The Umbrella Effect: How Rihanna’s Breakout Hit Changed Pop Music Forever
In 2007, a 19-year-old Barbadian pop singer released the lead single off her third album. By doing so, she didn't just give us a timeless, undeniable banger -- she changed the way pop music is made, a...
25 Feb 202535min
Learning to love: Tate McRae
Tate McRae's billions of streams and perfectly crafted hits can feel almost algorithmic, like an AI trained on 20 years of pop music. In anticipation of McRae’s third album So Close to What, out this ...
18 Feb 202543min
Does It Trance? The Weeknd & FKA Twigs
In last month's episode predicting the coming year in pop, one of the team's predictions was that trance music – the ethereal, dreamy subgenre of electronic music popular around the turn of the centur...
11 Feb 202544min
How Spotify hacked our ears (and our data)
Behind Spotify's promise of infinite music lies a carefully engineered system that shapes not just what we hear, but how music itself gets made. Journalist Liz Pelly's explosive new book "Mood Machine...
4 Feb 202551min
25 Predictions for 2025: Grammys, J-pop, kazoos and more
2024 was an unpredictable year, and 2025 seems to be cut from the same cloth. So for this episode of Switched On Pop, Nate, Charlie, and Reanna look into the crystal ball of pop music to create a (pla...
28 Jan 202555min
Bad Bunny's love letter to Puerto Rico
The first great release of 2025 is already here: Bad Bunny's newest album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS. Over the course of its 17 tracks, the Puerto Rican reggaetonero crafts an intertextual, anti-colonial t...
21 Jan 202546min
The biggest theme song fail
What happens when your podcast’s theme song—cobbled together from GarageBand loops—gets called “game show music” and likened to a cereal commercial? You rewrite it. In this episode, we take you behind...
14 Jan 202539min
Have Disney musicals lost their edge?
Critics are not feeling the love tonight when it comes to Disney's latest sequels, Mufasa and Moana 2. They've called the animated films "lifeless and bland." But save some sympathy for the composers ...
7 Jan 202539min
