Levi is joined by Matt Garman of the band Lucid Wasteland to discuss the evolution of music, a profound journey that mirrors the complexities of human civilization, transforming from primitive sounds to a sophisticated industry influenced by various socio-economic factors. This episode delves into the intricate history of music, tracing its origins from the rudimentary expressions of early humans to the contemporary commercialization of sound, where the Mafia played a significant role in shaping the music business landscape. We explore how music transitioned from a mere form of artistic expression to a lucrative business model, with artists navigating the treacherous waters of exploitation and profit. Furthermore, we examine how the advent of technology revolutionized the industry, enabling both unprecedented access to music and the manipulation of its distribution and consumption. Our discussion offers insights into the darker aspects of this evolution, emphasizing the ongoing challenges faced by artists in an ever-changing market.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. alexslemonade.com
2. lucidwasteland.com

CHECK OUT THE NEW WEBSITE: https://theremedialscholar.com

https://linktr.ee/remedialscholar

Remember to Follow, Rate and Share everywhere possible!!

Visit our:

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/RemedialScholar

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/theremedialscholarpodcast

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/remedial_scholar/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/remedialscholar

Merch Store: https://www.remedialmerch.art/

Support our friends:

West of Knowhere: https://open.spotify.com/show/1p7Lc7kOaFyXeCfeGVnFPK?si=19c44b96e5694025

Macabre Emporium: https://open.spotify.com/show/6jb0W9zgb23V0RKjvU5UOx?si=5991c6e0c7804fde

A Real Creature Feature: https://open.spotify.com/show/3rEwRTfTNIdBxJ3ZAqbQ4F?si=932aec3893784eaa

History Goon Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5I3VBsqrsIVjY2k6zdOYCf

In today's fast paced world, music is an omnipresent force that accompanies us in our daily activities almost constantly.

It's in lobbies, it's in elevators, it's at grocery stores, it's in advertisements, it's all over the place.

Whether you're just walking down the street, the odds of you hearing music are pretty high considering cars can drive by you playing music super loudly.

You can be walking past a store that has outward speakers.

But how often do you think about what the first music would have been like?

What when you hear Bon Jovi at the grocery store, while you're looking at how terrible all the tomatoes are, do you think about the first people to ever make notes?

What music used to sound like?

Do you?

Maybe you're a classical music fan and you're like, I appreciate old music, but do you think about the first instruments ever made?

Music has a long, long history tied to humans and almost as far back as humans go.

Music as we see it now has been there.

It wasn't a bunch of guys hanging around a campfire playing Wonderwall on some sticks and stuff.

It was, you know, how voices were amplified to communicate in really intricate cave systems as the, the way the echoes bounced off the cave walls to signal that somebody was coming or that there was, you know, a hunt was starting to instruments being made to instill fear in an enemy that was far away.

Blow these loud horns and they don't know what's going on and they are scared, right?

And then all the way into the Middle ages where music plays a big part in kind of emphasizing the biblical messages inside of cathedrals and moving into the 21st century.

How music becomes an outlet for people to claw their way out of lower socioeconomic ways.

And then also how people began to use music to manipulate other things such as ad revenue, listening charts, and even the mafia getting in involved in some of the jukeboxes.

All of that and more on another episode of the Remedial Scholar.

That's ancient history.

I feel I was denied need to know information.

Belongs in the museum room.

Stop skipping your remedial class.

Welcome everyone to the Remedial Scholar.

I am your host, Levi.

It's great to, great to see everybody that I can't see again.

With me today, I have a special guest, a good friend of mine who has some knowledge in the music industry and business and he's just a all around fantastic dude.

Matt, welcome.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Yeah.

Now Matt, you had had slash have had a band lucid wasteland which has been a friend to the various podcasts I've been on.

And you recently did your final album.

You want to tell everybody about that before we go?

Yeah, dude.

So basically we just finished recording an album while we just released it.

Pretty much it's digitally available.

It's up on Apple, Spotify, pretty much anywhere you can stream your music can also purchase it off of itunes, I believe.

Either way, we are collecting funds from this album.

So every time you stream this, it adds a little bit of that to our funding.

And we are donating that to Alex's lemonade stand to help with pediatric cancer research.

And yeah, we hope you like it.

It's our final album and a tribute to our friend and founding band member Caleb Sabren.

Yeah.

Pass away while we were getting this album together.

And yeah, this is kind of.

This is for him, so.

And he wanted to help the kids out.

So, you know, we're kind of, you know, doing that in his honor and.

Yeah.

Yeah, go check it out, guys.

You know, we put a lot of work into it.

We're really proud of it.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I mean, we've had the whole band on West Bind and West of Nowhere, I think at least once on each maybe, or maybe just West Bine for sure.

But it was always a treat having everybody on.

And Caleb was a.

He's a.

He's a super funny dude and we're gonna miss him.

And also, the background track for west of Nowhere is just the instrumental for one of.

One of the songs.

So if you have heard that and enjoy it, then definitely check it out.

I. I should have wore my west or my lucid Wasteland shirt.

I forgot I had it.

And I was cleaning and I found it.

I was like, oh, but I'm rocking Blondie today.

But, you know, hey, that's all right.

I also, like, appreciate the way that you guys handled that because, I don't know, it feels like it's kind of.

When you get into that position, it's.

It's a toss up.

Like, do you go the Led Zeppelin route or do you go the who route?

You know what I mean?

So.

You know, I mean, it wasn't really an easy decision to come true.

You know, at the end of the day, it just, you know, Caleb and I kinda, you know, we started this as a, you know, project just to kind of, you know, be creative and, you know, without him being there.

Just not the same.

Yeah.

You know, and it ended up, you know, just not being like, as fun.

I found that, you know, I lost like a Lot of the passion behind it, and.

Sure.

You know, for me, it was like, okay, yeah, it's this time.

Yeah.

Well, again, thank you for coming on.

I'm.

I'm happy to have you.

And I hope everybody goes and checks out the.

The album.

Now, today we are going to be talking about the music, the history of music, and it's.

It's.

There's a lot.

There's.

It's a long history.

I'm sure everybody's kind of aware.

Do you have any, like, super wealth of knowledge about music history in general, or do you just kind of have like a.

Like a passing interest in that kind of thing or what's your.

What's your skill level on that, if you were to rate it?

I remember, like, learning about, like, periods.

Yeah.

Of, like, music.

Sure.

Like baroque.

Yeah.

That's the only one I remember.

I like to listen to classical music.

Sure.

But, heck, yeah.

All right, well, that's good because I'm.

A whole bunch of it.

You're going to be learning today, so.

Which is great.

It's.

It.

Either way, it would have been great, but I just wanted to get a quick gauge on how much background you had.

So, yeah, I.

You know, we're going to be going through, like, all the way back from when people were beating their tummies like drums and then, like, Beethoven and you know, all the way to our Lord and savior, Taylor Swift.

You know, we're gonna.

We're gonna hit all of this.

Oh, sweet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So there's a lot of evolution to it.

There's a bit of.

There's some darker aspects, especially when we get into the 20th century, that I'm really excited to talk about, because I think a lot of that kind of, if it does get discussed, it can.

Gets brushed under a different.

Different things.

So, you know, we're gonna get a whole lot of everything, a little bit of everything.

So.

Are you ready?

Yeah, let's do it, dude.

All right.

Let's get into it.

Yeah.

So it's, you know, it's hard for us to fathom how life must have been hundreds, thousands of years ago.

Like, we have the access of being able to listen to whatever music we want to pretty much anytime, so readily available.

So, like, thinking about how new of a phenomenon this is is pretty weird.

We get to work, shop, clean, work out, do all this stuff with music alongside us.

Right.

And it was always that possible.

It's weird to think that less than 200 years ago, you would find people who wouldn't have heard their favorite pieces of music outside of three or four times in their entire lives, which is crazy, you know, like, I don't know about you, but I find a new song that I like and I listened to it about 86 times in a row.

