It was sadly announced this weekend that legendary music producer William Orbit passed away at his home on the 23rd of July.

Two weeks of silence for a man who produced one of the best-selling pop albums of the nineties (Madonna’s Magnum Opus Ray of Light) and left his signature sound all over tracks by All Saints (included my favourite song ever, Pure Shores) Britney Spears (Alien), Pink (Feel Good Time), Blur (13), Ricky Martin and U2.

Orbit spent thirty years building one of the most identifiable sounds in pop music without becoming an identifiable person in his own right. You know the work but you’ve never once had to know the face.

“The Sound”

Before working with Madonna, Orbit had already spent a decade as a working producer and remixer, running Guerilla Studios in London and cutting his teeth on Sting, Prince, Erasure, Depeche Mode.

In the early 90s he released a string of ambient electronica, and had a genuine hit as one half of dance act Bassomatic. By the time Madonna called him in 1997, he’d already built a serious toolkit of shimmering, waterlogged synths, trip-hop breaks - a production style and sound that sounded like it was recorded underwater, in the best way possible.

Then he put that entire toolkit inside Ray of Light and it became the sound of an era of pop.

Below are my essential tracks to get your teeth into William Orbits signature sound.

Madonna - Ray of Light

Seems obvious to say: Start with Ray of Light in full.

Every track on Ray of Light carries Orbit’s fingerprints, written and produced alongside Madonna

It’s a rare case of a producer sound and a whole artist reinvention arriving at the exact same moment and neither one are overpowering the other.

Madonna - Beautiful Stranger

He stayed on with Madonna for Beautiful Stranger in 1999. The track was co-written and produced for the Austin Powers soundtrack, and Orbit kept working with her through Music and into MDNA over a decade later.

All Saints - Pure Shores & Black Coffee

All Saints’ Pure Shores and Black Coffee both carry his signature production, and Pure Shores in particular is the clearest proof that the Ray of Light palette wasn’t a Madonna-specific trick - it worked just as well underneath the coolest British girl group. You can hear the distinct synths and sounds of Frozen on Ray of Light mixed through into the recognisable ambient tones of Pure Shores.

Pure Shores was and remains to this day my favourite song ever, followed closely by Ray of Light, with Black Coffee by All Saints also in the top 5. So you can say William Orbit molded my taste into what it is today.

Blur - Tender

From their album 13, the album William Orbit produced in full. Blur picked him after hearing his remixes on their Bustin' + Dronin' collection, much the same way Madonna found him (he did a rework for Madonna on Justify My Love)

On paper, Tender is the least Orbit-sounding thing on this list - a nearly eight-minute gospel-tinged ballad with barely a synth in earshot. But it's still all atmosphere and patience. A slow acoustic build that keeps expanding, closer to a hymn than your classic Britpop.

Melanie C - Go!

The opening track on her solo debut outside of the Spice Girls -Northern Star. Go! was written and produced by Orbit and Mel C sought him out specifically off the back of the success of Ray of Light.

Bassomatic - Fascinating Rhythm

Fascinated Rhythm was Orbit’s only real hit as a performing artist rather than a hired producer, credited to a house outfit he built himself with Guerilla Studios, with singer Sharon Musgrave and rapper MC Inna Onestep also on the track.

It reached No. 9 in the UK and became a proper dancefloor standard. A chilled groove built from synths, piano and a vocal hook laid over a rap verse, closer to acid house than to anything he'd later do for Madonna.

William Orbit - Water From A Vine Leaf

This is arguably where the William Orbit sound starts. A slow-motion, downtempo instrumental built around one mesmerising repeated note, with Beth Orton - in one of her first recorded vocal turns — floating over the top rather than fronting the track.

It got picked up hard by the Balearic Islands and progressive house scene at the time. Five years before Ray of Light, you can hear all the ingredients already there - patience, space, a vocal treated as another instrument rather than the point of the track.

And there’s so many more I could talk about. Like how in 1999 he co-produced Be Careful (Cuidado Con Mi Corazón), the duet Ricky Martin recorded with Madonna for his English-language debut, which is one of the odder pairings in his catalogue yet one of the most overlooked.

