Zinstrel, which has tracked AI music's political drift since May, lays out the midterm receipts: 220 AI-touched ads and $137 million in spending by mid-October, 70% carrying no disclaimer. The pattern worth watching is who controls the synthetic voice. An opponent clones Talarico into a Sound of Music number without consent; Blackburn's own campaign reposts her as Kendrick. Same tech, opposite politics.
Chartmetric takes a question every booking agent is quietly wrestling with: how does Slayyyter sell out all 20,000 seats at MSG without a single Billboard top 20 hit? The answer dismantles monthly-listener counts as a touring metric. First-time Garden headliners range from 9.2M to 36.9M listeners, no pattern at all. What actually predicts a sellout is geographic affinity: Slayyyter's 1.18x index in New York, Cleo Sol's 2.1x in Chicago.
Read →Sarah Larson spends an afternoon with the composer whose "On the Nature of Daylight" you've definitely cried to, even if you don't know it: Will Ferrell's lamp, Amy Adams's dead daughter, the top of Spotify's "Sad Classical." The piece quietly makes the case that Richter is the perfect streaming-era artist (his plays spike on weekdays, as background), while critics fume that his Vivaldi recompositions turn serious music into Pottery Barn Muzak.
Read →The singer who promised to "go dumb" on 2014's "2 On" turned out to be a music-nerd's perfectionist, and The New Yorker argues her thirteenth release "Popstar" (a debut at No. 6, finally) proves that cult-favorite stars like Tinashe now thrive in their own galaxies without crossing into ours. "No Broke Boys," remixed into a billion-stream house track, quietly rewrote her trajectory anyway.
The A&R man who signed KMD tells the story of how Black Bastards got shelved in 1994: Billboard columnists condemned the Sambo-on-gallows cover without listening to the record, WEA executives piled on without speaking to Doom, and Elektra dropped the band rather than fight.
Television's twin-guitar attack worked less like punk than like the Stones or the Allmans, and this NYT obituary for Richard Lloyd, dead at 75 of bile duct cancer, makes the case that Lloyd was its unsung half: his Stratocaster louder in the mix than auteur Tom Verlaine's Jazzmaster on 'Marquee Moon,' handling everything from crisp chords to torrential solos.
Streaming, not TikTok, shortened the pop song, Track Ten argues, tracing the trend back to completion-rate math that punishes tracks listeners don't finish. The real tell isn't runtime but structure: at $0.0038 a stream, intros collapse and choruses arrive fast. See 'Espresso' hitting its hook in 10 seconds, or 'BREAK MY SOUL' skipping the verse entirely to maximize playlist traction.
The Quietus talks with composer Sheherazaad about Khudgarzi, her self-produced debut that reclaims the South Asian figure of the 'Selfish Woman': the unmarried, childless villain of Hindi soap operas. Built as 'sound theatre' around Carnatic instrumentation, the album doubles as a critique of a racist infrastructure that platforms diasporic artists over those living in the subcontinent. Out November 20 via Erased Tapes.
An in-depth exploration of the creation and legacy of Mort Garson's Plantasia album, featuring interviews with Garson's daughter about his synthesizer work and the unlikely journey of how a novelty album became a perennial classic. The piece traces Garson's career from occult-inspired synthesizer albums to the creation of Plantasia and its transformation into a cultural phenomenon.
Chris Dalla Riva interviews Sonic Youth's legendary drummer Steve Shelley about founding his record label Smells Like Records in Hoboken, New Jersey, his work reissuing Lee Hazlewood's music, and his current label Vampire Blues. The conversation explores Shelley's role in discovering and promoting new music over several decades.
Before Fania's reissues flattened the memory of New York Latin music into one origin story, there was Al Santiago, the Bronx record-store owner whose Alegre All Stars lifted the whole jam-session format from Havana's Panart sessions. Cuba on Record traces that Panart-Alegre-Fania pyramid through a new Craft Latino compilation (out Nov. 13), restoring the man who built the infrastructure salsa later claimed.
