A New Vision for the Music Industry with Sean Adams

Becky Mollenkamp: Hello Sean thank you for being here.

Sean Adams: Hello again, how you doing?

Becky Mollenkamp: I really appreciate your time good I start all of my interviews the same way this is the first time I’ve interviewed a man for the podcast I know so it’ll be very interesting to see how it goes and I always ask about your relationship with feminism and I’m very excited to hear what a man will say to this.

Sean Adams: Well, I guess it to me doesn’t even feel particularly complicated. I grew up with a mother who ran a hairdressers, whose mother ran a hairdressers, whose great aunt was a suffragette. Um, when I started working in music, I started co -running a newsletter with a brilliant woman called Sean, which is a very similar spelling to Sean. When we started Drowned in Sound, about 50 % of our launch team were women. We didn’t even, wasn’t quotas, wasn’t thought about. It’s just people we thought were great and we wanted to be involved. When I started putting out records, I worked with Martha Wainwright and incredibly powerful woman. I worked with Emily from Metric. I work with an artist called the Yankeress and Catherine has a PhD in queer theory and is a really inspiring producer, songwriter, performer, and multiple, I think she plays as many instruments as Prince. I think that’s what Shuei says, anything with a key or a note that she can play and strings. And I also work with Charlotte Church, who is a female icon. So I think that I probably have a more difficult relationship with masculinity than I do with feminism, which is probably a, um, sign of the sort of world I grew up in. Um, I find that there’s, I mean, I grew up with riot girls. So when you’ve listened to bikini kill records and then you see the reality of what’s going on in the world around you, it’s challenging. Same way listening to hip hop records and hearing people like Dead Presence, Soul Williams talk about social injustice. I think that I think I’ve always cared about equality. So I don’t necessarily always see it through the lens of feminism, even though I know that’s the same thing, but there are so many different of, as you know, and I’m not going to mansplain feminism, but so many different types of feminism, um, that I think it’s difficult. I think it’s really difficult for men to call themselves feminists without it sounding a bit wonky and odd because I think if feminism is about equality, then it shouldn’t be difficult for everyone to want equality and to genderize feminism. Oh God, am I already getting off on the wrong foot? But I think like, for instance, I, I, I’d remember seeing the he for she campaign that the UN tried to run. And I can’t remember who it was that was fronting it. I think it was one of the cast of Harry Potter. Or was it Carrie Mulligan? I can’t remember anyway. And I was just a bit like were men really meant to get involved with this? It was meant to be like men for feminism I guess it was and yeah I think anything that’s trying to make the world more equal and inclusive for everyone is really important and crucial and the music industry that I’m working in has lots and lots of issues and how best to empower people making those changes but also how best to kind of intervene and use your platform and use your space is something that I’ve always been very conscious of. So, um, I think, I think it’s the sorts of things like the most everyday mundane thing. Like I’ve asked to only be the token man on a conference panel. Now I won’t, it’s not even, I won’t be on an all male panel. It’s like, I, I’ll be the only man on a panel or I won’t be on it. Make room for other people. So those are some of the like really basic everyday things that I’ve made my contribution.

Becky Mollenkamp: It’s a complicated question and probably more complicated for you than it is for many of the women who’ve been on my show. But I appreciate that. And the question I was going to ask next, which I think you already started to hint at, is what does it mean to you to be an ally to women?

Sean Adams: I’d hate to think what being the opposite was. Like, I know that’s a contrary answer, but the, if you put humanity first and foremost in everything, then the idea of supremacy over anybody like feels really wrong. Toxicity is not something that, um, and I’m sure there’s times in, in my life where I’ve used or misunderstood my male privilege and interrupted or spoken over or misunderstood situations but I think not really sure if I was answering the question.

Becky Mollenkamp: I think some of the things you’re talking about are in practice what it looks like to be an ally. And that is things like acknowledging privilege, not talking over, listening to, uplifting those voices, like you said, being the only man on panels. Those are all really great, actionable ways that people can think about what does it look like to be an ally. So thank you. I know we have limited time on this conversation. So for this question, I’m going to just say like, give me the Cliffs Notes version because I can imagine it could be long, which is you started the Drowned in Sound music publication in 2000. So, wow, you’re almost coming up on 25 years. So hard to think 2000 was 25 years ago on your own. I know. What drew you to writing about music in the first place?

