The New York Times digs into the residency boom through Harry Styles' 30-night Garden stand, and the math is the story. Live Nation is running 470 residency shows this year because parking the production saves a fortune on trucks and fuel. But when a residency replaces a tour, that cost lands on you: $1,000 presales, "fan tourism," a Bay Area fan attributing $4,400 of a $10,000 London trip to two floor tickets.
Dolly Parton died yesterday in Nashville at 80, and POW Mag's Arielle Gordon (Pitchfork, NYT) marks it with an obituary about the power of proudly plastic reinvention. Parton was always in on the bit, calling herself a "dumb blonde" before anyone else could, using absurd feminine expectations as shield and trojan horse. Gordon locates the real trick in the contradiction: complex, ugly feelings sung in the prettiest facade, a self manifested from tin cans and cloth sacks.
Read →Writing in Slate, Sam Adams eulogizes the Dolly Parton he actually loved: not Saint Dolly of the 2020s, but the original Material Girl, "desirous, downmarket, dramatic, and dissatisfied." He traces how she dragged Nashville toward the pop center, appropriated the boob joke from under Johnny Carson's nose, and mastered "the post-Warholian art of the genuine fake." There's also a "Down 'n' Dirty Dolly" playlist: zero inspirational uplift, all lust, mess, and protest.
Read →The trick, per The Guardian, is not to call it folk. A new wave of Polish acts is smuggling the oberek—a spinning triple-metre dance—into Chicago footwork, electronics and hip-hop grooves, betting listeners will connect first and learn the heritage later. It's part of a wider "peasant turn" reclaiming rural roots that communist-era ensembles and 90s disco polo sanitised away.
Evil Speakers uses Columbia House's long, quiet death as a way into a sharper observation: the peculiar melancholy of things that outlive their relevance by decades before anyone notices they're gone. Dolly Parton gets the counter-example treatment, more famous at the end than at the peak. Also in the column: new records from Alabama Shakes and Dogwood Tales.
The classical fixation and the club allegiance aren't two careers but one sensibility, argues The New York Times in this profile of Sam Shepherd, aka Floating Points. His studio holds annotated Dutilleux scores next to a vast vinyl stash; his most-played Spotify album last year was a violin concerto. New album 'Mere Mortals' and a ballet score are where those rooms finally merge.
The star-making mixtape is nearly extinct, and Carl Chery makes Doechii's Alligator Bites Never Heal the proof. He traces the form from '80s DJ vehicles through 50 Cent and So Far Gone, then shows ABNH went gold and won Best Rap Album on the strength of Colbert, Tiny Desk, and a UCLA crowd shouting 'Nissan Altima.' First since Bryson Tiller's TrapSoul, nine years back.
Here's a useful reminder that first-day reviews age badly: Vice revisits Pearl Jam's Ten, now a canonized all-time great, which critics initially dismissed as derivative and unworthy of Nirvana comparisons when it dropped 35 years ago. The record didn't even peak until late 1992. A neat case study in how retrospectives quietly rewrite the reception history that catalog marketing now leans on.
Liam Cunningham's Hotpress piece finds Cuba's music scenes hollowing out from both ends: the artists are emigrating and so is the audience that once sustained quality work. Cultural producer X Alfonso puts it bluntly, calling stable production nearly impossible now.
A personal essay exploring the author's relationship with her father through the lens of drag, performance, and Dolly Parton, examining how her father and Dolly Parton function as drag queens in the author's life. The piece weaves together reflections on fashion, identity, and the author's visit to Thomas Mann's Pacific Palisades house following Dolly Parton's death.
Carmen Villain talks First Floor through the making of Memoria, her chilly, dub-inflected new album, and the wider arc that took her from singing and guitars toward electronic and organic textures. The wide-ranging conversation also covers motherhood, Latin identity, lazy journalism, and the specific problem of building a compelling live show as an ambient and experimental artist. The paywall's down for 24 hours.
Shoday, the noodle-selling comedian turned Afrobeats artist Davido cold-DMs, is unusually blunt with Afrobeats Intelligence about the gap between songs he wants to make and songs that pay. Sixteen TikTok hits, he insists, came less from algorithmic luck than from durable relationships with influencers he treats as infrastructure. His verdict on the business, borrowed from the interviewer's own post-Pulse silence: people stop calling once you can't feed them.
Less-is-more, learned from Leeds dubstep nights, becomes an emotional argument here: Clash profiles producer Kloyd, whose album 'New Love' treats spare, spectral electronics as therapy. She improvised 'Kate's Theme' in tears, credits catharsis as her reason for making music, and champions long-form albums over singles.
