The reaction to digital marketing firm Chaotic Good’s braggy Billboard interview and musician Eliza McLamb’s smart essay on it continues to make its way through the internet. On the music biz side, much of the reaction I’ve seen has been mild annoyance and a resigned “that’s how digital marketing works,” plus a little bit of “what were the dudes from Chaotic Good actually thinking by giving that interview?” My two cents: I feel bad for Geese, who were the beneficiaries of a digital marketing campaign that seems to have veered into Bulgarian-bot-farm territory, and are now facing blowback. If I were their manager, I would console them with a reminder that the long arc of music history bends towards quality, and that, lest we forget, Lana Del Rey went from Best New Music in 2011 for “Video Games” to a spiral of industry plant accusations in 2012 only to emerge victorious. Having said that: If Angine de Poitrine also hired those guys, I will be pissed.

I finally caught up with this essay by multimedia artist Jaime Brooks, “Why Do So Many Big Artists Hate Touring?” after Justin Vernon shared it on Substack and said that it made him “almost teary.” It’s an excellent read that articulates the loneliness and vulnerability that artists can feel on the road, particularly the exposed feeling of medium-level artists who have some of the fame but none of the security and infrastructure of big stars. More than anything, it captures something compelling about the strange state of being a recording artist in today’s attention economy. (See Geese item above.) Brooks is a multimedia artist who had a short music biz career which peaked when she opened for Sleigh Bells under the name Elite Gymnastics; I’m new to her writing, but everything else I’ve checked out on her Substack is equally impressive.

In the “streaming is broken” lane: UK artist manager Ronnie Pye made the case in Hypebot that the dominant streamers’ royalty system is the structural reason we will never be rid of fraud. “Streaming manipulation isn't a bug that bad actors have found a way to exploit,” he writes, “It's a predictable consequence of the foundations of the economic architecture.” Friends inside the streamers have told me that user-centric royalties — which Soundcloud and Deezer have adopted in part, and which might help — would be too cumbersome to implement, but let’s face it — having to crack down on billions of tracks of streaming fraud seems pretty cumbersome too?

Most artists are unhappy with what they make from streaming, but are still on the DSPs because they need the exposure, according to a study by Oxford University and University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Out of the five countries included, the people happiest with streaming were Nigerian artists, who have benefited from the Afrobeats boom; the least happy were the Dutch, who, to be fair, might just be a little dour overall. Music Ally story here and full study here.

Ben Sisario’s NYT piece on Irvine, CA’s experience with Live Nation when the city tried to build a downtown arena is a good refresher on the touring giant’s power as it enters the next phase of the by-no-means-over legal battle. Highlights include an Irvine city councilman saying that Live Nation execs told him they would take over the council and get him booted, and Michael Rapino telling an exec at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center that it was “going to be a tough time” to send Live Nation tours to the arena if they didn’t use Ticketmaster.