He kept turning up in unlikely places across his career. Like with Feel Good Time, his collaboration with Pink for the Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle soundtrack in 2003 - a straight electro-pop banger.

There’s also Alien, the opening track on Britney Spears’ album Britney Jean in 2013, is a stranger piece of work for Britney - warped synth burbles under her more personal lyrics about isolation.

Orbit built a signature just as loud, arguably louder, since you can usually identify a Ray of Light-era production in three seconds without knowing anything about who made it, and never converted that signature into a public persona. The sound did the branding. He didn’t need to.

What’s your essential William Orbit track?

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Holly Brace is a writer, photographer and digital influencer strategist covering music, pop culture, fandom and the creator economy. She writes Up All Night, a newsletter about the ideas and internet behaviours shaping modern culture.

I was five, in a Woolworths in the depths of West Wales, and I spent my pocket money on the CD single for Aqua’s Barbie Girl. That was the first piece of music I bought for myself - iconic I know. I still have that CD somewhere in mums attic, albeit a bit broken and tired from age and overplaying.

Over 150 of you have turned up in the last few weeks, so before we go any further I want to introduce myself to you: HI - I’m Holly!

You’ve probably clocked the title’s a nod to Confessions II - my most recent piece was about Madonna and I mapped her album rollout strategy: queer community first, then the wider fandom, then everyone else. If that means nothing to you yet, it will (full article below). Up All Night was born to treat pop culture and music like marketing case studies and breaking down the internet machine that goes with it.

I break down artist rollouts, dissect campaigns that worked (or spectacularly didn’t), and semi-regularly fantasise in print about what I’d do if I worked on a specific campaign. You’ll also find some round ups of all the music, pop culture and internet news you’ll need to know if you work in marketing here with my “KEEPING ME UP ALL NIGHT” series.

By day, I do social content creative and influencer strategy. Seven years of it. I started in-house on the likes of Bumble’s social and brand team, then moved into agency, running influencer and creative strategy for brands like Aperol Spritz — which brought me to the influencer olympics, Coachella — Campari, Highland Park Whisky, Lenovo, Motorola and Dolby.

You could say I LOVE influencers and social, working with them, thinking about content, thinking about everything to do, I have definitely picked the right career choice for me.

So when I write about how a rollout should’ve gone, I’m not justtt guessing. That’s the day job talking.

The other half of me is behind a camera. I shoot music and events as a creative side hustle — WOMAD, Westival in Wales, Project 6 in London, Field Day, Cross the Tracks, artists like Folamour, Ziggy Alberts, Don West, Holly Walker, plus London and Copenhagen Fashion Week. Some of that’s below, and I post a lot of this on my Instagram @hollahbrace.

Photography isn’t just the real reason I go, though. A gig is my happy place, and a festival crowd is close to meditation for me. At Primavera Sound in 2025 I sat on the hill and watched Jamie xx, and somewhere in that four-count - one, two, three, four - my brain switched off and locked onto the beat at the same time. Same thing happens at Amyl & The Sniffers, Sabrina Carpenter, Red Hot Chili Peppers, whoever’s on. Different genre, same brain reset.

Then there’s deeper into the actual condition, which is music itself and probably why a lot of you are here. I can tell you the number one song for pretty much any era of my life, because I have a habit of attaching songs to whatever was happening at the time — it’s the fastest way I know back to a specific afternoon in my brain. I’m a genre-bender: my ideal back-to-back is The Eagles into Paris Hilton into Onra into Frankie Valli. It just works in my brain.

Every year as a kid, my family went to Florida for a holiday. Officially it was about theme parks. Unofficially, my real agenda was the pilgrimage to the mecca which was the Virgin Megastore — CDs I couldn’t get at home, Hilary Duff posters, every teen magazine on the Walmart shelf that had anything to do with Nicole Richie in it, merch and CDs for pop girls who hadn’t broken in the UK yet: Brie Larson, Lindsay Lohan, Ashlee Simpson.

Chasing what was about to land before it landed turned out to be good practice. It’s basically my job now, just with a byline instead of a suitcase full of physical media.

