Drowned in Sound

There's a marketing agency that will build your band a small army of fan accounts for about a dollar per thousand views. They post the clips, they seed the captions, sometimes they write the comments underneath too. Until a Substack essay by the musician Eliza McLamb and a run of stories in Wired, New York Magazine and The Verge this May, most of us assumed - unlike MAGA and Reform supporters - the people posting about our favourite artists actually liked them.

In this week's episode, recorded at the Shure Experience Centre in London, Sean is joined by returning guest Hanna Kahlert for a properly wide ranging mid-year check-in on where the music industry actually stands. It covers radio, playlists, spatial audio, AI, third spaces, and at some length, what's really behind the clipping campaigns turning fan accounts into an ad product.

Hanna Kahlert is a senior social analyst at MIDiA Research, where she heads up the company's coverage on social media, cross-entertainment audience behaviour, the creator economy, and the platforms all of it lives on. She was our guest before Christmas talking about the year in tech, which makes her one of a very short list of returning guests on this podcast.

However, MIDiA isn't her only hat. Hanna also mentors at Abbey Road Red, the studio's startup incubator, where she's currently working with founders building spatial audio for VR worlds and, more usefully for touring musicians, something like an Airbnb for recording studios.

The conversation moves through Apple's rumoured smart glasses, why an AR filter over a headline slot might one day save a band three trucks of touring production, and why last year's poolside advert for Meta's camera glasses, endorsed awkwardly by Peggy Gou, has aged badly.

This conversation also gets into how little has actually changed about the mechanics of a live show since Sean was a teenager, wireless guitars aside, and why a crowd full of phones sometimes means an artist is genuinely growing an audience and sometimes just means nobody real is in the room.

The bulk of the episode is about the clipping economy: the marketing model behind fan accounts that turn out not to be run by fans at all. Sean and Hanna work through the Billboard interview with Chaotic Good that started it, Eliza McLamb's essay Fake Fans, and what it meant when that essay led to a month of think pieces asking whether the band Geese were, in the discourse's own phrase, an industry plant psyop. Hanna's own MIDiA research covers the same ground, and it's linked below.

It also gets into third spaces, pubs, youth clubs, and Geoff Barrow's argument that five hundred million pounds would be better spent reopening youth clubs than almost anything else the industry could fund. It ends on why proper research, done slowly, might matter more to a working musician right now than any dashboard full of streaming data.

The Drowned in Sound podcast is presented in partnership with Qobuz, the pioneering high-quality music streaming and download platform for music enthusiasts and audiophiles. Each week we curate playlists on Qobuz, featuring our favourite records, artists, and the themes we explore on the show.

Visit https://drownedinsound.org/playlists/ to discover new music in rich Hi-Res lossless quality and start your 30-day free trial of Qobuz at https://qobuz.com/dis.

Edited by: tell.studio (Phil, Louisa, Owen, Matt)

Hanna Kahlert / MIDiA Research
https://www.midiaresearch.com/analyst/hanna-kahlert

Further reading
MIDiA Research: Clipping campaigns, marketing's next move in a fragmented attention economy
Eliza McLamb: Fake Fans
Dazed: If Geese are a psy-op, so is everything else
Eliza Hatch: Cheer Up Luv

Recorded at The Shure Experience Centre, London.

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Spotify paid Joe Rogan over $200 million for his podcast. Then, in 2024, they did it again. Tom Gray has spent the last five years thinking about what that kind of money could do for songwriters instead and his answer at the end of this episode is fascinating.

In this week's episode, DiS founder Sean Adams is back with Tom Gray for the second part of a two-part conversation. Part 1 was about the music and the person. This one is about the fight: where the #BrokenRecord campaign came from, how it works, what it has won, and where it keeps hitting walls.

Tom Gray is a Mercury Prize-winning songwriter and founding member of Gomez. Since 2020 he has been the founder of the Broken Record campaign, which began as a Twitter thread during the first lockdown and grew into one of the most significant efforts to change how songwriters and performing artists are paid in the streaming era. He has been Chair of The Ivors Academy since 2022 and stood as a Labour candidate for Brighton Pavilion in the 2024 general election.

