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On the Cover Featured on "Stop Eating Lady Gaga's Oreos"

There Is No Sound Of The 2020s.
Yet.

Gabriel Szatan starts from a feeling — a night of big-name DJs that left him cold — and builds it into the decade's central anxiety: the 2020s have thrown off plenty of sounds (groovy house, bassline, hard techno, big-tent Zoomer electronics) but no defining one, and most of what's massive is revival, "a new lick of paint on a classic motor." His real alarm isn't nostalgia or late capitalism, the usual Fisher/Berardi suspects, but the absence of any "tremor" hinting at what comes next. The first half of a two-part report that treats the missing sound of the decade as a problem worth diagnosing rather than mourning.

Music & Scene Read on Resident Advisor →
Joel Gouveia (Substack) · Music Industry Analysis

Why the Music Business is Booming and Artists are Starving

Joel Gouveia traces a century of music-industry mechanics and lands on a brutal punchline: the system was never broken, it was built this way. Labels called loans "advances," Spotify called attention-farming a "mission," and artists stayed outside the building the whole time. If you've ever wondered why record revenues keep climbing while your musician friends can't quit their day jobs, Gouveia has the receipts — and a founder-minded path forward.

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Music Business Worldwide · Music Industry Analysis

Music publishers strike AI licensing deals with Udio and KLAY as NMPA reveals 'landmark' industry-wide pacts

Music Business Worldwide reports on the NMPA's newly announced licensing deals with AI music platforms Udio and KLAY — framed as landmark agreements that value songs and recordings equally in training. The timing matters: publishers are trying to establish licensing frameworks before the technology outpaces them. Whether these deals become the template or get steamrolled by platforms that skip the handshake remains the real question.

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01 Music & Scene Essays
Resident Advisor

What Would We Change About Modern Electronic Culture?

A companion to RA's halfway-through-the-decade report: the staff turn the genre's endless "death of club culture" discourse into concrete proposals — invert weekday/weekend booking to make room for new talent, end the 30-second clip-ification of DJ sets, resist the sober-rave wellness creep, take Gen Z's phones at the door, and mandate 50% new music per set. Billed as their "contribution to the discourse landfill."

Read on Resident Advisor →
Experimental History

Stop eating Lady Gaga's Oreos

Experimental History asks why we'll buy Lady Gaga's Oreos — and argues the real puzzle isn't that art and entertainment collapsed into each other, but why we stopped flinching at naked celebrity commerce alongside it. The piece traces that tolerance to what it calls the Great Switcheroo: a cultural shift that reframed shameless self-promotion as aspirational rather than crass.

Read on Experimental History →
First Floor

First Floor #315 – Should Escapism Be Cozy?

First Floor's biweekly electronic music digest is back with issue #315, leading with a pointed question about whether escapism has gotten too comfortable. Alongside the editorial, there's a full rundown of new releases, news, and recommended reads — plus a guest pick from Stockholm selector Mattias El Mansouri. Paywall is temporarily down, so the timing is good.

Read on First Floor →
POW MAG

The Definitive Guide to DMV Crank Music

POW Mag makes the case that DMV crank's insularity is exactly what's kept it vital — no industry co-optation, no algorithm chasing, just an organic experimentalism that's produced some of the most genuinely avant-garde street rap in years. The primer traces the scene's lineage from Hoodrich Pablo Juan through producers like TrapMoneyBiggie, grounding the argument in specific names and records.

Read on POW MAG →
The Gig

Honest Songcraft in the Slop Era

Nate Chinen frames Gabriel Kahane as a test case for what honest songcraft looks like when AI slop and streaming flattening are the dominant pressures. Writing in The Gig, Chinen traces his own critical history with Kahane — from Where Are the Arms through the NYT's "Greatest Living Songwriters" list — before teeing up a live conversation about how a working composer actually navigates this moment.