On a more personal note: I also justgot married in Vegas!

Say “Vegas wedding” and most people picture an Elvis impersonator and a chapel with a neon sign (guilty), the whole thing piped through the classic soundtrack of the Rat Pack. Ours went a different way.

Our song was Bold as Love by Jimi Hendrix, and that set the tone for everything else - our photography shot on film, me in a ‘60s Jane Birkin-esque shift dress, burgers instead of a sit-down dinner, champagne (obviously). The music all night was the Stones, Dusty Springfield, Goldie Boutelier: songs built for dancing badly, not swaying politely. I also helped shoot and edit my own wedding video on camcorder (insanity) with the help of Petite Cherry Photo on Super 8 film which you can view here and here.

Home right now is Melbourne, but that’s a recent development.

Before this I’ve lived in London, Auckland and Sydney, plus stretches of my twenties spent mostly backpacking — I’m somewhere past 40 countries at this point. Wherever I land, the first thing I do is find out what’s playing that week and who’s on.

So that’s the person behind the byline — still chasing what’s about to happen next, wherever it happens to be.

For the fuller pitch on the actual writing, start with the below articles and see where they take you.

One thing before you go: tell me your first CD or vinyl you bought in the comments below. What it was, where you bought it, who you were with. I read and reply to everything here — you’re not too late to the party, you just walked in.

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Holly Brace is a writer, photographer and digital influencer strategist covering music, pop culture, fandom and the creator economy. She writes Up All Night, a newsletter about the ideas and internet behaviours shaping modern culture.

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In April, you could open the Grindr app anywhere in the world and there she was, sitting in your feed:

“Hi Grindr. It’s Motha.” Zero feet away.

When I first saw this, I recalled the iconic adage from Samantha Jones over two decades ago on SATC: first come the gays, then the girls, then the industry.

The Confessions II campaign is that line converted into a holistic media plan, executed with the discipline of a brand and an artist that knows exactly where culture starts and exactly how long to make everyone else wait for it.

This piece is about that waiting - the sharpest thing about what I think is the biggest album campaign of 2026 wasn’t the Grindr stunt, the Absolut cocktail kit (harking back to the Absolut Hunk of it all) or the World Cup halftime show. It was the order they happened in.

Was Madonna in her flop era? (As Madonna flops go)

We all know by now that Madonna doesn’t need to prove herself. She has ten US number one albums and a forty-year receipt trail of dragging club culture into the mainstream through pop, country, musicals, amongst others. But Confessions II the product and legacy carried real risk that Madonna the institution didn’t. The last decade-and-a-half of albums - MDNA, Rebel Heart, Madame X - underperformed by Madonna standards. Not absolute disasters. Flops as Madonna flops go, which is to say most artists would kill for them. But a downward line from the glory days of Ray of Light and True Blue all the same.

And this record wasn’t just another random album - it was a sequel to Confessions on a Dance Floor - arguably her most beloved late-career work (most beloved by me, anyway) the one that still packs a floor within seconds of that Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! sample. A bad sequel doesn’t just flop on its own terms, it can reach back and damage the original if not handled with the utmost care.

So the question Warner Music Group had to answer wasn’t “how do we reach the most people?” It was “who should hear this first” and “who would we want in the room once it lands”.

The album rollout acted as an exclusive guest list

If you look at the sequence the logic behind the rollout is unmistakable.

April 17: “I Feel So Free” premieres on iHeartRadio’s Pride station.

April 24: the Grindr takeover. The company’s largest commercial activation ever, complete with a platform-exclusive picture disc. Grindr’s CEO said the biggest artists no longer build campaigns around mass audiences - they build them around the communities that actually move culture.

And pssssst! I actually predicted the move to community-focused marketing when I wrote these blogs here and here.

April 26: a surprise 1am DJ set at The Abbey in West Hollywood, debuting unreleased tracks to the room. Interestingly, nearly every song on this album got a physical premiere before a digital one - Coachella (more below), a Martin Garrix show in Brooklyn, Club Confessions in Paris. In a streaming economy where access is infinite, the only scarce thing left is FOMO and/or proximity.

