The Returns
Nelson George from The Nelson George Mixtape
Nelson George
Jul 17, 2026
Nelson George checks the price of the nostalgia at Yankee Stadium. Five hundred dollars for the upper deck, $5K up front, and a crowd mostly over 40 experiencing "Empire State of Mind" as a monument to its own youth. His verdict on Jay-Z at 57 is "the Rolling Stones of hip-hop." Jigga is the only rapper of his generation who could sell three hometown stadium nights, and a man single-mindedly determined to resurrect his past as an enduring monument.
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The Guardian
Alexis Petridis
Jul 2, 2026
Whether the sequel is for Madonna or for her wandering fans is the question Alexis Petridis builds his review around. He supplies the ledger: every album since 2005's Confessions on a Dance Floor has sold half its predecessor. The record answers that deficit with defiantly old-school dance music — Lil Louis and Inner City in its DNA — and vivid vignettes of early-80s New York downtown and the Danceteria door. He calls it "an accommodation with her past that bodes well for her future."
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The New York Times
Lindsay Zoladz
Jul 19, 2026
The World Cup's first halftime show booked Madonna, BTS, Justin Bieber, and the Muppets doing "Seven Nation Army," and Times pop critic Lindsay Zoladz finds the problem isn't the talent but the purpose. Nearly everyone plays the safe old hit, and the spectacle runs seamless and forgettable. The one performer who cuts through is Bieber, gambling on an unreleased song. On the season's biggest stage, the past was the program and the present was a risk.
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EchoLocator
Tom Moon
Jun 30, 2026
Miles Davis at 100 is as much a business initiative as it is a music memorial. Tom Moon maps the Davis Estate's centennial campaign, run with the labels that issued Davis's primary recordings plus boutique imprints and grey-market opportunists. The roll-out is modeled on classical composer anniversaries: boxed sets, audiophile upgrades, unreleased live albums, tribute tours, and chatty podcasts. The paradox is the man at the center, who lived in tomorrow and rarely looked back. Moon argues that, in a culture where everything fits on the grid, the present needs that radical lunge.
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Music Business Worldwide
Jul 13, 2026
Lionsgate called it on July 12: Michael crossed $1.001 billion worldwide, the first biopic ever to do it, $371.8 million domestic and $629.8 million abroad. The milestone is only part of the story for Sony Music, which owns half of Jackson's catalog and watched his Spotify monthly listeners climb from roughly 68 million before release to about 105 million after.
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Mikal Gilmore from Night Beat
Mikal Gilmore
May 7, 2026
Mikal Gilmore argued about Michael Jackson more than any other pop figure of his Herald Examiner years, wrote the Rolling Stone obituary, and now says he probably wishes he hadn't. Gilmore traces what drew him in and what left him disillusioned, saddened, and after the obituary angry, partly at himself, for not seeing the man behind the mask.
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Can't Get Much Higher
Chris Dalla Riva
Jul 16, 2026
Olivia Rodrigo and Robert Smith is a data point, and Chris Dalla Riva has the series. Charting duets between artists at least fifteen years apart, he finds the rate climbing since the Reagan era to a 2010s peak, Sabrina Carpenter and Madonna, Post Malone and Dolly Parton, and Springsteen's young collaborators all on the same curve. His causes are structural: longer lives, recordings that never age out of earshot, a professionalized industry, with hip-hop's collaborative habits and streaming amplifying it all. The seam between old and new is now a genre.
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Fairyland
Ella Dorn
Jul 20, 2026
While most of our story is focused on more overt acts of nostalgia – Gen X and Boomer cash grabs, to be exact – Ella Dorn makes a far more nuanced and interesting observation: contrary to popular opinion, there is a traceable aesthetic that's largely tied to an Italian subgenre "of surreal, stylish and bloody crime films" from the '70s. This current aesthetic is anchored to a nostalgic loop that traces back to the '30s, and has its present-day grounding in a "golden age of paranoia." The piece is every bit as fascinating as it sounds.
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The Mechanism
Bruce Ramos
Bruce Ramos
May 26, 2026
Thirteen catalog-buying vehicles stood up in nine weeks this spring, at least $5.4 billion in disclosed capital, and Bruce Ramos reads the wave as a real asset class forming, the way commercial real estate got its buy-side in the REIT era. And the money was never for new artists. Catalog capital comes from yield mandates that would otherwise sit in infrastructure, a different pool from the one that funds A&R, and the two, he argues, never competed on the margin.
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musicben at STVDIO
Benjamin
Jul 9, 2026
The numbers behind the vibe. New music fell below 25 percent of streaming consumption in 2025, a first. By January 2026 it held 3.5 percent of Spotify's Global Top 50, down from 9.4 percent in 2024. Benjamin at STVDIO counts four causes: familiarity-favoring algorithms, catalog owners spending to reignite their purchases, the end of a shared mainstream, and a release volume that drives listeners back to what they know.
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Music Business Worldwide
Kenny Gates
May 12, 2026
A 20-year-old Essential Michael Jackson compilation beat Kneecap's Fenian to No. 1, and PIAS co-founder Kenny Gates blames the refs for killing the UK Albums Chart. Streams convert to album-equivalent sales, handing catalog a structural advantage built on decades of passive listening, the chart measures endurance rather than momentum, and new artists are stranded on first base.
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Ted Gioia
Ted Gioia
May 17, 2026
The music business would rather make money on dead musicians than living ones, Ted Gioia argues. Michael at $700 million in four weeks proved cancellation has no economic force; Paramount signed a first-look biopic deal with Warner Music covering Bowie to Cardi B; four Beatles films land in 2028. His sharper point sits underneath. The industry's stated priority is shifting money from new songs to old ones, and he closes asking readers to leave cultural space for new musicians, "otherwise we're just living in the past."
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The Feeling
The New Yorker
Jia Tolentino
Jul 5, 2026
The New Yorker looks back with a summer-songs series that digs up DJ Earworm's "United State of Pop 2009," the mega-mashup with 55 million views that never made it to Spotify, whose college-Photoshop cover art alone still triggers what the writer calls an instant shiver of pathos and pain. A 2009 artifact revisited for 2026 readers, in a series that spends this summer on summers already gone.
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Fast & Loose by Yasi Salek
Yasi Salek
Jul 11, 2026
Yasi Salek's song of the summer came out last October. Deep Heaven's "When I'm Not Around" played five times straight in the Subaru, and her defense doubles as a theory: a perfect summer song must be buoyant with a gossamer thread of sorrow, because summer's whole transcendence is knowing it ends. The season's official soundtrack never materialized, so she built her own from wherever the feeling lived.
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