In 2018, Trevor Daniel released the song “Falling” to little fanfare. Its tame take on emo-rap couldn’t hold a candle to the darker more confessional acts like Lil Uzi Vert and Juice WRLD,  who pioneered the sound. 

But two years later, “Falling” blew up, thanks to the internet. First, it was picked up by influencers on Instagram, then it became a TikTok meme featured in more than 3 million  videos. The social media hype led to traditional media success: The song spent 38 weeks on Billboard’s Hot 100, peaking at 17. It was streamed more than a billion times on Spotify, where it’s featured on prominent playlists like “Chill Hits,” “Beast Mode,” and “Top Gaming Hits.” 

Then Daniel attempted a star-studded follow-up, ”Past Life,” featuring Selena Gomez and produced by Finneas. The song peaked at No. 77 on Billboard, left the charts in 5 weeks and had just 10 percent of the streams that “Falling” achieved on Spotify. Daniels has yet to come close to replicating the accomplishment of “Falling.”  

Success in the music industry used to rely on radio plays and premium retail “endcap” placements (where stores like Best Buy gave album releases prime real estate). It’s no secret that streaming has changed everything, providing unfettered access to the largest catalog of music in human history.

It also presents a paradox of choice: What should you listen to when you can hear nearly any song that’s ever been recorded? With more and more songs released by more and more musicians on more and more platforms — and less emphasis on traditional media to tell listeners what to like — the sprawl of streaming has upended what it means to be a pop star. For an artist like Daniels, streaming both gave him the opportunity to break out from obscurity and made it exponentially more difficult to have a follow-up hit. That’s because like so many other viral hits, the song, not the artist, became the asset.

“Streaming is a great way to make an artist faceless,” says Lucas Keller, the CEO of the entertainment management company Milk & Honey, which manages some of the biggest producers and songwriters working today. His roster has written for artists including BTS, Ariana Grande, and Gwen Stefani — at one point in 2019, 10 of the songs on top 40 were written or produced by Milk & Honey talent. 

“The song,” Keller says, “becomes bigger than the artist.” 

He cites James Arthur, whose song “Say You Won’t Let Go” reached No. 11 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 2017. It’s a mid-tempo acoustic ballad with a gentle hip-hop groove that fits equally well on pop radio as it does in alternative and adult contemporary formats. And though appearances on Spotify playlists like Mood Booster, Happy This!, Warm Fuzzy Feeling, Chill Hits, and Alone Again helped generate billions of streams for the song and a number of follow-up singles, Arthur has yet to land another Top 40 hit. 

There’s more competition on the charts than ever. In 2020, there were more songs on Billboard’s Hot 100 than any year since the 1960s, the last decade when singles, and not albums, drove the recording industry. In 2019, 40,000 songs were uploaded daily to Spotify, according to Music Business Worldwide; in 2021, that number has grown to 60,000. For artists, as the volume of new music releases increases, it’s becoming more difficult to be heard. 

Keller puts this volume in perspective: “If you took all of the premium music released on a digital storefront right now, and tried to jam it into a record store, it’d need to be a Home Depot.” 

To help listeners find their way in the endless aisles of digital music, streaming providers created playlists — but this new way of listening has created unintended consequences for artists and songwriters.  Today, three services make up two-thirds of the streaming economy: Spotify, which has an estimated 32 percent of the market, Apple Music (18 percent), and Amazon Music (14 percent). But Spotify dominates the conversation both because of its market power and its immensely popular playlists. In 2017, 68 percent of all listening on Spotify was from a company or user playlist, according to the company’s 2018 Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Its platform has more than 4 billion playlists, 3,000 of which are owned by Spotify, curated by a mix of algorithms and editors. 

Its most prominent playlists have serious cultural power. RapCaviar shapes the sound of hip-hop, and can turn indie rappers into household names. The genre-agnostic, slightly quirky playlist Lorem curates the vibe for Spotify’s Gen Z listeners. In 2020, listeners ages 16 to 40 used playlists as their primary source for discovering new music on the platform, according to the company. So today, a placement atop one of its playlists can make or break a song. 

Spotify isn’t shy about the marketing power of its playlists. In its SEC filing, the company wrote as much, crediting Lorde’s breakout global success to her placement on a single playlist: Sean Parker’s Hipster International. But her example may be an outlier. The challenge for most artists is that playlist listeners frequently don’t know who they’re listening to. A song with high completion rates on a playlist might end up on more playlists, accumulating millions of streams for an artist who remains effectively nameless. In the best-case scenario, these streams, which pay very low royalties compared to radio, could help land the song a coveted advertisement, or better yet, pique the attention of Top 40 radio programmers. 

But pop stardom has always relied on a blend of catchy songs and compelling personas.  “The music video era gave you a big dose of their personality whenever you discovered new songs. And the same thing with an album,” says music producer Jesse Cannon. 