The Guardian profiles Jorge Drexler, the Uruguayan ENT doctor turned Oscar-winning cantautor whose career only clicked once he swapped personal love songs for the cosmic and biological: Lavoisier's conservation of mass, prehistoric migration, love at the cellular level. His latest, Taracá, a candombe return nominated for eight Latin Grammys, lands as he argues the US is now bilingual, and ICE is too late to stop it.
An essay examining the controversy around Sammy Kershaw's CMA Awards snub and arguing that country music's perceived heritage is actually a history of marketing and reinvention. The author traces country music's evolution from its origins as an insurance company radio show through various commercial eras.
After Macklemore was dropped from Ed Sheeran's stadium tour for saying "Free Palestine" and performing "Hind's Hall," nine U.S. arenas (MSG, Barclays, Crypto.com, Climate Pledge among them) offered him dates, then pulled them once they learned the shows were Palestine benefits. The Times lays out how a handful of billionaire venue owners now gatekeep which causes reach a stage.
Opinion piece analyzing Silicon Valley's failure to understand institutional power and public sentiment regarding AI. The author argues that tech industry's dismissal of consumer complaints about extractive and anti-human AI contributed to electoral losses and that the discourse around AI inevitability is driven by venture capital interests rather than humanist inquiry.
A quarter of James Blake's catalog was earning royalties that never reached him, stuck in the publishing black box that idly collects $100 million to $1 billion a year. STVDIO uses that leak to map the startups racing to fix it, from detection tech to artist-facing tools like Notes.fm, and argues publishing is now the fastest-growing, most disruptable half of the business.
Elvis Presley Enterprises just filed one of the first major suits under Tennessee's ELVIS Act, which strips the old requirement that likeness claims involve commercial exploitation and specifically targets the tools enabling voice cloning. Billboard reports the owners included videos of Suno outputs that sound uncannily like Presley, directly contradicting Suno's claim that its models can't mimic specific real voices.
If you're an independent artist, here are some of the lessons I've learned from watching how the major labels strategize launches. Read on!
Sonic Temple’s 2027 heavy lineup isn’t a new festival formula — it’s a decades-old one — but TikTok-driven rediscovery is what we're watching.
On the latest episode of On the Record, Billboard's Jason Lipshutz joins Kristin Robinson to dig into the economics of the boy band, from One Direction to BTS. The conversation treats the format less as a pop phenomenon than as a repeatable business model, and asks what carries over when the template moves from the UK to K-pop's industrialized machine.
Music Business Worldwide maps the scale of Robert Kyncl's three-year gutting of Warner: roughly 2,000 roles cut, 91% of them in Recorded Music, with no dedicated label head left in the UK, Germany, or Canada. Total headcount is set to fall 25% by year's end, even as A&R spend rises 8% and OIBDA margin climbs to 22%.
From parking-lot orchestras and space bubbles to double-header concerts in 2027, The Flaming Lips have been reinventing the live spectacle for four decades.
René Löwe grew up in East Berlin tuning into Western radio for Detroit techno, then fell into the minimalist scene around record store Hard Wax alongside Moritz von Oswald. Reductions collects six long tracks that loop synth lines modulating gradually over steady drums.
The Barcelona musician has invented a musical language singular enough to defy description: a fusion of post-Romantic tonalities (Satie, Debussy, Scriabin) shot through with piercing vocalizations descended from Meredith Monk, konakkol vocal percussion, and acoustic instruments in shards. A little bit Disney, a little bit Raymond Scott, a world of bracing dissonance and zig-zagging lines.
Recorded at Leipzig's St. Thomas Church on the 'Bach organ,' a replica of the 1696 instrument Bach's uncle designed, this draws out the organ's unequal temperament and variable frequency graduations. With Sunn O)))'s Stephen O'Malley on guitar and Lucy Railton on cello, captured across 20 microphones close and far. Laura Snapes called it, in drone world, 'Kali Malone's pop record.'
