I didn’t finish an essay last week because I was slammed at work. Sorry. I know that nobody is requiring—or necessarily expecting—me to write something every single week. This is the pressure I put on myself out of my gratitude for even having any audience for my writing. I don’t say it enough: thank you for your support, encouragement, and conversation.

I felt like I was in the eye of a storm this week because in addition to the usual deal flow, Zoom calls, and whatnot, I had a brand new country music client breaking out on TikTok come to Nashville for the first time for label, publisher, and management meetings. That’s usually fun, but also time consuming and stressful. And it happened during CMA Fest week, which is one of the busiest weeks in the country music business (second only perhaps to CMA Award week in the fall).

The official CMA Fest is Thursday through Sunday; however, just like the awards, it’s becoming a full week of festival-related stuff. It was a strategic move to bring my client to town during the festival, because everyone’s here this week. Everyone’s out day and night, and everyone’s talking about what’s next, what’s coming up. It’s hard to spin up a buzz; but if something catches on it’ll spread like wildfire.

Industry buzz is always an aspect of CMA Fest—whether or not the act even plays any shows. If the CMA Awards are about celebrating success, the festival is about what’s next—whether you’re a label, manager, digital marketer, radio programmer, or just a fan. After all, they used to call it “Fan Fair”—while it’s a big week for the industry, it’s supposed to be about giving the fans access to their favorite artists, and a chance to become fans of new acts.

The bigger stages are specifically for the fans, featuring a range of established artists from journeymen to superstars. The biggest stage—the nightly bill in 70,000 capacity Nissan Stadium, where the Titans play—is a celebration of the biggest acts of the moment. The smaller stages, free of charge and scattered around near Lower Broadway, are for the hopefuls, aspirants, the up-and-comers. Occasionally you see older former stars building it back, but mostly it’s a lot of developing artists you’ve never heard of.

When I say “developing artist,” I mean an artist that isn’t yet a headliner but strives to be one. It might mean a high school kid singing into his phone, or a signed act with a big marketing budget opening first of three on an arena bill. Often the artists playing the smaller stages have management, an agent, a label, a publisher, and for that matter a lawyer. I’m not out there stalking the stages, because by the time an act is on the festival at all, they’ve likely already retained legal counsel. If they’re smart and well advised, getting a lawyer is one of the first business moves and artist will make.

When I first moved to Nashville fifteen years ago and for my first five or six years, I didn’t really ever attend CMA Fest. I wanted to. My firm always had clients playing, often on the stadium bill. I did some work for those clients, but I never felt especially connected to the business teams. My own clientele was far more likely to play Bonnaroo, which used to directly conflict with CMA Fest. We had to choose one or the other. I went to Bonnaroo for the entire weekend because that’s where my clients were far more likely to play, and because we’d turned it into a family trip year after year. My kids had no interest in country music or CMA Fest. Bonnaroo had their favorite pop and hip-hop acts.1

I remember the first time I went to the daytime stages was 2017, because I was working with a client who had a lunchtime showcase on a small stage in front of the Hilton. My family was headed back to The Farm, as they say, for our second Bonnaroo day. The CMA showcase was early in the day, so I had time to first head downtown and get back for our scheduled departure. I invited my daughters Anna (14) and Sophie (9) to come with me. I promised them ice cream, which is the real reason they agreed to join.

The client was Morgan Wallen, then a newly signed young artist with a label, publisher, and management deals in place. I didn’t get to know Morgan all that well in our brief time working on the deals, but we met a few times and spoke on the phone numerous times to discuss his project. He wanted to understand his business, which is always a good sign for a new artist. I found him to be polite, ambitious, charismatic and super talented.

I also thought of Morgan as substantially different from other country artists I worked with at the time, such as Sturgill Simpson. Although Sturgill was beginning to post mainstream numbers for ticket and record sales, he wasn’t part of the same industry in my view. He was completely outside the Music Row machine—later that fall Sturgill held his famous free speech protest outside the Bridgestone Arena during the CMA Awards. He wasn’t playing the game, he clearly had his own agenda and he seemed willing to burn it all to the ground. Morgan seemed—at least at the time—ready, willing, and able to play the game. I’ll admit I was pleasantly surprised when Morgan covered Jason Isbell’s “Cover Me Up” in 2019. I’d have been shocked if he covered that song in 2017, but by 2019 it felt like that gap might be closing a little.

I believed Morgan had a real shot, and it was my biggest goal at the time to work with developing acts that would break big. That Saturday he’d recently signed to the brand new, well funded and resourced label Big Loud, an offshoot of a publisher and production company whose biggest success was Florida Georgia Line. They’d released his first official single to radio—which wasn’t exactly my taste at the time, but it sounded like a hit to my ear. The Way I Talk stalled around #30 on the Billboard country airplay chart. His success wasn’t assured, and there wasn’t much outside evidence yet that he’d get there.

I wasn’t counting heads, but I’d guess there were about 20 people there to see him on purpose. He had some family, some business people, possibly a few actual fans. He had so few songs with his band that he filled out his half-hour set with a ‘90s alternative rock medley. It wasn’t great, but you could see the effort and the potential. I was pulling for him and I wanted to make sure he knew I came to see him play.2

After the set, I explained to Anna and Sophie that I was there for work and that I wanted to go say hello. I encouraged them to come along for the brief visit, but they chose to sit and wait for their promised ice cream cone. They weren’t interested in country music, and it never crossed either of their minds that they may someday want a record of their meeting. I didn’t give it much thought, either. It wasn’t for them, and naturally I didn’t take it personally.

Artist development is all about trying to get people to give a shit. Like the vast majority of CMA Fest attendees, my kids didn’t give a shit—yet. I couldn’t expect them to share my excitement and passion for an artist that hadn’t been validated by the media. They had their own taste, which was informed by their own sources. It wasn’t their thing.

Today, Sophie is head over heels for Morgan’s music. Like so many suburban teenagers, she pivoted from mainstream pop and rap to Country a few years later. Now she considers the evening bill of CMA Fest her birthright, a celebration of her favorite music with her best friends. Notably, Sophie hasn’t bugged me for Bonnaroo tickets this year. She’s apparently moved on.

Sophie still brings that day up from time to time, asking me how I could have failed so spectacularly to do the very minimum of getting a photo of her with Morgan to show her friends. Believe me, I offered and cajoled. I’m sure Morgan would’ve been gracious. Nevertheless, my daughters were like most of the music fans attending the festival: excited about their favorite acts (which happened to be at Bonnaroo), and completely indifferent to anything in the “developing” category. It wasn’t the only time they refused to pose for a photo with a future superstar. Even though I’ve worked in artist development for decades, “dad’s work people” and “dad’s weird friends” were never of any particular interest—even if I reminded them they might someday become famous. And, to be fair, the vast majority of my clients didn’t become superstars. Several, however, did become household names; and naturally those are the ones they focus on.

Although my kids have a better understanding of what I do today than they did in 2017, I don’t think it would be much different today. They wouldn’t take my word for it if I told them a client was going to be huge, but I doubt that’s how I described Morgan. I wasn’t at all certain that Morgan would even get his shot. In another era, he might not have broken through at all. Conventional Music Row wisdom at the time was that a newly signed artist got two shots at radio before the label would cut their losses. I was very aware of this benchmark—that’s why I probably wouldn’t have sold it as “get your picture with the next superstar of country music.”

I remember discussing it with then-manager and label head Seth England, who assured me they had a plan and they were in it for the long-haul. He told me about their next single, “Up Down,” which would feature FGL. Seth predicted it would go to number one, as it did in 2018. I was reassured by his confidence, but I didn’t necessarily believe what he was telling me.

Morgan’s career is a good illustration of how the country business has changed in a variety of ways. The reason labels would cut bait after two singles is radio promotion is incredibly expensive. Launching a new artist at country radio was a six-figure spend without exception, and working a song to number one could cost $1,000,000. An act with two failed singles would put the label half a million in the hole, and there would have to be something unusual going on for a label to keep digging a hole like that.

England recently sat for an interview with Kristin Robinson on Billboard’s “On The Record” podcast. He discussed Big Loud’s early embrace of on-demand streaming, and his attention to an emerging Spotify data story on Morgan. His confidence wasn’t just belief in Morgan’s talent or magical thinking—it was based on consumption data. I don’t mean to suggest major labels weren’t looking at streaming data in 2017, but radio was still driving the conversation. Big Loud and a few other data-focused companies recognized they could see the future in data, and that streaming and social media were the key to reaching a younger, more diverse audience. Morgan is one of the early beneficiaries of massive streaming success leading to radio, ticket sales, merchandise, and all the usual trappings of success.

Today, country music is bigger than ever, and it’s a much bigger tent. Developing acts such as the client I had in town this week have far more difficult (but in many ways more exciting) choices to make, because “indie” options are both viable and a source of leverage for anyone with a real audience. Labels have fundamentally changed, as their parent companies have developed their independent distribution with the knowledge that not every act that can sign a record deal will end up signing.

Artist with label opportunities have to navigate the question of whether a label deal is a fair tradeoff. They give up back-end value, autonomy, and possibly ownership for investment and resources. The difference recently is that the resources are mostly available on the open market if you now where to look, and there’s plenty of available capital outside the record companies once there’s a little momentum.

A defining characteristic of all the artists I work with is having confidence in the value and integrity of their own creative work. When I’m participating in these conversations for my client, I considering their goals, but also their creative sensitivities. Plenty of people in both the independent and major label sectors have demonstrated to me that they are real artist advocates who will work hard to protect the artist’s vision. That’s the key, but as everyone knows if you sign with a major, people might not be around for long. That’s why management choices are at least as important.

Many of the biggest acts at this year’s festival—the main stage acts—broke out on social media before they had any radio support. That’s absolutely true for Ella Langley, the biggest breakout this year. It’s also true for The Red Clay Strays, which I’ve watched develop up close as their legal rep for the past few years. The Strays recently walked back a pull quote from a recent Billboard feature stating that radio is dead. Bassist Andy Bishop was saying something more nuanced, which is that they didn’t need radio to reach a massive audience. There’s an active argument about the importance of radio, but there’s no denying that it’s no longer the only gateway to success.

My client will have options, and the choices he makes probably won’t determine whether or not he’s successful. If an artist is in the same mindset as Morgan was in 2017, they’ll sign a deal if they can so that they have the most powerful resources and investment in blowing up a huge career. If they’re many of my clients circa 2017, they’ll stay indie as long as possible, which is likely forever. Most are in the middle, open to success but anxious about losing creative agency.

I’ve worked more closely with Big Loud in recent years, and I’ll admit that I didn’t really understand what set them apart back then. I rate Big Loud at least as favorably as certain Nashville major labels because they are future-focused, and they’re doing everything they can to see around corners. Maybe it’s because some of the architects of the company came from the rock business, specifically Nickelback. Love them or hate them, you can’t deny that Nickelback built an incredible business on real artist development.

Label decisions these days are about access to resources. We’re also betting on the future, because we don’t know how the business will change in coming years. I hope in ten years there’s still a reason to have CMA Fest. I hope the country genre continues to grow and evolved, and I hope that people still want a chance to meet their heroes. If there is, I know there will be a buzz factory and a business community looking for the next one.

[Author’s note: I got super busy this week with work and CMA Fest, and trying to write about CMA Fest during CMA Fest. I’ll finish and publish that one early next week. In the meantime, since I didn’t publish last week, I’m publishing another chapter of my Blake Babies story without the paywall. In the story, things are coming together just as I’m realizing our scene friends The Pixies are a way better band than we’ll ever be. I had so many feelings, ranging from competitive jealousy to sheer delight in a new obsession, a new favorite band]

Later that spring of ‘87, Marc Alghini got Blake Babies our own gig playing Metrowave. Things were finally starting to happen. Metrowave had been a goal of mine since I became a listener. Good bands played the show—popular bands. It felt great to be validated like that.

Hate Your Friends wasn’t out yet, but we’d all worn out our dubbed cassette of the master. It was my favorite album at the time, and I couldn’t believe my luck to get to be in the band. Freda and Juliana weren’t so enthusiastic about my new gig.

We covered “Second Chance” off Hate Your Friends on Metrowave. Instead of the real lyrics “There’s no such thing as a second chance, no such thing as another try,” Juliana sang “There’s no such thing as a Blake Baby drumming for The Lemonheads.” She’d put me on notice. Eventually, I’d have to make a choice.

Summer of 1987 was a magical time. We weren’t making any money or getting famous, but I could sense a new local music scene emerging around us. The Lemonheads guys became my gang, along with their extended clan of friends from Commonwealth School and Harvard. I spent a lot of time at Ben and Evan’s apartment, a unit inside his family’s home. Evan slept in the hall closet and covered his walls with pictures of Charles Manson looking evil. I went for beach weekends at the beach houses of Juliana, Evan, Ben, and Jesse. Such affluence felt exotic for middle class kids from Indiana like Freda and me.