An MTV study on fandom showed that fans expect to have direct interaction with artists. But in a music economy built on playlists, the listener is much less likely to be aware of who they’re listening to. Playlists are a “lean back” experience. You choose the mood you’re in, and the music just flows. Cannon believes that playlisting is breaking the fan-artist connection: “When we’re making playlists, there’s no depth whatsoever to the relationship.” 

Even if playlists work against persona-based star power, artists are still desperate to appear on them to create buzz for their music. “The buzz-making, hit-making economy has gone from top down, to bottom up,” says Slate’s chart expert Chris Molanphy.  “It used to be that you pushed things at radio, and that made people buy the single, buy the album.” 

Now songs develop on social media platforms, and grow on playlists, before making it to radio. Music marketers have repositioned themselves to build influence over TikTok feeds. PR firms market their ability to get their clients on playlists, though Spotify maintains a stance of editorial independence.

Even success on a small playlist helps boost an artist’s chances of getting noticed by an algorithm or editor and being placed on a larger playlist. (While researching this article, I received an email from an independent artist asking for placement on my playlist with 199 followers: “I just came across your playlist, ‘Silk Sonic’s Retro Soul,’” they wrote. “I have a song … that I think would be perfect for the playlist.” A link to the song was attached.)

This is one way would-be pop stars suffer in the new music economy: Playlists have become such an essential part of a song’s success that an underworld of playlist promoters have emerged to exploit this musical ponzi scheme. Independent artists often pay hundreds of dollars to them hoping for exclusive placements on popular playlists. The labels are in on it, too. Spotify provides an egalitarian service where everyone, whether distributed by an indie or major label, submits songs for playlisting. But according to Cannon, labels have direct access to the company through reps, and regularly wine-and-dine key decision makers at the company. 

Spotify’s guidelines do not allow for paid playlist promotion. Still, thousands of pay-to-play lists exist on the platform. And Spotify has its own program to boost the likelihood of landing on a playlist if artists and songwriters are willing to accept a lower royalty rate on promoted songs. Called “Discovery Mode,” it’s currently being probed by Congress for the practice of forcing lower royalties; representatives from the House Judiciary Committee want to find out if Spotify is limiting choice and hurting artist revenues. Spotify has argued that this program is an essential way for artists to highlight which songs they want to prioritize to be heard, even if they’re not seen.

For upstart musicians, the bottom-up model is the only choice. Without the old gatekeepers, in rare cases, indie artists can break outside of the major-label ecosystem. Cannon cites Penelope Scott as a prototypical example. She makes obscure baroque punk, but her music has expanded beyond her niche. Her song “Rät” has “lyrics that are so extremely online” that they’ve inspired thousands of TikTok videos, and that led to Spotify playlists and even a place on Billboard’s Hot Rock & Alternative charts. “That is what gets around the gatekeeper,” says Cannon. “This girl reached 3 million monthly listeners without any coverage.”

But overnight viral stars are rare, and building a lasting audience is harder than ever as social media platforms are flooded by celebrities and established acts. Many artists who break out on TikTok become one-hit wonders. Their songs eclipse their short-lived public identities as audiences move onto the next meme. And those who do break out still need to work their way up the ladder from social media to streaming, and finally, to radio to reap financial rewards.

Performers aren’t the only ones affected by streaming. Though streaming has been a financial boon for labels, songwriters still depend on radio play for the bulk of their income — radio pays much higher royalties to songwriters compared to streaming. Emily Warren, who has written hits for Dua Lipa and the Chainsmokers among many others, told me that she knows songwriters with hundreds of millions of streams and Grammy nominations who still drive Uber for a living. But she says that a songwriter with just two big radio hits is set up to retire. 

These distorted economics change the kind of songs that are written. “[Songwriters] are just chasing radio. The only way a writer can make any money is if they have a radio single,” Warren says. Even though it’s been widely reported that streaming has changed the sound of pop music, artists still fight for radio listeners, who skew older and more conservative in their tastes.

There may be some truth to the age-old criticism of all pop music sounding the same. Before iTunes started selling songs as singles, songwriters could make money off of deep album cuts: “There used to be so much money and value in any kind of song, and anywhere on the album. You could have track eight on an album that had a big single and you would make so much money off of it,” Warren says. She believes that album sales allowed songwriters to take more risks and find new sounds. By comparison, the Top 40 radio format of old-school anthemic choruses is creatively restraining. Warren says that these financial incentives are holding popular music back: “If songwriters start being compensated, there will be a musical renaissance.”

As artist and songwriter Julia Michaels puts it, “With streaming, songwriters are lucky if they make anything. If you don’t have the single, you’re basically fucked.” And in the bottom-up method of hit-making, promoting a single across every platform is exhausting.

Michaels believes that the creative laborers in popular music are feeling pressure to compete with every online influencer: “It is definitely a scary time for songwriters. And it’s kind of a scary time to be an artist, too. There’s a lot of expectations. You have to be a TikTok star. You have to be on social media all the time. You have to be a model.” 