So there's like, at a certain point, music was so hard for people to get into their ears that they couldn't just, you know, pop a thing on or if they didn't have anybody musically talented in their family, they couldn't have anybody learn how to play it.

So they might go their whole lives without hearing it twice.

That's.

Yeah, that's insane to think about.

Yeah.

Asking somebody who their favorite band is, like, yeah, music.

Yeah, I have heard music a couple of times.

And then you get to add in, like, okay, say they do have some musical talent.

Well then do they have the ability to buy sheet music at the time, or is it before sheet music was readily available?

Like, you know, so you have all these extra levels of like, well, maybe they lived out in the middle of nowhere and they didn't make it into town very often.

So they didn't hear music very often.

And it's so strange to even consider.

So when you think of like, ancient music, do you have any idea of what type of like, old instruments they could have been using?

Oh, I don't know, like bones and like human hairs?

Hell yeah.

Yeah, bones.

Astute.

I mean, there's evidence 40,000 years ago that they were using flutes made from hollowed out bones of different animal species.

Which is pretty crazy, but also like, kind of cool that they were like, yeah, this makes a fun sound.

That's pretty metal.

Yeah.

To be honest.

Yeah, it's pretty brutal.

Yeah, well, and you got to think like, if they were anywhere near like a larger bird species, you got birds with hollow bones.

You've got like a pretty cool quick flute to make right there.

Like it's, you know, ready to go.

And then you have horns of animals, whatever.

And so that's.

So that's a pretty good.

Pretty good guess you got there now before any of those.

They're actually a very interesting thing that they did.

There's a cave system in France which is.

They found a lot of cave paintings in this system.

And you know, that was like a huge thing right these day back 35,000 years.

And in the research for that, they found that in the parts where there are like paintings and like random tool remnants and stuff, that those caverns were actually the most, like, they had the most audible connection to the rest of the cave systems.

So like you could hear stuff happening clear off in the distance from those spots that were happening in the caves.

And so what they kind of of put together was that in like the descent kind of thing.

Like I don't know if you've ever seen that movie, but these underground creatures who rely all on system of hearing, like, are communicating through these tunnels in these caves because it's basically pitch black.

And so you have these caverns that they can hear pretty much everything.

And that's how they know A, if anything's coming to get them, B, they can communicate with each other super quick by just yelling through the caves.

And the resonance in them is pretty high.

So that's kind of sweet.

You know, we got a live in kind of French horn kind of thing going on.

Yeah.

Yes.

And then, yeah, beyond that you got early rituals, stuff like that.

You have like I mentioned the, Aaron, you mentioned the bone flutes and things like that.

Now we also have super early evidence of brass instruments, which is kind of surprising.

It's not that old, it's not the 40,000 years old, but definitely like 3,000 BCE.

We have evidence of these lures.

They're just simple horns made of brass.

And there's I think two of them that still exist, but pretty kind of just kind of reshaped.

And they're from northern Europe.

So it's, it kind of reshapes this barbarian theory that we have about how Europeans were.

Because they were clearly chill enough that they're like, let's just make some horns, man.

Granted a lot of them probably used for war purposes too, but you know, hey, you gotta, you gotta start somewhere.

And then we get ancient Egypt, you know, we have hieroglyphics and carvings that show different harps and flutes, things like that, percussion instruments.

Like it is a relatively new phenomenon.

So while we can find these different instruments and things that the ancient Egyptians used, we cannot replicate any of their songs, even if we know the words or anything, because we have no way to decipher.

Because ultimately it was like, it was a oral tradition of like, this is how you play this song and I will teach you my son.

And then he teaches his son and then it all gets passed down that way.

So cool that it was that kind of a close knit group, but also sad for us because we have no idea what some power ballads from ancient Egypt Might have been like.

I think it's also, like, interesting that their musical instruments are so, like, closely entwined with, like, their.

Their instruments of war or what, you know, those are the kinds of things that survived.

Yeah.

You know, for all this time.

Yeah, absolutely.

Now, the Greeks obviously took music to another level.

They kind of did.

They like to philosophize about different things, and so they took music and did their thing with it.

Even famous philosophers like Pythagoras discovered that musical intervals, like octaves, fifths, those kinds of things could be explained mathematical, like, ratio connections, which was a big step in terms of, like, how to make different music and how to kind of broaden what the sounds they were making were.

And again, we don't know what they were, but we now have a point where they have a system.

We just don't know really what the harmonies or what the notes are.

So you get.

Get these, like, levels of.

All right, well, we know they used instruments like, okay, well, now we know they had a structure, but we don't know what it is.

And then.

Well, we know what it is, but we don't know what notes they were making.

And so, like, the Greeks, famously, big fan of the lyre.

Right.

They.

That's Apollo's thing.

I think in any Greek painting or painting about Greece, there's one in depiction, even, like, I think it was the paint.

Or like, Nero was supposedly in ancient Rome, played the liar as Rome burned or something like that.

Yeah.

And obviously the Romans would capitalize on what the Greeks figured out and kind of expand in the way that they did, which is cool.

But again, they didn't continue to evolve it.

They just kind of sharpened, which is basically what the Romans did with every kind of invention that they took.

They're like, yeah, we like it, but we kind of.

We kind of want it to be like this a little bit.

And that's kind of it.

Right now we're.

We're getting pretty modern now.

We're getting Sound of Musicy.

And this allowed people to finally understand and write down music, which is a big thing in terms of just historical relevance.

Are you.

Did you do a lot of, like, music in school?

Or was it more like.

I just like music and I want to play guitar kind of thing?

So I kind of grew up around it.

Yeah.

My dad was in bands.

Okay, sure.

Growing up.

So he played Guitar.

He.

He showed me kind of like, like, the cowboy chords, I guess.

And, you know, after that, pretty much just like anybody else, like, looking up, like, tabs online.

Yeah.

You know, just kind of figuring it out like that.

Sure.

How to use my ear.

Yeah, that's.

But, like, as far as, like, formal education, I. I know very little I should know more, but.

Yeah, no, that's.

Me play guitar.

Yeah.

It's so.

Same kind of thing with my dad.

He's very, like, could do.

He could figure out songs by ear pretty quickly.

And, you know, that's kind of always been his thing.

When I was in fifth grade, I signed up for orchestra and then played French horn in sixth grade and then went back to orchestra after that for a couple years.

And so, like, a lot of this is, like, it's familiar.

I couldn't read music if you asked me to now, but there was a point where I could, and that was cool.

But, like, I never even translated it into guitar playing ever.

Like, I. I just always viewed guitarists so much more complex than the French horn or the cello.

Like, there's just a lot more going on, and I'm like, I don't have the time or the patience to learn any of this.

I'm just gonna do the same things as you said, like, get tabs and just figure it out that way.

Yeah, yeah.

But do re me.

Like, that's a super big thing.

I remember learning about that in, like, elementary music class.

We watched the Sound of Music, and that was a whole thing.

So this is a big, big point in music history.

And, you know, after that is really when things start to ramp up.

And it really isn't until I would say, probably the 14th, 15th century, that things like jump again, which is, you know, now we've.

And now it's like, all right, now we're kind of getting to a little more casual place with it.

Granted, it was being used mostly for, like, religious ceremonies at the time when he made these.

These connections because he's a monk, obviously.

All right, so now singers that were involved in church singing, there was a.

There was also a switch in terms of, like, how they.

How they decided to sing.

At first, they just had dudes, just old dudes, and that's it.

And eventually one guy was like, what if.

What if instead of just a bunch of dudes, we get Like a bunch of dudes and then, like, some kids to sing the same note.

So it's like almost a chord.

Right.

Which is hilarious that they're like.

It took them so long to get to that point.

And then eventually they're like, well, I don't know if you guys knew this, but we could probably.

All.

