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5 Music Streaming Features You Need to Be Using

By Chris Dalla Riva

It would be an overstatement to say that music streaming gets a bad rap. Last month, Spotify alone announced that they had 777 million monthly active subscribers, 300 million of which are paying (i.e., not using the ad-supported tier). In short, streaming is the dominant way to listen to music. That would probably not be the case if people genuinely hated it.

But at the same time, Spotify specifically—and music streaming generally—have faced their share of criticisms. They use deceptive practices to not pay artists enough. They were sluggish to combat AI impersonation. They make it next to impossible for artists to directly reach their fans.

Though I pay the rent working for a music streaming service, I am glad that listeners and fans want to hold the powers that be to task. The last four thousand years of human civilization have taught us that power can be used and misused. It would be concerning if everybody accepted the status quo.

Yet I do think that music streaming is an incredible technology. Not only did it end a decade of declining industry revenues, but it put (almost) the entire history of recorded music at our fingertips. I know that latter point has been normalized, but as I recall chasing down CDs and MP3s two decades ago, the present state still boggles the mind.

In many ways, streaming services are also getting better. Over the last two years, I’ve seen more exciting features rolled out across the streaming universe than the previous ten. Today, I want to talk about those exciting features, some of which may have escaped you.

#1 You Don’t Need the Title or Artist to Find a Song

Let’s say you have a lyric stuck in your head. You know it’s from a Beatles song, but you can’t remember which one. “All I do is hang my head and moan,” you keep repeating to yourself. It’s driving you crazy.

Decades ago, you might have had to dig through lyric booklets or call up that crazy neighbor who knew a little bit too much about The Fab Four. Now, just punch the lyrics into the search bar of most streaming services. Lyrics are indexed just like song titles and artists. In moments, you’ve found the earworm: “Tell Me Why,” the sixth song off of A Hard Day’s Night.

But this search result is even richer than just finding that unknown Beatles track. It shows that there is also a lyric match for David Allan Coe’s “Why You Been Gone So Long.” He also uses that “All I do is hang my head and moan” lyric right at the beginning of his country tune. Maybe he—or rather songwriter Newbury—was quoting The Beatles.

Look a little bit further down the list and you also see that The Beach Boys have covered “Tell Me Why” in a rich four-part vocal harmony barely a year after The Beatles released the song. Your search has not only answered your question, but it’s opened your ears to even more music.

#2 Context is Coming Back

Let’s say you’re enjoying The Beach Boys cover of “Tell Me Why,” so you decide to listen to the rest of the album it’s on, Beach Boys’ Party! You love it. It’s a bunch of loose, acoustic covers of 1960s hits. You’re familiar with all by the penultimate track: “The Times They Are a-Changin'.”

For years, Spotify has (rightfully) been criticized for obscuring song credits. Figuring out who wrote a song was difficult if not impossible on the platform. But the last few years have seen them make significant improvements. They rolled out songwriter pages. They expanded credits. And, most interestingly, they started testing a feature called SongDNA.

What’s Behind the Paywall?

• The coolest uses of Spotify’s SongDNA feature

• How to improve audio quality on your streaming service

• Fun ways to use time-synced lyrics

• How to get notified whenever your favorite artists releases a new song

• A new and old song recommendation

This week’s theme is “butt rock,” meaning post-grunge from the late 1990s or early 2000s. “Butt rock,” of course, is a derisive moniker. The term allegedly emerged from radio stations whose slogan was some variant of “Nothing but rock.” Haters then added a “t” and ran with it. But Ken and I are not going in with a bad attitude. Are we listening to nothing but rock this week? Yes. But we’ll only double that last “t” when it’s actually necessary.

#7 Come Clean by Puddle of Mudd (2001)

There is a video of Puddle of Mudd covering Nirvana’s “About a Girl” that frequently goes viral because it is unlistenable. I try not to judge poor live performances too harshly. Even the greatest artists have a bad day. I sadly can’t give Puddle of Mudd the benefit of the doubt, though. Their studio album Come Clean doesn’t reflect much more positively on the group.

Come Clean wants to be Nirvana’s Nevermind. But whereas stripping the crunch out of the guitars on a Nirvana song reveals deft songwriting and singable melodies (e.g., “Come as You Are”), there is nothing to the compositions on Come Clean. They are pure dreck.

Except for “She Hates Me.” Amid this puddle of garbage, “She Hates Me” rises to the surface. It’s the only song on the album that approaches Nirvana’s trademarked soft-loud dynamic (e.g., “Smells Like Teen Spirit”) with anything close to the level of skill of the Seattle trio.

#6 Disclaimer by Seether (2002)

There is no band this week that seemed more confused than Seether. On Disclaimer, they would move between Pantera-style riffs (e.g., “Pride”) and Lifehouse-style ballads (e.g., “Sympathetic”) without a warning. Transitions like this aren’t necessarily a problem. But Seether doesn’t seem completely at ease in either style.

Furthermore, their lyrics are manly in a way that borders between grotesque and performative. On “Gasoline,” they snarl, “Wanna waste her monthly blood / Wanna get some on my love.” On the aforementioned “Pride,” they growl, “Take it, break it, rape it, forsake it.” On “F**k It,” they scream the explicit title repeatedly.

Even when they get more introspective on something like their platinum single “Fine Again” (i.e., “They say it’s over, I’m fine again, yeah / Try to stay sober, feels like I’m dying here”), I continue to find it hard to buy in.

#5 Extreme Behavior by Hinder (2005)

From Elvis Presley’s gyrating hips being censored on The Ed Sullivan Show to Mötley Crüe’s ode to all things women, rock music has always been a horny genre. That said, if you were to give every rock subgenre a horniness rating, grunge would be relatively low on the list. Post-grunge, butt rock, or however you’d like to refer to it, is a different story. This is a horny genre.

You get some of that horniess on Hinder’s Extreme Behavior. On “Get Stoned,” for example, the Oklahoma City quartet sings the following:

Cause the sex is so much better when you’re mad at me
You wear me out
But it’s all right now
Without a doubt
Oh, the breakup’s worth the makeup sex you’re giving me

Extreme Behavior is not packed with horniness like some other albums on this list, though. Nearly every track captures a man unable to get over a break-up. “Lips of an Angel,” the biggest hit on the record, is a great example of this: “Well, my girl’s in the next room / Sometimes I wish she was you.”

The prevalence of the down bad anthem across this album—and this genre generally—is why critics also refer to it as “divorced dad rock.” “Divorced Dad Rock,” Esquire wrote in 2025, “rejects the concept of joy so completely that about 40 percent of it should come with a self-harm content warning.” Extreme Behavior surely should come with a warning.

#4 Sunburn by Fuel (1998)

When Consequence of Sound ranked the best post-grunge songs in 2024, the top five was packed with the biggest artists of the genre, including Nickelback, Creed, and 3 Doors Down. But among those post-grunge crowd-pleasers was another group: Fuel.

Fuel’s Sunburn is not an obscure record. It sold a million copies in 1998. And the lead single, “Shimmer,” was a minor chart hit. But I don’t think it sits as well in the public’s memory as some other records from that list. That’s a shame. Sunburn was arguably the most interesting record musically this week.

#3 15 by Buckcherry (2005)

If you were to ask me what my favorite song on each of these records was, it was consistently whatever the most popular song was. That’s why I was nervous to listen to 15 by Buckcherry. By Spotify streams, “Crazy Bitch” was the most popular song on this record. I don’t like “Crazy Bitch.” It’s got all of the silly, horny, machismo that defines many songs in this genre (i.e., “And now you got to freak me out / Scream so loud, getting fuckin' laid”). Lucky for me, this record has a bit more going on than “Crazy Bitch.” It even has a bit more going on than “Sorry,” the big power ballad that got a lot of radio play in 2005.

15 is a fun record. It’s got bits of country flair on songs like “Brooklyn” and “Carousel.” It’s got flying-down-the-highway hard rock on songs like “Next 2 You” and “Broken Glass.” And, of course, it’s got some hall-of-fame butt rock moments on songs like “Everything” and “Out of Line.”

I never thought I would be saying this coming into this week, but put your feelings about “Crazy Bitch” and “Sorry” and Buckcherry aside and give the rest of 15 a chance.

#2 Human Clay by Creed (1999)

If Puddle of Mudd is descended from Nirvana, then Creed is of Pearl Jam’s lineage. The Nirvana-Pearl Jam dichotomy—which I alluded to when writing about Pearl Jam’s Ten a few months ago—illustrates the sonic diversity of groups that we apply the “grunge” moniker to. Beyond geography, Nirvana and Pearl Jam don’t have a ton in common. Puddle of Mudd and Creed don’t even have that. It honestly feels strange to lump them in the same genre.

Creed often does not rock as hard as the other groups on the list. Scott Stapp’s Eddie-Vedder-esque warble just lends itself nice to a ballad. They’re also the most likely to sing about Jesus, a foreign concept in the butt rock universe.

Despite your feelings about Scott Stapp’s enunciation or Jesus’s Annunciation, you’ve got to appreciate Creed for one thing: They go for it. “Higher,” maybe the most famous song in the butt rock universe, is a great example of this. This is a band bearing it all. It gives me the exact opposite feeling for how Seether makes you feel. That was an act. This is reality.

#1 All the Right Reasons by Nickelback (2005)

My favorite quote about Nickelback comes directly from the mouth of frontman Chad Kroeger as quoted in Fred Bronson’s indispensable The Billboard Book of Number One Hits. In fact, I like it so much that I quoted it while writing about the Canadian group’s “How You Remind Me” in my book:

There are two types of bands that get signed. There’s the kind that has a buzz and you’ve got fifteen different labels with deals on the table, or else you have to sell so many records on your own that it doesn’t matter if you’re four monkeys farting into a box . . . so we tried to be the four monkeys.

Of course, this is a hilarious quote, especially if you are among the large contingent of Nickelback haters. But I also hope Chad Kroeger gives himself more credit. Yes, there is cheesy imagery on these songs (e.g., “Photograph”). Yes, there are the ridiculous macho lyrics (e.g., “But I got both hands on the wheel while you got both hands on my gears”). But Nickelback knows how to craft a song.

“Far Away,” for example, could very well have been a cut on the first Taylor Swift record. “Rockstar” has more humor and self-awareness than nearly every other song we heard this week (i.e., “Get washed-up singers writing all my songs, and / Lip sync ‘em every night, so I don’t get ‘em wrong”). Will I be actively listening to Nickelback after this week? Probably not. But I do tip my cap to them.

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Today, we’re talking about The Strokes, though. As with any Steven Hyden book, this book is about more than the titular subject. Sure, you get all the gory details about the making of Is This It, but you also get insightful, sometimes hilarious meditations on how the way we think about and experience music has changed in the last 25 years. Whether you’re a fan of The Strokes or just interested in the cultural shifts of the 21st century, I recommend you pick up a copy.

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I want to begin with a trivia question. On Spotify’s Rock Classics playlists only four of the 200 songs were released after the year 2000. What do you think those four songs are?

“Mr. Brightside” by The Killers?

Yep.

“Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes

Nailed it.

What I’m thinking about now is how we define rock. Like does Spotify call “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” by Jet a rock classic?

They do not.

“I Believe in a Thing Called Love” by The Darkness?

Nope.

“Do I Want to Know” by Arctic Monkeys?

No, oddly that’s not there. But let me give you the last two. The first I found unexpected: “No One Knows” by Queens of the Stone Age. But the second is the reason I’m asking the question: “Last Nite” by The Strokes.

Wow. I was assuming you were setting me up for a trick question.

Nope. I start with this question because only four songs from the last 26 years being “classics” says a lot about the state of rock music in the public consciousness. But The Strokes, as you note, were first billed among other things as the saviors of rock. Just to paint a picture of the era, what were they billed as saving rock from? Obscurity? Something else?

I think at the time the idea was that The Strokes were saving genre from the more popular rock bands of the time, which would have been the nu-metal and post-grunge groups. I write about this a lot in the book, but I think the narrative of Nirvana is really important in understanding how The Strokes were talked about when Is This It came out.

I think that there were a lot of critics at the time that were basically transposing what they remembered from Nevermind and putting it on The Strokes. They were going back to this idea that there are cycles in music. You have these periods where things aren’t exciting and then a band comes along that is a revolutionary force.

Honestly, that idea goes all the way back to Elvis and The Beatles. Then in the 1970s, you get that narrative around punk. The same thing happens with Nirvana in the 1990s allegedly displacing hair metal. I say “allegedly” because there were hair metal groups after Nirvana and some are still touring today, like Motley Crue.

Anyway, there were a lot of people in the press that hated groups like Limp Bizkit and Creed. They looked at The Strokes as being the band that derived from the 1970s New York scene that they liked. That said, as I write in the book, I think The Strokes also have a lot of 1990s qualities to them.

How so?

They looked a lot like a band from New York in the 1970s, but I think Nirvana and Pearl Jam really informed how Julian Casablancas thought about music and how he approached being in a band.

But, to get back to your question, they were allegedly going to save rock from the crappy bands that were dominant at the time.

It’s interesting, as you point out in the book, that despite the hype, The Strokes never achieved the popularity of, say, Nickelback and the other groups they were supposedly saving rock from. I assume Nickelback is playing larger venues than The Strokes these days.

The Strokes were playing amphitheaters this summer!

That is true.

But The Strokes are weird because they honestly never toured in a real way in a long time. Like I wrote a book about The Strokes and have been a fan of them for decades, but I hadn’t seen them until this latest tour.

And it wasn’t for lack of trying. It was hard to see them, especially if you lived in the middle of the country and weren’t going to Lollapalooza. They hadn’t played Wisconsin in like 15 years.

That is a long time.

But what was interesting when I finally saw them was that the show was dominated by younger people. This was not a nostalgia show. I was the only gray-beard in my vicinity. These people were there for The New Abnormal. That was their Strokes album. It wasn’t Is This It.

I wish I had written about this more in the book, but there is a weird disconnect between The Strokes’ original followers and this new audience. You’d expect there to be all this nostalgia with older fans and lots of skepticism from the new generation, but it’s the reverse. People who grew up with The Strokes are dismissive of everything they’ve done for at least a decade.

I feel like you note in the book how this is the endless dilemma of The Strokes.

Yes. It’s kind of baked into them. From the beginning, there were two camps: These guys are the saviors or these guys are overhyped. I tried to capture that push-and-pull in the title of the book. I can’t really think of another band like that.

I’m glad you brought this up because I wanted to touch on this phenomenon a little. If you go to The Strokes profile on Spotify, “The Adults are Talking” from The New Abnormal just surpassed “Last Nite” as their most played song. I found that shocking. I feel like you are the master of the artist analogy. Are there any other artists that have a career trajectory like that?

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This week, Parris decided to use his time here to weigh in on a classic debate in the streaming era: Are albums dying? I’ll let him take it from here because I think he has a very unique take.

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Intro: Rocky Raccoon

Throughout my time writing this newsletter, I have continually returned to the idea of Chesterton’s Fence, an economic principle that cautions against dismantling a (proverbial) “fence” before understanding why it was built in the first place. This maxim is especially relevant for younger generations assessing the past without the benefit of hindsight.