Today’s streaming economy looks a lot like the larger economy. Michaels explains that now, “if you’re not in the top 1 percent, it is not lucrative at all.” In fact, the pool that makes a decent paycheck is much smaller than the 1 percent — only 13,400 artists earned more than $50,000 on Spotify in 2020. Just 870 made it rich, bringing in more than $1 million. 

As for Trevor Daniel? Chart whisperer Molanphy says that he’s in the “middle of the pack — neither a nobody, nor a chart-topper — who now has to find his way in this weird new economy of hit-making.”  With so much financial uncertainty in music, it’s not surprising that so many artists are selling their catalogs and speculating with cryptocurrencies and NFTs. 

The age-old business of writing and releasing songs has been upended. Now every song has to find a life on a half-dozen different formats to be a hit. What was never easy is only getting harder. While we’re daydreaming to our “Chill Vibes” playlist, artists and songwriters are flailing to get our attention. 

Charlie Harding is a songwriter and executive producer and co-host of Vox Media’s Switched on Pop podcast, which looks at phenomena in pop music.

More from The Gatekeepers Issue

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony traces a journey that the composer described as moving “from struggle to victory.” The work starts with a famously anguished opening melody and ends with a major-key tutti celebration. 

In the first three episodes of the podcast series The 5th, from Vox’s Switched on Pop, the musicians of the New York Philharmonic deconstructed the symphony’s musical drama and legacy. In the fourth and final episode, key players in the contemporary orchestral landscape reflect on how the Fifth continues to shape our understanding of the world of classical music.

It’s a crucial time for such discussions, because classical music, like so many areas of US cultural life, has undergone what the Washington Post calls a “long overdue” reckoning in relation to race and gender in 2020. One pressing issue is whose works are being performed and commissioned — and whose are not. Last year, only 8 percent of pieces performed by major symphony orchestras were composed by women. The Institute for Composer Diversity polled 120 orchestral seasons and found that fewer than 6 percent of performed works were by composers from “underrepresented racial cultural and ethnic heritages.” This leaves classical institutions grappling with two sets of obligations that often seem in conflict: righting an inherited history of classical music, and preserving the repertoire of the symphonic tradition.

Beethoven himself had little to do with creating the narrow culture of classical music that developed in the centuries following his death in 1827. His politics tended toward the revolutionary; he declared in an 1819 letter that “freedom and progress” was the aim of his art. But Beethoven’s sheer popularity — in 2019, he was the most-performed composer around the world — has made him a de facto symbol of classical music. 

With 2020 marking the composer’s 250th birthday, it’s an ideal time to rediscover the Fifth’s message of resilience and transformation, especially as classical institutions are working to mediate their goals of inclusion and preservation. As the New York Philharmonic’s CEO and president Deborah Borda says in The 5th, “one of the critical tasks in front of us as we guide these iconic artistic institutes is uncovering the right intersection between the social imperative and the artistic imperative.”

To that end, Borda and the Philharmonic have initiated the largest commissioning project for women composers in the orchestra’s history, Project 19. Nineteen women are creating original works for the orchestra to perform, including Tania León’s piece Stride, which was inspired by the life of Susan B. Anthony and premiered in February, right before the Covid-19 pandemic caused the Philharmonic to suspend its season. 

Though the pandemic has put all orchestras, the Philharmonic included, in a perilous position, it has also highlighted how such institutions might rethink the conventions of classical music. With its concert hall dark, the Philharmonic is trying to reach new audiences through its Bandwagon project, for which the orchestra retrofitted a pickup truck to bring Philharmonic musicians to all five New York City boroughs to perform “pull-up” concerts. For this series, it has commissioned new works including the mesmerizing string trio Loop by Carlos Simon, recipient of the 2021 Sphinx Medal of Excellence recognizing extraordinary classical Black and Latinx musicians.

In addition to increasing the representation of new composers, the Philharmonic is also commissioning new works that directly address classical music’s history. Last year, it premiered David Lang’s opera Prisoner of the State, which reworks Beethoven’s 1805 opera Fidelio to confront contemporary social issues. Lang fell in love with Fidelio — a work that is half prison drama and half comic love story — after seeing it in his 20s, but asked himself, “What would this piece be like if it didn’t pull its punches?” in addressing the darkness of the carceral state. With Prisoner of the State, Lang’s aim was to build on Beethoven’s work to create a beautiful, austere opera examining the emotional and political ramifications of imprisonment.   

Lang traces his freedom to create and recreate back to Beethoven’s Fifth and the way the symphony’s opening melody (dun dun dun DUNNNN) becomes a throughline that spans the whole multi-movement piece. “This idea that you have something that happens at the beginning of the piece that you have to hold on to as a listener for an hour, that’s a revolutionary idea,” he says. “Beethoven invented that and we take it for granted now, so I think there’s a way in which everything that we do — including me writing a piece that challenges something from the past — shows that we have inherited this legacy from Beethoven.”

