The Decibel - Introducing ‘Lately’: The Globe and Mail’s business and tech podcast

Episode Date: June 21, 2024

Introducing ‘Lately’: a new weekly podcast from The Globe and Mail about the intersection of business and technology. Every Friday, host Vass Bednar dives into the defining trends that shape our lives.This episode’s guest is author and Polaris Award-winning artist and producer producer Cadence Weapon – the tech skeptic behind the new album Rollercoaster– who breaks down the depressing economics of an industry governed by Ticketmaster trauma, streaming algorithms and an AI invasion. Subscribe to the Lately newsletter, where we unpack more of the latest in business and technology.Send your comments, questions or ideas to [e-mail].

Hi, everyone. I want to introduce you to Lately, a new Globe and Mail podcast about the rapidly changing worlds of business and tech. It's hosted by Vas Bednar, an expert in digital public policy, and she interviews thinkers and newsmakers. This episode of Lately is a conversation with music producer, author, and Polaris Prize-winning hip-hop artist, Cadence Weapon. He knows all about the economics of the music industry, a world now ruled by algorithms and skyrocketing ticket prices. Him and Vass talk about what the future looks like in music. You can subscribe and find other episodes of Lately wherever you find your podcasts.

Hope you enjoy it. Welcome to Lately, a Globe and Mail podcast. I'm your host, Vass Bettner. And I'm Katrina Onstead, executive producer of Lately. Vass, what was the last concert you went to? I wish I had a more recent example. We've got to throw back to last summer, 2023. I went to the Always show in Toronto. It was outside. And I was a newish parent at the time, so I had to sneak in my dual-action, hands-free breast pump. I know. Rock and roll.

Take it home in my cooler. Yeah. How about you? Actually, I just saw Neil Young in Toronto recently. Oh, you're so cool. That's why you asked me, so you could seem cool. Yes, I did. It was a leading question, I just saw Neil Young in Toronto recently. Oh, you're so cool. That's why you asked me. So you could see him cool. Yes, I did.

It was a leading question, I fully admit. Seeing Neil Young is like a duty as a Canadian citizen. It's true. But buying tickets was so dodgy. There was nothing available on Ticketmaster. So we got them through this shifty secondary resale site. And the whole time we're waiting to go in, we're standing in line with all these people in a similar situation, looking at their phones going, God, are these real? Or have we just been

scammed? But we did get in. It was a fantastic show. 200 bucks to stand on a lawn at the very, very back looking at a dot that may or may not have actually been Neil Young, but it was worth it. And it was just a few blocks from where we live. So here's another leading question. Do you know anyone who's hopped on a plane to see a band this summer? Hmm. Well, now I'm going to strike out again, and it's going to seem like not only am I uncool, but I apparently need fancier friends. I cannot confirm nor deny whether I directly know someone who's done this, but I have been reading about it. Yeah. I think we both saw this article in the Times of London, a recent report that thousands of North Americans are traveling to Europe to see big acts like Taylor Swift this summer.

And some fans are claiming that it's actually cheaper for them to see their favorite artists abroad than at home. And that article featured an interview with a mom from a Canadian family who said that she bought three VIP tickets very close to the stage to see Taylor Swift in Hamburg, Germany for about $646 each. Meanwhile, to see Taylor Swift in Toronto, she could get nosebleeds for over 3,000 Canadian each on resale sites. Okay, well, you know, good for her. An interesting calculation. I sometimes find that stuff is like girl mathy because travel is also quite expensive when you add it all up. And hotels, yeah.

100% food. And this got us thinking, what is going on with the music economy? And lately, we've had this running list of issues under this heading of music, right? We have the Ticketmaster lawsuit in the US. And recently, JLo and the Black Keys have been canceling tours. And of course, AI always shaping what and how we listen. Yeah, so we wanted to know what it's like to be making music in a moment when the industry is in turmoil, transition, crisis, pick your word. And we wanted to talk to someone who is calling from inside the building. And we didn't get inside his building with him. We got him on the line, but we did call the absolute perfect person, Cadence Weapon. Now, he also makes art using his other name, a given name, Rolly Pemberton. He's a writer, rapper, producer,

