Dani Deahl on how streaming and sampling is changing the music industry

This week on The Vergecast interview, Nilay Patel talks to music reporter and host of the The Verge video series Future of MusicDani Deahl. Dani walks Nilay through two episodes of the brand new season — one about how music sampling has changed the way people are writing music, and the other about how the music streaming platforms are re-shaping the music industry. You can watch Future of Music now on The Verge's YouTube channel. 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.

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• 0:54Nilay Patel?

  Hey, everybody. It's Simon from The Vergecast. On this week's interview episode, we have Verge music reporter and host of our video series, Future of Music, Dani Deal. You don't know Dani. She's incredible. She's a DJ herself. She is our music reporter. Some of the most interesting reporting we do around music and platforms. She has a series. It's called Future of Music. So we're in season two. On this episode, we're going to focus on two specific episodes of Future of Music. One about how music sampling has changed the way people are writing music, and the other about how music streaming platforms are reshaping the music industry.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  Advances in technology have not only affected the way people get their sounds or create their sounds, but it's also affected the actual release process, how artists put their music out into the world.

• 1:36Nilay Patel?

  So you're going to hear some clips from Future of Music throughout this interview. Dani talks to some great artists about how they're making music, and you're going to hear from them. This is kind of a different interview episode for us. I'm very excited about it. Let me know what you think. Here we go.

• 1:52Nilay Patel?

  Danny, you've been making the future of music. Tell us what that show is.

• 1:55Speaker 03

  Wow, so the future of music is a show that all of these different aspects of what the future of music really means, because there's all these different directions when it comes to music, how the music is made, how the music is released, how things become viral, why do certain genres become more popular than others? And so we look at all of these different tangents and try to bring them back to what does that mean for musicians and for music culture right now?

• 2:24Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so here's a clip from the episode all about music sampling.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  Sampling is the creative art of cutting and pasting audio, and it's been used to create hits for decades. And it's become this global industry where producers can buy and sell sounds online to use in their own work. Top Latin pop producers Andres Torres and Mauricio Renjifo make and use samples to create global hits, most notably this song.

• 2:53Speaker 04

  When we were starting, it was a little unfair, because a big producer that had a lot of success will always sound better than a small producer, because they had money to buy... He had the kick. And the plugins and all that stuff. Now, it's fair. It's just creativity. Who is the most creative person that can make the most interesting song? Because everybody can sound good.

• 3:15Nilay Patel?

  So let's start with the songwriting process. I don't think people really quite grok how much samples have changed the songwriting process. Like, you know it, there's obviously songs that are built around famous samples, but samples are now just the building blocks of songs in a way that is actually quite surprising. Walk us through that a little bit.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  So I think in order to understand the way people get samples now, you really have to contextualize how people used to get samples and how difficult that used to be. So you would have to go to the label and try and figure out how to procure the rights to it, and more often than not, if you're a smaller artist, you certainly can't afford to do that. And that's why most people would just take it without permission and just hope that the song would fly under the radar, or you would make enough money off the song that it would get noticed and people would sue you. And by that point, you could actually have the financial resources to deal with settling the case.

• 4:09Nilay Patel?

  So I mean, that's like, ask for forgiveness, not permission, right?

• 4:13Speaker 03

  Right, but now we don't really have to do that is the thing. We have these things that are called sample marketplaces. And they're still relatively new, I think. There's only a few places that are really robust enough for people to go to right now. And the two primary ones are Splice and Sounds.com.

• 4:30Speaker 05

  This library is made so that you can do what you want with it and not worry about that.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  So you buy a sample on Splice, that's it, it's yours to use?

• 4:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, in your works, you don't have to do any attribution. It's yours to use, royalty free. There's like, you know, minor things, like you can't just resell the sample and things like that. But in your commercial works, you are good to go.

• 4:49Speaker 03

  And with both of them, you pay a very nominal monthly subscription fee. And then you get credits that you can exchange for individual sounds that you can download online. And Splice is the one that I use. And it's so fluid and easy for me to integrate into my workflow. I have a little widget on my desktop. And without even going to the website, while I'm in Ableton, I can just drop down that widget. I can be like, oh, you know what I need right here? I need a really strong impact with a little whoosh at the end. But I want it to be very low end, a little bassy. And I can just type in some keywords and then I can just drag from that widget straight into my project and it takes away one credit.

• 5:29Nilay Patel?

  That's wild.

• 5:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:30Nilay Patel?