Lang’s view shows how Beethoven’s Fifth still matters in 2020, and the importance of listening to it deeply and critically. This mode of listening is what motivated The 5th, our effort to hear this inescapable symphony with fresh ears, aided by insights from musicians who know the piece inside and out. 

Because no matter how many times they play it, the meaning of the piece continues to evolve.

New York Philharmonic horn player Leelanee Sterrett says that every orchestra member brings “a different interpretation to their parts each time.” When violinist and concertmaster Frank Huang performs the Fifth, he thinks about the wars and conflict raging in Europe while Beethoven composed: “To project this kind of triumph and joy … you have to feel like he was expecting the best in people. He had to have so much optimism and hope … to put something like that in music at that time.” For Huang, the work remains especially relevant given that “arguably, we’re kind of back in that similar environment these days.”

The Fifth is still essential listening because it carries an evergreen message of being unafraid to pursue the light during periods of darkness. For Anthony McGill, clarinetist and 2020 recipient of the Avery Fisher Prize for excellence and leadership in classical music, “this one, it wears well … it keeps its shine.” 

Commissioning new works, taking them to the streets, reimagining the classical canon, and continuing to perform and listen to the Fifth anew all are part of an effort for classical institutions and audiences to move forward while honoring the past. This effort doesn’t tarnish Beethoven’s legacy — in fact, it celebrates a composer who wanted to break all the rules in pursuit of a better world.

Listen to how Beethoven’s Fifth isn’t just a museum piece, but a living testament to revolutionary creativity and addressing social issues, on Movement IV of The 5th, available now.  

Subscribe to Switched on Pop wherever you find podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony starts with an anguished opening theme — dun dun dun DUNNNN — and ends with a glorious, major-key melody. Since its 1808 premiere, audiences have interpreted that progression from struggle to victory as a metaphor for Beethoven’s personal resilience in the face of his oncoming deafness. 

Or rather, that’s long been the popular read among those in power, especially the wealthy white men who embraced Beethoven and turned his symphony into a symbol of their superiority and importance. For some in other groups — women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color — Beethoven’s symphony may be predominantly a reminder of classical music’s history of exclusion and elitism. One New York City classical music fan wrote in the 1840s, for example, that he wished “all women shall be gagged by officers duly licensed for the purpose before they’re allowed to enter a concert room.”

Before Beethoven’s time, classical music culture looked and sounded quite different. When Mozart premiered his Symphony 31 in the late 1700s, it was standard for audiences to clap, cheer, and yell “da capo!” (Italian for “from the beginning!”) in the middle of a performance. After Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony debuted in the early 1800s, these norms changed — both because the rising industrial merchant class took ownership of concert halls and because of shifts in the music itself. 

As we explored in episodes I and II of the Switched On Pop podcast series The 5th, the musical complexity of Beethoven’s symphony required a different kind of listening. The Fifth’s four-note opening theme occurs and recurs in variations throughout the symphony, slowly shifting from minor to major keys and mirroring Beethoven’s experience with deafness. The Fifth’s creative rule-breaking — subverting the classical sonata form in the first movement, for example — requires close listening to fully grasp.

In Mozart’s day, each movement in a symphony was self-contained, like a collection of short stories. Beethoven’s Fifth acted more like a novel, asking audiences to follow a single story that unfolded over an entire four-movement symphony. New norms of concert behavior developed in turn. Sitzfleisch, or “sitting still,” became the ultimate desideratum for showing one’s understanding of the new language of classical music. Over time, these norms crystallized into a set of etiquette rules (e.g., “don’t clap mid-piece”) to enhance the new listening experience. 

In the third episode of The 5th, we explore how Beethoven’s symphony was used to generate the strict culture of classical music — and the politics that undergird those norms of behavior.

Though concert etiquette that evolved in response to the Fifth may have had the goal of venerating the music, it can also act as a source of gatekeeping. “Polite society” first emerged as a set of cultural standards developed during the mid-18th century as bourgeois class signifiers. In Beethoven’s time, new social etiquette extended into the concert hall.

Today, some aspects of classical culture are still about policing who’s in and who’s out. When you walk into a standard concert hall, there’s an established set of conventions and etiquette (“don’t cough!”; “don’t cheer!”; “dress appropriately!”) that can feel as much about demonstrating belonging as appreciating the music. 

For classical music critic James Bennett II, Beethoven’s popularity and centrality in classical culture is part of the problem. “As you perpetuate the idea that the giants of the music all look the same, it conveys to the ‘other’ that there’s not a stake in that music for them,” he says.

New York Philharmonic clarinetist Anthony McGill, one of the few Black musicians in the ensemble, agrees that Beethoven’s inescapability can make classical music appear monolithic and stifling. He likens the inescapability of the Fifth Symphony to a “wall” between classical music and new, diverse audiences. 

