Music’s nostalgia-industrial complex

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Sean Rameswaram: I remember way back in 1997 when Puffy dropped I'll Be Missing You. My first reaction was, wow, he sampled the police. That same year, Will Smith dropped Men in Black to go along with his movie, and I didn't even know at the time that he basically lifted an entire song called Forget-Me-Nots by Patrice Rushin. But now, 25-ish years later, I hear this kind of thing happening all the dang time. Someone did the Rickroll song of all the songs. Last summer, there were two songs that were just like Elton John classics. One by Britney Spears. One by Dua Lipa. Pop music's got a nostalgia industrial complex, and we're getting into it on Today Explained.

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Sean Rameswaram: A couple months back, we talked to Jason Green from Pitchfork about how Ed Sheeran got sued for making a song. that some would say sounded way too much like another song. Ed Sheeran won the lawsuit, but Jason recently wrote about a similar but different phenomenon in popular music when songs sound exactly like other songs, by design. And this is because some very business-savvy people have spotted that the value of well-known intellectual property in pop music has been skyrocketing. And they have bought up with their significant holdings and power a huge portion of most of what normal Western, whatever, American listeners consider to be the most beloved pop music and pop songs of the past 50 to 100 years. Jason calls this music's industrial nostalgia complex.

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Sean Rameswaram: I asked him how this is different from what Puffy or Will Smith were doing in the 90s. What's different, and this is a crucial, not academic difference at all, is who is the person behind it. Puff Daddy was doing that work. Yes, he was sort of looking at his pop music factory as a factory, as a hit factory, you know, like many super producer entrepreneurs of yore. But he was ultimately still a producer. You know, while he blurred the line between being a CEO and a creative, he was on stage. He was a performer. He was in the music videos. He was not someone behind the scenes. And it was his creative decision to take these beloved songs and remake them.

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Sean Rameswaram: So for a thought experiment, imagine that it actually went that some other guy that no one who listens to music has ever heard of because he's vice president of whatever at some record company pulls Puff Daddy aside and says, hey, listen. We need you to sample I'm Coming Out because our company just acquired this and we need you to take it and use it. But don't mess with it too much because if you do, we won't get as big of a payout. And he says, I like this right here. Come on. This is very intentional business strategy seeping into the creative process.

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Sean Rameswaram: One of these music publishing companies that has sort of been at the forefront of this extremely aggressive and very novel and new technique of guarding over your corporate property, your intellectual property, is a company called Primary Wave. You know, we're starting the tracks. You know, we've taken a lot of the melodies from a lot of our classic songs and, you know, maybe had someone throw down a guitar riff, you know, of just the melody and then, you know, give it to a producer who could put trap drums down on it and actually build a track, maybe without lyrics. And then so when we're pitching an idea, it's not like, oh, what do you think about covering the song? Now, Primary Wave, and this is crucial to this story, they are not people who came from music publishing. Music publishing has historically been an extremely dry and sleepy area of the music business. No one was looking to shake it up. You were just there to sign a piece of paper. But these people at Primary Wave came from the late 90s world of major label CD market boom. They are ex-music managers. Three guys left Arista Records in the late 90s, roughly when Carlos Santana's Supernatural sold 10 million records, right?

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Sean Rameswaram: This is still a time when major labels were just printing money and recording their highest ever grosses. And these people were behind the helm. The guy I spoke to at Primary Wave the current president had a hand in Carlos Santana Supernatural right And that was interesting because that a project where he took a legacy artist and reintroduced him to massive financial gain right That record went diamond So these people, as they saw the music industry was cratering around them, at least as they had known and built it. These are the people who were, you know, this is the private jet years of the CD era. And then Napster hits, you know, it's the first shockwave. And this is roughly when these three very savvy people, Larry Mestel, the CEO and founder, Justin Shukat, the president, and later on a guy named Adam Loewenberg, who worked with Avril Lavigne and helped break her, they gather together and form a music publishing company called Primary Wave. And at this point, they're really out in the wilderness. They're the only people who've decided that this is where they're going to take their task.

