The going price for a leaked or stolen hip-hop track, according to a 17-year-old hacker who, if you choose to believe this VICE interview, sometimes steals them, sometimes buys them, sometimes re-leaks them, sometimes keeps them for himself and sometimes fences them: US$100 to $200 for "smaller underground artists" like ROBB BANKS or WARHOL.SS, $300 to $600 for "bigger artists like SWAE LEE, LIL YACHTY, OFFSET, people like that," and up to $2,000 for "really hyped up artists" like LIL UZI VERT and PLAYBOI CARTI. Buyers tend to be groups of fans pooling their cash "because not a lot of people have thousands of dollars to spend on songs." The transactions generally happen via the messaging app DISCORD. This is all, in case it wasn't clear, illegal. And it's unclear what a fact-checker would do with this information. But I'm fascinated by the economics, which sound simultaneously cheap—does Offset have friends and associates hungry enough to pawn leftover or unreleased tracks and all they're asking for is a few hundred bucks?—and crazy expensive—are people really pooling two grand to hear possibly discarded Lil Uzi Vert tracks? Is there a potential legit business in this? Could Warhol.SS do this on purpose and find 20 or 25 buyers for every discard on his laptop? Could Uzi find 100 pods of fans with a couple thousand bucks per track? Are there managers who could monetize this, or who would want to? File under terrible business ideas, probably. I've got tons more if anyone's looking. The highest price reported by the hacker, by the way, is $12,000 collected by a group of fans to buy the JUICE WRLD song "REASON," but then somebody else leaked the song and the sale went out the window... Better, maybe, to license your music to SNAPCHAT or TWITCH, where you can find more than 100 fans in less time than it took you to read this sentence. The per-user pay can't be very good but maybe it adds up... Better still: Get your managers to give you a few hundred thousand shares of stock and then go public. Stock in BIG HIT ENTERTAINMENT nearly doubled in its first day of trading in South Korea, leaving the agency worth US$7.6 billion at the end of the day Thursday and each member of BTS a reported $21 million richer. Dynamite... In the negative column, meanwhile, are the promoters of the CHAINSMOKERS' pandemic-defying charity concert in Southampton, N.Y., in July. GOV. ANDREW CUOMO announced a $20,000 fine for the promoters and took away the Town of Southampton's right to approve public gatherings without state approval... POST MALONE's net worth increased by nine trophies at Wednesday's BILLBOARD MUSIC AWARDS, which were televised partly live, with no audience, from the DOLBY THEATRE in Los Angeles, with lots of socially distanced and/or masked live performances. Performers alone onstage was a common theme, as were calls to vote. A "dispiriting" night, according to the LA Times' SUZY EXPOSITO. Last month's ACM AWARDS, which mixed live and pre-recorded performances from three empty Nashville venues, is the only awards show, so far, that's figured out how to do this in a pandemic. Host KELLY CLARKSON ended Billboard's night by rolling a cart with all those statuettes, including the Top Artist award, toward Post Malone, "Covid style"... RIP SAINT DOG and HERBERT KRETZMER.