A project Boyd has been dreaming about since he was 13, released on his own Exodus label. Fairly called a gospel album, it balances postmillennial UK jazz, soundsystem culture, deep spirituals and R&B, and features a group of vocalists from the extended Boyd family he calls 'the kitchen choir.' The video for 'Say Yeah' incorporates footage of Boyd working with kids at the Woolwich Creative Club.
Brian Leeds, whose Huerco S. work specialized in sticky, charcoal-hued textures, moves into sleeker territory as Loidis: brushed stainless steel, graphite against paper. A direct extension of 2024's One Day but crisper and more hypnotic, with a lot of Luomo in its chordal flicker and percussion that's an expression of clicky bliss. The dozen tracks run eight to twelve minutes with no drops, no climaxes, no hooks, just crosshatched expanses of overlapping rhythms. Out on Anthony Naples' Incienso label.
Flow State picks the title track from Samantha Poulter's new album as part of the mix's quickening pace, slotted alongside Loidis and Charanjit Singh as the energy picks up.
Tuttle is a banjo and guitar-wielding ambient folk producer out of Brisbane who's kept company with Steve Gunn, SUSS and Luke Schneider; Cross brings guitar, synth and a hard drive of field recordings from Sydney. Trading files across distance with a few shared parameters, their mutual love of drones opens the portal: 'Athletic, Eup' starts with nature sounds and pastoral picking before 'pink Skyyy Sixth Prize' prods the boundaries of cosmic country, and 'Afternoon Sunrise (I Saw Galadriel at 711)' drifts into weightless, star-spotting ambience.
Shatter the Standards frames Dawn Richard's latest as the next chapter in a career spent singing through characters, from the Danity Kane manga superhero she drew for Diddy to D∴WN, the triangle-spelled solo persona staking a claim to revolutionary R&B. creole culture centers on a New Orleans monarch bearing her likeness, reckoning with the city she fled for Baltimore after Katrina.
A Songs in the Key of Life outtake that sat on a shelf for half a century, released on the album's 50th anniversary and mixed by two original engineers. Soulpolitan has rotated it the most of the four-track EP: Stevie planting a woman in his garden of love to turn her into a flower, a twisted conceit sung over bossa, with lyrics by Susaye Greene of The Supremes, who co-wrote "I Can't Help It" for Michael Jackson.
Excerpted from Nelson's memoir, this Guardian piece lets him speak in his own register: grief doesn't end, it just becomes familiar; a bad script is worth tolerating if it means hanging out with Cash, Waylon, and Kristofferson; and the IRS seized his ranch so he recorded an album called The IRS Tapes to pay them back. Longevity as subject and proof of concept, in about 1,500 words.
The New Yorker makes the case that AI hasn't improved search so much as replaced it with something worse: a system that optimizes for generating answers rather than finding them, draining Google's ad revenue in the process (Alphabet lost $500B in a single day after admitting 'lower monetization' on AI queries). Reddit is pulling up the drawbridge, requiring logins to block AI crawlers, and the open web is quietly becoming a database that bots mine but humans can no longer navigate.
404 Media's read on Tuesday's elections: voters in red, blue, and purple states rejected the Silicon Valley oligarchy project wholesale. Of 40 ballot measures on AI data center projects, 39 passed restrictions. Sherrod Brown won Ohio running on reining in data centers. Gina Hinojosa beat Greg Abbott as an economic populist.
404 Media sits down with Yuriy Nazarenko, the Ukrainian creator of OnlyFake, who built a fake-ID empire by first editing passport scans pixel by pixel in his grandfather's apartment, then automating the whole operation with generative AI. The site made over a million dollars selling fakes at $15 each, helped North Korean workers beat KYC checks, and, per Nazarenko, 'unleashed a new age of AI-powered fraud' before the FBI shut it down and arrested him.
Essay examining data centers as infrastructure and their emergence into public consciousness. The author argues that data centers were deliberately kept boring and low-profile for operational reasons, but growing public awareness of their physical footprint and resource demands has sparked localized opposition and concern about competition for water and energy.