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Sean Rameswaram: But Larry Mastel was a visionary in the sense that he saw that there was going to be more demand in the coming decades for catalog. The vision was to provide a lot more human focus or human resources in focusing on iconic and legendary artists. So when we started in 2006, as opposed to investing in accounting people and royalty people and copyright registration people, most of the partners that I brought on very early were people that could drive the top line. And they ended up at the forefront of a lot of what has now become super commonplace, and that is they've acquired the rights to massive artist catalogs that they then own either a piece of or 100% of, depending. Many of them are catalogs by artists who are deceased, and so when they are dealing with this artist's catalog, if they have the blessing of the estate, in some ways they have a more efficient way of maneuvering, because there is no living artist in the room with them to talk to them about what they think they should be doing with their catalog.

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Sean Rameswaram: To that end, their first big purchase that they made headlines with was that they very presciently got the catalog of Kurt Cobain. But what do they do with it? Because I haven't heard, like, a Kurt Cobain hook in a Dua Lipa song yet. No, they don't do that. But this is where this new mentality that the primary wave guys were bringing to the industry comes into play. They said, no, we're going to monetize this. We're going to work this catalog as if they were artist development A&Rs, right? And you said, what do they do with it? Well, it took them many, many years. But over the course of the next decade, what they did manage to do was sort of plant the seeds for and help stoke the fires of and arrange the meetings around the documentary Montage of Heck.

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Sean Rameswaram: I accumulated quite a healthy complex, not to mention a complexion. Then one day I discovered the most ultimate form of expression ever. Marijuana. Oh boy, pot. I could escape all day long and not have routine nervous breakdowns. Which, if you recall, was this very impressionistic piece of sort of biographical docudrama that was largely basically based on the fact that there was this treasure trove of home recordings. This is Kurt Cobain at home on his couch, strumming his acoustic guitar, humming to himself the melody for a song that might go on to become something from Nevermind, right? You can hear him muttering the melody to Polly, right? They're trying to basically invent a biopic as the rights holders to their publishing. No one's even dared to think this audaciously.

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Sean Rameswaram: So while this is happening, they test out some other pretty big moves. And one of them that they were very proud of, because I spoke to all three of those people, Larry Mestel, Adam Loewenberg, and Justin Shukat. I spoke to all three of them. And the one that Adam Loewenberg was most proud to tell me about was this campaign they devised in 2009 around Aerosmith's Dream On, which is the proto-power ballot. It's the first lighter waiver song, arguably, you know, in rock history up there with Stairway to Heaven. Iconic. Everyone knows it. Everyone knows it within 10 seconds. And they devise a lottery tie-in around this song. Because, as, you know, I think they surmised in their sort of pitch meeting, there's something dreamy about thinking you'll win the lottery. And they want to stoke that.

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Sean Rameswaram: So they approached lottery vendors. I can't imagine in the history of music publishing that any pop music catalog owner had ever approached a lottery vendor before for a meeting ever. But they basically approached a lottery vendor and say, hey, we have this idea for Boston and Massachusetts, which is Aerosmith's hometown and home state. We want to run an Aerosmith-themed lottery campaign. And so what we're going to do is we're going to brand it with their logo. And when you scratch off, the lyrics to this song that we own is going to be on the card. And then when you promote this campaign on radio stations to get people to buy tickets, guess what? You can play Dream On on it.

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Sean Rameswaram: Since we introduced Dream On, the new instant game from the Rhode Island Lottery, seems everyone's getting into it. After all, with a grand prize of $35,000 staring you in the face, wouldn't you jump at the chance? Play Dream On. Dream on. Dream on. Dream on. Dream until your dream comes through.

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Sean Rameswaram: And this was a genius move from a marketing standpoint because it meant they collected revenue streams on the two different ways that you can own rights to a song. They collected money on the right to own a song on paper, as in the lyrics and the notes on a page, because it's printed on the lottery. So the minute those words appear on the lottery ticket, a check goes to primary wave. And then they get paid again when the song itself, which is the master, appears in the campaign. So it's a massive success and it ends up spreading to 10 different states. And this is when I think the big money green light bulb went on over all of their heads.

