How One Guy Saves Past Pop Hits From Extinction in the Age of Streaming

[MUSIC PLAYING] Vice President JD Vance is emerging as the lead in negotiations to end the war with Ron. And he could be taking a big political risk in doing so. Plus, California shot down the billionaire tax, but that may not be the last of efforts to tax the wealthy. And how does one guy get pop songs rescued from the streaming graveyard by asking really, really nicely? I was extolling how good this album is to a friend of mine. And he said, oh, you know the reason why that you can listen to that right now is this guy that I met at a party. It's Wednesday, November 11. I'm Alex O'Sullef for The Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today. [MUSIC PLAYING] First up on tonight's show, Markets. Core Weave shares search 25% after the company reported strong earnings yesterday. That helped lift other data center and chip stocks. The NASDAQ rose 1.6%. The S&P added 1.3%. And the Dow moved up half a percent. Journal Markets reporter Jack Pitcher says Core Weave's positive report made investors feel a bit better about the AI trade. That could be good news for one company in particular that's got a lot riding on the next several days. And the background here is anthropic. It's expected that anthropic is going to begin trading publicly next week. But up until, really, they kicked off this IPO this week, there was growing concerns as we saw. Markets selling off volatility and stocks in debt tied to AI. The fact that they have brought it during what's been pretty volatile markets and the early indicators seem to be that it's going well and they're attracting capital. That has also eased concerns and made investors feel better about the AI trade, at least for now. Jack says that despite the turbulence we've seen in the market recently, investors are still overall buying. We have seen some much more volatile days over the last few weeks, including one day that was one of the biggest sell-offs of the last few years. But taking a step back a little bit, the S&P 500 has not dropped more than 1% and back-to-back days since March of this year. After every one of these sell-offs, we've had a lot of either not as bad days or up the next day as people step in and by the dip. Overall, it still seems like a pretty strong market. Separately, we've been talking on the show about the rise of the AI agent and how they're supposed to make your life easier by doing all kinds of things for you, like a personal assistant. Banks, retailers, and other companies are figuring out what to do with them. Amazon's already blocked Metas Muse agent from shopping. Now, the journals exclusively reporting that United Airlines is banning personal AI assistance from booking flights. United's worried that the bots could expose customers' sensitive information or accidentally by things that customers didn't want. United also said automated AI actions could violate government rules for what airlines have to ask customers. For example, an AI agent can't attest during check-in that bags don't contain explosives. United said customers using AI agents could still see United flight options and prices. The bots just can't book on its website. As for Meta, even as tech shares rallied today, its stock fell 2%. In national security news, the journal has learned that Vice President JD Vance is considering face-to-face talks with a top Iranian official to try to end the war. Middle East and U.S. officials say that President Trump has told AIDS and other foreign leaders that he's empowered Vance to negotiate. Some of those U.S. officials say that it's a political risk for Vance to take on the role of lead negotiator with Iran. Because if peace talks fail, it would make him the face of that failure. U.S. officials say the discussions about having Vance meet directly with Iran remain preliminary. Meanwhile, there were talks in the Middle East this week on the war between Russia and Ukraine. The journal's Georgi Kachev reports that Ukraine says Russians arrived at the talks with almost no room to bargain on key issues. After two days of high-stakes negotiations between Ukraine, Russia and the United States, the meetings here in Abu Dhabi have wrapped up without a major breakthrough or any real path to peace in the Ukraine war. The biggest takeaway from this is that the two sides remain very far apart. The most difficult decisions would be left to the leaders of the countries, but there's no concrete timeline for where President Zelensky and President Putin would meet. U.S. officials said that they're hoping for a deal before the end of the year, but there's little evidence that this is actually achievable. However, Georgi says that there was one concrete announcement, an agreement to exchange prisoners, and that it could be one of the biggest prisoner exchanges in the war so far. Coming up, why the death of California's wealth tax may not be the end for efforts to tax the rich. More after the break. As we mentioned yesterday, California voters have rejected a new tax on billionaires. If it had passed, it would have become the first modern tax on wealth in the U.S. But it's failure this year doesn't mean the idea is totally off the table. As W.S. J. Paul Kiran reports, the health care workers union that proposed the California measure says it could put the tax back on the ballot in 2028. It's the end of the line for this billionaire tax measure, but this is an issue that is in the air. It's probably more in the air now after this long and very public campaign, the head of the union that proposed the tax told me that he was surprised by how much attention the sky. You're hearing a lot of talk about taxing the rich and taxing the billionaires. Certainly the progressive wing of the Democratic Party talks about it a lot. And so I don't think this issue is going to go away. So why