Pitchfork picks up Wired's dig through the ShinyHunters dump of MSG's surveillance database, and the detail that should stop you cold is buried in a database of nearly 40,000 names: Madison Square Garden flagged 93 people as "LGBTQIA," Phoebe Bridgers and Ricky Martin among them, alongside notes on race and a "risk" score. This is the venue that already scans every face at the door. Now we know what it's quietly filing away, and on whom.
Of Songs and Poems traces the pre-revolution golden age of Iranian pop and psych, and the through-line is that this scene didn't just happen: state reforms built the infrastructure, and female performers and literate audiences made it flourish. Then it was silenced. Googoosh vanished for 21 years; Kourosh Yaghmaei's psych experiments outlived the crackdown when Nas sampled him decades later. A reminder of how quickly a living culture can be forced underground, and how it survives anyway.
STVDIO has been tracking the slow strangulation of new music, and this one puts a number on it that should worry anyone who releases records: new music dropped below a quarter of all consumption in 2025, and January's Global Top 50 was 3.5% new, down from 9.4% two years ago. The culprits are familiar. Algorithms reward the songs you already know, catalog acquisitions turn Queen and Bieber into annuities, and there's no mainstream left to break into.
Laura Snapes visits Gilla Band in the Dublin studio where the Irish four-piece built one of indie rock's most imitated sonic palettes, ahead of their new album Pugnello. The piece frames them as alchemists rather than noise merchants: a black steel guitar, a Roland TR-909, and a trademark of power welded to precision that bands like Dry Cleaning have sought out for a little 'poison.' Around the drum machines and death and unhinged humor, these are, improbably, love songs, and Snapes makes the case that Gilla Band's influence now outruns their fame.
A feature about an AI-assisted jazz music competition at the Montreux Jazz Festival, where finalists' AI-generated tracks will be performed live by a house band. The event includes a panel discussion titled "Does It Matter Who Composed It?" exploring the philosophical implications of AI-assisted music creation.
A critical examination of Jay-Z's 1996 debut album Reasonable Doubt and how it became the fulcrum for his unlikely rise from unsigned underdog to hip-hop icon. The piece explores how Jay-Z's late entry into the rap scene at age 26, combined with his specific talents and timing, allowed him to capitalize on the genre's evolving concerns during a crucial moment in hip-hop history.
Shawn Reynaldo's First Floor traces the unexpected return of tribal guarachero, the Mexican house offshoot that drew international hype around 2010, then got dropped by electronic music's tastemakers for a decade. Now it's back in circulation, casually name-checked by the very curators and publications that once acted like it never existed.
NPR's American Anthem series revisits the White Stripes' 'Seven Nation Army,' refreshed for the 2026 World Cup, on how a 2003 garage-rock riff became the planet's biggest sports anthem. Fans sing the guitar line rather than Jack White's vocal, a simple five-note phrase that turns hypnotic across stadiums, from 'No Scotland, no party' terrace chants to matches worldwide.
A roundup newsletter covering recent developments in Chinese music, including new releases from female electronic producers, Chinese emo bands, Xinjiang black metal, and Shenzhen fuzz-rock. The issue highlights new EPs from Sullenboy and The Red-Haired Youth Murder Case.
Martyn Pepperell follows his survey of 1990s Aotearoa techno with a map of where the music has gone since, eleven records from the last six years that refuse to sit still inside the genre. He hears the old dubby, ambient signature persisting in CYXQRD and Eli Hoff while the frame widens to Mokotron's electro built on taonga puoro, Crone's sci-fi goth EBM, and Kaishandao's China-to-New-Zealand digital dub. The through line is not a sound so much as a sensibility, people chasing catharsis in dark rooms and open fields, and a happy refusal to police where techno ends and everything else begins.
New Bands for Old Heads turns two and marks the occasion by shipping an interactive version of its central bit: type in a band you already love and the tool returns newer acts built on the same DNA, each linked to the original writeup and a Spotify player. Gabbie has filed close to 500 'if you like X, you'll like Y' recommendations across two years, too many to hold in one head, so the archive becomes a searchable database rather than a spreadsheet. She is candid about the limits, that it maps one listener's taste, with Gang of Four, Pavement, and My Bloody Valentine recurring as touchstones, and promises quarterly updates with genre tags and playlists.
Two recordings, two Americas: The Nelson George Mixtape reads Ray Charles's 1972 "America the Beautiful" against Gil Scott-Heron's "Winter in America" as a generational split. Charles, forty-one and playing Nixon's White House, sings the dream; Scott-Heron, a twentysomething radical, names the broken promises. The piece is sharpest on how Charles's fidelity to a lyric, sharpened by Quincy Jones's cinematic arranging, turns an anthem ecstatic.