poet, and activist. His new album, Rollercoaster, is right on time. It feels like a direct response to this moment, looking at how tech exploits, benefits, and challenges artists. Yeah, Caden's Weapon has lived through massive shifts in music, which makes him sound a lot older than he is. He's still pretty young, but a lot has happened in his industry in a very short time. And the biggest shift, which you two talk about, is of course the delivery of music, this transition to streaming. But since it's taken over, a lot of artists have declared that there's been little payout for them. One industry estimate puts Spotify's payout rate for recordings at about $4,000 per million streams, meaning like you'd have to get

a million streams to get $4,000 or less than half a cent per stream. Yikes, that's a lot of streams. And in response to this kind of eroding or depleting monetization model, we have been seeing some policy experimentation from different governments. The US has proposed something called the Living Wage Musicians Act, which would mandate that artists receive a minimum of a penny per stream. A full penny. Yeah, this would be progress, right? But it would be.

Yeah, it would. Canada recently announced that as part of Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act, it does expect streamers to contribute 5% of their Canadian revenues to support various funding programs that in turn support film on television, production, news, and music. Some are already concerned that platforms like Spotify are going to start passing those costs on to us so that the price will go up further. And for artists, I mean, it doesn't change that they're not getting paid enough money and could make it challenging if they can't directly access these

funds. Yeah, well, I wonder if there's going to be a course correction. We started off talking about concert tickets, and there's been some reporting about not just cancellations, but low ticket sales for really big acts like Billie Eilish and Justin Timberlake in this summer concert season. Maybe there's a bit of a hard no out there for these ridiculous ticket prices at last. Like, we were willing to pay those exorbitant prices post-lockdown, and that appetite caused what's been called funflation. But maybe it's enough now, right? Maybe prices will have to come down if consumers are pushing back, exerting their power by not paying for tickets at those costs. Or maybe they're just going to find better friends and fly to Paris to see a concert there. Oh, yeah. Cain's Weapon won the 2021 Polaris Music Prize for his album Parallel World. His debut memoir, Bedroom Rapper, was published in 2022. Currently based in Hamilton, he was a former poet laureate in his hometown of Edmonton. His new album, Rollercoaster, is out now, and Cain's Weapon has a new song about the Edmonton Oilers. This is Lately.

Let's start at the beginning. Could you tell me the quick story of the day that you signed your first recording contract? Because that's kind of the teenage dream, get discovered, sign a contract, become a star. What was the reality like? Yeah, I mean, I was pretty early on putting my music on the internet, and I was very productive in reaching out to people. And I put it on some MP3 blogs and I got a lot of attention from that, including from this one label. And they ended up wanting to sign me to a deal.

And so back then, this is how long ago it was, they sent the contract through as a fax. That's how long ago it turned out to be actually not a very good record deal for me. They didn't end up working in my best interest. So it was still a bit of an old school horror story record label situation. When was that? Like what time period are we talking about? Oh, that would be like 2004. Okay. The good old days. Yeah.

Yeah. When I first started in music, there was no YouTube. Okay. It was really challenging to get your music across, but there was a leveling of the playing ground back then, I would say. Like I was able to reach an audience without it being throttled in any way. Like you could just post something and anyone on the internet could just look at it and it was a very direct thing.

And it was a lot more novel to be an artist who made music on their computer because back then there was no garage band. I remember when I would make music and I'd show it to people and they're like, yeah, so you made these beats on like a computer. It's like a desktop computer, like a word processor. You go on the computer. People didn't get it at all. People would be like, what are you it's like a desktop computer like a word processor you go on the computer people didn't get it at all yeah people would be like what are you gonna bring a desktop

computer and put it on on stage with you you know it's funny now it's like you can't find a live show really that doesn't have a computer involved on stage yeah yeah yeah so we're going way back to when there was just garages and bands um flash forward to today, the single My Computer is very nostalgic for the earlier days of the internet, maybe the ones we're talking about now. That free open web, and it's critical, the whole album is, compromised. Consciousness commodified. Product personified. My computer, my solution. Could you tell us a bit about the spark for that song? So I felt like with my computer, I wanted it to be a bit stream of consciousness, like you're going through a YouTube or Wikipedia wormhole, and all these topics and subjects and things are just like buzzing by you. And I really wanted to have the kind of overwhelming feeling that I sometimes get when I'm online. I think a lot of the themes on my

album Rollercoaster, I'm discussing the idea of there's a different way that we can be living our lives online. And we've experienced it in the past, but I think for younger people who weren't around back then when people were faxing contracts and stuff, they won't be aware of the fact that, yeah, you actually didn't have to give all your data and all your information to these companies. You could just have your own website and people would come there. And we had a lot more control of the means of production than we do today. I want to describe your new album, Rollercoaster, as being tech skeptical. Is that fair? And was there a moment or a breaking point in your life where you thought, I need to come at technology in my music? Yeah, I think that's an appropriate way of putting it.