Sean Adams: There were a lot of different things. I think, I think really visually and when I started reading certain journalists when I was 14, 15, it made much more sense to me than a lot of the literature I was reading and fiction I was reading and there was a lot of writing that I liked, but for instance there’s like one section of A Clockwork Orange where he describes Beethoven and it’s just like the most beautiful few sentences about music. Like the start of Don DiLilio’s Great Jones Street, it’s just like an amazing opening page and it’s a description of music. I read like, I mean, obviously a lot of that like seventies, eighties kind of Lester Bang’s type journalism was full of a lot of misogyny. But there was a lot of great descriptions in the ways in which things were written in there. So I think that I loved making mixtapes and I loved like the idea of becoming a radio DJ or something like that. And, um, I’m quite lucky in that when I’ve spotted something that I think is going to be big and I’ve really gone all in on championing it, then I’ve not been wrong very many times. Um, and that’s right from when I was 16 championing Muse to signing the Kaiser chiefs and signing Bat for Lashes and working with a whole range of artists, but I remember like championing Laura Marling and I still think she’s going to be even bigger than she is now. And like the first time I heard SZA, I was really impressed. And I remember the first time that, I mean, I saw Lizzo play to 40 people and I was like, how is she not going to be like the biggest artist in the world? So I think that desire to try and spot what the zeitgeist might be next and marry that with writing about music, curating music, which is one of those like awful C words. Um, that, so I think there was those two things came together and it just seems like being someone that could go watch gigs all the time, listening to music for a living, championing music and power artists all felt like that was the sort of thing I wanted to do. And 25 years later, I’m still doing it. So I mustn’t have been doing something wrong.

Becky Mollenkamp: And just for the young listeners, not that we probably have that many, but mixtapes are what we now call playlists. And I sure miss that. It was a craft. It’s too simple now. It used to be something that was like a real craft. And I love that. So then how does someone go from blogging into building a music label and managing musicians. That is something that I think for a lot of people would be kind of a pipe dream of like, oh yeah, someday this blog will become something like that. And rarely does it actually happen. So how did that transition happen for you?

Sean Adams: And to begin with, it was, it felt like a really natural progression. I mean, it was hard to publish online in the year 2000. We had to build the site. Someone built it in their summer holidays. Someone I met, I think on like the radio head message board agreed to like spend some time building it. So we always had to build the infrastructure right from the start, which a few, if you had waited a few years, blogger and WordPress would have arrived and just getting off the ground would have been easier. We were promoting gigs. And I’d done that since I was 17 in my hometown I was putting on club nights. I was obsessed with record labels anyway. Like I wanted to know everything there was to know about creation after I got into Oasis. And I wanted to know everything there was to know about sub pop because you could pick up on two or three bands. You’re like, oh, these are all on the same label. And a lot of the like, um, kind of skate and surf videos I was watching was full of things on epitaph and fat wrecks. And so I was like, I was very aware of labels from quite an early, early age. And I really liked them again, it’s like a curatorial thing. So when we started putting on gigs and writing about artists and we couldn’t write any more about them, because they didn’t have any new releases out, putting their records out found like the next obvious step. And by doing so we discovered that, oh, radio one are going to talk about our website because they can talk about it being released by us. And journalists when they write about the artist can talk about drowning sound in the enemy and they can talk about the drowning sound in Sunday times and the observer. And so that was a really unexpected, useful thing that came because it, it bought an audience to what we were doing elsewhere, which I think is a similar to magazines would have had cover mount CDs in years gone by. So it wasn’t like we were doing like cutting big checks for people or anything like that. It was can we put your record out and like, here’s a small amount of money and we’ll spend this on marketing it. So I think that then I’m going into management really as a small label, you end up doing a lot of the manager’s job if an artist doesn’t have a manager. So I kind of learn quite a lot of things quite quickly. I still have more to learn about management. It’s like such a big the more the industry changes, the more falls on the artist and the manager to really know and understand. I suspect people that have run small businesses, like if you’d run a bar and you end up brewing your own beer that’s probably not too different to running a magazine and then putting records out. I think since restarting it last year, because we took a few years off to really have our own audience has been really crucial to get kind of records out into the world. And I think increasingly that’s going to be the case of people that are releasing music kind of needing like as big a net as possible to kind of continue to sell. And I think there’s going to be some quite big changes because our social media becomes less and less important. And WhatsApp groups and mailing lists and all those kinds of things become the new normal again for a while until we find a new platform. Having a way of keeping an audience engaged and feeding them more good things, I think is going to be really crucial.

Becky Mollenkamp: I want to transition into talking really about your industry and specifically the issues for folks with marginalized identities and what it looks like to be a woman, to be queer, to be BIPOC, to be in this industry that is changing and becoming more, it feels like from the outside of the industry, and you can tell me, it feels like it’s becoming more and more difficult for anyone who isn’t already a legacy artist or operating within some sort of, it seems like luck or legacy, seems like the only way to be found anymore, right? And it just doesn’t seem like there’s that same system where you could go in and pitch yourself to the local radio and they might play you and then that can sort of like build from there. It feels so different now. Social media, as you said, is changing a lot too. So I wanna start with the part about you managing artists. What are the differences that you’ve noticed in how they are being received, being spoken to, being paid, all of those things.