The episode opens with the origin of Broken Record: a tweet, a discovery that UK music copyright law was last substantially reformed in 1988, and the realisation that performing artists have no right to the equitable remuneration that has applied to radio play since the 1930s, because streaming platforms treat a stream as a sale rather than a broadcast. Tom explains how the (Kevin) Brennan Bill came together, including the ten-minute phone call in which it was named, and why the word "remuneration" nearly derailed the whole thing.

From there it goes into Labour's relationship with tech, Daniel Ek's visit to Downing Street, the AI consultation process that Tom describes as a failure, and what it feels like to run for Parliament when you have spent four years arguing with the government about copyright law. The metadata problem gets a sharp section of its own: no regulation currently requires streaming platforms to record songwriter information at the point of upload, which creates conditions for fraud and erases the attribution chain entirely. And there is a significant exchange on Spotify's AI remixing feature, Nick Clegg's position at Meta, and what Tom calls "the copyright gang" and "the tech gang" operating in direct opposition inside Whitehall.

The episode also gets into the EU Copyright Directive and why the UK failed to implement it, the CMA's 2022 music streaming market study, and what Chicago School economics has to do with how governments think about music monopolies.

But the last twenty minutes are about hope. The per diem proposal for songwriters has gained real traction. Tom's belief that one difficult conversation a day, with whoever is in front of you, is more useful than waiting for systemic change. And the case for cautious optimism from someone who has been fighting this for five years and can see things starting to move.

The Drowned in Sound podcast is presented in partnership with Qobuz, the pioneering high-quality music streaming and download platform for music enthusiasts and audiophiles. Each week we curate playlists on Qobuz, featuring our favourite records, artists, and the themes we explore on the show.

Visit https://drownedinsound.org/playlists/ to discover new music in rich Hi-Res lossless quality and start your 30-day free trial of Qobuz at https://qobuz.com/dis.

Edited by: tell.studio (Phil, Louisa, Owen, Matt)

Visit: The Ivors Academy

Read: Tom's original Broken Record Twitter thread (April 2020)

Read: The (Kevin) Brennan Bill (Parliament.uk)

Read: CMA Music and Streaming Market Study, November 2022

Recorded at The Shure Experience Centre, London.

Sign up to the DiS newsletter: http://drownedinsound.org

How do you go from winning the Mercury Prize to writing music for a CBeebies series about a pig named Hector and a very glamorous chicken named Pru? The answer takes in a Tim Buckley obsession that lasted five years, years of touring America with bands like Frightened Rabbit, and a Brighton theatre company you've almost certainly never heard of.

In this week's episode, Sean finally sits down with Tom Gray, songwriter, founding member of Gomez, and the person behind the Broken Record campaign that took on Spotify. This is the first bit of a two-part conversation.

This episode stays close to the music and the person: what it meant to make Bring It On in 1997, before home recording was what everyone did, and what it felt like when it won.

Tom Gray is a songwriter and composer and a founding member of Gomez. The band's debut album Bring It On, recorded in bedrooms and back rooms when its members were 22 and 23, beat Massive Attack and Pulp to win the Mercury prize.

He went on to write music for theatre and film, including the CBeebies animated series Tilly and Friends, based on Polly Dunbar's books.

However, since 2020, Tom has been at the centre of one of the most significant debates in the British music industry. He founded the #BrokenRecord campaign, which started as a Twitter thread during the first lockdown and became a movement that put music creator rights onto the parliamentary agenda.

Alongside the campaign, Tom has been Chair of The Ivors Academy since 2022 and stood as a Labour candidate for Brighton Pavilion in the 2024 general election.

