Will the future of music sound a lot like the past?

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:48David Pierce?

  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 look like. Our first episode this week comes from The Verge's Managing Editor, Alex Krantz. Hi, Alex.

• 1:13Alex Cranz?

  Hello, David.

• 1:14David Pierce?

  What is this episode about? I realize I know almost nothing about what this episode is about. You just like disappeared and made podcasts.

• 1:20Alex Cranz?

  It's about the future of music.

• 1:22David Pierce?

  Okay, good. That's perfect.

• 1:23Alex Cranz?

  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.

• 1:41David Pierce?

  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 drum line from a song from the 1950s.

• 1:50Alex Cranz?

  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 executives saying, yes, I need more of this song from the 1950s as a baseline in this little Nas X 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.

• 2:17David Pierce?

  One of my favorite podcasts.

• 2:18Alex Cranz?

  It's so good. So he felt like the perfect person to talk to about this and it was a lot of fun.

• 2:23David Pierce?

  Awesome. All right. Take it away. Let's go.

• 2:34Alex Cranz?

  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?

• 2:43Speaker 03

  I report on music, so yeah.

• 2:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I feel like that's fine.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  Music is an infinitely large vocabulary with many languages that one must learn. And so I know a few of them.

• 2:54Alex Cranz?

  You know pop music, though.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  I know pop music pretty well.

• 2:57Alex Cranz?

  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.

• 3:05Speaker 03

  Great.

• 3:05Alex Cranz?

  So the first one I want to talk about was this article I read on Vulture. Selena 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."

• 3:40Speaker 03

  This is a obviously very particular and tragic case 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.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  A 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 Billie Holiday, that sort of whiny vocal that you know.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  A lot of the reason why she had this very constrained vocal sound that is now iconic was that she 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 holidays 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 autotune through an entire vocal performance. That's extremely common. And for creative effect, I think about Miley

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Cyrus's We Can't Stop, where you hear this really low manipulated vocal that was taken from the world of chopped and screwed music.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  Or Billie Eilish's Bad Guy has this low vocal where it's like, I'm the bad guy.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  Even Kanye West's entire early catalog of chipmunk soul music is predicated on taking samples and pitching them way up so they sound like they're in a different world.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  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 how, 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

• 6:43Speaker 03

  Selena'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.

• 6:53Alex Cranz?

  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?

• 7:11Speaker 03

  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

• 7:54Speaker 03

  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.

• 8:03Alex Cranz?

  Have we heard of other artists doing the detuning method, like in Selena's case?

• 8:08Speaker 03

  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 in to the voice. In fact, our ears are EQ'd to hear the human voice over other sounds. Makes sense because we want to be aware of when our parents call for us, when there's danger.

• 8:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 8:32Speaker 03

  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 living artists, 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 little more in tune, fits in the mix well. But you're talking about not just technology, but also

• 9:16Speaker 03

  aesthetics and people's expectations and culture. There's a lot of reasons why people might not want to hear that recording.

• 9:23Alex Cranz?

  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.

• 9:46Alex Cranz?

  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.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  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 a listener can have this parasocial 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.

• 10:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  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? Like, if you're going to recreate a song that I love or release a new song from someone who has died, like 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

• 11:27Speaker 03

  and the three remaining surviving members of the band at that time put out the song "Real Love"

• 11:36Speaker 03

  and "Free As A Bird."

• 11:44Speaker 03

  And those were kind of like the Beatles' final two recordings of the four of them by taking tape of John Lennon that had 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.

• 12:03Alex Cranz?

  Is the intent part of that? Like, the intent of the artist is part of that desire from fans?

• 12:09Speaker 03

  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.

• 12:45Alex Cranz?

  Also adjacent to this is AI voices. Like, 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 gonna recreate Judy Garland"? Like, are they doing that, recreating these? And is that like a viable future for music?

• 13:06Speaker 03

  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

• 13:50Speaker 03

  today, but why don't you just like, eh, 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.

• 13:59Alex Cranz?

  But using them more as tools, not necessarily as like the centerpiece of an album?

• 14:03Speaker 03

  No, of course not. I mean, 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, Dweezil Zappa, has a project where

• 14:48Speaker 03

  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 gonna 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

• 15:31Speaker 03

  kind of more in the EDM hip hop remix culture. That feels like a very ripe place for AI voices from deceased artists.

• 15:41Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's funny you bring up remixes because we were actually going to talk about that. But first, we're going to take it to a break.

• 15:56Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's Chief Investment Strategist, and Colin Martin, Head of Fixed Income Research and Strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 16:45Alex Cranz?

  Okay, and we're back. During the break, Charlie was telling me he has a very cool AI remix story you want to share.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  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.

• 17:10Speaker 03

  They lost their masters. And so, they wanted to do remixes, mash 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 AudioShake, 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.

• 17:55Speaker 03

  Any sort of Guitar Hero mashup 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 contexts that you couldn't do in any other way.