Sean Adams: So there’s, it’s very different. I mean, DMs that a female artist receives and a male artist receives are completely, completely different. I worked with the composer Max Richter for a year and ran all of his social channels because he was very busy making film scores and soundtracks and things. I don’t think there was a single even gently flirtatious message in his inbox. I’ve worked with the composer or the songwriter, Ed Harcourt who’s written songs for Paloma Faith and Sophie Ellis Baxter and all sorts of people like that. Again, his channels, he never got, I mean, he might’ve got a few kind of like Fanny fan messages, but not like explicit messages, whereas most of the women I’ve worked with have experienced really over the line stuff that’s now illegal. I don’t want to say anything triggering and I don’t want to share any confidences of artists because I think as soon as you start to say those things upset artists, then people start to do it more. But I think the huge differences are things like when an artist arrives in a venue. I’ve even been into guitar shops with one of the artists I work with and she was about to play the 02 on tour, has played guitar since she was like 12, has won awards for her albums. And the guy in the shop kept deferring his questions to me and I don’t play guitar. I know nothing about guitars. We just walked out of the shop and the guy said, how come you’re leaving? Because you’re not talking to the customer. You’re talking to me, I’m not interested. So I’ve experienced that very first hand. I mean on the flip side, a lot of the women I work with have had picture editors dedicate a whole page to them. Whereas the male artists I work with were getting like two or three sentences. So having people that are more attractive does allow for more space in media sometimes, which I think is an inverse kind of thing, which I think also in terms of like engagement online, like there’s a lot of women that can grow a much bigger audience, whether they are people that are interested in their music or not is a whole different thing. I stopped going to meetings for quite a long time because I was so sick of every meeting we can think, assuming I want us to talk about what happened in the football that weekend or like Formula One or something. No one ever wants to talk about music at the start of a meeting about music. The assumption I’d be more excited about talking about that. And you’ve got someone in the room and they quite clearly know that that’s a conversation they’re not included in. I mean, I’ve known, there’s plenty of women I know that know loads more about football than I do and would be quite excited about that conversation. But it’s like to think that those are the norms. I mean, there’s also lots of things to do with class. I’m working class and like people asking me, I didn’t realize this when I was younger, but people would always ask where I was holidaying. I was like, I can barely afford to get the bus home. What do you mean going like, and they were all talking about where are you skiing this winter? It was very much that they were filtering me out and making me feel not included in their world, An artist I know that told me once that she’s now had it three times asked when the guitarist will be on stage and can your girlfriend leave the stage, and she’s the guitarist in the band and they’re a like really big band. I’ve had stories of musicians being kicked out of their own dressing room because they assume they were a groupie stealing the rider, and physically assaulted by venue staff. Because the norm is 90% of the people that come through the venue that perform are men. So their expectation that someone drinking the wine in the dressing room was not meant to be there. And that’s before getting into obviously assault and all sorts of other awful things, which the things that I’ve heard people say in recording studios, when the artist is on the other side of the glass, one guy did not realize the talk through mic, which allows you to hear what’s being said in the control room in the recording studio. She’s in the middle of recording a really intimate, powerful song and this guy is making the worst comment you can imagine. And like how is a woman meant to feel comfortable expressing herself in a studio when that sort of thing is happening? I’ve intervened in those situations, but like to what extent can you do that when you’ve got one day in the studio, there are the two members of staff that have been employed and they’ve been paid, and so the like the freelance nature of the music industry, which I think a lot of other industries suffer from where you’re not, you’re not in a position of power to change things on a something you’re only going to like, if you go into a music venue, you’re only there for that day. So any change you can make is only incremental in the hours you’re there, not in the kind of grand scheme of things. So we, but we’ve done things like invited Safe Gigs for Women who are campaigning in the UK. They raise money by selling much. But what they also do is they go around the venue with the venue staff and ask questions and find out about their policies. They find out what training the bouncers have had. They tell, do you know about this free training your bounces can get to be like, like just to know what would happen if for instance, I’ve been at shows where I’ve heard men shout disgusting things at the women on stage, and it’s not heckling. It’s more than that. It’s there to make them feel like they don’t belong on the stage. And I’ve asked bouncers to eject people and they’re like, yeah, but it’s just like, they’ve not done anything wrong. It’s like, yes, they have. If you did that at any other point, place of work, that would not be acceptable. And until misogyny is a hate crime, it’s much, much harder to do anything about something like that and to set norms and standards for concerts because we don’t turn up to gigs with here’s gig etiquette of what you should and shouldn’t do. And time and time again, those things, they seem like they’ve been worse since lockdown from what a lot of people have told me as well, just like people have forgotten how to behave in public spaces and they’ve dehumanized a lot of the people they see on stage to a much greater extent than before.

Becky Mollenkamp: So much time on social media being that keyboard warrior. They go back into the real world and kind of forget, oh, I don’t have that veil of anonymity now and are showing up that same way. I’m excited to learn about Safe Gigs. I’m going to check them out. That sounds really amazing. I don’t know if there’s a similar thing here in the US, but that’s wonderful.

Sean Adams: I know there’s, there’s a version in Ireland. I’d not seen anything similar in the U S. They were great though. There’s like, they came every night on the anchor, S tour and they were selling T shirts, answering questions. In fact, one of the interesting things was some of the audience was little bit older and they were asking about what their daughter should do. But I overheard loads of conversations about what my son should do when he goes to gigs. 