All these dudes could probably sing like, slightly different notes at different times and stuff.

Like, this is like very like, baby step method of slowly changing things, which, if you think about it, it's the Catholic church at the time, so they don't.

Not really big fans of changing stuff rapidly.

They had a lot of money and a lot of time.

Yeah, yeah, we.

We just.

We're gonna take our time in figuring this out.

So that's what they did.

Yeah.

Was a big factor.

Now people were able to print sheet music faster, like instead of one by one people annotating and everything, which meant that people were now able to take the music and travel and play different things, like the lute or the harpsichord.

Big fan of the harpsichord.

I'm pretty sure if I'm thinking of the right one.

It's that thing that's like in every Renaissance movie or, like, documentary.

It's got like this really, like, copper kind of sound to it.

Yeah.

Like.

Like looks like a piano, but it's like it's plucked.

Yeah.

Instead of, like, hammered.

Yes.

Yeah.

And so again, all the compositions primarily meant for kings and cathedrals, but then you get these people who are, like, able to figure stuff out on their own and kind of starting to travel very, very ever so slightly.

This is like the first troubadours is what they were.

Like, that's what they were.

They were traveling musicians, which is super.

Kind of funny to think about at the time when it seems like Europe especially was just so chaotic that you had these guys like, I just got to go to France and play some music, man.

I don't think it's changed all that much, man.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, it's.

It's.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Right?

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

And so now with printing and all these things, you have a.

The ability to print and copy and sell music on a.

On a bigger scale, which is a little closer to a more commercialized product that it is, you know, more so today.

But also you get this.

It's twofold.

So you get people who can buy music and learn it and then travel and play it for people.

But then you also get People who are now able to just make it and sell it, which is kind of interesting.

Like, I don't know how many famous people there were doing that back then, but this would pave the way for the more prominent composers to enter the fold and be a little more.

Not illustrious, but profitable in terms of how they're.

How they're brand is coming across.

So in the next few centuries, you get Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, who are selling sheet music of their work as well as composing at the same time, which is interesting.

I never really considered that to be a part of their thing.

You can only just ever hear about them composing for the Pope or whatever, and then that's kind of it.

But like, they're selling their stuff in like, books.

Like, hey, buy this Mozart Volume 5, please.

Now that's what I call Mozart, the.

Beginning of the album.

Yeah, that's cool.

That's sick.

Yeah.

We have instruments now being mass produced.

And yeah, they were a little more luxury item.

Right.

But it also, in the middle class, became pieces of furniture.

You know, this is where you get.

Everybody kind of has a piano in their house for some reason.

And then everybody has parlor rooms where they have sheet music on display.

And so now everybody's able to sing music.

If they have somebody in their family that can learn a piano, they can play stuff, they can buy one of these books of sheet music, and then everybody gets together for holidays or whatever and.

And they get to actually hear music instead of it being like, my grandma had to travel 300 miles just to hear the sounds of a bunch of monks all sounding the same with their Gregorian chants and stuff.

Yeah.

Now.

Now it's all in our pocket.

Yeah, just the littlest effort just beep.

Yeah.

Now the composers, they mostly got portions of the printed royalties, but also it was not a very consistent system when it was done, because nobody's able to really track.

If a guy buys your book and then travels to the next town over, next country over, and then replicate it and then sell it, nobody's able to really track that down.

And nobody's gonna really question a lot of it, especially if, hey, you make me 100 copies of this, this music book, I'm going to slide you some.

And then, you know, we're gonna.

We're gonna just make money without Beethoven knowing a damn thing.

So.

So that's a little.

A little sketchy and also kind of funny again, the how things kind of just stay the same throughout history.

So now you didn't even have to be in the room where the music was made to be able to hear it, which is huge.

Now, once this happened, this is a big, big moment in terms of, like, all right, well, we can.

Music has, like, this fork in the road now.

You have public performances which people are paying for.

But now if you can figure out the technology.

Right.

You can potentially massly produce this stuff and people don't have to go anywhere for it, which is.

This is like, I feel like the biggest moment in commercialization of music in general.

Right.

And I think it is a little poetic that Edison is the one that kind of is at this fork in the road.

I don't know that he knew.

Knew exactly what was about to kind of be unfolded, but I feel like it's pretty on brand for him.

Yeah.

Now, obviously, it had a little while to go before people were able to actually capitalize on it, but the.

The foundations are there.

So.

All right, so in the early 20th century, we have a couple new musical things coming around, especially in America.

We have the blues, gospel, jazz.

As emancipated black community started producing their own songs, their own music.

And largely wasn't really.

It wasn't like, hey, we gotta, like, start showing everybody this is like, they're just entertaining themselves.

But as we know, people found it very appealing and started, like, going, hey, you should start playing this for everybody.

Which is pretty cool.

You get people like Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, these people who are like, the foundations of this new and very different type of music.

And one of the things I was listening to about just music in general was how jazz was, like, completely hated by traditional classical music fans.

Like, they.

They were so mad about it.

And it wasn't even.

Because it was primarily black people that were playing it.

They were just like, you're just breaking, like, all the rules.

And I don't like it.

It's so funny, like, because I think I. I view jazz in a different way, where jazz is like, yeah, they're doing a lot of stuff that's not traditional, but they're also extremely talented.

Like, they are.

Oh, yeah.

So good at the traditional classical music that they are able to flip a lot of These traditional things and like, do crazy stuff with it.

And so imagine these people, like, no, don't like it.

It's very funny.

Yeah.

So that was all popping off.

But then in the early 20s, we have a little thing called prohibition, which, you know, kind of, kind of killed the whole night nightclub scene pretty quickly, unfortunately for a lot of musicians that were having a lot of fun doing that.

But you know, the Mafia, they.

They were not going to let the government take out their money.

So speakeasy started popping up.

You know, big, big thing going on in all the major cities.

And then it's all cash driven, so there's no real way of tracking any of it.

And they needed live music.

So jazz started to become the place for like, that was the music that spoke about this nightlife.

And also kind of like semi illegal, which I think might have been a reason that some of these older people were like, this is bad.

But it is like at the end of the day, they're just musicians playing at the club.

It's not their fault.

People are there for legal reasons.

They're just hanging out, man.

It's because they could see people having fun.

Yeah, I don't like it.

They're just happy.

Yeah, absolutely.

And it's because of this little side view of or like this little path that we have going on that the Mafia actually realized that people more often came for the music than.

Than the alcohol that was.

There's so like, what if we just prop up more musicians?

Instead of making it focused on alcohol, we make it focused on the music.

And so they started funding individual music musicians and buying clubs and then like making almost like a Vegas, like, what do they call it?

Residency, like for these different artists.

Like, hey, you remember you saw this guy at this XYZ speakeasy.

Well, here you go, he's here.

Come eat dinner and listen to whatever.

And people were pumped.

And artists were also pumped because they were getting paid nightly rates.

They got, you know, good instruments, they had regular schedules.

Like, it was nice for them to be able to have a little consistency and all.

While the Mafia is basically just laundering money with this.

Which is really funny to me.

Like, not something I would have ever really thought about in terms of the first musical clubs.

Like, I knew prohibition obviously played a part in it, but you don't think about them like going straight as parting of the.

Or part of the Mafia, like capitalizing.

On it back in the day when the mafia was taking care of everything.

Yeah.

And that's where the day is.

Yeah.

And you got Gangsters like Oni Madden in New York, Al Capone, Chicago, they invested in these nightclubs super heavily.

Money was dirty, but you know, worked, worked really well.

And then prohibition ended and they didn't really even have to change a whole lot.

They just kind of shifted things from.

Instead of prioritizing liquor, they started to do something different where, well, hey, we can, we can buy music and we don't have to pay anybody to, to be there to perform.

So they kind of started the whole jukebox train, which is pretty interesting.

So I, it's really weird.

They like started to produce and then also fund the different jukebox like vendors and transportation.