The Lemonheads had more and better shows than Blake Babies, but I never had a conflict. If I made any money at all playing shows, I still had to work full time jobs around Harvard Square. Keeping a job became increasingly difficult as we started playing out of town. Lemonheads did a three-week tour in Jesse’s mother’s station wagon. Jesse connected with a Cleveland band called The Off Beats who let us open for them and use their equipment.

There wasn’t much reason for us to tour—we didn’t really have an audience. We toured because we could; because we wanted to travel and play every night. We slept on floors and ate fast food for most meals. We slept on floors and barely scraped by. It’s the most fun I’d ever had, and I couldn’t believe my luck. I knew I’d have to choose between The Lemonheads and Blake Babies soon, and I wasn’t looking forward to it. I believed Blake Babies had a better shot at success—especially since Ben and Jesse were Harvard students with real prospects. Evan was my closest friend at the time, constantly at the Condo Pad. He had doubts about the future of The Lemonheads, and a growing interest in Blake Babies’ ambition. It was hard to miss the magnetism and charisma of Evan and Juliana together. Whether or not they could make it as a couple, I could easily picture them emerging as underground rock stars.

I dropped out of school at the end of the semester. Mind heart and mind were in the scene, not my studies. I didn’t mind working jobs, but I despised the growing pressure of school.

Seth’s departure from the band wasn’t dramatic—he simply packed up his car and returned to Bloomington without so much as a conversation. Marc Alghini, who had been a Condo Pad regular for months, moved into Seth’s “room,” set off from the main room by a makeshift partition. Marc brought his massive record collection, which is how we learned about a bunch of incredible new bands such as Dinosaur and Yo La Tengo. I spent hours sitting cross-legged in front of the rows of vinyl records, picking out things I’d never heard. Marc had great taste and music knowledge—and so many promotional albums he’d gotten through the station.

Blake Babies gathered up our recordings, plus a few live recordings T.W. made at a show we played with The Lemonheads at Adams House, the Harvard party dorm where Jesse lived, to make our debut album. We hastily designed a cover for Nicely Nicely, named after a character from Guys and Dolls that Juliana’s dad turned into an expression of encouragement.

For some reason I can’t remember, we ended up cutting Radiator from the album order. It’s a song we played many times at our shows, one of the better songs in our repertoire. Seemingly, the Recording hasn’t survived. I think we left it off because we wanted to save it for the next project. In a sense we left Radiator behind just as we moved on from the community of hard-partying Berklee outcasts in favor of our Lemonheads crowd and a growing number of Bloomington punk scene kids coming out to see what we had going.

Juliana used to make these elaborate doodles in her notebooks as she stressed and obsessed about anything and everything. When we needed an album cover she repurposed one of her doodles for the front cover. The cover image is a reflection of Juliana’s troubled mind. For the back cover we cut up some snapshots and posted them on a piece of paper. To our surprised, Juliana chose a slightly risqué shot with her flannel pajama top unbuttoned. She hand-wrote the song titles and credits for the back cover. Everything was handmade, because we had no idea how to typeset or design a cover image. We didn’t ask anyone for help, we just did it—sort of like how we did everything.

We borrowed more money from Juliana’s parents for the pressing. After a couple months, thirty-four boxes of vinyl records arrived. The boxes filled the entire front room of the Condo Pad. We had an album—albums—but no idea what to do with them.

First, we dropped a few off at local stores on consignment, then we gave copies to all the local radio stations. One box down, thirty-three to go.

We decided on vinyl records over compact discs or cassettes because vinyl is the format we knew college radio stations would play. CDs existed in 1987, but they were prohibitively expensive and not all college stations had CD players. Cassettes were cheap to make and easy to sell, but impossible to get played on the radio. That’s why we invested in what was already seen as a dying medium during the rise of digital media. Rumors of the demise of vinyl at the time are exaggerated. We chose to press a thousand for the cheaper per-unit price without much thought as to how all those records would find homes.

With Seth out of the picture, we needed a new bassist. The solution was simple—as it would turn out, too simple. My high school friend Andrew Mayer transferred from a junior college near Bloomington to Berklee and moved into the big bedroom of the Condo Pad with me while Freda moved out and got her own place. Andrew was an easy-going guy and a good guitarist from the Bloomington hardcore scene. Andrew got a bass and amp and jumped in with both feet. Problem solved…for the moment anyway.

By late 1987, we’d emerged from the audition night purgatory to weekend opening slots for established local acts who could pack The Rat and T.T.’s such as O Positive and The Lyres. One Saturday we’d just finished our set when a stocky, slightly older guy in a wool ballcap and glasses approached us with a friendly smile. “Hey,” he said. “I’m Gary Smith, I love your music!”

Gary told us that he co-owned a studio in town called Fort Apache and he’d love to have us by to show us around. I’d read about “The Fort” in the local arts paper The Boston Phoenix. The 16-track studio in Roxbury—named Fort Apache because of the allegedly dangerous, mostly black neighborhood—had become the go-to studio for all the cool underground bands in town.

Gary helped us load our gear and took us by the brand new 24-track Fort Apache facility in North Cambridge. The space was clean and new but still homey and stylish, and packed full of vintage gear—studio equipment, guitars, amps, keyboards—everything we’d need to make an amazing record. The tidy space smelled like fresh ground coffee beans and strong weed—representing the drugs of choice to complement the fridge stocked with the beer of the moment: Rolling Rock. It was absolute paradise.

Gary asked a lot of questions about our ambitions, what we wanted to do with the album, new songs, and what sort of career we wanted. Career? Our goals included headlining a local club and getting rid of the 900 vinyl records taking up all the space in our apartment…and global pop stardom.

Gary had so much confidence—we’d only just met but he talked about our future like our stardom was imminent. Nobody had ever talked to us like that. He sent us home with tapes of his most recent productions, demo cassettes by Throwing Muses and a new band called The Pixies he’d recorded at the Roxbury studio.

Like an idiot, I’d already made up my mind I hated The Pixies before I’d even heard a note of their music. We’d been up for a Saturday support slot at The Rat, opening for a popular local band called Nova Mob. After we’d confirmed the slot Bonnie, the booker for The Rat, called to say there’d been a mix up and they’d given the gig to The Pixies. It sounds like such a small setback, but small disappointments felt devastating in those frustrating times inching towards prominence. What did they have that we didn’t? As it turns out, quite a bit.

Around the same time, the local fanzine The Noise (the one that gave us a bad review) wrote a rave review of The Pixies along with a feature. I seethed with jealousy. Who are these clowns, and why are they getting all this attention?

I listened to the Throwing Muses demo right away, but I waited a week before cracking open the Pixies tape. I reminded myself I was supposed to listen as a sort of audition for Gary as our producer—as if such a thing was even necessary. On first listen I realized their songs were strong and fully realized, confident. Then I listened again…and again. By the tenth listen they’d become my favorite band. I couldn’t believe how great it was, it didn’t make sense.

It was such a mix of emotions, because in a way I felt more jealous than ever—they’d accomplished everything we set out to do. At the same time, I was a huge music fan, always seeking inspiration from records. I realized how lucky we were to be in a scene producing genius young bands like The Pixies, Throwing Muses, and The Lemonheads. We were part of something bubbling up that could explode into a real cultural moment—a dream come true. And now we had Gary.

The Pixies demo had seventeen songs, each representing another wild creative swing. They were clearly excellent musicians capable of playing a range of styles, but they somehow managed to be so genuinely weird while writing songs that sound like massive hit singles in some alternate universe radio format. I wore my tape out on the various shitty cassette players in my life. When the tape finally gave out, I asked Gary for another copy.

Gary told me they’d been signed to the artsy British label 4AD records, which had also recently signed Throwing Muses. The two bands shared management. Eight of the songs would be on a debut EP. The track list surprised me because it didn’t include some of my favorites, like Here Comes Your Man, Subbacultcha, Broken Face, and a cover of Lady in the Radiator Song from one of my favorite outsider movies, Eraserhead—which one of my high school bands used to cover. It all felt connected. It seemed like The Pixies were pretty much exactly the same as us, but somehow on a much more evolved planet musically. It continued to both motivate and frustrate us throughout our time in Boston.

When I asked Gary why they left some of the best songs off the Come On Pilgrim EP, he explained that they were saving potential hit songs for their album. Hit songs? Could they be, like, actual, real world hits? In a time of Bon Jovi and Madonna’s dominance, it seemed far-fetched that bands like ours could have actual hits. Gary, however, didn’t accept that music was either underground or mainstream.

Gary believed music like ours would soon become the mainstream. Sometimes after our late-night sessions Gary would crank up True Blue by Madonna and we’d all dance around the big room at the Fort. He wanted to remind us of our goal. Soon, he said, our music would be as high-profile and impactful as Madonna. Did we believe him? I can’t say. But we loved it when he talked that way.

Gary completely agreed that Here Comes Your Man was “the hit,” which validated my sense of what makes a great pop song. I kept coming back to that song, which inspired me to swing for the fences in my own songwriting. If they could do it, we could do it. I wanted to write hits. I obsessed about writing hits.

Gary got us on a bill at The Rat opening for Throwing Muses and The Pixies in late 1987. We became friendly with both bands, and it felt amazing when Kristin Hersch from Throwing Muses paid us a compliment from stage. Since both bands were building an audience in the United Kingdom, a journalist from Melody Maker reviewed the show. The review made passing mention of our set and included a couple quotes from our drunk drummer about smoking cigarettes.

We were all finally old enough to legally enter the clubs we’d been already been playing and sneaking into for a couple years. And now we’d been favorably mentioned alongside our favorite bands in a prestigious UK music weekly! We were on our way—what could go wrong?

We went into the BF/VF studio, just a block from The Radiator on Boylston Street. I didn’t have any real studio experience at all. I’d made four-track demos and learned some basic microphone placement skills out of a textbook, but I hadn’t had a chance to record a note in a professional studio.

T.W. took the producer job seriously, giving direction on everything from guitar sound to vocal phrasing. Despite occasional tension over creative choices, T.W. maintained a calm disposition and a good sense of humor.

As expected, I loved everything about the recording experience. I’ve always felt comfortable in creative spaces—especially when I’m in the creative process.

We recorded a few songs that came out sounding reasonably good through the control room speakers, though they sounded strange and thin when we dubbed a cassette and listened on our boombox at the Condo Pad. Tracy wasn’t satisfied with the equipment at the BF/VF and wanted to upgrade to a better studio to complete the sessions.

He got us a deal at a high-end professional studio decorated like a fern bar—called Newbury Sound—which drastically reduced their rate if we were willing to record between midnight and 6:00 a.m. I remember seeing a pre-fame cover of the New Kids on the Block album and thinking we were in the wrong place.

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Every Memorial Day for the past decade I play a big lakefront concert in my huge neighborhood with a highly skilled and seasoned cover band of mostly former pro musicians. Our neighborhood in Franklin has over 2,500 homes—as you’d guess, there are some very talented singers and pickers. This year I played guitar on about a dozen songs and this year I sang one, Suffragette City by David Bowie.

Most of our material is either classic rock, 90s alternative, or dance party funk to close out the night. What’s typically absent from our set is anything remotely country. That is, until this year. A young singer asked to sing “Choosin’ Texas” by Ella Langley.

I wanted to play guitar on “Choosin’ Texas” for a couple reasons. For one, it has a really cool recurring lick played by two electric guitars in harmony in a call-and-response with a plaintive pedal steel. I knew it would be fun to play. But also I just happen to love the song. Langley has a traditional sound. Most of her songs—including “Choosin’ Texas”—would have worked just fine in the 1970s. It’s simple, direct storytelling, a heartbreak song of sorts, that doesn’t have the hallmarks of a modern country crossover hit. But it is, in fact, a massive crossover hit.

Langley is arguably the biggest breakout country star of the 2020s. Like other contenders for that title—Lainey Wilson, Shaboozey, Jelly Roll, perhaps Zach Top—Langley doesn’t fit within an acceptable category of breakout country stars from the previous era. Her breakout success is in spite of—rather than because of—the Music Row promotion machine.

I first paid attention to Langley’s music with her irresistible breakout duet with Riley Green, “you look like you love me.” I found her sultry Alabama drawl irresistible, and I went straight down the rabbit hole—she’s a brilliant singer and writer. It’s an example a classic or even vintage song that broke through in the most modern way—as a TikTok sound. Just a few years ago, back when it mattered, county radio wouldn’t have prioritized a song that unapologetically traditional. But with country music, when it all gets too glitzy and showbiz, tradition always finds a way—even when the industry tries to move on.

The same week when “you look like you love me” is in its tenth week as the number one song on the Hot 100, Luke Bryan is going viral for all the wrong reasons. His new single, Fish Hunt Golf Drink, is a throwback to the bro country era. It’s a song that would have gone unnoticed a decade ago, but now it’s an object of ridicule. It’s a reminder of how far we’ve come from the nadir of the early 2010s, when I first arrived in Nashville.