Becky Mollenkamp: I love the idea of misogyny as a hate crime, by the way. I wanted to point out one thing too, just on the women getting more media while I know that inverse thing, but also just want to point out that is still, I think, women having to trade on the male gaze to get attention, which obviously is still very much rooted in misogyny. So yeah, and I know you know that.

Sean Adams: No, of course. I’m just conscious of knowing how much more space some of the women I’ve worked with have had in magazines because of it. And it’s, but also it’s because the magazines are full of men. So when you are working with some of the few great women making records, they also want to try and branch the magazine out. And almost all those picture editors I was thinking of, by the way, were women.

Becky Mollenkamp: I bet though that they have to fit a certain ideal of beauty. The more they do, the more they are able to get that attention, right? Because, you know, talking about Lizzo, I mean, that I am sure was part of that reason of why is she in a room of 40 people still trying to get that attention when you are somebody who’s in a larger body is not the same. And a Black body is very different than when you’re in a white thin body. So anyway, I know you know all of that. I just wanted to point it out for listeners.

Sean Adams: It’s one of those things where it doesn’t… it’s not a negative, but it is a negative, and it shouldn’t make any difference. 

Becky Mollenkamp: So let’s talk about legacy and privilege in your industry. And what role do they play and how has that changed over time? Because there’s always been legacy acts and, you know, privilege that’s affected people getting attention, getting label or getting a record deal, getting plays. But is that shifting as the landscape has changed so much in how music gets out there?

Sean Adams: The biggest thing with privilege is people expect you to build your own audience before they want to sign you or work with you, like to get to a certain level. And that requires an investment of both time and money. And who doesn’t have time or money, people that are working jobs and can barely afford to pay their rent. I think we’re increasingly see artists in big cities where the cost of living is just so much higher, like not be able to have the same footing unless they come from wealth. And the there’s definitely a lot of like, even artists where they’re playing to like 800 people, a sold out show, they might not be making very much money on that concert. And if the next night they lose money, and the night after that they make a little bit of money, the tour is breaking even, it’s not profitable. And everyone thinks people make their money from live and that’s unless you start to get to playing to 2,000 people, kind of 20, 30 nights a year. Most of the time you’re not out on the road and to build an audience across kind of different territories, let alone across the same country is challenging. I guess for context, I remember the Dandy Warhols right at the peak of their fame, they were on a massive TV ad here. They were playing two nights at Brixton Academy in London, which I think is 6,000 people a night. So like 12,000 tickets in London, but in, in Newcastle, they were playing to like 600 people because the coolness and the kind of audience was not the same in different parts of the country. And I’m sure there’s people that will play Washington to a big crowd, New York to a big crowd. But when they go out to Denver or somewhere where there’s not as big a music scene, then they might not play to as many people. I know artists that I’m friends with that because they’ve been on certain video games, they can play across cities that other bands that have had almost everything else the same as them apart from this video game can’t. So audience growth is a massive challenge.

Becky Mollenkamp: You see so many legacy kind of artists that there’s just privilege built in that because they already have a parent who’s able to open so many of those doors for them. 

Sean Adams: Before I came on this call, I literally just saw that, um, Yoko Ono’s son, which I’m guessing is also John Lennon’s son and Paul McCartney’s son have just put a track out together. And I think that’s like the peak nep baby. But I think in terms of legacy for a lot of artists, like if you put a record out 30 years ago, there was a lot less competition for attention. So even a mid-level band back then would have had a decent amount of press coverage. They would have had a year for people to find out who they were. They would have been on most festivals over the course of five years. And the difference is 2000-ish when CD sales peaked in the music industry had Napster and things where a lot of us all got into music of our generation. That was when home recording started and when home recording started, we went from a few thousand albums a year to a hundred thousand albums a year to now it’s 120 ,000 tracks released every single day. So having the benefit of marketing at a time before it was impossible to cut through. I mean, if you look at like Netflix is now launching loads more TV series, the TV is now quite a crowded landscape, but film is still kind of, you could watch all the major films this year. You’d really struggle to listen to all the major albums. I say major albums, not major label ones, but just the ones that people critically think are good or that all the kids in LA are listening to, or all the people in London are really excited about. It’s even harder because media has lost its footing. So I guess my bigger fear is that both of those things, both legacy and privilege, mean that you can drive the algorithms on streaming which become a self-fulfilling prophecy of you’ve got like even the privilege of having someone famous guest on your track means that the algorithm will play your track with Lana Del Rey or whoever it is on to Lana Del Rey’s audience. And your small artist will suddenly get loads more audience, which means the next time you release a track, all the people that heard your previous one, get your song in there, discover weekly and release radar and autoplay and same thing happens on YouTube, same thing happens on Apple. The other thing of that privilege of having access to people who’ve already got big audiences becomes another kind of like way of getting scale. There are plenty of examples of artists that get scale that don’t really have a fan base and don’t really have tangible success. Like they might have big vanity numbers, but they don’t really have people going out wanting to buy their things and see them play. So, there’s genuine audiences for some artists and that’s the thing that’s really difficult to build right now.