Like the people who were like going place to place to pick up the money, like they owned that trucking company and they were like, they just had their fingers all over everything and it was, it's crazy.

But you know, now that, that kind of live performance thing was.

Yeah, it's great for the big cities, but you can't get ax to go to these smaller towns.

And so jukeboxes were kind of like a kind of a scapegoat or not escape go, but just a stand in for that kind of thing, which is, which is also smart.

Like, hey, it works, it kind of works for everybody.

So.

All right, yeah, so these jukeboxes people kind of viewed them, hey, I'm just going to put some money in, play a song, whatever.

But like I said, really, the mafia had owned the bars sometimes, but most of the time they just own the machines and, and the company that went to go pick up the things.

And then by the end of the 40s, magazines were using jukebox play counts to organize what the Billboard charts would be.

Yeah.

So, yeah, so now you have this kind of murky water situation where if you really wanted to prop up a specific guy, you just had to pay the right people and they could make sure that his music was in more jukeboxes, which is pretty crazy.

There's a whole, I believe it's called Paola.

Right.

We're actually gonna get into that here in a second.

So record labels, they caught on pretty quickly.

If a jukebox operator could make a record look like a hit, you know, sales would follow, people would buy the record and then also play it in the jukebox a bunch.

So why not pay the mafia to kind of make it make it look a little cooler.

And now we have Paola entering the fold, which is a mashup of pay.

And Victrola is a pretty simple format.

You slide an envelope full of cash to your local radio station or wherever.

And they would make sure to make that whatever band or artist or song be heard more often and frequently.

Yeah.

Which is definitely.

And this is probably one of the more prominent examples of that.

Like payola is.

It's not super common knowledge, but it is probably one of the more common in terms of like, all of these things.

Like, the jukebox thing was brand new information to me.

And then how they tied it into the Billboard stuff was like, okay, yeah, so this is a big part of the radio being a bit like a main way that people listen to music now is as the radio kind of kicks off, well, you have to start paying different DJs to pay to play some of your music.

And it's like, okay, well, that's just how we do it.

But that's also like the people who couldn't afford to do that.

That's not fair for them.

So.

Yeah.

And nowadays with the streaming platforms, we have playlisters.

Yeah.

That you can just.

You can pay somebody.

And I mean, I've never done.

Looks kind of scammy, kind of scary to me, which really it is because, like, yeah, I've heard like stories where these people, like, create like bot accounts.

Right.

Or whatever, and they'll bring your numbers up.

So that's what I've always heard about it.

It's like, yeah, we got bots to pump the numbers up or whatever.

I don't see how it's any different than modern day payola.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's super interesting.

Yeah, I, I didn't even think about the playlist or sort of.

Like, I.

When I was doing this, like, writing this episode, I was thinking about the YouTube reaction channels, you know what I mean?

Like, there's a couple that I really enjoy.

But then I get to this point in the script, I'm like, am I being tricked?

Do I want to hear this song?

I don't know, but.

But most of them that I listen to are like songs from 20, 30 years ago.

So it's not like they're gonna capitalize a whole lot on it.

But then that you have these ones that are like, only new music.

Only new music of a certain genre.

And you're like, okay, I don't know.

It seems like it could be a very innocuous way to kind of be a little more popular in the, in the, you know, the public view.

But super interesting how that, you know, it's definitely got its foundations in this kind of thing.

This guy, Morris Levy of Roulette Records was kind of one of the first, like, Mafia guys to go straight in terms of his record company.

He was also a big part of the payola scandal.

He was really about controlling every aspect of it.

And he was one of the first that kind of kept his talent people really, like, locked down and not willing to fight back about it.

So, like, one of the first skeevy record company owners.

And obviously he's got Mafia connections.

Like, he just went.

Went straight, basically, which is, yeah, great, great that this is where we're going.

Yeah.

So let's see.

Yeah.

In the 50s, by the mid-50s, radio DJs were able to be like the new gatekeepers.

They were these influencers of their time.

They decided which songs got airtime and by extension, which records would sell.

And naturally, labels and the Mafia made sure that these DJs were being compensated very, very heavily.

The peak of this is when a Cleveland disc jockey named Alan Freed, he was one of the guys who helped popularize the term rock and roll.

And he had this very energetic style.

And he had an ear for very good, very new talent, especially black artists whom he played on mainstream stations, which was, you know, not super common at the time.

But behind a lot.

A lot of this energy was a quiet network of a lot of money moving around.

And labels would pay Freed and others like him to feature their rising or prized acts, and didn't last a super long time.

Congress launched a investigation into this, and they found widespread bribery across the industry.

DJs executives fired and fined, and Alan Freed himself was forced out of radio completely.

He died a few years later, broke.

He was blacklisted.

And he was kind of the fall guy.

Even though everybody was kind of doing it, he was the scapegoat.

So it was just unfortunate for him and kind of sad that he took the brunt of it.

But now that everybody is kind of aware of it, you know, they didn't change what they were doing, they just kind of changed how they were doing it.

Instead of cash envelopes, they had promotional budgets.

You know, instead of mobsters, they had middle managers.

And, you know, a lot of this language and stuff changed, but they kind of kept doing the same thing.

They just got a little more creative.

The jukebox era definitely introduced new and dangerous ideas that you could engineer popularity, which is, you know, kind of a scary thought, but I think it's pretty evident in terms of, like, some of the, you know, you have people who discuss new talents or new Artists now as, like, industry plants or whatever.

And this is kind of that.

But, you know, 50, 60 years ago.

How many people you think are out.

There because of the Mob, like, currently or in general?

Currently, like, obviously, like, we know the mobs, like, calm down, like, quite a bit.

Right.

Since, like, the.

The 50s.

Yeah.

But like, like the Rat Pack, like, that's got.

That's got to be like.

Oh, yeah.

Somehow involved.

Right.

Well, Sinatra famously, like, big friends with a lot of the.

With a lot of the Mafia guys, like.

Right.

Yeah.

And that was.

That was crazy because he wasn't, like, sneaky about it.

Like, he was having dinner with him, and, like, they were at his club and he's just hanging out.

But.

Yeah, I know what you're saying.

I don't know if I was able.

Down some gabagool.

Yeah.

I don't know how many modern versions are.

You could probably.

I'm sure you could probably find a couple that, like, have some dubious origin.

Stories and things, but probably, like, street gangs today, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, and then if.

If the Mafia decided, hey, if we just go straight and we just start a record company, like, you know what I mean?

Like, it's not.

It's not illegal for them to have a record company.

It's.

It's unfortunate.

Part of that, how this business works or how business in general works, but if you just regular business just.

It's fine.

Well, it's.

It's sports betting now, right?

Yeah.

What, these guys are getting wrapped up with the Mafia?

Yeah.

Or.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's crazy to see the Mafia in the news again.

It's like.

I thought we were done with you guys.

Come on, calm down.

Yeah.

So the FBI with the crazy eyes just come.

Yeah, we got them up.

Yeah.

I think that's just like.

That's his dream.

He's like, I'm so excited.

I watched the Godfather over and over, and then I watch Untouchables and then.

Yeah.

So, yeah, the more a song got played, the more people heard it, and the more they heard it, the more people liked it, and that means the more money they would spend to try and hear that artist.

And so this feedback loop of basically engagement is its foundations were of, like, modern Tik Tok and.

And streaming services.

All of that based on this kind of format that they had going back then.

Now, you know, the Mob figured out at least a century ago how to.

How to transform something emotional into something that they could sell, which is creepy and scary, but, you know, it's cool.

And then we get hits from this era that define generations and early rock and roll, rhythm and blues.

It's worth remembering that a lot of these artists, you know, they might have gotten a lot of popularity, but that stuff wasn't, like, crafted by them right there in the studios.

Like, it was kind of manufactured in a way, or like almost.

I can't think of the different word manufactured seems all right.