It's tech skeptical. Because it's not necessarily totally negative. Like, I feel like I'm very reliant on technology. I mean, we're talking over some technology right now. True say. My career also is very reliant on technology from the very beginning. Like, everything I made was with these pirated programs that I used to use when I was a kid. But I feel like the point of the album is really just to remind people of their agency.

And it's really easy to get stuck in this loop where it's like, okay, what do I do when I go on the computer? I go through this loop of programs. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter. And I'm in this constant feedback loop. So I got to make my TikTok today. I got to do my Twitter. I find I'm spending more time making social media than I am actually making art or making music. It feels like often that we're just employees for these tech companies. I work for Instagram and it's like I've got to clock in every day

and make my scheduled amount of posts to create revenue for this corporation. And I feel definitely less connected with my audience than I ever have, especially just through the throttling. I feel like every time you post something, if I say something and it says the word music, I know it's going to get shadow banned. No one's going to be able to see it. What's shadow banning? You mentioned this in your album too. Yeah. So the social media companies will say that it's not a real thing and that they don't do it. But basically, say I was like a conspiracy theorist or something, and maybe I am. If you listen to my album, I kind of am. If I was talking about some weird stuff, if I post a link on

certain social media platforms, it immediately downgrades the quality of my post. So it won't be boosted by the algorithm. Right. We're all kind of subject to these algorithms. What is it like for you as an artist to see your music or your posts be vulnerable to streaming algorithms? Well, it's really frustrating because the whole idea of me being on these platforms is I bring my audience here and you benefit from it. The corporations benefit from it. Everyone benefits except for me because I don't actually get to share information with the people who are following me. It's very frustrating, particularly on X nowadays, ever since Elon

took over, it's really deprioritized my place and people like me. And it feels like something I would have posted back in the day that would have just went hugely viral. It doesn't have the same legs as it once did. So then how would you describe the power and influence that these algorithms have, both in terms of, I want to bring it to music recommendations and kind of discovery, but also just voice of artists and these attempts to connect with audiences. Well, honestly, they're very powerful. A lot of these different algorithms, especially with streaming apps, like the way that they determine what random song you're going to hear next, if you have the autoplay going, it's not as random as you might think. Oh, yeah. here next, if you have the autoplay going, it's not as random as you might think. And we know

Spotify is partly owned by all the different labels. So it's just not an equal playing field in so many different ways. And it's just extremely frustrating. And it's not transparent. I mean, there's been some music journalism that looks at why are we seeing the resurgence of certain songs or certain bands? And is it because their music mimics or sounds very quote-unquote normal? I mean, now, I think the way that these streaming apps, what they incentivize are tracks that are not going to make you cut off the app. Right.

So I think there has been a mass softening and homogenization of music, and I would say probably Right. like these apps are not really for that. It's really just for keeping you on the app for as long as possible. And you're not going to stay on the app if you hear a freaky song that you didn't want to hear. What do you think that does to us as listeners in terms of our habits or our expectations of music? I think one of the most important things about being a fan of music or being a fan of art in general is that feeling of surprise and delight, right? Like some of the best experiences I've had is when I was surprised. I went to a show, I didn't know who's going to be playing, and then the opener blew my mind or something. I feel like that's equivalent to times I've just been on YouTube and it recommends something that's actually unlike anything I've ever heard before. And I used to have that experience often, and I feel like it's becoming more and more rare.

Let me be devil's advocate for a second with some of these platforms. What about the upside? Is there any for you as an artist? For instance, don't some of these technology companies share some data and information back to the artists that can be informative? I'm thinking of Spotify's artist dashboard. No, that's true. There are some beneficial tools that they've created. They have a thing where you can see what playlists have played your songs or whatever, right? But I recently got a message being like, we're going to be erasing all that data as of this point. What? So they're taking away data we used to have.

