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. Read the other stories here. To reinvent Motown Records, Ethiopia Habtemariam wants to start by going back in time. “I remember being a really young kid …

Earlier this year, singer-songwriter-producer Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds — known for writing massive hits for Toni Braxton, TLC, and Boyz II Men — received a call from P. Diddy. Diddy’s job was to convince Edmonds to face off against Teddy Riley on an Instagram-based rap battle. And he didn’t mince words. …

Todd Mayo says it was like finding buried treasure when he started The Caverns. Mayo was spelunking, excavating a cave on a plot of land he’d purchased — when he realized that the scenic space in Pelham, Tennessee could be an impressive outdoor music venue. Since its founding in 2018, …

Back in 2018, it was possible to break a single via an Instagram meme. It happened with Rich the Kid’s “New Freezer:” Omid Noori, co-founder of the digital marketing and management company ATG, stumbled on a meme featuring several kids whipsawing their heads to the track; he then paid a …

Recorded music has been in a state of limbothroughout quarantine: Though live events like concerts and other in-person money-makers have shut down, songs and albums have been buoyed by streaming — so things are difficult, but not terminal. On April 20th, Olivier Nusse, the CEO of Universal Music France, gave …

“If the music industry wants to support black lives, labels and platforms can start with amending contracts, distributing royalties, diversifying boardrooms, and retroactively paying back all the black artists, and their families, they have built their empires on.” This statement, from professor and author Josh Kun, caught fire in influential …

Jamila Thomas and Brianna Agyemang made no mention of silence, let alone a black box, when they called on their peers in the music industry to devote Tuesday, June 2nd, to a new initiative, #TheShowMustBePaused. The idea was to force the industry — which is built on black talent, but …

Your next luxury guitar may not be made of treasured mahogany from the forests in Guatemala, nor from the long-revered rosewood of India — but from the lumber of a tree off the side of a Los Angeles highway. Taylor Guitars, one of the most well-known acoustic guitar manufacturers in …

Songwriters usually operate out of the public eye: Even when creating inescapable hits that charge up the charts, they rarely leave the studio. But earlier this month, writers angrily stepped into the spotlight. In an open letter to Spotify, a group of hitmakers spanning generations and genres, from pop-R&B legend …