Becky Mollenkamp: As I’m thinking about it, I think I’m more interested in is legacy artists, meaning people who have been around for a long time already have a fan base built up, the Taylor Swifts, the Beyonces of the world that sort of hit before or at the early stages, right? They’re like the early adopters to this new way of doing music. And they put something out, it gets noticed. But how do other people breakthrough? Because the promise of Spotify and self-publishing and all of that was the democratization of music. Now anybody can publish anybody can be heard. And in theory that’s lovely. Let’s have you are the gatekeepers fewer of the white men holding the keys to the fortunes, and yet in practice it doesn’t seem to be what happened at all. Sure, you can put music out, but no one will hear it and you will make no money. The more I’ve learned about what it takes to actually receive any money for putting music out there is wild.

Sean Adams: And let’s not forget. I think the reason we first spoke was because of Taylor Swift and her generational wealth.

Becky Mollenkamp: We’re talking about that in a second. How does the model as it exists allow for new artists to ever appear beyond just a handful?

Sean Adams: Well, that’s the question that if I knew the answer to, I’d probably be on an island this weekend and not having a lovely conversation with you. I mean, it’s a challenge of everything. Cause you’re not just competing with all the other music that’s being released for people’s time and attention. You’re competing with every Amazon prime show. You’re competing with the latest video game. You’re competing with whatever the culture war about Sydney Sweeney is this week. You’re competing with debates about trans rights, you’re competing with all of these things in people’s feeds and in the kind of media landscape where there’s space for these things to be discussed. And going back to the other thing about that legacy is the decision makers that are deciding, like you can be signed to a major label, but the label still has to decide to prioritize your release to spend the money on it. And guess who makes a lot of those decisions and guess what percentage of the industry’s senior management teams are predominantly white men that have been in the same jobs for 40 years or so? As things start to kind of, implode is probably the wrong word, but as the media landscape changes and we’ve seen Pitchfork roll into GQ. Pitchfork had amazing women editing it until recently. As we see Spotify lay off editorial teams, like the women behind, I think it was the Equals project. Like I think that’s now like an algorithmic thing or a much smaller team behind it. So a lot of the initiatives have been put in place to try and address imbalances in the industry have also gone. So I guess in terms of answering your question on how do people cut through, a lot of it is paying money to Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Google to do marketing and advertising. A lot of it is that kind of one by one winning people over, commenting on Instagram posts. I mean it’s really difficult. Like I hadn’t released an album, well I haven’t really done a proper album campaign, I released an album last year that was reworking by The Anchoress and the landscape had changed radically since lockdown. And a lot of publications have gone, the readerships of the publications are still there. We’re just not as, I mean, readerships of music publications have always been quite strange. Like I know from Duran & Sound, like people were reading the publication, but they were reading about Radiohead and they were reading about Yeah Yeah Yeahs. They weren’t necessarily reading all of our new music coverage, even though they were coming into, we had an arena-size audience come to our website every day. It was about 22 to 29,000 people consistently every day for like 15, 16 years. And some of those people were reading the smaller stuff, but whether they were then going out and buying their records. I know that we put one artist on the homepage once and he’d only sold a couple of hundred records at the time. And he told us like, he sold like 2,000 or something within like a day. So we knew that we could have an impact on getting people to buy stuff. And we knew that we could drive listeners cause we’d seen lots of the data, but that’s changed so much from like 20. I mean, I started to see it change in about 2016. There’s a lot of media all writing about the same artists. And I mean, last dinner party cut through this year, but that was a lot of media coverage and a lot of negativity and misogyny and involved in a lot of that as well, being described as industry plants because they’re managed by Q Prime that managed Metallica and Foles and they’ve got an amazing manager, Tara, who’s she used to manage Foles and like she knows exactly what she’s doing. They got support with the Rolling Stones before anyone had really before they’ve released any music. So I can see why people thought they were industry plants, which if the industry was good at planting things, they’d be far more successful acts around. It’s a difficult question because like, how do we make your podcast bigger? How do I make my podcast bigger? It’s all the same challenge that everyone’s facing. And I think the VC money that goes into media projects is also the same people like BlackRock that have shares of the platforms where the advertising money is being spent. I don’t think it’s money being laundered, but it’s definitely money that they’re not losing money when it’s going back into where they’re already got their funding. Sherry Hugh from Water & Music did this amazing graphic of just like all the different ownerships of all the different companies and how like UMG have the same owners if like 40% of their shares are Spotify and another company and TikTok and you look in the overlap between all the like biggest companies in the world that own all the biggest companies in the entertainment industry is they’re not, they’re just moving their money around. The money’s not being lost, the wealth is not being extracted.