Here's what selling your catalog really means now: Gene Simmons says KISS can't play live without permission from Pophouse, which bought the band's music, publishing, and even the iconic makeup. The Needle Drop notes this is the logical endpoint of the full-brand acquisition trend — the band becomes IP for films, TV, and theme parks, with the members effectively tenants of their own legacy.
The middlemen are the problem, not the artists. A Vanderbilt white paper pegs annual US fan losses at $11bn — $6.8bn in excess service fees, $4.5bn in resale markup — and proposes capping resale at face value and processing fees at 10%. With StubHub freshly fined by the FTC and state regulation still patchy, the case for federal action via "unfair practices" authority is sharpening.
Saying no to Elvis was the smartest business move of Dolly Parton's career, The New York Times argues. In 1974, Colonel Tom Parker demanded half the publishing on 'I Will Always Love You' as his price for a Presley cut; Parton refused and cried all night.
Tim Ingham pins Drake's war with UMG on timing: he, Taylor Swift, and Adele all signed life-of-copyright deals with indies between 2005 and 2010, just before streaming made lifetime rights grabs rarer. The proof of what those signatures are worth: XL still owns Adele's first three albums, and its back catalog drove £70M in 2025 revenue and a £17.6M dividend split.
Hypebot's Bruce Houghton recalls how Dolly Parton handled a soundcheck nightmare with grace and set a standard every touring artist should follow.
Today’s direct-to-fan tools have finally made Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 True Fans” theory a viable career strategy, here's why.
An essay by Michael from Mad Records sharing insights from interviews with 300 independent artists, focusing on three key lessons: owning constraints, avoiding backwards-looking strategies, and moving beyond opportunity maximalism.
People keep calling gen-AI music “inevitable.” But if making a song no longer requires an artist, that isn’t the future, it’s the end of the artist economy.
The Weeknd's first-ever No. 1 on Billboard's monthly Top Tours anchors the biggest touring month ever recorded: July's top 30 grossed $1.155 billion. Billboard tracks how After Hours til Dawn pulled $124.4 million from 16 European stadium dates, the largest one-month gross by a solo male act, with R&B acts (Brown and Usher, plus BTS) filling out the top slots.
The closer on 'ii,' Denzel Curry and Kenneth Blume's nine-track, 24-minute collaboration, illuminated by Yebba's feature. Blume, who dropped the Kenny Beats name a while back, works like a man with a point to prove, his luminescent beats carving pathways between past and future while Curry packs word upon word into explosive flows. The concise span masks an information-overload approach that grants endless replay value.
Shatter the Standards frames this sequel around one live variable: the beats were all fixed before Dilla's 2006 death, so the album stands or falls on what a 54-year-old Busta brings now. Busta treats his flow as another drum flickering in the dead space between kick and snare, but the record's tension is half improvised memory (he abandoned writing by hand years ago) meeting half decades-old shelved production.
Shatter the Standards details production that pushes past the old boom-bap pocket: Mr. Porter anchors it, with Madlib on 'The Peejays' and Groove on 'Pretty Bird / Way U R,' while 'Joyful' ranges from trap to piano to soul to spoken word. 'Apple Juice' features Evans over a sample of D'Angelo's 'One Mo'Gin,' recorded months before his death. The songs name targets: on 'No Way' she calls out No Jumper and Vlad by name and tells the listener to put a gate on the culture.
Built around Inflo's piano and a live band, the record threads tough love through gentleness: 'Sunshine' calls her baby 'literal light,' but 'Heart Full of Love' remembers a mother's love only protects so far. When Rosie Danvers's strings and a choir arrive on 'Don't Let Me Fall,' strength and tenderness collide.
Mari rubio weaves resolute vocals and acrobatic harmonies through strings, guitar, banjo, and stuttering electronics, channeling Scritti Politti, High Llamas, and The Sea and Cake into a gently pulsing composition. Written while falling in love with guitarist Wendy Eisenberg, who sings on it, the song holds the tension of good things arriving while a pit of trauma sits in the background. From sentence structure in the country, out March 20th via Thrill Jockey.
A Centripetal Force release that sets the band's psychedelic guitar and synth pieces over laidback drum machines, per Flow State. Forty minutes, no vocals, from a roster built around experimental and instrumental music with an Americana bent.
