Tag Archives: features

This story appears in Rolling Stone‘s 2021 Future of Music issue, a special project delving into the next era of the multibillion-dollar hitmaking business. Read the other stories here. Josh Katz has come a long way from fetching tuna sandwiches for Clive Davis in the Nineties. Back then, he was …

It was Valentine’s Day of 2018 in Washington, D.C., and Mary Wilson was on a mission. Then 74 years old, the Supremes singer, outfitted in a glamorous red dress and very high heels, needed to convince the nation’s representatives and senators to vote yes on the CLASSICS Act, a proposed …

Last year, aspiring rapper YNG Martyr was barely holding on to a job as “a web designer that didn’t know how to design websites.” “I was in a nine to five that was God-awful,” he remembers. “I hated it.” Faced with the prospect of wasting away at work, most people …

Before Championxiii released “BOO!” — a ticking, clapping, bottom-heavy record with the charmingly goofy refrain “bitch, I’m a ghost!” — in October, the 25-year-old rapper already knew it would be a hit. That’s because Championxiii, who grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts but now lives in Houston, tests all his demos …

Paul and Courtney Klimson have spent their lives behind the scenes. They want little more than to protect road crew members — an often-overlooked workforce of thousands of people who work on tours and live-music shows — which is why they launched the Roadie Clinic, an advocacy group and de …

Twitch unveiled a new feature on Wednesday to give streamers easy access to rights-cleared music, after months of being criticized for not licensing music. Named “Soundtrack,” the feature is essentially an in-house streaming platform: It arrives with a sizable library from artists like Porter Robinson, Above and Beyond and Mxmtoon, …

This is the seventh installment of Rolling Stone’s series At Work, in which we explore the fast-changing music business from the perspective of a different industry leader each week. Read earlier pieces in the series here. Veteran music executive Barry Weiss is a difficult man to Google, with everything from …

Slowly but surely, independent artists are devouring the recorded-music industry. This, at least, is the view from the major labels, who are watching self-releasing or “DIY” acts gobbling up increasing percentages of global market share — to this day, still a primary performance indicator for the likes of Universal Music …