Tag Archives: music

White Paper: From Gatekeepers to Signals: The Canceling of Ebro in the Morning and the Changing Relationship Between Radio and Online Music Journalism

Posted on December 16, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary The canceling of Ebro in the Morning—a flagship hip-hop radio show associated with Apple Music and Beats 1—marks more than the end of a particular program. It reflects a structural transformation in the relationship between traditional radio authority … Continue reading →

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White Paper: Curated Memory vs. Measured Success: What Bread’s Compilations Reveal About Popularity, Taste, and Soft-Rock Canon Formation

Posted on December 14, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Bread’s legacy is unusually shaped by compilation albums rather than by sustained attention to their original studio LPs. By comparing The Best of Bread (1973), a comprehensive view of Bread’s singles output, and later greatest-hits collections, this white … Continue reading →

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White Paper: A Short History of Boy Krazy

Posted on December 12, 2025 by nathanalbright

Boy Krazy (sometimes mis-remembered as “Boy Crazy”) are one of those small but revealing footnotes in pop history: a short-lived New York girl group whose one big hit arrived two years late, whose album was largely built from repurposed Kylie … Continue reading →

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White Paper: From Isolated Works to New Genres — Understanding Artistic Transitions and Their Defining Marks

Posted on December 10, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Artistic innovation often begins as a solitary anomaly: a painting that defies conventions, a novel that reorganizes narrative time, a musical track that deploys new production techniques, or a film that reconfigures genre boundaries. Yet only some of … Continue reading →

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White Paper: The Paradox of Obscurity: Why “Babe, What Would You Say” Became a Forgotten Hit

Posted on December 8, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary “Babe, What Would You Say”—released in late 1972 and rising to major chart success in early 1973—is a classic example of a song whose momentary popularity failed to translate into long-term cultural memory. Despite reaching the Top 3 … Continue reading →

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Album Review: Hits (Mike & The Mechanics)

Posted on December 1, 2025 by nathanalbright

Hits, by Mike & The Mechanics In looking at an album like this one has at least two questions to answer. Are the songs any good and are they actually hits? Released in 1996 after the band lost two of … Continue reading →

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White Paper: Mapping the Topology of Music Genres to Radio and Station Segments: Alignments, Overlaps, and Untapped White Spaces

Posted on November 25, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary The structure of radio programming is historically built on demographic assumptions and legacy scheduling models. Meanwhile, music genres and subgenres have followed their own evolutionary trajectories, driven by sociocultural shifts, streaming data, listener mood patterns, and generational identity … Continue reading →

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White Paper: The Neglected Production of Phil Collins

Posted on November 25, 2025 by nathanalbright

Phil Collins is usually remembered as the voice behind “In the Air Tonight,” the drummer-frontman of Genesis, and the pop superstar who dominated 1980s radio. What tends to be forgotten is that he was also a remarkably busy and influential … Continue reading →

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The Irony of Denying Language: A White Paper on Works That Claim Words Cannot Communicate

Posted on November 21, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Across musical, poetic, and literary traditions, creators have long produced works that paradoxically use language to deny the power of language. Songs that insist “words don’t mean anything,” poems that confess “I cannot say what I feel,” and … Continue reading →

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White Paper: Buster Scruggs as a Compelling Character for Feature Films and Serialized Television

Posted on November 18, 2025 by nathanalbright

Executive Summary Buster Scruggs, the white-suited singing gunslinger from The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018), stands out as one of the most singular Western characters created in the 21st century. Though he appears only briefly in an anthology film, his … Continue reading →

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