Consider my newfound investment in a record player and vinyl collection: buying vinyl records and subsequently listening to these albums has led me, full circle, to the appeal of playlists. I could cite several examples where I back-solved the benefits of Spotify, but my most recent epiphany came while listening to The Beatles’ White Album—specifically a three-track run from “Blackbird” to “Rocky Raccoon.”

“Blackbird” is one of the most beautiful protest songs ever written—so much so that you are only now realizing it is, indeed, a protest song (inspired by footage of civil rights activists). Then the White Album effectively record-scratches, as this somber elegy is immediately followed by “Piggies” and “Rocky Raccoon.”

“Piggies” is a heavy-handed satire of patrician greed that will hit hard for anyone who has never read Animal Farm or encountered a metaphor, while “Rocky Raccoon” is a strange folk western pastiche that sounds like it should have been unearthed from a lost archive and not made readily accessible on Spotify.

As I trudged through this strange three-song stretch, I began contemplating the continued existence of albums. Sure, vinyl has seen a resurgence, but most consumers pay for streaming services or individual tracks, and thus will know little of “Piggies” and “Rocky Raccoon.” Instead, they’ll hear “Blackbird” by way of a playlist, consuming an all-you-can-eat buffet of their favorite content.

And yet the album format persists, embraced by pop stars like Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, and Bad Bunny. Which led me to a very simple question: why? Why are albums still popular, and do contemporary listening patterns support the continued existence of this medium?

So today, we’ll explore the album’s commercial decline, how listening patterns have shifted with digital distribution, and whether artists have altered their release strategies in the 21st century.

Are Albums Obsolete in the Streaming Era?

Music distribution has evolved rapidly over the past three decades—from CDs to digital downloads to streaming. The most consequential shift came in the early 2000s with the launch of iTunes, which unbundled the album and reframed music consumption around individual tracks. Consumers embraced this flexibility, and song-level spending—first through downloads, then through streaming subscriptions—started dominating industry revenues.

Nearly 90% of music spending is now concentrated at the song level, yet albums of ten or more tracks remain the default release format. This raises an admittedly cynical question: given the extreme imbalance in popularity across tracks on a single record, how inefficient is the album as a distribution strategy?

To quantify how modern listeners engage with albums, we’ll use Spotify listening data to calculate a track’s share of an album’s total streams. For example, if an album generates 100 streams and one song accounts for 25 of them, that track has captured a 25% stream share.

When we apply this calculation to widely-streamed releases, we find a heavily skewed distribution: nearly 75% of songs capture 5% or less of their album’s total streaming activity.

Attention clusters around a record’s two or three hit singles, while most other tracks receive a small fraction of overall listens. The natural next question is whether this pattern is a recent development.

To test this, I analyzed the average streaming share captured by an album’s most-played song. This approach rests on a simple assumption: listeners of works from the 1960s are more likely to engage with albums as complete works, while contemporary listening increasingly centers on standout singles.

Indeed, the album share captured by a record’s best-known track has nearly doubled since the 1960s, subsequently leveling off in the 2010s.

Shifts in listening behavior point to a structural change in how songs are popularized and ingrained in cultural memory. Listeners who encountered Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in the 1960s are probably familiar with deep cuts like “Fixing a Hole” or “A Day in the Life,” while I cannot tell you a Carly Rae Jepsen song that isn’t “Call Me Maybe.”

So how have artists adjusted their release strategies in response to listeners’ growing preference for mixing and matching singles? According to Discogs, the average number of tracks per release has steadily declined since the turn of the century.

This is mostly driven by an uptick in singles and EPs, formats containing two or fewer songs.

If you were to show this pattern to someone in the 1960s, they would probably be dumbfounded. Until the early 21st century, storage space was a scarce resource that dictated how much music a consumer could receive. With each upgrade in physical media—be it a shift from the 45 rpm record to the 33 rpm vinyl, or a move from cassettes to CDs—consumers typically received more music.

In an era of unlimited digital storage, the way artists package their songs is increasingly obsolete. And while there has been an uptick in EP and single releases, it’s significantly below expectation—or at least my expectation—especially when you consider the complete and total flattening of the discovery experience.

So why has the album persisted amidst all these changes in distribution and discovery? The rationale is a counterintuitive combination of philosophical and economic.

Final Thoughts: A Complete Artistic Statement

In 2024, long-simmering tensions between Drake and Kendrick Lamar erupted into open feud, with both artists trading increasingly personal diss tracks. Rather than waiting for a traditional album release, the rappers dropped new songs within days—and at times hours—of one another, using streaming platforms to respond in real time.

The episode underscored how easily modern artists can compress release timelines when they want to. Which raises an intriguing question: if rapid, single-track releases are commercially viable, why do roughly 70% of artists package their music in ten-to-fourteen-track chunks?

Ultimately, the album’s cultural staying power can be traced to three underlying phenomena:

1. Industry Inertia and Promotion: Record deals, rollout playbooks, advances, tour planning, promotion cycles, and coordinated label support remain organized around multi-track albums. Listening habits have changed, but the industry’s marketing machinery is still calibrated to the album format.

2. Risk Diversification: Song popularity is highly skewed, favoring outlier mega-hits. Releasing multiple tracks at once increases the odds that at least one song will break through.

3. A Complete Artistic Statement: Albums offer cohesion, intention, and a unified point of view in a way individual tracks rarely can. By bundling songs together, artists assert greater control over how their work is framed and interpreted.

I find this last point particularly compelling when examining artists with long-running careers.

Recently, a friend asked what my favorite Taylor Swift album is, and as I considered my answer, I thought about what each record represents in her career. I understand this reads like an advertisement for The Eras Tour, but perhaps that’s a testament to how well she monetizes awareness of her celebrity (after all, she’s a billionaire and we’re not).

I first encountered Taylor Swift when I was a teenager who enjoyed country music (because yes, she used to be a country artist; a fact that will one day sound apocryphal). Over the past two decades, it’s been fascinating to watch her move from country to pop and ultimately become the defining pop star of her generation—an evolution you can track album by album.

The same lens can be applied to most legendary music acts: you can trace when The Beatles embraced psychedelia, or watch David Bowie’s shifting personas unfold record by record.

The album may be inflexible in design, but it’s remarkably dynamic in function. It can serve as a marketing vehicle, a career milestone, a calculated attempt at a hit, or a cohesive artistic statement. It’s a medium where the whole may be greater than the sum of its parts, especially when those parts are “Piggies” and “Rocky Raccoon.”

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Want more from Chris Dalla Riva? Get a copy of his debut book, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves.

This week’s theme is “early 2000s europop,” meaning pop albums released by European artists before 2005. Frankly, this theme was a bit of a failure. Ken’s initial theme was “2002 pop,” meaning pop albums released in 2002, but his first selection accidentally rocked a bit too hard to qualify. So, we pivoted to Europop more broadly. As the week shaped up, his first selection still didn’t make a ton of sense, but we let it slide. More on that later.

#7 Planet Pop by A Touch of Class (2000 - Germany)

On the first track of Planet Pop, A Touch of Class talks over a gurgling synth to let you know what you are about to experience:

Hi everybody, we’re gonna take you
On a journey through planet pop
This journey starts in Australia
And it goes to Italy

From England to New Zealand
And all over the world
Our motto is people of the world come together
A big welcome from ATC
Enjoy the ride

“Wow,” I thought to myself after hearing this. “We’re about to go on an international musical journey. This is going to be epic.” It was not epic. Sure, hits like “Around the World (La La La La La)” are fun, but I would hardly describe this as a Phileas-Fogg-style circumnavigation of the world’s pop music. It’s bland Eurodance with way too many lackluster ballads scattered throughout (e.g., “Mistake No. 2”).

Also, there was no reason for this album to run for an hour. I understand that you theoretically need a lot of time to take us on a global pop journey. But if you aren’t actually going to do that, please get in and out in 35 minutes.

#6 The Platinum Album by Vengaboys (2000 - Denmark)

If you’ve heard Vengaboys late 1990s hits “We Like to Party” and “Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom!!”, you have no need to hear anything else the Dutch group produced. It’s all silly, occasionally horny, dance pop (e.g., “Skinnydippin’”).

Well, mostly. For some reason, they insisted on closing the album with an imitation-Disney ballad called “Forever as One” and a 7-minute instrumental whose name makes you think they’re taking themselves too seriously: “Opus 3 in D#.” By the end of that one-two punch, I was almost begging for the headache-inducing beats of “Kiss (When the Sun Don’t Shine)” and “Cheekah Bow Bow (That Computer Song).”

#5 DiscO-Zone by O-Zone (2004 - Moldova)

In 2003, the Moldovan trio O-Zone released “Dragostea din tei,” the lead single from their forthcoming album, DiscO-Zone. Despite a delectable hook, “Dragostea din tei” did not have the makings of an international hit. Moldova was just not known for producing music that connected outside of their borders.

But there was something special about “Dragostea din tei.” After topping the charts in nearby Romania, it began to spread throughout Europe. In order to capitalize on the phenomenon, the Romanian singer Haiducii released a cover a few months later. That cover started to compete with O-Zone’s original, soon topping the charts in a few European nations. O-Zone would get the last laugh, though.

Right around this time, an animated video of cats dancing to O-Zone’s original began to go viral in Japan. A young American named Gary Brolsma saw the video and decided to record himself lip-syncing along to the song. In a world before YouTube, Brolsma uploaded the video under the title “Numa Numa Dance”—a play on the song’s lyrics—to a site known as Newgrounds. The video went massively viral.

Internet virality is so common these days that it requires no explanation. But back in the early 2000s, nobody was sure what to make of it. A 2005 article in The New York Times described Gary Brolsma—“a pudgy guy from Saddle Brook, [New Jersey]”—and his video as a “cautionary tale.” The paper of record wrote:

But with the Internet, humiliation—like everything else—has now gone public. Upload a video of yourself playing flute with your nose or dancing in your underwear, and people from Toledo to Turkmenistan can watch.

Brolsma went along with the virality at first, but then it became too much. He stopped answering requests for interviews and television appearances. This all seems very quaint today, but “Numa Numa Dance” remains a landmark in the history of the internet. Not only that, but it was an early illustration of how a song could go viral without the artist’s involvement (see Chapter 12 of my book).

“Dragostea din tei” was so popular that it rendered everything else on DiscO-Zone and in the O-Zone catalog a mere footnote. As evidence, it would later be sampled/interpolated by David Guetta and Rihanna, along with soundtracking multiple films.

Yet all these years later, “Dragostea din tei” remains a tremendously fun dance record, one where the pulse of the beat and the sound of language is more important than what the record is actually meant to convey. Throw it on and be reminded of the power of pop music.

#4 Feels So Good by Atomic Kitten (2002 - United Kingdom)

Though the albums this week were performed by groups from across Europe, nearly all of them were shaped by one country: Sweden. During the 1990s, a producer named Denniz PoP helped launch a group called Ace of Base out of his Cheiron Studios in Stockholm. PoP died way too young, but his acolytes—the most famous of which being Max Martin—shaped pop music throughout the 1990s and 2000s by working with artists like Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, and Britney Spears (see Chapter 11 of my book).

As noted, the Cheiron sound shaped nearly all of the albums this week in some way. Atomic Kitten’s Feels So Good might bear the most influence, though. You can hear the Swedish sound in the deadened programmed beats on songs like “It’s Okay” and “Walking on Water.” You can hear it in the massive choruses on “Baby Don’t You Hurt Me” and “Softer the Touch.” And you can hear it in the precisely edited guitars on the Liverpool group’s cover of “The Tide is High.”

When the Cheiron sound is perfectly executed, it is pop music that rivals Motown (e.g., “...Baby One More Time”, “I Want It That Way”). But when the writing isn’t as strong, the production can fall flat. For me, Feels So Good falls on the flatter side for most of its runtime.

#3 Don’t Stop the Music by Robyn (2002 - Sweden)

Speaking of Max Martin, Denniz PoP, and their addictive brand of pop music, Robyn actually emerged from the Cheiron scene. Both Martin and PoP are credited across her first few albums, along with other Swedish tunesmiths. In fact, the duo was involved in her first two hits in America, “Do You Know (What It Takes)” and “Show Me Love.”

Robyn has managed to transcend the Cheiron sound during her career, though. She’s just more interesting than your average starlet. And I think you can really see the beginnings of her transformation on Don’t Stop the Music.

You still get cookie-cutter Swedish pop on Martin co-productions, like “O Baby.” But songs like “Blow My Mind” see her experimenting with vocal production. Others like “Breakdown Intermissions” have beats that could give Michael Jackson’s crazed “Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'” a run for its money. I don’t think Robyn had fully arrived on this record, but she was on her way.

#2 D-D-Don’t Stop the Beat by Junior Senior (2002 - Denmark)

This was the release that inspired the entire week. Ken had heard a song from the Danish band and selected “2002 pop” as the theme so that we could listen to the rest of the group’s best-known record. “I don’t want any rock. I don’t want any hip-hop,” Ken told me at the beginning of this week. He went on, “God help you if you give me jazz.” The funny thing is that he didn’t really follow his own rule with this pick.

It’s not that D-Don’t Stop the Beat has nothing to do with pop. Tracks like “Go Junior, Go Senior” and “Move Your Feet” clearly take cues from the pop songwriting world. But this album is closer to pop rock or power pop than the pure pop we ended up listening to throughout the rest of the week.

Despite not following his own rule, I forgive Ken because this album was more fun than almost anything else we listened to. The rhythms were tight (e.g., “Rhythm Bandits”), the hooks were huge (e.g., “Shake Your Coconuts”), and the vibes were playful (e.g., “Chicks and Dicks”).

#1 Fever by Kylie Minogue (2001 - Australia)

Another rule broken by Ken. Kylie Minogue is not from Europe. She’s from Australia. But as with Junior Senior, at least he was breaking rules for music that was good. If he’d broken a rule for A Touch of Class, we would have had a problem. Kylie Minogue gets a pass.

Fever is a dance record if there ever were one. From the opening thump of “More More More” to the funky fade out of “Burning Up,” Minogue wants you on your feet. And she largely succeeds. Fever is more rhythmically interesting than nearly any other dance record we heard this week. And, much to the Aussie’s credit, she doesn’t foist drab ballads on you, like Vengaboys or Atomic Kitten.

I did enjoy this record all the way through, but it is worth noting how much stronger “Can’t Get You out of My Head” is than the rest of the album. It’s the perfect combination of insatiable rhythms with singable melodies. And the “la-la-la” hook deserves direct induction into the nonsense lyric hall of fame, right next to The Crystals “Da Doo Ron Ron” and The Beatles “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”

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Roth stopped by to talk about the inception of this idea, why she’s been able to sustain it for decades, how you adapt heavy metal for babies, and the difficulties of adapting music by her famous brother, David Lee Roth. If you enjoy our conversation, check out the latest releases from Rockabye Baby! wherever you stream music.

Listen to Rockabye Baby

I know you’ve told this story before, but where did the idea for Rockabye Baby! come from?

The first week I started working at CMH Label Group, I had to go to a baby shower for a friend who loved music. I thought this was going to be an easy gift to find. It was 21 or 22 years ago, and there wasn’t much online shipping. So, I went to a baby store looking for music that would be fun to give as a gift. There was nothing! I went back to the owner of CMH Label Group and said that we needed to get into the baby business. I wanted to create something for the adult that had a sense of humor and a bit of irony.

