Scores of music industry insiders including the artists Nile Rodgers, Nadine Shah and Ed O’Brien of Radiohead, as well as songwriters for stars such as Kylie Minogue, have hit out at an “archaic” streaming model that allows major labels…
Sarah Hart has always had an eye for the covert ways mathematics permeates other fields. As a child, she was struck by the ubiquity of the number 3 in her fairy tales. Hart’s mother, a math teacher, encouraged her pattern-seeking,…
Taylor Swift is telling me a story, and when Taylor Swift tells you a story, you listen, because you know it’s going to be good—not only because she’s had an extraordinary life, but because she’s an extraordinary storyteller. This one…
By 1900 industrial processes had begun to reshape all lives and all culture. Popular music was about to be transformed. Stephen Foster in the mid-1800s was the first writer of songs that were recognizably pop, tunes that would later be…
This article appears in the November 13/20, 2023 issue, with the headline “Louis Armstrong’s Last Word.”“Iget this question all the time,” Ricky Riccardi admitted. The director of research collections at the Louis Armstrong Center looked at me carefully. “Just last…
In the history of pop, the producer’s place is clearer. A producer serves as a shorthand for the dominant sound of a whole era: George Martin and Eddie Kramer for the “studio as a musical instrument” experiments of the late…