The Vergecast - Will the future of music sound a lot like the past?

Episode Date: September 19, 2022

In part 1 of our Vergecast: Future of Music series, Alex Cranz talks with Switched on Pop's Charlie Harding about the trends in music today that make new songs out of old material, and whether it's foreshadowing the future of pop. Further reading: Selena Quintanilla Will Sound Older on Her New Posthumous Album Michael Jackson songs removed from streaming services to 'move beyond' fake vocals controversy Shred with Green Day, with some help from AudioShake Invasion of the Vibe Snatchers Music played in this episode: Como Te Quiero Yo A Ti - Selena My Way - Frank Sinatra I'll Be Seeing You - Billie Holiday We Can't Stop - Miley Cyrus bad guy - Billie Eilish Through The Wire - Kanye West Breaking News - Michael Jackson Real Love - The Beatles Free As A Bird - The Beatles 2000 Light Years Away - Green Day Betty (Get Money) - Yung Gravy Genius of Love - Tom Tom Club Fantasy - Mariah Carey Big Energy - Latto I'm Good (Blue) - David Guetta, Bebe Rexha Bang Bang - Rita Ora, Imanbek Higher Love - Kygo, Whitney Houston Don't Start Now - Dua Lipa Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the cassettes that you lost underneath the seat of your first car. I'm your friend David Pierce, and this is the beginning of a new series. So for the next three Mondays, we're going to be bringing you different stories about the future of music.

It's kind of exactly what it sounds like we're going to try to figure out what the future of music is, but we have a bunch of different ideas about what that might be. look like. Our first episode this week comes from the Virgins Managing Editor Alex Kranz. Hi, Alex. Hello, David. What is this episode about? I realize I know almost nothing about what this episode is about. You just like disappeared and made podcast. It's about the future of music. Oh, okay, good. That's perfect. We were looking into like, what about old music? What's happening with old music? Because it felt like we were seeing a lot of like remixes and samples and interpolations and stuff. And as we thought about it more, we were like, wait a minute. It seems like the future of music might be more related to

like the back catalog of music, all the old stuff. I mean, it is kind of true. You listen to music now, and it's like every part of songs now is actually like the drumline from a song from the 1950s. Yes. So we wanted to figure out, is this like just a thing? Is this just randomly happening? What's going on here?

Is this on purpose? Our music executive saying, yes, I need more of this song from the 1950s as a baseline in this little NASDAX song. So that's what we did. We went and we spoke with Charlie Harding, who is a music journalist. He's a songwriter. And he also co-hosts the podcast Switched on Pop. One of my favorite podcasts.

It's so good. So he felt like the perfect person to talk to about this. And it was a lot of fun. Awesome. All right. Take it away. Let's go. Okay.

So I have Charlie here. Charlie, you are like a music expert, especially compared to me. But I think probably compared to most people. Is that accurate? Can I say that about you? I report on. music. So, yeah? Yeah. I feel like that's fine. Music is an infinitely large vocabulary with many languages that one must learn. And so I know a few of them. You know pop music, though. I know pop music

pretty well. Okay. So we're going to talk about a couple of different trends that are happening here in music. And I'm curious about whether this is an indication of the future of music. Great. So the first one I want to talk about was this article I read on Vulture. Selina Quintanilla will sound older on her new posthumous album. So Selena died in. 1995 and they're using recordings from when she was like 13 to 16 years old and they're detuning her voice to make her quote sound like she stepped out of the booth at 23 years old. This is a obviously very particular and tragic case of, of the need to revive a voice.

But people have been manipulating vocals since the beginning of recorded music. And I think it's important to contextualize vocal manipulation and changes as a very age-old thing. If you even think about the era of the crooners, Sinatra, if you will. Big part of their technological advancement

was microphone technique. It was getting up real close on the microphone and getting that deep bass when behind you, you have the support of an orchestra. Now, that's an auditory illusion. It's impossible to sing to an entire arena of people with an orchestra, and you're singing, if you didn't have a microphone, you'd have to be belting to be heard.

And so that's just an early example of how people sing. Even Billy Holiday, that sort of whiny vocal that you know, a lot of the reason why she had this very constrained vocal sound that is now iconic was that she needs. needed to make sure to not make the needle jump as it was recording. If there were too many fluctuations in the voice, the needle could skip and ruin the recording. And so part of the vocal technique is actually determined by the technological requirements of the holiday's era.