Valerie Aiello came up with a “Lullaby Rendition of …” series rather than “Baby’s First Punk Rock” or “Baby’s First Sex Pistols,” which is what I initially pitched. The lullaby renditions idea clicked with the owner of the company a bit more. Then it became a full-time development project. 20 years later, we have a full-on baby brand with over 130 releases totaling 4.5 billion streams.

Could you tell me a little bit about the first release and if it was difficult to get that first project off the ground?

It took about a year to develop the brand, and we actually released three artists at once because we figured three releases made a series. It was initially a rock brand, so those three releases were Radiohead, Coldplay, and Metallica. That covered three genres of rock.

This wasn’t a huge leap for the label. They had done popular songs in different genres before. For example, they had started the Vitamin String Quartet, which was doing very well now. They did string quartet versions of rock, pop, and hip-hop songs. So, it was a little bit of a well-oiled machine. When we did the first releases, The New York Times did a big article on it, and that led to so much traffic that it crashed our website. It was so popular because there was nothing else like it.

Initially, we treated it like any other music series. We were putting the releases in bins at record stores for whatever artist the album was covering. But that wasn’t really working. I felt like people couldn’t find it. Six months in, we hired Francie Kaplan, a marketing person who had worked for Disney and Mattel. She said we had to treat this like a true brand with a cohesive logo and color schemes and characters.

She also suggested that we get into brick-and-mortar baby and children’s stores. That was a first for the label. Then it just kept growing through word of mouth. 20 years later, the industry has changed. Brick-and-mortar discovery isn’t a thing anymore. So, we’ve transitioned with the industry and moved to streaming.

How does the licensing work for these projects? Is it all compulsory licenses, or do you need buy-in from the artist?

We pursue mechanical licenses for each and every track. That requires the publisher or owner of the recordings to sign off. A compulsory license may pop up if there were lots of writers on a track. That’s very common now. You’ve got 12 writers on a song, and we can’t find one. Personally, I prefer to get the mechanical, so I know we have sign-off.

I think the longevity of this project is best illustrated by the artists you’ve covered. At the beginning, you did releases by Pink Floyd and The Cure. Now, you’re doing Paramore and Post Malone. Is there just as much interest from parents in this type of music these days as when you initially launched the series?

Yes! When I wanted to do this at the beginning, we were making this for the adult. Our characters and cover art and verbiage and marketing all have the adult in mind. Of course, we also want the music to be soft and digestible enough for an infant or toddler. But we also want the adult to be able to recognize it. I want them to have fun too. It creates an opportunity for real bonding between parent and child.

I’m glad you’ve mentioned the cover art. It’s all so playful and fun.

Yup. All of our artwork is a nod to the original artist. There’s also little hidden iconography. It’s fun to come up with ideas. I work very closely with Jennifer Cuellar, our lead illustrator who has been working on the brand for over 15 years

When going through some releases in the series, I was shocked to see how often you’ll arrange complicated songs, like “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen or “Schism” by Tool. Are there any artists or songs you won’t touch because they are too complex?

No. Unfortunately, we don’t consider how difficult the music might be before we do it. Translating all artists—but especially certain artists—into instrumental lullabies using our particular palette is kind of an art form. And it’s all done by humans. It’s a challenge, but it’s really one of the most enjoyable things in the creative process. Like it’s not easy to simulate a sustained minor chord while using a wooden block.

Some people think all you have to do is slow the music down, but that’s actually not the case. If you slow it down, you lose the recognizability. There are other little tricks and nuances that you have to finesse. We haven’t started with an artist that we weren’t able to complete. Some are definitely harder than others, though. And there are some that you think would be easier but end up being tricky.

Are there any particular challenges that come to mind?

When we translated a number of Madonna songs using our Rockabye Baby! palette, they had too much of a Calypso vibe that we had to really tweak to get right. Heavy metal is also not easy. Neither is hip-hop, especially if it’s not melodic. But they’re all great challenges, and the producers we work with have always gotten it done.

I also noticed that you don’t shy away from covering music with explicit lyrics, like Wu-Tang Clan or Kanye West or even Pink. Has there ever been any pushback from parents for including songs with expletives?

All our lullaby renditions are instrumentals, no lyrics. Since we started this before social media, there wasn’t much initial pushback. Occasionally, the explicit lyrics of the original would get pointed out in the press and you might find some disgruntled person. But the point was to have fun, or even funny renditions of these songs clearly made for adults to enjoy too.

I would be remiss not to acknowledge another complex, sometimes subversive group that you’ve covered: Van Halen. Of course, your brother was the lead singer of Van Halen. Was there any uniqueness to that project given the familial connection there?

Read more

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No One Sings About Kalamazoo Anymore

By Chris Dalla Riva

You never know where inspiration will strike. Last week, it came from Joe Weisenthal. Weisenthal is a financial journalist at Bloomberg who hosts the popular podcast Odd Lots. Sure, I follow Weisenthal on Twitter for financial news and analysis, but his appeal is a bit wider than that. He’s genuinely curious about the world.

That brings us to the inspiration. Weisenthal recently reposted an old tweet from another financial commenter, Michael Antonelli. Antonelli’s post pondered why musicians of the 1930s and 1940s were so often singing about unexpected places, like Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Anontelli is alluding to “(I’ve Got a Gal In) Kalamazoo,” most famously performed by Glenn Miller’s Orchestra in the 1940s. And his observation feels correct. I don’t know much about music of the 1930s and 1940s, but I can easily call up scores of songs about places that (a) aren’t that large in terms of population and (b) don’t often get written about today.

Frankly, you don’t have to look further than the Glenn Miller catalog to understand this. Along with “(I’ve Got a Gal In) Kalamazoo,“ he and his orchestra had huge hits with “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “Along The Santa Fe Trail,” “I Dreamt I Dwelt In Harlem,” and “Pennsylvania Six-Five Thousand,” among others.

So, were we actually singing about places more frequently back in the day? And were the places we were singing about more obscure than the population centers that seem to litter our songs today? I decided to look.

The Rise and Fall of the City Song

It goes without saying that people still write songs about places. Just a few weeks ago, for example, we discussed the controversy surrounding Stella Lefty’s recent hit “Boston.” But we aren’t concerned with the existence of songs about places. We are concerned with how prevalent those songs are and the cultural importance of the places immortalized in those songs.

To help investigate these concerns, I turned to Billboard magazine. Billboard has been publishing weekly music charts since 1958 and year-end charts since 1946. By supplementing that data with reconstructions of earlier charts, we can get a list of over 49,000 popular songs going back to 1940. By analyzing song titles, we can whittle that list down to 957 hit songs whose titles mention one of the following:

• City/Neighborhood: 407 songs (e.g., “Kokomo, Indiana” by Vaughn Monroe, “Havana” by Camila Cabello ft. Young Thug)

• Continent/Region: 45 songs (e.g. “South America, Take It Away” by Bing Crosby, “Africa” by Toto

• Country: 251 songs (e.g., “Johnny Doughboy Found A Rose In Ireland” by Guy Lombardo, “Mexico Honey” Kacey Musgraves)

• State/Region: 188 songs (e.g., “Tennessee Waltz” by Patti Page, “Choosin’ Texas” by Ella Langley)

• Street/Landmark: 42 songs (e.g., “Penny Lane” by The Beatles, “Coney Island” by Taylor Swift)

• Natural Feature: 24 songs (e.g., “Rocky Mountain High” by John Denver, “Niagara Falls” by The Weekend)

If we begin by focusing on cities and neighborhoods—the subject of the tweet—we see that (a) these songs were never that popular but (b) they used to be much more prevalent. Why?

I believe this comes down to a few reasons—some musical and some political. First, as I’ve noted previously, there used to be a much deeper connection between the hit song and the musical. From South Pacific and Oklahoma! to Meet Me in St. Louis and Bing Crosby’s Road to… pictures, many of these musicals had songs about where they were set.

Second, as I detail in my book, the music industry of the 1940s was much more focused on songs rather than recordings. If a song was a hit for someone, scores of other artists might rush out versions.

For example, Johnny Mercer and Harry Warren wrote “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” in 1944 to be used in a film The Harvey Girls. In 1945, before the film was released, Mercer released a popular version of the song. Bing Crosby and Tommy Dorsey soon followed.

Judy Garland, the star of the film, released her version not long after. By the time people sat down in the cinema, everybody already knew the song well. Thus, one song about a place could seem even more ubiquitous because so many people were releasing it.

But the song about a place was not just a function of the structure of the music industry of the 1940s. The decade also saw soldiers returning home from WWII having seen faraway places. This worldliness certainly impacted the pop charts. In the animation below, you can see how global songwriting was in the 1940s. Only in later decades did country mentions become more focused on the United States.

Furthermore, the US was still expanding at this time, Alaska and Hawaii yet to join the Union. There was, for example, a whole subgenre that cropped up around Hawaiian and Pacific exoticism. Songs like “Hawaiian War Chant (Ta-Hu-Wa-Hu-Wai),” “Blue Hawaii,” “The Hawaiian Wedding Song (Ke Kali Nei Au),” and even Bing Crosby’s Christmas classic “Mele Kalikimaka” would all climb the charts before 1960.

So, yes, we used to sing about places more often. But a second question still looms: Did the places we used to sing about used to be more obscure? Or were we always singing about population centers?

The Subtle Evolution of the City Song

First, let’s generate a map of cities that we sing about in the US. We’ll compare music released over the last 25 years to music released during the first 25 years of our data, namely 1940 to 1965.

A few things jump out from this map. First, there seems to be a wider distribution of places in the 1940 to 1965 period, especially in the mid-west. The more recent period is not just focused on major cities (e.g., New York), but they do seem to represent a larger portion of musical geography. Let’s see if this visual holds up to more quantitative scrutiny.

If we look at the median population of the cities mentioned in titles as a percentage of the total US population of the time, we see something a bit more subtle. The 1940s did have a special interest in small cities, but it’s not that much smaller than other decades.

The outlier, of course, is the 1970s. The influx of hits about New York City and Los Angeles and New Orleans drove up the median population dramatically. While we aren’t often getting songs about places like Sioux City these days, there is an influx of hits about places like Laredo and Santa Fe and Calabasas that keep the median at historically expected levels.

I think it’s also important to note that when we sing about places, we don’t have to sing about cities. You can sing about mountain ranges and streets and continents too. We should check if maybe our singing about cities has just been replaced by singing about countries.

It has not. Places are sung about less frequently in every decade since the 1940s. But if we are singing about places, it is most often a city. In 7 of the last 9 decades, cities are the most common type of place to appear in a hit song title. They are only outpaced by countries in the 1980s and 2000s.

In summary, the 1940s was unique in how we immortalized place in song. Cities were more likely to appear in titles than in any other decade and those cities were also more likely to represent a smaller portion of the US population.

Not that much smaller, though. As noted, not every song is about New York and Los Angeles. Especially with the success of country music in the 2020s, we haven’t forgotten about all the small to medium-sized towns that make up America.

They Call It the Jersey Bounce

Often when I put together interesting datasets like these, I end up uncovering lots of fun facts that don’t fit into the actual narrative of my essay. As with my piece on classic rock, I decided to leave you with some of these stray observations rather than hoarding them for myself.

• The hit songs to mention the smallest places are “Okolona River Bottom Band” by Bobbie Gentry (pop. 3002), “La Grange” by ZZ Top (pop. 3092), “Taos New Mexico” by R. Dean Taylor (pop. 3369), “The Anaheim, Azusa & Cucamonga Sewing Circle, Book Review And Timing Association” by Jan & Dean (Rancho Cucamonga pop. 4500), and “Wildwood Days” by Bobby Rydell (pop. 4690).

• “Wildwood Days” immortalized the famed New Jersey beach town. In my book, I had a bit about trying to find songs that mention New Jersey, my home state. The piece taught me that there have actually been 6 hits to mention New Jersey or a place in New Jersey: “Jersey Bounce” by Benny Goodman, “Jersey Bounce” by Jimmy Dorsey, “Palisades Park” by Freddy Cannon, “Cherry Hill Park” by Billy Joe Royal, and “Jersey” by Future.

• New Jersey is far outpaced by other states, though. California has 38 mentions. Tennessee and Georgia follow up behind with 23 and 21 respective mentions.

• I mean this with no offense to residents of The Gem State, but I am shocked to report that Idaho has appeared in four titles: “Idaho” by Alvino Rey and His Orchestra, “Idaho” by Benny Goodman, “Idaho” by Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons, and “Private Idaho” by The B-52s.

• Given that these are American charts, the United States is indeed the most mentioned country among our hit song titles. But number two was not a place I expected: China. Part of this is driven by a few different versions of “On A Slow Boat To China” finding success in the 1940s, but the country is still represented more than I anticipated.

• That said, I think the two most unexpected countries to find their way into titles are Mozambique (i.e., “Mozambique” by Bob Dylan) and Lithuania (i.e., “Lithuania” by Big Sean ft. Travis Scott)

A New One
"Los Andes" by Hermanos Gutiérrez
2026 - Genre

Some people require pages and pages to properly evoke a place. On “Los Andes,” Alejandro and Estevan Gutiérrez don’t even need a word. The two instrumentalists’ guitar work evokes the old west with hints of Latin flair. You can almost feel yourself being chased through the famous South American mountain range as this track lumbers on.

An Old One
"My Tennessee Mountain Home" by Dolly Parton
1973 - Country

Dolly Parton died two days ago. There are scores of songs that I could recommend by her. She was one of the great songwriters of the 20th century. But to remain on theme, here is a song she wrote about a place: “My Tennessee Mountain Home.” Like nearly all of her greatest work, Parton manages to evoke vivid imagery with the simplest of language on this track. Rest in peace, Dolly.

Shout out to the paid subscribers who allow this newsletter to exist. Along with getting access to our entire archive, subscribers unlock biweekly interviews with people driving the music industry, monthly round-ups of the most important stories in music, and priority when submitting questions for our mailbag. Consider becoming a paid subscriber today!

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This week’s theme is “q but no queens,” meaning albums by artists whose names start with the letter “q” but do not contain the word “queen.” Why no queens? From Queen Pen and Queen Latifah to Queens of the Stone Age and Queensrÿche, this category would have been too easy if queens were allowed. Since they weren’t, it turned into sonic chaos.

#7 Metal Health by Quiet Riot (1983)

At the end of each week, I send Ken the list of every album we’ve listened to. He subsequently sends me his ranking. I then adjust those rankings as I see fit, and that’s what ends up in the newsletter. My adjustments usually aren’t that drastic, though. Our respective tastes are similar enough. Not this week. We had little agreement about anything except Quiet Riot.

If you were to catch me on the right day, I might claim that a “Cum On Feel the Noize” is the greatest hard rock song yet to exist. It’s got a hook most pop craftsmen would envy but is still backed by grinding guitars. The problem is that it’s pretty close to the only highlight on the group’s album, Metal Health.

Quiet Riot is an early example of what would become known as “hair metal.” Don’t let people tell you otherwise: Hair metal is largely pop music dressed up with distorted guitars played by men in outrageous outfits. Metal Health succeeds when it’s aware of that. When it’s not, you get half-rate ballads (e.g., “Thunderbird”) and solos that aim but fall well short of Eddie Van Halen (e.g., “Battle Axe”).