As I’ve found my way deeper into the country business over the years, I’ve become a fan of more mainstream country music. That isn’t because my tastes have changed—it’s because the music is consistently better. In my opinion we’re in a golden age for country. It’s enormously popular, with countless pop singers crossing over to country—or at least trying to.

Back in the early 2010s, I had a sense that country was about to turn back to traditional sounds. That’s because going back to basics is a feature of country since the industry began in the early 20th Century. The industry pushes the music further and further into pop and away from tradition until the audience rejects all the glitz and glam in favor of traditional storytelling, fiddle and pedal steel, and traditional Southern voices.

When I first heard Sturgill Simpson’s debut album High Top Mountain as a demo and joined his business team back in 2012, I believed he would be the traditional voice that would crack the mainstream. He had the songs, the voice, and the charisma to become a legend, and I assumed the gatekeepers of music row would agree. They didn’t.

At my Music Row law firm, I had a daily audience of Music Row gatekeepers. I passed out a lot of Sturgill demos in 2012 into 2013. I asked people to listen and tell me what they thought. For the few people who listened, I didn’t get much encouragement. Just like with The Civil Wars a couple years earlier, the consensus was that it wasn’t really country music at all. Country music wasn’t a genre—it was a radio format. If they wouldn’t play it on the radio, you had to call it something else. Americana? Heritage Country? Anything but Country—that meant something else.

Then Sturgill found his audience, just as Chris Stapleton found an even bigger audience the following year. Not through radio airplay but by touring, word of mouth, late night television, YouTube. Then social media gave artists a way to build a fanbase directly, and the role of radio declined. Now most artists break out on social media, and often it isn’t the acts that would have found their way when radio ruled. For example, now we have huge stars who are women, people of color, or just beautiful weirdos who wouldn’t have made it past the previous gatekeepers. Today Sierra Ferrell would be the subject of a label feeding frenzy. In 2019, we signed her to Rounder without any competition.

It’s important to note that Langley, our biggest breakout in recent memory, isn’t really even a product of Music Row. After years of regional touring, brick-by-brick artist development, and years on the songwriter round circuit, she broke out on social media and signed to Columbia Records, a West Coast label that’s geographically and structurally off The Row. Unlike her Columbia label mate Megan Maroney, Langley isn’t also signed to Sony Nashville. Her radio promo partner has been Triple Tigers, an independent alternative to the mainstream promo machine.

Coastal labels signing and developing country talent is controversial on The Row. Recently a former major label president issued a recent press release for a new venture that compared outsider labels’ “coastal legitimizing” of country to coal companies strip mining Appalachian land. While I agree that major labels haven’t always been great to—or for—creative musicians, this is awkward coming from a longtime Music Row major label executive.

As a longtime Music Row lawyer, I disagree with this view. Coastal labels have shown up in Nashville in a big way, and they’ve seriously disrupted the dealmaking culture in a way that has been a huge benefit to artists. They’ve brought competition that has forced Music Row labels to offer better deal terms in general. It’s a symptom of country’s popularity, but it’s also been a positive influence on how artists are treated by the industry.

My experience since moving to Nashville is that the Music Row machinery seeks to exercise enormous creative control over the artist development process to shape singers into hitmakers. That goal used to be radio hits. Now artists break on social media and develop an audience before the Nashville star machine has an opportunity to exercise control. The audience loves the artist they’ve discovered and would push back if the sound substantially changed. Labels and managers know better than to second guess what’s already working—therefore development is happening on the artist’s, not the label’s, terms.

The coal analogy is especially poignant because there is a modern day equivalent to coal companies taking the tops off of mountains, and that’s the tech industry, particularly generative AI. It isn’t surprising that the consensus reaction to Luke Bryan’s recent embarrassment is that it was probably written by AI. That’s becoming the go-to when commercial product feels overly processed or manufactured. “That’s probably AI” is the equivalent of “that’s processed mainstream dreck” in a prior era.

The miscalculations of the powers-that-be about the audience’s appetite for AI product have created a media environment where authenticity is paramount. I can’t prove it, but I believe that “Choosin’ Texas” wouldn’t have broken out of the old Music Row model. But as some mainstream executives experiment with implementing AI as a means to reclaim market dominance, traditional sounds and authentic voices have a clear lane ahead, with a diminished country radio following rather than leading.

For the general public, “country” has always been a style, a vibe, a tradition, not a format. Now that the processed sounds of the prior era can be achieved with a simple prompt, audiences want to hear songs and voices that can be reproduced in a live setting by living humans. Who knows where the rest of the industry is headed but for now, don’t bet against tradition.

Note: I’ve been working on a new music business piece that I’ll publish next week - my week has been very demanding with work, our daughter graduating high school, and visiting family. In the meantime, I’m publishing ONE MORE free chapter to my Blake Babies memoir - in which we’re finally getting the band up and running. Lots more to follow!

CHAPTER 4

In some ways Juliana was just like us—her musical taste, ambition, and desire to change her life and have an impact on music culture. In other ways we were wildly different. Freda and I grew up free-range in a college town, exploring everything a local music scene had to offer. Juliana grew up isolated, rejecting the party-down culture of her affluent suburban South Shore community of Duxbury, as evidenced in her early songs such as Swill and the Cocaine Sluts and AKA Deluxebury.

Juliana was extremely private and deeply shy. She felt strong contempt for people who partied and had casual sex—a judgmental, oddly Puritan worldview. Freda and I came from a hedonistic culture without many rules or boundaries. These inherent differences led to all sorts of conflicts right from the start. Nevertheless, in the early days, we were all friends and grateful to have found each other.

Freda extended her chaotic lost weekend when she arrived in Boston, drinking heavily and causing all sorts of chaos—and grief for me. I more or less moved into The Radiator as it became a nightly party house for the freakiest Berklee students. When Anne and Tom got together, Tom moved in as well. Nobody had any privacy. Tensions naturally followed.

Just as soon as we had our core lineup for Blake Babies, I had a breakdown of sorts, and I hastily decided to bail for the summer and get a handle on myself and my future. I’d become distracted from school and emotionally spent after yet another breakup with Freda—one that felt like a final breaking point.

I spent the summer of 1986 working long shifts in a grim job at a medical supply factory, alternately daydreaming about my future with the band and stressing about my return to Boston. I further complicated things by meeting someone new in Indiana, which made me consider bailing on Boston completely.

Freda was persuasive and apologetic, however, and she gradually convinced me to make amends and return to Berklee. The promise of Blake Babies was too compelling, everything I’d worked for. Unable or perhaps unwilling to break our old co-dependent patterns, we went right back to our cycle of getting back together, breaking up again, and causing chaos everywhere we went.

Juliana’s mother purchased a renovated condominium on Symphony Road as an investment, and we became her tenants. The flat was a ten-minute walk to Berklee, close to Northeastern University and the Christian Science Center. We dubbed the place the “condo pad.” It was a beautiful third-floor walkup with a big bay window in the front room and two bedrooms—a small room Juliana claimed and a larger room that Freda and I shared. I loved the exposed brick and polished wood. We were still feral, however—we quickly filled the place with found furniture, heaps of dirty laundry, and piles of unwashed dishes and food containers in the kitchen.

We felt we needed a fourth member to complete the Blake Babies lineup. Juliana owned an electric guitar and amp, but she still learning to play the electric guitar. With the simple backbone of Freda’s rock-solid but bare-bones drumming and Juliana’s basic rhythm guitar, we needed my guitar to orchestrate the sound and define the arrangements. That meant we needed to find a bassist. We also needed a fourth roommate at the Condo Pad to be able to afford the place. Freda suggested we call our friend Seth in Bloomington from Medium Cool to see if he’d come to Boston and join our band and be our roommate.

I can’t remember Seth’s exact circumstances. I think he dropped out of IU after a year like so many faculty kids who grew up in Bloomington and made a mess of things. He didn’t have any practical reason to stick around Bloomington, though he didn’t have a big desire to leave either. He drove to Boston for a visit and ended up sticking around.

Seth was a smart, funny, extroverted goofball know-it-all. He had enormous self-confidence and very specific musical taste that didn’t completely align with the rest of us. He was in many ways the opposite of Juliana. Medium Cool came together from a shared love of The Velvet Underground and The Modern Lovers. Seth, Freda, and I still had that in common, but it wasn’t where Juliana came from. Seth annoyed Juliana from the first moment they met.

Above all, Seth loved an obscure Indiana band called The Gizmos that played a style of proto-Americana rock influenced by The Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly. To him, The Gizmos did it right and wrote the rock ‘n’ roll rulebook.

Freda and I loved The Gizmos, but Seth considered their songs and records to be the ultimate source of all inspiration. The irony is that The Gizmos never had any real success beyond minor cult status. Juliana felt that way about The Replacements and R.E.M., but Seth didn’t even like those bands. Seth sneered at our interest in these popular new bands that he considered mainstream sellouts.

Seth developed an unfortunate crush on Juliana and made a fool of himself trying to flirt. He assumed if he constantly turned on the charm, eventually she’d cave. Juliana was immediately put off and eventually repulsed by Seth’s goofy attention-seeking. I sensed it wasn’t a fit right away, but we saw it through for lack of a better option.

We salvaged some curtains and created a false bedroom for Seth in the front room. In retrospect, he was a good sport about it all. It’s a wonder he didn’t leave after a week.

I’d been working with Juliana to come up with guitar arrangements for her songs as I taught her the songs Freda and I had worked up—Rain, Radiator, Her, and Goodbye. Juliana and I had our first co-written song she titled Wipe It Up, her first of many songs complaining about people who pissed her off—which in the case of Wipe It Up I think included Freda and me as shitty roommates (“threw my letter on the floor” references a time when Freda tossed a fan-letter reply she’d received from Paul Westerberg of the Replacements on the floor).

Juliana tended to develop obsessive crushes on guys who may or may not have been physically present in her life. During the first phase her love interest was Westerberg. For example, an early song she wrote is titled “A Sweet Burger LP.” That’s an anagram for Paul Westerberg. “You say it’s unfruitful to sit here and daydream. But I’m sure no one I know is half as cool as you seem.” That seemed to be her primary relationship at the time: a fantasy romance with the singer of a band from Minnesota.

Eventually, like many love interests to follow, fantasy Paul let Juliana down, and that’s the subject of our song “Lament.” The unforgivable betrayal was making a record she didn’t like as much as the previous records. Many years after that, they became real-life friends and bandmates. I wonder how 19-year-old Juliana would have felt to know she’d eventually connect with Paul in real life. Maybe she expected it to happen.

We practiced in the Berklee ensemble rooms. Juliana and I took turns waiting in line in the morning to sign up for a room later in the day. We stored our gear in a locker near the ensemble rooms. Sessions only lasted two hours. We often covered the small window in the door because Berklee students often peeked through the glass, openly laughing at our amateurish efforts. We stood out for all the wrong reasons.

Early practices were awkward and uncomfortable. Juliana knew exactly what she wanted on her songs, but she didn’t have the language to communicate her ideas. We arranged the songs by throwing out ideas and gauging Juliana’s reaction. Seth would write all the notes of each chord on a whiteboard and play random notes until he found something that worked. We fought all the time as the songs slowly took shape.

We had a friend from the Radiator days named T.W. Li, a super-serious yet occasional goofball half- Asian, half-Irish jazz guitarist who became an important friend and mentor to us. He was just a couple years ahead at Berklee, but he had a world-wise demeanor and a quick wit.

T.W. lived in the best apartment in the shittiest building in the Back Bay—same building as The Radiator with an epic bay window over the seedy corner of Hemenway and Haviland Streets. T.W. shared his two-bedroom flat with a long-haired audio engineering student named Tracy Chisholm.

Freda and I hung out at T.W.’s apartment constantly. We imagined he was our Andy Warhol and his flat was The Factory. We’d bring a bottle of cheap wine or malt liquor and sit around eating peanut butter sandwiches, listening to weird songs, and watching T.W.’s weird video art collection. We all loved weird art—the weirder, the better. Richard Kern movies, G.G. Allin videos, brutal industrial art with body manipulation and robot wars.

It was a time of extremes for underground art and music, and we all embraced the weirdness wherever we could find it. Juliana rarely hung out at T.W.’s place with us and didn’t share our interest in weirdness for weirdness’ sake, but she trusted T.W. and welcomed him into our creative process. He didn’t know much more than we did about making records, but we enjoyed being around someone so confident.

T.W. was our first real fan. He loved our music, which was wildly different from the experimental jazz and art music he favored. He liked us as people more than the music, but he believed in our potential. He thought of the music as an extension of a culture we were creating, a culture he felt part of. He thought we could become great, and that felt amazing and empowering. Nobody had ever expressed such confidence in our work. Certainly not ourselves!

T.W. came to some early practices, where he sat and listened with knitted brow behind his horn-rimmed glasses. Occasionally he’d make a musical suggestion, which we welcomed. He wanted to bring out something special in our music. In a way, T.W. was our very first fan.

