How Ticket & Scalper Financing Inflates Prices and Excludes FansChris Castle on how ticket and scalper financing inflates prices and make it harder for real fans to buy. As resellers get millions in credit to hoard tickets, fans are left paying more - or missing out entirely.
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“These are not songs coming out of Sabrina Carpenter’s head”: Rick Beato says most modern popstars are just “vehicles” for songs crafted by professional songwritersRick Beato has called out the machinery behind modern pop and the way most popstars today just function as “vehicles” for songs crafted by teams of professional songwriters.
Using Sabrina Carpenter’s latest hit Manchild as an example, the producer and YouTuber explains how most fans don’t realise just how curated the process really is – or how little of the song may actually originate from the artist themselves.

READ MORE: “Labels have found a new way to put artists in a position where they seem to be making a lot of money, but they essentially own nothing”: Rick Beato and Anthony Fantano discuss the impact of Spotify and streaming

“When an artist like Sabrina Carpenter is doing a new record,” says Beato, “she’s presented hundreds of songs to choose from. Or, she will go and ‘write’ with people she had hits with from the last record. Which she did – Amy Allen was one of the writers, and so was Jack Antonoff. And they will write new songs for this thing.”
“Yeah, she might be in the room for some of this stuff. But the fact of the matter is, these same people are all over multiple hit songs.”
According to Beato, hitmakers like Allen and Antonoff are part of a “professional songwriter group of people that write a majority of big hit songs out today that we hear constantly.”
“These things are created by the producers. And then they figure out what the image is going to be for the video, for the record. This stuff is all put together. And when I see people make videos on YouTube where they’re talking about her lyrics – what this Manchild thing means – it’s like ‘it doesn’t mean anything!’”
“They’re not written by these people. They’re no statement,” he says. “All of it is a completely calculated thing.”

While Beato acknowledges that artists like Carpenter may be musically capable – “I know she plays guitar and piano and everything. You can see videos of her doing that” – he remains skeptical of their involvement on the actual records.
“You think she’s playing anything on here? That’s Jack Antonoff playing that, I’m sure. These things are all just programmed. They bring her in, she sings over it, she reads all the lyrics, she might say ‘You know, I wouldn’t say that, I would say this,’ and she gets her songwriting credits on there. The fact of the matter is that these songwriters need artists that are young – let’s be honest about it – that are vehicles for their songs.”
“These are not songs coming out of Sabrina Carpenter’s head,” he continues. “I bet she doesn’t play one note on any of her records.”
At the heart of it, Beato says, is an old truth about the music industry: “This has been going on since the beginning of the music business. In order to get your song cut by a huge star, you have to give a piece of the song. Even if they wrote nothing, and it’s really terrible. Especially when there’s so little money in the business these days as compared to 25 years ago, even.”
The exception, in his view, is Billie Eilish and Finneas – one of the few major acts who not only co-write their music but play the parts too.
“She and her brother write the songs together. Not only do they write them, but he plays all the parts,” says Beato. “They’re one of the very few people.”

The post “These are not songs coming out of Sabrina Carpenter’s head”: Rick Beato says most modern popstars are just “vehicles” for songs crafted by professional songwriters appeared first on MusicTech.

GIK Acoustics: Room EQ Wizard Tutorial This GIK Acoustics tutorial video talks through the process of using REW to measure the likes of frequency response, SPL, decay times and more, along with details on how to configure the software and generate waterfall graphs. 

Book Store: "501 Essential Albums of the 1980s" Edited by Gary GraffMC contributor Graff has played an absolute blinder here, working with a long list of esteemed scribes (Cary Baker, Rob St. Mary, many more) to compile the 501 essential albums of the '80s. Naturally, with any sort of book like this, everyone will point to albums that should be in there but aren’t. That said, this is damned extensive. All the appropriate new wave, new romantic, pop, and hair metal albums from that decade are present and correct. But Graff makes sure that gospel, country, jazz, punk, hip-hop, soul, and just about everything else gets a fair shake too. Essential reading for anyone with even a passing interest in that decade.(Hardcover) $40The post Book Store: "501 Essential Albums of the 1980s" Edited by Gary Graff first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Google launches Doppl, a new app that lets you visualize how an outfit might look on youGoogle is launching a new experimental app called Doppl that uses AI to visualize how different outfits might look on you.

Meta hires former OpenAI top talent amid AGI pushMeta's latest AI hire follows several developments and partnerships aimed at making the tech giant a leader in the burgeoning sector.

Room360 Audio Room360Room360 represents a step forward in the field of algorithmic reverb. No cut corners, and no cheating. Every aspect of the resulting sound comes directly from the hundreds of thousands of traced reflections, made possible in real time with carful optimization. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSZ41kznQmo Read More

What is a verse in a song? How to write a verse
Learn about what a verse is, its purpose in a song, and techniques for how to write effective verses of your own.

