Media & entertainment
Film, music, TV, and gaming. What's new, what's good, and the business behind it all.
Open this topic in the app to listen.
For decades, record labels pushed engineers to master albums louder and louder, crushing the dynamic range until a whisper and a scream sounded nearly the same. This is the story of the arms race that damaged the way we hear popular music, and the quiet rebellion that fought to reverse it.
In 1951, a bit actor recorded a single agonized scream for a Western that no one remembers. Decades later a sound designer resurrected it as an inside joke, and it became the most-used sound effect in Hollywood history. This is the story of how one anonymous cry hid inside Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and hundreds of blockbusters.
Berry Gordy borrowed the logic of the car factory to manufacture hit after hit, building a Black-owned music empire that defined a decade of American sound.
For decades, labels quietly paid to get songs played, shaping what became popular — the scandals, the laws, and the clever ways the practice never really died.
Behind the polish is a deliberate system of training, financing, and cultural strategy — how South Korea turned pop music into a global soft-power machine.
One short drum break became the rhythmic backbone of hip-hop, jungle, and dance music worldwide, while the drummer who played it lived and died with almost nothing to show for it.
A 1979 promotion to blow up disco records turned into a field-storming riot — and beneath the spectacle was a backlash tangled up with race, sexuality, and who pop music was for.
Near collapse in the 1990s, Marvel licensed away Spider-Man and the X-Men for cash, then bet everything on making its own films — and built the most dominant franchise in movie history.
Film, music, TV, and gaming — and the business behind all of it. Listen to how Motown ran an assembly line of number-one hits, how six seconds of a 1969 drum solo built modern music, how a broken mechanical shark invented the summer blockbuster, and how Marvel went from bankruptcy to owning cinema. What's new, what's good, and the machinery that decides what you see and hear.
Fylom episodes are researched, written, and voiced by AI. Automated checks help catch inaccuracies, but episodes aren't reviewed by a human and AI can still get things wrong. Treat them as a starting point, not a source of record — more in our accuracy disclaimer.