Transcription
Why is that music selling as well? Should be trash. I think there's been some albums that sold well. Kendrick did what about 60 second year? Tyler, Tyler's been cooking.
These are artists who really push the envelope in making projects. Majority of the field are making songs to get put on playlist to last for a couple weeks and they coming back doing it again.
You're not crazy. You feel it, don't you? That nagging sense that something in music is broken. You look back at the icons, the artists who define generations, and then you look at what the industry is feeding you today, the flavors of the month, the TikTok trends that are here today and forgotten by tomorrow. And you have to ask the question, how did we get from artists who defined a decade to artists who can barely define a week? What broke? You're about to find out in this video.
This isn't a story about music getting worse. This is a story about the factory that runs the music business and how that factory's business model changed from building artists to strip mining them.
How do you feel about the state of like music though? Overall, right now at this very moment, I'm a little bit bored right now. I think it's like super watered down. To the point where I get in the car, I don't even know what to listen to. And I think that's why rap is kind of like fading a little bit because back then everybody had their own sound, basically. I don't think that's the case now. Everybody's trying to make the radio hit and it's a recipe and they try to follow it.
To understand how we got to this point today, you have to understand the old system. Once upon a time, record labels were not only gatekeepers, they were investors. They were in the artist development business. This was a high-risk, high-cost gamble because when a label signed a new act, they were on the hook for everything. Studio time, marketing, tour support, music videos. They were betting millions that in five years that artist would be a superstar.
You made a dollar, but you spent $2 to make that dollar. So, you owe somebody a dollar. So, you might make the decision, I want to fly first class. Hey, I want to shoot a $50,000 video instead of $25,000 or a $200,000 video instead of a $50,000 video. These are all choices that are made constantly.
Because the investment was so high, the product had to have integrity. It had to last. This required an A&R, an artist and repertoire executive. This person was the bridge between raw talent and the industry. Think of Dr. Dre mentoring Eminem or Jermaine Dupri grooming Bow Wow. They spent years refining the sound, the image, the skill. Yes, the labels were in control, but that control came with an investment. They were building long-term profitable assets. The factory back then was only built to make durable goods. The model was clear. Artist development was the only path to profit.
Why the Atlantic basically tell YoungBoy, listen, after 22 albums that you dropped in a time period where we only contracted you to do five, we'll negotiate and give you this amount of money, but we ain't giving you a motherfucking masters back. These are real things. What does that mean? When YoungBoy started, he's 17, he's 22 now. You don't understand what's going on. He's just putting out music. Even you look at the guys now that's probably big right now with social media. I just seen they had NBA YoungBoy. He's the biggest YouTuber. Influencers for his music. He did a deal for $2 million for five records. So, think about that. You got the money up front. Imagine what they get.
Then around 2015, the system broke. Streaming didn't just change how we listen. It changed how the factory finds its product. The A&R's gut feeling was rendered obsolete. It was replaced by a cold, hard spreadsheet of streaming data. Why gamble millions on a hunch when you can just log into SoundCloud and see which song already has 10 million plays? The entire business model flipped on its head. Labels stopped making hits. They started acquiring them. This new model was brutal, efficient, and required zero development. It is called trend acquisition.
While the old system could be referred to as farming, the new system is more along the lines of industrial mining. Labels no longer launch careers. Instead, they demand you build one on your own. As writer Ted Gioia put it, "Labels lost their ability to create stars, so they demanded musicians do it for them on social media." Only after you prove you can go viral. Only after you've built your own buzz, will they swoop in, and they swoop in with a 360 deal, a contract that gives them a piece of everything: your streams, your tours, your merch. They pour gas on the fire of the one hit you already created, squeeze every last penny out of it, and when the trend dies, you're forgotten.
Everybody gets paid but the artist and the artist is cool with that because that's the commercial for them to go make their money selling their merch, which is their t-shirts, and make their money from their show. Now you can't own your ass on the road and your clothes and also every time you make money from endorsements. So you actually telling someone to give up their whole entire behind 360 degrees of your ass, pause, away just because of a trick. And now you got to ask a person or you have to say things like, "The label lets me do this and that." Like when you say somebody can never say an artist is signed to me, that doesn't sound correct to me.
The data-driven industry doesn't care about your artistic vision. It only cares about your immediate virality. These artists are on these streaming forms. They are on these streaming platforms. Even from a guy like J. Cole that say, "How many artists got streams from these bots? They not as hot as they seem." Well, J. Cole is a part of that system as well, and he don't even know it.
The major labels are running these streaming platforms. They running these streaming numbers. They running these setups. All right, we're in a major, major industry, and that industry is ran by a machine. This is the matrix.