  How do you feel like that impacts your creativity, right? Like so much of traditional songwriting creativity is like constraint. Or it's, I don't know, I'm thinking about Led Zeppelin putting guitar amplifiers in churches and things to like get weird sounds that no one else could create. Like, I mean, that's like the, in the raucous world, like that was a moment, right? Like, they actually did this thing that no one else can do. They built this thing that no one else can get. How do you, as you're now have access to just an enormous library of sounds and you can just like pay for whatever, how do you think that's changed kind of your, your version of creativity? And what have you learned from artists that you've talked to?

• 6:05Speaker 03

  It's made the idea in my head connect to what I see on the screen much quicker. And that's actually better for my creativity. I think sampling in general gets kind of a bad rap because people associate it with stealing or unoriginality, or you're just taking something else that somebody already made and you're not doing the thing. But there's this really great quote that circulates within producer circles. And it was a comment that was left, I think, on a message board in 2010. And the gist of it is basically, I thought loops was cheating, so I made all of my samples from scratch. But then I thought samples was cheating, so I recorded all of my drum sounds. But then I thought using drums was cheating. So then I learned how to build my drums.

• 6:50Speaker 03

  And then basically it leads to, but then all of that was cheating. So then I wound up raising goats so I could make my own skins for the drums. And now I don't really have time for making music, what with the goat farming and such.

• 7:02Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  So at a certain point, I mean, sure, we're getting sounds that fill in little gaps or are the building blocks for what the larger end product will be. But people also neglect that samples are manipulated and treated in all of these different ways and are reinvented and put into conditions that maybe they were never envisioned to be a part of to begin with. Are there any sounds from Despacito in your sample pack?

• 7:32Speaker 04

  There are, there are.

• 7:32Speaker 06

  Probably, yeah.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  Like a lot of percussion that we have used that are real people that we recorded, for example, the Wida.

• 7:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's there 100%.

• 7:42Speaker 04

  That's near.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  That's nice.

• 7:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:56Nilay Patel?

  When you were talking to Andres and Mauricio, what were they saying to you that like really opened your eyes?

• 8:01Speaker 03

  One thing I thought was really refreshing about Andres and Mauricio was, one, they were very forthcoming about the fact that they use samples and a lot of top 40 producers use samples, but maybe don't want to talk about it because there still is this stigma around using samples. And then not only that, they had heard some of their samples used by other big groups very prominently in their songs, and they were really proud of that.

• 8:28Speaker 04

  We have heard a lot of drums being used and song, "Why Don't We?", they used our one guitar from our sample, but they tweaked it and the song is really awesome.

• 8:47Speaker 07

  So we're proud. We feel super cool about it.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  I think that that was really inspirational. These guys that made literally the top song on the planet that you could not escape for over a year. To have them say, this other group that's also really big, used one of our sounds. And we feel really proud about that.

• 9:04Nilay Patel?

  And they just put that on Splice, right?

• 9:06Speaker 03

  And they just put it on Splice and you could get that same sound for probably five or 10 cents.

• 9:20Nilay Patel?

  I came up making music in radically different time than now. And what's amazing to me is all the little glimmers, you could see them, right? But like, we had slow internet connections and like, what you're describing with Splice, where it's just a widget, you can just like type in a sound and get a sound and like move it over. That, to me, was like five hours of file sharing transfers to get like one kick drum sound, right?

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh. There were afternoons where I would wait for LimeWire to download one song. And then sometimes somebody titled the song wrong. So what I downloaded wasn't even the thing that I thought I was getting.

• 9:53Nilay Patel?

  A classic LimeWire shenanigan.

• 10:02Nilay Patel?

  Let's actually talk about the process of writing and distributing music. Because when you get to LimeWire, I think about distribution, right? LimeWire and Napster and whatever else, they revolutionized distribution. They weren't necessarily legal, but we all used them. That led to iTunes, which led to a rebirth of singles. iTunes famously, Steve Jobs said its competition was piracy, like this is continuing on a theme. And then iTunes sort of begat Spotify and now Apple Music and Tidal, right? Like the streaming services are here. And that has like dramatically changed not only how things are distributed, but how things are made. I just want to set up a clip here. Here's a clip from the upcoming music streaming episode with Charlie XCX, which is going to be out on September 20th.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  We all know streaming is changing the way we listen to music, but it's also changing how artists release music. Charli XCX is a singer and songwriter known for hits like Boom Clap, Boys,

• 10:58Speaker 03

  and 1999 with Troye Sivan.

• 11:03Speaker 03

  She's known to release music however and whenever she wants, often with little warning, which would have been unthinkable before streaming. Now, artists can instantly put their music online, but this also means they have to find ways to stand out among the millions of songs at our fingertips. As a result, the idea of what an album is has completely changed.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  One thing that I think people really don't realize is that iTunes was the impetus for reinvigorating the singles market after we had come out of 40 years of being almost completely album-based as a society. So on iTunes, they said, "Cool, we're gonna host all of your albums, but if people want to, they don't have to buy the whole album. They could just buy one song if they want to, or they could buy two or three."