The singer is Gabriele Kerner, three years short of '99 Luftballons.' The Stripes were her first band, formed in Hagen in 1979 and finished by 1982. The show is Plattenküche, a WDR variety hour with fountains, a filing cabinet that toppled every week, and a working kitchen where the co-host cooked dinner on air.
Nick Uff, a gardener by trade, drew it frame by frame on 16mm without a storyboard, letting the film go where it took itself. That scratchy hand-made animation sits over an arpeggio Adrian Utley couldn't get a sequencer to play, so he recorded the notes one at a time and edited them into the loop.
Before Tom Rubnitz became downtown New York's patron saint of camp, he helped make this: a performer named Frieda rapping backed by a chorus line of dolls, production values scraping the floor on purpose. 'Plastic Rap' is Lower Manhattan circa 1980 deciding that cheap and ridiculous could be an aesthetic, not a limitation.
Spike Jonze gives Ludacris a pair of prosthetic Popeye arms and aims them at a man who won't observe bathroom etiquette. Interestingly enough, the man is Fatlip, the Pharcyde rapper whom Jonze had filmed four years earlier narrating the worst day of his life. In 2004, he is still the one getting hit.
Zürich, 1981. Mother's Ruin had been going since 1978, early enough that Swiss punk barely existed, and director Paul Grau shot 'Lost in Town' for the 'Want More' LP while the scene was still inventing itself. Snarl from a country nobody files under snarl.
Out of Los Angeles, Dorothy Fuzz stack sweet vocal harmonies over trippy psych and title the album 'Mad Art For A Mad Age,' which about covers it. '1 2 3 Understand Me' keeps reaching for connection and dissolving into haze before it can close the gap. Sunshine on top, something woozier underneath.
Jonathan Glazer sends a man stumbling through a tunnel, getting hit by cars over and over, muttering Thom Yorke's looped prayer. Each impact lands harder than the last until the final one doesn't. UNKLE and DJ Shadow built the track from dread and strings; Glazer turned it into a parable that earns its resurrection.
Spike Jonze films it like a pratfall in slow motion: Fat Lip narrating his own worst day, every small humiliation landing square on the beat. It's tragi-comedy played dead straight, an itemized series of humiliations played with a stand-up's timing. The Pharcyde's sharpest tongue turns self-loathing into the funniest, saddest three minutes the West Coast underground ever produced.
A Romanian pop grande dame, who'd spent five decades exploring the outer boundaries of samba, soul, and disco-pop, takes Pulp’s 'Common People' and sings it in her own language. The pairing is the pleasure: a voice raised on the state airwaves wrapping itself around a Britpop anthem about class.
The live music stage is among the most monetized and contested spaces in all of culture, and what you can say, do, or play in those spaces is determined by the constantly rebalancing confluence of artists, fans, owners, investors, promoters, and governments. These pieces look at a few of these fights, from the venue owners who censor pro-Palestinian sentiments to the Mexican states that ban corridos.
Ed Sheeran says he stays out of politics so his platform can be "a place of safety and sanctuary." Laura Snapes points out that isn't accurate, since he played the Concert for Ukraine in 2022 and endorsed Jeremy Corbyn. The occasion is Macklemore's removal from Sheeran's US stadium tour after he called for a free Palestine onstage at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft confirmed barring the rapper from the Gillette Stadium date, and Sheeran stressed the decision wasn't his. When the other support acts and Beoga, Sheeran's backing band, pulled out of the remaining dates, they made a mockery, in Snapes's view, of the headliner's claim to be powerless. Aaron Rowe, by far the smallest act on the tour, thanked Sheeran for a life-changing opportunity before adding, "But as Irish people we know all too well about genocide, forced famine and violent occupation."