Becky Mollenkamp: I feel like is a good segue into the discussion around Taylor Swift, and not to bag on Taylor Swift, but about the rise of the music billionaire, the concentration of wealth inside of the music industry. Because I mean, Taylor Swift is an individual that exemplifies kind of what happens when music goes when this industry goes this way. It’s not just her, obviously, it’s like you’re just saying it’s also the conglomerates and the corporate ownership over media. But what are your thoughts about the rise of music billionaires? Because Beyonce is probably very soon to be, if not already, on that list. And there may be others, because again, it’s fewer and fewer artists that are getting more and more of the play and then the percentage of money coming out of places like Spotify. So what do you think about that?

Sean Adams: For a start, I think Rihanna has got it right. Cause she’s making her money out of things that are not music, even though she’s made some incredible records. I think Taylor’s from generational wealth, like her beginnings in the industry were very different. I mean, she’s an incredible songwriter. Like I think that she’s lucky that she can also access some of the best collaborators in the industry because of her success. That’s not really about money. That’s just about, like, choosing to work with The National was not an obvious decision. Like Aaron Destner is, I think previously the records he produced were like Sharon Van Etten’s records, which critically incredible. One of my favorite albums is Tramp by Sharon Van Etten. Um, but wouldn’t it have been an obvious choice to, as kind of someone for her to work with. I think Jack Antonoff had worked with St. Vincent and a few other artists before working with her. Having money is one thing, but having taste is another. Having people around you with good taste that can kind of say these are the people making the most exciting records right now. This is who you should be working with. That’s also crucial. And I think Beyonce is in a similar position. She can work with almost anyone and people up their game because it’s Beyonce. And if you’re going in to write a song, you’re going to be on your best day, like hopefully, or your worst day, like depending, but so she’s going to be getting the best songs, filter up to her. I think the problem we’ve got is like the way in which Spotify works for instance, is that we all pay our 9.99 a month and you could listen to a hundred songs. And none of them are Taylor Swift, but Taylor Swift had 90% of the streaming on Spotify last month and 90% of your money and all the other money that’s gone in Spotify has paid to Taylor Swift. That’s how it works. That’s like the very basics. It’s much more complicated than that really, but because if you’re in Spain and you’re listening and you’ve, you’ve got adverts, it’s like what percentage of your plays had advertising. The spreadsheets they send you are on a daily basis by platform, by country, by type of stream, because a paid-for subscriber stream is different than advertising stream. Anyway, I won’t bore your audience with that. But I think that the songwriter is not getting as big a cut because that comes out of a different percentage. The performers on the track, which is a different royalty again, they’re only getting a really tiny amount. The producer, unless they’re one of the co-writers, is not really getting anything extra. They just got their fee for producing it. So all of that money that’s flowing is the top 1% of the top 1% because something like 10% of artists are kind of making some money out of streaming. They’ve just taken, I think it’s 65% of artists were getting less than a thousand streams a year. And that’s all been demonetized now, which will mean even more money for the biggest artists. And I almost think on purpose streaming is complicated. It’s not like iTunes where you paid 99 cents or 99 p, and 20% of that went to the credit card company and 20% went to Apple and the rest went to the label. And then the label paid if the artists had recouped the record deal. And this is the other thing. Most artists aren’t making money because they got a big advance and 82% of the money goes to the record company for everything they do. And the other 18% of all the marketing charges and the advance, everything is charged to the artist. So their chances of making a profit, unless they hit huge, huge numbers is really difficult. So that’s one of the other big things. Streaming royalties normally are much better in the artist’s favor, but a lot of artists are on deals that are over 20 years old. So if people want to dig into like Fortet’s case where he’s trying to get his royalties refreshed and a new, fairer deal because streaming didn’t exist when he put music out, when he signed his record deal. Like there’s loads and loads of complicated things where big corporations are big corporationing.

Becky Mollenkamp: When I have criticized Taylor Swift as part of the billionaire issue, her fans, boy, do they come out because they love her. And I get it. I love Beyonce. I also don’t think Beyonce should be a billionaire. Right. And I love Taylor Swift and I don’t think she should be a billionaire. I don’t think we should have billionaires and not because Taylor Swift and Beyonce aren’t incredibly talented and deserve to be rewarded for their talent, but because it’s always, always extractive. It is coming at someone else’s expense. And people like to point that Taylor Swift does all these wonderful things in paying roadies more and giving bonuses and all that. And that’s all wonderful. But like you just said, she doesn’t have control over it, but it doesn’t make the billions any less problematic that it’s coming at the expense of these independent artists who aren’t getting paid for their music also existing on these platforms.