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Sean Rameswaram: Is music's nostalgia industrial complex good or bad for music? Jason has opinions. He'd like to share them with you when we're back on today's Explained. Support for today show comes from Adio What is Adio Adio is an AI customer relationship management system built specifically for the next era of companies. They say it's extremely powerful, adapts to your unique data structures and scales with any business model. According to Adio, Adio takes less than a minute to set up, and within seconds you will have your email and calendars synced. You'll see all your relationships in a fully-fledged platform, they say, all enriched with that actionable data. And they say you can build AI-powered automations and use its research agent to tackle some of your most complex processes to seize so that you can focus on what matters, building your company. You can join industry leaders such as Flatfile, Replicate, Modal, and so much more. You can go to adio.com slash todayexplained to get 15% off your first year. That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash todayexplained.

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Sean Rameswaram: Today's point is back. Artists dead and alive are selling off their catalogs to companies like Primary Wave so that their music can be milked for profit from now until the sun explodes. We asked Jason Green from Pitchfork to tell us whether this is good or bad or what for, you know, like art and creativity and the like. On its face, there is nothing inherently evil with a company trying to make money for like the intellectual property that they hold. Right. I think that there is something suffocating in the current way that this is happening, because I think that when the proverbial suits, when the people whose job it is to look after everything but the creative side are in the creative process, I think it's rare that that's good for the music or the art.

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Jason Green: I think that there's always this complicated symbiosis between people like Justin Shukat and, you know, someone like Otis Redding. Wow. But I think broadly speaking, It's just not great for creativity as a sort of pursuit as a muse when the stuff that people use in pop music, which is the catalog, right? They reference the catalog either directly or indirectly, whether through sampling or inspiration. When you have people who are so closely guarding those songs as if they were Smaug the Dragon on a big pile of jewels. You will burn.

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Jason Green: It's hard to envision a world in which this is liberating for songwriters or for producers who are trying to make good music, right? And I think it also does something very flattening to one of the most anarchic and vital art forms of the past hundred years, which is sampling, right? And sampling and money have always had a completely antagonistic relationship. back to the 80s when it was a free-for-all and, you know, an album by Public Enemy could stuff hundreds of samples inside of one album. Well, welcome to the Teredo. The minute that that became verboten because people intervened and said, hey, this person's got to get paid for this because you're getting paid for it, sampling recedes dramatically.

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Jason Green: Sampling became really expensive because of the legal fees associated with it to the point where then in the late 90s and the early 2000s, creative rappers and producers and artists found a way around it. They stopped doing it, almost. Like, think about the Neptunes or Pharrell. Those were people who, you know, and that's an ironic example I recognize, but, like, for the majority of the 2000s, what he was known for was crafting his own melodies on a synthesizer that were alien and new and did not sample, you know, soul songs from the 80s or 70s or anything.

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Jason Green: But you ain't looking at no other dudes Cause you love me I'm sorry What happens when, you know, money becomes so present in this sphere is that people who are trying to be creative are often punished, right? A classic example that I can't help but use because it's so poignant is De La Soul. If you have a creative mind, you can basically use anything. For example, I could take a record such as a basic Disneyland Mickey Mouse record, for example. Now, people may not believe it, but if you look at these old records, you could find things like drum beats on them. De La Soul is an example of like, this is a group who treated sampling, you know, like Salvador Dali. Like they treated it like this absolutely anarchic platform upon which you could do almost anything.

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Jason Green: You could bend the rules of space and time. You could really – and they induced this wonder at the human mind and its ability to sort through all these things, right? It was glorious. And I think it's really telling and poignant that De La Soul's music was barred from being on streaming services because of rights issues for decades. Until just recently. And so that proprietary sort of mentality just never suits creators. It never suits creativity. It's bad, I would say, like objectively bad for the art form that we love.