The conversation covers how Gomez happened: what making records at home without a budget or a studio actually does for the music, and the aesthetic of limitation that defined the band's early sound. Tom talks through the years he spent chasing down a slice of Tim Buckley's back catalogue, the anticipation of finally hearing the Starsailor album, the disappointment of actually listening to it, and the one track, 'Dolphins', that made the whole rabbit hole worth it.

The conversation also gets into what the other Gomez members have been up to, including an Empire of the Sun connection, and the first threads of the streaming frustration that becomes the whole of Part 2.

Part 2 is next week: more on the Broken Record campaign, the Kevin Brennan Bill, and AI.

The Drowned in Sound podcast is presented in partnership with Qobuz, the pioneering high-quality music streaming and download platform for music enthusiasts and audiophiles. Each week we curate playlists on Qobuz, featuring our favourite records, artists, and the themes we explore on the show.

Visit https://drownedinsound.org/playlists/ to discover new music in rich Hi-Res lossless quality and start your 30-day free trial of Qobuz at https://qobuz.com/dis.

Edited by: tell.studio (Phil, Louisa, Owen, Matt)

Visit: The Ivors Academy

Listen to: Dolphins - Tim Buckley (Sefronia, 1973) - original by Fred Neil (Fred Neil, 1967)

Watch: Tilly and Friends on CBeebies

Recorded at The Shure Experience Centre, London.

Sign up to the DiS newsletter: http://drownedinsound.org

What do you do when everyone tells you that you can't make a film without the right connections, the right funding, the right people saying yes? If you're Geoff Barrow, you spend everything Invada Records has on proving them wrong. And the result is a fantastic watch.

In this week's episode, Sean Adams sat in the sun outside Geoff's home near Portishead to talk about GAME, the debut feature from Invada Films, a gripping rural thriller set against the backdrop of the 1993 British rave scene. It stars Marc Bessant and Jason Williamson from Sleaford Mods as a dealer and a poacher locked in a tense standoff deep in the Somerset woods.

It was shot for £150,000 (essentially all the money Invada had), and it was written, produced and distributed from Bristol, by people who actually lived in that world.

Geoff Barrow started out as a tape op for Massive Attack before co-founding Portishead. He runs Invada Records in Bristol, which has released soundtracks for Drive, Stranger Things and Red Dead Redemption alongside records by Gazelle Twin, Billy Nomates, Beak> and more.

Alongside Ben Salisbury, Barrow has scored Ex Machina, Annihilation, Civil War, Black Mirror and many more.

However, GAME is something different: his first credit as producer and co-writer of a feature film.

They talk about why making GAME felt like a reaction to being told no, and how a five-hour session with a friend who had been both a poacher and a countryside rave supplier in the early 90s shaped the script.

The conversation also gets into why casting Jason Williamson was an obvious call the moment it came up, why Geoff stripped the score back to almost nothing (he has spent enough years watching low-budget films drown themselves in music to know what it does), and how a football teammate called DJ Smudge ended up making the period-accurate 1993 bangers on the soundtrack.

From there the conversation goes wider: the inside story of how Invada came to release the Drive soundtrack, why Mica Levi's Under the Skin changed what Geoff thought a film score could be, why Kangding Ray's Sirāt gave him a similar jolt more recently, what it was like working with Alex Garland and Ben Wheatley, why Low's Double Negative is one of the most important records of the 21st century, how the people who went to those countryside raves in 1993 ended up voting Reform, what he'd do with £500 million if he had it, and what all of his records would taste like. 

GAME has its live stream premiere on Thursday 18 June at 7:30pm BST. Tickets are £5 and available everywhere except North America. Geoff, director John Minton, Marc Bessant and screenwriter Rob Williams will all be in the live chat taking questions, hosted by Paul Weedon. Get your ticket at https://watch.eventive.org/invadafilms/play/69c69adff08307d6b404d921

🎧 The Drowned in Sound podcast is presented in partnership with Qobuz, the pioneering high-quality music streaming and download platform for music enthusiasts and audiophiles. Each week we curate playlists on Qobuz, featuring our favourite records, artists, and the themes we explore on the show.