“If you pretend like there’s no other music out there, that Beethoven is the greatest music that ever will matter,” says McGill, then orchestras will alienate new listeners, since “we’re not promoting any of the composers alive today that are trying to become the Beethovens of their day.”

Find out how Beethoven’s Fifth went from symbolizing freedom to a more complicated legacy — and how the symphony’s original meaning might be recovered — in Movement III of The 5th, available now.

Subscribe to Switched on Pop wherever you find podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Update, September 16: This article has been updated to clarify some of the historical views of the Fifth Symphony and problems of representation in classical music.

In the first movement of his Fifth Symphony, Beethoven set up a battle between hope and despair. The dark side of that spectrum is represented by the symphony’s anguished opening notes: dun dun dun DUNNNN. Over the course of the next three movements, Beethoven tries to overcome a dark real-world fate with bright, major-key melodies — and keeps getting defeated.

With each high and low, the arc of the symphony becomes clear: This battle isn’t just about major and minor harmonies, it’s about the will to live in the face of adversity. 

In the second episode of our four-part podcast series The 5th, a collaboration between Vox’s Switched on Pop and the New York Philharmonic, we break down exactly how Beethoven keeps listeners on the edge of their seats, waiting to hear whether the symphony will end in darkness or light. 

After the stormy first movement, the second movement introduces a hopeful C major passage played by the Philharmonic’s French horn player, Leelanee Sterrett. Sterrett says every time she performs that melody, it feels like she’s “crashing the party,” bringing some joy and life to the somber proceedings. But as quickly as her part appears, it “sort of dies away.” 

In the third movement, the same thing happens: A bright major melody gets silenced by dark minor chords. By the time we get to the final movement, the suspense is palpable. How will this story end? Can hopeful major chords win out? 

Spoiler alert: The answer is a resounding “ja!” The Philharmonic’s concertmaster and first violinist Frank Huang describes the symphony’s final movement as “euphoric”: “The horns have this beautiful, heroic melody, and then the orchestra has these big chords and it just feels like you’ve conquered something that’s been bothering you your whole life … like when you finally reach the destination you’ve been working for for years.”

That feeling of relief, for both the orchestra and the audience, is palpable. “Every time I get there, I look around and see everybody kind of enjoying themselves,” Frank says. “You look out at the audience, and people are just mesmerized.”

For Beethoven, the symphony’s ending wasn’t just about delivering a bright, major-key melody. It was about persevering in the face of hardship, with contrasting harmonies and melodies acting as metaphors for life and death.

Right before Beethoven composed the Fifth Symphony, he wrote to his brothers that his oncoming deafness had “brought me to the verge of despair.” He questioned whether he could go on: “but little more and I would have put an end to my life.” What saved him? “Only Art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce, and so I endured.”

Listen how Beethoven overcomes his musical and personal perils in Movement II of The 5th, available now. 

Subscribe to Switched on Pop wherever you find podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

They say you should never meet your idols — that you’ll only be disappointed. We had this possibility in mind going into our first interview with Carly Rae Jepsen, the pop star who inspired us to start our podcast Switched on Pop back in 2012. Back then, Jepsen’s hit “Call Me Maybe” was the soundtrack for our conversion from rock and jazz snobs to true pop believers. As we analyzed the ubiquitous summer bop, we were blown away by how Jepsen’s musical choices reinforced the lyrics’ sense of nervous anticipation.

The narrator of “Call Me Maybe” switches from past tense in the verse (“I wasn’t looking for this”) to present tense in the chorus (“here’s my number”). As she does, her vocal melody explodes into dynamic motion to underscore the plunge into real time. We were hooked. From then on, our ears could be described as pre-Carly Rae and post-Carly Rae. We would seek to better understand the sounds of Top 40 pop in our weekly podcast, all under the watchful eye of the artist we referred to as “Saint Jepsen.”

Six years and hundreds of pleading emails later, the time had come to meet the muse and unpack her latest offering, Dedicated Side B. In the course of composing her last two albums, Emotion and Dedicated, Jepsen wrote more than 200 songs. Many of her favorite works didn’t make it onto either final album, so she’s started a tradition of releasing “Side B” records on the one-year anniversary of her last release. Her newest collection of unreleased music fluidly crosses decades of musical history and spans a vast emotional range.

We spoke with Jepsen over Zoom about how she curated her latest B-side release from a massive body of work. Would this beatific figure, once described by poet Hanif Abdurraqib and the “most honest pop musician working,” live up to her reputation? Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Subscribe to Switched on Pop wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

Charlie Harding

It is the one-year anniversary of Dedicated. What were you wanting to accomplish on that record?

Carly Rae Jepsen

I had a mission statement to start off with, but I ended up straying very far away from that. I had this fake album title called Music to Clean Your House To. I thought, that’s when I listen to music at this age. It’s not raging, it’s chill, disco kind of sounds [that] sounded interesting to me.