29 May: Grindr Presents: Confessions with… Madonna drops. A Truth or Dare-style roundtable with Bob the Drag Queen, Ivy Mugler, Jeremy O. Harris, Raul Lopez and Marcelo Gutierrez. No topic was left off the table: hole pics, sex with JFK Jr., the AIDS crisis. The full uncensored version was gated inside the app so you had to already be there to see it.

4 June: Grindr notifies users via the app that Madonna is going to perform a surprise set in Times Square at 6:30pm, kicking off Pride Month. The surprise performance was simultaneously livestreamed on Grindr for anyone who couldn’t get there.

Then, threaded through all of this sequencing, the second engine: The girls.

Madonna materialising like Aphrodite during Sabrina Carpenter’s Coachella set in the same corset and boots she wore to headline in 2006 was, to put it lightly: a GAG.

She and Sabrina performed “Bring Your Love”, another unreleased single from Confessions II. For a generation who probably know Madonna as more of an abstract idea rather than an influential music artist, this was their introduction - vouched for by their own girly pop fave. Sabrina was the bridge across to the next stage of this campaign.

See also: a promotional spot for the album with Anna Wintour ahead of The Devil Wears Prada 2 screenings, a fantastic Vogue Italia cover and her tenth Interview Magazine cover. The girls were being handled separately and simultaneously the whole time.

Only after all of that did the mainstream get its turn: TikTok pop-ups at release, a livestream that pulled 2.16 million unique viewers, and finally the World Cup Final halftime show in front of a billion-plus global audience.

Run that exact sequence in reverse and the whole thing would have probably collapsed. World Cup first, Grindr last, and the Grindr activation reads as a legacy act pandering to the gays on her way back down (which, by the way, Madonna would NEVER do). Because Grindr came first, the World Cup was a fresh global coronation of the Queen of Pop back in action.

The verification layer

The gay club is an extremely high-scrutiny room with taste on the table and allegiances earned over years. Pandering gets clocked very quickly.

Director of Consumer Content at Grindr (and my former manager and friend) Benjamin Cooper put it better than any trade press piece could when he appeared on the Trend Effect podcast earlier this year: “The internet works fast, but the gay internet works ten times faster... by the time it’s hit mainstream it’s seen as tired and done... so if we can’t act fast we kinda pass on it.”

Via Calibre. Watch the whole podcast episode here.

The speed at which the Madonna x Grindr partnership went at isn’t incidental. By the time something reaches mass, the room has already moved on. Which is exactly why Madonna needed to appear in that room first to gain the momentum this album deserved.

Brat is the cleanest recent proof of this layer too (apologies for still wanging on about Brat). In 2024, the world discovered a decade-old queer consensus about Charli XCX, formed over multiple albums while everyone else wasn’t looking.

Madonna knows this, which is why the campaign’s best subplot - Charli declaring the dance floor dead on “Rock Music”, Madonna responding with “if your dance floor feels dead, maybe you’re playing the wrong music”, then the two publicly reconciling and going on a bender together at Club Confessions Paris - felt like a masterclass in competitive verification.

And the girls who join the consensus are their own verification layer, with their own receipts. Sociolinguists have known for decades that young women lead language change and culture - the vernacular teenage girls use today is how everyone speaks a generation later. William Labov’s research into this put women roughly a generation ahead of men in adopting new linguistic forms. The same pattern holds for taste.

Hate to break it to the die hard fans, but Elvis was a horny teenage-girl phenomenon before he was a cultural one. Same with Beatlemania, dismissed as fodder for hysterical teenage girls right up until the screaming girls taste turned out to be the entire future of popular music. The mainstream has a long, embarrassing history of ridiculing what teenage girls love and then adopting it wholesale five years later.

So the Confessions II sequence - gays, then girls, then everyone - wasn’t a funnel Warner Music Group invented. It’s the existing diffusion path culture already travels. They put Madonna’s spend in the right order along it.

Did it work?

Confessions II marks Madge’s tenth US number one album, debuting with the biggest week for a dance album in 2026 and her best sales week since 2012. It’s also her thirteenth UK number one - first since MDNA - making her the first American female artist with chart-toppers across five decades, level with Elvis. Go figure.