Visit https://drownedinsound.org/playlists/ to discover new music in rich Hi-Res lossless quality and start your 30-day free trial of Qobuz at https://qobuz.com/dis.

Visit https://drownedinsound.org/playlists/ to hear our podcast companion playlist and discover new music in rich Hi-Res lossless quality. To start your 30-day free trial of Qobuz head to https://qobuz.com/dis.

Edited by: tell.studio (Phil, Louisa, Owen, Matt)

GAME (Invada Films)
https://www.invadafilms.co.uk/

GAME tickets, Blu-ray, vinyl and more
https://linktr.ee/InvadaFilmsGame

GAME Limited Edition Orange Vinyl (300 copies, signed) pre-order
https://www.invada.co.uk/collections/game

Invada Records
https://www.invada.co.uk/

Recorded, engineered and hosted by Sean Adams (seaninsound.com) at Geoff's home near Portishead, Bristol.

Sign up to the DiS newsletter: http://drownedinsound.org

George Michael had the highest hit rate in the history of the US Hot 100. Nineteen entries, eight number ones. 'Last Christmas' has been covered more than four hundred times.

Ten years after his death, there's been no big tribute concert, no statue, and almost no serious book about his cultural legacy. Until now...

Sean Adams and Helena Wadia spoke to Sathnam Sanghera, historian, journalist, and lifelong George Michael fan, about his new book Tonight the Music Seems So Loud: The Meaning of George Michael. 

Sathnam Sanghera is the author of Empireland (British Book Award for Narrative Non-Fiction, Channel 4 documentary), Marriage Material (shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, adapted for stage in 2025), and The Boy with the Topknot (Mind Book of the Year, BBC film). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society, and has been a George Michael fan since inheriting the bug from his sisters during Wham! mania in the mid-1980s.

Tonight the Music Seems So Loud is a portrait of George Michael that doubles as an account of a turbulent period in British history, and this conversation covers most of it. Sathnam explains why Wham! was essentially a solo act, why George's perfectionism mattered (twelve hours on the vocal for 'Kissing a Fool', six months producing 'Fastlove', gaps of up to five years between albums), and how 'Last Christmas' was written in an afternoon while Andrew Ridgeley watched Match of the Day downstairs.

The conversation goes well beyond standard fan-book territory. Sathnam makes the case that George Michael's activism has dated better than almost any British pop star of his era: he was publicly opposing the Iraq war before the marches, campaigning on AIDS while the tabloids used every appearance as an opportunity to out him, and he split up Wham! partly in protest at the management's involvement with an apartheid-era South African company. The Sony lawsuit, which cost him five years and millions of pounds, was fought on behalf of all artists, not just himself.

The immigrant angle runs throughout: both George's Greek-Cypriot father and Andrew Ridgeley's Egyptian father came to Britain as a direct consequence of the British Empire, the faith-era aesthetic owes as much to immigrant overdressing as anything else, and Sathnam traces surprising parallel lives between a Greek-Cypriot boy from Finchley and a Punjabi boy from Wolverhampton.

The episode also asks what George would do with £500 million extracted from the music industry, whether his 1998 outing was a turning point for press homophobia, and why a musician playing in every shopping mall on earth still has no statue.

Visit https://drownedinsound.org/playlists/ to hear our podcast companion playlist and discover new music in rich Hi-Res lossless quality. To start your 30-day free trial of Qobuz head to https://qobuz.com/dis.

Edited by: tell.studio (Phil, Louisa, Owen, Matt)

Co-hosted by Helena Wadia, who also co-hosts the Media Storm podcast: https://mediastormpodcast.com/about-us/

Sathnam Sanghera / Tonight the Music Seems So Loud
https://www.sathnam.com/
instagram.com/sathnamsanghera

Further reading
Sathnam Sanghera: Empireland and other books

Recorded at The Shure Experience Centre, London.

Sign up to the DiS newsletter: http://drownedinsound.org