Linear Solar Chargers for Lithium CapacitorsFor as versatile and inexpensive as switch-mode power supplies are at all kinds of different tasks, they’re not always the ideal choice for every DC-DC circuit. Although they can do almost any job in this arena, they tend to have high parts counts, higher complexity, and higher cost than some alternatives. [Jasper] set out to test some alternative linear chargers called low dropout regulators (LDOs) for small-scale charging of lithium ion capacitors against those more traditional switch-mode options.
The application here is specifically very small solar cells in outdoor applications, which are charging lithium ion capacitors instead of batteries. These capacitors have a number of benefits over batteries including a higher number of discharge-recharge cycles and a greater tolerance of temperature extremes, so they can be better off in outdoor installations like these. [Jasper]’s findings with using these generally hold that it’s a better value to install a slightly larger solar cell and use the LDO regulator rather than using a smaller cell and a more expensive switch-mode regulator. The key, though, is to size the LDO so that the voltage of the input is very close to the voltage of the output, which will minimize losses.
With unlimited time or money, good design can become less of an issue. In this case, however, saving a few percentage points in efficiency may not be worth the added cost and complexity of a slightly more efficient circuit, especially if the application will be scaled up for mass production. If switched mode really is required for some specific application, though, be sure to design one that’s not terribly noisy.

Court shoots down Sarah Silverman’s case against Meta’s AI – but declares using copyrighted works for training is NOT ‘fair use’The latest ruling contradicts another ruling on AI and fair use, issued by a different judge in the same court just two days earlier
Source

Humanizer Midi is a FREE Humanizer Plugin for Windows
Humanizer Midi by Audiowavez is a Windows-only plugin that makes your MIDI tracks less static by subtly changing the velocity and timing of the notes. If you’ve felt like your MIDI-generated melodies, chords, and rhythms sound clunky, hard, and robotic, you’re probably not alone. Think of how a real piano sounds when you play it. [...]
View post: Humanizer Midi is a FREE Humanizer Plugin for Windows

Streaming is both retail and radio. It shouldn’t beIn a brutally simplified view of the past, the recorded music industry had two lanes: retail and radio. Piracy killed retail. Streaming killed piracy, then went on to, if not kill, then seriously maim radio. The two lanes converged into one – reverse bifurcation. 

At first, it was all upside: the consumers that retail had lost began spending on subscriptions, and audiences migrated from lower-paying broadcast radio to higher-paying streaming. However, artists and songwriters then became unhappy with per stream rates, contextualising them against retail rather than radio. Meanwhile, record labels realised they had inadvertently capped the spending of people who in previous generations had been high spending superfans. This is the problem with squeezing two highly distinct models aimed at serving opposite ends of the music aficionado / passive massive spectrum into one space. In the growth phase – when everyone was waiting for the bright future – it felt like a best of worlds. When growth slowed, however, and everyone realised how things are now is how things will always be, it began to look like an unsatisfactory compromise that delivered the best of neither. 

If streaming was only benchmarked against radio, in rightsholder remuneration terms, it would be an undisputed success. However, because rightsholders and creators alike also depend upon it for the income stream retail used to represent, critiques and criticisms have become part of streaming’s narrative. For the majority of mid-tail artists, streaming is in many respects like radio was 15 years ago. It is a badge of success, but you have little idea who listened – or any means of connecting with them. It sets up other income streams (live, sync, merch, etc), generates income (decent, but not enough to live on), and it builds audiences rather than fanbases.

Supremium: Can streaming monetise fandom?

Enter stage left supremium. The concept is logical: tap the latent spend of superfans by delivering them scarce and high value experiences and content from their favourite artists in the app where they do their music listening. The problem is that this might not be the best place to tap fandom. Streaming has made music listening more passive with playlists, stations, and other forms of algorithmic programming. Streaming took the price point from retail but the format from radio.

The risk with fitting a superfan product into streaming is that it commodifies and generalises fandom in the same way it has music. Music might be always on, but except for a small niche of obsessives, fandom is not always on for most people. Most people are fans of multiple artists and do not listen to them all the time. As our superfan report found, many do not even listen regularly to those they consider themselves fans of the most. Social has already done its bit to commodify fandom, compelling creators to become content factories to meet the algorithm’s insatiable appetite and not be forgotten by it. Social is free and so commodification is tolerated. The premise of supremium is premium scarcity – but in an always on, on-demand environment, users will expect something much more frequent than occasional. By making scarcity frequent, it will lose its specialness and, well, scarcity. Sometimes it is better to give people what they need rather than what they want, or in this instance give them less when they think they want more.

Music listening is like breakfast, you eat every day and generally do not put too much store by it. Fandom is like eating out at a fancy restaurant – something you typically do infrequently and make an occasion of. Think about the attention you pay to an artists’ YouTube notification versus their Instagram notification. The former is likely infrequent and so you pay more attention to it, the latter is ‘great, yet another notification’.