#6 96 Tears by ? and the Mysterians (1966)

Debates about the first song in a genre are usually fruitless. Sure, you could argue that “Rocket 88” was the first true rock ‘n’ roll song. But genres don’t arrive on a particular day. They slowly emerge over time, mutating from earlier forms. That doesn’t stop us from arguing, though.

If you’ve ever been deep into a conversation about the first punk song, “96 Tears” by ? and the Mysterians has probably come up. The late Dave Marsh claimed that he was the first to use “punk” in a Creem magazine article to describe ? and the Mysterians. The term “punk” actually goes back centuries, but in the early 1970s it was more regularly being applied to a raw, often rudimentary kind of rock music.

“96 Tears” is an incredible song. It is raw and rudimentary, but the specificity of the snarled lyrics (i.e., why are there 96 tears?) and the organ flitting back-and-forth between staccato and arpeggiated chords makes for a memorable song. Even the shouts of Rudy Martinez—then known as the inquisitive punctuation mark—heard during the outro are particularly inspired.

The rest of the record doesn’t have the special feeling of the title track, though. It’s mostly mid-rate garage rock (e.g., “Don’t Tease Me”), forgettable instrumentals (e.g., “Set Aside”), and a simple cover of “Stormy Monday.” None of this is offensively bad. In fact, I enjoyed the record while I was listening to it. But I’d probably never listen to any songs other than the title track again.

#5 A Letter to My Younger Self by Quinn XCII (2017)

Right around the time I was headed off to college, a subgenre of hip-hop began to emerge that was fit for the moment in my life: frat rap. This style, arguably launched by Asher Roth’s “I Love College,” was dominated by White boys, often from the northeastern United States, rapping about drugs and parties and girls. It’s a style that only works if you come to it at the right point in your life.

Though Quinn XCII is not a frat rapper, his music shares some attributes with the genre. The beats are chilled out (e.g., “Two 10s”). The subject matter sometimes centers on love and substances (e.g., “Am I High Rn”). And though he mostly sings, some of his flows are reminiscent of a rapper (e.g., “A Letter My Younger Self”).

On songs like “Stacy,” Quinn XCII manages to put all of this together to make compelling music. But he doesn’t have the steam to carry it through for a full 40 minutes. In short, this record would have made a better EP than an LP.

#4 The Dude by Quincy Jones (1981)

I think I’ve finally come to accept that I just don’t like 1980s R&B ballads. 1970s R&B ballads are fine. So, are 1960s R&B ballads. But something bad happened to the R&B ballad after MTV switched on.

Quincy Jones’s The Dude is half ballads and half dance numbers. The dance numbers, especially “Ai No Corrida,” are excellent. Some of those propulsive beats, like “Turn on the Action,” even seem to presage the blockbuster Jones was to work on the next year: Michael Jackson’s Thriller. But those dance numbers are bogged down by the ballads. I need an album with more “Razzamatazz” and less “One Hundred Ways.”

#3 No Kill No Beep Beep by Q and Not U (2000)

What makes No Kill No Beep Beep stand apart in the post-hardcore universe is how rhythmically diverse it is. Some of that diversity takes you to an almost math rocky- world (e.g., “Fever Sleeves”). But other times it heads to more traditional dance beats (e.g., “Line in the Sand”). It’s in that twitchy, dancy tension that No Kill No Beep Beep thrives.

#2 Get Up On and Dance by Quad City DJ’s

While searching for artists that fit this week’s theme, the Quad City DJ’s ended up on my list for two reasons. First, I could not discern why their name had an apostrophe in it. Second, they made the delectable theme song for the movie Space Jam.

If you like the theme song to Space Jam, you will enjoy the Florida trio’s sole studio album: Get Up On and Dance. And that name says almost everything you need to know about the album. It’s packed with non-stop southern beats that will get you on your feet. Just throw on “C'mon N' Ride It (The Train)” and let the rhythms wash over you for the next 45 minutes.

#1 Isle of Qveen and THE ALCHEMIST by Qveen Herby (2026 and 2024)

I studied mathematics in college. People often assume that mathematics is explicitly concerned with numbers. Sure, numbers are often involved, but mathematics is more generally concerned with the study of abstract objects. You start from a set of basic definitions and see what you can deduce logically. Great mathematicians can often push those definitions to their limits in order to prove shocking, unintuitive results.

Ken—I am almost certain—has never enjoyed a math class. Yet our year of album listening has demonstrated that he has the same boundary-pushing impulse of great mathematicians. Qveen Herby is a great example of this. I said no queens were allowed this week. Ken made sure to find a qveen that followed my rules.

Qveen Herby releases are short. Most run under 20 minutes. That’s why we listened to two of them. And I think her sound is best captured by a bit of dialogue heard at the beginning of her song “The Fool”: “People always say like, ‘That’s not realistic’ / Not for you, you unwhimsical bitch.”

Both Isle of Qveen and THE ALCHEMIST are packed with whimsy. On the former, she tells us she’s “Rude on the beat when [she’s] doing [her] dance.” On the latter, she relates how she might “Fuck around, be the new Bob Dylan.” And the beats are somewhere between cartoonish and demonic, the perfect sound for a strip club overtaken by demented Looney Tunes. Just remember to bring your whimsy inside when you enter.

Shout out to the paid subscribers who allow this newsletter to exist. Along with getting access to our entire archive, subscribers unlock biweekly interviews with people driving the music industry, monthly round-ups of the most important stories in music, and priority when submitting questions for our mailbag. Consider becoming a paid subscriber today!

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Recent Paid Subscriber Interviews: Pitchfork’s Editor-in-Chief • Vinyl Specialist • Spotify’s Former Data Guru • Hall of Fame Songwriter• John Legend Collaborator • Broadway Arranger • Indie Label Founder• Fender Exec

Recent Album a Day Themes: 1990s Hip-Hop • Trading Favorites • Concept Records • Peaked at 200 • Alliterative Artists • Hip-Hop Groups • Supergroups • Punk Ladies • Short and Sweet • Long Closers • This Year • Grammy Losers and Winners • Artists You Hate

Want more from Chris Dalla Riva? Get a copy of his book Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves wherever books are sold.

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But, like I said, that was the topic we intended to talk about. That’s not what happened. Somehow we started talking about the state of the music media. That off-the-cuff conversation was so interesting that I wanted to share it. The actual Strokes conversation will be out in a week or two. In any case, you should pre-order Hyden’s new book and check out his excellent newsletter, Evil Speakers.

Pre-Order Is This It

How’s the prep for the book launch going so far?

It’s going fine. I’m just starting to do interviews right now. There’s not as many places to talk to anymore. It’s interesting. I put out a book a few years ago, and I feel like things have changed considerably just in that time.

Yeah, definitely.

Which I knew, but being on this side of it is interesting. There are fewer places to promote your stuff.

Also, before we start, I just wanted to say congrats on how well your newsletter has been doing.

Thank you. It’s been amazing. Totally exceeded my expectations. I’ve always been a staff writer at so many places, and this has paid me way better than any staff writer job I ever had. Hopefully, that continues.

I’ve been in this business long enough to know that there is no perfect media job. Everything is always changing, so there’s a part of me that is trying not to feel too secure. I feel like with any of these tech platforms, someone messes with it and it starts to be less effective. Then you have to go somewhere else. But I don’t know. As long as you know that and keep moving, then you can manage it.

Evil Speakers

Where the bands are.

By Steven Hyden

You started your career in newspapers, right?

Yeah. Daily newspapers and alt weeklies. So, I’ve seen a lot of different waves in my time. Right now really reminds me of 20 years ago when print looked like it was dead and the transition to websites was happening. That was the period of time where media sites decided that they were going to make money by making their content free. They’d just maximize page views in hopes to convince advertisers to buy the space around the content.

I really wonder if that is going to be the aberration in media history. It feels like right now that model is slowly being eradicated. We’re reverting back to the way things used to be, which was that if you want a newspaper or a magazine, you subscribe to it and it’s delivered directly to your mailbox or doorstep.

Totally.

To me, Substack is actually a very traditional media delivery device. It’s this other thing that I came up in that feels weird now.

It’s also interesting that when you look at sites that are still trying to rely on ad dollars, like Business Insider, their ads are in so many places that it almost makes reading impossible.

That’s the kind of desperation that you feel kicking in at a lot of these places where they’re just grasping at anything. The other thing too with a lot of these companies is that there’s so much overhead that you have to support. We’re in an environment now where the less overhead the better. I think about this with myself. If I had one or two other people working on my newsletter, it would go from being a really good living to being a side hustle.

I still think that there’s space for magazines with multi-person staffs, but it can get expensive fast when you’re paying for rent and HR. It’s also hard to justify those expenses when the public is so tolerant of low production value. You can just put someone in front of a mic and people will watch. You don’t need the whole late night talk show. I find it both interesting and scary to watch unfold.

Are you still writing for UPROXX too?

I am.

Does Warner Music Group still own them?

Not anymore. They sold it in 2023 or 2024. It was bought back by the original owners and some investors, including will.i.am. They are trying to do some new things, but I do respect them. They’ve always done right by me.

I feel like many of these media companies of the last few decades have ended up being owned by unexpected parties. I’m sure you’ve kept up with the layoffs at BrooklynVegan. I believed that was part of Veeps, a conglomerate founded by Joel and Benji Madden of Good Charlotte, which was majority-owned by LiveNation.

There’s been a lot of rancor about the guys in Good Charlotte. And they deserve it! I would never defend them. But the problems are also so much larger than them. The entire tech-based ecosystem is extremely hostile toward ad-supported, text-based websites. Even if you had the best owner in the world, I don’t know how you could survive.

You could have a billionaire investor, like Laurene Powell Jobs and The Atlantic.

Yes. There are sites that do run through charity or donations. But even in that case, that’s only half the battle. Most of these sites are just so hard to find now. They’re buried by Google. They’re buried by social media. So, even if you have money, you don’t know if the writing will be seen. The discovery model has just been decimated.

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The Most Influential Critic

By Chris Dalla Riva

A couple of months ago, music critic Anthony Fantano got into a fight with the pop star Halsey. This fight was not new, though. It centered around Fantano’s pan of Halsey’s now two-year-old record, The Great Imposter.

Halsey has always had a bit of a blustery relationship with critics. In 2020, the “Bad at Love” singer asked her millions of followers on Twitter if “the basement they run p*tchfork out of [can] just collapse already.” “p*tchfork,” of course, refers to the music publication Pitchfork. What Halsey didn’t realize was that Pitchfork, owned by Condé Nast, operates out of the World Trade Center. She later deleted the tweet.

You can turn elsewhere if you want to understand the contours of this internet beef. What concerns me is a comment that the self-proclaimed “Internet’s Busiest Music Nerd” (i.e., Fantano) made to Variety in the wake of the back-and-forth:

I don’t have to prove my track record to Halsey. I have been the most relevant and impactful music critic of my — and any — generation for over 10 years now. You can’t really debate that. There’s no music critic bigger than me who’s had more impact than me for as long as I have, consistently. And if I die tomorrow, nobody’s going to outdo that run.

Anthony Fantano has had an impact on music. In the same way that you can point to the Rolling Stone of yore for creating the hero worship around many classic rockers and Pitchfork for pushing indie into the mainstream, you can give Fantano credit for helping platform certain artist, like Death Grips.

Still, referring to yourself as the most “relevant and impactful music critic” not just right now but in history is quite the claim. I could dive into the particularities of this claim, but did so with such deftness a few months ago that I figured I’d just quote him:

Now, I happen to despise the word “relevant” in this context, mostly because I don’t know what it means. Does it suggest a certain level of influence in the music industry that goes beyond quantifiable numbers? Does it mean Fantano tangibly impacts the streams of a song or album he reviews? Or does it simply signify that a lot of people watch his videos? If it’s the last one, I’m sure Fantano is right, at least in the modern world … But back to “relevant” for a second: Does Anthony Fantano really matter outside of his (relatively large for a music critic) audience? In the way that a famous critic might have mattered in the days of a more centralized, top-down media? … And, in terms of those videos, what exactly does a “view” connote, anyway? I have “viewed” many YouTube videos in my life, and I don’t know that I’d call the vast majority of them “relevant” or even “memorable.” A “view” seems like a rather cheap commodity, when you think about it.

I happen to agree with many of Mr. Hyden’s points here. But this is a newsletter about music and numbers. So, I decided to see if critical impact was actually measurable.

The Most Interesting Place in Music Criticism

Anytime I head to a Wikipedia page for a particular album, I am almost certain that I will find one name: . I mean his words are literally all over Wikipedia:

• Thriller by Michael Jackson: “Erlewine felt it was an improvement on Jackson’s previous album, although he was critical of the title track, describing it as ‘ridiculous’ and ‘sucked out the momentum’ of the record.”

• The Eminem Show by Eminem: “In his review for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine said the album ‘proves Eminem is the gold standard in pop music in 2002, delivering stylish, catchy, dense, funny, political music that rarely panders.’”

• Barney’s Favorites, Volume 1 by Barney: “Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic said that both volumes in Barney’s Favorites, much like the television series, are ‘cute and sweet.’ He stated that the album ‘provides hours of listening enjoyment for small children, although parents might find it a little tiring.’”

If you’re familiar with Erlewine, all of these mentions shouldn’t come as a shock. The critic had a long-time association with AllMusic, the online music database that seeks to catalog, well, all music.

Furthermore, the man is a workhorse. Along with bylines all over the place, Erlewine is very active in his newsletter So It Goes. It honestly feels like if you sing a song in the shower, Erlewine will have a review of it up before you dry off.

Jokes aside, I started to wonder (a) if we could use Wikipedia to judge the impact of a music critic and (b) if there was anybody cited across Wikipedia’s music universe more than Stephen Thomas Erlewine.

To sate my wonder, I first sourced a list of critics from Wikipedia’s respective lists of chief music critics and American music critics, along with those mentioned in a recent newsletter from Embedded titled “The best music critics, according to music critics.”

Next, I built a tool that looked for mentions of those critics across every album page on Wikipedia. My idea was that if the things you say about music are cited regularly, then you are probably influential. So, who is the most influential music critic?

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This week’s theme is “1990s hip-hop,” meaning rap albums released in the 1990s. Between our weeks listening to diss albums and rap groups, we’ve actually listened to a good deal of hip-hop this year. That said, this week showed the strongest representation from the genre—MC Hammer aside.

#7 Please Hammer Don’t Hurt 'Em by MC Hammer (1990)

When Ken and I listened to The Message by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five a few weeks ago, we were a bit shocked. For an album by a rap group, there were a surprising number of tracks that did not involve much rapping. I came to learn that early in hip-hop’s history, rapping was seen as a bit of a novelty. Thus, many early albums in the genre contain various R&B and rock songs (e.g., “Takin Care of Business” by Kurtis Blow).

MC Hammer falls firmly within this bygone tradition. Of course, he raps on tracks like “Lets Go Deeper” and “Crime Story,” but the album is littered with covers (e.g., “Have You Seen Her”) and quasi-reimaginations (e.g., “She’s Soft And Wet”). This is not a problem in the abstract. Many albums are littered with covers and quasi-reimaginations. The problem is that MC Hammer’s covers and quasi-reimaginations and horrendous.