A breakup album built around an interactive frame that feeds back on itself: "Schrödinger's Green Room" turns ambient dread into a list of intrusive thoughts imagined as a DJ in his head, goofy and he knows it. Eagle's writing is quick as ever, though the target stays vague, subjects and objects mistaken for each other. Rated a Standout at four-and-a-half stars, with "Out to Lunch" and "Watching a Movie Called Freedom By Myself" among the highlights.
Taja Cheek's third album synthesizes dancehall, tape meditations, slow jams, gospel, and crunched metal to tessellate how a person grows in a world not built for them to thrive in. Shatter the Standards notes it begins like a stammer, a four-line fragment of the same stalled sentence: "I keep trying to start the/Start."
Futurism Restated's record of the week is deeply faithful to dub techno's formula of rippling chords and crisply stepping kick/hat patterns, with the Basic Channel, Maurizio and Deepchord lineage clear. What sets the Japanese producer apart emerges on repeat listens: the carefree fillip to the chords of "Epiplegic Zone," the airy melancholy of "Urban Night #0," and the muted wash and serrated lead of "Urban Night #5."
Emanuel planted a tracker in a rare book shipment to follow it to VGT3, an Amazon warehouse where workers cut spines and scan loose pages for AI training data. The anonymous buyer pipeline, the physical destruction, the rare books: 404 Media put eyes on a supply chain most AI companies would prefer stayed invisible.
The New Yorker makes a clean structural argument: once you actively promote a sex tape, it stops being a scandal and becomes pornography, which is a different product with a different ceiling. The Jaden Newman story is the case study — a former child basketball prodigy and her family treating a leaked video as a career pivot, seemingly unaware that Kardashian's rise depended on remorse, not bragging rights.
Cocomelon's studio has released detailed guidelines for how artists can use AI tools in their creative work, with specific rules about what is and isn't permitted. The guidelines distinguish between acceptable uses like utility tasks and visual research versus prohibited uses like generating key creative elements or ghost-writing.
A review excerpt from The Believer Issue 70 examining unrealized film projects by notable artists, including Vladimir Nabokov's screenplay 'The Love of a Dwarf' and Kasimir Malevich's film script. The piece explores how these artists' cinematic visions never came to fruition.
A personal essay reflecting on returning to London after years away and attending Jimmy Eat World's Bleed American 25th anniversary show at Crystal Palace Park. The author explores nostalgia, the passage of time, and the importance of maintaining one's love for music throughout a career in the music industry.
An essay excerpt about Jim Davis's journey to creating the comic strip Garfield, tracing his early career struggles with Tumbleweeds and failed strips before developing the character that would become a cultural phenomenon.
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.
Jeff Mills sits down with a single Roland TR-909 and turns pattern-building into performance. No mixer sleight of hand, no rack of gear. Just the machine that built Detroit techno getting reprogrammed live, hi-hats and kicks bent in real time by a man who treats the 909 like an instrument, not a preset.
Neil Halstead sings a name like he's trying to keep it from dissolving. Slowdive built their reputation on guitars that swallowed themselves whole, but 'Alison' is the song where a melody fights through the haze and wins. Three decades on, it remains the gentlest thing the Thames Valley scene ever produced.
A German DJ in a horse mask who answers to Stella Stallion and swears she's half-equine. The joke could have ended at the viral 'My Barn My Rules,' but 'only the best' keeps the mask on and aims it at luxury, deadpanning about wanting only the finest while the beat refuses to take her, or money, seriously.
Three years before MTV switched on, the twin sisters Ellen and Lynda Kahn were already treating the music video as an art object. 'Instant This Instant That' races two women through a day of pop hyper-reality, pure jump-cut consumer delirium, and it hung at the Whitney and The Kitchen before the form had a name.
The idea of using music to foster cross-cultural dialogue seems almost inherently good. After all, we’d be better off if we’re sharing and talking, right? But the reality is often more complicated, and the history of these exchanges is littered with instances of power imbalances and even outright exploitation. Our first piece today is one of the morally thorniest examples of this exchange. Before he passed at the age of 37 in 1912, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was probably the best-known Black classical composer of the Edwardian era, though he never saw a royalty from performances of his most successful piece. That piece was “The Song of Hiawatha,” his setting of a Longfellow poem that, according to the piece’s author, Tom Service, now reads as colonialist caricature and a white-empowering fantasy. Every year, from 1926 to 1939, the Royal Albert Hall housed a production of the piece using around a thousand performers decked out in red-face make-up and racialised caricature. Mohawk chief Os-ke-non-ton also performed in it, granting what the piece terms an apparent authenticity, but Service still finds the spectacle jaw-dropping.