Sean Adams: And the big difference is Taylor’s in a position where she could get them to change how they operate. Like taking all those trucks around America, she could have left infrastructure in every venue to make it cheaper for every other artist to tour, and obviously at arena level, there’s lots of money anyway. Billie Eilish, by contrast, tried to get Live Nation to make all their venues single plastic. And she did that on one of her tours and she said, look, you should keep this up. There’s no reason for single-use plastic to be the default at all your concerts. She managed to make the O2 in London go vegan for the night, which they’d never done before. And loads of the restaurants now have more vegan dishes on because they had to do it for that show. Billie Eilish is just about to release her album on bioplastic. Taylor Swift could have done that. If she’s being called out for flying around in a private jet, it would have been very easy for her to have offset the conversation by opening up our own pressing plant that does bioplastic. Like Radiohead with their In R project, one of the biggest data capture things an artist has ever done. Did anyone else get to share in that? Do they send emails telling you that out this week, here’s 10 independent records we really like? No, and it’s like, that’s the big difference. Taylor Swift could change an artist’s career in a tweet. And that’s a strange power to have. I agree with all of the environmentalists that say billionaires shouldn’t exist. It means they’ve extracted too much from the system. It’s not that we need like the great reset, like all of the conspiracy theorists talk about, but what we do need is for people when they are at that level, not just to be able to pay the truck driver a hundred grand bonus. I mean, the other thing that no one talks about with, I think this is why we first started talking was that Era’s tour was so successful for Taylor Swift that they added extra dates, which means those people were working outside of most labor laws because they would have been driving trucks hundreds, if not thousands of miles. And then putting up a stage, putting on a show and then taking it all down and then doing the same thing, driving another few thousand miles. I’ve been on tours and I’ve been on tours at quite large scale as well with a, one of the artists I worked with was in Simple Minds for a few years. And you’ve got people that are literally starting work at 8 a.m., driving across the country, putting up a stage. They sleep while the concert’s on for like four hours, five hours. And then they pull down the stage, put it all in lorries, drive as far as possible, sleep for a bit, then put the stage up again. There’s not two of them. There’s not someone body doubling them. And often those tours are six months long. And I’d imagine there was a lot of people on that crew, which thought they were going to spend the day with their family on a day off on tour or have. It’s not that they’ve been kidnapped, but it’s probably doesn’t feel too far off. And some of those are just people doing the cake backstage catering. Some of those are people that are selling the t-shirts or like there’s a whole village that moves. And I think, I think it was a hundred lorries that did the U S tour.

Becky Mollenkamp: And not to mention, by the way, those T -shirts that you mentioned, I have yet to be able to find anyone who can verify where her merch is being made. And again, it’s not just to call out Taylor Swift, but it’s this system has now created where we’re going to have this. She’s not going to be the last billionaire coming out of the music industry, the last artist to do this because of the way things are going. Again, we’re gonna have more of these folks that are elevated to this. And there’s responsibility there that isn’t being addressed. And it’s not just her because obviously the corporations have a lot of responsibility that they’re not addressing.

Sean Adams: Look at how differently Megan Rapinoe acts as a public figure. Look at how differently Lewis Hamilton acts as a public figure. When women in Iran were cutting their hair to protest what was going on with the government, the music industry wasn’t really speaking up about that. Actors and comedians and all sorts of people were. In that documentary, Taylor Swift is really swerving about whether she should call out Donald Trump or stand up for women’s bodily autonomy. We don’t talk enough about the social responsibility of that level of fame. Like you said, where’s her merch being made? Is she using vegan inks? Is she selling a load of single-use plastic at her shows? That’s all huge, when you’re at that level, you are contributing in the same way Apple have tried to change how they operate as a corporation. She can set new norms for the entire industry.

Becky Mollenkamp: She’s an adult woman with a lot of responsibility, yet we don’t treat, very rarely do people want to treat her that way. Most people are out there like, oh, be nice to the sweet, delicate little white girl. And it’s no, she’s a grown white billionaire who should be expected to make changes along with all of them. And again, I don’t want to, it’s not just her, but I think it’s an important thing to look at because that is the natural outcome of how the music industry has evolved. So I have two questions left in the time that we have left. One is you mentioned social media changing, people moving to newsletters, things like that. What are the changes that you’re seeing right now? And like, what do you see as being kind of the next step in the industry you’re in?

Sean Adams: There’s loads of conversations at the moment in the music industry about super fans. Basically, they mean the paying customers rather than the people that stream for free, which is no different than I remember reading about Winzip once where about, I think it’s 1% of people that paid for that software, the unzipped files, like the corporate account paid for the other 99% of people to use it. In music, it’s the people that buy the CDs and vinyl and merch and tickets, they are deemed as super fans. And everyone that just streams the music is just a fan. I think the big things that we’re seeing is, I mean, Nine Inch Nails and Childish Gambino, and there’s a few other people that started their own media companies. And I think that’s something we’re going to see a lot more of, of people starting production houses, which are making more than just records. They are putting on multi-medium projects like Bjork’s done collaborations with National Geographic and MoMA. So I think we’re seeing a lot of those levels of projects where music becomes a component, but it’s not the central piece of what people are doing, which I think is actually really exciting because as someone who’s very multi-hyphenate and all the different things I do, I don’t necessarily think that just sticking to your lane is what’s going to work. I sort of wish more of those people were funding media because in the UK and in the US, there’s lots of right -wing media funded by billionaires that want the anti-woke kind of discourse to rise up. You don’t hear stories of, I don’t know, I’m trying to think of the right artists. Olivia Rodrigo putting a million dollars into the nation magazine or something. What you do hear about is people doing partnerships with Chanel and it’s like, you’re not putting that money back. You’re just taking money out. You’re not bringing it back in. All the different music magazines I’ve spoken to recently have all got the same struggles. Taylor Swift could buy Twitter? She could literally fix one thing in society and it would take a small percentage of her actual wealth to do it. There was all sorts of things where proactively. Anyway, going to back your question about social media. Anything that drives friction is cutting through still and pretty much anything that’s promotional needs to be paid for anything with a link and an off ramp. And that’s been the same for pretty much 10 years, to be honest. There’s so much conversation about community and I just don’t think artists should be running their own Discords and having to deal with private moderation. That’s a whole other world of like protection of audiences, especially very young audiences and especially making it so that artists feel like their fans are paying for them. So like the whole Patreon thing where like I go along to my artists fan meetups on zoom for Patreon because I don’t know what these guys are going to be like. Like that’s.

