Ethan Millman

Los Angeles-based reporter specializing in business and features, currently serving as the music editor at The Hollywood Reporter. 

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My latest

The Hollywood Reporter •

John Mayer on Why He Keeps Quietly Funding Brain Research Studies

We’re less than 30 seconds into our conversation, and John Mayer already has me wondering whether I have his full attention. He has just climbed out of a Sprinter van and into an office beside the garden at his Chaplin Studios compound. After a quick handshake, he sits down and begins explaining what he calls the “villainous” nature of recording an album. “You start to lose your social grace,” Mayer says. “You dedicate everything to the mathematics of coming up with the thing, and so...
The Hollywood Reporter •

John Fogerty On N.Y. Times’ Songwriter List Snub, Taylor Swift and Why There Aren’t More Protest Songs

The American songbook would be incomplete without John Fogerty. Over just a four-year span from 1968 to 1972 with Creedence Clearwater Revival, Fogerty had one of the most legendary runs in music history, amassing a collection of hits it’d take many songwriters a lifetime to write. Among the iconic songs he wrote during that period are “Proud Mary,” “Bad Moon Rising,” “Down on the Corner,” “Fortunate Son,” “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” and “Someday Never Comes,” to name just a few. It’...
The Hollywood Reporter •

The Music Industry Crosses an AI Tipping Point

There’s a vibe shift happening in how the music industry is coping with its ongoing AI revolution, at least if you believe the man who is arguably the most responsible for starting that revolution: Mikey Shulman, CEO and co-founder of Suno, the music industry’s most prominent AI music generation platform.   “It wasn’t even happening at the end of last year, but in the past couple months since the beginning of this year,” Shulman says over Zoom. “I don’t meet a lot of producers and songwrite...
The Hollywood Reporter •

“We’ve Really Lost the Middle Class in Music”: Late Night’s Cuts Are Just the Latest Blow

Jimmy Kimmel Live! is pulling back on its number of musical guests featured each week, and with it, artists are continuing lose more opportunities in what had for decades been a mainstay for how they market their albums and expand their audiences. Music’s decline on late night has been years in the making. Since Stephen Colbert had taken on the Late Show mantel from David Letterman in 2015, the show went from hosting a musical guest nearly every night in the beginning to around once to twic...
The Hollywood Reporter •

“I Think Everything I Write Is Going to Be a Hit”: Ed Sheeran, Shaboozey and EJAE on the Songwriter Roundtable

It’s been four months since “Golden” and KPop Demon Hunters became a global phenomenon — sitting atop the charts for eight weeks and racking up more than a billion streams — and EJAE, the song’s brainchild and main vocalist, still seems to be in disbelief that she’s sharing a table with some of the biggest songwriters of a generation. “This is a happy accident,” she says, flanked by Hayley Williams and Shaboozey as she recalls her winding path from aspiring K-pop idol to an unexpected sensa...
The Hollywood Reporter •

Kennedy Center to Artists: Your Checks Are in the Mail

If it’s not one thing at the Kennedy Center these days, it’s another. Even before Democrats opened an investigation into alleged “cronyism and self-dealing,” the Trump-era leadership was already fending off reports of plummeting ticket sales and internal dysfunction. Now add a fresh headache: Several artists say the center has been stiffing them on their fees. Representatives for three performers tell THR they’re still waiting on checks months after their shows. Veteran booking agent Wayne...
Rolling Stone •

Feds Indict Musician on Landmark Massive Streaming Fraud Charges

Federal investigators have indicted a North Carolina man over a scheme in which he allegedly used bot accounts and hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs to earn more than $10 million in royalty payments from the major streaming services. The case is a landmark development in the still-developing music streaming market, with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York calling it the first criminal case involving artificially inflated music streaming. In the i...
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