Oh. Like there's another thing that they have called Spotify Marquee, where you can pay extra and get your music promoted within the app. So sometimes you'll get a pop-up that's like, hey, here's some new music recommended for you. And they imply that it's because of the music that you've been listening to, but it's actually just somebody who paid. Yeah. Sneaky ads, sneaky ads. Well, in order to go to a show and listen to a mind-blowing opener, you probably have to buy a concert ticket. So let's talk about Ticketmaster for a second.

In the US, the Biden administration has an antitrust lawsuit. Now we're in my home court, you know, against Ticketmaster trying to break up the Ticketmaster Live Nation monopoly. What does it feel like to be a musician in this Ticketmaster era? Live Nation during the pandemic, they bought up a bunch of the small and mid-sized venues. So if you're a touring musician of a certain size, you have to work with them in a lot of markets. So you don't really have a choice. I think one of the most frustrating things about it is because Ticketmaster and Live Nation, they've cornered so much of the market, it's made the smaller companies and smaller

promoters copy their business tactics. So that's when you start seeing you're playing at some small DIY venue with 100 people in it, and then they're like trying to take a merch cut from you. We're also seeing tour cancellations by otherwise big artists. Jennifer Lopez, for some reason, it doesn't feel normal for me to just say J-Lo, but I suppose I should have, right? Black Keys. What do you think's really going on? Is this because streams don't really mean people will come to a concert? No, I'll tell you exactly what's happening here. And it's a problem with the music ecosystem in general. So you have a band like the Black Keys. They are a very successful band. They're like a pretty big rock band. Somewhere down the line, their team is encouraging them

to play these stadiums. You make more money if it's in a bigger venue. Everyone around you makes money. The promoters, the venue, the booking agent, your management. And you have all these voices being like, I think it's time to start playing these stadiums. And you're like, are you sure? I don't know if I can really play in a giant Coliseum. We usually play 5,000 person venues, 2,000 person venues. I don't know if we're ready for that. And everyone's pushing you to do it. So you're like, fine, we're going to do the stadium tour. And then now we're in this time where there's an economic crisis. People can't afford to go to every show.

Like me, to go to a stadium show, it's got to be one of my all-time top, top, top artists. Like I got tickets for Charlie XCX. I got to go to that, right? But then there's been a lot of controversy that some of those shows she's playing, like Stadium in Denver, didn't sell any tickets, right? Which I'm not surprised that she doesn't have a massive following in a random Midwest state. But we got to really think about the whole music ecosystem. A lot of it feeds into the artist's ego, where it's like you want to believe that you're this stadium artist, even though you don't have the proof for it. And it's happening on every scale of music right now. I think a lot of people

and bands are coming out and thinking they can play the same venues that they played a few years ago and realizing that the entire market has changed, circumstances have changed, ticket prices have changed. And I think the problem is there used to be room for the middle class of musicians and artists, and there used to be a bit more balance in the industry. And now I think what you're having is there's the megastars who are taking a lot of oxygen. And these are the people like Taylor Swift and Beyonce, who everyone is going to buy tickets for that show for sure. And then that basically leaves not a lot of room for going to buy tickets for that show for sure. And then that basically leaves not a lot of room for somebody to buy another stadium ticket that year, right?

Mm-hmm. On your album, On Roller Coaster, you come at this moment of maximum optimization, like in the song, Press Eject. I'll just say one line. I will not- You should rap it though. No. You know how Spotify wants people to listen to the end of the playlist. We want people to listen to the end of the episode. Right. Everything we do just boosts their stock price. This feels like a mindset that has been ported over from tech, constant growth, bigger, more. How does this play out for you or for musicians? That's a really great question because I consider myself to be an

artist. I'm just trying to make the most beautiful, thoughtful piece of art that I can when I'm making music. I don't think of it as a commercial endeavor, but unfortunately we have music and we have the music industry. They're not the same thing, but they have to work together. And in this case, there's so many things that are encouraging me to get into that growth way of thinking. It's like, you got to have more fans than you had your last album. You have to have more followers, more, more, more. Like, I try not to feed into it.