Nearly every track on this album is derivative in the worst way possible. “U Can’t Touch This,” the album’s only classic, is a prime example of this. It’s just some lazy rhymes over “Superfreak” by Rick James (e.g., “Fresh new kicks, and pants / You gotta like that, now you know you wanna dance”). Even when Hammer tries to do something original, like on “Black is Black,” he doesn’t have the skills on the microphone to carry the song.

Yet Please Hammer Don’t Hurt 'Em sold ten million copies in less than a year. Ten million copies! Only 53 albums sold that many copies in the era of physical media. Why? How? I actually got the answer when my wife entered the room while I was listening to this travesty. Usually when I am playing music, she enters without a comment. But with Hammer bumping, she danced her way in to the room. Get the ladies dancing, and you’ll sell a lot of records.

#6 The Coming by Busta Rhymes (1996)

As a child of the 2000s, I’d always thought of Busta Rhymes as the mile-a-minute rapper on tracks like “Break Ya Neck.” Busta was not moving with that speed on his debut album, The Coming. His voice was still compelling and playful. On songs like “Woo Hah!! Got You All in Check” you could almost compare him to a circus ringleader.

But since his flow was so much different than my expectations, I ended up not enjoying the record as much as I would have liked. Of course, that’s not really Busta’s fault. But I must speak my truth.

#5 Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... by Raekwon (1995)

I’ve admittedly never gotten very into Wu-Tang Clan. Frankly, I find some of their work more impenetrable than I should for a popular act. But Wu-Tang is unique: a ten piece hip-hop team where each member somehow remains distinct. Pair that setup with beats equally likely to be sourced from old soul songs and kung fu movies, and you get one of the most unique hip-hop groups in history.

Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... is firmly within the Wu-Tang lineage. Being billed as Raekwon record would be enough to join that blood line, but with RZA producing every track, Ghostface Killah appearing on nearly every track, and the rest of the Staten Island clan popping up throughout the project, it’s a Wu-Tang Clan project in all but name only.

Of course, there are differences. Raekwon leaned heavily into his mafioso personality on this album, popping bottle after bottle of Cristal while—in the words of Jonah Bromwich from Pitchfork—writing “paeans to those hardworking souls ducking RICO charges.” Because of that, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... is equal parts glitz and grit. Just a few bars from “Incarcerated Scarfaces” illustrates this dichotomy:

But all I need is my house, my gat, my Ac'
Bank account fat, it’s going down like that
And pardon the French, but let me speak Italian
Black stallions wildling on Shaolin
That means the island of Staten
And niggas carry gats and mad police from Manhattan

#4 Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik by Outkast (1994)

Though many would make the case that both André 3000 and Big Boi are two of the finest emcees in hip-hop’s history, their respective skills on the microphone are not what keep me coming back to Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik and the rest of their catalog. It’s the musicality.

I will mention something similar when discussing Supa Dupa Fly, but in a genre so heavily built around words, it’s easy to coast by on basic beats. Just set the drum machine to a preset, chop up an old funk song on top, and tell a story. Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik does not rest on that. You’ve got singable choruses on tracks like “Player’s Ball.” You’ve got Eddie-Hazel-esque guitar solos on tracks like “Funky Ride.” And, of course, you’ve got bars on bars on tracks like “Git Up, Git Out.”

Much of this is the work of the production trio Organized Noize. But André 3000 and Big Boi’s contributions should not be discounted, especially when we know where their career was headed.

#3 The Infamous by Mobb Deep (1995)

It would be easy to highlight the thematic similarities between The Infamous and Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Both capture grim tales of street life. But, as noted, Raekwon’s characterization is just as much glitz as it is grit. Mobb Deep has no time for glitz.

If Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... and The Infamous were both films rather than albums, the former, while violent, could be some escapist fantasy. The Infamous doesn’t play like that. It’s a documentary narrated by Prodigy and Havoc, the rhymes telling the story but the grim beats setting the stage. I challenge you to listen to tracks like “Survival of the Fittest” and “Shook Ones, Pt. II” and not feel like you’re being followed.

#2 Supa Dupa Fly by Missy Elliot (1997)

Compare the lyrical sample I just shared from Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... to this sample from the title track of Supa Dupa Fly:

I feel the wind
Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten
Begin, I sit on hills like Lauryn
Until the rain starts coming down, pouring

This example is representative of the fact that Missy Elliot is not as skilled a rapper as André 3000 or Raekwon or Prodigy. Her rhymes aren’t as dense. Her wordplay isn’t as deft. But what Missy lacks in technical skill, she more than makes up for in other ways.

Missy Elliot’s bars are filled with swagger. In the male-dominated world of hip-hop in the 1990s, a woman rapping, “I was lookin for affection / So I decided to go, swing that dick in my direction / I’ll be out of control / Let’s take it to perfection / Just you and me” was shocking. Missy Elliot is compelling.

And then there are the beats. Missy paired up with a young, mononymous producer named Timbaland to produce Supa Dupa Fly. Whereas many rappers in this era were sampling well-known hits (e.g., MC Hammer) or creating simple, repetitive loops to pontificate over, Missy and Timbaland were turning, in the words of Entertainment Weekly, “avant-garde sounds into No. 1 hits.”

A track like “Izzy Izzy Ahh” is a great example of this. Missy manages to transform nonsense into frightening boasts (e.g., “Izzy-izzy-ah-zi-zah-zi-zah-zah / Hard bitches be talkin’ like they rah-rah / Blizzy-blizzy-blahzah-blahzah-blahzay / None of y’all fools ain’t got shit on me”) while Timbaland cooks up a sparse, sinewy beat.

#1 Capital Punishment by Big Pun (1998)

Not long after college, I fell in love with The Postal Service’s album Give Up. The collaboration between Ben Gibbard, Jimmy Tamborello, and Jenny Lewis sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before. I was excited to have a new discography to dive into. The excitement didn’t last long. I soon realized that The Postal Service only released a single album. I was upset. Big Pun left me feeling quite the same.

Before clicking play on Capital Punishment, I wasn’t familiar with Big Pun. But moments into the first track, “Beware,” I was enthralled. Seldom have I heard an emcee stack so many rhymes on top of one another. Here’s a few fiery bars from “You’re a Killer” that illustrate this:

Big Pun’s my thug’s name, bustin’ my guns, that’s my love thing
I’ll slit your jug’ vein and snatch your Adam’s Apple
John Madden-tackle your corpse to hoist it on a cross at the tabernacle
That’ll have to hurt, I’ll work your body ‘til it burst

I needed more Big Pun in my life after hearing Capital Punishment. Sadly, there wasn’t that much more to listen to. The Bronx rapper was dead two years after releasing his debut. He’d struggled with his weight for most of his life. When he had a heart attack at 28, he was almost 700 pounds.

I can’t pretend that Capital Punishment has the beats of Supa Dupa Fly. I also can’t pretend that it has the hooks of Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. I’m not sure it even matches the storytelling of The Infamous. But Pun’s dexterity on the microphone will leave you asking “What if?” for years to come.

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And he did! During May of this year, he kicked off his wild tour. The aforementioned Darius Mullin tagged along for the first three shows in Birmingham, Alabama; Cleveland, Mississippi; and Searcy, Arkansas on May 3. After Nordista Freeze set the record, they caught up again for a conversation. If you enjoy the conversation, check out Mullin’s newsletter and Nordista Freeze’s music.

I’m excited to catch up about how things went, since I only got to be there for the first day. For the sake of the interview, what did you do, and why did you do it?

I successfully toured all 50 states in the fastest possible run, which was 36 days. It was 36 days and now it is 30 days (or technically 29-and-a-half).

I mean, on the one hand, I did it to challenge myself to be a world record holder. But really, for me, it seemed like a cool way [to use] myself as the catalyst to weave together and create a modern network of DIY and independent artists and creatives across the country. And there’s a large swath of the country that I still obviously didn’t hit, but at least being able to touch all 50 states within a month shows some sort of unity that can be found through artistic communities.

In 2026, which is a unique time of isolation and division, it was a nice thing to attempt. And also, it just felt right in my life. I’ve been touring across the country for about a decade, and this seemed like a nice way to kind of cap off or tie together a decade of work that I’ve put into touring and believing in different artistic communities and how they could all work together to support me in my art. But at the same time, I give back to these spaces by creating events that hopefully bring their own communities together.

Sounds like the culmination of what you’ve been doing for the past many years of your career in a lot of ways.

Exactly. That first day that we were together had a magic to it. I felt like those first couple of days were crazy. Of course, after that there were other chapters that were longer and more grueling, but that first day was really fun.

I like the unity message. You were breaking a world record, but it wasn’t just breaking it for the sake of breaking it. Breaking it would be good enough, but there’s more to it for you than that, right?

Right, right, totally. You know, I’d say the anecdote that I genuinely wasn’t expecting [was] when people would come to the shows and they would bring me a gift or something that they’d made.

Sometimes I feel not necessarily a guilt, but almost like—people are so passionate and believing in me and wanting this to succeed. I do feel maybe a bit of imposter syndrome. Because, man, there’s real stuff going on out there! There’s people who need help, and there’s real hardships. And I was beginning to feel a little embarrassed of my mission or what I’m doing.

I had some people give me pretty good advice when I was out there: “You doing this stunt enables other people to do whatever their thing is.” And, if someone bakes you banana bread and they bring it to the show, having a response of, “Oh, I don’t deserve this,” doesn’t really add up. What you should actually look at is this person is doing something that they’re passionate about; they’re doing something they love to do, and they’re showing that with you. So, by me putting on this stunt, other people were able to engage with it in their own ways, which actually is really cool and uplifts more people.

You said that it got really grueling after the first few days. Is that largely because there was just so much driving and you were doing only one show a day? Or because that was part of the country that you hadn’t visited as often?

There was the first two days, and then we did one show a day for a while, all the way to the west coast, and then back to Las Vegas. And then it got to where there’d be one or two shows a day going up the west coast. But then once I hit the Midwest, which I guess technically starts in the Dakotas, I started doing two shows almost every single day. I described that route as “the Midwestern pretzel,” because I was basically zigzagging around. That was the hardest part.

When you start the road trip or the big tour, you’ve got the capacity to do eight-hour drives. Things only started to get hard until we got to the Midwest where the landscapes are not as scenic, it rained a lot, and I was doing two shows a day. There’d be times when you’d wake up at 7 A.M., drive until noon, play, leave at 1 P.M., then drive until like 7pm and play again. And that’s just an exhausting way to spend consecutive days.

I knew by the time we hit the East Coast, we’d have a lot of positive momentum. But that time in the middle, there was so much rain. I think that was probably the lowest point. I knew it was never a question whether I was gonna quit, but I was definitely hitting a darker space in my head than I anticipated.

And driving in the rain is a lot more mentally taxing than driving not in the rain.

It’s one thing to drive for 30 minutes in the rain, but when you’re doing hours and hours of days, it’s very hard. There were probably two days where I legitimately just felt like I wasn’t even enjoying it anymore.

I would guess that the shows themselves were probably the best part of that?

Yeah! One person described it as the mile markers of a marathon and how you have people cheering for you. The shows are the easy part. Some people wrongly assume that the shows would be a difficult part. Ultimately, I think the sleep deprivation and the long drives were the hardest part for me.

Tell me about the people who were along for the drives for you. There was Danny and Zayne at the beginning, and there were some others too, right?

So, Zayne was the only other constant. Zayne’s with me the whole time documenting. And then I had attempted to create what I described as a “baton relay” to keep us going. It didn’t exactly work out.

We had Danny for a while. After Danny, we had two people kind of drop out. So, we were alone for five days. But a bunch of other people joined along the way: Zayne’s boyfriend Trevor, my sister, my tour manager, my bass player, and a few other people. If I didn’t have drivers, I would have been pulling over and pouring ice down my back and slapping my face.

Would you ever do this again?

I don’t know. I’m kind of conflicted. I think I can do it faster, but do I want to? I feel like if someone broke the record then I would go again.

You’ll do it to defend the title?

If I had to defend the title, I will do it. If it’s uncontested, then maybe I’ll consider doing it. But I’ve got routes and I actually think you could do it faster. So, we’ll see what happens.

I watched an interview where you said, “[T]he question isn’t doing it so fast, but doing it so slow.” Did this end up being so intense that that idea didn’t apply?

I think what I was originally referring to was traditional touring. I love touring, but I don’t necessarily find it easy. As I get older, you become a little bit more aware of time and how important it is. When you’re 19 and you miss Father’s Day or someone’s birthday, you just kind of think, “Well, that’s the life I chose.” But then as you get older, you’re like, “Man, some of this stuff is important!”

Even when I first started touring, I wouldn’t do any off days. I would book a three-week tour and there’d just be 21 shows. As I get older, I can kind of understand that if I am near the Grand Canyon, maybe I should go see it or maybe it is good to get dinner with your friends while you’re in Milwaukee.

All that being said, I find touring to be too slow. Not only do you drive all day, but then you get to a venue, you load in at like 5 P.M. Then you soundcheck at 6. Then doors are 7 or 8. Music starts at 9. It’s over by like 11:30. Then you leave at 1 A.M. It’s a lot of waiting around!

I felt like I broke free from a lot of that malaise on this tour. I wasn’t loading in. I wasn’t sound-checking. I could be in and out of a venue in an hour-and-a-half. Because of that, this was my favorite tour I’ve ever done.

Have you done much playing just solo acoustic before? I’ve never seen you play a solo acoustic set.

Not really. I always just kind of felt like people came to see me rock and roll. But during this tour, people were very encouraging of my solo sets. Playing solo allows me to fit into more metaphorical spaces.

I loved hearing lots of your acoustic versions. Some of the songs, like “Dolphin,” you completely reimagined.

Dude, thank you.

You were telling me when we were in Cleveland, Mississippi, that you had never actually played all 50 states before.

That’s right. There were seven that I’d never played before.

Which seven did you hit that you had never hit before? And what was your impression of any of them?

The first one that I hit was Wyoming. I’d been to Wyoming; I’d never played there. We had a great experience. We went on I-90, which basically means I just barely nicked Wyoming at all.

Then I had never played Alaska, which was a three hour stint back and forth. I just dedicated an entire round trip from Seattle, where I just played, went up to Alaska, performed, and came back.

There were two in New England: Rhode Island and Maine, which both went great. And that leaves three. What were they? Delaware is one of them. I never played Delaware, and I think I was in Delaware for less than an hour. We literally showed up, played this coffee shop where nobody cared that we were playing, and then left. It’s such a small state that we were like, wow, I think we literally were here for 54 minutes or something.

Oh, North Dakota! Now, that’s actually an interesting one, because that wound up being one of the highlights of the entire tour. We played Fargo, North Dakota, and there was like 80 kids there out of nowhere. It was a really great show.

And then, of course Hawaii, where I ended things. That was amazing. It was just cool to be there. I played a show to probably about 10 people. It was extremely cool. And then my girlfriend and I just got to hang out for three days and go to the beach. It was awesome.

You said the previous record was like 35 days. Who was the first band to hit all 50 and then how the record has gotten whittled down?

I think they were called The Black Donnellys. They’re an Irish band. They came over here and just crushed it. They did the whole US, and they were doing radio and other things too.