T.W. figured out how we could get in the studio for free, which was another selling point for him being our producer. He was a member of the Boston Film and Video Foundation (BFVF). T.W. had a good reputation as a video artist, taking part in a series of art shows and installations. He became friendly enough with the managers of the BFVF that they let him record in their bare-bones 8-track recording studio late at night for free—or perhaps just under the radar. We paid for a few reels of tape, that’s it. We couldn’t afford anything else. Tracy, always competing for studio time, jumped at the chance to engineer. After playing together for less than a month, we went into the studio to begin to record our debut album.

I’d pulled my grades and test scores up from bleak prospects. Nevertheless, I wasn’t in the mix for elite colleges like a lot of my friends or my much more academic-focused older brother Jake. I had other friends who dropped out entirely with zero prospects, which put me somewhere in the middle on the scale of hometown screw-ups. My parents knew I wasn’t quite a lost cause, but they couldn’t begin to picture the future I had in mind. They had the good sense to recognize I wasn’t like those other kids. Accordingly, they encouraged my creativity in every way. They had the wisdom to know I had a chance to figure it out—they sure weren’t going to figure it out for me.

I knew about all the American cities with the most legendary local punk scenes. That’s how I picked potential schools. That’s all I needed—a music scene anchored in hardcore punk evolving into something new, places like Los Angeles, Austin, Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, New York, Washington, D.C… or Boston.

I ended up choosing Berklee College of Music because it wasn’t really college at all, or so I thought. I assumed it would be easier and looser than real college, and that it would leave me more time and resources to figure out how to get my band going. That plan didn’t work out so well, but I did magically end up in exactly the right city at the right time to launch a band. If I’d landed in another city, I’d have had a different band. But I believe I made the right choice.

Freda and I had an immature, dysfunctional relationship. We used to break up and get back together constantly. We would date other people during the time off, then we’d make up. It became a never-ending cycle…until eventually it just ended along with the band. Eventually it became an extension of the band, the band an extension of the relationship. We continued to play music together even after we’d declared our relationship a failure, but by then most of what we did came from habit. Breaking up took a long time.

Our parents saw all the dysfunction, but they knew better than to seriously intervene. My mom let Freda come along to drop me off at the Berklee dorms. We didn’t say much when Freda left with my mom; we just held each other for a long time and cried. If Freda could get it together to move to Boston, then we’d do it together. If not, I’d be on my own. I wasn’t going back—not until I’d done something.

We might continue as a couple. If not, I’d do it on my own. I urgently wished she’d return, but Freda didn’t have the money to join me. She was eighteen and dead broke, crashing in her friend Anne’s dorm room. She could attend Indiana University for free, which is the only thing that made sense.

When she left, I felt completely alone and a little bit terrified. I didn’t know anyone in Boston. I lived with constant anxiety, wondering what Freda was doing, whether she’d found someone new.

After a few days of making new friends on my hall and attending classes, labs, and lessons, I quickly realized Berklee wouldn’t be that easy after all. I wasn’t prepared for the rigor of the curriculum or the musical proficiency of the students—including some of the best musicians in the world. When it came to sight reading, music theory, and even technical guitar ability, I was near the bottom—in way over my head. I found my work ethic in a hurry.

First semester I locked in, and ended up making decent grades. I practiced guitar many hours every day until I developed thick callouses, focusing as much on songwriting as my lessons. By the end of the semester, I’d made friends with the weirdest outsiders on my hall. Before the holidays I had enough original material to make a 4-track demo.

I had three songs I considered good enough to share: Hanging Out, inspired by Lou Reed’s solo albums, one I can’t remember the title that I basically ripped off of R.E.M., and then the best of the lot, a mid-tempo song titled Rain that was inspired by Husker Du. In each instance, the music came easy; but I struggled to write lyrics I liked. I didn’t know what to say or how to say it, so I did my best. I wrote in the style of famous bands because it gave me some structure, a way to get started. If I could imitate well enough then I’d find my way to something original.

I came home for the holidays with my demo to play for Freda. She liked what she heard—actual coherent songs—even good songs! We’d seen each other twice during the semester—once when she visited for a week in October, and once when I came home for the R.E.M. concert in November. By the holidays, we’d rekindled our romance and hatched a plan for Freda to move to Boston later in the winter to start our band.

I met a skinny guy with glasses named Dan Wolcott on my dorm floor. Dan came from Michigan. He shared my obsession with Lou and The Velvets. He had a wry sense of humor and a keen eye for the absurd. We went to see The Minutemen together at The Rat. I asked him if he wanted to try a band and he said sure, why not.

Dan had a few cool songs and wanted “to play out,” as the Berklee kids used to say. Dan’s songs were solidly-written, but they were mostly these jokey sort of novelty songs. One I remember was called “Blues Man.” He sang “I’m a blues man, my baby left me…that’s why I’m a blues man…so I went for a walk.” He had another one that was a love song from Eva Braun to Hitler. They were really funny, but I’ll admit to some trepidation about being in a funny band. I loved clever lyricists like Paul Westerberg and Evan Dando. But I didn’t really have an appetite for “funny.”

Freda arrived in town in late January—on Super Bowl Sunday—blackout drunk with her best friend Anne, also wasted, who had decided on a whim to follow Freda to Boston and learn bass. I don’t think Anne had any musical background or training—certainly not on guitar.

Dan and I gave Anne some lessons on the fly until she could cover the most basic chord changes. There we were, Dan and I: two proficient guitar students at an elite music school starting a band with two beginner musicians. Attractive beginners, but beginners nonetheless. It’s what I’d signed up for. Dan, not so much.

Freda and Anne rented a studio apartment on the corner of Hemenway and Haviland streets a couple blocks from Berklee, a corner that always had a prostitute and a crack dealer on duty. We called the place “The Radiator” because it had an old-fashioned steam heat radiator that constantly hissed during the winter. It was a roach and rat-infested shithole on one of the worst blocks in Boston. The Radiator quickly became a hangout for my hard-partying Berklee friends as well as a rehearsal space for the band.

The four of us in the group—Freda, Anne, Dan, and I—shared an interest in the Beat writers, Kerouac, Burroughs, and of course Allen Ginsberg. One night in early 1986 we all went to the Sanders Theater on the Harvard campus for a Ginsberg poetry reading. The set ended up being more of a concert than a reading as Ginsberg accompanied himself on the harmonium and sang a bunch of filthy songs, such as Hard On Blues (“blues is like a hard on…it comes in your mouth”).

Ginsberg spoke intensely and passionately about the works of William Blake and about Buddhism, more of our shared interests. He was about 60 at the time—unimaginably ancient and wise beyond anything our young minds could fathom. We loved him so much we decided to hang around after and try to pay our respects.

When we walked across the sturdy wooden stage and claimed our place in line to the impromptu meet and greet with all these older Harvard Square beatnik types, Anne had the idea to ask him to name our new band. When our turn came, Anne approached and said, “We’ve just started a band, we’d love it if you’d give us the honor of naming our band.” He glanced at each of us and without missing a beat he said, “You’re Blake Babies.”

We had our name, but that’s the only real progress we made in those early months. Dan lost patience and it all came to a head one night when Anne and Dan had some sort of a verbal fight, or maybe just a misunderstanding. I can’t remember what they had to fight about, but it ended with Anne storming out of the Radiator in tears. Freda told Dan and me we had to go after her, so we walked down the block and ate a slice of pizza. Dan said, “So…I guess that’s it for the band?” “Yes,” I agreed. “I think we’ve taken this as far as it’s meant to go.” Just like that, our quartet became a duo.

All wasn’t a loss for Anne. She fell in love with my Berklee roommate Tom, a wildly creative experimental musician from Pittsburgh. They’ve been happily married and making art in San Francisco for nearly 40 years.

Freda and I considered remaining a duo, though there wasn’t much precedent for an electric guitar and drums duo. We didn’t have the example of The White Stripes, and I didn’t really want to be the lead singer. I wanted to write songs and play guitar while someone else fronted the band.

We pushed on with our writing, including a song titled “Radiator” that told the story of the scene that increasingly gathered in the apartment at night to drink, smoke, and hang out. I wrote the rockabilly-influenced tune while Freda wrote the lyrics, referencing among other things the free Hare Krishna dinners we enjoyed every Sunday to supplement Freda’s diet of stolen dorm food, and Freda’s scorn for all the potheads who sat around smoking weed all day on the floor of the Radiator (which had lots of instruments but no furniture—just foam rubber pads on the floor for sleeping).1

By late spring we decided that we needed to find our new singer and try to move things forward for Blake Babies. Freda had her eye on this pretty brunette we’d noticed in the halls of Berklee who dressed the part—black leather motorcycle jacket, hair pulled back in a ponytail—cute but seemingly very shy, moving quickly through the halls to avoid human contact. Compelling.

In those days you could take an informed guess as to someone’s musical taste based on their fashion. Berklee had metal guys, bebop purists, jazz-funk virtuosos (mostly from Japan), and goth kids. We didn’t fit any of those categories. We loved all sorts of music, but we favored underground rock. We recognized the sartorial statement by this girl as consistent with ours and correctly guessed that we had similar taste in music. Freda became increasingly confident this girl was our singer, and that we needed to meet her and talk to her about the band immediately.

One evening after several rounds at a nearby bar that served underage Berklee students, Freda and I were in the lobby with my friend Stevie Blacke, a talented multi-instrumentalist and one of the hippy regulars at the Radiator’s nightly stoner jam sessions. Suddenly our mystery girl walked into the lobby carrying a pineapple, making for the elevators. Freda subtly gestured towards the elevators like the commander of a Special Forces unit.

Freda had stalked mystery girl for weeks, so that she knew which room she lived in. It was a rare solo on the 8^th floor, also my floor. She led us to the door and knocked. The girl answered and said hello. “Hi,” Freda said. “I’m Freda and this is John and Stevie. John and I are starting a band, and we think you might be our singer.” Mystery Girl smiled and quietly said, “Hi, I’m Juliana.” She invited us into her small dorm room.

Juliana had pictures neatly taped to the walls around her bed of some of our favorite bands—our shared Big Three of R.E.M., X, and The Replacements. Those bands form the basis of our early sound. We talked about music and Juliana said she studied piano and voice but she was learning to play guitar and write songs. Perfect. After a half-hour of small talk we invited Juliana back to The Radiator to play some songs together.

It all happened that easily, because Juliana had her eye on us as well. She thought we looked cool too, but her deep shyness prevented her from making the first move. I wouldn’t have either; but Freda wasn’t shy at all—especially if she had a few drinks. Freda’s energy and momentum had everything to do with our formation and early success. She had a vision and confidence to get things moving.

That night I played a few of my songs that Juliana seemed to enjoy. Then she played some of her songs on her Yamaha acoustic guitar and sang so quietly we had to strain to hear the words. I could tell her songs were good and carefully crafted. She’d spent a lot of time figuring out how to do what she does without much outside influence beyond her main musical sources—her underground heroes plus The Police and Olivia Newton-John. In a sense, she arrived fully formed. By the end of the evening, I joined in on guitar and Freda played drums. Just like that, we had a band.

Read more

I’ll paywall this after the first one, including a second chapter later today once I finish my chores. For anyone I’ve promised to comp a subscription, I’m going to figure out how to do that today.

Chapter 1

I’ve read enough books by musicians of my generation to know my origin story is typical. Perhaps the one unusual trait is I had wonderful parents who provided my brother Jake and me with everything we needed. Nevertheless, for a time in my early childhood our house became a nightly war zone as my parents’ marriage fell apart.

I found it deeply unsettling without any context for the near-nightly battles. When they had “the talk” with my brother Jake and me when we were eight and ten, I felt nothing but relief. I didn’t know about separation or divorce. I just knew they couldn’t live together anymore. Or perhaps I couldn’t live there anymore if things didn’t change.

Neither my parents nor my brother had any musical ability. What they lacked in musical talent, however, they made up for by appreciating and valuing music. My dad had a killer record collection that he let me pillage from a young age. I wore out all the Beatles and Stones albums. I listened to everything—probably 500 albums—in search of the weirdest music. Trout Mask Replica won the contest, with the bizarre music matching the insane cover image of a man with a fish face. I listened to that album for clues about the stranger sides of life. I wanted to understand why someone would choose to make such a record. Were they trying to be weird, or did it come naturally?

Music played constantly in the house, everything from Dylan and the folkies to Delta blues to modern jazz to classical to my favorite, rock n’ roll. Most of the music faded into the background and seeped into my subconscious. Other music lit me up like a Christmas tree and had me hauling certain albums to my room to play on my Mickey Mouse console record player with the needle at the tip of Mickey’s finger.

Starting around age four, I listened to certain Beatles songs obsessively on repeat. I favored the songs I like the least as an adult—Yellow Submarine, The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill, basically the kid-friendly fare. I watched the Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour after The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. My parents bought me the albums Wichita Lineman and Hey, Little One. The songs on those albums haunted my young musical brain. In a different way, they still haunt me.