I don't really look at the streams. But it is really hard because everything's become gamified. And it's become this thing where it's like, okay, I'm trying to get the most monthly listeners on Spotify of all my friends. I feel like all those statistics that you were talking about that we can see, they don't really benefit us that much. It's really just something that allows us to pit ourselves with each other. You mentioned buying merch earlier. And I think a lot of fans, depending on what show they're going to,

will buy something like the t-shirt or the book bag because they love the artist and they think that that's a good way to show their love. You've been involved in a big campaign called My Merch. What changes are you looking for? What changes have you already seen? And what's the problem there? So the My Merch campaign was something that I did with UMAA, the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers. So the idea is we're advocating against the practice of merch cuts, which is when a venue will take 15, 20 to 30% of the money that we make from selling albums, selling shirts, selling anything at our shows. And in my experience on this campaign, it worked, I think, pretty well.

Over 100 venues signed up and said that they weren't going to take merch cuts anymore. That's amazing. Yeah, no, I was really happy to see that. And I just wanted to talk about just what it feels like, though, the merch cut thing. This is so weird because we're in a music ecosystem where we all have to work together, right? Everyone benefits from what we're all doing, but particularly what the musician brings, right? There's no show without the musicians. The weirdest thing is you go to the venue, you're having a great conversation with the promoter and the people who are helping you.

And everyone is super happy and nice. And then it's the end of the night and they're just like, where's my cut? Right. You know, it just feels really bad. It feels like you're getting shakedown. I want to talk about your feelings related to artificial intelligence. Let's pick one company, Suno. It's a generative AI audio platform recently announced that they raised $125 million USD in funding. Maybe one of the tech bros that you mentioned on your album had a hand in this. For fun, or because I guess we were curious, we used Suno to write us a lately theme song in the style of Cadence Weapon. It was really terrifying. And I wanted to ask if it would be okay for us to play it for you.

Oh, of course. Okay. I'm dying to hear this. Okay. I'm dying to hear this Okay Did he say you feel cray? Man, I would never say that. I know. How do you feel about companies like Suno and other AI companies in the music space? So I find it really funny.

I feel not very threatened by this because I think Nick Cave had the best answer to the whole AI thing, where you can only make something based on what I've made in the past. Right? Like the lyrics, those are, it seems like similar themes to my most recent album, but all my albums are different. And they're all inspired by my experiences and my human nature that really is going to be difficult for them to replicate. So I'm not super threatened for that. But the one thing I am really concerned about, and particularly for new artists, is this technology. The reason why I think you're seeing so much funding and so much enthusiasm around it is there's this idea of, man, it sure would

be great if we could get music without the musicians, right? Really? Yeah, no. And I think the problem is, say, if you're a corporation that wants to have some music in a film, in a commercial or whatever, they find it a little annoying that they have to get your rights. We have to sign off on it and you have to deal with humans and other companies. And they're like, man, this is so annoying.

It'd be great if we could just get this app to make it for us. Right. And the thing that I always compare it to is when you go to Shoppers Drug Mart and there's the kiosk, they want to do that to musicians. They want to turn it into the kiosk so they can get rid of a job. A self-checkout, displace that person. Yeah. You hinted at this earlier. I've been reading a little bit about this risk of fake music, fake artists, where these platforms, you know, you as a musician have a smaller body of work

than a streaming platform who can kind of absorb listener habits and all the music information that they have to potentially produce a song that is fake, but that they don't tell you is fake and that they put in their playlist. Is there a kind of vibe or a sense of what that's feeling or looking like in your artist community? I mean, when we see things like that, the first thing I think about is this is fraud. Right. we see things like that, the first thing I think about is this is fraud, right? There's the criminality that sometimes is behind the music industry is just changed shape. I talk about it in my song, Bots, whereas like Payola's still rolling. They just changed the name up. And

they're doing it in all these clever ways where it's like, oh yeah, we have this artist. Nobody's seen or heard them before, but they have all these amazing streams. They're based in Sweden, go figure. Yeah, so we are concerned about that. They're moving the goalposts and they're trying to get people used to paying for a subscription rather than paying artists directly. When I was doing some research on the price per stream, I noticed that Peloton ended up having one of the higher payouts. In 2019, it was 3.1 cents per stream, which still is not a lot of money. Do you know why that is? And how do we get a Cadence Weapon, you know, ride? We definitely need the Cadence Weapon Peloton ride. Holler at me if you're listening, Peloton.