In contemporary pop music, vocal manipulation is very commonplace. Now, every major pop star minus one or two uses some amount of vocal tuning to clean up, Sometimes just, you know, a small error. Sometimes there's auto tune through an entire vocal performance. That's extremely common. And for creative effect, I think about Miley Cyrus's, we can't stop where you hear this really low, manipulated vocal that was taken from the world of Chompton Screwed music. Or Billy Elish's bad guy has this low vocal where it's like, I'm the bad guy.

I'm the bad guy. Even Kanye West's entire early catalog of Chipmunk's. soul music is predicated on taking samples and pitching them way up so they sound like they're in a different world. Now, what you're talking about here is potentially a little bit different, right? Because it's about trying to perfect the voice, change the age. Certainly. I've done this.

It's not that hard. I've taken my three-year-old's voice and recorded it and then put it through vocal processing to get a sense of like, what might he sound like when he's 12 years old? All you have to do is just change the pitch and a setting called Formance, which is kind of like where you place the vowels in your voice that can make an old voice sound young or a young voice sound old. It can change the perceptions of gender and the ways that gender is stereotypically perceived in the voice. These things are all actually fairly easy to manipulate. And so I'm not surprised that this is a way that Slina's estate may want to update her music. It's a very achievable thing to do.

people look to change, clean up, update voices all the time. Is it kind of like, I think we've seen maybe with Nirvana and some of these older bands, they go and they find like, oh, yeah, they did these garage session recordings, and now we're going to clean them up and make them sound a little more studio. Is it kind of that same thing, just finding these old, almost lost, quote unquote, tracks and just updating them? They're connected. There are slightly different processes.

Like when you're trying to clean up bad recordings, a lot of what needs to be done is removing hiss and crackle and trying to separate the instruments in a way where you can actually really mix them with modern mixing techniques. But part of that will certainly be, hey, this vocal wasn't recorded very well. How can we get the most out of it? And using techniques of cleaning tools and plugins that will nicely EQ and compress and do all kinds of things to the voice to make it the best sounding performance possible. It's very common.

The reality, though, is that technology has come a long way at recovering bad audio. but every mix engineer is going to tell you, don't fix it in the mix. Get it good the first time. You know this as someone who makes a podcast. If someone delivers you bad audio, it takes 10 times as long to deal with their audio. So a lot can be done.

But it's very hard work. Have we heard of other artists doing the detuning method, like in Salinas case? I think this is a somewhat unique case. I'm sure there could be other examples out there. But part of what we're talking about is the uncanny, valley of relating to the human voice. You know, humans are immensely tuned into the voice. In fact, our ears are EQ'd to hear the human voice over other sounds. It makes sense because we want to be

aware of when our parents call for us when there's danger. And so we are very good at hearing when voices don't sound right. It's why some people don't like the sound of autotune because it doesn't sound natural. I think that when you're updating a vocal, getting an old recording that is recorded poorly at a different age to sound contemporary and totally natural is very challenging. Even if it's done properly, could create fan confusion. I think especially for a living artist, if they were to release a recording of their younger self, I think it would be more likely that they would actually just make it sound like their younger self and mix it so that maybe it's a more in tune, it fits in the mix well.

But you're talking about not just technology, but also aesthetics and people's expectations and culture. There's a lot of reasons why people might not want to hear that recording. You talked about that confusion, and I was thinking a lot about, like, Michael Jackson, after he passed away, Sony Music released this whole new, like, album. And there were a couple of songs on it that people were like, this isn't Michael. This doesn't sound like him. I think this is an impersonator. One fan actually in 2014, one fan actually in 2014, sued Sony music because she was like, it's not him.

