How does the music industry work? Planet Money started a record label to find out

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/10/29/ [login to see] /inflation-song-music-label-earnest-jackson
Earlier this year, a musician named Kinny Landrum sent Planet Money an email, and he made an unusual proposal.

Back in the 1970s, Kinny explained, he was the keyboardist for an instrumental funk band called Sugar Daddy and the Gumbo Roux. This was the height of the "stagflation" era, when stagnating growth and skyrocketing prices were wreaking havoc on the American economy. The band collaborated with a singer named Earnest Jackson, who had written a song with lyrics that captured that era's zeitgeist. The song was called "Inflation."

Sugar Daddy and Gumbo Roux recorded a demo of the song in 1975 at a famous studio in New Orleans called Sea-Saint Studios. The demo, however, was never released. The band broke up. And the song disappeared. So did high inflation, after the US Federal Reserve hammered it down in the early 1980s.