Forty years on, people still argue about the ethics of Paul Simon’s mid-period masterpiece, Graceland. Simon cut the core sessions in South Africa, where apartheid meant the Black musicians could not be on Johannesburg’s streets after dark or use public transport. Ashley Kahn, who has a new book on the album, makes the case that Simon paid the South African musicians triple the daily rate of American union players. But the backlash over songwriting credits never stopped, and it came from the album’s own musicians: Los Lobos, Rockin’ Dopsie and the Zydeco Twisters among them, and guitarist Ray Phiri. A young Mark Batson, who would go on to produce for Beyonce and Eminem, confronted Simon at a Howard University Q&A, asking the legendary singer-songwriter how he could justify “taking over this music.”
To say that Max Mix, the Spanish DJ megamix sold as a compilation, was a hit is a bit of an understatement. Its twelve volumes from 1985 to 1992, nearly all from the same label’s catalogue, sold a staggering 32 million copies. Rolland calls the first of them poison and their success a shameful circus show. The Catalan DJs Mike Platinas and Javier Ussia behind the project cited the 1982 DMC championship as their point of inspiration, and Rolland gives the invention to Ben Liebrand, Alan Coulthard, and above all, hip-hop pioneer Grandmaster Flash, whose 1981 Wheels of Steel is the first real megamix in that reckoning. The only problem was that there was no DMC Championship in 1982 (that didn’t start until 1985), and the success of the series did as much to stunt DJ culture as it did grow it.
Six-piece Chilean boy band Q_ARE were assembled through online casting and trained for six months before they debuted in 2024. They sing in English, Spanish and Chilean slang over a production aesthetic that borrows heavily from K-pop. The piece traces how the Korean wave reached Chile through anime and widened into food, television, and skincare. The Rey Sejong Institute in Santiago has quadrupled its Korean-language students since 2019, and the Patronato neighbourhood now holds more than fifty Korean restaurants, many of them Chilean-owned. One member of Q_ARE says the obvious part aloud for NPR: though they take inspiration and influence from Korean music and culture, they are clearly not K-pop, because they are Latinos.
For years, Remezcla argues, K-pop leaned on outdated, caricatured takes on Latin rhythms and language. Samuel Arredondo Kim could be the corrective for that. He grew up in Bakersfield, born to a Korean mother and a Mexican father from Michoacan, and then moved to South Korea at ten to train as an idol, debuted at thirteen. He made a public career based on the Korean half of his inheritance, and his new four-track EP SAMUELiTO connects the dots to the Latin side. The production borrows from reggaeton and K-pop, and its lead single is sung in English, Korean and Spanish. “I didn’t want to fake it,” Samuel says. “I didn’t want to fake anything.”
In the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and the ceasefire that followed, the boundary sliced right down the middle of Balti-speaking country, leaving Baltistan under Pakistani administration and Kargil on the Indian side. Movement across it was nearly impossible for the better part of eighty years, and this piece tracks the effects of that rupture. Balti folk music is an oral tradition, and the broadcaster Kaleem Balti reckons maybe a tenth of the childhood musical gatherings survive, displaced by Bollywood and western music. Zahra Banoo, who is 23, frames it as language loss: when a language disappears, identity disappears with it.
Ugwu begins the piece by focusing on the well-understood truism that after all these years, the genre remains regional. Cities listen to rappers from those cities. But what’s really interesting about the analysis is the finding that rappers from overseas do particularly well in cities that serve as influences for their particular style. And a clear majority of American hip-hop fans now say they want cross-border collaborations. This is a compelling look at what happens when culture travels, and when it comes home.
Shabaka Hutchings is a generational talent. As the saxophonist leading groups like Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming, Hutchings approached music with an unparalleled ferocity and raw velocity, redefining the boundaries of jazz for an entire new generation of fans. Later, picking up the flute, Hutchings funneled his intensity into music that was deeply quiet and meditative. Hutchings grew up in Barbados and came up in Birmingham and London. Wisdom of Elders, his 2016 record with The Ancestors, was recorded in Johannesburg with South African players. All Things Jazz explores the jazz tradition of that country, and calls it one of the deepest outside the United States, tracking the musicians who transformed American swing, bebop, and modal improvisation through local rhythm and melody, and developed jazz as a spiritual practice and social witness during apartheid. The piece argues that authentic diasporic British jazz must engage with African and Caribbean lineages beyond London itself.