My sister is a proud member of the Peloton family. But I don't know why it varies from platform to platform. But even the best thing still is like satellite radio pays very significantly more than that. And radio pays way more than that. But the whole idea of streaming is trying to reorient everyone's listening away from these platforms that actually pay a significant amount of money. Interesting, because I sort of think of radio as like kind of an algorithm too. There have been various attempts to democratize the music industry to make it more fair for artists in the streaming era. I'm thinking of things like Vault, Backstage, Ditto Music.

We've also seen this radical release style by the artist Cindy Lee, who posted their music on a GeoCities website. There are no physical copies of the album. It was released for free with a kind request to e-transfer. Why hasn't this model or some of those other platforms, why haven't they really caught on what are they missing i love that i thought it was uh and you know it's a really great record i love that distribution method but um it doesn't work for every artist yeah that's the problem with a lot of these these answers that people have like vault and you have james blake on there and it's like if you sign up you get all this james blake subscription right but it's like he or he has an amazing, massive audience. And it's not the same for like a new artist who what he's going to go around to his family and friends and be like, can you subscribe to me and pay or whatever? It's going to be hard for them. Yeah.

And I think also the idea of all these different apps, there's supposed to be a solution to the problem. It's really just a bandaid that isn't dealing with the core problem, which is the value of music has been lowered dramatically by the streaming companies. Right. We really need to have streaming reform, totally. And, you know, we're seeing Spotify, they're raising their monthly prices, but that isn't translating to more money for artists. Now they have audio books. But then that means even smaller cut is going to artists now because they've added this new thing. And you realize they're not a music company. It's not about music. It's about

content and whatever they're going to get the best return on. So in your sub stack, you were reflecting on your recent tour with Hot Chip, and you wrote that we don't really have a strong music or arts culture in mainstream Canada. And yet we do have these legislative interventions like the Online Streaming Act, where we're trying to invest in and protect culture and kind of stand up to digital giants. Where's the disconnect? Yeah, I think the disconnect is actually with the people. Like, there's two different Canadas. There's the Canada of a young person who lives in Jane and Finch and they experience local Toronto rap and they have an idea of what Canadian music is. And then you have the other Canada, which is the octogenarian in Miramichi who listened to CBC and they'd be afraid if they heard someone rapping.

And that's why they don't play rap on the radio that much. So I feel like that's a bit where the disconnect is. When you go to England, this is the crazy thing. You go to London, you get into a cab, you turn on the radio, and you're hearing people live mixing electronic music live on the radio. You're hearing people rapping and doing a grime battle on the radio. And this is something that it's thrilling to me and it's so exciting and so vital. And it's a part of the culture there for decades. And it's something that we could have here, but we haven't even started. We haven't even scratched the surface on really tapping into what we really have here in Canada.

It's the weirdest thing. I always feel like Canadian identity, we have this love-hate relationship with ourselves. And until we break out of that and acknowledge who we really are, we're never going to be the country that we believe is possible. As listeners finalize their hot girl or boy or person

summer bucket list and comb over their concert budget. What are the best ways for them to support the musicians that they love? thousands of streams, just buying one shirt. Buy advanced tickets to shows because it really sends a positive signal to promoters. This is where you can get away from having the J-Lo tour canceled because you're getting the signal that people are going to come to the show. So the show may not happen if you don't buy your ticket ahead of time, is basically what I'm saying. Tell a friend about your favorite artist, your favorite album. Tell a friend about Rollercoaster by Cadence Weapon. It really is the most beneficial thing, word of mouth, because your favorite artist is just struggling so hard to break through to the point where they're so fatigued, it makes them want to not continue being an artist. I know so many people that I talk to like that. So the best thing is just tell a friend. Honestly, it means a lot.

We're telling our friends and we're so glad that we got to speak with you. Thank you, Cadence. Thanks, Bas. You've been listening to Lately, a Globe and Mail podcast. Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. Thank you. pack a little more of the latest in business and technology. A new episode of Lately comes out every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.