A member of Kneecap thanked Ed Sheeran "for organising this concert," and Alexis Petridis allows that the line has more than a grain of truth in it. Six weeks after his removal from Sheeran's US tour, Macklemore has turned the publicity into a Free Palestine benefit tour in noticeably bigger venues than his last European run. The crowd greets Beoga, the County Kerry folk band who also left Sheeran's tour, like returning heroes (they are founding members of Irish Artists For Palestine). "You don't fuck with the Irish, lads," says drummer Eamon Murray. Macklemore mentions that Kneecap and Hozier were the first to agree to play, which leaves Petridis wondering how his calls went elsewhere. Even so, Dublin's 13,000-capacity 3Arena is sold out, like every other date on the tour.
Sónar has announced its own death on its website, on Instagram and, per La Vanguardia, in a print ad in that Barcelona paper. That's a substantial promotional push, Shawn Reynaldo points out, "for a business that's supposedly gone kaput." The trouble dates to 2025, when a BDS-sponsored boycott over the festival's ties to KKR (by Reynaldo's account a pro-Israel private equity giant with connections to weapons manufacturing and to businesses that operate in the occupied West Bank) led more than 50 artists and collectives to pull out of the line-up. Sónar belongs to Superstruct, the KKR-owned conglomerate with more than 80 festivals, and Reynaldo's guess is a fresh start, "albeit with Superstruct's money." Sónar might be dead, he concludes, but what's left of its team looks most interested in killing "all of the baggage associated with their brand."
In Milo Rau's staging of Wagner's "The Flying Dutchman" at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the cursed captain stands for Germany's Holocaust guilt, Senta for Israel as the vehicle of absolution and the jilted Erik for the Palestinian cause left out of the pact. Many in Germany argue that politicians have been censoring artists' criticism of Israel over Gaza, and as The New York Times's Thomas Rogers tells it, the premiere was watched as a bellwether for provocative work on state-funded stages. Rau describes a climate of "self-censorship." The subsidy system gives lawmakers leverage: the house is due €56 million from Berlin in 2027, and the federal Culture Ministry confirmed that a representative called artistic director Aviel Cahn before the premiere to suggest consulting antisemitism experts.
Jay-Z's company, Roc Nation, has produced the Super Bowl halftime show under a 2019 deal reportedly worth $5m a year, and the league has named him headliner. Lee Escobedo calls him the perfect choice, "and that's not a compliment." In 2017 Jay-Z wore Colin Kaepernick's jersey on Saturday Night Live. At the 2019 news conference announcing the NFL partnership, his line was "We've moved past kneeling." The NFL is Roc Nation's client, Escobedo notes, and the team owners are its partners.
Form 696, the Metropolitan police risk assessment that critics said discriminated against Black music events, was scrapped in 2017. A two-year investigation led by Black Lives in Music and commissioned by the mayor's office suggests its legacy persists. The report, covered by Aamna Mohdin, finds that Afrobeats, drill and dancehall events in London are routinely labelled "high risk" despite a lack of credible evidence, while indie, pop and rock face comparatively little scrutiny. It puts the cost of cancelled, displaced and prevented events at £127m to £141m a year. Lead researcher Hakeem Stevens explains that the scrutiny has become harder to document: "it's whispers, it's phone calls." Kwame Otiende, a venue owner and promoter, says the extra scrutiny discourages venues from hosting certain events, and that a venue could just book middle-of-the-road chart music instead. "I'll still make the same amount of money."
Weeks before Natanael Cano sang 'Cuerno Azulado' to a Mexico City stadium in August 2024, live on Disney+, he had waved it off onstage in his native Sonora. "Not that one, because they can kill me." The song boasts, in the Sinaloa Cartel's own voice, about the Culiacanazo, the 2019 day the cartel took over Culiacán and forced the state to release El Chapo's son. It was pulled from streaming services minutes after its 2023 release, and state and municipal governments in Baja California, Chihuahua and elsewhere, and eventually Mexico City, began restricting performances of corridos tumbados, the genre Cano founded. In Clash, Oscar Adame Galeano meets him backstage two years on and asks about politicians who want the genre banned. Cano's last word on it: "The violence is in films too, in TV series." When a transnational studio produces the violence, Galeano writes, "it is tolerated."