• 11:51Nilay Patel?

  And with that change, that changed the entire release strategy of albums, right? I mean, I don't know, the Taylor Swift record is out. She's released like four singles already off that record, like just all in a row. The album is actually not the event, the singles are the event.

• 12:04Speaker 03

  Right, and it's probably worth noting what the actual traditional album cycle is, that I think that's maybe something you and I know, but maybe a lot of other people don't. That traditional album cycle is, there's this big buildup to this massive thing that drops, right? But you only tease one or two things, so maybe there's one single and maybe there's two. And that's generally been the format for decades. And now what we're seeing is people are releasing way more singles, and those singles might make it onto an album, they might not, they might live on their own. And we're also seeing that some people just continue to release singles, and it never culminates in an album whatsoever.

• 12:43Nilay Patel?

  And this is part of what is called the waterfall strategy?

• 12:47Speaker 03

  The waterfall strategy, yes, that's been around for a few years. And so basically, the concept is you release one single, and then you wait a month or two, you release another single, month or two, another single, et cetera, et cetera, until you have enough material that you can bundle it up. And then push it on people again with maybe one or two extra songs and call it an EP or an album.

• 13:08Nilay Patel?

  So I thought that was really funny when you were talking about the waterfall strategy, Charli XCX, and she was like, this is dumb. Wait, I should just run it. It's like hilarious.

• 13:16Speaker 08

  I've had that term for like three or four years now. And like, it's like whenever I go to like a meeting with my label, I'd be like, you know, like, let's put some music out, guys. And they'd be like, yeah, you know, we've been thinking about this new strategy. It's called the waterfall strategy. And I'm like, great, like, what the fuck is that then? And they're like, well, you know, you drop one song and then three months later, you drop another one. And then three months later, you drop another one. And that's the waterfall. I'm like, wow, okay, like, that's just dropping songs, like, right? I don't know.

• 13:49Nilay Patel?

  What about the waterfall strategy makes it work? Like, what is the real difference? Like, why is it talked about that way?

• 13:55Speaker 03

  So the first thing that you have to understand about Charli and why she thinks it's hilarious that a label has told her about a concept she already knows is that she is truly a child of the internet. So her stage name, Charli XCX, was actually her old MSN Messenger screen name.

• 14:11Nilay Patel?

  That's amazing.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  And she was discovered on MySpace. So she's been working the digital game literally for her entire life. And this is all that she knows. And the reason why the singles format works so well in the digital age is really just because people want content all the time at this point. And it's much harder to get people's attention. It's much harder to keep that attention once you have it. And it is much easier for people to forget about you if you're not constantly on their mind and at the forefront of their timeline or appearing in an email in your inbox or on the top of a playlist.

• 14:50Speaker 08

  People just want shit. That's what it is, right? People just want shit. And like, yes, there's a case of like, sometimes you can like overcrowd your own space if you. Give them too much shit, hence the three-month waterfall strategy.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:03Speaker 08

  But like, also like, who cares? Like, cause some shit pops off, some shit doesn't.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 15:08Speaker 08

  People forget, people move on, people gravitate to like the new person doing the waterfall strategy. Like, it's all a mess, just to put out what you want, let's go.

• 15:17Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that is, to me, that that goes right into how songs are are changing, right? Like, we live in a world of non-stop battle for our attention. The songs are gonna be a lot shorter, which is wild to me.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  Not only that, but the song's structure is also being changed to reflect people's changing attention spans. And that's just because you're trying to hook people within the first few seconds and make sure that they add you to a playlist.

• 15:43Nilay Patel?

  So that's wild, because you're you're in this constant battle for attention. And they measure something called skip rate, right? Which is you're in Spotify and this is how fast you move to the next track?

• 15:51Speaker 03

  Yes. Skip rate is really important because you only get paid on Spotify if someone listens to thirty seconds of your song or more. So people are trying to tweak the way that they write songs to make sure that your attention is grabbed and you're invested and you're listening for a minimum of thirty seconds so that that payout is triggered.

• 16:11Speaker 08

  If I'm working on like pop stuff for somebody else,

• 16:14Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:15Speaker 08

  or like if I'm working on like the singles that like my label wanna take to radio, they talk about skip rate.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  So what are some of those tricks that you use to make sure that the skip rate is as low as possible?