That’s crazy.

I don’t know much about them, but I know there’s a documentary about it. I’d like to watch it.

I’d imagine Ireland is smaller than most US states, so doing all that traveling in that short amount of time would have been, I mean, tough for a European.

I think when I did my UK tour, and I was opening for this guy, Casey Lowery, and I was riding with him, and he kept just being like, “Oh, mate, we got another long drive today!” And I’d be like, “Bro, these drives are like two hours. This is like Nashville to Jackson, Tennessee. It’s a day trip.”

So, tell me some of the stranger or more wholesome or more horrible anecdotes that you would wanna share. I am curious about how you played an extra show at a Steak ‘n Shake.

I did play! I played one song. I guess I didn’t count it as a show in my head, but you could make an argument. The father of Zayne, my friend and videographer, came to our show in Kentucky and was like, “Oh, I wanna buy you guys lunch.” There was a Steak 'n Shake next door, so we went there.

We get over there and right as we’re walking in the door, I see these kind of hipster-looking girls walking into a coffee shop we just played at. I walked over and I’m like, “Are you guys here for a show by chance?” And they were like, “Yeah, we missed it!” And I was like, “I’m free!” I was gonna play outside, but it was so hot so we went into Steak 'n Shake and did a little song.

I also believe you got pulled over a few times.

Danny got a speeding ticket, and I got a speeding ticket. Actually, I’m glad you mentioned that because I need to pay that speeding ticket before it gets elevated.

Did you have any bad experiences?

I think the worst would just be neutral. There’s just a few times when I could tell that maybe the owner of a space I’d been interacting with on Instagram DMs or email maybe hadn’t communicated properly to their staff what was going on.

One last thing: Where can people connect with you? And then what’s up next?

People can find me pretty much anywhere. I’m most active on Instagram. I’m pretty active on TikTok these days, too. Next up, I’m going to apply to be on Survivor.

After that, I’m going to play my 1,000th show. I’ve played 969. The 1000th show is going to be in Nashville somewhere. It’s gonna be an “end-of-an-era” kind of vibe. It’s gonna be really emotional and cool, and gonna have a big band.

Want more from Nordista Freeze? Check out a full set from his world record tour on YouTube.

Want more from Darius Mullin? Check out his newsletter, Midnight Donuts.

Want more from Chris Dalla Riva? Get a copy of his debut book, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves.

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The Worst Beatles Song

By Chris Dalla Riva

My colleague—and fellow newsletter writer— likes to rag on me for spending too much time listening to bad music. I swear I’m not a musical masochist. I’m just a curious guy!

While Bruce Springsteen, my favorite artist, was trying to get his career off the ground, he was regularly being outsold by the likes of Captain & Tennille. Yes, I want to hear the great records but understanding that “Muskrat Love” outsold “Born to Run” in the 1970s helps make it clearer what a groundbreaking record the latter was.

That said, I was a bit of a musical masochist this week.

It started with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” After Martha Reeves sung a truly abysmal rendition of the patriotic anthem to kick off the season of the newly established Women’s Pro Baseball League, I decided to go on a hunt for other bad anthems.

But then I felt the need to witness more horrors. I wrote up some code that looked for playlists on Deezer named some variant of “Worst Songs Ever.” I then aggregated the songs across all the playlists to see what your average listener felt the greatest musical travesties were.

I learned a few things from this exercise. First, if you concocted some objective standard for musical badness, I don’t think any of these songs—outside of Rebecca Black’s “Friday” and “It’s Everyday Bro” by Jake Paul—would meet it. Most of these songs are just popular records from the recent past that are at best redundant and at worst annoying. Truly unlistenable music is usually not reaching enough people for listeners to care.

Second, people really hate “Dance Monkey” by Tones and I. Like really hate. I posted about these findings on my TikTok page, and no song inspired more vitriol in the comments than that one.

• “Dance monkey. It makes me physically ill.”

• “Dance monkey has a special place on my hate list”

• “That’s Dance Monkey? I never knew the name of the song, but I can’t stand it. Makes my ears hurt”

• “dance monkey is audible torture”

As I continued to mull over people’s notions of musical badness, my mind went to a very unexpected place: The Beatles. The four-headed musical beast composed of John, Paul, George, and Ringo is widely considered the greatest band in history. How would people’s notions of musical horror intersect with their discography?

“We Were Just a Band …”

When many Beatles’ outtakes were released in the 1990s as part of the Anthology series there was a snippet of dialogue from John Lennon included that I’ve always enjoyed:

We were four guys, that’s it. I met Paul, said, “Do you wanna join me band?”, you know. And then George joined and then Ringo joined. We were just a band who made it very, very big. That’s all.

Of course, this is the understatement of the century. But I think it is also helpful framing when approaching The Beatles’ catalog. They were just “four guys.” Now, those four guys composed some of the greatest songs yet to exist. But because they were four human guys, they were also fallible. In other words, there are bad Beatles songs.

Unlike my exercise with the worst songs generally, there aren’t people who make playlists called “The Worst Beatles Songs.” I had to resort to other means to avoid writing a bland essay where I just rant to you about the Beatles songs that offend my ears.

What’s nice is that because The Beatles are so famous, many people have gone to the pains of ranking every song in their discography. Bill Wyman at Vulture did it. Charles Curtis at USA Today did it. Mark Beaumont at NME has done it. And, of course, scores of random Redditers and bloggers online have done it.

I built a database of every Beatles catalog ranking I could find. I didn’t care if the ranking was done by a seasoned music critic or someone listening to The Fab Four’s oeuvre for the first time. They just had to have ranked every song. I then tossed out all covers, outtakes, and any songs released after they broke up. Then I took the average across all the lists.

So, the worst Beatles song is … “Dig It.” “Dig It”? Yes, “Dig It,” the 50 seconds on Let It Be culled from a longer jam where John Lennon shouts out the FBI and the CIA and the BBC and BB King.

Beyond the fact that I kind of like “Dig It,” I’ve always felt weird including it on lists like these. It resembles an outtake more than an actual song. Similarly, ranking sonic experiments like “Revolution 9” and “Wild Honey Pie” also feels a bit unfair.

They do technically fit my criteria, so I will include them. But, if we ignore those for a second, then we get to what I think is a much better answer to the what-is-the-worst-Beatles-song question: “Little Child.”

Beyond John Lennon honking on the harmonica he was soon to put down for good, “Little Child” is aptly described by Vulture as “Filler from the second album.” It will not offend your ears, but in a catalog of gold, the sub-two minute “by-numbers Merseybeat”—in the words of NME—is a dud.

Outside of their weird sonic experiments, most of the lowest ranked songs are those “by-numbers Merseybeat” cuts that you mostly find on their first few records. The lowest post-Revolver album cuts are sadly two Harrison numbers, “Only a Northern Song” and “For You Blue.” That said, I would listen to all of these songs before willingly turning on “She’s a Woman,” “Yes It Is,” and “I’m Down” again.

They are Pretty Great, Though

We are talking about The Beatles. And they are worth the hype. So, this entire essay shouldn’t be a downer. If we average all song ranks from their studio albums, Revolver just ekes past Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to come out on top.

Despite the fact that our ranking of songs only looked at originals, I decided to include covers in this album ranking, especially since many of the early albums have a good deal of them. Now, let’s just pull out the covers and rank those.

I’m fine with “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” being at the bottom. It might be the worst closer in the rock era, especially since you have to listen to John Lennon’s half-rate Little Richard impression right after the majesty of “Yesterday.” But in my heart, I would move “Mr. Moonlight” to the bottom. It’s a truly drab number with an organ solo that sounds like a stomach on the verge of illness.

When The Beatles got a cover right, it could be transformational, though. I don’t think most people even realize “Twist and Shout” was written by someone else. I’m sure depending on who you talk to, they might think the same for Motown classics “You Really Got a Hold on Me” and “Please Mister Postman.” For my money, their cover of The Music Man’s “Till There Was You” represents their finest adaptation, George Harrison’s solo a text for how to integrate beautiful melody into lead lines.

But let’s not just talk the best covers. The Beatles are much better known for their originals. To close out this piece, let’s use the same methodology we applied to find the worst originals to find the best originals.

It’s nice to see “A Day in the Life” come out on top. Not only would I declare that The Beatles best work if push came to shove, but it’s widely hailed as their magnum opus. It’s always a good check on a statistical methodology, no matter how simple, if your results make some intuitive sense.

Had this been a list based on my personal tastes, I would have ranked “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” and “For No One” a bit higher. I don’t think those songs are underrated—is it possible for a song by the most famous band to be underrated?—but I do like them quite a bit. After a week of listening to terrible tunes, I think it’s time to spin that trio by the grandest quartet a few times.

A New One
"Betty’s in the Band" by Abigail Rose and Weston Hunter
2026 - Folk

Moments ago, I just mentioned The Beatles folk pastiche “I’ve Just Seen a Face.” When I first heard the Help! album cut, I was infatuated. I must have listened to it on loop for at least two hours. Abigail Rose and Weston Hunter’s new song “Betty’s in the Band” has given me a similar feeling.

Like “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” “Betty’s in the Band” lives in the world of folk music, although at a much slower tempo. But no matter the speed, both of these numbers convey a joy that is infectious. The former’s joy is built on falling in love hard and fast. The latter takes a different path. It captures the euphoria of a drifter on the road making so much music that she’s “got bruises on her legs from the tambourine.”

An Old One
"Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" by P.M. Dawn
1993 - Psychedelic Rock

I’ve only recommended a Beatles song once in this newsletter. And even though it was a deeper cut (i.e., “I’m Happy Just to Dance With You”), I still felt silly doing it. Do we really need to spill more words on the most successful band in history given how hard it is for smaller artists to get any press? Probably not. So, no, I won’t be recommending a Beatles recording here. But I will recommend a song by the group: “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” by P.M. Dawn.

I spend a lot of time writing about P.M. Dawn in my book. I think the psychedelic hip-hop group was quietly influential. Their cover of The Beatles Rubber Soul classic is a great example of how inventive they could be while still respecting their source material.

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This week’s theme is “trading favorites,” meaning each day I sent one of my favorite albums to Ken that he’d never heard, and he sent one back. Since we both technically listened to a different record each day, we decided to rank them as pairs. My pick is listed first. Ken’s is listed second.

#7 A Night at the Opera by Queen (1975) and The Presidents of the United States by The Presidents of the United States (1995)

When I recommended A Night at the Opera, I had not heard it in years. My memory was that I had been blown away by its inventiveness. You had experimental structure on songs like “Bohemian Rhapsody.” You had guitars masquerading as horns on “Good Company.” You had voices masquerading as horns on “Seaside Rendezvous.” It was inventiveness, along with doses of strong songwriting, that called attention to itself.

The Presidents of the United States is inventive in a much quieter way. These songs, including hits like “Peaches” and “Lump,” feel like standard, riff-driven alternative rock that was pervasive throughout the 1990s. But The Presidents of the United States have an unexpected set-up, the trio composed of drums, three-stringed guitar, and two-stringed bass, the latter two of which are tuned to open C#5.

This forces us to confront an important question: Is inventiveness better when it shouts from the mountaintops or when it hides in the shadows? Maybe the theatrical weirdness of Queen distracts from the fact that some of the ideas are half-baked (e.g., “I’m in Love with My Car”). Maybe the hidden exoticness of The Presidents of the United States prevents us from giving them proper credit.

As I’ve aged, I try not to delve too deeply into these ideas. All that matters is if the songs move you. Beyond the obvious gems (e.g., “Love of My Life,” “You’re My Best Friend”), A Night at the Opera didn’t do much for Ken. He also found it almost preposterous that a group with a singer as good as Freddie Mercury would let anyone else take the microphone (e.g., “'39”). Likewise, The Presidents of the United States left me wanting more. I’d turn a few other places for big 1990s riffs before returning to their alternate tunings.

#6 The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan by Bob Dylan (1963) and Caught it from the Rye by Tré Burt (2020)

As a Bob Dylan superfan, I knew I was going to have to pick an album from Hibbing, Minnesota’s favorite son this week. This was a problem for Ken. He’s an avowed Dylan hater. In fact, earlier this year when I made him listen to Dylan’s Infidels, he said the entire album “felt like a prank.” Luckily, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan was less tedious for him.

When I first discovered Bob Dylan in high school, I kept hearing that many found his voice off-putting. I didn’t understand why. Freewheelin', the first album of his that I fell in love with, is packed with endearing vocals (e.g., “Girl from the North Country,” “Corrina, Corrina”). That’s actually why Ken was able to connect with the Nobel Prize winner on this record. “His voice,” Ken told me, “is semi-normal on this one.”

His general distaste for Dylan’s nasally tone left me unsure why he loves Tré Burt’s Caught it from the Rye. Burt, signed to John Prine’s Oh Boy Records, has a voice clearly descended from the “Blowin' in the Wind” singer-songwriter. For me, Burt’s voice and his album were totally fine. Not something I would return to but serviceable.

#5 Melodrama by Lorde (2017) and Bridges Worth Burning by Kind of Like Spitting (2002)

A few days into this week, Ken told me that he was making his selections based on whatever I had chosen. My early Bob Dylan record, for example, was paired with a singer-songwriter that he liked (i.e., Tré Burt). My Queen album was met with an album by a group named for another head of state (i.e., The Presidents of the United States). That said, Ken felt his pairing of Kind of Like Spitting’s Bridges Worth Burning with Lorde’s Melodrama didn’t make much sense.

On the surface, I got why he thought that. What do Lorde’s off-kilter, alt-pop anthems have to do with early-2000s emo cuts? Actually, quite a bit. Lorde’s diaristic lyricism (e.g., “Green Light”) pairs quite well with Ben Barnett’s heart-on-your-sleeve passion (e.g., “Passionate”). Of course, the instrumentation is quite different. You won’t find a trap hat on Bridges Worth Burning. But I think Lorde’s success is a small example of the long shadow that punk and emo have cast on the world of popular music.

#4 Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen (1975) and War Elephant by Deer Tick (2007)

Whether they intended it or not—and they probably did given their recent cover of “Dancing in the Dark”—I can hear the influence of Bruce Springsteen on Deer Tick’s War Elephant. The dark characters of Nebraska lurk in songs like “Standing at the Threshold.” The Americana of Devils and Dust powers “Baltimore Blues No. 1.” The intensity of “Not So Dense” could very well have been ripped from the final third of “Backstreets.”

“Backstreets,” of course, comes from Springsteen’s 1975 breakthrough Born to Run. Born to Run is my favorite album. It’s an album of dreams realized and thwarted, strapping yourself to another person—whether its Terry or Eddie or Mary or Wendy—as you try to change your life. And even if it all goes wrong, maybe you’ll still have one another to weather the storm.

When Bruce Springsteen inducted Roy Orbison into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, he noted, “In 1975, when I went into the studio to record, Born To Run, I wanted to make a record with words like Bob Dylan, that sounded like Phil Spector’s productions, but most of all I wanted to sing like Roy Orbison. Now, everybody knows that nobody sings like Roy Orbison.” And, no, he does not sound like Orbison on this record. But no other record has dared to unify the disparate worlds of Dylan, Spector, and Orbison. 50 years later, it remains a miracle, influencing scores of artists, Deer Tick included.

