Ep. 249: Rick Beato | Songwriters Got Poorer. AI Is Next. So Where Is Music Going?

Today's guest is a multi-instrumentalist, music educator, interviewer, producer, and songwriter. He is also one of the most influential independent music voices online. His real story isn't the channel he built after a 90-second video of his son's perfect pitch hit 80 million views overnight, it's his incredible value to the music community and the conversations he sparks online about the state of the music industry and his conversations with some of the biggest creators within it's orbit.

This is one of the more unflinching conversations we've had about what's actually happening to music. Two musicians from different generations of the same fight, working it out in real time. Where do you stand when the rules of the music industry keep changing under your feet?

And The Writer Is... Rick Beato!

In this episode of And The Writer Is, we go deep on:

• How getting dropped in 1999 built a YouTube empire 16 years later
• Why Ringo would be a co-writer of every Beatles song in 2026
• The Eli Mercer experiment: building a fully fake AI artist with Claude — and what happened when he uploaded it
• The NPR EDM stunt: 4 million monthly Spotify listeners, 6,300 followers, and what that math says about AI
• The 90-second video of his son's perfect pitch that hit 3 million views by 10pm and 80 million total
• "There's no two current artists with the gravity of Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder" — and Ross's case for their modern counterparts
• Who is the Michael Jordan of pop music? Queen at 3 billion streams enters the chat
• Why Ross is still bullish on songwriting — and what the Music Modernization Act got right that the No Fakes Act needs to finish

And much more...

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A special thank you to our sponsors for making these conversations possible.

Our lead sponsor, NMPA — the National Music Publishers Association. Your support means the world to us.

Chapters

0:00 Intro

2:14 The beginning of Rick Beato's music career

3:11 The rollercoaster of an early music career

5:32 The Napster era and the dawn of digital recording

9:16 Producing Shinedown — and how "Simple Man" became the hit

10:54 Why "Yellow Ledbetter" was a B-side — and why bonus tracks are back

12:48 What country radio still gets right about hits

14:54 Inside Nashville sessions and the number triangle

17:28 The future of AI in music — and the No Fakes Act

21:20 The future of prompting and curating music

23:54 Would The Beatles be a four-way publishing split in 2026?

25:39 The modern music economy: are album tracks worthless now?

27:58 American writers are chasing global stars now

34:30 The Eli Mercer experiment: a fake artist built with Claude

36:52 The NPR EDM stunt and what it proved about AI on Spotify

41:18 4M monthly listeners. 6,300 followers. AI is winning the algorithm.

42:58 How Rick Beato built a YouTube empire

45:22 The "What Makes This Song Great" era

51:49 1984 vs now — and the search for a modern Bob Dylan and Stevie Wonder

54:18 Who is the Michael Jordan of pop music?

55:51 Queen at 3 billion streams — what counts as "biggest"

1:00:28 Golden, Blinding Lights, and what makes a 2020s standard

1:06:53 Songwriter similarities and the lawsuits that never happened

1:09:42 "Best era of pop music. Am I wrong?"

1:13:56 1998: how Clear Channel and Cumulus consolidated radio

1:20:14 The Music Modernization Act and what's actually next

1:24:54 Is the future of songwriting still bullish?

Credits:

Hosted by Ross Golan

Produced by Joe London & Jad Saad

Edited by Jad Saad

Post-Production VFX by Pratik Karki

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