By third grade my parents split up and my dad, an English professor at nearby Indiana University, moved into an apartment in a building with mostly students. I spent a lot of time listening to AM radio, where I developed a taste for sugar-sweet pop confections. I found I could fall just as hard for Sometimes When We Touch by Dan Hill as Rock and Roll All Nite by Kiss.

My dad got really into California country rock, which really caught my ear. The first album I bought with my own money was Eagles Greatest Hits. The second album was Kiss Alive. Those became my two favorite albums by my two favorite bands.

Kiss and Eagles got me through fourth grade, and then the hard rock floodgates opened. I made some dirtbag friends and then it was one musical obsession after another: Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, ZZ Top, AC/DC, Pink Floyd, Rush, Black Sabbath…on and on.

By the time Freda and I met in tenth grade I’d discovered hardcore punk. I first heard The Ramones and The Sex Pistols from my brother Jake around eighth grade. Like a mind virus, punk quickly took over my life. By 15, I had a “punk” haircut (really a mullet) and an army jacket with the logos of my favorite bands: Dead Kennedys, Black Flag, Sex Pistols, Circle Jerks, and probably a few I’d never even heard before.

My hometown of Bloomington, Indiana, has two high schools, North and South. I knew of Freda, but we’d never met. I clipped an article she wrote in her school newspaper on the punk scene and pinned it to my wall. She interviewed some of the punks at North who were semi-legendary in their extreme punk fashion and their willingness to get beaten up by the country kids who despised punks.

Freda and I met at a video arcade in downtown Bloomington. As I played my favorite driving game, Top Fuel, I could see the reflections of two pretty girls standing behind me in the glass. I could see them smiling and whispering to each other. I crashed on purpose and turned to see two pretty, punkish girls about my age.

When I didn’t recognize them, Freda said, “Are you Jake Strohm?” They’d met my older brother the previous weekend and they took me for him. “No,” I said. “I’m John Strohm, Jake’s brother.”

She introduced herself and her friend Dee, who I realized had briefly been in my fifth-grade class. “Do you want to go with us up to Discount Den and look at records?” From that instant, we became each other’s world.

Remember the Baldwin Fun Machine organ? In the late ’70s, I took music lessons at Smith Holden Music in Bloomington, Indiana. I liked to get there a little early so I could play with the Fun Machine on the showroom floor. It had all these cool synth sounds plus programmed beats in styles such as rhumba, Bossa Nova, and four-on-the-floor disco.

The Fun Machine wasn’t meant for professional musicians; it was meant for fun! It was an extension of a console entertainment system, like a television or stereo. In the old days people gathered around the household piano to share songs. Now they could do it with a oompah rhythm. Fun for the whole family!

Suno CEO Mikey Shulman’s vision for the future of AI music predicts Suno’s domination on two fronts: professionals and hobbyists. It’s an expansive vision, but his ambition to exponentially grow the industry won’t occur by simply disrupting professional music creation. The growth will happen—as Shulman describes in his recent Billboard interview—when AI music creation becomes a pastime.

My take is that Shulman isn’t committed to music for music’s sake; he’s primarily a technologist. If you don’t believe me, listen to the aforementioned Billboard On the Record interview. He’s passionate when he talks about disruption and when he defends the legality of Suno. But at the end when he’s asked about his own musical interests, he’s out of his depth. It’s awkward to the point of discomfort. The way he talks about the business of music, he could just as easily be talking about crypto or prediction markets. When he talks about music, he might as well be reading a script.

That isn’t unique in our business. The more lucrative the industry becomes, the more non-music people infiltrate music. I’ve met enough venture capitalists in the music space to know it’s happening more than ever. Music is an asset class, a collection of revenue streams. Revenue streams also attract fraudsters—Suno is a streaming fraudster’s wet dream.

I’ve spent enough time on the r/SunoAI to know that its most enthusiastic adopters aren’t professionals or committed hobbyists—it’s people who believe they have a good shot to become professional musicians, producers, or songwriters (whether or not they contribute anything original) on the app.

I’ve had a couple strange interactions recently where someone who seems sane and rational will tell me they plan to make a career change and pivot into professional music production or songwriting. I ask them about their work, and they send me a dropbox of Suno tracks of various styles and genres. It’s so disorienting for about half a second.

I believe it’s a symptom of the head-spinning disorientation in rapid AI adoption when people convince themselves that because they can easily produce decent quality outputs, they can make music for a living. It’s like they’re in love with their AI creations, wildly overestimating the quality of the tracks based on their own emotional connection with the music. Any creative musician understands the emotional space. We fall in love with our own work, and are often snatched back to reality by an indifferent public reception.

I haven’t had a deep discussion with any of these mostly well-meaning folks about how they hear or think about their tracks, but I can venture a guess. I know from vast experience that exceptionally creative people are wired differently—likely defined as neurodivergence—which leads to obsessive focus on creation. They create because we have to. For truly creative people, making music isn’t a pastime; it’s an obsession. With or without proper equipment, with or without financial incentives, creative people will create. The lucky ones who work at it long enough might even make some money.

Suno is, of course, a creative space. People find their creativity there, and they enjoy creating just like they did on the Fun Machine. That’s fine. Or, rather, it would be fine if Suno weren’t extracting value from the millions of tracks it’s illegally trained on. If prompting AI tracks turned out to be incredibly fun for millions of musical hobbyists, I’d be fine with that. I want people to be creative and have fun.

However, if it’s purely a hobby, there would be no reason to distribute Suno-generated tracks on commercial platforms like Spotify. The point isn’t the creative process that produces the end product; it’s the end product itself. Although it might involve some degree of creativity, prompting an AI model isn’t the same as a creative process from scratch. Most of the creative effort is already done via training the model on existing works. The outputs are ordinary by design. Suno is incapable of creative innovation because it’s a derivative, predictive model built on existing works. It produces average, uninspired tracks that are flooding streaming platforms at incredible scale and finding their way into our discovery algorithms and social feeds.

One of AI music’s talking points is that most people can’t tell the difference between AI music and non-AI music. It came up today in the most recent Billboard On the Record podcast (where we also learned that although there are 50,000 AI tracks uploaded every day, it only makes up 0.5% of Apple Music’s consumption).

I believe the entire topic is a red herring—simply distinguishing AI from human creation misses the point. Although I’m getting better at immediately recognizing Suno outputs, I’m not at all confident I can tell the difference between a Suno track and an ordinary track created by a human with musical instruments, microphones, plug-ins, and a DAW. With the availability of tools such as auto-tune and quantizing, many DIY tracks already sound like they were created by robots. We strive to make recordings perfect because we can, but a perfect recording is a soulless outcome that defeats the purpose of making music. AI tracks suck because they are derivative by design, uninspired—like the vast majority of the vast ocean of tracks on Spotify.

Somehow in this massive cluster of mediocrity, great music still finds its way.

The important test isn’t whether or not it’s AI, it’s whether or not it’s exceptional. I remember a time not so long ago when you’d pay special attention to a well-recorded, high fidelity demo, because the good sound quality meant someone cared about it and spent some money. But now, thanks to Suno, good sounding recordings are the baseline. Studio quality sound has become common enough to have lost its intrinsic value.

If I hear a track that sounds like a record, I don’t assume it’s any good. In fact, I assume it’s slop or DIY crap unless the sound finds its way into my nervous system and raises the hairs on the back of my neck. Like most obsessive music fans, I know it when I hear it. If the output is truly great, and if the model is fairly trained, I don’t care that it’s AI. If AI tools help truly creative people with their craft, I’m fine with that as well. I just don’t think Suno is designed to produce greatness. It’s designed for “good enough.” Good enough for a hobby, good enough for streaming fraud. If abominations like Breaking Rust or The Velvet Sundown are an indication, not nearly good or interesting enough to live up to the hype that Suno outputs will somehow compete with the best human creations.

I’ve been a full-time “professional” musician, though these days I identify as a hobbyist. One thing I agree with Shulman about is that more people should embrace music as a hobby. I am wired to be creative—creativity is a priority for me. I am a product of a culture—namely the 80s and 90s indie/DIY underground—that deemphasized technical proficiency in favor of creative exploration.

The first musical community outside to embrace my band Blake Babies was the Pacific Northwest pop underground exemplified by Beat Happening and other K Records artists—the scene that inspired Kurt Cobain. That scene cooled on us when our records became more professional-sounding—instrumental and vocal proficiency was irrelevant or frowned upon. Originality and creativity were celebrated.

There’s a common theme between that version of the DIY underground that anyone can do it—but the “it” in each case is a polar opposite. In the pop underground, anyone can embrace their creativity to produce something truly original and personal—even if it’s primitive or simply out of tune. With Suno, anyone can produce commercial quality music product without a whiff of innovation or creativity.

I would love to live in a world where a billion people embrace their creativity and make music or other art that expresses their unique human experience without expectation of financial gain. I do not, however, want anything to do with a billion people producing mediocre, unoriginal slop that they hope might make them a few bucks.

Maybe someday generative AI tools will truly enhance creativity and expand our capabilities for true expression at scale. Until then, learn an instrument. Write a song. Make up a story. Support your favorite artists because real artists bring joy and meaning to our lives.

I’m disappointed, but I realized it might not come together. I will probably repurpose my part for a larger project in the future; but I decided I’m going to share my draft in chapters on Substack over the next few months. The piece is a 20,000 word narrative history of my band Blake Babies, starting from the time I met Freda in 10th grade to the end of the band in 1991.

I’ve been putting up occasional paywalled pieces to give value and show appreciation to the paid subscribers. I’m going to put these behind the paywall because I want to keep it low-key so that I can reuse parts of the work in a later project.

I have a standing offer to anyone who wants to read my paywalled work but can’t find it in their budget. Send me a note and I will put you on the list to get access. I’ve discussed why I decided to do a paid tier, but I understand some people are stretched thin. I can very much relate.

Look for the first chapter next Sunday.

Over many years of knowing and working with many artist managers, I feel I am entitled to my opinions. When done well, it’s an all-consuming job. In my view, managers are the primary agents of change. Record companies have been forced to change their model because managers figured out they could do much of the job themselves. If the artist makes more money, so does the manager. If the manager is willing and able to competently be the record company, then the manager deserves to make more money.

It isn’t just about the money. The manager must fully understand the world an artist inhabits as well as the one they are creating. They free the artist up to be creative and have a life because they absorb the most annoying aspects of success in music. A skilled manager can take a hard line approach in negotiation in a way that doesn’t tarnish the artist’s reputation.

I’ve had the good fortune as a lawyer to work with some truly great managers. Great managers are easy to work with, because they understand how to delegate. I know what’s expected of me, because the manager is leading the team. They know what to send to the lawyer, and when. They understand the value I bring beyond my legal skills. They have the humility to let people do their job.

I saw another side of management as a label president. I had projects with a few bad managers. I learned that having a bad manager can wreck a project.

Bad managers come in many varieties but with two basic types: passively bad, and actively bad. Passively bad managers don’t really do much of anything. Actively bad managers create chaos, whether through incompetence or on purpose.

Great managers lead. Just like great CEOs and great politicians. Real leadership always includes empathy and humility. It’s about understanding how to motivate people around shared goals. It’s about having a vision and communicating the vision to a variety of other people. When outstanding talent aligns with great management, it almost always works.

The problem is most managers aren’t great. Some managers are truly bad. But how do you know what you’re getting?

It’s especially difficult to navigate because literally anyone can be an artist manager. As a lawyer, I had to go to law school, pass the bar, and maintain my law license. In order to maintain my law license, I must abide by a set of strict rules governing my professional conduct. If I break the rules, I could lose my license.

Managers don’t need to be licensed. They’re generally considered fiduciaries, meaning they owe some special duties to their clients, including confidentiality and fair dealing. However, it’s much more difficult to enforce because you don’t have a Board of Professional Responsibility - you have the courts. You can file a bar complaint against a lawyer for the cost of postage. Suing a manager costs tens of thousands.

Management contracts and compensation have been structured the same for decades. Managers insist upon a term of years, with “sunset” provisions that entitle them to earnings even after the end of the term. They commission fifteen to twenty percent of gross earnings1 right off the top—not just before costs but before the artist gets paid.

I don’t have any problem with a great, well-resourced manager responsible for creating enormous value taking a commission off the top. The commission usually covers a senior and day-to-day manager in addition to the resources of the management company, which may include services such as radio promotion and digital marketing.

People are often surprised to learn that many top-tier managers of popular acts don’t have a contract with their artist. They’re equally surprised to know that if I represent the artist, I don’t really care if there’s a contract. As long as there’s a written understanding about the money, then the artist is better off without being under a term of years or sunset clause. The best artist/manager relationships are founded on trust. If the parties trust one another, that’s a beautiful thing.