So, yeah, now you had, in the 50s, America caught in this cultural explosion.

Teenagers now had money and radios and they had nothing to do.

And so you have television coming out and music no longer just like a super random thing or backdrop.

It was now largely identifiable to these.

To these youths that now had all this time and money to be doing things.

So rock and roll, this rebellious stuff, started becoming more and more popular among the young people.

Well, as soon as people started paying attention that, that people were liking, like, well, we got to get a guy like that, you know, which is kind of interesting.

And probably most famous version of this is a man known as Elvis Presley.

He was just.

Just a fella from small town Mississippi who's had this, like, really good voice that was able to kind of paint the picture of the gospel of blues.

But also sounds like a good southern fella.

He's a nice white boy, you know what I mean?

Really easy to market to the.

The broad racist people of the 50s.

Even if everybody didn't like him back then, it was more digestible.

Right.

And he didn't invent anything.

He didn't like, craft anything.

He did take a lot of influences, and that's fine.

That's not.

I don't.

I don't knock Elvis for the music that he made.

He made a couple questionable personal choices, but, you know, he was like a poster boy for what record companies saw as, like, the next thing they knew that gospel and rhythm and blues and all this stuff was getting super popular, but they kind of didn't want it to not be a white guy that was selling it.

So they got a guy who sounded like a lot of the black musicians, and they're like, here, here's some money.

Let's.

Let's take you to go do this stuff.

And I kind of.

I don't know.

Have you seen the movie Sinners?

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a really great line in that movie talking about the blues.

They say it, they like the.

They like the blues.

They just don't like who sings it.

And I was like, yeah, that's.

That's true.

Especially at that time.

Like, just very poignant.

And that's the Business model that Elvis was kind of built on.

Like, he had a love for this music, so he was very talented at it.

And he had this sharp, chiseled jaw and, you know, movie star looks and then had this like dark energy about him too.

So he was like this perfect thing to like, because you couldn't get like a two straight lace guy to do this stuff because it wouldn't work.

So you need a guy that kind of could do all of it.

And also he's from Mississippi.

Like, he was raised on this kind of music.

He lived in poverty.

Like, he knew, he knew this stuff, right.

So it just kind of worked out.

And then you get his puppet master, Colonel Tom Parker, involved.

This is kind of like the beginning of manipulative managers in the music business.

He wasn't obviously a real colonel.

He was not even from the United States.

He's like a Dutch immigrant and also a carnival worker who had dubious ties to potentially the mafia underworld.

So that's weird.

It checks out.

Yeah.

And he knew how to get people to be invested in something.

And he saw Elvis as a just a big old brand.

He was like, I can, I can sell this guy.

Like, I can do it.

And he did.

He produced, mass marketed, monetized, like everything about this dude.

And he also took 50% of Elvis's earnings, which is crazy to me.

He had locked him into these very exploitive contracts, made decisions that prioritized his revenue over different, like musical and art tastes.

Right.

Elvis wanted to famously tour internationally.

He wanted to go to Europe, he wanted to go to Asia.

He was like, I want to go all over the world.

Everybody wants to see me.

And Parker said, no, we're gonna put you in Las Vegas, which is basically the world if you don't think about it.

But really it was.

Parker didn't have a valid passport and was like in the country illegally for the most part.

Just didn't want to get arrested.

So that's pretty messed up.

But now Elvis, you know, kind of gets locked into this stuff.

He is like one of the first musicians to have a.

A very long term residency in Las Vegas and very famous.

Like people did come in droves to see him, but he eventually, his mental capacity could not take it and eventually cracked in a lot of different ways.

But many of Elvis's biggest hits, obviously covers originally written by black musicians.

So that was kind of this, another point of this, hey, we need a white guy to sing these songs.

You know Hound Dog, which is Big Mama Thornton, and then Arthur Crude up Crudups.

That's all right.

Which is those are banger songs.

But a big issue that I've seen people talk about with Elvis is like, well, he just kind of did this music and then didn't, like, didn't give any, like, appreciation or anything.

That is, like, I don't think he was allowed to.

I think they wanted people to think that he wrote this stuff, like, especially back then, where they couldn't, like, really look into a lot of that things.

And I've seen a couple videos of him, like, in live concerts, and he talks about these people, so it's not like he didn't know.

But, like, you buy.

You buy the Elvis record, it's not gonna say with.

With music written by so and so and so.

It's gonna try and look like Elvis did all of it.

Because he's the brand.

He's the.

He's the product.

So.

And, well, I forget which songs they were, but Led Zeppelin also.

Oh, yeah.

A few songs that you could, like, literally, like, transplant from black artists in the United States.

Yeah.

Well, drop it into their music.

And that's.

I remember, I read Keith Richards book a few years ago, and he was talking about, you know, they would buy Muddy Waters records and stuff and, like, listen to it, and they loved it so much.

And, you know, the Stones, they got a lot of.

A lot of crap for being a little crazy.

But one of the things that they would do is they would bring Muddy Waters to England and play because they knew people loved him there.

Which is, like, you don't see a lot of that, especially back then.

And I think that's kind of like a big part of.

You know, you can make the argument like, okay, so this is originally black music, and then these guys took it.

But I think where a big difference in some of these bands is like, did they give back when they could, like, with the Stones bringing Muddy Waters on or, like, XYZ artists bringing BB King out with them?

You know?

And that's another part.

Is B.B.

king famously commenting on Elvis and people saying that he stole music.

He's like, you can't steal music.

It's like, it's.

Yeah, it's just out there.

And I'm like, hey, if B.B.

king says you can't steal it, I'm gonna trust him because he knows more about it than I do.

Yeah.

So now you have this figurehead of.

We can.

We can kind of take this music and we can.

We can make it digestible for a lot of the racist, racist whites.

And.

And that's what that's kind of what Elvis was all about.

Not him personally, but, like, his branding and Colonel Tom Parker and everything.

So eventually you get to where this jumps from record sales to now branding, and that Elvis was a big part of it.

You know, you had Elvis everything.

Like Colonel Tom Parker famously sold.

I hate Elvis and I love Elvis buttons.

Like, I'm gonna make money.

I'm playing both sides.

I always come out on top.

Yeah.

Which is crazy.

Like, it's smart, but it's like, all right, at a certain point, maybe you don't need to make money on everything, but it's okay.

That guy did.

Yeah, that guy.

He give.

I mean, you got to give him credit.

He definitely knew how to make some money, but.

Yeah, so now you have.

By the end of the 50s, at the beginning of the 60s, you have the British Invasion into the United States when the Beatles came over, and that's the biggest.

That was like, okay, now we know where the money's gonna be at now.

Now we know how music's gonna evolve.

And pretty much as soon as that happened and the teenage market saw, like, in person, what that was going on, like, it just exploded.

It was crazy.

Every teenager wanted electric guitars.

Every label wanted to cash in on some part of this thing.

These promoters that ran different clubs were now forced to, like, expand drastically to handle the huge amount of people that wanted to go to these things.

And then you get merchandising and then TV syndication stuff.

Like, definitely a lot of different aspects that were just now surging because basically, since Elvis, there wasn't anything like this.

And Elvis was stuck in Vegas at this point.

So it's like, okay, well, we don't know how to handle this infrastructurally.

So we have to expand a lot.

And one of the.

One of the big parts of this was just making venues.

So you have a lot of arena shows at this point.

Because a.

You're not going to get a band to go to, like, every single little town in a state.

You have centralized locations, so football stadiums and baseball arena.

Like, all these things are, like, starting to get just jam packed with people, which a lot of these, like, old pictures of, I don't know, like, Woodstock, like the original Woodstock, where there's just hills covered in people.

It's like, super crazy to.

To think about.

But at the same time, you have Motown starting to get a little more popular in Detroit.

Barry Gordy, in the late 50s, early 60s, he started putting together teams of different songwriters, musicians, choreographers, and his goal was to kind of like build these marketable and fun artists.

