The hidden money financing your favorite songs
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Whose music recommendations do you trust and why?
I mean, this is going to sound annoying, but I have to say my colleagues at NPR Music. That's sweet. I love their recommendations. I trust their recommendations. I think they all have incredible taste and they all have like a different specialty of music. So I go to them all the time. And also my best friend, Kendall. She has great taste in music. I listen to anything that she recommends.
I love that. I love that. I get mine from my friend Jordan, who I've been friends with since 2003.
So you trust those recommendations.
Yes. I have been taking his music recommendations for 23 years, okay? He's the friend who introduced me to MIA back in 2004. She was not an easy artist to find in Michigan in the pre-social media era, you know? Yeah, totally. It's good to find people who are going to put you on to some hot new music that is just your taste.
How did NPR introduce the issue of influencers being paid to promote music?
But lately, it's getting harder and harder to trust online tastemakers. Because they might be getting secretly paid to show for labels. This is not a conspiracy theory. It's real. Indie musician Eliza McLam posted a sub stack about this a few months ago that went viral about a billboard interview she watched with the founders of Chaotic Good, a digital marketing agency. These founders described their, quote, narrative campaigns and user-generated content that basically make viral moments happen through creating or paying social media accounts to post about specific artists. NPR music reporter Isabella Gomez Sarmiento saw this and wanted to talk to the online tastemakers that are paid to post and don't tell you about it, which, by the way, is potentially illegal.
And there's a lot of questions that came up for me around this. Like, what does this mean for us regular music enjoyers? And can we ever disentangle money from the internet and from culture? Isabella is here with me to get into it. Welcome back, Isabella.
Thank you for having me.
Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.
I want to first start by talking about these interviews that you've done with online creators. Like, how much are they getting paid?
So it's a sliding scale. I talked to five content creators. Some of them requested anonymity so they could speak freely about the relationship between creators and record labels. But essentially, they all told me they're making hundreds of dollars off of these videos. Low end was about $150. High end was about $600. per video they told me that either marketing agencies or record labels will come to them and ask them to make videos promoting a specific song or promoting a specific artist then they kind of like come up with a script the marketing agency or label approves that and then the video gets made and goes up so there's a lot of back and forth wait so okay describe me like what do these videos look like
It usually looks like a normal person talking to their phone. Maybe they have a little microphone. And they're saying something like... Here's a great album that came out this week that you should know about. Or if you like so-and-so artist, have you heard of this person? Or sometimes they're also reaction videos, which are becoming more and more popular. And that's where there's like a split screen where maybe the top half of the screen will be like a music video. And then at the bottom, you have a creator that's like live reacting to the video. Some of the people I talked to told me that they do these for money from record labels.
Wow. Okay. So I've seen lots of videos that are like that. But those aren't SponCon, but like, I don't know.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–1:18
2
How did NPR introduce the issue of influencers being paid to promote music?
1:18–12:00
3
How much money are content creators getting to promote songs on social platforms?
12:00–15:09
4
What do paid music-promotion videos typically look like and how are they produced?
15:09–20:42
5
Are creators disclosing paid music promotions and what do FTC rules require?
20:42–22:51
6
Which artists and campaigns were named and why do examples span from Bella Kay to the Rolling Stones?
22:51–27:47