Anthony Nicholas Fantano[5] (/fænˈtænoʊ/fan-TAN-oh; born October 28, 1985) is an American music critic and internet personality who runs TheNeedleDrop, a YouTube channel with a tie-in website and Twitch[6] streaming channel. Self-appointed as "The Internet's Busiest Music Nerd", Fantano discusses and reviews music from a variety of genres online.
He also runs the channel Fantano where he talks about events in the music industry solo or with guests and conducts interviews.
Fantano started his career in the mid-2000s as a music director for the Southern Connecticut State University college radio station.[12] In 2007, Fantano started working at Connecticut Public Radio (WNPR), where he hosted The Needle Drop.[13] That same year, he launched The Needle Drop in the form of written reviews, eventually launching his series of video reviews on the YouTube channel of the same name in January 2009, starting with a Jay Reatard record.[7][14][15][13] In 2010, Fantano removed older reviews that contained music clips in order to avoid violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.[7] At the time, he was working on The Needle Drop at his college radio station, as well as at a pizza restaurant. In late 2011, he decided to pursue The Needle Drop full-time, but kept affiliation with WNPR until 2014.[12][7][13]
Fantano was offered an album review show on Adult Swim but declined.[7] By the end of 2017, Fantano had reached a million subscribers and diversified his content to include weekly "track roundup" videos, livestreamed Q&As, and video think-pieces alongside his album reviews.[15] To earn enough money to pay his editor Austin Walsh, by November 2016, Fantano was recording more regularly on a secondary YouTube channel, "thatistheplan", on which he reviewed memes and recorded "often irreverent videos that don't fall into the record review format", according to Spin.[7]
In October 2017, an article by Ezra Marcus in The Fader accused Fantano of promoting alt-right sentiments in videos on "thatistheplan". Marcus criticized Fantano for the use of Pepe the Frog memes (which had recently been labeled an alt-right symbol) and targeting feminists.[16] After the article was released, multiple scheduled dates of The Needle Drop U.S. tour were cancelled, with at least one ticket booking site for a Brooklyn tour date stating that their cancellation was due to the Fader article.[17][18] Fantano produced a video response calling the article a "hit job". He disputed accusations of sympathizing with the alt-right and stated that the videos in question were satirical. The article was deleted by The Fader in March 2018, with both parties saying that the claims were settled.[19] In a later interview, Fantano acknowledged that there had been some "grubby, closed-minded, young, aggressive male" viewers on the "thatistheplan" channel and disavowed what he saw as the "toxic and problematic" side of internet humor, stating that the incident had led him to be more vocal in his advocacy for social justice issues.[20]
Later that year he curated a charity compilation, The Needle Drop LP, which consists of tracks performed by "artists that have either been featured on the site or reviewed favorably in the past". Profits from the album were donated to The Immigrant Legal Resource Center non-profit.[23]
In 2022, Fantano was referenced on rapper Logic’s track "LaDonda", from his studio album Vinyl Days. He discusses his relationship with Fantano, calling him a "plaid-shirt-wearing motherfucker" and admitting that he had "fantasized about murdering" him after he had issued negative reviews of his albums Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Supermarket. During his livestream reaction of the album, Fantano expressed shock after hearing the song, saying that he felt "overemphasized" and that "there never should have been any reason Logic should [have hated] me in the first place".[24]
On September 15, 2022, Fantano uploaded a video on his second channel jokingly claiming that Drake had sent private messages to him on Instagram, specifically recommending Fantano a vegan cookie recipe. In response, Drake posted his genuine messages to Fantano on Instagram Stories, which stated that Fantano's existence is a "light 1" and that the "1 is cause [he is] alive". Fantano later spoke about the exchange on an Instagram livestream, stating that the video was a "shitpost" and that he had no "hard feelings" toward Drake.[25][26][27]
Fantano garnered attention for his video on Kanye West and Ty Dolla Sign's album Vultures 1 in February 2024. Declaring the record "unreviewable trash," he talked about West's antisemitic views, particularly those expressed in his music, and general attitude preventing him from fully critiquing the record,[28] while also delving into the discourse of West's fan base being generally hostile to criticism and negative reviews. The video subsequently received backlash from West's fans on social media.[29][30]
Albums rating scale
Albums are rated on a standard zero to ten scale, with additional qualifiers ("light", "decent", or "strong"). Fantano will also occasionally give a score outside of the standard scale, such as "NOT GOOD" for albums he deems unworthy of reviewing in full, believing the album to simply be "not good".[31]
The Needle Drop won the 2011 O Music Awards in the "Beyond the Blog" category.[49][50] In 2014, Nick Veronin of Wired said of Fantano: "Instead of deploying ten-dollar words to describe a riff or synth tone, Fantano relies on gestures, clenching his fists or contorting his elastic, expressive face. It gets at some of the more ephemeral qualities of music that written words can't begin to touch".[3]
When asked about the merits of Fantano's reviews, veteran music critic Robert Christgau said in 2019:
[Fantano] seems to have arrived at a plausible brand of 21st-century rockcrit taste that runs toward what I'll call dark prog [...] Nowhere near as insensible to hip-hop/r&b as dark proggers tend to be, but note that very few female artists crack his top 10s, which in 2018 was really missing the action. Fantano seems to have figured out a way to make some kind of living by disseminating his own criticism in the online age.[51]
In his 2019 book Perfect Sound Whatever, comedian James Acaster called Fantano's best albums of 2016 list "a real music fan's Top 50" and said of Fantano: "Perhaps more than anybody else, he appreciates how the reviewer's role has changed since the internet became a thing [...] The job of a reviewer used to be telling people what's worth their money but now it's telling people what's worth their time."[15] In September 2020, New York Times culture correspondent Joe Coscarelli described Fantano as "probably the most popular music critic left standing". According to Coscarelli, Fantano has successfully brought an "old art to a new medium" and has revitalized the record review format for a younger generation of music consumers.[20]
On July 24, 2023, Fantano was named as a defendant in a lawsuit from video game developer Activision over a viral audio clip he had recorded on TikTok about pizza slices. Activision claimed that Fantano had asked for "substantial monetary damages" for the company's use of the audio in an advertisement for custom Crash Bandicoot trainers, or to be "prepared to defend a lawsuit".[54][55][56] On August 10, Activision dropped the lawsuit with prejudice, meaning it could not be refiled.[57]
Falling in Reverse frontman Ronnie Radke filed a defamation lawsuit against Fantano on August 20, 2024, claiming that the latter had "acted in malice" and "engaged in fraud" in posting commentary about the singer in a 2023 video titled "This Guy Sucks".[58][59]
^ abcdefgCoscarelli, Joe (September 30, 2020). "The Only Music Critic Who Matters (if You're Under 25)". The New York Times. ISSN0362-4331. Archived from the original on July 20, 2021. The influential evangelist in question is the YouTuber named Anthony Fantano, 34, who has been speaking album and song reviews directly into a camera for more than a decade on The Needle Drop, his channel with 2.26 million subscribers, making him probably the most popular music critic left standing.