He had the Supremes, the Temptations, and even Stevie Wonder early on, right.

They had this clean, polished look that could cross over into white America while basically capitalizing on the reverse switch that Elvis gave to their music.

Like, all right, so we basically just got to polish everything up and make everything fun, but also, you know, make sure it's good because people are going to want it.

But Gordy had worked at Ford Motor Company in Detroit.

He kind of put the label together like an assembly plant.

He had every artist, every song, every outfit, everything was fine tuned for mass market appeal.

He, he was like, had a very interesting system.

It was kind of, kind of funny to see how like his origin working for.

For it influenced this.

He also had very, very, very tight contracts similar to what Henry Ford would like.

Royalties, very small image was everything.

If you couldn't keep your image in public Persona like you were out and it had to be family friendly stuff.

So they kind of were a. I don't know, it was like a conglomerate.

Almost like you had to kind of keep to this system.

And if you could, you could stay on.

You weren't going to make a lot, but you weren't going to make a little.

I guess so, yeah.

In the 60s, the music and entertainment economy was kind of all over the place because it intermixed with radio, television, and then even in movies.

You know.

Now we had a lot of musical stuff, but it wasn't like musical musicals.

It was like pop music in intertwined or intertwined.

And it just made it a lot more accessible but also broadened the market to a certain extent.

But now you have to find new and interesting ways to be more popular and get more money in terms of like having staying power.

Right.

So they would start to do like long term contracts and try and own the image as, as a whole.

Which is definitely something that is murky and kind of creepy.

Also I think this isn't this.

So they started with Marvin Gaye is a.

Is a good beginning point because, you know, he famously died not very old, right.

I don't know if he was one of the 27, but he was like he was younger.

And then as soon as he died, the Motown records were like, all right, well he's gone.

But like how do we, how do we capitalize on that?

And I guess that's.

It's more in like the 90s when that really takes off.

But that you get into this thing with record contracts called the Death Clause.

Are you familiar with this?

Not, not super But I understand that there's some things with, like, publishing rights, like, basically depending on what you sign, who you sign it with, and, you know, basically what they're allowed to do with your work.

Yeah, yeah.

So Marvin Gaye is a good example.

I think a better example is Kurt Cobain.

So the death clause is essentially an insurance clause in a lot of, like, big time record contracts.

And essentially, yeah, it's like what can happen with the music and the image and likeness and everything once the artist is no longer right.

Kurt Cobain's a big example because Kurt famously hated commercialization.

He hated all of that stuff.

He thought it was dumb that they were popular.

Like, he hated all of that stuff.

And then as soon as he died, you get Nirvana slapped on, like, everything, because that's part of the death.

Like, him dying gave Geffen Records more of a say in how the image was going to be used.

So basically, Geffen and Courtney Love now had more ownership in what was going to happen with Nirvana stuff than Dave and Chris.

So.

So it was like a weird way where they were able to outvote and capitalize on it.

And I don't know that Dave and Chris like, how they voted in that kind of thing.

But just for instance, like, if they decided, no, we don't want to do that, we didn't stick to Kurt's memory, it wouldn't have mattered because Geffen has Kurt's vote now, and then Courtney is gonna obviously capitalize on that because she sucks.

But, yeah, which is a little.

Yeah, I. I saw a, like a Jersey type shirt the other day, a Walmart that had like a Nirvana logo on it and it had, like, numbers on it.

And I'm like, yeah, I'm like, you know, the two things.

Sports and Walmart T shirts.

Exactly.

And I was just like, man.

But yeah, no, exactly.

Right, yeah.

He doesn't own the rights to his.

His stuff anyway.

Yeah, right here, you know?

Yeah.

So that I kind of jumped ahead a little bit.

But another thing that was starting to happen was instead of labels trying to find somebody who could fit an image or find somebody that they could, like, profit off of their image or style, they just started to make styles up.

Like the Monkeys, I think, is probably the most famous example of like a crafted top to bottom band that completely fictional, which is pretty interesting.

But another one that I think is not just as straightforward is Milli Vanilli.

Milli Vanilli, famous for.

You know, they got in trouble for that.

They were lip syncing their songs there too.

They were they were German, but they were very handsome guys.

They had, like a very model, like, look to them.

Long hair, very tan skin.

You know, they had all of it.

But apparently they liked this studio voice that they had for these guys.

And so Milli Vanilla is touring and doing all this stuff and winning Grammys and everything.

And then it comes out, they are lip syncing at one of their concerts or something, and.

And it's interesting because, like, I looked it up and these guys were like, yeah, we wanted to sing, but the record guys, they wouldn't let us.

And I'm like, well, that's dumb.

And, like, I've heard them sing.

They're not terrible.

So I don't.

I don't really understand what the thing was, but it's very.

It's another, like, subplot to the Monkeys thing where they are like, right, well, these guys have the right look.

They don't quite have the sound that we want.

And maybe it was one of those things where they're like, if they sound a little more like this, we can make just that much more money on it or something like that.

But instead, Billy Vanilli is like a.

It's almost like a.

Like a nightmare tale you tell the people in early music stuff.

They're like, you want to be.

Don't turn yourself into Milli Vanilli.

Always record your own stuff.

Yeah.

At the same time, you get like, the more record company contracts that are getting more and more tight, get artists who are fighting back against stuff like this John Fogerty, big example.

He just was like, I'm gonna go do my own thing.

And then they tried to sue him for sounding like himself, which is hilarious to me.

He had to, like, bring a guitar into the courtroom and play the songs.

And he's like, see how it's different?

So then you have, like, Prince.

Prince's whole thing with his record company is where he just turned himself into a symbol, the artist formerly known as Prince.

And then he would perform with.

He would write slave on his face and makeup and stuff.

And, like, I think a very obviously, it's not a direct parallel, but, like, it's very important, I think, for artists to have had some sort of, like, pushback on how overreaching these contracts were, like, finding out about some of these things that they were like, like, locked in for however long to do this.

And they were like, had to play so many shows a year.

And, like, then you get into the thing too.

Like, these guys are Musicians, they're not attorneys.

Right?

You don't know how to read legal documents.

Yeah, they're just like, I'm gonna get paid for this.

Like, I can, like, yeah, pay to keep my heat on, my lights on.

Like, you're gonna pay me to travel.

That's awesome.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

It reminds me of, like, well, the.

The NWA thing where when they kind of forced Ice Cube to quit because he was not getting paid an equal share despite his contributions, it's like they were already not making that much money.

And then he's like, I'm out of here because I'm writing most of the songs.

You guys are kind of screwing me over.

And then, like, even further down the road, the rest of the guys in NWA are also not making that much money either.

So it's like they don't know what the contracts are that they sign just right.

Some dudes who wanted to make some money and.

And then by the time they figure it out, it.

A lot of times it's too late for them to kind of push back and get.

Get even in a way.

But, yeah, also really fun thing that happened in the 90s is these.

These random dudes in Sweden became like the master producers for Pop.

Like, they.

This guy Dennis.

Dennis Pop.

That's his name.

And Max Martin, they.

They run Sharon Studio.

Like, Sharon.

The.

The guy.

The fairy guy in the river Sticks, right, Karen?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Something like that.

But in Stockholm, Sweden, and they famously did so many artists like this, they.

They just propped them up with these hits.

They did stuff for Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, NSync, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, and they, like, had a methodology to just make hits.

Like, it was a formulaic thing, and they figured it out.

And, you know, all of these.

All of these worldwide superstars were going to them to get their number ones, which is also, like, at a certain point, when you're optimizing every single note and lyric and everything down to the very bottom, is that fun anymore?

You know what I mean?

Like, yeah, like, I.

It is not a direct parallel, but you watch the videos of these dudes playing, like, Super Smash Bros.