So Sony actually had to pull the songs from streaming services this year to avoid further controversy. Pop music is deeply predicated on a performance of authenticity. People want to believe that the performer is performing their identity in their life and that the listener can have this parapsial relationship with that person and potentially see their own life in that music. And for that performance of authenticity to work, you have to believe in the thing. And so in any place where someone is using impersonators and ghostwriters, fans frequently become very suspect of those kind of techniques. Fans have long critiqued the idea of boardrooms

participating in the songwriting process, things being overly commercial. There's a lot of reasons why I think we should challenge some of those assumptions. Yeah. Because it's their age old. There is reason to believe that fans should be suspect of how is technology potentially manipulating my relationship to that artist that I love? Technology or potential fake recreations. If you're going to recreate a song that I love or release a new song from someone who has died, either be like, hey, we're getting someone else who's awesome who you really love to perform in the style of that person and be very clear about it. or give me an old recording that is mixed in a strange way. One of the earliest examples of what you're talking about, in fact, that I can recall,

was the Beatles when they put out their anthologies found songs that John Lennon had recorded, and the three remaining surviving members of the band at that time put out the song, Real Love and Free as a Bird. And those were kind of like the Beatles' final two recordings of the four of them. by taking tape of John Lennon that have been left on the floor, writing new verses for Paul to sing in between, and sound like they were a band again. And that works because that, I think, passes the authenticity test. Is the intent part of that?

Like, the intent of the artist is part of that desire from fans? The artist's intent is always something that people are questioning about is an estate managing the artist in a way that they intended. A great example would be the Prince estate. Prince was suspect of streaming and limited the amount that his songs were available on streaming services, but his estate has made his music available on Spotify. And so there is reasons why fans might want to question whether or not that is a thing that he would have done and may want to participate in his music in a way that would be closer to his intent.

It is always a part of the conversation. Also adjacent to this is AI voices. We see that happen a lot in films and stuff like that where they'll recreate the voices. Is that happening in music where people are like, I'm going to recreate Judy Garland? Are they doing that? Are you creating these? And is that like a viable future for music? This is happening.

It is a fairly nascent area of AI research. I'm sure people have been working it for a couple of years. but I don't know of at this point publicly available tools where you can manipulate someone else's old vocal, but I know that there are firms that are doing this, that are successfully recreating voices off of training sets of that singer that sound reasonable at this point and could be used for future recordings. And there are reasons why people may want to use those AI recordings. A great example might be, hey, you finished a track and you're a really busy pop star. And all of a sudden, you're not available, but you missed one backing note. And we want to recreate that backing note.

There's a bunch of different ways you could do that today. But why don't you just like, we'll just have the AI sing it for you? I could see lots of applications why people might use these tools in the future. But using more as tools, not necessarily as like the centerpiece of an album. No, of course not. Yes, someone's going to do it because, first of all, someone's going to do it as an art project because it's interesting art. people love making AI art is like the conversation that is happening right now. So someone's going to make the full AI vocal album at some point in which nobody's saying it.

Nobody wrote the lyrics. Like that's going to happen for sure. There's a lot of precedent for bands continuing on past the, we'll just say availability of their lead singer, whether they've left the group, whether they're deceased. I can think of like Queen, Van Halen, Genesis, The Grateful Dead, Nirvana, Zappa. they have all continued to perform with other lead singers. Maybe Frank Zappa is one of the really interesting cases. His son, Dweezel Zappa, has a project where he performs his father's music, Zappa without Zappa. There are cases where fandoms want to continue to engage in the artwork and the music of their favorite bands.

And as long as that fandom is around, there's probably a marketplace for this kind of recreation of a voice. but it's going to have to pass through the lens of culture, through these authenticity tests. Do people want to hear this? And so will it be used? Absolutely. How it's going to be used, I think is going to be determined by where is the culture at? Are we willing and wanting to hear, especially new material with old voices? We'll see.

I think we might definitely hear maybe like remixes and updated lyrics and things that are like mashups and kind of more in the EDM hip-hop remix culture. That feels like a very ripe place for AI voices from deceased artists. Well, it's funny you bring up remixes because we're actually going to talk about that. But first, we're going to take it to a break. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work.

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One of the biggest challenges in remixing music is do you actually have the original music available? There was a famous fire that burned down a ton of masters in the world of popular music. One band included was the band Green Day. They lost their masters. And so they wanted to do remixes, match up their music in new and original ways, but they only have the finished final products. You can't change the voice. You can't take the guitars out until they partnered up with an AI company called Audio Shake, who can do AI stemming, where they can actually use AI.

to remove and separate the guitars, the bass, the drums, the vocals, background instruments, and create them as separate tracks so that you can do new things with them. And Green Day did that and released one of their songs on TikTok where they actually just completely removed the guitar so that other people could play guitar along with it. And a sort of guitar hero mash-up competition of your dreams if you're a fan. And so I think that you're going to see AI tools used for all kinds of creative purposes for fan engagement and for putting music in new context that you couldn't do in any other way. And I think that like those remixes seem to be one of those things that's really taking off.

