Anthony Fantano ( ; born October 28, 1985) is an American music critic and YouTuber who runs the YouTube channel The Needle Drop and its tie-in website, as well as its Twitch streaming channel. Self-appointed as "The Internet's Busiest Music Nerd", Fantano discusses and reviews music from a variety of genres online.
On The Needle Drop, Fantano rates albums on a 0-10 scale with the qualifiers "light", "decent", or "strong". Alternatively, he sometimes uses non-numerical descriptors, namely "not good", or others like "not bad". He also runs another channel where he talks music with guests (or solo) and conducts interviews.
Early life
Fantano spent his teenage years in Wolcott, Connecticut. As a teenager, Fantano became interested in politics through the work of the musician Jello Biafra, former lead singer of the punk band Dead Kennedys, calling him "pretty much my political idol". Fantano graduated from Southern Connecticut State University with a degree in liberal studies in 2008.
Career
Fantano started his career in the mid-2000s as a music director for the Southern Connecticut State University college radio station. In 2007, Fantano started working at Connecticut Public Radio (WNPR), where he hosted The Needle Drop. 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. Fantano has said that his review for Flying Lotus' 2010 album Cosmogramma appearing next to other Flying Lotus videos in YouTube's "Featured Videos" section gave him the "hint" to continue making video reviews. In 2010, Fantano removed older reviews that contained music clips in order to avoid violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. At the time, he was working on The Needle Drop at the 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.
Fantano was offered an album review show on Adult Swim but declined. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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.
In June 2019, Fantano had a cameo in Lil Nas X's video for the Young Thug and Mason Ramsey remix of "Old Town Road", appearing as a security guard for the Area 51 military installation (a reference to the "Storm Area 51" meme). Later that year he curated a charity compilation, The Needle Drop LP, which consists of "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.