting, in order to sell those sounds. And so, when one tries to fit songs into these formats as a label and as terrestrial radio stations back in the 90s. Actually before, but certainly in the 90s where there's this stranglehold of major labels on how the whole system functions. So, part of what we're dealing with now is the loss of that clarity of genre designations and we can see it In the Billboard Hot 100 right now. When you go down the list and you see all of these artists that are consciously genreless. Billie Eilish is a perfect example of someone who fits this mold, where she and Phineas are making music that isn't easily categorized in any one way. You can hear a little bit of, I don't know, Tyler the creator and that kind of indie hip hop at times, you can hear some big pop ballad type stuff going on at different times. You can hear certainly different kinds of alternative music and electronic music involved in what's going on. And there's so many things that she's drawing from and that they as a team as songwriters are drawing from that defies those traditional categorizations. And the same holds with artists that seem more securely to fit in a genre and that was the upheaval over Old Town Road is that somehow this was on the country charts. Sonically, there was very little, if anything, that red country there. What you had was little Naz X dropping a few lyric references that could probably be considered related to cowboys or something, writing on my tractor, whatever. But then he goes for the southern hip hop lean all in my bladder, bladder, song with bladder in it, but not only get distracted. Point being, you have [LAUGH] Going on this moment in which genre is basically founded on jello and as a result that shifts the way that we understand our current sense of fandom. We look for other ways of doing it and as a result too, artists are looking for other ways of connecting with fans. I had a fascinating conversation a few weeks ago for an article that I did for the New York Times T magazine. I talked to a bunch of young hip hop artists including the City Girls and also this artist from Atlanta, Mulatto, Big Lotto and both of them independently. Both the City Girls and Latto talked about the new ways that they go about interfacing with fans. And Latto mentioned the importance of different kinds of playlists on the major streaming sites. She said a lot of her fans come to her through there. So, that a Spotify playlist or an Apple music playlists that features her on it, that where she is being aggregated along with artists who share some sort of sonic similarities or thematic similarities. So, a listener may go for, I don't know, go there listening to a Little Baby or something and then discover Latto by virtue of that. City Girls mentioned this and you might imagine this being a really important element, social media. Different kinds of social media platforms that they have employed to give people a taste of what they do. That then draws people to them and to their performances and ultimately to buying their music that merge their whole persona. So, that's definitely something that's accelerated in the last decade and even more so in the last five years, I think, become the new spaces, both the playlists and the social media platforms. Where these are ways that we as listeners are finding the music we love. But it's also the way that the artists themselves are finding their audience, are finding their fans and building their fan base by virtue of those connections. >> Yeah, this is so interesting and you talked a few minutes ago about how from the vantage point of fans, genre has become a little bit unmoored. And you also talked about how from the vantage point of maybe the industry or the labels format, the release format has perhaps been correspondingly unmoored. So, I wonder, historically one of the key ways that fans interacted with an artist was through pictures of them on a gatefold vinyl album jacket or concert. Live concerts where they purchased tickets and can see the artist from quite some distance away, in some cases, right? >> [LAUGH] >> If you're watching the Rolling Stones or something like that. So, the kind of direct contact and connection and almost networking that's possible between fans and artists. Especially up and coming independent artists that don't have that kind of infrastructure to support them always through social media. And the playlist seems to me to represent that kind of a unmooring of format. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how music is released now and also elaborate on its aggregation and playlists. And how that has changed the way maybe artists think about the way they're producing music in the first place and certainly the way it changes the dynamic of fan to artist. >> Those of us who love putting together lists of our favorite albums have reason to despair in the present moment. And in part because there is a dominant move of the industry is away from the album as the lowest common denominator format. And moving toward the necessity of basically having a constant irregularly stream of releases going on. And these can be album length of course, as we've seen with Taylor Swift releasing, God knows how many albums in the last 12 months, 3, 4 lost count. It could also be simply an instance, like with Cardi B, where she has this huge debut a couple years ago and then last year no album released. But she releases the biggest song of the year and what with the accompanying video as well, that the visual as they call it nowadays, that of course underscores the position of that song in the culture. And really gets it deeply ingrained in a lot of conversations about propriety and women's empowerment and sexuality and a host of issues. So, there's a model, two different models, one of an artist who in Taylor Swift, taking control quite literally of her past material, taking control of her future. And understanding that her fans need to hear from her regularly. She also happens to be immensely prolific, so she's able to crank out multiple albums over the course of the year. And in terms of Cardi B, knowing once she and her team that strategically it makes sense not to go a full year without being heard from and heard from with something powerful in doing that. So, part of the shift is I think, away from the album as the gold standard and toward these other modalities. That in some ways I think favors hip hop because hip hop at least in its origins, wasn't really an album driven genre. And hip hop actually comes to life in the moment of album driven Rock music in the 70s, where the album is the gold standard of that genre. Hip hop, it's about the song, what's the album behind Rapper's Delight, what's the album behind Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's message, that's not as immaterial. Those were the songs that defined the moment. And so, the single driven modality of hip hop, the dance driven modality that that comes along with that as well, of a single being released to the clubs in the 70s and 80s. All of these are actually pretty well in keeping with where we are now, where for artists to release an occasional single makes sense. The other model is the playlist idea which Drake has played around with, of just releasing a series of songs that aren't really intended to cohere as an album. But are simply often sprawling array of sounds for a listener to find her own way through and to structure as one sees fit. Because most of us don't listen to entire albums right now, but rather pick and choose and listen to playlists and other kinds of ways of putting songs together, that makes sense. You have instances now where those songs from Drake will appear on the top list on Spotify and probably most of them are beyond there. But you won't necessarily listen to them in the order in which Drake released them on the other sequence then I should say. So, those are all some of the new moves that I'm seeing as a listener and as someone who occasionally gets the privilege of talking to artists and hearing directly from them. How they go about thinking about releasing their music to the world and the pressures that are incumbent upon an artist in the present moment. Where there's a need to always stay in the public eye and have ones music in the public year.