did the California measure fail? Paul says it might have been some of the specifics of how it would have worked and some of the backlash it faced from the state's wealthiest residents. Some people have told me that they voted against this wealth tax, even though they support the idea generally, because they didn't like the way it was written or certain provisions of it. And the proponents of this wealth tax, as well as supporters like Rokana and Bernie Sanders, attribute is failure to just the flood of money that was spent to defeat it. In fact, Sanders said yesterday that, quote, "We will pass a federal billionaire wealth tax." That may prove tricky, Paul says that there are legal obstacles in the U.S. to doing so, especially with a conservative majority in the Supreme Court. The White House has warned incoming House oversight chair Robert Garcia that some Democratic investigation threats may be criminal. White House counsel Will Sharf said in a letter that congressional investigations must further a legitimate legislative task and that they can't be used for harassment. It's a sign of the aggressive posture the White House plans to take against investigations and of its intent to go after any Democrat that officials believe has crossed the line. [Music] And finally, you ever have this experience when you've got an old song stuck in your head, maybe some pop song, say from the early odds, you go to your streaming service of choice only to find it's not there. Okay, admittedly, this has never happened to me, which probably says something about my music preferences, but it has happened to my colleague Katie Dayton. I was listening to, and I don't know why, I had a hankering to listen to Emma Bondton, aka Baby Spices, solo album. [Music] And I was extolling how good this album is to a friend of mine, and he said, "Oh, you know, the reason why you can listen to that right now is this guy that I met at a party." I feel like I learned a lot from that anecdote. So, Katie, how do songs end up not on streaming services? I assumed that it would be an automatic process that any music that a record label had in this library would just magically appear on streaming, but the record labels had to digitize everything when music moved from disc to MP3. And some of that music dropped out of that process, maybe it wasn't very lucrative for the record label. Some of it literally got lost. Some of the master tapes got lost in that shuffle. And then the next big push was from MP3 into streaming, and the same thing happens. Other times, there are lots of rights issues. Maybe a track used a sample that the record label at the time got signed off for physical release, but didn't get it signed off for digital release. And in a lot of cases, there's maybe multiple rights holders because record companies have consolidated, some have closed down, and some artists don't even want their music out on streaming at all. So, a multitude of reasons, but don't expect everything you heard in the '90s to be available on streaming is the last night learned reporting this. Okay, so then enter Rob Johnson. That's the guy your friend met at a party. Johnson works for a law firm. He's based in London. How did he get involved in all this? He had a friend who was also a musician, and she had a sort of middling career, I think it's fair to say, in the '90s and '90s, mostly on the trance scene, but she did have a couple of her own records that she recorded. And they never made it onto streaming. So, she was just frustrated that her music wasn't available for anybody to listen to in their modern world unless you still have a CD player. And he was like, well, why don't I just ask nicely? and see if they will put your stuff online. And it worked and from then he started to think, well, what other songs and what other releases can I find to get back online? How did he go about getting these songs on streaming? He has a little bit of a process, some of which he wouldn't reveal to me just in case everyone else started doing the same thing and annoying the record companies. But he uses this online encyclopedia called Discogs, which basically tracks which record companies put out which songs. He then looks at the record label from the time the song was recorded and works out whether that was still an existence. A lot of these are not and then he basically finds the person online that he needs to ask very nicely. And a lot of the time he's got evidence that people already want to listen to it. He has people writing into him saying, "Hey, I would love to hear this." And he can prove that there is interest there and that he is a real person and they should take him seriously. What percent of the time when he reaches out about a song or an artist is he successful in getting it on streaming? He doesn't really know that hit rate because a lot of the time companies don't say yes or no, they'll just ignore his email. And then a song might pop up a year later that he'd asked for but he can't exactly attribute that to his own request. But he has got, as of Monday, 900 releases online and that's happened in the last 10 years. Quite a few big ones too. Yeah, who besides the very essential to our music knowledge, baby spice? I think one of the biggest ones that American listeners would recognize is Girlfriend by NSYNC and Nelly. And originally they had only the album version of that song on streaming and pop nerds knew that that was not a single version that came out so he got that on streaming too. Well, truly doing the work of the people. Truly. That was WSJ Leadership Institutes, Katie Dayton. Thank you, Katie. Thank you. And that's what's news for this Wednesday afternoon. Today's show was produced by Anthony Bancy and Danny Lewis with supervising producer Tully R. Bell. I'm Alex Osella for the Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening. [Music]