The future of music fandom

Digital fandom products can absolutely work (as long as the expectation is to convert superfans, not suddenly turn the passive massive into superfans). In MIDiA’s recent streaming pricing study, in fact, many subscribers showed willingness to convert to a tier unlocking ‘superfan’ features. However, it will be difficult for streaming to design a product that works for those it is intended to serve. It means building a mass-market, one-size offering for a consumer segment that is inherently niche and diverse. It also means that the more consumers who sign up, the less “exclusive” and scarce the subscription becomes – and therefore, success ironically breeds failure. Fandom products may need to be somewhere else to fulfil their potential. That might mean standalone apps, but we have had a good few years of fan apps trying to make 

headway and realising that consumers already have more apps than they want. 

So, the challenge is to work out where fandom products should live (and what they should be, if not the traditional retail offerings). Social platforms would be an even poorer choice. This leaves the Bifurcation go-tos of YouTube, SoundCloud, and Twitch – each of which has respective strengths and weaknesses. 

The hard truth is that there probably is no ideal location for digital fandom products right now, but streaming is probably not the right place either. Artists and labels alike need a successor to retail. This does not necessarily have to actually be retail (e.g., Bandcamp) but it does need to be somewhere where people can be fans as frequently or infrequently as they like, converse with likeminded others, express themselves, and spend on their favourite artists, whether that be actual products or digital items.  Social platforms may enable the former behaviours, but are far less efficient when it comes to the latter (spend), at least for music. Streaming may well have taken the retail part of its equation as far as it can. Now is the time for something else to grab that baton and run with it.

“We are the inventors of electro”: Emmanuel Macron thinks French electronic music should be granted UNESCO cultural heritage statusThe French President, Emmanuel Macron, has boldly claimed that France is the true home of electronic music.
Macron asserted his belief during an appearance with French radio station Fréquence Gaie, marking France’s annual celebration of music, Fête de la Musique.
“We are the inventors of electro,” he asserts [via Mixmag]. “We have that French touch!”

READ MORE: MusicTech’s favourite plugins of 2025 — so far

While some might question Macron’s stance, its undeniable that France has left an indelible mark on the electro scene.
From Daft Punk to Justice to David Guetta, to more recent artists like Gesaffelstein, French artists do seem to have a certain spark to them… a “French touch”, if you will.
The “French touch” has also been recognised as an official genre: French Touch. It’s France’s unique brand of house music, recognised as having its first boom in the ‘90s for its unique mix of Eurodisco, space disco and funk.

Of course, some might be critical of Macron’s assertion that France “invented” electro. While the French genre ‘musique concrète’ dates back to the ‘40s, you could argue the first sign of electronic music was the birth of the theramin in 1920 in Russia. But then, musique concrète saw the first examples of musicians editing together synthetic and industrial sounds.
But even that begs the question: when the first song was released entirely comprised of electronic sounds? That apparently took place in 1953 in Germany, marking the birth of ‘elektronische musik’. Some also argue Kraftwerk were one of the very first electronic bands.
While there are many arguments for where electro originates, many consider the modern version of electro to have formed in the ‘80s. People often pinpoint the first examples emerging in America in the ‘80s, with African American communities across New York, Chicago and Detroit blending together funk, hip-hop and disco.

Regardless, Macron is so proud of the country’s musical heritage that he’s even keen for it to attain a cultural status. Berlin received such an honour last year, being added to the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage – and Macron believes France is worthy of being popped onto the list.
“We’re going to do that too,” he insists. “I love Germany – you know how pro-European I am! But we don’t have to take lessons from anyone.”
The UNESCO list aims to support unique forms of art across the globe. Other genres that have received honourary nods includes include Colombian marimba, Cuban rumba, Greek Rebetiko, Jamaican reggae and more.

We did it! #TechnoCulture in Berlin is officially recognized as Intangible Cultural Heritage!Congratulations to…
Posted by Rave The Planet on Wednesday, March 13, 2024

When Berlin’s output of techno was acknowledged by UNESCO last March, the techno world was ecstatic. Rave The Planet, who campaigned for years to see Berlin recognised by the UNESCO list, posted a celebratory post on their Facebook: “Congratulations to all the cultural creators who have shaped and contributed to Berlin’s techno culture,” the post read.
“A big thank you to everyone involved who has been with us on this journey since Hans Cousto’s initial idea in 2011. Special thanks to the Expert Committee on Intangible Cultural Heritage at the German UNESCO Commission!”
“This is a major milestone for the entire culture, and our joy is beyond words.”

Berlin techno culture is recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site!
This another milestone for Berlin techno producers, artists, club operators and event organizers. https://t.co/Bd1EnvJRN4
— clubcommission (@clubcommission) March 13, 2024

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The Unexpected Rise of Cringe as a Music Marketing StrategyCringe content is no longer a liability — cringe is a music marketing strategy. As audiences crave authenticity over polish, artists who lean into awkward, overly earnest moments are breaking. Continue reading
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NIVA Day 3: Frank Riley, Bandsintown and YouTube’s Ali RiveraThe third day of the NIVA ’25 independent live music conference included actionable insights, a major award and the announcement of NIVA 2026. NIVA Day 3 The National Independent Venue. Continue reading
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