But the idea of it being exclusively disco was sort of pigeonholing me ’cause it wasn’t coming out naturally. I think “Julien” [the first song on the record] is the closest thing I got to it, but the rest of the album went in different directions — ’90s, ’80s, all the colors. I let go of the rules of knowing exactly what I was going to make and just allowed myself to play in all the genres of pop that I was attracted to.

Charlie Harding

You have a brand new release, Dedicated Side B. How did it come together? 

Carly Rae Jepsen

I have a reputation with my label that I think, at this point, it’s kind of common knowledge that I’m a bit of an overwriter.

Charlie Harding

What do you mean by that?

Carly Rae Jepsen

Well, I write all the time. Even when I don’t have a project right now, I’m writing. It’s very therapeutic for me. It’s my greatest joy. So it’s not like this is just my job. Songwriting is something that I am very passionate about. The truth is, by the time Emotion was ready, I had 200 songs to select from. And same with Dedicated. That’s a lot, right?

My publisher says I store songs in my cheeks like a chipmunk. But it was really hard to select [which ones to put on the album], because there were a lot of different places that I experimented with. … I always kind of knew that I wanted Dedicated to be a two-part album.

I once said when I was done with this album, “Would it be weird to release, like, a 50-song deluxe [edition]?” Like, yeah, that’s weird. No one does that. Okay. We’ll start with 17 and then we’ll get to the rest later. And it’s kind of fun to do it on the one-year anniversary. I’m kind of making a tradition with that.

Nate Sloan

You’re not alone in hoarding songs. The songwriter Irving Berlin [the grandfather of the American Songbook] had what he called his trunk songs, which was literally a trunk filled with hundreds of songs that had never been published. Occasionally, he would pull one out. For example, “God Bless America” was a song that sat in his trunk for 30 years. And then he was like, “Let’s try this.” The song almost became the national anthem.

Carly Rae Jepsen

That’s amazing. I call them albums that I’ve buried in my backyard. I have an entire album called Disco Sweat that no one will ever hear. It was really fun to make, though. “Cut to the Feeling” is a good example of that. It was never going to come out. And then I did a voiceover for the cartoon film Ballerina, and they were like, “Do you have any tunes?” And I’m like, “Well, this one’s very theatrical. I think it could work.” So that’s sort of how I roll. [The song made the year-end best lists on Billboard, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair.]

Nate Sloan

You have hundreds of songs buried in your backyard — how do you choose which ones go on the album?

Carly Rae Jepsen

I go a little crazy. That’s when I turn to my friends and my family. We have these listening parties at my house where I feed everyone and give them copious amounts of wine hoping that they’ll have opinions about the music. And then they all send in their votes to me, including my bandmates, my manager, and girlfriend Alex — she sends me notes in the night. There starts to be at least six to eight common songs that are all resonating with people. Then I pick the rest myself from my favorites and fill in the blanks of what’s missing from the album.

I take the album quite seriously as a whole body of work that I really, really want to get right. I’ll rate the songs for energy level, and if there’s too many fives, then I’ll think, what’s a two? Where do we put the one? And I also rate the songs on subject matter. I’ll give each song a word — like “In My Room” was sex — and I’ll look for all the different emotions.

Nate Sloan

Is there color-coding involved?

Carly Rae Jepson

I could show you the boards. They’re embarrassing.

Nate Sloan

There’s a board? Like you’re trying to catch a serial killer or something?

Carly Rae Jepsen

Yeah. It’s like A Beautiful Mind. Actually, it’s embarrassing, because I have them out about my house and I forget. Then if I ever have somebody come over, beforehand, I would be like, “Don’t look at that, I promise.”

Charlie Harding

What are some of the other themes that people are going to hear on this Dedicated Side B record?

Carly Rae Jepsen

I tried to explore a lot of different things. The opening track, “This Love Isn’t Crazy,” only ended up making the album at the last minute and is now my favorite track. I wanted to open with something really theatrical. With “Julien,” the opening song on Dedicated, I went really subtle. So I wanted to flip the switch and just be like, “Welcome to love, everyone! We’re going to have a party! Stop cleaning your house!” 

I also wanted to acknowledge the loneliness that some people might be going through. So I slipped in a song called “Solo” for that very reason. It’s a song that sort of hooks on to, like, “So what? You’re not in love? We’re going to shine bright on yourself dancing solo!” I was looking for motivational, uplifting sort of feelings.

Nate Sloan

You described yourself as an overwriter, perhaps a workaholic in some ways. Which suggests that even though you’re just putting out this record, you’re still writing. What are you working on right now?

Carly Rae Jepsen

Tavish [Crowe, Jepsen’s main songwriting partner] and I have already made an entire quarantine album. And it’s very different. It’s kind of fun. We have to do it from Zoom. It’s been a challenge, but a really fun one. You write differently that way. You have more time to have space in between the decisions you’re making, and more time to be away from the song for a minute. So I find it to be a whole new style of writing. I really like it.