• 16:27Speaker 08

  Like chorus within like the first thirty seconds. No like weird self-indulgent intro, which is basically all my songs I put on my album. Like hook at the top in the intro, probably maybe even start with the chorus, under three minutes. Probably like no pre-chorus, just after the second verse, no pre-chorus, straight into the chorus, done.

• 16:47Nilay Patel?

  This to me just blew my mind, that this is a famous artist, a major songwriter for other artists, as you said, and she is actively thinking about ways to construct songs that will increase plays on Spotify.

• 17:00Speaker 08

  It's all about like making sure the person doesn't change the song. Now it's like all about like, did you like grab them in that first five seconds? Did they add it to their playlist? Did they blah blah blah blah, all of that shit?

• 17:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:12Speaker 08

  Like, people use those kind of tricks to make sure that people are doing all of that stuff.

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• 19:01Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so let's add all this up. So we've got wild new distribution methods. We've got artists who are writing songs to those distribution methods. And then you've got artists writing to the playlist, writing to the fact that they know that there's a skip button. You've got massive sort of democratization of the sounds. You're making a series called The Future of Music. What does that future add up to for you?

• 19:21Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh, everything is happening so fast right now. It's crazy. When you think about the amount of music that is coming out, I think, what, it's over 25,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify every single day? More than half of people now listen to songs on a playlist rather than actively searching out those songs or listening to an album from beginning to end.

• 19:44Nilay Patel?

  So I think it's really easy to talk about that as all downside. And, you know, the moment in tech right now is to think about everything as downside. But that is actually, I think, for the listener, for the audience, for the music ecosystem, every song has to stand on its own now and be good. Whereas, I don't know, when people are buying CDs, like, they were loaded with filler. And the music industry, for so long, literally predicted its revenue against known format shifts. Right? So we're gonna move you all from vinyl to cassettes. We're gonna move you all from cassettes to CDs. We're gonna, like, put out super audio CDs. They literally thought that they could just make people rebuy Dark Side of the Moon over and over and over again. And all of that is gone.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, we don't even own our music anymore. We lease it.

• 20:31Nilay Patel?

  And so, like, you're saying iTunes broke that up, streaming has broken that up, all these songs have to be bangers. Like, that is ultimately, I think, better for the consumer, even if Charli XCX saying, "Okay, I'm gonna put the hook in the first 30 seconds to make sure you don't skip it", seem as more cynical in one way. At the end of the day, it kind of feels like we're getting better music out of the deal.

• 20:50Speaker 03

  I think "better" is a dangerous word to use because how do you qualify better? And I think that there's also still space online for things that don't follow this format. A lot of artists are still putting out what they call "mixtapes", which is just another word for an album that doesn't have a lot of the marketing push behind it and might allow the artist to have a little more creative freedom with what they're doing. And Charli XCX does mixtapes, and artists like Blood Orange do mixtapes. And there's still space for this stuff that doesn't have to be gaming the system. That's, I think, more where we're going is that there are rules, but there is more space for those rules to be broken. And there's more space for everyone to have a voice.

• 21:34Speaker 08

  What is the difference to you between a mixtape and an album? Literally nothing. The ones recently that I did, like, number one angel and pop two, I called them mixtapes because then, like, my label felt more relaxed about them. Because I think for a major label, like, I am kind of an odd artist. Because I'm not currently, like, on the radio slash really care about it that much, even though they probably hate me for saying that. But still, for them, I think albums are like the big deal. We're making an album, we're putting it out, there's expectation. Like, we want it to, like, hit this, this, this, like, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And so, like, for me, the mixtape thing, like, I just wanted to, like, bang, bang, like, two albums, like, in one year, like, let's go.

• 22:19Nilay Patel?

  So how do you go, just to, again, try to add all this up? You can be Taylor Swift and you can step out of the feed, and then you can come back and be like, here's my record, like, we're all gonna talk about it forever. Or you can write something that's so catchy that it just dominates the feed.

• 22:33Speaker 03

  Old Town Road.

• 22:34Nilay Patel?

  Right. Or those are the kind of the two moves. And everyone in between is just like, here's another new song, here's another new song, remember me?

• 22:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know it's very enticing to try and polarize these things and put them into buckets, but...

• 22:44Nilay Patel?

  Clearly, I keep trying.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  I know. Yeah, those are the two extremes. You have the Old Town Roads, this guy that wrote the beat in Europe, had no idea that Lil Nas X was going to buy it and that it would become a viral hit. But he clearly knows how to memify what he's doing and to make it catchy. And I've actually had friends that have had their songs go viral because of TikTok and have seen that jump over to other platforms and then seen increases on Spotify and YouTube and all of these other places where the song exists. Because it just became a TikTok challenge without them knowing about it. So there are definitely these two buckets. Create a really, really good song that's so catchy that people can't help but listen to it.