Tournaments or like Mortal Kombat tournaments, and they have, like, figured out the system, not the game, but they have figured out the system that controls, and they just, like, game it so very precise that they're just doing crazy stuff.

It's like, is that fun anymore?

I don't.

Well, I mean, when you optimize like a workflow like that, like, you're losing a lot of, like, soul and, you know, performance in the project.

So, like, you.

You get what you get out of it.

Yeah, that.

That reflects and, you know, a lot of those songs from that time.

Yeah.

I also think it's a very good kind of indicator of.

Okay, well now at that point, especially in the 90s, that is for the most part, obviously today we have even more access.

But like, at the 90s with the Internet and everything, the way, like, how technology had advanced, how even television was now, like, so much more accessible, you have this moment where so many people are able to consume this stuff.

And so now, instead of it being a very smaller group of people who enjoy music, who are like kind of at the helm of being the ones to say, this is good or these bands are good and I'm going to help them out and do this.

Well, now everybody's got to say, and unfortunately, the vast majority of people are not as intelligent as they would like to think.

And so you get this more easily digestible stuff that becomes more and more popular.

That's why, like, I don't know when you get to like, this is movies, but Rotten Tomatoes, like, the audience score is super high, but the critics score super low is like.

Well, yeah, it's a dumb movie, like, Right.

It's dumb fun.

Like, it's not.

It's not.

Not fun, but it's not a great movie.

It's just entertaining.

You know what I mean?

Right.

Yeah.

Like, nobody's critiquing like, LMFAO on their, like, their musical talents or like the depths of their lyrics.

Yeah, it's fun.

It gets people going and that's about all that matters.

Yeah, yeah.

Other kind of.

I mentioned the.

The Death Clause and other artists that kind of followed in Kurt Cobain's path, I guess, when Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls both murdered the same kind of thing, they had all of these, like, post ominous albums that were now released.

They had all these recordings that they're like, we gotta pump those out.

Because also in terms of, like, knowing that the artist is no longer there, that's when most of them get to be substantially more popular than they already were, too.

So at a certain point, and I think it's more evident in hip hop, where you have so many recordings that just don't make it into any of the albums or don't even make it into songs, they're just recording raps and flows and things like that.

And so they have all this banked material.

Well, now that artist is dead and they're like, all Right.

Well, now we can just throw that stuff out there and people will buy it just because that artist is dead now.

Which is sad, but also like, I guess sad for a couple of reasons.

Yeah, it's like that Chappelle show joke where he's at the club and they're like listening to this new Tupac song.

He's like, I wrote this song in 94.

Yeah, I, I remember this is a really dumb moment in my life, but me and my brother, we were going, we were going to Walmart and he was in like back when Walmart had like a whole CD section and he found this thing and it was a two box cd.

He's like, oh, I got two parts.

I was like, oh, yeah, that's cool.

And I'm like, six maybe.

And I was like, what is that, like a new one?

He's like, well, yeah, but he, he got shot.

And I was like, again?

And I had no idea he had been shot multiple times at this point.

But like he has already been dead at this point.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So a lot of the death clause is also it in terms of marketability.

It's not just, you know, your image and likeness.

It's also any unreleased music.

And also if the masters haven't been, you know, purchased by that person's, their, the people that handle their, like their family or whatever, then they can remaster and re up different things.

And it's not just, you know, rappers that this happens too, because it happened when, when John Lennon died.

It happened obviously when Elvis died.

Michael Jackson, another big one, Aaliyah, when she died in her.

And I, I guess, like it, it feels dirty to me, but that's just me.

Like, I get it.

They recorded it, so at a certain point they definitely wanted to release it.

But not like that.

I don't know.

I. I feel like I would want to release something that I know is finished.

Right.

And like, as long as it's finished, yeah, I don't think.

Well, and the other part of it is like these record companies are throwing producers on this music that probably didn't even work with the artists to finish these things.

And it's like, that's weird.

Like, it would be one thing I know when like Mac Miller died and his like his producer that he worked with, with like everything and like a bunch of his friends came together and finished that album, like that makes sense because that's people he surrounded himself with and kind of knew the, the expectation of where they wanted to go.

But then you get, like, Tupac dying and then some Joe Schmo from Sony wreck or wherever.

A death row.

Right.

Death row record to just finish it up and like.

Okay, well, that feels weird.

Yeah.

An interesting part of this whole death clause thing is when Michael Jackson died, Sony, who owned his stuff, right.

Their market value rose by over $1 billion within one week of his death.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

That's crazy, right?

And then, like, within a month, they had already, like, re released his catalog, documentaries with his, you know, stuff about him.

A different merchandise was rebranded, re released like, all within a month of this guy dying.

I.

You just always hope, like, with these things that it's always.

That it's done in good taste and, like, in memory of a person.

Not like, okay, this is our chance to make, like, some really good money on people do that.

Yeah, but.

But yeah, no, you.

You just hope people's doing the right thing with stuff like this.

Yeah, well, and another aspect of it is kind of in the streaming world that we're in now where, you know, you get an artist that dies, and then all of a sudden their name is in front of, like, every platform that you're using to consume music.

And it's like, okay, do I actually want to listen to this because I am curious, or is it like, a, they're dead now, so, like, I'm curious about that.

But B, now this company, this record company is trying to profit off of these guys.

So they're like, pushing.

And even.

Even if the record company isn't, the streaming platform might be.

You know what I mean?

Like, they're right.

It's.

It's.

It's just got a lot of weird layers to it.

So I know, like, with, like, the distributors that, like, we use.

We use like, distrokid.

Right.

And that's.

That's what puts our music up on, like, YouTube and Sure.

Spotify all that.

So you can go in there and like, check off as an option, like, you can pay to, like, leave it as a legacy item to basically where it would.

Sure.

Stay basically up on there for, you know, even after you die.

Yeah, no, I think, like, the thing.

It's different with that.

Like, I think it's like 50 years after you die.

Like, people are allowed to have that stuff anyway.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I think it's.

I think it's like 60.

60 or 70, but yeah, yeah, I know what you're talking about.

Public domain.

Yeah.

Something changed recently.

But yeah, like, at some point, like, it's it's going out there anyway.

So.

So I don't know.

Yeah, and then you get into like.

Yeah, get a. AI to the AI.

What do they.

What's.

They did that for Tupac too, with the, the hologram.

We get a hologram?

Yeah, play coaches.

I mean, it's cool, but it's creepy also.

Like, I don't know how to feel about it, but it's no different than just watching a video of them, I guess.

But how long do you think until they've got like full, like animatronic.

Got their entire like, personality like, up uploaded via like AI?

They've turned them into a Chuck E. Cheese band.

Oh, dude.

No, I'm, I'm saying, like, oh, like.

A legitimate black mirror.

Like black mirror.

Like we've got like, so these, these artists or whatever, they're like, you know, whatever contracts they've signed, they're like, you know, I've given you all this information over now.

What if the record companies are just like, okay, we can upload you into like one of these like silicone robots and now you got John Mayer in your home.

Oh, no.

I don't know.

Get him out.

Yeah, I don't know how far off that is, but that is kind of also, like, it's very logical next step, dude.

Yeah, it's very much a.

What do they call it?

The uncanny valley of like when a robot looks kind of human but not human enough.

A. Yeah, I don't like that at all.

I don't.

I.

As much as fun as it would be to watch a real life Jimi Hendrix play guitar like he did, you know, I don't think him as a robot would be a good legacy item like that.

That's.

I think it gets into the, the realm of.

All right, well, this feels very disturbing.

Yeah.

But think of, think of like the.

Just like the music that would come from that kind of existential crisis.

Oh, yeah, yeah, that's true.

Yeah.

You get, you get some probably really creative things that would happen, but at what cost?

Yeah, the, the advancement of technology on music is definitely like, it's multifaceted and also crazy.

Like dipping into the origins of streaming.