I know TikTok we talk a lot about on the Vergecast. TikTok is kind of this big engine for music right now. It's driving music in a way, maybe more so than Spotify even. Is that just like a fad? Is that, you know, because everybody's got TikTok and the fancy new tools or is this just like kind of a new future. We're just going to be getting more and more remixes. Remix a culture and especially the use of interpolations is at an all-time high. We're seeing more new music mashed up with older than we have in the last decade. I've done some reporting that shows that interpolations have,

in fact, doubled in the last five years on Billboard's year-end Hot 100. You asked me, is this here to stay? I think all of culture is a fad, right? At some point, we're all going to be wearing moon boots again. I'm so excited. And so at some point, remixes are not going to be cool, but is this here for a minute? For sure, because TikTok is the biggest, most important social network at the moment. And it's going to have staying power for how long? I don't know. The cycles of power and staying power within social media seem to be increasing in time. And so I think it's going to be around for a minute. If you asked me what's happening in 50 years, I don't know. Like I said, I'm going to be wearing moon boots on the moon and making music in ways I can't even imagine. Thank you.

Well, you talk about in interpolations. How is that different than remixes? Like, how do we define those two? Sure. If you want to use someone else's song, there are roughly three things that you can do. One is you can make a cover of a song, which is basically, you know, redoing all of the melody. and the lyrics with maybe slight variation, but staying really close to the original. You could sample a song where you actually take the original recording and you put it into a new song and you change the context so you're not singing the same lyrics throughout the entire thing, but you're using the actual recording itself. The last thing you can do is you can interpolate a song, which is that you're going to

borrow a musical element from another song. It could be a melody. It could be a lyric. It could be a big part of the vibe in production. and you're going to update it into a new song. And so this has become extremely popular recently. Young Gravy has a song called Betty Get Money, which interpolates Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give It Up,

which is great because if you play that, then I've just Rick rolled all of your listeners. Yes. Lado is a great example. Her song, Big Energy, one of the most fun songs for the last couple years, uses both a sample of the TomTom Club, and interpolates Mariah Carey's fantasy

which had used the same sample but because Lotto uses some of Mariah Carey's lyric she's interpolating Mariah Carey's version of the Tom Tom Club that's bitch I could be a fantasy I can tell you got beat D energy That's a very popular interpolation There's a new interpolation of the song Blue Abba Di Abba Da

that David Getta has out There is even a song by Rita Or which interpolates the Beverly Hills cop theme. It's a very common thing right now that people are taking old hits that are still in the cultural memory, still interesting, but maybe have faded just a little bit, and then updating them and bringing them back because, frankly, there's no better hook than a song that's already hooked you before. So people like to update them.

It's kind of like the Hollywood strategy of rebooting everything. And it all has to do with the cost of marketing. Marketing a new film is extremely expensive. People want to go see things that are familiar, and it's easier to market something that is already in the popular consciousness. And so I think the same thing is true of music. There is more competition in music today than there ever has been before. The number of songs released daily a few years ago was 60,000 songs on Spotify. And so I don't even know what the number is updated to today.

But you have so much competition when you're putting a song out. So maybe if it connects to another major hit, you have a better chance of being remembered. Are the studios doing this intentionally? Is this just the artist being like, I want people to listen to my song, which I totally get? Where is the kind of drive coming from to do this? I think it's bidirectional. Clearly listeners like this music because it's performing very well on Billboard. People are choosing to go and listen to it. Radio DJs are continuing to play this music because it's working. At the same time, music publishers, music publishers are the people that own the songwriting credit,

which is the part that gets interpolated. Music publishers are actively pitching the idea of interpolations to major artists to continue the lifetime value of their. catalog of music. So I spoke recently with Hypnosis sounds and Primary Wave, two of the biggest financially backed music publishers. These are the people who are buying up old catalogs, like paying sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars for old catalogs. They believe that it's a stable financial asset because they can predict streaming revenue off of these songs for a number of years and they think that they're going to make money back off of it. And they're also trying

to find new markets and new life for that music. They're doing it through biopics. They're doing it through docs. They're getting people to cover those songs, all which increase the value of that catalog. But they're also actively pitching interpolations. They literally go through their list of songs, make lists, sometimes even produce ideas for songs that then turn into hits that get played on the radio because through the label system, they're able to pitch those ideas. They get them to a major artist and they get remade. One of my favorite examples of this kind of thing happening was the song, Hire Love.