Ricardo Amorim, founder of Spine, reflects on his love of physical media and browsing as an intentional act of discovery. He explores why record crates, video-store aisles, and bookshop tables worked as "machines for serendipity" and examines how friction and physicality created meaningful engagement that streaming and algorithmic curation have eliminated.
Spotify has apparently decided music’s biggest remaining problem is that listeners are still occasionally forced to hear a song as the artist intended.
The creative sector out-earns telecom in the EU, yet capital treats it as a rounding error. MUSIC x's podcast argues the money is already there, just unstrategic: one guest counted 8 to 10 percent of Sequoia and a16z portfolios sitting in creative tech, unlabeled. The sharper point comes from IPR.VC's Victoria Fäh, who locates IP value in distribution, arguing the audience relationship is part of the asset itself.
Layer prediction markets like Kalshi on top of Spotify's chart data and you hand bot-farmers a fresh reason to game the system, Infinite Catalog argues. The real culprit is pro-rata itself: a decade in, it funnels money to aging superstars while enabling an estimated $1.1B in annual streaming fraud on Spotify alone. A user-centric model would starve most of these scams, since no account can extract more than it pays in.
Venues are discovering that beer sales no longer sustain live music, experiments with memberships, diversified revenues, and community models have begun.
A comprehensive guide to navigating the complex registration and royalty collection system for musicians. The article details the nine separate registrations required for a single artist to collect all earnings from one song, exposing how the music industry's royalty system is deliberately complicated and causes many artists to lose money.
The NO FAKES Act protects your likeness with one hand and hands labels a lever with the other, argues Vinyl Culture. Because it creates a new federal IP right outside Section 230, the EFF and ACLU warn platforms will over-remove first. And the bill only bars permanent transfers, not decade-long licenses, which for artists used to signing away control is cold comfort.
From the trio's debut LP Magic Object, where percussionist Booker Stardrum (SML, Weyes Blood), saxophonist Will Epstein (Nicolás Jaar, Darkside), and synth player Ben Vida oscillate between spiritual jazz and Krautrock. Epstein's brass becomes the focal point above a Vida-Stardrum rhythm section, with overdubbed saxophone unisons giving the illusion of multiple horns in conversation. Grown out of a bar-band residency at Tubby's in Kingston, New York.
REC 01
Charanjit Singh
Raga Bhairav
♪ proto-acid house / electronic raga
The Bollywood session musician blended ancient Indian ragas with electronic dance beats made on then-state-of-the-art Roland gear: the Jupiter-8, TR-808, and TB-303. The result uncannily anticipated the sound of Chicago acid house by five years, an album way ahead of its time now returned via reissue.
Born from an accidental two-day session when Kiefer, CARRTOONS and Nate Smith gathered to test a new studio console, the record moves at the clipped, looped pace of a beat tape. Shatter the Standards singles out PEARL, where a light, Brazilian-influenced groove lets Kiefer deliver compact melodic cells while Carr weaves complex lines between them.
One of five versions on the Hypercube EP, drawn from the LP Evaporator. While early buzz gathered around the Basile3 Remix, a closer listen points to the Hard Version that opens the set: a retro bleed of breakbeats and hard trance, a summer banger.
From Kinshasa in Action on Nyege Nyege Tapes, the track channels the sound of overstuffed outfits made from discarded and repurposed metal used as instruments during a Kampala street fair. A closer listen offers it as vicarious access to an experience few have had.
A January release that became an instant contender for collaboration of the year: a springlike set redolent of a walk in the woods, complete with a surprising cover of a Blade Runner track.
The Lebanese-Swiss producer from Sydney lays traditional Lebanese folk music over an idiosyncratic cocktail of trip-hop, dancehall, and post-dubstep. The drum samples alone justify the tune-in: as Mutek put it, this sounds like traditional Lebanese wedding music with a tough, stripped-back, clubby twist.
Pitchfork frames SML as LA's latest torchbearers of slanted jazz, spun off from the Jeff Parker/ETA lineage but openly discombobulating where Parker wanders. Captured live at Zebulon, "Roundabouts" opens on Jeremiah Chiu's tricky 5/4 synth pattern before the quintet climbs into intersecting layers of transcendent high notes, Uhlmann's nervy hammer-ons giving way to robotically muted 16th notes. Krautrock in the stew, but the destination stays up in the air.