Charlie Harding

Well, that’s really encouraging for us, because we’re vibing off this Dedicated Side B record, and we are excited to see what continues to emerge. 

Carly Rae Jepsen

Thank you. I mean, maybe a little of the joint Disco Sweat in the backyard. We’ll see.

Nate Sloan

Carly, this has been so much fun. Thank you for joining us and thank you for giving us a reason to talk about pop music every week for the last five years. This is all your fault.

Carly Rae Jepsen

Well, I’m very sorry, but thank you so much.

Scandal and intrigue surround Joseph Allen Maldonado-Passage, a.k.a. Joe Exotic, the central character of the hit Netflix docuseries Tiger King. Tiger King depicts the 57-year-old Oklahoman as something of an outsize character: He sports a platinum blond mullet, wears flamboyant sequined tiger-striped shirts, and always seems to wield a weapon. But he’s also possibly a misunderstood antihero, who makes it his mission to provide work for rehabilitated felons and save the endangered tiger species through rampant breeding. 

Among this eccentric zookeeper’s many idiosyncrasies, Exotic tries his hand at country music. The series is interspersed with Exotic’s self-published music videos about his love of big cats (“I Saw a Tiger”) and his hatred for his nemesis Carole Baskin. Released in 2015, the gruesome murder ballad “Here Kitty Kitty” alleges that Baskin (the owner of Big Cat Rescue, to which Exotic owes $1 million), fed her missing former husband to the tigers: “Her husband went and disappeared … oh, here, kitty kitty / Mama’s got some treats for you.” The video originally received minor acclaim with tens of thousands of views, but that count is now over 5 million since the Netflix show’s debut.

On a recent episode of Vox’s podcast Switched on Pop, I spoke with journalist Robert Moor, who profiled Joe Exotic for New York magazine and in the podcast Joe Exotic: Tiger King. From 2015 to 2019, Moor followed Joe Exotic. He lived at Exotic’s zoo for five days in 2015; visited him again in 2017 and twice in 2019; interviewed him numerous times; and eventually attended Exotic’s 2019 criminal trial, which is also covered in the Netflix series. A jury went on to convict Exotic for attempting to hire an undercover FBI agent to kill Baskin. 

We discussed what compelled Exotic to make country music and why his work has become so popular since the series’ release. While living at the zoo, Moor came to learn one of Joe Exotic’s biggest secrets: His country music wasn’t written by him at all, despite Joe professing it to be deeply personal. Instead, it was written and performed by at least one ghostwriter. In the interview excerpt below, we discuss how Exotic misused country music tropes to craft his public persona.  

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Charlie Harding

Why was Joe even “writing” these country songs? 

Robert Moor

By that point in his life [in 2015], Joe was pretty much doing anything he could do to get attention to make himself larger than life. He was a magician. He was into low-rent local  wrestling for a little while. He was making a reality show. Then he started running for president. He started running for governor. He was doing anything he could do just to get eyeballs on him. And I think he thought that being a country singer was a good route to that. 

Now, what’s funny is when I talked to Joe, he didn’t seem to particularly love country music all that much. When he was young, he said he loved Cyndi Lauper. He was into ’80s pop and new wave. He wasn’t really a country guy growing up but adopted that persona.

Charlie Harding

And yet it kind of makes sense that he pursues country music, because country of all genres is particularly narrative-driven. Throughout Joe’s most popular songs [like “I Saw a Tiger” and “This Is My Life”], there are clear stories that he’s trying to tell.

Robert Moor

Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. And one of the things I’ve always found so interesting about country music is that it’s so often about mythologizing the American experience.

There’s one song I like called “My Front Porch Looking In” by Lonestar. It’s just about the singer, his wife, and his kid living in the suburbs, raising the banality of that experience up to something that feels almost mythic, because it’s in a song. It’s about taking the stereotypical American experience and middle-class suburban or rural experience and elevating that to something that feels larger than life.

What Joe’s doing is totally different. Joe is taking something that is outside of the norm. A lot of his songs are about being gay. A lot of his songs are about his love of tigers. Some of them are about odd subjects, like the death of Carol Baskin’s husband in “Here Kitty Kitty.” None of this is what you’d expect to hear lyrically from a country artist. 

I also think it’s interesting to point out that [“Here Kitty Kitty”] is actually maybe one of his most traditional, because there is this rich tradition of country songs about murder. 

Charlie Harding

Murder ballads.

Robert Moor

Yeah, exactly, murder ballads, like Garth Brooks’s “The Thunder Rolls,” or Johnny Cash’s “The Long Black Veil.” There’s lots and lots of songs about jilted lovers killing one another, and this one has the added element of feeding the body to the tigers.

Charlie Harding

A good country song can take an ordinary story and make it seem extraordinary. And here, Joe’s making extraordinary songs using more ordinary music, and it creates this cognitive dissonance. We don’t really know what is true, what’s fiction, how the two blend together to create the best narrative.