IQ Magazine reports that EXIT Festival has vowed to return to Serbia, its home country, after a student-led movement unseated longstanding president Aleksandar Vučić following the parliamentary election of 25 October 2026. The country's live sector is welcoming the result, which ends an administration many in the sector had accused of threatening the creative industry and attacking free speech.
South Africa's surge of anti-immigrant feeling has reached the continent's concert bills, with performers on both sides pulling out of shows. Per The New York Times, the South African singer Tyla scrapped a Lagos date after Nigerian protests, and the Malian musician Salif Keita, 77, cancelled a South African appearance, citing what he described as "xenophobic violence." Gayton McKenzie, the South African minister responsible for arts and culture, denies that South Africans are xenophobic and rejects blaming the country's artists; the Times notes that he also helped popularise the Zulu slogan "Abahambe" (let them go), chanted at anti-immigrant protests. In Zimbabwe, Blessing Jake faced boycott threats unless South African acts were cut from his Buddie Beats Concert at Victoria Falls. He removed the South African band Mafikizolo and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. As he puts it, "xenophobia is very expensive."
When Markus Svensson went on the Swedish public broadcaster SVT to discuss his album as The Tarantula Waltz, he was shut down for calling out Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson for "crawling into bed with a racist party" and told to "stick to the music." He came away wondering whether SVT had grown wary of the Sweden Democrats' threats to cut its funding. In The Quietus, Alan Pedder talks to Swedish musicians ahead of the 2026 election about a scene that stayed largely apolitical while SD became the country's second-largest party in 2022. Folk musician Sara Parkman says there's been an idea that artists need "to be neutral and treat SD like a normal party, even though they aren't." Parkman sees episodes like Svensson's as symptoms of the right-wing governing bloc's turn toward private funding for culture, and asks, "Who gets to decide what art is being made?"
During the student protests in France, gas canisters landed in double-bass cases and L'Orchestre du Nouveau Monde kept playing. The orchestra, co-founded by conductor Étienne Jarrier and friends as teenagers, calls itself "a tool for struggle" and grades its performances on consciousness-raising impact. For Tom Service, its protests and the police's reaction to them are "a wake-up call to remind classical music where it comes from." Service places it beside the Scratch Orchestra, which Cornelius Cardew co-founded in 1969; it played the Proms in 1972 and disbanded in 1974.
Maybe Fenix Flexin won't be remembered as the Elvis Presley of AI music, but his track "Rubberz", which delivers street-rap verses over '80s synth-pop, reached the Hot 100, drew months of accusations, and ballooned into one of the biggest stories of 2026. We track the story's twists and turns, and consider where we're going (and where we've been).
Between a billion dollar Michael Jackson biopic, a blockbuster Madonna album, and the return of "Wonderwall" and "Mr. Brightside" to the charts, 2026 could be defined not so much by what we created, but by what we remembered. We survey the landscape, and consider what it means when culture turns into a hall of mirrors.
For years, the labels sued to stop fans from generating AI covers of licensed content, and then Universal and Spotify signed the deal for a tool that does just that. Beneath the product announcement lies the story of how billion dollar catalog acquisitions have created incentives for the industry to recycle the catalog rather than invest in new music.
Miles was the avatar of cool who kept detonating his own styles, a privileged Black artist who declined every story offered to him about privilege or suffering, and both an undeniable genius and a man who hurt others, particularly women. And a hundred years on, he remains a mystery and a contradiction, which is probably what he would've wanted.
We live in an era of unreality, where our foundations have evaporated and our ability to determine what is real and what is a product has dissolved. More so than ever before, people care about authenticity when it comes to music and culture, and also more so than ever, they’re offered music as a product and commercial construct. The pieces below look at the variety of scams and subterfuges, and search out what it means to have an authentic cultural experience.