Not talking about Steve Winwood. I'm talking about Kaigo taking a bonus track from Whitney Houston covering that song and then updating it with contemporary production. This is one of those cases where a music catalog company helped facilitate the revival of this body of work. And I think it's an amazing song. I love the new version. So these studios who are buying all of these catalogs because they want this. predictable revenue. Because, like, I guess music, like all forms of entertainment is not predictable in its revenue. Is this kind of a newer thing in music? Have they been doing this a while,

this predictability play? Well, certainly streaming has changed how publishers perceive the lifetime value of their work. Music catalogs have always been valuable, and people have made a lot of money off of legacy artists and owning that publishing. That's not new. There's an apocryful story about Paul McCartney telling Michael Jackson, hey, it's a really good idea to own publishing. Like, there's a lot of value in it. And Michael Jackson went behind his back and bought the Beatles catalog. And Paul was not so happy about that. So there's always been value in it.

What has changed is that streaming provides more predictable revenues. You can see how your revenues are changing literally day by day. And previously, you would have had to rely on physical retailers. And of course, if you have a legacy catalog, maintaining shelf space in a physical location is more challenging when so much new music is being released. On streaming, fandoms are able to continue listening. If you're a boomer and you love boomer music, you're going to keep listening to that on Spotify. You know, if you're from the greatest generation and you really love listening to the old classics of pop music, you probably couldn't find them at Best Buy today. But if that's your thing, you can find playlist, you can find the music, can be in good.

engaged with it on streaming in a way that provides some predictability now. And so it's not hard to build out financial forecasts of this is how much money this artist is making over streaming year over year. Is it growing? Is it declining? And you can predict what those, the revenues might be, which is all predicated on listener behavior is going to be the same in the future as it is today. And we don't know about that. But you've got these companies who are going, they're buying this music and they're saying, okay, I know I can predict this. And then I also know I can get somebody to go do an interpolation. I can go have a whole bunch of let's slow it down so it'll sound great on a movie trailer to know just how dramatic it is. If you want to be crass and think

about music as a marketplace, listeners have to want this kind of music. In the 60s, the worst thing you could possibly do was to sell out and work with a brand. And now it's like if you're not working with a brand, you're not a real artist. So ideas around this in culture are going to change. But listeners are definitely tuning into this music and it's working. And so I think you see the suppliers of this music are recognizing, okay, we need to figure out how to supply more of this and do it well. All of the publishers I've spoken with work very hard to maintain high quality. Now, that obviously is extremely subjective, but they're not just letting their catalog out there willy-nilly saying, hey, go cover this song, do whatever you want with it.

They're trying to connect old songs with new artists where there is a, a, really strong resonant connection that fans are going to love. They're getting approvals on the songs, the usages, et cetera, et cetera. And Hypnosis Sounds, for example, told me over email that they usually tell the artist who did the recording originally that this is going to happen, even when they don't need to, because a lot of these deals are like, these publishers just own all of it. So they don't need to get the artist's permission. In some cases, they do. But they do so anyway because you don't want to mess with these legacies, right? If you're going to use old IP, don't mess it up because it's actually going to potentially

hurt the entire value of the overall catalog. So I think people are trying to do this intelligently and do it in a way that builds value rather than dilutes it. So the publisher pitching part of it is definitely important, but I think it's just one part of the marketplace of how we are listening to old hits in new ways. Is there an end date for this kind of business model? where they buy the catalogs, they put them on streaming, and then they work with a lot of artists and stuff to do remixes, to do interpolations. Is there an end date to that, a point where, like, there just aren't any more artists who can do these songs?

Or there aren't any more artists who you can buy the catalogs from? Pop is always churning over, so there will always be new acts coming along. But there are a couple of end dates. One, you have to have a fandom. You know, not a lot of people are currently buying, say, John Phillips's music, who, was one of the biggest pop stars of the 19th century. It's just me. Oh, yeah, okay.