#3 Heard It in a Past Life by Maggie Rogers (2019) and Capacity by Big Thief (2017)

According to Spotify, my most played song of all time is Maggie Rogers’ “On+Off.” When I first found this song, not long after Rogers went viral when Pharrell Williams praised her song “Alaska” during her senior year at NYU, I was borderline obsessed. I think that obsession was driven by how the song combined contemporary production with the ethereal qualities that I love in folk music. The rest of Rogers’ debut album Heard It in a Past Life isn’t all like that. Songs like “Give a Little” are much more indebted to contemporary dance music. But the record is at its best when it combines these two worlds.

The best of Big Thief, a band that I have been meaning to get into for the last few years, kind of gives me a similar feeling to the best of Maggie Rogers. I could very clearly hear Rogers singing something like “Mythological Beauty” or “Shark Smile” even if she chose to dress up the production differently. There is an airy beauty to these albums even when they reach the peak of their intensity.

#2 Let It Be by The Replacements (1984) and Dookie by Green Day (1994)

For me, the trick to great punk music is pairing the silly, childish imagery with the most gut-wrenching melodies you’ll ever hear. It is naming your album Dookie and packing it with songs like “Basket Case” and “When I Come Around.” It is playing a song named “Gary’s Got a Boner” right before the soul-crushing “Sixteen Blue.”

Both Let It Be and Dookie are tremendous albums. In fact, many of the songs are so strong that aspiring hitmakers should put down their Michael Jackson and Madonna records and pick up these. Additionally, the musical performances on these albums are somehow underrated. No, I don’t think The Replacements ever played with as much precision as on something like Green Day’s “Burnout,” but it is a miracle to play with as much looseness as “Favorite Thing” or “Androgynous” and not have the song go completely off the rails.

#1 Running on Empty by Jackson Browne (1977) and Violent Femmes by Violent Femmes (1983)

For each pair of records I’ve written about this week, I’ve been able to find a thread to tie them together. Sometimes it was easy, as with Bob Dylan and Tré Burt. Other times it was more of a stretch, as with Lorde and Kind of Like Spitting. But a thread was nonetheless tied. Beyond the fact that we like this pair best, I’ve got nothing with Running on Empty and Violent Femmes.

Running on Empty is a road album in all senses. Some cuts, like the title track and “The Load Out,” were recorded on stage. Others, like “The Road” and “Nothing But Time,” capture a musician who lives in liminal spaces, whether on the tour bus or standing side-stage. Browne takes you through all the highs and lows of this fast-paced life. You’ve got the women (e.g., “Rosie”). You’ve got the drugs (e.g., “Cocaine”). And you’ve got the party.

Running on Empty closes with a tremendous cover of Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs’ 1960 number one hit “Stay.” It’s the perfect encapsulation of the party you don’t want to end, of the night that has you screaming “Encore!” until the lights come on. The tank always runs out, and we all must go home, but even then, we want to “stay just a little bit longer.”

The Violent Femmes’s self-titled record has nothing to do with any of this. Beyond the fact that it also exists in the broad world of rock music, I can’t really even fathom a comparison. Violent Femmes is a raucous, gnarly album that combines both folk and punk, albeit in a way that Jackson Browne could never attempt. Regardless, the miracle of Violent Femmes is that between the visceral bass lines and disturbing imagery, the music will make you want to shake your rump. Few can combine disgust with sneaky dance rhythms so seamlessly.

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Copyright Always Wins

My views on copyright often confuse people. First, I think copyright terms should be dramatically shorter. This often makes people think that I’m anti-artist. I’m not. Long copyright terms have led to a variety of downsides and distorted incentives. That said, during the term, I think rights should be defined broadly and strongly. Music firms have been flexing that strength recently, especially in the world of AI.

The world of AI-generated audio is strange. As I detailed just a few days ago, despite intense backlash, artists are using the tools and listeners are sometimes enjoying the results. But it’s also leading to a slew of problems.

Deezer has noted that 50% of daily uploads (~90,000 tracks) are completely AI generated. Spotify has dealt with a similar issue, having to delete 75 million tracks of the same type. At Audiomack, a similar problem emerged last week. We saw a bunch of AI-generated uploads dumped on the platform, followed by a bunch of fake accounts being created to stream those songs.

This is where AI is a problem. From fake music by dead idols to the viral social media posts of nonexistent tours, it is being used to confuse listeners. At the same time, it is also being used to siphon royalties from legitimate artists. Of course, these problems existed prior to the advent of AI, but they are only becoming worse because of the speed and scale at which AI can operate.

But copyright, as I said, always wins. Labels, publishers, and advocacy groups have been fighting back hard against these forces, especially because it is affecting their bottom lines. And, slowly but surely, they are winning.

• A German court recently ruled that Suno, the premiere AI music company, broke copyright rules at scale.

• Anthropic just agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement to authors for infringing on copyright.

• Albeit not related to AI, the major labels are finally taking action against Musi, the “'parasitic service [that] mimics licensed streaming platforms while pulling copyright-protected recordings from other services without permission.”

Should copyright terms be shorter? Absolutely. But I’m glad that those rights remain strong. They’re one of our best tools to fight back against the deluge of slop drowning the web.

What’s Worst Version of the American National Anthem?

Last week, Martha Reeves sang the national anthem at the inaugural game for the new women’s professional baseball league. Martha Reeves is a legend. The Alabama-born and Detroit-raised vocalist sang on many Motown classics, including “Dancing in the Street” and “(Love is Like a) Heatwave.” Sadly, her national anthem did not live up to those standards.

First, I don’t begrudge anyone who can’t pull off “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It’s a hard song to sing. Second, Martha Reeves is 85-years-old. Every vocalist, from Aretha Franklin to Paul McCartney, sees their voice change as they age. So, I want to give Reeves some grace. Even so, this was a horrible rendition of the national anthem.

I don’t really like the America national anthem. In fact, I’ve written about my distaste for “The Star-Spangled Banner” in this newsletter. But I still like to hear it sung well. If you’re going to sing a bad song, give me a Whitney Houston or Marvin Gaye rendition.

Still, I kind of love a bad national anthem. A few years ago, I got stuck in a YouTube rabbit hole of bad anthems. I like to believe that I’ve heard dramatically more “and the rockets’ red glare” than your average person. And I think that Ms. Reeves has been bested (worsted?).

So, who performed the worst version of the American national anthem?

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People (Sadly) Enjoy AI-Generated Music

By Chris Dalla Riva

While my wife and I were taking a car to the Naples airport a few weeks back, we sat in mostly silence. No, there was nothing ominous about this silence. We were on our honeymoon and had been traveling for a few weeks. It was a silence of tiredness. But like I said, it was not complete silence. It was mostly silence, the air quietly filled with some music from the radio.

This was a longer car ride, so we heard a lot of music from this radio. And I recognized none of it. Which is kind of shocking. If you stick me in a car for at least an hour and turn on a popular radio station, the odds of me recognizing no songs are vanishingly small, especially if they are being sung in English.

And these songs were. Much to my disappointment, we weren’t listening to local music. We were stuck with this anonymous, mostly terrible music sung in English. What was going on? Had the copious amounts of Italian wine erased my decades of pointless pop music knowledge?

When the next song came on—some uninspired neo-soul—I opened the Shazam app. If my ears were failing me, maybe Shazam’s would do better. Nope. Shazam, too, was stumped.

Given that our driver only spoke Italian, I figured I’d peer around his seat to what station he was tuned to. Maybe I could deduce what was playing that way. That’s when I realized that we weren’t listening to the radio. We were listening to a playlist on YouTube, a playlist filled exclusively with AI-generated music.

How did I know this music was AI-generated? Well, all the hallmark tells were there. The vocals had tinny, lifeless quality that remains pervasive in AI-generated audio, and the cover art was cartoonishly tasteless.

I was kind of disgusted. This isn’t a shock if you read the news. AI-generated music has received a tremendous amount of bad press over the last few years.

• Variety: “Jack Antonoff Slams People Who Make AI Music as ‘Godless Whores’: ‘Bad Actors Will Willingly Reveal Themselves Through Slop’”

• CNET: “I Only Listened to AI Music for a Week. It Was Terrible, but Not for the Reason You Think”

• 404Media: “Spotify’s AI Problem Is So Bad Random People Are Stepping In to Track the Slop”

• Hollywood Reporter: “The Music Industry Crosses an AI Tipping Point”

• NPR: “AI music is flooding streaming platforms. But listeners like it less and less”

• Pitchfork: “Bandcamp Announces Ban on AI Music”

But despite the onslaught of bad press, there are growing signs of two things. First, listeners enjoy the stuff. Second, the music industry has no incentive to stop listeners from enjoying it. One recent song can help us understand why.

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This week’s theme is “concept records,” meaning albums where all the tracks cohere around a single story or theme. Concept records are typically associated with the rock era (e.g., Tommy), but the underlying idea goes back decades earlier. Frankly, if you broaden the definition to include song cycles, they possibly go back centuries.

Please note that unlike most other weeks, we are not ranking albums based on how much we enjoyed them. We are ranking them based on how well we think they executed their concept.

#7 Exile in Guyville by Liz Phair (1993)

Before I tell you anything else, I need to say that Exile in Guyville is an incredible album, a visceral take down of decades of chauvinism in the rock world. But, as noted, we are not ranking based on quality. We are ranking based on execution of concept. And Liz Phair’s 18-song magnum opus is billed as a track-by-track response to The Rolling Stone’s 18-song magnum opus Exile on Main Street.

For nearly every other album on this list, you could piece together the concept just by listening. You would never know this was a track-by-track response to another album simply by listening to this record.

#6 Love, Marriage & Divorce by Toni Braxton and Babyface (2014)

Toni Braxton and Babyface’s collaborative concept record is pretty simple on the surface. In fact, its title is also its descriptor: love, marriage, and divorce. This is about a failed relationship culminating in divorce. As you’d expect, Braxton and Babyface tell this story backed with heart-wrenching R&B production.

The vocals on this record are tremendous. On tracks like “Where Did We Go Wrong?” the pain is palpable. But for an album called Love, Marriage & Divorce, not much of the album is focused on love or marriage. From track one, “Roller Coaster,” the relationship is already on the rocks. As Ken noted, the former love is implied from the heightened emotions. Still, I would have liked to feel a bit more of the love and marriage before the divorce.

#5 Tallahassee by The Mountain Goats (2002)

After releasing six albums recorded effectively as a solo artist with minimal technology, John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats decided to get together a full band for his next project, Tallahassee. These songs, which tell the story of a doomed couple drinking themselves to death, are still spare, but they are fleshed out with bits of bass and percussion.

Like Love, Marriage & Divorce, Tallahassee spends most of its time on the depressing end of this couple’s life. We were expecting a bit more happiness before the Leaving Las Vegas-style end of this tale. Had we just been ranking based on quality, the songwriting alone would have put this album near the top of the list.

#4 Good Old Boys by Randy Newman (1974)

Randy Newman opens Good Old Boys with a shocking stanza:

Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show
With some smart-ass New York Jew
And the Jew laughed at Lester Maddox
And the audience laughed at Lester Maddox too
Well, he may be a fool but he’s our fool
If they think they’re better than him they’re wrong
So I went to the park and I took some paper along
And that’s where I made this song

If those words don’t shock you enough, Newman than sings the n-word in every chorus of that song, “Rednecks.” What is going on? Why is the guy that scored a slew of family-friendly hits for Pixar singing these words?

The sardonic, ironic, iconoclastic Randy Newman shies away from no topics. On Good Old Boys, he inhabits a variety of flawed southern characters trying to face a world changing faster than they ever will.

Originally, this album was supposed to follow a southern racist named Johnny Cutler. Seeds of that character remain through the first tracks on the album, but Newman expanded the scope to include historical events (e.g., “Louisiana 1927”) and more general themes (e.g., “Mr. President (Have Pity on the Working Man)”). This album is a masterpiece, but we docked it a few points for abandoning the initial concept. You could have pulled it off, Mr. Newman!

#3 Undun by The Roots (2011)

In general, I am not a lover of concept records. First, they often attempt to turn pop music into some high concept that I don’t think it needs to be. Second, when they do follow a narrative, the narrative usually doesn’t go much further than recounting someone’s life.

Undun technically falls into the simple narrative category. It tracks the tumultuous life of a drug dealer. But The Roots turn this story on its head. They tell it in reverse. Could you tell this story chronologically? Sure. But by flipping it upside down, it turns an overdone format into something novel.

#2 The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society by The Kinks (1968)

Just as their British Invasion compatriots were taking over the US, The Kinks had a problem. Disputes with US musicians’ unions effectively banned them from touring in the country for years. Of course, this affected their ability as a live act. But it also affected their songwriting.

As their fellow Brits expanded their sound to meet the demands of global audiences, the music of the Davies brothers became more provincial. The apotheosis of this provinciality was The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society.

The Village Green Preservation Society is focused on a theme rather than a narrative, The Kinks lamenting an evolving British society. And this album is very British in sound and imagery. But that illustrates its appeal. By focusing on where they were from, The Kinks ended up making an album built around ideas that listeners could identify with everywhere.

Well, not at the time. Marred by a poor roll out and The Beatles and The Rolling Stones releasing records around the same time (i.e., The Beatles, Beggars Banquet), The Village Green Preservation Society failed to chart. Since then, it’s become their best-selling album in the United Kingdom and their best-regarded album everywhere else.

#1 In the Wee Small Hours by Frank Sinatra (1955)

When you read about the history of the concept album, people will sometimes refer to In the Wee Small Hours as the first record of this type. This is not strictly true (see Dust Bowl Ballads). Still, In the Wee Small Hours reshaped how many artists conceived of what an album could be.

There is no narrative running through this record. It is—as it’s album cover suggests—Frank Sinatra at his most melancholy, trying to press on through the darkness of myriad failed relationships. To quote Ken, “Damn! Frank was down bad.”

In the Wee Small Hours succeeds at what it is aiming for. The songwriting is immaculate. The arrangements capture a depressing night roaming the town. And then there’s that voice. I don’t think any vocalist has ever realized the pain of lost love so completely. If the title track doesn’t entrance you, then I guess you are lucky never to have had your heart broken.

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A passionate lover of classical music, Levin decided that this trend was worth covering. He recently launched Orchestrology, a newsletter, podcast, and Instagram page dedicated to all things orchestra related, with a special concern for how orchestras are intersecting with the world of popular music. We sat down for a brief chat to discuss why this is happening now and what excites him most about it. Subscribe to his newsletter if you want to learn more.

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I want to start with maybe the broadest question: Why? Why are you covering orchestras now? For most people, they feel like part of the distant past. But you think the orchestra is alive and well.

Honestly, I just noticed things happening in the space. In the podcast I recorded with Derek Hodge, we talked about the surge in orchestral crossovers with popular music. Hodge wrote orchestral arrangements for the 20th anniversary of Nas’s Illmatic that were performed by the National Symphony Orchestra. That was the first time they ever performed hip-hop.

I come from a classical background. Combining that with my experience as a journalist, I just started to notice that Hodge’s work was part of a larger trend. The electronic artist John Summit just did something with an orchestra. Dua Lipa has done some work with an orchestra. It just felt like this was happening enough to dive deeper.

