THE MASTERS AND THE ROOM
Follow the podcast Immersive Business 01 in your app:
Follow the podcast Immersive Business 02 in your app:
THE MASTERS AND THE ROOM Book 1
4 parts · 15 h 36 min
New York and Los Angeles, 1964 to 1996. A mailroom clerk at a talent agency, a longshoreman's son sweeping out a recording studio, and a college student with a drum machine in a dormitory each build a record company, and each builds the same machine.
THE MASTERS AND THE ROOM Book 2
4 parts · 14 h 31 min
New York, Chicago and Fort Worth, 1961 to 2025. A recording is a physical object before it is anything else, and for most of the twentieth century the company that paid for the tape owned it forever. Shawn Carter incorporated his own label because nobody would sign him.
THE MASTERS AND THE ROOM Book 3
4 parts · 14 h 20 min
Fort Worth, Staten Island, Sacramento, Bushwick, Highland Park: the rooms where American records were made between 1965 and 2024, and the people who made them without owning them.
THE MASTERS AND THE ROOM Book 4
4 parts · 16 h 41 min
Stockholm, San Francisco and Washington, 1995 to 2025. A law written for satellite radio, a compression format released to the world for free, and a Swedish teenager who could not buy the records he wanted combine into a business that pays for music by the fraction of a cent.
THE MASTERS AND THE ROOM Book 5
4 parts · 14 h 58 min
New Jersey, London, Manchester, Chicago, Olympia and Las Vegas, 1972 to 2026. A band is four or five people who agree to be one thing, and almost none of that agreement is ever written down.
THE MASTERS AND THE ROOM Book 6
4 parts · 16 h 7 min
For a century the American music business has periodically replaced the people who play with a machine that plays, and each time the argument has been the same one: whether what comes out is the thing or a copy of the thing. The theater organist lost his job to a sound film in 1929.