Music Biz Features

This story appears in Rolling Stone‘s 2021 Future of Music issue, a special project delving into the next era of the multibillion-dollar hitmaking business. Alongside our reporting, we invited four star artists to share their own predictions on the music industry’s wild next era. Read the other stories here. Joel …

Gary Witt has waited and waited and waited. A Milwaukee venue owner and live music veteran, Witt weathered 14 months of a total shutdown of his business; he’s down 40 percent of his full-time staff, 97 percent of his revenue from the last year, and nearly all of his life …

Ben Winston is exhausted. The television producer, who moved from the U.K. to Los Angeles six years ago to start The Late Late Show With James Corden, is a week away from executive-producing his first Grammys telecast. “I literally had two hours of sleep last night,” he tells Rolling Stone …

Tracy Chan has spent his career in jobs that never existed in the old music industry. The music-tech entrepreneur started as a product manager at YouTube, then launched his own company, CrowdAlbum, a photo-aggregation algorithm collecting pictures taken by fans at shows. Spotify acquired the startup and brought Chan on …

One of the most revolutionary price experiments in entertainment history is being undertaken by Disney next week. With many movie theaters still shut and consumer attendance weakened by fears over the pandemic, next Friday, September 4th, the House of Mouse will release its big new blockbuster live-action movie, Mulan, direct …

It was not on my list of expectations, when interviewing Los Angeles-based chairman and COO of Warner Records Tom Corson, to be greeted by a quote from the German soccer coach Jurgen Klopp. But these are, as those serotonin-sapping global headlines keep reminding us, unpredictable times. “Football is the most …

Shows are canceled. Studios are shuttered. What’s a young rapper to do while sheltering in place? A lot of acts are turning to recording feature verses for other artists as a way to stay sharp, stave off boredom, and pad their bottom line during the quarantine caused by COVID-19. “The …

On July 16, 2018, Drake’s “In My Feelings” was crowned as the biggest hit in the country. To have a hand in a Drake single is a life-changing event for a producer, but that change can come slowly — according to one industry source, the several million dollars in writing …

The largest radio conglomerate in the country, iHeartMedia, initiated a round of mass layoffs this week, cutting enough people that one former on-air host described Tuesday as “one of the worst days in on-air radio history.” The layoffs were concentrated in small and medium markets, where staffs had already been …

Holly Herndon is not interested in creating her own replacement. The composer-musician saw the rise of machine intelligence in music as major labels and tech companies, hungry for cheap production, began pushing AI songwriters. But rather than fight it, Herndon decided to raise a robot bandmate herself. Herndon, who completed …