I don’t mean to suggest that managers shouldn’t have contracts. Managers who are heavily invested in acts deserve some protection. It isn’t reasonable to expect that all managers would simply trust their artists and vice versa. It’s earned on both sides. But it is why, in many cases, I encourage artists to insist on a trial period to get a feel for a manager. Six months, better yet a year—it’s so valuable to test the business relationship.

An emerging model that avoids both long-term contracts and commissions is the management consultant. Management at the highest level is vision and execution, but at the lower, “day-to-day” level, it’s mostly about service. I’ve noticed a trend in managers charging consultant fees to furnish management services without a term of years.

Sounds like a good solution, right? For a small number of artists, it is. I keep a short list of skilled managers who will provide basic services month-to-month for a reasonable fee. For necessary services such as advancing and coordinating tours, day-to-day project management of independent releases for a working artist, this can be an ideal short-term solution. This assumes the artist is earning enough to afford the fee, and that the fee is reasonably correlated to a commission.

I can illustrate the problem with the consultant model with a hypothetical based on a real situation. A very early stage artist with little to no revenue but some online traction is approached by a seasoned manager who used to manage a superstar act. The consultant DMs the artist’s social media and offers to help build the artist’s audience on a month-to-month consultancy that costs $5,000 a month, plus an additional $5,000 to hire out marketing.

Assuming marketing services would be bundled into a traditional management commission, that means the manager is charging a broke artist the equivalent of a commission for a mid-level touring artist. The only way the artist could afford to spend that much is if they are somehow independently wealthy, which means the scam is trying to find a wealthy family willing to bankroll a long shot (at best) campaign. This is the hopes and dreams business, a scam as old as the industry.

Finding a good fit manager comes down to assessing value. My general advice is to hold off on the long term contract until a manager has demonstrated their value. If it’s a “friendager,” someone trying to leverage a friendly relationship to break into management, they can defer commissions until there’s real money. If a more seasoned manager wants to get involved with a baby act, you can test how passionate they are by insisting on working together for a period of time before there’s a term.

It’s almost always messy to unwind a bad management situation unless it’s clear that there’s no long term obligation. You can get that in writing, just as you can define a manager’s compensation without committing to a term of years. For a baby artist it’s worth taking the time to get it right, because having the right manager is often the key to success.

If an unproven manager pushes a long-term contract as “industry standard,” you can use my line—there is no industry standard. Everything is negotiable with leverage. If the manager sees an opportunity with an artist, then the artist has leverage. The leverage shifts to the manager once the manger has shown the artist that they are a value-add even when they’re taking a percentage off the top.

The bands I played in in the ‘80s—The Lemonheads and Blake Babies—started touring long before we could expect to make any money or even play to a significant audience. We didn’t really care about making money; it wasn’t about that. We wanted to get out there, meet some other bands, check out their scenes, and do whatever we could to move things along.

We did two very early Lemonheads summer tours between school terms, ‘87 and ‘88. Then after the ‘88 run, the band kind of broke up. Jesse Peretz and Ben Deily each had a full plate at Harvard, and Evan Dando wanted to make more music. He wanted to stay on the road and crack the code to do music for a living. For a brief period, as detailed in his recent memoir, he decided Blake Babies had a better shot. Juliana was still nominally attending Berklee (she graduated as scheduled), Freda and I had dropped out of college.

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I had a perfect music festival day last weekend at Stagecoach in Indio, CA. I go to a lot of festivals—usually with professional objectives, but I always hope it will be one to remember. Of course, it rarely is.

Heather and I were out there together, and as great as Friday was, Saturday was a bust. We didn’t really care about any of the acts except the headliner, Lainey Wilson, who we both love. We had to leave before her set when they evacuated the site due to dangerously high winds. The desert is a mystery.

Friday was the magical day, and I didn’t even hear that much music. I took time to see a few things—a few songs from Lyle Lovett, Larkin Poe, and Counting Crows. Mostly I went for the album launch of The Red Clay Strays, who put on a truly magical show as the second stage headliner. I wrote about The Strays a couple years ago—it’s wild how much has changed. Friday was the announcement of their new album and first arena tour. Their set carried the day and made it one of my favorite festival days of all time.

Festivals have been a huge part of my experience for over thirty years, but I’ve never gone to one without some sort of work objective. In the 90s I played the European summer festival circuit a few times with The Lemonheads—literally work. In the 2000s I went to SXSW every spring to grow my law practice. In the 2010s as a label head I went to festivals to scout talent. In recent years, it’s mostly a chance to spend quality time with professional contacts and clients.

Some festival days are instantly forgettable, others (like Saturday in Indio) are a total mess, with weather events and crowd issues. Once in a while, however, I’ll have a day like last Friday that’s just perfect. I can think of a few more memorable days from different phases of my life, including the day my mom let her guard down and accidentally showed me a side of life that became my obsession.

The Police Picnic, August 23, 1981

My best friend from childhood, Eric, lived down the road from me in Bloomington. We were inseparable. Eric moved away the summer after second grade. I was devastated. For a few years I’d travel to Rochester, New York, to visit Eric.

The last time I went to Rochester was in August, 1981, along with my mom and my older brother Jake. I was fourteen and I was deep into music, playing drums, trying to start a band. Eric and I had grown apart didn’t have all that much in common anymore, but it was a cordial visit.

One afternoon I was driving around Rochester with my brother and my mom when we heard a commercial on the radio for a show near Toronto featuring The Police and a bunch of other bands. Jake was just getting into The Police, and he asked if we could go. “Sure,” said mom. Looking back it’s hard to believe she was willing. Next thing we knew we were checking into a hotel in Hamilton, Ontario to attend The Police Picnic.

We arrived just before Iggy Pop took the stage. I wasn’t really a Police fan yet, but I already loved Iggy. I owned Raw Power and Metallic K.O. by The Stooges, and I loved the raw chaos of those albums. His set was tamer and more straight-ahead than I expected. It’s the first time I ever heard “Lust for Life,” and I sang it over and over in the car on the long drive home, to everyone’s annoyance.

Next up was The Go-Gos, which I expected to be a ska band for some reason. I was blown away to see five young, punky women playing tight, energetic pop-punk songs. I liked their show enough to go straight to Duroc Records in Bloomington and buy Beauty and the Beat the the week we returned from our trip. I wore that album out, and I was so annoyed when they blew up and all the cheerleaders got into them. I couldn’t wear my Go-Gos shirt anymore—it used to be a cool punk artifact until everyone knew what it meant. By then I’d graduated to Dead Kennedys and Black Flag shirts that got me tossed into lockers by the jocks as a high school freshman.

The true highlight was The Specials, careening on the edge of chaos but still absolutely locked in. Jake and I loved their debut album. It was the first time I ever heard their brand new single, “Ghost Town.” Then The Police played and became my favorite band for the next year or so.

Today I’d have a hard time standing in a field for five hours seeing band after band, but I loved every second of that day. I took in every weird outfit, every wild haircut, the band names on all the T-shirts. I wanted to find my way into that world and stay there forever.

Glastonbury Festival, 1994

I rejoined The Lemonheads in early 1994, playing a few odd shows early in the year. Our summer tour kicked off in Spain and made its way into France and Germany. About a week in, our management told us that we’d been asked to play the Glastonbury Festival the following week as a last minute replacement for Van Morrison, who had cancelled.

Nobody bothered to explain to me the scale of Glastonbury. It’s a gigantic festival. We played in the afternoon to over 60,000 people. I’d never played to a crowd a tenth that large. The biggest shows I’d ever done had been in the past couple weeks. It was a surreal, out-of-body experience. I got through it, but I can’t remember much. I’m glad the videos exist—I showed it to my kids when they were little and they didn’t believe that long-haired guitarist was me.

That day the main stage was programmed more or less for the grown-ups—Peter Gabriel, James, Jackson Browne, and my hero, Johnny Cash. When we finished our set and returned to the backstage trailers, I saw Johnny, all in black and looking incredibly cool, strolling around with June Carter on his arm. I had to meet him.

I went in our trailer and downed a glass of wine. I told Lemonheads bassist Nic Dalton that I simply had to meet Johnny and June. Johnny was my childhood hero, after all. Nic said OK, let’s go say hello. We left the trailer and realized they weren’t out strolling anymore. Undaunted, the utterly fearless Nic led the way to Johnny and June’s trailer and knocked on the door. Johnny opened the door a crack and peeked out. “Well hello,” he said. “Thank you for warming up the stage for me.”

Johnny and June, alone in the trailer, invited us in to sit with them. We chatted for ten minutes or so, mostly Johnny asking us where we were from and making small talk about his times in Bloomington and Sydney. He’d been everywhere, after all. Mostly I just sat there in disbelief. I started to feel we might be wearing out our welcome when I had an idea. I said, “if I go get my guitar out of the truck, will you sign it for me?” “Sure,” he said. I ran to find one of the crew members to help me get my blonde 1959 Fender Jazzmaster.

I knocked on the trailer and Johnny stepped out, Sharpie in hand. He said, “Oh, that’s a nice one—just like Luther used to play.” He meant Luther Perkins, the lead guitarist for his band The Tennessee Three, who often played a white ‘59 Jazzmaster.

The second stage that day was a who’s-who of rising British rock and “Britpop” acts, including Oasis (onstage at the exact same time as us), Blur, Radiohead, and Spiritualized. After catching Jackson and Cash, I spent the rest of the day and evening at the kids’ stage. Spiritualized put on the best show.

Bonnaroo, 2009

In 2009 I was still living in Birmingham, still practicing commercial real estate law at a big firm. My firm let me take on music clients without any real expectations, and I had a few. Literally a few—including Bon Iver and of Montreal. That year, Bonnaroo had both of those acts playing back-to-back at “This Tent,” the smaller of the two tents, the fourth-largest stage. Bon Iver played before of Montreal, by the way. They were still a developing band with growing momentum.

My old label boss from Mammoth, Jay Faires, invited Heather and me to stay at his house in Sewanee, TN for Bonnaroo 2009—my first time. At Jay’s house I met fellow houseguest John Frankenheimer, chairman of the music practice at Loeb & Loeb, who later hired me and got me out of Birmingham and into the big leagues of music law. I assume it helped in the hiring process that John had seen my clients perform and recognized that I was building a real clientele.

The schedule that was as if I’d programmed it myself. After Bon Iver and of Montreal, Wilco played before Bruce Springsteen on the main aka What Stage. If I’d had the opportunity to pick four acts, there’s a good chance those would have been my four.

Heather doesn't love Springsteen like I do. At one point she asked the reasonable question of why he was playing “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” in June. Nevertheless, she was a good sport. Acknowledging the rigor of remaining on her feet for ten hours, I agreed to head to our car before the final encore. The sacrifices we make!

Our next Bonnaroo was 2012 when Bon Iver triumphantly returned to the main stage. We took our kids and they hated everything about it except for the giant water slide. Eventually they came around, and Bonnaroo has since become a family trip we’ve taken together many times. That first one, however, is probably as good as it will ever be. I’d worked so hard to get my foot in the door as a music lawyer. I was finally on my way.

I’ll confess that I first learned about Gram Parsons when The Lemonheads covered Brass Buttons. I heard Evan Dando sing that song, and I rushed out and bought the single-disc CD with both Gram’s solo albums. Even without the Internet, it didn’t take me long to realize Gram sang with The Byrds on Sweetheart of the Rodeo, one of my dad’s favorite albums that I probably heard 100 times as a kid. I didn’t know it, but I knew it.

That would’ve been 1990. I already had a taste for country, mildly obsessed with Hank Williams, digging Lucinda and Dwight. But Gram was the missing puzzle piece, the transformative figure who brought it all together: the distance between The Lemonheads and The Eagles, Drive By Truckers and Rodney Crowell. He cracked a code in the ‘60s that opened a door artists are still walking through to this day.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will formally induct its 2026 class this fall. There’s been an expectation that Gram will be inducted with the 2026 class in the “early musical influence” category, a category usually represented by artists who predated rock, like Robert Johnson and Jimmie Rodgers. What that says to me is that the Rock Hall acknowledges exactly what I am saying: that Gram is foundational to rock and roll and related genres. He invented something that has grown and expanded and shape-shifted—just like Kraftwerk, another early influence inductee.

A cliché you hear a lot around Nashville is that Gram will be in the Rock Hall before the Country Music Hall of Fame, as a snub to the CMHOF. I do think Gram belongs there, but I’m not shocked by the omission. The CMHOF is actually designed to be behind the curve. It’s regressive because it has so much ground to cover. Only three new acts are inducted each year. The three categories are “Modern Era Artist,” “Veteran Era Artist,” and “Non-Performer.”

With SO many popular and acclaimed artists not yet inducted, they have their work cut out for them. Last year’s inductees were Kenny Chesney (a true superstar of the modern era), June Carter Cash (really just as iconic as her husband), and Tony Brown (a successful producer and label head from the 80s who I see at my Kroger in Franklin about once a week—and yes he deserves it).

