Since the mp3 landed on the record business like an atomic bomb nearly two decades ago, artists and the industry alike have remained in a state of flux over how to make music and money. The result is that some of music’s most prolific funders aren’t record labels at all, but corporations looking to jack a little brand swag from what the kids are listening to. Some of these collaborations have been distasteful (SXSW’s Doritos stage, the Sour Patch Kids house), but others have given marginalized artists a major signal boost they might never have received otherwise (Red Bull Music Academy, Ray Ban’s Boiler Room collaboration).

Turner Broadcasting’s Cartoon Network has been one of the good ones. Its popular Adult Swim programming block has long supported independent artists that few other cable behemoths would find practical use for, from sci-fi lullaby crooner Helado Negro to the experimental composer J.G. Thirlwell. The late-night slate of shows buys beats for promos and bumps, as well as licenses entire catalogs from indie labels for a yearly sync fee. Adult Swim even tried to function as a proper record label, Williams Street Records, which released albums from Killer Mike and Cerebral Ballzy alongside music from Adult Swim shows like “The Venture Bros.” and “Metalocalypse.” They’ve since transitioned from selling music to giving it away: For the past five years, the Adult Swim Singles Program has licensed new or unreleased tracks from artists that span the spectrum of genre, from Flying Lotus and Tanya Tagaq to Death Grips and Diarrhea Planet. This year, the program took a huge leap by expanding from 31 to 52 straight weeks of free weekly songs, in addition to dropping DOOM’s new album over the course of 14 weeks.

Behind the scenes of all of this is Adult Swim’s Senior Vice President and Creative Director of On-Air Jason DeMarco, whose own taste formed the basis of programming’s distinctly left-of-center musical approach. Responsible for producing everything on Adult Swim that isn’t a show or third-party ad, DeMarco distributes cash to (mostly) independent artists and labels in service of soundtracking and promoting Adult Swim’s content. In the process, he has quietly become one of the music industry’s most influential tastemakers. DeMarco also introduced Killer Mike and El-P years back, which means in a way that you can thank him for Run the Jewels.

We caught up with DeMarco recently, calling from his home base of Atlanta, to discuss Adult Swim’s role in the music industry and the tenets of responsible corporate patronage.

Pitchfork: The music on Adult Swim has been a huge part of its identity for almost as long as it’s existed. Is there an origin story for its musical ID?

Jason DeMarco: We kinda had to find our way a little bit, just like any new venture. When Adult Swim started, the whole point was to keep it as cheap as possible, so we used Turner library music. There are tons of music libraries that television networks license that are just anonymous artists making music that sounds like somebody else. The guys that made the on-air content and the bumps at the time were getting tired of sifting through tons of mediocre music to find the three or four good tracks in the library. They asked, “Man, can anyone just get us some music? Can you help us figure this out?” For years, I had been buying beats from people like Danger Mouse for Toonami [Cartoon Network’s action-cartoon programming block]. So through relationships I had with Ninja Tune, and later Warp, and then Ghostly, and now Hyperdub and a bunch of others like Brainfeeder, we go to those labels and make deals to use music from their artists in exchange for a yearly fee. It was a way to go to an independent label that normally wouldn’t get this kind of exposure and money and offer them that in exchange for us being able to use their catalog on our air. Between that and me buying original music from people like Flying Lotus and Clams Casino, we developed our on-air feel.

How did you get from buying beats for promos to Williams Street Records to the Adult Swim Singles Program?

Williams Street Records came out of the Danger Doom project [Danger Mouse and MF DOOM’s 2005 album, The Mouse and the Mask]. We put that out on Epitaph Records, it did really well, sold like 350,000 copies. And we didn’t, frankly, see that much money because we made a dumb deal with Epitaph. We didn’t know how records worked. At the time, Warner Bros. Records was part of our company, so we had a publishing arm, we had everything. The idea was to see if we could set up a label with a very small stuff and run it like an indie, but be a part of a giant company. Which was a doomed idea. Turner exists to make money, like any company. So they were looking at it like an experiment, to see if it could become profitable. It really didn’t need to be a huge profit, it just needed to pay for itself, like anything. And it did for a while, but as the music business fell apart, we didn’t really have the type of infrastructure it needed to be launched. So eventually the decision was made to keep it open as sort of a marketing arm and release the music for free. People like the music we release, but we just aren’t a real record label so we’re not really able to monetize it. And frankly, real record labels are barely able to monetize it, so...