• 18:13Alex Cranz?

  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 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 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?

• 18:38Speaker 03

  Remix of culture, and especially the use of interpolations, is at an all time high. We're seeing more new music mashed up with older music 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? Like, at some point, we're all going to be wearing moon boots again.

• 19:04Alex Cranz?

  I'm so excited.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  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 gonna 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 gonna be around for a minute. I just, if you ask me what's happening in 50 years, I don't know. Like I said, I'm gonna be wearing moon boots on the moon and

• 19:35Alex Cranz?

  You'll be looking great.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  making music in ways I can't even imagine. Thank you.

• 19:38Alex Cranz?

  Well, you talk about interpolations. How is that different than remixes? Like, how do we define those two?

• 19:45Speaker 03

  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 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.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  And so this has become extremely popular recently. Yung Gravy has a song called Betty Get Money.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  Which interpolates Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give It Up.

• 20:50Speaker 03

  Which is great because if you play that, then I've just Rick rolled all of your listeners. Yes. Lotto is a great example. Her song Big Energy, one of the most fun songs of the last couple of years, uses both a sample of the Tom Tom Club.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  And interpolates Mariah Carey's Fantasy.

• 21:13Speaker 03

  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.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  That's a very popular interpolation. There's a new interpolation of the song Blue Aba Di Aba Da that David Guetta has out.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  There is even a song by Rita Ora, which interpolates the Beverly Hills Cop theme.

• 21:56Speaker 03

  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.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  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.

• 22:48Alex Cranz?

  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, the kind of drive coming from to do this?

• 22:59Speaker 03

  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

• 23:42Speaker 03

  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, 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.

• 24:24Speaker 03

  One of my favorite examples of this kind of a thing happening was the song Higher Love. Not talking about Steve Winwood, I'm talking about Kygo taking a bonus track from Whitney Houston, covering that song, and then updating it with contemporary production.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  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.

• 25:02Alex Cranz?

  So these, 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?

• 25:20Speaker 03

  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 apocryphal 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, you know, day by day. And previously, you would have had to relied on

• 26:04Speaker 03

  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 playlists, you can find the music, you can be 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

• 26:46Speaker 03

  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.

• 26:55Alex Cranz?

  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 look, sound great on a movie trailer to know just how dramatic it is.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  If you want to be crass and think about music as a marketplace, listeners have to want this kind of music. In the sixties, 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.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  They're trying to connect old songs with new artists where there is 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.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  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.

• 28:56Alex Cranz?

  Is there an end date for this kind of business model? Where they, 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?

• 29:16Speaker 03

  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 Philip Sousa's music, who was one of the biggest pop stars of the 19th century.

• 29:33Alex Cranz?

  It's just me.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, okay. That's awesome. I mean, if people still play the Sousaphone, that's awesome. But like horn music from that era is not very popular today. We might hear it in marching bands, et cetera. But generally, that's not driving pop music. You also have copyright expirations. 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 reignite it so that the fandom for that thing grows and at least sustains an ongoing business for each of these mini artist brands.

• 30:13Alex Cranz?

  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?

• 30:23Speaker 03

  In the music community, there's probably a mixture of what people want. Some people want like, let me sample 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 like 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.

• 31:04Speaker 03

  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.

• 31:13Alex Cranz?

  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 is in the fabric of the future of music. Is there any that's like just stand out to you?

• 31:29Speaker 03

  I'm not gonna 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 wanna say, "All pop music sounds the same", it's like, "Just listen to what pop music sounded like five years ago", does not sound the same. It updates and changes. It's very chameleon-ic. I can't tell you the combination of how pop music is gonna sound, how it's gonna be created, and how technology is going to inform it, because I think it's gonna 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 gonna participate in music in wild and creative ways that I can't even possibly imagine.

• 32:12Speaker 03

  It's all gonna happen so fast that I just would feel irresponsible to pinpoint, like, "This is the thing that's gonna be around for the next 100 years." I mean, again, I love the sousaphone, but it's got a very particular place. At one point, it was very, very popular. You know, it's just all gonna change.

• 32:29Alex Cranz?

  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, are we gonna just be in this loop, this endless loop of recall?

• 32:42Speaker 03

  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 and disco right now. One of the biggest albums of the last couple of years was Dua Lipa's Future Nostalgia, and it is an update to the disco sound.

• 33:17Speaker 03

  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 gonna happen is we're going to go to the most avant-garde, weird thing that's ever been created. And, you know, 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 gonna be a push and a pull.

• 33:50Alex Cranz?

  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.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  Thank you for chatting.

• 34:08Alex Cranz?

  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. Norrie Donovan is our executive producer, and Brooke Minter 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 [email protected]. Or you can call us on our Vergecast hotline

• 34:51Alex Cranz?

  at 866-VERGE11. 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.

• 35:08Speaker 04

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