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Click Track covers the past, present, and future of the music industry—with a strong emphasis on technical insight and economic analysis.

The greatest hits

These are notable Click Track essays, categorized by their topic:

Business profiles

• Merck Mercuriadis and his billion-dollar empire are the heroes that songwriters need

• Inside Audioshake, using AI to recreate lost stems for hit songs

• Inside tonebase, the Masterclass for music lessons

Market analysis

• NFTs won't save the recorded music industry, but they might save the live events industry

• The #BrokenRecord movement's quest to "fix" the music industry (and why they are wrong)

• How we could design Kanye's "Y Combinator for Music"

• Podcasts are the new battleground between the music streaming sites and the record labels

History

• Songkick's fall from grace: Most startups die of suicide. But Songkick was murdered

• Inside the rise and fall of the record store chain Tower Records: From $1 billion in sales to bankruptcy five years later

• The dark history of the jukebox: how the Mafia used murder to build music machine empires

• Robots as rockstars: how artificial intelligence is the future of making music

Affiliate link policy

Click Track is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate, Click Track may earn money from qualifying purchases made by users that were directed to Amazon.com via one of our affiliate links.

These affiliate links are only visible on web properties. Amazon Associates forbids sending affiliate links over email. As such, when Click Track publishes a new post on Substack, the post's webpage may have affiliate links to Amazon, but Substack converts these links to non-affiliate Amazon links when sending posts over email.