Along with popular artists using orchestras, you also have groups like Kaleidoscope Orchestra who began just doing classical versions of popular songs. They grew enough of an audience to start doing original material too. So, a lot is happening, and I’m here to talk about it.

When you launched this platform, you framed it as part of a larger social trend where people are longing for social connection. What do you mean by that?

Between COVID and digital places replacing physical spaces, I think it’s obvious that people are looking for in person connection. When you can use AI to produce entire songs, I think the re-emergence of the orchestra represents the desire to make music with other people. Obviously, part of this is something that I am hoping is true. But I think there is evidence for it as well.

That point about AI frames some of this as a technological backlash. But I think what is also interesting about this is that some of the interest in orchestral music is enabled by the same technology that pushed it near obsolescence. I had a friend, for example, who would listen to hours of classical music while studying in college. Most of that was accessible to him because it was on YouTube. Do you think technology has also enabled this resurgance?

Absolutely. As I was preparing for the launch of Orchestrology, I realized that it doesn’t have to be either-or. You can still utilize analog instruments while making music on your computer. You can pick up a trumpet and a laptop. Technology is still vital for this trend to proliferate.

Back in the day, many people discovered The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Now, those discoveries happen on Spotify. You can discover a pop star singing with an orchestra on a streaming service. That’s fine. There’s no gatekeeping with music anymore. I want technology to make this resurgence even stronger. I want it to inspire people to go out to concerts.

Relatedly, there seems to be more money in live music than ever before. It feels like pop stars are using orchestral arrangements as an additional selling point for their expensive concerts. Do you think that’s also part of this resurgence?

Totally. If you’ve watched Dua Lipa’s concert with an orchestra, you can see how it not only sounds good but is exciting to watch. It makes a concert much more dynamic than one singer roaming around stage performing over a backing track.

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Is Nepotism Real?

By Chris Dalla Riva

In 2009, while journalist Ian Betteridge was lambasting TechCrunch for an irresponsible headline (i.e., “Did Last.fm Just Hand Over User Listening Data To the RIAA?”), he made an observation that I think about often:

One thing though: This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “no”. The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.

Though this maxim predates Betteridge, it has come to bear his name: Betteridge’s Law of Headlines. And I’m often thinking about Betteridge and his law because this newsletter regularly uses questions in its titles (e.g., “Is the Album Dead?”). I like to think that I write with enough nuance that Betteridge would give me a pass, but I can’t be certain. Social media’s twisted incentives make us do many things we might not otherwise.

That said, I am certain that today’s inquiring headline does break his law. Nepotism—or in the words of Merriam-Webster, “favoritism … based on kinship”—is undoubtedly real. From that dolt in your high school class taking over his father’s successful plumbing company to The Los Angeles Lakers drafting the under-qualified son of LeBron James, examples of nepotism in every area of the world are easy to come by.

Something strange is going on with nepotism, though. And it doesn’t have to do with actual acts of nepotism. It’s with how we apply the word, especially in the world of music. Stella Lefty proves a good example of this.

Stella Lefty is a singer-songwriter whose rise over the last year has been nothing short of meteoric. In fact, she recently scored her first top 10 hit: “Boston,” a twangy song about falling in love hard and fast that interpolates the chorus of Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season.”

The success of “Boston” doesn’t require a ton of explanation. First, it’s got a catchy chorus. Second, it arrived at just the right time. Country music has resurged over the last five years. As I write, the genre commands half of Billboard’s top 10.

Stella Lefty has a problem, though. If you scroll through the top comments on any of her recent videos, one thing comes up again and again: nepotism. Stella Lefty—born Stella Lefkofsky—is the daughter of Eric Lefkofsky, the billionaire founder of Groupon. People are very angry about this. Her recent popularity, they claim, is just driven by the fact that she was born into a wealthy family.

This doesn’t make much sense. First, is this really nepotism? I know this might seem pedantic, but it’s not like her father is the CEO of Atlantic Records. He made his money in e-commerce. Wealth comes with incredible resources and benefits. If Stella Lefty’s music career failed, she’d be just alright. That wouldn’t necessarily be the case had her origins been more humble. But I don’t think “nepotism” really captures her career trajectory.

Second, that career trajectory is so much more mundane than any of these comments assume. If you dig through her TikTok, you will see that she posted for years getting almost no views. Occasionally, she’d find small virality by singing a snippet of a popular song.

@stellaleftymusic @stellaleftymusic ♬ original sound - Stella Lefty

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Over time, people started responding positively to her voice. Then the same happened for her originals. Hundreds of views became thousands. Thousands became millions. Somewhere along the line, she picked up management and had a popular producer named J Kash reach out to her. But that’s not enough to have a career. She kept posting and eventually “Boston” went mega viral.

I would bet serious money that neither her management company nor J Kash knew who her father was when they reached out. They just saw a girl with a pretty voice building an online audience. Countless artists get record deals that way. (Albeit not related to original songs, I’ve built a large following on TikTok talking about music—no billionaires required.)

To be clear, I don’t even think “Boston” is a very good song. It’s a few lackluster verses slapped around a catchy but derivative chorus. Still, I think people significantly underrate how hard it is to score a top 10 hit. I’m not saying that wealth doesn’t confer advantages, but I suspect true nepotism is much less common in the world of popular music than people think. But to be sure, I decided to look.

The Myth of the Musical Nepo Baby

A few years ago, I wrote a piece for Business Insider that was a bit different than my normal fare: “The rise of political nepo babies.” To summarize, we looked at what percentage of each Congressional class had parents who were also in Congress. For most of the 20th century, that rate sat at or below 2.0%. By 2010, it had risen to 4.6%.

Then we took things a step further. Rather than just measuring if a member of Congress had a parent who was also in Congress, we looked for every member whose parent had a Wikipedia—excluding members whose parents only had pages because their children were famous (e.g., Bill Clinton’s mother and father). Though not strictly a measure of nepotism, we figured “if at least one of your parents was notable enough to have Wikipedia page, you likely had some advantages in your political career.”

I decided to apply the same methodology to the world of music. Even though I just argued that we are misusing the term “nepotism,” I figured we wanted to be as generous as possible with our definition. Of note, this methodology would count Stella Lefty as the beneficiary of nepotism because her father has a Wikipedia page.

To track this over time, I grabbed Billboard’s year-end Hot 100 between 1960 and 2025. For each artist who performed a song, I went to their Wikipedia and noted if their parents had a Wikipedia page of their own. For bands, I used their frontman as proxy. Finally, as with politicians, I removed parents who only had a Wikipedia page because they created someone famous (e.g., John Lennon’s mother and father).

We can glean two things from our graph. First, the large majority of hits in any decade are not by artists benefiting from nepotism. In fact, the highest the nepotism rate gets is 7.2% in the 1990s because of the likes of Wilson Phillips, Bonnie Raitt, Lenny Kravitz, Tim McGraw, and Jewel.

Second, the nepotism rate is decreasing. Thus far in the 2020s, only 2.6% of hits have been by artists who benefited from nepotism, down almost five percentage points from the peak during the last decade of the 20th century. This illustrates one of the promises of the internet: democratization.

Back in the day, it was probably a lot easier for John Sebastian to get his group The Lovin’ Spoonful off the ground because his father was a notable musician and his mother was good friends with actress Vivian Vance. It’s hard to navigate the world of entertainment when information is hard to come by.

Now, connections remain vital, but information is more plentiful. Furthermore, social media and music streaming have made it easier than ever for artists of all social strata to get their music out there. (Relatedly, see the fact that you are reading a newsletter with thousands of subscribers by a guy with no connections in journalism.)

Do We Really Care about Nepotism?

At the beginning of this piece, I noted, “From that dolt in your high school class taking over his father’s successful plumbing company to The Los Angeles Lakers drafting the under-qualified son of LeBron James, examples of nepotism in every area of the world are easy to come by.” I believe the plumber-LeBron dichotomy illustrates how most humans feel about nepotism.

You likely don’t care if that guy you used to hang out with takes over his father’s plumbing business even if he didn’t inherit his father’s skills with rushing water. On the other hand, you might care that LeBron James’s son got drafted into the NBA without having the typical stat line required.

The difference is twofold. First, being a plumber doesn’t automatically lead to riches the same way being in the NBA does. Second, the world needs a lot more plumbers than NBA players. If you’d always dreamt of working with toilets and sinks, your friend’s career likely has no effect on your success or failure. Bronny James, on the other hand, likely took a spot away from someone much more qualified.

So, I get why people are mad at Stella Lefty. Being a famous musician is much closer to being an NBA player than a plumber. But at the same time, people who benefit from nepotism can still make good music. I have yet to hear someone complain that Carly Simon is the daughter of Richard L. Simon, the cofounder of Simon & Schuster. Likewise, nobody gives the spirit of David Crosby grief for being the son of an Academy Award-winning cinematographer.

I, too, would like to live in a more equitable world, the most talented rising to the top. But your efforts would probably be better spent fighting for progressive tax reform than yelling at singer-songwriters on the internet for the parents they had no choice in being born to. Plus, if those singer-songwriters end up writing better songs, you probably won’t care anymore anyway.

This week’s theme is “peaked at 200,” meaning albums whose highest performing position on Billboard’s album chart was dead last. According to Luminate, the company behind the Billboard charts, you only need to sell around 6,000 to 8,000 copies in a week to reach number 200. Back in the past, it likely required more sales, but it was still a low enough bar that obscure releases could find their way onto the chart.

#7 K by Kula Shaker (1996)

As I’ve noted in the past, despite their being tremendous overlap in listening habits between Americans and Brits, there are also clear differences. Kula Shaker is one of those differences. Along with doing well across continental Europe, the group’s debut album K topped the charts in their home country. In America, it barely made the charts.

In one sense, K fits directly in the Britpop universe that defined the United Kingdom in the 1990s. Though it encompasses a large variety of styles, one unifying element was how groups drew heavily on music from the 1960s. Whereas some groups leant on the melodicism of The Beatles, others turned to the riffs of The Kinks. Kula Shaker was more drawn to the psychedelia of the 1960s, though.

Songs, like “Sleeping Jiva,” are solo instrumentals on the sarod, a popular Indian instrument. Others, like “Temple of Everlasting Light,” build much percussion around the tabla. Still, other songs, like “Godvinda,” are sung entirely in Sanskrit.

These sounds don’t dominate every moment of the album. You get very standard 1990s British rock fare on songs like “Knight on the Town.” But the Eastern influence is what stands out most across this record. While it works at times, sometimes it comes across as cartoonish and even fetishistic.

#6 No Sign of Weakness by Burna Boy (2025)

Just as Latin music found a larger audience in the US during the 2010s, African music has begun to find chart success in the US more recently. Burna Boy might illustrate the pinnacle of that success. The Nigerian singer-songwriter has charted two albums in the top 40, with 2022’s Love; Damini making it all the way to number 14. His latest album, No Sign of Weakness, did not perform as well.

No Sign of Weakness is an easy album to listen to. The beats go down smooth. The vocals are digestible. But the album struggles because of collaborations that seem forced, the strangest of which is a duet with Mick Jagger.

I know you’re not going to turn The Rolling Stones legend down if he wants to be on your album, but you’d hope he’d at least disappear into Burna Boy’s style a bit more. Much of the track is backed by the West African rhythms that power most of the album, but then Mick Jagger’s hook is sung over a more standard rock beat. The whole thing is very confused.

#5 The Boy Named If by Elvis Costello and the Imposters (2022)

Coming a week after listening to Shel Silverstein’s similarly named Boy Named Sue and Other Country Songs, this Elvis Costello effort felt fitting for our chart-bottoming theme. The Boy Named If is Costello at his most rocking, The Imposters cooking through old-time rock and roll beats (e.g., “The Death of Magic Thinking”) and punkier fare (e.g., “Farewell, OK”). The record only seems to fall flat when the Englishman is trying to be a bit too clever with his lyrics.

#4 Waterloo to Anywhere by Dirty Pretty Things (2006)

Before we talk about Dirty Pretty Things, we have to talk about The Libertines. Like Kula Shaker, The Libertines were a British rock band that emerged in the 1990s whose influences mostly lay in the distant past. Unlike Kula Shaker’s obsession with psychedelia, The Libertines took cues from the garage rock movement. When they broke up in 2004, guitarist Carl Barât put together a new group: Dirty Pretty Things.

Dirty Pretty Things—like Kula Shaker and The Libertines—are another example of a group that was much more popular in the UK than the US. But their lack of success in the US didn’t mean that the style of music they were making wasn’t popular in the US. It was. And it was being made to great effect by The Strokes. So, if you like the rough-and-tumble rock and rock and roll of The Strokes, then you will probably enjoy Dirty Pretty Things debut, Waterloo to Anywhere.

#3 A Possible Projection of the Future / Childhood’s End by Al Kooper (1972)

The title and release date of this record make it feel like you are about to listen to some prog-based, Genesis-adjacent concept record. As someone who doesn’t like prog-based, Genesis-adjacent concept records, I’m happy to report that that wasn’t the case.

Al Kooper originally conceived A Possible Projection of the Future / Childhood’s End as a concept-like record with a storyline. So, my gut reaction to the title was on point. But he abandoned that and largely crafted a soulful album with covers scattered throughout (e.g., “The Man in Me,” “The Monkey Time,” “Swept for You Baby”).

I loved this record. I loved every inch of it. From the decrepit album cover to the playful blues of “Let Your Love Shine” and the jaunty intensity of “Love Trap,” this was my favorite album of the week. So, why is it ranked at number three? Ken hated it! He said Mr. Kooper was lucky his album made it to number 200.

#2 Roger Miller 1970 by Roger Miller (1970)

If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you’ll know that in each Thursday edition, I recommend a new song and an old song. In the first edition in October 2022, the new song I recommended was “Moss” by LKFFCT. The old song was “Engine Engine #9” by Roger Miller.

I’m glad that I kicked off this newsletter of with a Roger Miller recommendation. I love Roger Miller. He’s the rare artist whose voice could capture the simplicity of a nursery rhyme (e.g., “Chug-a-Lug”) or the heart-aching rhythms of the modern world (e.g., “Where Have All the Average People Gone”). After listening to his 1970 release, I love him all the same.

Roger Miller 1970 is a hodgepodge of covers, many of which were written by Dennis Linde. And you get the same balance of playfulness (e.g., “The Tom Green County Fair”) and depth (e.g., “Jody and the Kid”) that makes the best Roger Miller songs so memorable.

#1 Tell the Truth by Otis Redding (1970)

When I was growing up, the one artist gone too soon that I wished I could bring back was Jimi Hendrix. I would have loved to see what the guitar god could have done with drum machines and synthesizers and hip-hop beats. But in my age, I think I’d bring back someone different: Otis Redding.

Otis Redding died tragically in a plane crash at 26-years-old. His sole chart-topper, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” didn’t get to number one until after his death. Other posthumous releases have trickled out since then. Tell the Truth is one of those releases.

Largely culled from sessions in 1967, Tell the Truth captures Redding was at the top of his powers. What’s most astounding about this record is not just how good it sounds, but how in control Redding is.

It’s hard to overstate how much energy pours out of Otis Redding’s voice. For your average singer, that energy would quickly devolve into chaos. But Otis Redding is a military general, his band falling in line behind his commanding presence.