But what happens when the new currency, the data itself, is a lie? The moment streams became the measure of success, the incentive to counterfeit those streams was born. We are now in the era of streaming farms. Shadowy operations that use bots to artificially inflate an artist's numbers, creating an illusion of success. And the major labels, the streaming services, they seem to be turning a blind eye or seem to be the drivers of the shenanigans. The allegations are explosive. A class-action lawsuit filed by Snoop Dogg's cousin, rapper RBX, claims a substantial portion of Drake's 122 billion Spotify streams were generated by bots. This person who was actually Snoop Dogg's cousin is suing Spotify because Drake has been getting billions of fake streams. All right, so we had Drake suing UMG because Kendrick was getting botted, and this is Snoop Dogg's cousin. So, we got the article here and it says, "A new class-action lawsuit against Spotify alleges the company has turned a blind eye to mass-scale fraudulent streaming on its platform and that one musician in particular has been the beneficiary of billions of fake streams. Drake."
The suit argues this mass botting causes massive financial harm to legitimate artists by diverting royalties.
It's gotten so bad that Drake himself accused his own label, UMG, of using bots and payola to boost Kendrick Lamar's diss track, "Not Like Us." The heated feud between two popular rappers is now turning into a legal battle. Drake has filed a lawsuit against Universal Music Group, or UMG, claiming it falsely infiltrated, inflated the popularity of Kendrick Lamar's song, "Not Like Us." Lamar released the single back in May as a diss track against Drake. According to Spotify, the song has more than 900 million streams, but Drake's suit argues that UMG used bots and launched a pay-to-play scheme to increase those numbers and make the song go viral. UMG denies the claims. It's also worth noting Drake is currently represented by Republic Records, which is a division of UMG.
You can't do the crime with them for years and then get mad when somebody else benefits from it more than you. Whether you knew about it or not, they were using bots. They were using it on everybody's shit. You think your records hitting number one by chance and fair business practice? That's what you really think? You should be embarrassed to release this. This is goofy. They've been doing the same thing for you for 15 years or however long it's been, and you ain't say one goddamn thing. As soon as you lose a battle, now you want to sue them and Spotify and make it like you some hero.
That's the state of the industry. The biggest players are openly accusing each other of faking their numbers. But why would a label or an artist bot their streams? There are two main reasons I can think about. One, to create the illusion of movement. Let's look at the case of Doja. In 2024, the industry was telling you she was the next big thing. She performed at the Grammys and won an award for best rap album on the same night. She was on magazine covers and her Spotify numbers were astronomical, peaking at 59 million monthly listeners. But when her debut project, *Alligator Bites Never Heal*, actually dropped, it sold around 11,000 copies in its first week. How is this possible? How does an artist with 59 million listeners fail to sell over 11,000 units? The math does not add up. It has to be a trick. And at the point of recording this video, her Spotify monthly listeners have dropped by more than half. It currently sits at 24 million. The faked numbers are a marketing tool to make you, the listener, pay attention, hoping the music eventually sticks. Two, the playlisting scam. Bots are used to trick the algorithm into thinking a song is a viral hit, forcing Spotify to place it onto massive human-curated playlists like Rap Caviar. From there, it's exposed to a real organic audience. The common theme: the listener is being deceived. The system isn't just rewarding what's popular. It's rewarding what can be faked to look popular.
Now that the industry's data scheme has been uncovered, let's look at another angle. Content that goes legitimately viral. The algorithm has discovered a clear, undeniable currency: shock. Nothing, it turns out, generates more real engagement than shock. The first test run was the SoundCloud Rap Wave. The music was raw, nihilistic, and saturated with drugs, depression, and drama. From a label's perspective, these artists were a dream, organically viral. But they were also a nightmare. Unstable assets, and the assets started to self-destruct. But the machine learned a morbid lesson. When rapper Juice WRLD died at the tender age of 21 of a drug overdose, his streams didn't stop, they exploded. When XXXTentacion was shot and killed by armed robbers at a more tender age of 20, his ostentatious album topped the charts. The industry learned that shock and tragedy were engagement gold mines. But it needed a more reliable product. The industry refined the formula into two new hyper-efficient product lines: real-world violence and brazen sexuality. The drill era was born. The music wasn't just about violence. It was a real-time log of actual gang conflicts. Rappers boasted about opps they allegedly shot, daring rivals to retaliate. The drama became the content. As Lupe Fiasco said, "Y'all dancing on graves. People are dying." And the streams poured in.
On the other side, the hypersexual era. Artists like Sexyy Red and the City Girls were being promoted. The machine loves this product because it's outrage marketing. The lyrics are so explicit that they generate a storm of social media debate, reaction videos, and think pieces. That outrage is the promotion. It's free. But this new factory model needed an amplification arm, a media machine to monetize the drama. Enter the controversy profiteers like DJ Akademiks, Adam22, and VladTV. These are not journalists. They are a crucial cog in the shock era. They package tragedy and toxic gossip as news. Akademiks built his career with his war in Shyra series, narrating real gang murders like a sports broadcast. It's a symbiotic relationship. The labels push the drama and these platforms amplify it, which in turn boosts the streams. It's a perfect closed circuit of exploitation.
This factory has a human cost. Artistry is being sacrificed on the altar of engagement. Let's be clear about Sexyy Red. This is not an attack on her. It is an analysis of her as the perfect product for this system. She requires zero artist development, but generates massive engagement through pure shock. She is low cost and high reward. She is upon being pushed by the industry right now.
