Music Biz Features

Six weeks ago, a group of music executives threw seven Gen Z influencers in a mansion on a 40-acre estate for a live competition that would pit the fledgling artists and songwriters against each other, with the promise of a path to fame and fortune for a sole winner. What …

The moment Richard Coble has been anticipating will arrive in just over a month. At Dallas’ Globe Life Field on July 24th, the tour manager will gather together the members of Green Day from a warm-up room and walk them to the stage for the first show of their long-delayed …

This story appears in Rolling Stone‘s 2021 Future of Music issue, a special project delving into the next era of the multibillion-dollar hitmaking business. Read the other stories here. People wrote off Lil Nas X as a fluke. His self-released country-and-rap medley “Old Town Road” had pulled in blockbuster streams …

This story appears in Rolling Stone‘s 2021 Future of Music issue, a special project delving into the next era of the multibillion-dollar hitmaking business. Read the other stories here. When Doris Muñoz met Cuco, one of the first things she told him was that his art was pure and should …

How do you release new music videos at a time when making them is dangerous? One art form has the answer to the industry’s quarantine woes: animation. For some artists who rushed to animated videos during Covid-19, avatars and CGI may prove a brief fad — but for Dreambear, a …

“TikTok is the most important thing in music right now.” Statements like that, delivered recently by one industry executive, have become fairly common in the last year. TikTok users have been the jet fuel powering a slew of recent hits, shoving Doja Cat into the deep end of mainstream pop’s …

On June 9th, Cumulus Media read out on its 424 radio stations a list of black victims of police brutality, including Breona Taylor, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and George Floyd. Cumulus’s tribute was supposed to air only on its urban-formatted stations. But it switched gears at the last minute and …

In the last couple of months, United Talent Agency (UTA),which represents artists including Post Malone and Chance the Rapper, has closed 165 brand partnership dealsfor its artists. Co-heads of UTA’s music brand partnerships division Alisann Blood and Toni Wallace say they expect to close twice as many deals as in …

Producers and topliners have always had a particular dynamic: The producer usually sits behind the mixing board in the recording studio, acting as the song’s Svengali, while the topliner in the booth — the singer-songwriter who is responsible for layering lyrics and melodies over the beat — follows their lead. …

I t was the beginning of March when Don Smiley started planning for the worst. As the chief executive of Milwaukee’s Summerfest — which calls itself “the world’s largest music festival,” attracting 900,000 people over 11 days each year — Smiley was confronting a tidal wave of reports about the …