Robert Moor

That was one of the really fascinating things about being at the trial. Joe’s attorney tried to use all of these threats and present these songs as evidence that Joe didn’t try to hire a hitman to kill Carole Baskin, because who would be so stupid as to publicly make threats like this for years and then go and hire a hitman? He would be the first person everyone would come looking for.

Charlie Harding

You reported that Joe didn’t actually write his songs. He hired musicians Vince Johnson and Danny Clinton to write and perform his music. Then Joe posted the lip-synced music videos to his YouTube channel. There’s so many people in the making. In some ways his songwriting process actually feels very much like contemporary country songwriting, a collaborative effort between songwriter, producer, and artist. In what he claims are his own songs, Joe Exotic is actually taking the role of the artist, except he’s sort of Milli Vanilli-ing this thing and not actually singing.

Robert Moor

Yeah. I think that’s right. I mean, the other thing that is interesting is Joe listened to these songs, his own songs, obsessively. He had them playing in his gift shop on a 24-hour loop. He had them playing in his car all the time. He was only ever really listening to his own music. I never heard him listen to another country song [when following him for the piece].

Charlie Harding

Why do you think the documentarians behind Tiger King left that question of whether Joe was writing his own music out of the series?

Robert Moor

I really don’t know, because the directors, Eric Goode and Rebecca Chaiklin, must’ve known that Joe wasn’t singing those songs — the amount of access that they had, they must have known. There’s two plausible explanations. One is, there’s just too much stuff in this story that it structurally becomes a nightmare [to include every detail].

That might be it, but I think more than that, they were trying to build up the mythos of Joe Exotic as this larger-than-life figure. And when you reveal that he’s not singing those songs, it deflates that.

And I’ve seen that reaction on my Twitter feed. I created this long thread of all the things that the documentary left out. And the thing that grabs people’s attention the most and that people seem really disappointed by is that Joe didn’t sing those songs. It seems to reveal him in some fundamental way to be a fraud. And when that’s the case, it’s a lot harder to root for him. And I think that that’s kind of what the documentarians wanted you to do — to root for this antihero.

Listen to the full conversation on Switched on Pop, in an episode called “The (Murder) Ballad of Joe Exotic.”

If you walk into a small-plates restaurant in any major US city, you’ll likely hear a similar playlist in the background — mainstream indie acts like LCD Soundsystem, M83, Grimes, and Beck will all be on there. That’s what Hillary Dixler Canavan, Eater’s restaurant editor, caught onto after hearing the same tunes throughout her food reporting. She captured this trend in her 2019 piece “This is Every Generically Cool Restaurant’s Playlist,” which struck a nerve with diners and music lovers, and her accompanying playlist picked up nearly 5,000 followers on Spotify.

But she was left with some questions: How is it that these same bands and songs end up playing in hip restaurants across America? And worse, what does this musical uniformity reflect about the sameness of contemporary dining?  

In Dixler Canavan’s follow-up investigation for Switched On Pop, she found that, aside from relying on staff playlists and Pandora algorithms, restaurant owners often hire “music selectors” to curate their establishment’s music. Dixler Canavan spoke with Yvette Bailhache, a music selector from Washington, DC, who calls the industry a “small, weird bubble”; and Jonathan Shecter, the Vegas-based founder of the background music provider Playback Prodigy, who says “a lot of [professional and amateur selectors] have the same cool references. They’re trying to project the image of cool, left of center, contemporary but not obvious.” 

Given the limited number of selectors in the business and their overlapping tastes, it’s not surprising to find that different restaurants end up with very similar playlists. This homogenized sound is designed to appeal to the target demographic of hip, urban restaurants — Shecter says selectors “target people in their 20s and 30s,” just like a lot of trendy restaurants do. Urban millennials in this age range with disposable income and a taste for adventurous food have surprisingly predictable musical affinity.

The specific millennials these selectors target also have increasingly hardened musical tastes, anchored in the early to mid-2000s. A 2018 survey by the streaming service Deezer found that peak music discovery occurs at age 24. By 30, nostalgia for past music overrides the hunger for new sounds. These solidified preferences are reflected in Dixler Canavan’s playlist, which Bailhache confirms is “so accurate” to the lists of songs that selectors come up with. The playlist predominantly includes indie critic-beloved, synth-based dance music, with a few deviations into Billboard 100-charting hip-hop and inoffensive acoustic folk music.  

That so many restaurants play indie music from the 2000s also reveals a less appetizing component of contemporary dining. New restaurants and real estate developments often accompany and ­­­­further gentrification. And music can play a role in community displacement. Background music in “hip” establishments can have a deleterious effect by signaling who does and does not belong in the venue regardless of a neighborhood’s historical makeup.

In Dixler Canavan’s story with Switched On Pop, we go deeper into how music selectors craft the sound of the dining world and question the subliminal effect of the background music in our lives.