Read on The Gig →
Cuba on Record

Word Cup Music: Molotov Parties, Julieta Venegas Fails to Score

Judy Cantor-Navas uses Mexico's two World Cup songs as a study in fit versus misfire. Molotov's 'Viva México' makes no pretensions — pure adrenaline, 18M views, job done. Mexico's official entry, Julieta Venegas's 'La niña futbolista,' carries a worthwhile message about girls in soccer but lands so treacly that YouTube disabled the comments. Good intentions, wrong brief.

Read on Cuba on Record →
Can't Get Much Higher

Can Pop Music Be Epic?

An essay exploring how pop music achieves an epic quality through production techniques, melodrama, and song structure. The piece examines the 1980s as an inflection point for epic pop music and discusses how production and structure contribute to creating big, anthemic pop songs.

Read on Can't Get Much Higher →
Crritic!

Take that TONE with me

An interview with organizers of the TONE festival in Toronto discussing the curation of experimental and creative music, the state of the scene in 2026, and future plans for the festival. The conversation covers artist discovery, changes in their programming interests, and the evolution of experimental music communities.

Read on Crritic! →
02 Music Industry Analysis Insight
musicben at STVDIO

Who invests the most in new artists? (Universal, Sony, Warner compared)

STVDIO pulls Rostr data to stress-test the narrative that majors have quietly retreated from new artist development. The headline finding: 124 new signings across the three majors since January, with Atlantic the most prolific single imprint at 19. UMG's €402M in advances — more than double the prior year — adds weight, though deal structure and development commitment stay opaque.

Read on musicben at STVDIO →
Hypebot

A Meditation on Waste

Hypebot surfaces an essay from Soundfly Weekly arguing that waste isn't the enemy of creative work — it's a structural requirement. The piece draws on drug discovery and Picasso's legendary output to make the case that volume and apparent inefficiency are how you find the thing that actually works. A useful reframe for anyone who treats creative output like a production pipeline.

Read on Hypebot →
Mad Records

An open letter to artists afraid to monetize

Mad Records makes the equity-vs-cash-flow case for artist monetization, and the framing is useful: every stream sent to Spotify and every follower built on Instagram is an asset transferred to someone else's balance sheet. With 86% of indie labels still routing through major distribution, the piece argues the independent scene's survival depends on artists owning the upside — not just complaining about who does.

Read on Mad Records →
AI Music Newsletter

WMG Acquires AI Detection Company Sureel

AI Music Newsletter covers WMG's acquisition of Sureel, an AI detection company — a move that signals the majors are done waiting for platform partners to solve the synthetic content problem and are building the infrastructure themselves. When a label buys the detector, the incentive structure shifts in ways worth watching.

Read on AI Music Newsletter →
03 Music Recommendations Tunes

Chloe Lula — "Hidden Reverse EP"

via Flow State

French-American cellist turned Berlin techno practitioner, Lula builds this EP from electroacoustic recordings by Swiss composer Alexandra Bellon. The result sits true to Berghain-adjacent club music while carrying the spectral residue of her conservatory training and Bay Area rave immersion.

04 Voice & Culture Essays
Sean Fennessey

Can A.I. Complicate a Filmmaker's Legacy?

Sean Fennessey examines the implications of AI use in filmmaking, discussing recent controversies around Martin Scorsese and Brady Corbet's films that allegedly used artificial intelligence. He explores the tension between his preference for handmade artistry and the practical reality that AI is becoming ubiquitous in modern filmmaking.

Read on Sean Fennessey →
The Believer Magazine

The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War

The Believer runs a firsthand account of life among the Internacionalistas in post-revolution Nicaragua — the thousands of foreign idealists who flooded Managua after the Sandinistas took power. The contrast with El Salvador is vivid and immediate: terror versus a cheerful communist kazoo concert.

Read on The Believer Magazine →
i-D

Can you be a successful teenage artist?

i-D uses the box office run of Backrooms — shot by a 19-year-old — to ask what we actually mean when we call a young artist prodigious. The piece traces the lineage from Welles to Akerman to argue that early creative output isn't anomaly; it's a recurring pattern. The real question is whether youth is ingredient or coincidence.