The critics handed over the exact review the sequel needed: her best album in two decades (Rolling Stone). Which means the original is safe with its legacy protected.

IMO this was a phenomenal album launch - a masterclass in fan mobilisation, collectability (the Grindr Exxxclusive Picture Disc!) and the relentless insistence that something was always happening somewhere you weren't - rather than the start of an all new streaming era for Madonna. I’d argue WMG knew that going in. They didn’t pretend Madonna was a playlist artist. They built a machine to convert forty years of emotional investment into ownership, attendance and chart history, and the machine worked.

The playbook probably wouldn’t work for others

Every brand or digital strategist reading this needs this tattooed somewhere visible: you cannot do this without the groundwork already set.

Madonna could open on Grindr because she’s spent four decades paying into that account - from today’s Danceteria era to AIDS activism when it was commercially radioactive.

The LGBTQIA+ community’s entire power comes from the fact that its endorsement can’t be bought. That’s precisely what makes it worth everything downstream and why the Grindr partnership was one of the smartest things both WMG and Grindr could have done for this album rollout.

Same with the girls: chase them as a segment with nothing to back you up and they’ll clock you as a tourist straight away.

The lesson from Confessions II isn’t “do a Grindr takeover”. Almost nobody can credibly do it like Madonna can. But you can find the people who give your work its cultural meaning, acknowledge their role before you ask the wider world to care, and accept that the acknowledgement only counts if you were already in the room before you needed them.

First come the gays. Then the girls. Then the industry world.

Know someone who’d be into this? Send it their way.

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Holly Brace is a writer, photographer and digital influencer strategist covering music, pop culture, fandom and the creator economy. She writes Up All Night, a newsletter about the ideas and internet behaviours shaping modern culture.

👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀

We’re a few weeks on the down since the Coachella of Marketing wrapped up. In case you missed it, for a week in June, everyone at Cannes Lions was arguing about taste.

There was a debate on the Rotonde stage called “Creative Taste is Not Opinion, But an Objective Truth,” where four creative directors spent an hour disagreeing about whether some people are just better at knowing what’s good. Pinterest built a patisserie on the Croisette that baked you a custom dessert based on your taste graph. Spotify Beach had a “Shape Your Taste” froyo bar.

A whole new Lion - the Creative Brand Lion - was invented to reward the “systems and cultures” behind good work. To make things confusing, Simon Cook, who runs Cannes Lions, told The Hollywood Reporter the industry is now living in “a world defined by mediocrity at scale.”

Underneath all of the panels and activations, many people were agreeing that, yes, the rise of AI means you can produce a competent social ad in about eight seconds (which means competent ads are worth nothing, because now everyone has infinite of them). So, the only thing left worth paying for is the human bit - the judgement to know which of the eight thousand competent options is actually good.

Paul Graham has been posting about this fact all year. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman keeps saying taste is what he now hires for. Kyle Chayka wrote a New Yorker piece about tech bros suddenly caring about it. We had the Tech Gala (see: The Met Gala), a direct ploy from Jeff annd Lauren to become adjecent to actual taste. By June, the whole industry had settled on the same answer: taste is where the value now lives.

You could say Cannes was the official coronation of taste in 2026.

And then the industry did what industries do. It started shopping for taste like you’d shop for a media plan.

That’s the bit that doesn’t work for me. Every brand that’s tried to “taste-code” its output with AI has ended up looking a bit tragic IMO - Coca-Cola’s AI christmas ad, which got mocked so badly they pulled it, but they just did it again a year later anyway. J.Crew and Vans announced their August 2025 collab with visuals so obviously AI-slopped. Each of these brands wanted the feeling of a considered creative moment without doing the considered creative work. It reads like someone doing an impression of a brand with taste, which is exactly what it is.

All the gear, no idea.

If you go back way before Cannes Lion 2026, the internet has been catching this failure for ages. Last summer, the “performative male” meme spread across every city with a park, a coffee shop and a Trader Joes.

