There’s a moment in Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain where the words stop meaning anything. The phrase — a fragment of a street preacher’s sermon, looped on two tape machines…

There’s a moment most songwriters know intimately, even if they’ve never named it: you’ve written a strong line, something honest and specific, and then you spend the next twenty minutes…

Some songs start as a feeling, a chord progression, a line that arrived in the shower. But a lot of the most durable pop and country songs started as a…

There’s a particular kind of exposure in sitting across from someone you’ve never met and being expected to say something true. Co-writing with a stranger compresses months of social negotiation…

The number that breaks most musicians’ hearts is somewhere between $0.003 and $0.005. That’s the per-stream rate they’ve heard quoted online, usually accompanied by justified frustration. But that number is…

There is a moment on Hey Jude that lasts four minutes and seven seconds. The coda just keeps going — the same refrain, the same “na na na,” building and…

There is a moment in Daft Punk’s One More Time where the whole track seems to inhale and exhale with the kick drum. Nothing is technically wrong. The compressor is…

Every piece of music ever made is doing exactly two things: creating tension, and releasing it. That’s the complete list. Harmony, rhythm, dynamics, texture, register — these are all just…

Every culture on earth, working independently, arrived at the same five notes. Chinese court music, West African kora traditions, Scottish folk songs, indigenous music from the Americas — the pentatonic…

Kevin Kelly published “1000 True Fans” in 2008, and it should have changed everything. In some ways it did — Patreon exists partly because of it, and a generation of…