Session singer Yvette Marine accused Paula Abdul and her producers of using computers to build a "composite voice" on "Opposites Attract," blending Marine's guide vocal with Abdul's own. (Marine sued and lost.) Ann Powers writes that fights like that were about purity, and calling something fake was a way of saying "Stay out"; the newer ones assume fakeness has already won. Powers casts Stella Lefty as "the Paula Abdul of 2026," a TikTok star hounded by accusations that her hit "Boston" lifts the chorus of Noah Kahan's "Stick Season." Lefty's own account of writing it, "I was literally thinking about nothing at all," recalls for Powers "the serviceable obliviousness of a chatbot."
A curious Gramophone reader put a Joyce Hatto Liszt CD into his computer, and it came up as the work of the Hungarian pianist László Simon. Hatto, an English pianist of middling reputation, had released around 100 albums on her own label from the late 1980s, with her husband, William Barrington-Coupe, producing, to reviews that were close to unanimous raves. In February 2007, Barrington-Coupe admitted swapping in other pianists' performances. NPR Music's staff set the Hatto affair beside their other favorite fake-music scandals of the 21st century, among them Silibil N' Brains, two Dundee rappers laughed out of a Polydor audition as "the rapping Proclaimers" who then got signed by Sony UK as Californians. On Hatto, Tom Huizenga says the critics were not exactly duped: they really did hear "spectacular playing," just not hers.
Musician bio-pics nearly all run from hardship to glory, and Brady Brickner-Wood writes that "we prefer our artists broken and emotionally bedraggled." The nepo baby, in the internet's telling, skipped the heartache. Stella Lefty's "Boston" swept TikTok, and then internet sleuths discovered that her father, Eric Lefkofsky, is a Groupon co-founder turned billionaire A.I. executive. The argument since has turned less on whether he made her famous than on how lavishly he may have bankrolled her career. Brickner-Wood's larger point is that the internet promises discovery on talent alone, while the hidden variables of virality (expensive recording equipment, proximity to major cities, time to churn out content) favor anyone with a safety net. Lefty's manager, Adam Alpert, offers a flat denial: "Industry plants don't exist."
Stella Lefty's father is Eric Lefkofsky, the Groupon co-founder, and her rapid rise has fed accusations that she bought her way to the top. If so, Jon O'Brien observes, she took her time about it: for several years before "Boston," her Spotify monthly listeners struggled to get past 100K, and the hit took her to 17.4 million. Where Brady Brickner-Wood weighed the resentment, O'Brien runs Chartmetric numbers on a crop of well-connected acts and finds that wealth buys playlist placements and, perhaps more importantly, time to build an audience. The most blatant case of the lot, O'Brien suggests, came when Will Ferrell played his son Magnus's single "Asleep Talking" on Michelle Obama's IMO podcast, which helped push it from 417K to 6.89M Spotify streams.
Some influencers are taking label money to promote music and not telling their followers, according to an NPR episode hosted by Brittany Luse, which insists this is "a real practice." Music reporter Isabella Gomez Sarmiento got the details from several online content creators, who described how labels approached them and which artists they were being asked to promote. The episode flags it as potentially illegal, then gets into why fans are so wary of "industry plants" and whether musicians need these secret campaigns to succeed. It ends by asking whether the internet is "kind of dead."
"All opinions are formed in the TikTok comments," Jesse Coren, co-founder of the marketing agency Chaotic Good, told Billboard's On The Record podcast. Once the episode aired, the outcry centered on the agency's "narrative campaign," which sends a network of accounts into the comment sections of any post about a client to drive a story about that client's talent. Harry Levin checks one client, Geese, and finds the band's TikTok posts don't draw an overwhelming number of comments next to artists of similar size; Billboard's Kristin Robinson, who conducted the interview, adds that the campaigns "actually usually don't work." "The second a consumer feels like they're being tricked, they immediately disengage," Nala, an independent dance music artist in Los Angeles, explains. About three weeks after the podcast, Wired called the fanfare around Geese a "psyop," and in the fallout Chaotic Good cleared every client off its website.