The archetype: a guy in wired earbuds carrying a matcha, a tote bag, a copy of bell hooks he hasn’t read, a vinyl record for a turntable he doesn’t own, updating his Letterboxd on the walk home. There were contests in Washington Square Park, London’s Soho Square, Wicker Park, Alamo Square, at Yale. The performative male joke was that he assembled the entire aesthetic without ever explaining, or maybe even knowing, why any of it was supposed to matter.

So, if taste isn't the gear and it isn't being found in the the Pinterest mood boards, what is it?

Because if you can't buy it or hire it or install it into your brand system by December, the entire Cannes conversation is a very expensive way of avoiding an answer.

For me, it all leads back to pop music.

Pop music is a very useful place to look, because it’s been publicly running this taste experiment for 40 years with the results out in the open.

Musicians who last tend to have a clear idea of what they think music should feel like, and they hold that idea across every decision they make - what they write about, who they produce with, what the cover art looks like, what stages they will and won’t play. They’re not picking each choice on its own merits. They’re picking it because it fits an argument they’ve been making for years. When you say someone has taste, that’s what you’re actually seeing. You’re seeing the shape of what they believe, held steady across a decade of choices that rhyme with each other.

This is why we saw Rosalia win the Music Grand Prix at Cannes this year for her incredible album Berghain. She didn’t get there just by having a refined taste. She got there because Berghain is a real argument for her taste - flamenco crashing into Berlin techno, sacred choral into industrial club, a Spanish woman making a song named after the most gatekept nightclub in Europe. The album cover, the visuals, the collaborators, the way she sings - all of it downstream of a musical stance she was willing to defend.

Charli’s brat was the same. The deliberately ugly green was Charli saying pop in 2024 should feel sweaty and mean and a bit shit on purpose. Every brand that tried to brat-code its Instagram in the six months after face-planted for exactly the reason the performative male became an internet laughing stock. They wanted the green without the argument that produced the green.

Rick Rubin has been saying this on every podcast he’s ever appeared on. He doesn’t work from mood boards or reference decks. He sits in the room until something in his gut tells him the song is or isn’t right, and then he makes the artist do it again. That’s his entire method. Which is why every marketing person keeps inviting him to Cannes to explain the thing they’re trying to reverse-engineer, and why every marketing person walks away from those talks slightly disappointed, because Rubin can’t give them a framework. He can only describe what it feels like to have made up your mind about what’s good and stay there for 40 years. Which is why no model, no matter how much you spend on credits, is ever going to give it to you

The Cannes taste conversation may not go anwhere.

Conviction is not a thing you can buy from a vendor. It’s not something you can generate with AI credits.

Simon Cook is right that the industry is drowning in mediocrity right now, but the fix isn’t a Creative Brand Lion or a taste-led agency review or hiring someone from a magazine. The fix is having a point of view about your category that you’d defend to the hilt at 2am, and then making choices out of that point of view even when they piss half the room off.

One last good example of taste being used in creative decisions… The Ordinary won the Health & Wellness Grand Prix this year for a campaign that reclassified 49 beauty industry buzzwords as a spoofed periodic table - “age-defying,” “wrinkle-erasing,” all of it. It worked because The Ordinary has actually believed something specific about the beauty industry for a decade: it runs on unregulated language and inflated pseudo-science. Every product, every price, every ad they run has come out of that belief. The campaign is what that belief looks like when it takes a shape. Nobody in the room was surprised.

If you’re a creative strategist reading this and wondering where to start, the honest answer is that you don’t start with taste. You start by figuring out what you actually think about your category. What would you fight about after two drinks. What choices would make your competitors twitchy. If you can answer any of that, the aesthetic will sort itself out, because it always does. If you can’t, no creative director in the world is going to save you. You’ll probably just end up at Broadway Market, holding a Labubu, wondering why nobody’s laughing with you.

I’ve spent the better part of seven years in the influencer and social marketing world, which is a roundabout way of saying I think about why culture and trends move the way they do for a living.

Up All Night lives where music, pop culture, fashion and marketing strategy bleed into each other. I take the things you’re already half-watching - an album rollout, a brand collab, a sound that’s suddenly everywhere - and pull them apart to show you the strategy humming underneath. The aim is to leave you a little sharper in the room.