"Yes, they got me in this. I don't know. I can't get out of it. I'm getting too much money. I'm getting so much money."
And another thing that's heart-wrenching is horrifying. Your five-year-old daughters are asking to listen to "Pound Town." Your five-year-old daughters are asking, "Can we hear 'Pound Town'?" I'm playing them Princess Tiana ballet music and they are asking me, "Can we hear 'Pound Town'?" And I'm so scared for these little girls today because this is the most insane, insane agenda push I have ever seen in my life.
But the industry is filled with ponds that can be deemed as collateral damage, and some of them have already been discarded. Artists like Pop Smoke and King Von were the perfect drill product. Their artistry was heavily tied to gang activity, and they eventually lived by the gun and died by the gun. They were profitable in life and even more profitable in death. Their labels rushed out posthumous albums to capitalize on the tragedy. But if death is not the tragedy, then it's jail. Look at the case of Lil Durk. The label capitalized on him when he was free and rapping about murders. They capitalized on the buzz of him being arrested on conspiracy to commit the murders he rapped about. And they would potentially capitalize on the buzz of his sentencing or release. This specific factory model doesn't offer a retirement plan. It offers jail or worse, death.
The most heartbreaking cost is the music we aren't hearing. The industry is actively starving the best artists of oxygen. Artists like Cordae or Joey Bada$$ praised for their '90s style lyrical depth, release albums, and because it doesn't have a viral TikTok dance, it sells 10,000 copies or less. The industry labels it a flop. An artist like Rapsody, a two-time Grammy nominee, admits, "It's hard to be who I am in this business." She's told she isn't entertaining enough, a polite word for scandalous. These aren't bad products. They are complex artisans. They are the artists who need the development the old system provided. But the new factory model has no assembly line for them.
But the factory has one final diabolical move. Why even deal with messy, disposable, expensive human artists at all when you can just manufacture one? First, they tested the waters with FN Meka, an AI rapper signed to Capitol Records. It was a disaster, a digital blackface caricature programmed with racist stereotypes. They even posted an image of FN Meka being beaten by a virtual police officer. A gross commodification of trauma. The backlash was severe, and Capitol dropped it. You'd think they'd learn, but they didn't.
Now, legendary producer Timbaland is facing his own backlash for collaborating with an AI music generator called Suno. They've already released an AI artist named Tata, complete with an AI-generated music video and a human villain to play the role, but the community sees it for what it is. "I think what happened with Timbaland was he was telling people to send music in the year before to sign humans, people. And the thing that he signed the following year was an AI. And so the combination of that right raises a lot of concerns or or questions like, were you using our music to train your AI?" "This AI-generated Asian woman who is singing and mimicking the music and the styles of Black R&B and Black rap. It's purely an AI music video that seems like it ducks between, I guess, some real scenes. I can't really tell right now with her if she's a stand-in and this is just the mascot." "This is disgusting."
As veteran DJ Shy FX put it, this comes at the cost of real artists. This isn't disruption. It's a cash-in. This is the factory's endgame model. Why invest in artists, managers, A&Rs, or artist development? Why risk a human being when you can generate a digital one? You have a perfectly obedient, scandal-free, and royalty-free asset.
All right, so it's a lot of talk about AI. We know how the feelings of violating certain things, but let me tell you something. I got a solution. Always wanted to work with Biggie, and I never got a chance to until today. It came out right. Play. This is how the industry truly wants to break its artists and replace them, expecting that we, the listeners, are stupid enough not to care. As long as we get our dopamine hit, we'd be fine, right?
"I mean, I already accomplished what I'm going to accomplish, right? I just feel like when I leave out the room with Suno, it's always leaving me in a creative space. I'm never resting. For me, at this stage of my music career, it's my muse. I'm like a kid. Like I was 19 years old. It's like falling back in love with the purity of creativity."
So now we have to ask the hard questions. Who is in charge of this new direction for art? Is it the music people or the tech people? Are they making decisions with the musician or the listener in mind? Or are they only concerned with streaming stats, tech gimmicks, and profit margins? The answer is clear. The industry is no longer run by artists. It's run by data scientists and venture capitalists. Do real creators benefit from this? The truth is, they largely don't. When fake streams siphon money, legitimate artists lose royalties. When labels prioritize virtual acts, real musicians see fewer opportunities. Existing artists are now told they have to compete with bots. New artists are told their human art isn't as efficient as a computer program.
This brings us to the final, most important question. What do we do? This is where we, the listeners, have to stand up. The industry thinks we are stupid. It believes we are a passive audience that will consume anything it puts in front of us, whether it's faked, generated, or just plain hollow. It's up to us to prove them wrong. We have to raise awareness. We have to stop being deceived by the artificial hype. Support real artists. Go to their shows, buy their merchandise, share their human music. Be the A&R that the labels refuse to be. Seek out the real artists versus the viral sensations. Be the gut feeling that the algorithm is trying to kill. The industry factory is a runaway train, but we are the ones shoveling coal into its engine every time we passively accept what it feeds us. It's time to stop feeding the industry and start feeding the art. Thanks for watching.