The first single from The Singer In My Band, which Nate Amos calls his first "road record": ideas that incubated while daydreaming out the van window rather than home with a guitar. His father, bluegrass musician Bob Amos, rips banjo on the title track, and Nate cites a "lifelong reverence" for bluegrass and its particular rules, where songs have to stand up on melody, lyrics, and chord progression alone. Amos engineered, produced, and performed nearly everything himself.
The latest single from Lacy's self-produced third album Oh Yeah? (out July 26), billed as "a record for guitar kids who love synths and synth kids who love guitars." A slow, soulful number where the romance is undercut lyrically: Lacy examines why he's "never learned to love properly" and why he cheats, admitting "I don't even trust myself." SZA plays the at-odds lover trying to work things out in the face of his infidelity.
After School's midweek trends debrief opens with a sharp observation: young women, having exhausted Depop and Goodwill, are now hand-making Y2K Juicy Couture and Abercrombie because the brands themselves keep reissuing the silhouettes in cheap polyester blends.
Gary Shteyngart has been making the trip to Hudson for 25 years, back when the city was still 'delightfully sketchy' before the Billions mention and the renovation wave. The piece is a personal eating guide anchored around Cafe Mutton's fried bologna sandwich, which he calls his favorite sandwich in the world. A quick, warm dispatch for anyone navigating the Mid-Hudson Valley.
De La Soul flipped Steely Dan and Otis Redding into the same three minutes, then dressed the whole thing in a daisy-age sweetness that shouldn't have worked on wax or screen. Before the Native Tongues became a movement, this was the proof of concept: hip-hop could be goofy, lovestruck, and sample-drunk all at once.
SOS 01
Björk
All Is Full of Love
♪ 1999 · art pop
Chris Cunningham built two porcelain Björks and let machine arms assemble them into a kiss. Coolant, sparks, and tenderness share a single frame. It's among the very few music videos in MoMA's permanent collection, and twenty-five years of CGI later the robot romance hasn't dated a second.
Will Anderson buries his voice under so much distortion it becomes another texture in the wall, a smear of vowels fighting through the fuzz. Hotline TNT's whole trick is making guitar noise feel like tenderness, and this one's the proof: a love song you have to lean into just to catch the words.
The fuzz comes like a saw through brick, and, under it, Douglas Dulgarian narrates his block: the Philadelphia corner store he hits daily, his friend T out front asking for spares, a dead TV glowing in the window. This is shoegaze as squealing cinéma vérité.
Rob Kelly tracked 94 publicly disclosed AI licensing deals and found the mix has shifted: training rights, once standard, now appear in fewer than half. The action has moved to real-time content access for answer engines. For anyone negotiating music catalog deals with AI platforms, that reframe matters — the leverage point is no longer historical depth, it's fresh relevance.
Jason Koebler reports that 41 percent of longform content users actually encounter on LinkedIn is likely AI-generated, with X close behind at roughly a third. The numbers come from Pangram, whose Chrome extension scans passively as users browse, meaning these aren't theoretical platform-wide estimates but a measure of what people are actually seeing. Reddit and Substack land around one-in-ten.
An investigation into the proliferation of low-effort, AI-generated advertisements and flyers flooding social media and physical spaces, from local business promotions to party invites. The piece explores how ChatGPT-designed signs have become ubiquitous across various contexts and geographies.
Alex Heath interviews Alexandr Wang about Meta's new API business for selling access to its AI models, positioning it as a serious competitor to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. The API offers competitive pricing at $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 per million output tokens, with OpenAI SDK compatibility to ease developer adoption.
Alex Heath reports that GPT-Live, OpenAI's new voice model generation, is the infrastructure play behind Jony Ive's forthcoming device: a puck-like, sensor-laden object you control entirely through speech. The product lead's framing — voice as 'primary interface to computing' — signals where this is heading, and Heath got OpenAI's comms team to confirm the direction by refusing to answer.
The AI Corner makes a case that per-token pricing is the wrong unit entirely. Grok 4.5 lands at #4 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index and costs roughly 90% less per completed task than the models above it, because it uses 4.2x fewer output tokens on equivalent engineering work. Verbosity, it turns out, is a line item almost everyone misses.
Arvind and Sayash argue that AI labs are trying to escape commoditization by getting customers to inhabit their systems rather than just invoke them. Accumulated memory, custom workflows, and retrieval indexes create the same lock-in that makes replacing Salesforce feel like open-heart surgery.
An in-depth interview with Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, discussing how product team structures are changing, the rise of the product staff role, and Instagram's approach to AI-generated content and creator identity. The conversation covers his career journey from Facebook designer to Instagram leader, and his perspectives on the future of design and product roles.
