Into The Music
What Happened to Music Festivals and What the Survivors Tell Us About the Future
The summer festival model that defined outdoor music events for decades ran into a wall in the years following the pandemic, and the shape of what survived tells...
Deep Dives
Long-form essays on the albums, artists, and moments that shaped music history.
Featured Deep Dive
Still Here: What It Means When a Dead Artist Shows Up on a New Album
Mac Miller has been dead since September 2018. He was 26. This week, he appeared on a new Thundercat album, performing on a funk groove called “She Knows...
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The Album Cover Has Survived Every Format Change. Here Is Why It Still Matters.
The album cover was a commercial invention that became an art form, and the story of how that happened is also the story of how music became visual....
Why the Streaming Math Never Works Out for the People Who Made the Music
The math has always been ugly. A stream pays a fraction of a cent. Millions of streams pay a few thousand dollars. The artist who earns a few...
Eurovision Is Going to Asia. What Gets Lost When You Move a Contest That Was Built Around a Specific Political Geography.
Eurovision is going to Asia. The announcement came this week through Billboard: an Asian edition of the contest is launching in 2026, with Bangkok as the host city....
Bob Dylan Has a Patreon Now. It Uses AI Voices. What Is Happening.
Bob Dylan is 84 years old, a Nobel Prize laureate in literature, one of the most studied and mythologized figures in 20th century culture, and he has launched...
The Sphere Is Not Just a Venue. It Is a Threat to Every Idea We Had About What a Concert Should Be.
The Sphere in Las Vegas opened in 2023, and the argument about what it means for live music has not resolved itself. It probably should not. The venue...
The Setlist as Argument: How Concert Programming Became a Political Act
There is a clip circulating of David Byrne at the close of “Life During Wartime,” the lights shifting and actual ICE footage appearing onscreen for thirty or forty...
No Image
The Charts and the Critics Have Never Been Further Apart, and Nobody Is Fixing It
The charts and the critical consensus have never been further apart, and nobody seems particularly bothered by that. At the top of the Billboard 200 right now: BTS....
The Only Paycheck Left: How Touring Became the Entire Music Economy
The economics of live music have been warping for years, but 2026 feels like the moment when the pressure has become unavoidable at every level of the touring...
Why Musicians Keep Going Back to Tape
King Tuff went back to Vermont and used the same Tascam 388 tape machine he made his debut on. Adele recorded 30 using analog equipment as a deliberate...