Has Billie Eilish saved the music industry?

Beyond Today

BBC

News

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 21 February 2020

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Billie Eilish is on top of the world right now. The 18-year-old recently swept the board at the Grammys, winning five awards including best new artist and song of the year. She also replaced Taylor Swift as the youngest person ever to win album of the year. She’s just performed at the Brit Awards and has written the theme for the upcoming James Bond film No Time To Die. She seems to be a rare example of organic streaming success in the music industry, having had her big break after uploading a song on SoundCloud. But if you dig a little deeper there’s more than meets the eye. In this episode David Turner, who writes the weekly streaming newsletter Penny Fractions and works for SoundCloud, says Billie Eilish’s story is one of an industry trying to make a criticised model appear well-functioning. We also speak to the music journalist Paula Mejia about how streaming has changed our relationship with music. Presenter: Matthew Price Producer: Duncan Barber Mixed by Emma Crowe Editor: Philly Beaumont

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:06.0	Hello, I'm Matthew Price.
0:07.7	This is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4,
0:10.4	where we ask one question about one big story.
0:14.0	Today, has Billy Eilish saved the music industry?
0:24.1	Here's one version of the story.
0:31.2	Here's one version of the story.
0:34.0	Everyone was worried about the music industry because of streaming.
0:38.0	We were listening to the songs, but artists weren't getting paid.
0:48.0	And then suddenly everyone's talking about how Billy Eilish broke the model, how she used streaming to get her talent out there.
0:57.3	And seemingly overnight she's writing the Bond theme and collecting Grammys.
0:58.3	Yeah, she's the star of the moment and I think it's also that she speaks to the change that's happened in the music
1:03.7	industry with regard to streaming. David Turner writes the weekly streaming
1:09.2	newsletter Penny Fractions he works for SoundCloud.
1:15.0	Hang a moment, stop, stop. By the way, we can't play any commercial music here
1:19.0	because we would have to pay a shed load of money for it.
1:22.0	So we are going to have to make do with this.
1:26.1	So talk us through that. What's the sort of standard narrative on how she got to where she is?
1:31.6	So the standard narrative for Billy Islands is that she just
1:34.4	one day uploaded a song to SoundCloud. It ended up getting picked up by a blog. That
1:39.6	blog ended up being picked up by someone else. And then within a year, she was just sort of
1:44.9	started to get all upon like Apple Music
	...

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