Tag Archives: music-industry

The California Reparations Task Force has issued its first interim report, a nearly 600-page document that spends a full chapter focusing on the longstanding inequities surrounding the history of arts and entertainment in the United States. “Throughout American history, the federal government historically deprived Black American artists and innovators of …

Arizona Zervas’ debut single “Roxanne” is four-times platinum in America and has more than a billion streams worldwide — but he started out as an unsigned artist self-releasing via DistroKid. That was 2019, when the DIY trend and the might of independent, non-label distributors became acutely clear to the music …

Last week, Shawn Mendes became the latest and biggest artist to launch a line of digital goods in the form of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Mendes partnered with Genies, a company that makes 2D avatars, to design virtual versions of some of his most identifiable accessories, like his signature Fender guitar, …

Where are all the women? According to Rolling Stone‘s just-published rankings of the biggest songs and albums of the first half of 2020, female artists are vastly underrepresented. Among the Top 100, there are only 19 songs and 17 albums by women. When compared with all of 2019, the number …

Carlos de la Garza can “count on one hand” the number of alternative rock records being green-lit by major labels right now. De la Garza, a drummer-turned-producer who also mixes and engineers and has worked with everyone from Bad Religion to Best Coast, remembers a more lucrative time: 10 to …

Signing an artistto a record deal is a lot like dating, says Pete Ganbarg, president of A&R over at Atlantic Records. But Ganbarg — who has brought in Twenty One Pilotsand Christina Perri, as well as the blockbuster cast albums/soundtracks to Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, and The Greatest Showman —says …

On March 11th, as global measures to stop the spread of Covid-19 began to escalate, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a ban on travel from mainland Europe to the United States. In a different era, this would have spelled troubling news for the entire Swedish music industry — which has …

Earlier this month, Sofar Sounds, a startup that stages around 10,000 intimate concerts a year across 400 cities, had no choice but to suspend all its shows due to the coronavirus pandemic — a decision that immediately impacted more than 2,000 artists in six continents. The company is now moving …

Africa is the second-biggest continent on the planet. Yet “there is no company in the world solely committed to servicing African music,” says Mr. Eazi, the Nigerian star who has collaborated with Beyonce and Diplo. The singer is aiming to plug this hole with emPawa, a company that identifies talented …

As Taylor Swift prepares to release Lover on Friday, she is returning to a pop world that has undergone profound changes. “Before it was a push business,” ace songwriter Savan Kotecha (Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber) explained in 2018. “Labels would push an act on a TV show, an award show, …