Read on i-D →
The New York Review of Books

The Siren Song of Illness

An essay by Adam Kirsch examining Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain and how it originated from a misdiagnosis of tuberculosis at a Swiss sanatorium. The piece explores the novel's central theme of ambiguity in distinguishing health from sickness and mind from body.

Read on The New York Review of Books →
Night Beat

Night Beat Post 120 - Hunter Thompson Part I: The Way Up

Mikal Gilmore opens his Hunter Thompson retrospective with a premise worth sitting with: Thompson's life didn't just inform his work — it became the work. Gilmore places Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas alongside Moby-Dick and Gatsby as a document of the American psyche, then traces how Thompson's Louisville origins shaped the recklessness that made the writing possible.

Read on Night Beat →
Famous and Beloved Newsletter

New ways to hate women are invented every day

Clare's piece opens with a deceptively simple premise: fluency with digital culture isn't generational, it's experiential — and the gap between people who grew up inside it versus adjacent to it shapes how misogyny spreads and mutates online. Grounded in her own chronically-online upbringing, it's a sharp structural read on how new platforms don't just host old hatreds, they engineer new ones.

Read on Famous and Beloved Newsletter →
05 AI + Content & Editorial Technology Insight
(Re)Structured News | Tow-Knight Center at CUNY

After the Moat

(Re)Structured News argues the "defensible moat" framing is already obsolete — AI is filling those moats faster than anyone can dig them. The smarter question isn't what humans do that machines can't, but what you need to learn to govern systems that may soon outperform you at nearly everything. A useful reframe for anyone building editorial workflows around AI right now.

Read on (Re)Structured News | Tow-Knight Center at CUNY →
The Media Copilot

Vibe coding can turn investigations into experiences

Kris Krüg's piece in The Media Copilot makes a practical case for vibe coding as a journalism tool: describe the interactive experience you want, let the AI build it, ship something readers can actually explore. The argument is that the 3,000-word investigation is only one container for reporting — and often not the most useful one for the data sitting behind it.

Read on The Media Copilot →
Luiza Jarovsky, PhD

When AI Becomes a Religion

Luiza Jarovsky's newsletter makes the structural case that AI hype isn't just marketing — it's the latest iteration of a centuries-old cultural reflex that treats technological progress as inherently good. The argument lands because it names the incentive architecture holding it in place: IP law, capital, and the story modern societies tell about what it means to be advanced.

Read on Luiza Jarovsky, PhD →
Shae O. (Substack)

5 Ways to Use AI Without Using Data Centers

Shae's piece makes a practical case for local AI models — the kind that run on your phone or home server, no data center required. The examples are personal and concrete: a Zotero plugin that reads research papers aloud, an iPhone app that captures stray thoughts without breaking focus. The argument underneath is simple but useful: most frontier-model use cases don't actually need frontier models.

Read on Shae O. (Substack) →
06 AI Product News News
404 Media

Who the heck is 'Elias Thorne?'

404 Media reports on Cornell research confirming what engineers had already noticed: ask any major LLM to tell you a story and you'll almost certainly get Elias the lighthouse keeper. Across 20,000 samples from ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, just 11 words — names and occupations — appear in over 88% of generated stories. The models are converging on the same fictional furniture.

Read on 404 Media →
Montreal AI Ethics Institute

The AI Ethics Brief #192: Canada Has a National AI Strategy. The Hard Questions Come Next.

The Montreal AI Ethics Institute flags the tension hiding inside Canada's new national AI strategy: the targets are bold — 60% business adoption by 2034, 250,000 jobs by 2031, $200M toward health outcomes — but the harder architecture questions around governance, equity, and what sovereignty actually demands in practice are largely deferred.

Read on Montreal AI Ethics Institute →
AI as Normal Technology

Why AI hasn't replaced software engineers, and won't

Arvind and Sayash's piece cuts through the replacement panic with a useful structural argument: AI compresses the "execute" layer of knowledge work, but the decide and deliver layers resist automation in ways capability gains alone won't fix. Software engineering is the best-case test — rapid adoption, few regulatory barriers — and mass displacement hasn't materialized.

Read on AI as Normal Technology →
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