An in-ear monitor mishap on NBC's Today left Renée Downer of the British trio Flo with a small flub and an instant fear of being bullied online. Malia Mendez's reporting widens from there to high-profile performance, where fans paying premium prices expect studio-perfect vocals and live pitch correction has become standard. Lalah Hathaway likens the correction to sanding off a fingerprint. Musicologist Lucie Vagnerova notes that artists, women especially, get penalized both for using it and for missing notes.
The Guardian and The Quietus both championed Betty Hammerschlag, a lo-fi songwriter often described as a Gen Z Grouper, whose Instagram is all young women and purple-heart emojis. Shawn Reynaldo reports that the project is the work of Tilman Hornig, a German mixed-media artist who is at least 45 and hasn't publicly copped to any of it. The trail runs from a Brussels gig's train ticket, booked in the name of a woman supposedly born in 2004, to an Apple Music credit naming Hornig as the lone songwriter on the 2024 single "Cream." Reynaldo's objection is consent, since Hornig appears to be catfishing fans, promoters and fellow artists. After the piece ran, blush label founder Tim Dalzell posted that the artist, messaging "in the style and dialect of a young girl," once "asked for royalties to be paid earlier so he could buy paints for art school."
Seven seconds of a woman in a gaming chair saying "gg ez," from Kaien Nuen and Angelina "Sugar" Zhang's remake of the song, drew more than 70 million views in the original X post. The song itself came from a mysterious artist called M.Sasuke and set off a dance trend among K- and J-pop idols, whose fans quickly clocked the "tinny glimmer of AI" in its robotic vocals; M.Sasuke soon admitted it was made with AI. The pair got permission and redid it with their own voices. Kieran Press-Reynolds is more taken with what Kaien already does, "humanizing inhuman music" with covers of Brazilian phonk, the slop genre of aura-mogging compilations, on instruments from erhu to suona. Their "GG EZ" takes that a step further, reworking a popular AI song so it's more "ethical" and lifelike.
In a viral A.I. trend, users swap anyone, from their pets to Sam Altman, onto Quavo and Takeoff performing "Hotel Lobby" on A Colors Show, and the stand-ins channel the same aura as the originals. That aura came from originality: Migos revolutionized the triplet flow so thoroughly that pop from Taylor Swift on down adopted the "Migos flow." Brady Brickner-Wood's first thought on seeing the meme was that it was a new form of blackface minstrelsy, a way to inhabit a Black rapper's aesthetics with none of the historical or cultural experience of being Black. Perhaps the clearest precursor, in Brickner-Wood's view, is TikTok, where white teens turned dances created by Black people into frictionless paths to virality, except that face-swapping gives many of its makers plausible deniability. As Brickner-Wood puts their logic, "They aren't the ones pretending to be Quavo; it is their A.I. avatars."
The sign outside BJ's Lounge, a dive in New Orleans' Bywater, read only "Tuesday: Thank You for Choosing BJs," and the one clue was a piano set up next to the video poker machines. Word had gone around town that Cameron Winter of Geese might play, and about a hundred people packed in to hear him work through mostly new songs. For ock sportello, who was there, the unprompted show suggests a subconscious desire on Winter's part to test the notion that his success is a "digital mirage," the psyop charge Harry Levin weighed for Chartmetric. "I thought this was going to be, like, a seven-person thing," Winter quipped.
When a friend told Rhonda Garelick she looked like a drag queen, she was deflated, because it meant she had failed at feigning feminine naturalness. That failure is the hinge of her Times essay on Dolly Parton, since conventional beautification hides the work and drag shows all of it. Garelick places Parton's uberblonde hair and big lashes alongside Mae West and Marilyn Monroe, and argues that Parton was a drag artist of a kind, utterly real about her own unrealness. As Parton put it, "I'm very real where it counts, and that's inside." She never tried to convince anyone the hair or the lashes were hers. The look became one of the great drag personas, and she found that hysterical.