Becky Mollenkamp: This reminds me of season 2 of this podcast, go back and listen to Rebecca Borucki who runs Row House Publishing, trying to disrupt the publishing industry. And Geraldine DeRuiter, who is a bestselling author and her thing was, what if the thing that I’m good at, which is writing, isn’t enough anymore to be a writer? And it feels the same way for musicians. What if the thing I’m good at being a musician isn’t enough to be a musician anymore, to make money on it? I mean, there are some people who can make money. Somehow scrape enough together through touring to survive barely. But I mean, it’s tough. OK, you have to go. I have one more question, which is, how can we as consumers of music do what we can to reward artists and not just make the billionaires more wealthy? Is there anything we can do?

Sean Adams: There’s quite a few things. One, be mindful and conscious of where you put your attention. All the time you are spending following gossip, following, listening to the soundtrack to Stranger Things, it’s time you could be spending exploring. Put in your diary reminders to just go and explore. If you’ve not listened to an artist for a while, go see if they’ve got any record out, go to their band camp and buy it, go see if they’ve got shows on sound by tickets. And that sounds really basic, but taking the time to do your own research and not relying on the convenience of algorithms. Then try and find some voices that are championing some of the types of music you like, whether that’s the record companies, look through the labels to see coherent things. If you find that a label like Sacred Bones, who are one of my favorite labels to make amazing goth records. They’ve got a whole wealth of artists on there from dark folk all the way through to like this artist called PharmaKun that does this most intense noise art projects, which is really fun. Then look for journalists cause they are out there. They’re running Substacks. I found some amazing people on TikTok running their own channels, curating music. So we’ll put in an hour a month. You don’t have to put in an hour a day or an hour a week, put in an hour a month just to explore because one, it’s exciting, because you might find something that’s incredible without too much effort, but two, you might find someone who can reliably deliver you some things. I’m doing a monthly email, which takes about 15 minutes to read just of music. It’s one song, two albums, and then like something that’s provocative, normally. Like there was this month’s had an artist called Lambrini Girls that have made a really big like anti-British government song I just thought was fun and hilarious, but also incredibly important right now.

Becky Mollenkamp: I went to your website right before this and just saw a couple of new artists I hadn’t heard and I’m super excited you were featuring a bunch of women. I love that about you. Do we listen to them on YouTube to help them make more money?

Sean Adams: Listening to artists on YouTube helps the algorithm play their video to people with similar tastes and interests as you.

Becky Mollenkamp: It feels like maybe better than spot. I don’t know. 

Sean Adams: I think YouTube pays slightly less than Spotify, but it swings in roundabouts. It’s like, it doesn’t always.

Becky Mollenkamp: You only have to get a thousand subscribers to be able to start making money. So maybe that helps. I don’t know. Thank you so much for your time and educating us. I think it’s been really, really helpful. And thank you for doing your work to be a good feminist.

Sean Adams: Yeah, I don’t think we talked as much about that as I was worried I was gonna get grilled on. But I think there’s like, if there’s a few things that most men can take away is they really need to figure out how to make more space, understand the problem and not deny there’s a problem. There needs to be more counter narratives to Andrew Tate, and all those kinds of toxic men as well. Like there’s no man in a position of power that’s countered his narrative that I’ve seen. So that’s really important. I just think generally there’s some really simple things that men in every industry can do, which don’t involve having to do training. It involves reading, thinking, and most importantly, listening.

Becky Mollenkamp: Athen uplifting other voices. I wasn’t gonna grill you because I’ve met you before and I’ve researched you. And from all I’ve seen, now I hope you don’t turn out to be an Andrew Tate, but from all I’ve seen, you are really putting in the work. And again, just going to your website and seeing how when you’re featuring new music, it’s woman after woman, you know? And that is something that’s, it’s so important. 

Sean Adams: They’re making the most exciting music.

Becky Mollenkamp: And it’s just so important to have, to think about it because I think often we think of voices that sound like our own and it’s important to think beyond that. So thank you for doing that and thank you for doing this.

Sean Adams: Well thanks for your time and I’ll see you again.