They started the, the music streaming thing without even like kind of realizing it.

It was piracy then, right?

It was, we're taking music that somebody bought a cd, put it on in line and then gave people the ability to download it.

And basically Lars Ulrich got mad about it and basically Metallica ruined it for everybody.

Yeah.

But it's weird because if you think about it, like, if they would have figured out a way to make that work for them, they could have been on the cutting edge of this what end up being streaming.

But like the, the straw that broke the camel's back is.

They got is.

Is that song that was for like Mission Impossible and.

Really.

Yeah.

Mission Impossible 2 or 3, I think it was.

I don't even remember the song now.

But yeah, they as Metallica got real weird about it and understandable to the point to where like they had no idea what this could mean, but they just knew they didn't like it.

And I understand that aspect, but you know, people were like, you have enough money.

And I don't know that that's generally what they were concerned about.

But whatever the reason is that Napster was just the starting point because as soon as Napster died, a bunch more popped up.

We have, you know, Limewire is probably the biggest one.

Man, I've ruined many a computer with Limewire and.

Right.

It's.

That was just, you know, part of, part of growing up and that was.

A rite of passage as a millennial.

Yeah.

Destroying the family computer from downloading Soulja Boy and the system of down mashup.

The one that always cracked me up was.

It was Cats in the Cradle, Guns N Roses, but it was actually Ugly Kid Joe.

Yeah, like it's not Guns and Roses.

Never buy that.

Yeah.

And then you get like different torrent websites and eventually those all kind of, I don't know that they highlighted anything for record companies, but they definitely gave some other companies companies some ideas.

And so you get.

Itunes is like kind of the first, the first where they're like, hey, pay a little bit and then you can get this money or this music.

But then you have various streaming platforms beginning.

I don't know when specifically they started in because it's like Sweden that they started in.

But eventually they were like, hey guys, you don't want your stuff pirated.

Here's what we're gonna do.

You give us licensing for your thing, we're gonna charge people monthly premiums and we're gonna give you money for that.

Unfortunately, you know, it's.

It's such a fraction of the money that they could have been made.

And now that's all it is, is streaming.

Everything, everything's streaming.

And you know, I think the average profit per stream is like a 3,300th of a cent or Something like that.

For a certain amount of plays and obviously for people like Taylor Swift and you know, the big hitters, that's like, okay, we're going to get a lot of money but.

Because our stuff is played a lot.

But then smaller artists.

I don't know how much like, do you even know if there was any kind of revenue from Spotify, from your guys's stuff?

Let me, I'm actually pulling it up right now, I can tell you.

And it'll like break it down to.

Like per play and stuff.

It.

I. I think so.

Like, let me just pick.

Yeah.

One off of here.

I mean it'll tell me the.

Okay, I gotta go to the bank.

Basically it shows me.

Okay, here's.

Here's a song that's gotten.

It doesn't even tell me how much place.

It's a frag.

It's a fraction of a penny, like literally.

And it's like a decimal point.

Yeah.

Of like numbers that like goes on.

For like ever way too long.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So.

But it's, it's very, very nominal per stream.

Right.

Yeah.

And it's tough because like, I don't know, back in, back in the day, obviously like record sales were big for up and coming artists because if you could.

If you could open for a big band and follow them on tour or something like that, and then people start hearing your stuff and buy your records, then you can start to pay for better recording, whatever.

And it would like compound into being able to produce better stuff and market better and whatever.

But now everybody's streaming everything.

You can't convince people to buy whole records as easily as you used to be able to.

And you're not getting any money on that.

So now you have to tour.

But like, how do you get more popular if you're only being able to play certain types of places?

You know what I mean?

And I feel like it's just super unfortunate because there's a lot of like up and coming bands that don't make it because of that.

You there?

Yeah.

Okay.

There you are.

Yeah.

So I came back and I, I found one of the songs on here.

It's.

Yeah.

One, one stream I have on here was worth point.

I mean, that's pretty good.

I mean you stream that song about 3 billion times and you'll get a nice cheeseburger somewhere.

Killing it, dude.

Yeah.

So like, so now in the, in the streaming age, you have to.

You're not just a musician anymore because you have to be able to market yourself because you can't fund Your marketing by selling records, you have to market yourself to be able to get people to stream you, which then you need that information to convince venues to book you.

Exactly.

It's just a weird like, mix of everything.

Yeah.

Like it.

If you want to.

That's just.

If you want attention.

Yeah.

If you want to make a living off of it, you pretty much have to become a merchandise company.

Yeah.

I mean you, you could kind of make a little bit of money playing shows, but even then, like, you still gotta get the attention to get people to come to your shows.

Yeah, yeah.

So it's definitely like, basically could put the kibosh on like a lot of these up and coming guys that you used to be able to, you know, see flourish eventually.

Like, they put a lot of work in and then they, you know, grind it out.

And then now they can pay a marketing company to do stuff for them.

But now it's like they have to do all the marketing and all the writing and all the performing.

And then maybe you might get able to tour once or twice and then, you know, that's.

If you're lucky, it's might be able.

To get enough gas to get, get to the next gig.

Yeah.

That's crazy.

It's.

It's just weird how drastic everything has shifted in terms of like the way that especially just the way performing is like, even like not just music, but like if you want to be funny, you want to be a comedian, you have to also do the same stuff.

Like.

And it's, it's wild to me that that's like the method.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Let's see.

I had lost my place, but I guess essentially like at the point where streaming took over, you get, you get artists that instead of like legacy artists, old school guys or not old school in general, but just people who have been around a little bit.

Their new methodology becomes selling their masters.

Right.

Like selling the whole catalog.

And that's for like insane money.

That they don't really have to worry about doing any of that stuff anymore.

And I think that, that like it's, it's crazy.

Like you see Bob Dylan selling his entire catalog for like $400 million.

Springsteen I think was like 5 or 600 million.

Just like these, these insane sale prices.

And you're like, okay, well what does that even mean for you as a person now?

Like what?

Yeah, like, I haven't.

There's not a real good way for my mind to process something like that.

But you know, they get to catalyze on different things.

Like we get biopics and things like that that kind of drum up success.

But like, even that, is that the artist deciding that they want to biopic done or is that the company being like, hey, if we have this biopic produced, we can get, you know, X amount of streams on this thing or whatever, or we can sell this.

I mean, at the end of the day, it's got to make.

It's got to make the company's money.

Yeah.

For them to even want to think about being interested.

Yeah, yeah.

Super, super weird where.

Where it has.

How it has come.

You know, we get all the way back from cave shouting and bone flutes and things like this to where we are now, which is kind of why I wanted to do this topic.

It's just like a very, very tangible.

And like everybody can kind of understand music in.

In general.

Like, I know what music on that level and how it has went from, you know, within a thousand years, even barely being written down to now, like every aspect of it is monetized.

Which is.

Which is crazy.

I guess it's also like kind of a paradox of art in general.

Like, you get physical art, like actual paintings and stuff.

You get the point to where now it's a banana taped to a wall.

And that's, you know, people are paying money for that.

You know what I mean?

It's like starts to dilute the soul of what it was at one point.

And that's, you know, you.

You said that when we were talking about this guy just in Sweden, kind of like making every single note and every single thing be a part of this larger picture.

And how it.

How it takes the soul out of what's going on is.

It's kind of like, that's kind of how I feel listening to some of these newer artists.

Now, granted, not all of them.

Like, I don't want to be like the old guy that's like, yeah, this new music's terrible, but like, there's some.

Where you're like, yeah, they're just kind of cashing a paycheck.

Like they're just making money, which.

Good for them, I guess.

But it's.

It's always the easiest ones that are accessible too.

Yeah.

Like all like the music that's out there, that's like really good and like heartfelt.

It's being played right down the street.

Yeah.

At the local bar.

Yeah, absolutely.

You know, there's a good possibility nobody's ever gonna hear that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think it's Nice.