• 23:30Speaker 03

  Or be able to navigate the internet so successfully that you can make something go viral.

• 23:37Nilay Patel?

  I mean, you say it like that's not everyone's quiet goal in the back of their heads, but...

• 23:41Speaker 03

  Well, it's not. It's not. It's definitely not.

• 23:45Nilay Patel?

  I mean, there's an element of this is just how it works in like, I don't know, like the, a star is born, right? Where it's, okay, we, you have some talent and now the machine will take you and like the machine will make you a star.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  But that doesn't happen so frequently anymore.

• 24:00Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then there's the other element of like, you're gonna, you're gonna do it, but you're gonna do a bunch of stuff that the machine used to do for you. You're gonna market it yourself.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  And that's increasingly becoming the norm right now. It, it used to be that labels would get talent where they saw promise and they would build them up and help them develop their marketing strategy and the way they would look front-facing to the world. And now it's much more common to ask artists to already come to the table with a presence and with a marketing plan and with a whole bunch of songs that are already in the bank ready to go.

• 24:32Nilay Patel?

  And that's all because they have access to their audience in a way that ever before. I mean, I think that's like the, the thing. When, when we talk about the future of music, it's not Ableton will have some AI built into it that writes a song for you, which is like a thing that you cover, but it's as much the artists themselves are changing and becoming their own direct conduits to the audience because they have the tools to do it in a way they never had the tools before.

• 24:52Speaker 03

  Exactly. And we're seeing this now with companies like Cobalt and AWOL and Amuse. And these are companies that technically can operate as distribution and record labels, but they don't sign traditional deals. So you could go to a company like Amuse and say, I want to release this song with you, but you will only own the song for X amount of time. And then after that, the ownership reverts back to me. Or even saying that you want to sign a single song with a label is kind of unheard of in a lot of genres of music. So we're seeing new startups that are very flexible with the way that they deal in procuring and releasing music and their ownership of that music.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  Do you think that what you're doing represents more what people will be doing in the future?

• 25:39Speaker 08

  Kind of think it's the norm now. I mean, like Ariana Grande is one of the most huge artists in the world. And to me, at least, it felt like she is like doing what she wants. Like she just put out an album and then like straight away drops like thank you next. And I think that's happening a lot more now.

• 25:56Speaker 04

  The most important thing, if you go a little deeper than music, is that is equal. And that's the way art should be. To do music production, it was very expensive and very difficult to get stuff. Now, if you can get a computer, that is already expensive. But once they get it, they have access to the same things that we have. And everybody can do the same quality of music. And that, for me, is the world evolving and being a better place for art.

• 26:26Nilay Patel?

  So Danny, you've been doing the series Future Music. Tell people what the other episodes are.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh, all of the episodes this season were so exciting. We went to London and spent the day with Eric Prids, who is one of my favorite dance artists, and saw the making of his hollow sphere, which is this eight-meter-tall, transparent LED sphere that he performed in in Tomorrowland. That was just insane.

• 26:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  Then for episode two, we went to the home of Tom Hulkenberg, who used to go by the name Junkie XL. He was a dance producer until he saw one of his songs, his Junkie XL songs, used in Blade during the Blood Rave scene.

• 27:04Nilay Patel?

  That's amazing.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  And then decided he wanted to be a movie composer. I mean, if I had that happen to me, I'd probably be a movie composer, too. So now he represents this new DIY generation of movie scorers who use analog instruments and U-rack modules, but also traditional orchestral composition. And then, of course, we have sampling, and then we do an episode on K-pop, which is fascinating because K-pop pretty much does YouTube better than any other genre of music. And then, of course, Charli XCX and streaming.

• 27:34Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that sounds like an incredible season. People can check it out on YouTube right now?

• 27:37Speaker 03

  Yes, they can. All the episodes are up on The Verge YouTube channel.

• 27:41Nilay Patel?

  And where can they find you?

• 27:42Speaker 03

  They can find me on Twitter, just under my name, Danny Deal.

• 27:45Nilay Patel?

  Awesome. Well, Danny, thank you so much. I love the series. Now that it's over, it's like I get to talk to you again, like you're back, because you've been off producing it for so long. So I'm excited to get you back on The Verge and talk to you about Future Music. Well, I have to have you on The Verge next again soon.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  I know, yeah, this is great.

• 28:01Nilay Patel?

  All right, thanks again to Danny Deal. Season two of Future Music is out right now on YouTube. Go check it out. Our season finale is with Charli XCX. That's out on September 20th. We'll see you Friday with a chat show.

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