In a forecasting report for August 2026, the esteemed MIDiA Research projects $121.1 billion in recorded-music retail revenue by 2033, with much of the fastest growth occurring outside of the subscription model. Fan-economy segments reach $18.5 billion, expanded rights become the industry's second-fastest-growing revenue source, and retail outruns trade across the projection. Streaming remains dominant, but listener ARPU gains come from pricing, new tiers, add-ons, and fewer free trials.
Despite years of hype, the superfan subscription already failed, at least according to Bruce Houghton. The author tallies the wreckage: Vault dropped paid subscriptions inside two years, Patreon's free memberships now outnumber paid four to one, and Spotify's promised superfan tier stalled out before achieving liftoff. Subscriptions force artists into a schedule that doesn't match how they create, Vault CEO David Greenstein says. Instead, discrete high-intent moments (the release, the listening party, the merch drop) are what matters.
The playlist playbook is losing its grip, argues George Ergatoudis, a former Spotify and Apple Music curator who spent years running that playbook. The evidence he presents is operational. Irish band BABYRAT delayed streaming releases to collect fan contacts at shows; Ren's team leaned into reaction videos, while Ren built Discord communities, Patreon memberships, and merch; and Compost Compost Compost, managed by Jamie Oborne, chooses mastery over momentum. As AI makes music abundant, the truly scarce goods become fans' attention, trust, and identity. More than anything, fans need to feel a sense of ownership.
Fans are paying for scarcity and connection now, Jeremy Young reports at Hypebot, and the trend of limited-edition merch is the evidence. Chicago's Surge Iconics launches crystal tickets and gold-plated collector cards in collaboration with KISS, Styx, and the Lost Lands Festival, while artists at every level ship hand-numbered lyric notebooks, signed test pressings, limited-run cassettes, behind-the-scenes zines, and monthly mystery packages. Many of the objects cost little to produce. Patreon normalized paying for access; the same instinct now buys handwritten lyric sheets and personalized videos.
While the titans of recorded music theorize about superfan monetization, Live Nation is building the physical version. Music Business Worldwide covers Michael Rapino's plan to remake venues along the lines of sports arenas, with premium experiences taking up to 30 percent of venue capacity. People will pay for a better experience, Rapino says. The early results are on-site spending above $100 a head at the Hollywood Palladium and a 30 percent lift at Amsterdam's Ziggo Dome.
Spotify's Reserved went live in June with a specific mechanic: engagement signals identify an artist's top listeners, and the platform holds two concert tickets for each ahead of public sales. Role Model was the first artist, with the rollout running through Live Nation and Ticketmaster for US Premium subscribers. Eligibility watches for bot inflation, and background listening won't tip the scale. Sarah Perez notes at TechCrunch the detail that gives the strategy away: Spotify takes no fee on the transactions. The product is the funnel from stream to seat.
Booking agents read Spotify Reserved as a data play, and Ciaran Donnelly captures their concerns in a recent piece for IQ. The anti-scalping pitch masks the real prize: keeping tour data inside Spotify's walls, with the platform deciding who counts as an artist's top fans. One agent warns it is infrastructure, not a pilot. At stake is the streaming, location, and purchase intelligence that shapes touring decisions.
The recording stopped being the product the moment it became infinitely available, Donny Slater argues, and the industry keeps trying to solve the wrong problem. The alternative Slater offers is to treat the master as a loss leader for an artist-owned universe, the way Nipsey Hussle used his music to propel his lifestyle brand, The Marathon. The barrier Slater names is traditional advances, which buy up tomorrow's guaranteed cash flow and are incompatible with genuine entrepreneurship.
The add-on economy showed up in Spotify earnings. On Spotify's Q2 call, per Billboard Pro, co-CEOs Alex Norström and Gustav Söderström told investors the much-hyped AI remix tool has strong momentum ahead of launch (Universal and Merlin licensed, covered artists opting in to be remixed for compensation and credit). Meanwhile, Reserved held nearly 100,000 tickets since late June, selling through full allocations on some tours until Live Nation upsized them mid-run. For Spotify, it's not just about the streams anymore.
The closer: growth's next markets pay artists only if the plumbing works. Downtown Music Publishing Africa reads IFPI's last two Global Music Reports side by side: global recorded revenue accelerated to 6.4 percent growth and $31.7 billion, while Sub-Saharan Africa gained 15.2 percent on revenues of $120 million, with South Africa taking 78 percent of the region's share. The regional table moved too, with Latin America overtaking Africa as Asia rebounded. The essay's argument is deliberately unglamorous: sustained growth depends on covering the basics of accurate metadata, clean splits, and proper registration. It's the rights infrastructure that decides whether expanding markets pay the people who make the music.