I’m not going to hold my breath they induct Gram, because his legacy doesn’t really need it. His influence is everywhere, including all over Nashville. On the East Side it’s a primary source, loud and proud. On The Row, it seeps through as second-hand influence, like The Eagles, Emmylou Harris, and Marty Stuart.

Although much of Gram’s music—particularly his solo albums with Emmylou—is straight-up country, the spirit of his music is more in line with rock culture. He brought two worlds together that created the genre with more names than any I can think of. It’s country rock. It’s alternative country. It’s Y’allternative. It’s stomp n’ holler. It’s indie country. And—most enduringly—it’s Americana.

Although the Music Row establishment is taking its time to acknowledge Gram’s contributions, Americana claims him as its foundation. In 2003, the Americana Music Association awarded Gram its President’s Award, acknowledging Gram as a foundational figure in Americana. In Nashville’s taxonomy, that might actually work against him. If Americana is his home genre, then maybe it isn’t country by definition. Country has a clear definition on The Row.

That reminds me of something. When I first came to Nashville people in the Music Row community told me with a straight face that my clients such as The Civil Wars and Sturgill Simpson weren’t country. To me they were obviously country—even if they counted as other genres too—and this was some sort of music business double-speak. It’s an exclusive club by design—a small bedazzled tent.

Maybe now that radio’s a death rattle, country can go back to being a Big Tent it promised to be. The country radio business—my friend Patrick Clifford calls it something like the “Country radio and lifestyle business”—is on life support. The country music business is slipping from the grasp of the kinds of assholes who would tell you Sturgill isn’t country. Hallelujah.

I’ve been thinking about Gram’s choice to bypass Nashville and move to Los Angeles after he dropped out of Harvard to form his first country-rock band, The International Submarine Band. Nashville was closer to home—both Boston and South Georgia. He moved to L.A. and networked his way into The Byrds and convinced them to become a country band. Turns out it didn’t take much convincing—Chris Hillman is a grasser, and all the folkies loved Appalachian country music.

I’m not going to delve into his biographies for answers. He made the right move. All the right moves in fact, except for the opioid addiction and dying at 26. If he’d come to Nashville, would he have found his way? Would he have survived?

I’m writing this from a villa at the Sunset Marquis in L.A. Someone picked out the hotel for me, but I’m grateful. I love old L.A. hotels, I love the Hollywood Hills. I used to stay at the Chateau Marmont with Evan—it’s practically across the street. I thought about Gram constantly in those rooms, imagining his charisma lighting up a room, captivating all the women. He was a kid, doing all that when he was the same age my kids are now.

If Gram were in Nashville today, I believe he’d be on the East Side with the freaks. I don’t think he’d have sung on American Idol or done TikTok dances. There was a ‘60s and early ‘70s version of that, and he chose not to go that way. To that end, maybe he bypassed Nashville because the only way that much of a legend lives on is to join The Byrds, be best friends with Keith Richards, discover Emmylou Harris in some suburban Baltimore bar, and die at 26 having made a lot of the greatest country music ever made.

“I can get the best voice from AI. I don’t even need anybody to sing the song anymore.” - Diplo

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Melissa Auf der Maur’s Even the Good Girls Will Cry: A ‘90s Rock Memoir opens with Hole’s performance at the 1994 Reading Festival, her first performance with the band. She joined the band the week before. They’d rehearsed a few times. Her first time playing outside her hometown of Montreal, she played in front of 60,000 people at one of the highest-profile rock festival in Europe.

I was there that day. I played guitar in The Lemonheads, the second-to-last act on the stage where Hole performed (just before Cypress Hill). For a brief moment, I was onstage during Hole’s performance. As I stood side stage with Evan Dando’s sister Holly, Courtney Love turned to me and said, “John Strohm from the Lemonheads! Bring me a cigarette!” I quickly bummed a smoke and walked it out to Courtney. Holly captured the photo. What a day.

I related to so much in Melissa’s book. I relate because I experienced and witnessed similar things, even some of the same exact scenes she describes in the book. I also relate to the way she came into her big ‘90s rock experience. She had a couple weeks’ notice before standing on that Reading stage. Before that her career peak had been a hard-won slot first of three opening for her favorite band, Smashing Pumpkins. Billy Corgan, a friendly acquaintance, took notice.

That August day when I met Melissa, I was at the end of a six-month run with The Lemonheads, at the start of a victory lap swing of European festivals. Although I had a bit more of a ramp-up to my main stage experiences than Melissa, it was still quite a shock to play for audiences of that size, to meet all sorts of high-profile people, to glimpse the reality of early ‘90s alt-rock stardom.

We didn’t talk much that day, but I saw a fair amount of Melissa a couple years later on tour. She and Evan became good friends in Courtney’s orbit. I loved hanging out with Melissa—she’s so smart and friendly. As the book confirms, she was still too wide-eyed and new to this world to be jaded or guarded. I considered her a friend.

I remember one time I found this insane DIY girls blue jean jacket from the ‘70s that somebody had done a terrible job embroidering with a Pisces image. It wasn’t cool. I gave it to Melissa—famously a Pisces—and she looked confused. It wasn’t a romantic gesture, but I blew it anyway. She was nice about it. She was always nice.

Melissa writes that thinks of her adult life as two acts: Act One she’s a rock star in Hole and Smashing Pumpkins. Act Two she’s a wife and a mother making art and living a quiet life in the Hudson Valley. Even if I didn’t have the same high-flying success she had, I think of my own adult life in a similar way. It’s great to hear about people who scaled those heights and actually got out and had a different sort of family life. She actively pursued it, and walked away from rock stardom twice.

Melissa describes the ‘90s as a magical time, a time of warm analogue sounds and sonic guitar majesty. Rock held such promise for a brief moment. She experienced a sense of great loss with the introduction of digital. She saw where everything was headed.

She describes a ProTools mixing session she insisted upon attending where a young engineer is thrilled to demonstrate that he they could create the illusion of perfect performances through digital editing. When she suggests that there’s value in the flaws, in the fluctuations of pitch, tempo, and feel, the engineer stares at her blankly. This wasn’t in his training.

At the end of the ‘90s the music culture saw a tectonic shift caused in part by two seemingly unrelated things, the passage of The Telecommunications Act of 1996, and the rise of hard disk (i.e. ProTools) recording. That brief window between Smells Like Teen Spirit and Celebrity Skin is an epic era—perhaps the most concentrated time of modern rock. Nevertheless, it came to an abrupt end. The wildly diverse and creative genre that became alternative rock metastacized into a commercial radio format just as all the rough edges of the sound were sanded down to homogenous product.

Melissa describes Courtney Love and Billy Corgan as her grunge parents. It’s fun to read overwhelmingly positive characterizations of two controversial public figures. I’m pro-Courtney and I don’t know Billy, but I assume I’ve read more negative press about each of them than accolades. She’s grateful to the people who changed her life, and I can relate to that, too.

The emotional center of the book contrasts Melissa’s grunge parents with her real life parents, a pair of ideologically aligned creative visionaries who brought their daughter into the world with a one night stand. They encourage her feminism, her creativity, and her unorthodox path. When her father, Nick Auf der Maur, a high-profile journalist and politician in Montreal gets terminal cancer, Melissa takes on a quasi-parent role. The loss is incalculable, and coincides with her pivot from rock stardom to family life.

When I read music bios (if you read this newsletter, you know I read a lot of them), I look forward the business stories. There’s a fascinating contrast in how Melissa was treated by the Hole business versus the Pumpkins business.

In Hole, Melissa started off as a salaried employee, paid by the week. Just like my time in the 90s Lemonheads, she was paid a weekly salary during work times, and no retainer. Then Hole’s management approached her to become a member of the group. He plopped a heavy stack of paper in front of her and expected her to sign on the spot. He discouraged her from hiring a lawyer.

Melissa did end up hiring a lawyer—my former music lawyer and friend Richard Grabel. He reviewed the contract and told her there were problems, but she decided not to push for better terms. She left the band a few years later in significant debt due to the advances she’d been taking against her non-existent share of profits. It might not come as a surprise that Hole spent a lot of money.

Then she joined Smashing Pumpkins for a one-year farewell tour in 1999 and 2000. She negotiated her compensation poolside with the band’s manager, Sharon Osborne. Ozzy lay sunbathing while they hammered out a deal. Sharon actually helped her get the best deal she could. Billy paid off her entire Hole debt.

Billy, by the way, comes off as a real stand-up guy. I loved the first couple albums, but my enthusiasm for the band cooled due in part to Corgan’s public image. If I’m honest, part of my criticism had to do with Corgan’s ambition and rock star ambitions. He made no apologies for his constant swinging for the bleachers. But you know what? Every musician who had that much success had that much ambition, including Kurt Cobain.1 It just wasn’t cool to be that honest about it. That’s a window into the culture.

The lesson for musicians is that may be better off getting paid a wage than taking on all the liabilities of a band without transparency as to the band’s finances. Ask to see the financials to calculate what your share would have been. She had no way of knowing how much money she’d make as a partner. With the bandleader dabbled in movie stardom and cultivating a limo and private jet habit, it turned out not to be the proverbial pot of gold.

I used to entertain myself on Lemonheads tours in the ‘90s imagining how many costs I could cut to make the band more profitable. I would’ve happily shared a hotel room with a crew member for an extra $500 a week. I can compare those tours to the tours I help pull together for my clients. I see people trying to cut costs to make a bigger profit, and I see people who seem to have given up on profit and just want an easy go of it. If you see a bus outside a 300 capacity room, it’s probably one of those.

Auf der Maur’s world of the mid-90s wasn’t a time for frugality or temperance. It was a time of excess, of people openly doing lines and shooting dope in the green room, being fucked up, losing their shit, and sometimes dying young. Somehow, some of us made it through and moved on. How was it that messed up and still so magical? Read the book for something close to an answer.

It’s impossible to tell what’s real and fake online. Andrew Spelman and Jesse Coran, co-founders of the popular music marketing firm Chaotic Good, are beyond caring about that. They fake it so real they are beyond fake. That’s what social media marketing is all about.

I’ve read a few articles about a recent Billboard On the Record podcast interview with Coran and Spellman (posted above). I listened with great interest—as a former label head and someone who works in artist development, I try to understand the vanguard of digital marketing at all times. I’m grateful when interview subjects are this forthcoming.

I started writing this essay before I read Eliza McLamb’s excellent essay that covered much of the same territory that drew me to the story. I recommend reading her piece. We noticed some of the same things, but it’s a different take. McLamb’s is from the frustrated point of view of a smaller artist. She nails it.

Chaotic Good is a digital agency that uses state-of-the-art social media marketing techniques to create narratives and the illusion of virality. They call it “trend simulation” - recreating organic viral moments using hundreds or thousands of social accounts. Their clientele is mostly mainstream, major label acts. More on that later.

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First of all, a disclaimer. Today I’m writing about a client, The Droptines. I have the band’s permission to disclose my professional relationship and write about the music. I always ask, and of course I take care not to share anything confidential.

In many ways I’ve invented my career to do what I’m best at and enjoy the most, which is artist development. It’s been a chaotic path to get here, but it’s exactly what I had in mind when I went to law school. My thinking at the time was that I could work for artists on the business side without having to answer to a large music company.

In some ways I messed up by going to a large music company, but I have no regrets about it. That’s how I learned how artist development really works, how marketing works, how to work with artists around common goals, not just deal negotiation and risk management.

It’s been awkward for a long time that I can’t make year-end lists because it’s always at least half my clients. That’s a weird look, but it’s absolutely true. I tend to get into the music of the artists I work with. After all, I have to understand the product and how the music will connect with an audience. If it doesn’t hook me, how do I know if it’s any good?

It’s such a blessing, because I can prioritize my music discovery as a matter of professional development. It makes me happy to discover and get into new artists. It isn’t just something I get to do; it’s something I have to do. And by “discover,” I don’t mean to overstate my role. Officially, I haven’t “discovered” a single act. I managed to be in the right place at the right time, paying attention. That’s it—other than creating the client relationship.

If there’s any risk with writing about clients, it’s that I might disclose something confidential. I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen by getting their permission and then just focusing on the music. Telling you I love the product doesn’t require letting my guard down. The real risk is a personal one—that other clients will feel slighted if I write with great passion and enthusiasm about other clients. To be clear, I only work with artists whose work I admire. I have to understand the appeal to understand the value. Once in a while God smiles on me and I get to work with my very favorite bands, and they turn out to be super cool people like The Droptines from Concan, Texas.

The Droptines, led by singer/guitarist and songwriter Conner Arthur, are a rock n’ roll band that started putting music out in 2019. I found out about The Droptines in the usual way—a client referral. I always listen to the music before I meet with a client, and I quickly determined that it was a quality project. Then I kept listening…and listening… In the car and on the trails, cooking dinner, cleaning the house. I kept coming back to it and certain songs stood out.