If that’s your frequency, subscribe — it’s free, it lands weekly(ish), and I’d love to have you here.

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So it’s real.

After a month of paper flyers, locking phones away at concerts and the now famous $1 show at Madison Square Garden (where she told a room of superfans that if they’d stuck an Apple Watch somewhere unmentionable to record it, please don’t post it online) - Phoebe Bridgers announced Lost Weekend this morning. It’s coming 14 August and will be a 16-track double album on the Dead Oceans record label, with the first single already coming TODAY.

I’ve been watching this rollout for weeks and I want to do something slightly uncouth with it. Not the usual “wasn’t that clever” teardown written safely after the dust settles. The rollout is happening right now - single tomorrow, album in seven weeks, tour in September. So I’m putting my version next to hers and grading it live. What she did, what I’d do, and where I think she’s leaving money - and fans - on the table.

Fair warning before I start handing out grades: Phoebe and her team are very, very good at this. The parts you can see, anyway. The interesting bit is the part you can’t.

One thing I’ve held front of mind the whole way through: Phoebe isn’t a pop machine. She’s not Sabrina, she’s not Charli, she’s never shrilled out a record behind Times Square billboards and an influencer seeding budget and a slot on SNL - and that restraint is the point of her. So this won’t be a maximalist plan with fifty creators and a stunt activation. Everything below is sized for who she actually is. (Although, a Phoebe SNL takeover would be incredible as host and musical guest. File it under things I’d love to see.)

Stage one: earning attention.

She doesn’t need my help here so let me get the applause out of the way. Because pretending I’d improve on this would be dishonest and you’d see straight through me.

The blackout and phone-free announcement definitely worked. I pulled her Google Trends data line and it tells the whole story without me editorialising - flat at around 11 for a full year, dead air, nobody searching. Then the pop-ups start, and the week of the MSG show it spikes to 100 which is nine times her baseline, built with no music to stream, no single, no huge TikTok push. Just locked phones and a rumour mill going crazy.

That’s a masterclass and I won’t bother dressing it as anything less. Going dark can still make the internet feral. Top of funnel: solved.

However, a spike is the easy part to admire and the easy part to misread. One week after that peak, the same Google Trends line falls off a cliff - down to 24. Attention this hot has a half-life on the internet of about seven days. So the question was never whether she could earn attention. She can summon it at will. The question is what she built to catch it.

Stage two: storing it.

Here’s the thing that’s been nagging me for a month.

Phoebe’s team locked phones away in Yondr pouches for the entirety of the shows. Rooms full of some of the most devoted fans she’ll ever be in a position to stand in front of, all of them present, all of them gagging to feel like insiders. And from what I can see from the outside - and I can only see the outside here - she captured none of it. No email at the door. No phone number. Everyone got pointed back to Instagram, which she rents from Mark Zuckerberg, and Ticketmaster, which keeps its own data and isn’t famous for sharing.

That’s the gap. She ran the most intimate fan event of her career, a bonafide goldmine for getting up close and personal with her fans during and after.

So here’s what I’d do, and it’s the one place my version breaks hard from hers. Keep the phones off - the no photos or videos mystique is great and I wouldn’t touch it. But give every person in that room a selection of official photos and videos afterwards. Properly shot, properly lit, fully licensed, theirs to post wherever they want, caption however they like, no rules. The catch is that to get them you hand over your email and number on the way in.

Look at what that does all at once. You capture the room into something you own. You take total control of the content supply, so the only footage on the internet is footage you shot and chose to release - which kills the leak problem before it starts, because there’s nothing to leak she didn’t hand out herself. And you turn every superfan into a distribution channel armed with gorgeous, on-brand assets they’re thrilled to share. Phones off, clout on. The scarcity holds and the list fills up.

Now, some artists will recoil at the words “data capture,” and I get it. It can feel cold, a bit too close to treating a room full of people who love you like rows in a spreadsheet.

