Welcome to the 13th edition of my mail-outs, all of which have been archived here. This one is primarily dedicated to my traditional EOTY list(s), which you can now find on my website. 

However, I have not been completely idle since my last mail-out, so as usual please find an overview of my recent articles and radio features as well as a bonus fortune cookie below. Again I specifically point it out if a piece is available in an official or my own English translation.

+++++ Stuff That I Wrote (or Said on the Radio)

— You might have heard that the major music corporations have struck different deals with a variety of genAI services, most notably Udio and Suno, and then dropped those lawsuits that they had only used as leverage to force those companies to sit down at the negotiating table with them. The playbook for this is 20 years old, so none of this was really surprising. But there is one question that has been living license-free in my head for the past months: Okay, now that Udio and Suno can legally train their models on those companies’ material, we will definitely get more AI music in the future—but where is the audience that actually wants more of that or the genAI products that Spotify—presumably the long-rumoured remix feature—wants to develop with a license from pretty much everyone in the music business? I wrote an in-depth piece for DJ LAB giving an overview over recent developments and argue that the music industry has always been one that has produced a demand rather than a supply (s/o Jacques Attali), but that in this case—more than 2 ½ years after Fake Drake went viral, two years after Suno launched—it doesn’t look like a sizeable amount of people want more Velvet Sundowns, Breaking Rusts, or Xania Monets in their Spotify recommendations. For the German-speaking audio freaks, I produced a short feature for WDR Westart (starts at roughly 35 mins) that hammers home the same point. 

— Now, this doesn’t mean that the slop that clogs the streaming platforms isn’t being listened to, but that has more to do with them having softly coerced their audiences into »lean back« listening, i.e. more or less blindly following a service’s algorithmic recommendations. Yes, I’m pivoting to something Spotify-related, or rather Spotify-unrelated, because der Freitag (archived) asked me to give an overview over possible alternatives and discuss their individual ownership (if you think Daniel Ek is evil, maybe check who owns Deezer!) as well as remuneration schemes. 

— Speaking of streaming, for NDR Kultur’s Das Journal I took a look at the official German classical music charts for the year 2025, absolutely dominated by Ludovico Einaudi and Max Richter. This, I argue, is the result of a paradoxical development: While a lot of people listen to so-called neo-classical music more or less absent-mindedly thanks to the playlist ecosystems such as Spotify’s, the successes of those two and of course pianist Lang Lang—a solid fourth place—are also indicative of a star system in which it is the artists and not so much individual performers or orchestras that take the led. 

— That’s of course not the only EOTY-themed thing that came out in the past few weeks. One of my favourite retrospectives is always the yearly round-up by the Das Filter editors and writers. For this year’s Hängengeblieben, I wrote about the Lanthimosisms of indie cinema, ZEA & Drumband Hallelujah Makkum’s wonderful album, swimming, and an oral history about the so-called pop journalism in Germany. In my last mail-out, I have already pointed you to the first part (German/English) of my big two-part round-up of contemporary composition/field recordings/electronic and electroacoustic music/improv/etc. records by Berlin-based artists and/or on Berlin-based labels for field notes. The second part (German/English) has also gone live in the meanwhile.

— Need more album recommendations? I’ve written about Anna von Hausswolff’s Iconoclasts for HHV-Mag (German/English), and wrote the press release for Liz Allbee’s wonderful Breath Vessels, out now on Ni Vu Ni Connu.

Thank you for your attention and until next time.