The first song that really caught my ear is “Kammi’s Pants.” I’m always a sucker for straight-up power pop. This is very much like what I was trying to do in the 90s. I wish more so-called “Americana” acts would stretch into this sort of unapologetic pop-rock songwriting. I did it the opposite way, moving from indie pop to roots music. Either way, it’s perfect pop rock. The entire 2022 EP “4 More” is effortlessly catchy and direct, and irresistibly melodic. It’s masterful. But that’s just one of the arrows in Mr. Arthur’s songwriting quiver.

Conner writes great hooks, but he’s also a masterful storyteller. His songs are rich with outsiders, desperate characters, drunks, and fuck-ups—often personified by the narrator himself. “Army Green” is stark storytelling: a brutal gut punch, delivered with dry humor. Arthur’s lyrics are often clever and irreverent—occasionally shocking—but he’s capable of delivering incredibly powerful lines that tip us off to his vulnerability. He’s a songwriter’s songwriter. To that end, their songs makes me want to write again.

Their major label debut, Draught Flower, on the Big Loud Texas label, came out this month. It’s their most produced album, and their years of touring have wrought a tight, muscular sound, often built around sharp guitar riffs. I honestly don’t know how much of a factor it is in my own love for the band that they sound so much like a great lost ‘90s band, right in the pocket for my personal taste. There are echoes of Whiskeytown, Scud Mountain Boys, Uncle Tupelo, The Bottle Rockets, and—perhaps most of all—The Replacements. I also hear elements of Guided by Voices—especially with their often outrageously short songs that abruptly end just as you expect some perfect chorus to beat you over the head for another minute and a half.

There are so many standout songs on Draught Flower. I’m sure it will change, but right now I love “Old Tricks,” which reminds me of Westerberg, the gorgeous Sarah Jarosz duet “Mamaw,” and the truly heartbreaking “What Ate My Friend.” When I first heard the tracks, I immediately recognized “Grand Canyon,” but I couldn’t place it.

It’s a gorgeous interpolation of the Magnetic Fields song. In 1988 I shared an apartment in Cambridge with Claudia Gonson of Magnetic Fields. Stephen Merritt came over all the time. That was before Magnetic Fields existed. I told that story to Conner and his manager Elliott. I assume their reaction was something along the lines of “Wait, how old are you??”

It’s an open question whether The Droptines will ever reach a massive audience. I hope they do. They’ve already built something sustainable. At their recent album release pop-up at the tiny punk venue The End in Nashville, I saw some of their true superfans—middle-aged guys in ball caps singing every single word. And women. Lots of women. I could look around the room and see that I’m not alone. I’m not the only one out on a limb being in love with this band. It’s going to grow. The only question is, how big?

I love these interviews because they are all close friends with complex, larger-than-life shared history. I’ve never met Corgan, but I’ve long admired his music. I respect Smashing Pumpkins more today than I did in the ‘90s. I recently played and sang 1979 with a fantastic professional cover band that sounded exactly like the record. It was a thrilling musical experience. What a song. If I’m honest, that song accomplishes what I tried and failed to do with at least twenty of my songs. It’s perfect.

I knew Melissa and Courtney pretty well for a short time. I knew them because they were friends with Evan Dando. Evan and I were together much of the time on tour. He really wanted me to be friends with his friends, and his friends were fabulous—and often rich or famous (or both). Evan vouched for me and they welcomed me into their space. Melissa was so charismatic, and Courtney was endlessly fascinating. It was for a brief time, but I considered both Melissa and Courtney friends.

Melissa talks about her magical 90s experience, followed by the crushing disappointment of the Millennium. I get where she’s coming from, because I had a magical 90s experience, too. I made such a hard pivot out of the 90s that I didn’t have time to feel disappointed. Between 2000 and 2004, I got married, we had two (out of three) kids, and I finished law school and took the bar. Melissa left public life and focused on motherhood.

I know it’s hard to settle into everyday life when you’ve lived big like that. Melissa loved her challenging year touring with the Pumpkins, but she found it grueling. Over 180 shows in a year, sometimes four hours long. That kind of playing is so physical, and the energy in those rooms is so overwhelming.

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Imagine a world without Suno.1 It’s easy! Easy for me, anyway—I’ve never logged on. As a matter of policy, I won’t use generative AI music creation tools that aren’t trained on an opt-in, transparent, licensed, and compensated model. As a musician and music rights advocate, that’s a value I prioritize.

Others would feel a great loss without Suno—I know this because I’ve spent time lurking in the r/SunoAI subreddit. I read it because I want to understand how and why people use it. Its users are passionate—some claim to listen to their own prompted Suno music exclusively. I’ve read posts from dozens of AI music creators whose lives have been enriched by Suno, who feel part of a community, and in some cases feel oddly superior to human artists who have wasted so much time developing old-fashioned skill sets like singing, songwriting, playing instruments, and recording music.

I know from the conversations I have every day that many of us in the creative music communities resent and regret Suno’s launch. Compare Suno’s origins to Spotify. Spotify had its origins in an illegal pirate platform, but it ostensibly launched with licenses in hand from all necessarily rights holders. I signed up for Spotify when it launched because I thought it would be a value add in my life. It has been, but I’ll only continue to support Spotify if I continue to believe it’s a value add for music. Honestly, the jury’s out—but at least they got permission and paid for the music.

I’ve been consistent in my fierce objection to what I consider Suno’s original sin of training its model on tens of millions of scraped tracks and launching a commercial product without any licenses. As a music lawyer I regard this act as an egregious violation of intellectual property laws.2

It’s evident that Suno’s rush to market without permission, licensure, or compensation has polarized the music community and often galvanized creative communities into hardened “anti-AI” positions. This reflects a much larger trend in technology, culture, and politics; but it’s feeling like battle lines are drawn. It didn’t have to go down like that.

As an artist advocate, I’ve looked at these issues through the lens of impacts on artists and artist communities. I’ve tried to keep a balanced view, while processing my own emotional reactions around Suno’s wrecking ball entrance into the market. I want to keep my opinions balanced and nuanced for the benefit of my clients; but it often feels like a gut punch when I see how all these important participants—musicians, singers, songwriters, producers, engineers, labels, and publishers—are economically harmed by the outcomes.

Last week my law firm co-sponsored a conference with the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and Mauer School of Law called Algo Rhythms: Exploring Human-Centered Creativity in Music and AI.

I spoke on a panel on legal frameworks, which focused on copyright and other personal rights. It was a nuanced discussion that acknowledged the actual and potential value of AI, but emphasized the risks and harms of prompt-created commercial music currently flooding the market and the cavalier attitudes of those responsible.

After my panel, I met Marcus Lawrence, an AI music journalist who publishes the newsletter Zinstrel. His review of the conference gave me a new perspective. The TL/DR is that Marcus is frustrated because so many of us remain laser focused on Suno as a bad actor, which distracts from a larger conversation about how AI tools can empower creative individuals.

Without absolving Suno for its “move fast and break things” ethos, Lawrence expressed frustration that Suno’s problematic and divisive launch had become the entire conversation. His take made me rethink my own position. Maybe AI isn’t the problem, but rather Suno’s aggressive and likely illegal entrance and push for market domination is the problem. Maybe Suno isn’t just harming music, musicians, and music professionals; maybe Suno has harmed the future of AI music as an institution.

When I write about issues I have with AI music, I always note that I’m not anti-tech or even anti-AI. For the most part I’m a tech optimist. I use AI tools. I have no issue with anyone using fairly trained AI tools for music applications. Whether it’s post-production, instrument modeling, algorithmic marketing, or idea generation, AI has many good use cases associated with music and music production. If it’s a generative model with licensed training data and outputs that are somehow differentiated from human-made music, no problem. If we can create efficiencies and empower creators without cutting jobs, stealing or devaluing property, or destroying the environment, then I’m generally OK with it.

Suno entered the music market like a bull in a china shop. Musicians had strong opinions, mostly negative. The hype cycle followed. Mainstream producer Timbaland became a strategic advisor, calling Suno the “future of music production.” Later that year a fictional classic rock-style “band” was “exposed” as an Suno-created project. Every music publication and even some mainstream publications showed the strange, AI-generated “band photos” of ghostly, mismatched young men in awkward hippie outfits.

Then 2025 saw a string of chart hits. First, a mysterious country act called Breaking Rust had a number one single. Then a big-voiced R&B/gospel singer named Xania Monet had a radio hit. It was all happening so fast.

Here’s the thing. None of these news items amounted to anything the music industry would consider successful. The Velvet Sundown was purely a hype cycle. Their audience is nonexistent. Breaking Rust had a number one hit on Billboard’s digital songs chart. That position reflects a few thousand iTunes sales. It’s probably worth buying a few thousand tracks for around a dollar a piece to get a headline. And Monet—the biggest AI act in the world—currently has fewer than a million monthly listeners on Spotify. The song “How Was I Supposed to Know” debuted at number thirty on the Billboard Adult R&B Airplay Chart—which is significant, but not conclusive evidence of actual success. Monet is the best anyone has done to date.

I recognize that the majority of people don’t give music all that much thought. Some of us, however, care very deeply about music. I don’t just mean musicians and people in the business; I mean people who are truly passionate about music, who have well-defined musical taste, who experience deep joy in the music they love. Music people can’t imagine life without great songs, great voices, great records—they won’t accept a knockoff of the music they truly love.

The Velvet Sundown was like a Rorschach test. Some people saw it as the end of music, the moment the machines took over. Others like me found it laughably bad. There weren’t many opinions in the middle. But after the story died down, nobody listened. Now the breakout song has fewer than five million streams. Turns out the people who thought it sucked were the people they needed to win over. Those impressed by the recording quality or the similarity to classic rock records weren’t going to be the return listeners. A real audience develops when people connect with the music on an emotional level.

People don’t reject this music simply because it’s AI; they reject it because it lacks the emotional resonance people seek in the music they choose.

Suno is bad for the future of AI music because it blew its entrance. with tens of millions of slop tracks on services in addition to the competitive releases such as Monet and Breaking Rust, you’d expect to have something break out. Promoters of AI music have put in the effort. They took a big bet, spent a lot of money, and failed. Now the majority of people not only hate AI music, they hate the very idea of AI music. They want to know it’s real human music so they don’t waste their time on something inauthentic. Where does that leave us?

There’s no question that Suno has facilitated streaming fraud at scale. Tens of thousands of inferior, prompt-created tracks are uploaded to services every day, diverting and diluting the royalty pool for human artists. Spotify recently deleted 75,000,000 “spam” tracks from its platform—that’s almost as many tracks as there were on Spotify in 2019. There’s been such an acceleration of uploads in the past couple years that we don’t even notice a block deletion of nearly half the catalogue. That’s a crisis.

I got myself in trouble in my panel talk by noting songwriter demos as a reasonably legitimate use case. Professional publishers and songwriters pointed out all sorts of things that are problematic with Suno demos. Songwriters are horrified when their publishers create Suno demos from their work tapes. Suno makes mistakes, screws up melodies, misses chord changes, and the vocals sound weird. Even more disturbing is the uncertainty of how Suno uses the songs that are uploaded. Do those unreleased songs become training data? The most recent version of Suno encourages users to upload their own voice to create an AI facsimile. Do they own that as well?

The sync (film and television) business has become self-policing against AI music. All the major sync houses and streaming services have anti-AI policies as a defensive position. Voluntary labeling will likely scale because nobody wants to be mistaken for AI music. Companies like Humanable are offering to certify tracks as substantially AI-free, which I predict will become a badge of honor in certain music cultures.

It’s a common claim that people can’t tell the difference between AI and human music. AI music “sounds professional,” therefore it’s “as good as” human music. The problem is that “professional” sound has become extremely processed as digital technologies have developed.

We’re used to hearing everything tuned and tidied up to the point where human mistakes that have been largely eliminated. It may sound like professional music, but professional sound is cheap and accessible. Sounding good doesn’t mean music has the qualities music fans seek. It’s impossible to quantify, but we know it when we hear it. You don’t need science to prove this point when we’ve already rejected everything the industry has to offer by simply choosing not to listen.

Generative models improve through access greater volume and quality of training data. With multiple lawsuits and negotiations on limiting access and adding cost to its access to training data, I don’t see how their model improves in its ability to mimic quality music.

According to its CEO, Suno seeks to make music-making to be more like playing video games. Remember when Guitar Hero blew up? People want to passively enjoy music, and I don’t fault them. Music-making as a passive consumer experience is fine—as long as it’s within a legal framework that doesn’t devalue existing music to take away from working musicians.

Actual musicians find joy in the process. We want it to be less like video games—less isolating, fewer screens, more community. We record in analog studios because we want to get off screens. We make music together in person because it’s about human connection, not isolation. I believe the next innovators—the true geniuses of AI music—will create and train their own tools for their own purposes to leverage and enhance creativity.

The future of music creation belongs to creative individuals, not algorithms. The sooner we embrace that, the sooner we can get back to making the most amazing music anyone’s ever heard. That future is ours if we can find our way through this dark period caused by the unrestrained greed and malfeasance of technologists who don’t even understand the product they are selling.