Listen to the latest edition of the Key Changes podcast
The music industry evolves at a dizzying pace. And I’m here to help you make sense of the “Key Changes” in these roundups of music new analysis.
In recent months, a string of bands have announced that they’ve pulled their music from Spotify in protest of the company’s CEO investing in military technology. One of the latest groups to make that move, Hotline TNT, is on Nashville-based Third Man Records.
I recently spoke with an emerging voice in Nashville’s independent R&B scene — singer, songwriter and producer Shelldhn —who told me he opted not to put his early 2000s-inspired R&B-pop album That’s Hot on Spotify in the first place.
Instead, he exclusively released it through a platform called Even where far more of the compensation goes directly to artists.
For context, there was a time roughly a decade ago when several country acts on Nashville labels — including Jason Aldean, Justin Moore, Brantley Gilbert and Taylor Swift — spoke out about Spotify’s low royalty rates and made it known that they were withholding their albums. (At the time, Swift was still signed to the powerful independent country label Big Machine, along with Gilbert and Moore.)
But streaming has become far more important to country music, and vice versa, in the years since. Today, there’s just one holdout: Garth Brooks.
Americana Music Festival
Meanwhile, the country music industry will have a greater presence at the Americana Music Festival next week than in the past. One reason is that mainstream labels are increasingly interested in signing Americana artists, and some are hosting showcases. (The resurgence in roots music’s commercial appeal has become an object of fascination of late.)
At Wednesday night’s Americana awards show, another type of boundary-blurring will be on display; many of the nominees — Waxahatchee, MJ Lenderman, Medium Build and the duo of Julien Baker and Torres included — came up in indie rock scenes.
I’ll be there, paying attention to how the landscape’s shifting.
