Spotify pays no royalties on a track below 1,000 streams in a trailing year. Here is what the rule, its unique-listener test and its artificial-streaming fines mean for small labels.
Korg’s Phase8 skips oscillators and strikes eight tuned steel resonators with electromagnets instead. Here is how the $1,149.99 “acoustic synthesizer” works.
Kraftwerk sued over a 2-second Metall auf Metall sample in 1999. In September 2026, after 27 years and six BGH rulings, Germany’s top court ruled against them.
The Roland Jupiter-8 cost $5,295 in 1981. By December 2024 a mint original listed on Reverb for $27,996 instead. Who played it and what made it special.
Huey Lewis would not write a song called ‘Back to the Future’ in 1985. He wrote ‘The Power of Love’ instead, and it became his first US No. 1 hit that August.
Kavinsky released ‘Nightcall’ in 2010. Drive put it over its 2011 opening credits, the Paris 2024 Olympics revived it, and the track just turned 16.
Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ hit No. 1 in the UK in July 1977, built on a borrowed Moog modular synth, one human drummer, and an engineer named Robby Wedel.
a-ha’s Take On Me sold 300 copies in 1984 and flopped again in 1985. Then Steve Barron’s rotoscoped video, 3,000 drawings in 16 weeks, sent it to No. 1.
Sega’s 1986 arcade racer Out Run let players pick the song from the car radio mid-race. Its Hiroshi Kawaguchi soundtrack later gave synthwave the outrun name.
New Order’s Blue Monday sold over 700,000 UK 12-inch copies. Peter Saville’s die-cut sleeve cost £538.20 to design, and Factory said it lost 5p a copy.