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Jason Green: It's good for very few people. And I would say either dulling or monotonous for listeners because the nature of the way that these copyrights are exploited means that they don't really want you to mess around with it as a producer, right? They want it to sound recognizably like their song. Let me play devil's advocate for a second here. I do wonder if ultimately it's good to be reminded how great a song Rocketman was. Or how great a song Never Gonna Give You Up was. even if it comes at the cost of hearing it in some you know cheesed up mass produced single I mean I would argue that that song is very well loved That the reason it was pointed to The reason it was pointed to and chosen was not because, you know, it was a song that someone out there thought the world needed to be reminded of.

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Jason Green: It was chosen because they knew it was a song everyone already was new to the point of being sick of. It was ready made. It would defeat their purpose in many ways if they were farming out more obscure stuff. Cultural attention is not an endlessly renewable resource. There's a finite amount of cultural attention, right? We only give our bandwidth to so many songs by so many artists, you know, unless you're a maniac like me, who's consuming hundreds of records and keeping literal spreadsheets, right? But no one's like me. They're just out there listening to charts in the Hot 100. Like, it's a very recursive place right now. It's very empty. It's very full of recycled air.

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Jason Green: So I can't imagine that it's a good thing, right? If anything, it makes people tired. I've heard this before. Why am I hearing this again? When I listen to Nicki Minaj's Super Freak, at this point, because we've already done this twice, right? We've done it with MC Hammer. You can't touch this. You can't touch this. Big Sean, who sampled this song in 2010. And maybe you're also being reminded of Rick James, if you're old enough. But I don't think that this song out there is making... I mean, again, someone might in the comments be like, well, I'm this year's old and I didn't know about Super Freak, right? There's always a time. But I can't help but feel like there's more out there, right?

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Jason Green: And what this shows is a profound lack of imagination. One final devil's advocate-y thought. The Beatles were in a way repurposing Little Richard. The Rolling Stones were in a way repurposing all the blues that they'd ever heard, right? Beyonce wrote one of the most critically acclaimed albums of our young decade. And it's a lot of samples. And my favorite Billie Eilish song sounds just like a Weezer track from the 90s. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. Is music always sort of thrown back and is music always referencing and always, you know, acknowledging nostalgia? Yes, of course. But what's different now is that you have effectively patent trolls who are blocking access and hoarding resources. That's not good.

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Jason Green: To me, this was a story about like end stage capitalism, right? Because these are also people who decided to stop working with living artists and mostly manage the affairs of dead ones. They're like, it's too hard to make money off of living artists. So let's transition and let's work with the catalogs of ones that everyone already knows. And they all said some version of this. Our job is really easy. We had this idea. And again, it was really, you know, giving the creatives, leading them to water, not telling them they had to do this, but say, hey, here's the breadth of our catalog. When you already own the catalog to the most beloved music of the past 50 years, your job is really easy.

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Jason Green: I don't have to walk into a room and convince everyone that this new artist is great. Everyone already knows this stuff is great. And that's why they're there. So maybe worse than how poorly it affects the listener who only has so much time to spend on culture, it's really bad for new art. I think it can't be good for new art. I don't. Yeah, I think it can be good.

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Sean Rameswaram: Jason Green, Pitchfork. Our show today was inspired by an article he wrote titled, Everything is Interpolated, Inside Music's Nostalgia Industrial Complex. You can find it at pitchfork.com. Our show today was produced by Hadi Mawagdi, edited by Matthew Collette, fact-checked by Serena Solon, and mixed by both Patrick Boyd and Michael Raphael. I'm Sean Ramos. For them, the rest of the Today Explained team includes Halima Shah, Abishai Artsy, Amanda Llewellyn, Miles Bryan, Victoria Chamberlain, Siona Petros, Laura Bullard, and my co-host Noelle King. Our supervising producer is Amina Alsadi. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. John Ahrens is helping out at the moment. We use music by Breakmaster Cylinder. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC, and we are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thank you.

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