That's awesome. I mean, people still play the sousaphone. That's awesome. But, like, horn music from that era is not very popular today. We might hear it on marching bands, etc. But generally, that's not driving pop music. You also have copyright expiration. So at some point, all work will enter the public domain.

But that is a long period of time, many generations. And I think you're going to see a lot of music publishers pursuing Disney's strategy. which is maintaining the lifetime of your intellectual property and trying to constantly re-ignite it so that the fandom for that thing grows and at least sustains an ongoing business for each of these mini artist brands. And when all else fails, they will go petition the government to make sure they can hold Mickey Mouse forever. Do you think we'll see the music labels doing that as well?

In the music community, there's probably a mixture of what people want. Some people want, like, let me sample anything. anything I want to pay. Certainly the people who own the intellectual property are working to maintain the lifetime value of that in the longest possible way that they can. And so certainly, I know for a fact, there are labels that don't want to believe in, for example, fair use because they would prefer that in every case people pay for any instance of recognizing that music, which is why we see an increase in music docs that are actually owned and operated by the artist. Those are not Docs, those, that is artist propaganda, they can be fun. You should watch them, enjoy them. That's

totally fine, but that's not a documentary, but so many music docs today are sold as a doc when actually it is a like someone with complete creative control about how they are being represented. Is there any kind of music trend that you're seeing right now that you think that's the one, that's the future of music? Because a lot of these we've talked about, you're like, you know what, this is going to be part of the future. This isn't the fabric of the future of music. If there are any that's like just stand out to you. I'm not going to put my Oracle hat on for a very specific reason, which is that I think music is one of the fastest moving media format, that the culture around music evolves so

quickly. Every time people want to say all pop music sounds the same, it's like just listen to what pop music sounded like five years ago. It does not sound the same. It updates and changes. It's very chameleonic. I can't tell you the combination of how pop music is going to sound, how it's going to be created in how technology is going to inform it because I think it's going to shift every single year. Even when we get to the point where AI is going to perfectly recreate a song if and when that happens and create new interesting music, humans are still going to participate in music in wild and creative ways that I can't even possibly imagine, it's all going to happen so fast that I just would feel irresponsible to pinpoint like this is the thing that's going to be

around for the next hundred years. I mean, again, I love the sousaphone, but it's got a very particularly place. At one point, it was very, very popular. It's just all going to change. All of these interpolations, all of these remixes, are we just kind of, I don't know if it's doomed is the right word. They're absolute bops. But are we going to just be in this loop, this endless loop of recall? We definitely seem to be living in the greatest era of nostalgia. And that is reflected, I think, in all of our media. And it particularly is true in popular music. Interpolations are on the rise. It seems like every year there's a new throwback to a previous generation. We are very much into the 80s in disco right now.

One of the biggest albums the last couple of years was Duolipa's future nostalgia, and it is an update to the disco sound. We are, I think, in a nostalgia loop. I maintain that I think the ideas around pop culture and what's going to be interesting will change and that at some point nostalgia will be frowned upon, but we are in it for a minute. There's no doubt about that. I think every musician secretly hopes for the moment where actually what's going to happen is we're going to go to the most avant-garde weird thing that's ever been created.

And we lean on artists like Bjork and other folks to help push those sort of boundaries and help change our understanding of what music can sound like. It's always going to be a push and a pull. Ah, I love it. All right. Well, thank you, Charlie, so much for taking the time to talk to us and educate me about music and all the artists that I've never heard of until today. Thank you for chatting.

All right, that's it for The Vergecast today. Thanks for listening. You can find Charlie's podcast switched on pop anywhere you get podcasts. This is the first episode of our future of music series, which will be every Monday for the next three weeks. In the meantime, you should check out Theverge.com. We've got a new look, tons of cool articles, and we're here to talk about the future of everything else, including music. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Norie Donovan is our executive producer, and Brooke Mentors is our editorial director of audio.

The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you have thoughts, feedback, feelings, mixtapes, you can always email Vergecast at theverge.com. Or you can call us on our Vergecast hotline at 866 Verge 1-1. David will be back on Wednesday to talk about TikTok search, your iPhone 14 questions, and a whole lot more. See you then. Rock and roll.