Donald Trump Has Pardoned a Bunch of Musicians: Link Drop

A round-up of the most important stories in music right now

If you enjoy this newsletter, consider ordering a copy of my debut book, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. It’s a data-driven history of popular music covering 1958 to 2025.

Today’s newsletter is link drop, meaning our monthly series for paid subscribers where I discuss art, news, and stories that have gotten me thinking and laughing in the last 30 days. This month, we talk about the Ringo Starr, Timbaland, Lawrence Welk, and so much more.

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Presidential Pardons

I was recently looking at this list of people that Donald Trump has pardoned and noticed there was a shockingly large number of musicians on the list. I’m not going to bother researching this, but I would bet this is the largest number of musicians ever pardoned by a president:

• Youngboy Never Broke Again

• Lil Wayne

• Michael “Harry-O” Harris [Co-Founder of Death Row Records]

• Kodak Black

Musical Trends to Keep an Eye On

“Spotify says support for external payments on iOS has already boosted subscriptions” by Sarah Perez (TechCrunch)

For years, Apple forced mobile applications to use their payment infrastructure within their apps. At the same time, Apple took 30% of all transaction paid for within all apps. Thus, if you paid $10 for a subscription within an app, Apple got $3. That is an insanely large percentage, especially when you compare it to the 1% to 3% that most online payment providers, like Stripe, take.

The good news is that Apple recently lost a lawsuit, which has forced them to allow apps to link to external payment providers. After the ruling, Spotify said they noticed a surge in subscriptions. More subscriptions → more money for artists.

“Timbaland’s New Artist Is Young, Photogenic — and Not Human” by Brian Hiatt (Rolling Stone)

Timbaland, the genius producer behind scores of hits, has been set on torching his legacy. In the last year, Timbaland has been partnering with Suno, the popular app that allows users to generate songs with artificial intelligence. Recently, he announced a new “artist” named TaTa that is completely AI-generated. I am not anti-AI by any means, but what is the point of this when there are thousands of hungry, young artists trying to make a career? Shame on you, Timbaland!

Timbaland’s new artist “TaTa”

“‘A Billion Streams and No Fans’: Inside a $10 Million AI Music Fraud Case” by Kate Knibbs (Wired)

Beyond Timbaland’s ill-advised forays into the AI-music space, what else is going on in this world? A whole lot of fraud. Wired recently reported a multimillion dollar scheme uncovered by the FBI where a man was collecting royalties generated by millions of streams by armies of bots on AI-generated songs:

Then, last September, [musician and businessman Mike Smith] turned up at the heart of another music streaming incident, this one rather epic. The FBI arrested him and charged him in the first AI streaming fraud case in the United States. The government claims that between 2017 and 2024, Smith made over $10 million in royalties by using bot armies to continuously play AI-generated tracks on streaming platforms.

Musical History to Write Home About

I recently came across this old video of the classic “Ghost Riders in the Sky” being performed on the Lawrence Welk Show in 1961. The video is awesome in its own right, especially when you see one of the percussionists going absolutely nuts. But I think it’s an important artifact for how dramatically the look of rock music and musicians changed in the 20th century.

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Ringo Starr often gets ragged as the least important member of The Beatles. But when you listen to this demo of “Money” from before Starr joined the band and Pete Best was on the drums, you can hear how vital he really was to the Fab Four’s sound. To quote a tweet that I saw about this video: “Ringo did the stuff that doesn’t show up on the stat sheet.”

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Why does actor/director Ron Howard appear in Jamie Foxx’s music video for his 2008 hit “Blame It (On the Alcohol)”?

News from Inside the Music World

“Universal, Warner and Sony Are Negotiating AI Licensing Rights for Music” by Anne Steele (Wall Street Journal)