But this is exactly where a label should be doing the heavy lifting, because capturing the contact is only the start. What matters is where it goes next. Those contacts become the front door to something owned: a Substack newsletter she actually writes, a QR code on the way out that drops you into a WhatsApp group heaving with other Phoebe fans, a Discord that’s hers and not rented from anyone. Somewhere the fandom can sit and talk between records instead of scattering back to the algorithm the second the night ends. And then the part that would make it sing - every so often, Phoebe herself drops in from a burner phone or account. Just turning up to reply and engage with a few people directly. That’s the move that turns a mailing list into an actual community.

Stage three: the re-spike.

The announcement itself is great, and credit where it’s due. Very minimal Instagram post, no detail, single held back a day so tomorrow gets it gets its own PR cycle. She’s still rationing information at the reveal, which is the right call - the withholding is what keeps the conversation open. Every outlet wrote “we don’t know much beyond that,” and that absence is the story.

My only problem is where it lands. The re-spike points, again, at Instagram and the press -rented ground. If I’m running this, the single doesn’t just go up on streaming and socials and hope. It comes with a pre-save that captures a contact and an SMS blast to the list I’ve been quietly building since Stage two. Same spike, except this one leaves something behind that I keep.

And I’d go further than a pre-save, because the communities from Stage two are the whole point - they’re the front row. So before the single touches streaming, the people in the WhatsApp group and the Discord hear it first. A voicenote from Phoebe with thirty seconds of the produced track, dropped in like she’s texting a mate. Then the full song surfacing on Substack or in the Discord hours ahead of everyone else, so the most devoted fans are the ones who got to hear it first - and the ones who get to tell everyone they did with then made-for-TikTok videos from the original shows shared around fans: free single distribution for Phoebe and social clout for them. This does more than re-spike the public. It rewards the people who handed over their details with first dibs on the thing they care about most.

Phoebe’s team are brilliant at making the wave. I’d make sure I had a bucket under it.

Stage four: converting.

The tour sold out in hours - go back to the Google Trends search data spike and look at what people were actually typing. Not “Phoebe Bridgers new song.” Things like: presale, tickets, MSG, Ticketmaster all up nineteen hundred per cent.

The double album on coloured vinyl is the other smart move, and it’s all about margin. Physical is the superfan flywheel. The Cure banked their last hype cycle into a hundred thousand pre-orders across five vinyl variants, and Phoebe’s reading off the same page (and, as I argued here, if you can’t release a remix album you release vinyl variants). Streaming, by contrast, pays about three-tenths of a cent a play, so I’d treat it as a touchpoint that feeds the list and never the destination.

Here’s how I’d take that physical touchpoint one step further, to close the loop the blackout opened. I’d press a live recording of each specific night - the actual first time those songs were ever played to a living soul, wobbles and all - and make it buyable only with a code sent to the contacts captured at that exact show (through my mechanic mentioned earlier).

The Roswell pressing goes to the Roswell room. The MSG recording goes to the people who stood at MSG. You weren’t allowed to film the night, so this becomes the only way to own it, and the only people who can buy it are the ones who were there. The thing you couldn’t capture on your phone turns into the rarest object in the catalogue.

Then I’d wrap it in a physical booklet - proper photography from that show, the stage, the room, faces in the crowd in the dark. Because (annoyingly) the thing people complained about with the no-phones rule is that they couldn’t prove they were there. No story, no post, no clout. This hands it back to them, and in far better quality than a shaky phone clip ever could. Every person who was in that room now has gorgeous, high-end content to post - them, at the show nobody else could film - and the album’s distribution multiplies tenfold off the back of these fans showing off that they were there. You took the one genuine complaint about the no-phone strategy and turned it into your biggest content engine.

So what’s the grade?

Here’s where I land. The rollout you can see is an A. The one you can’t drags it to a B+ - and that missing half-grade is the whole ballgame.

Phoebe Bridgers’ team are as good as anyone at earning attention and converting it. But the rollout has a hole in the middle, and it’s the same hole most artists have. Building spikes and pointing them at platforms and lists they don’t own. The attention is rented every single time. And rented attention is the line between a brilliant campaign and a career that compounds - between doing this from scratch again next album, and starting the next one with a hundred thousand people who already raised their hand.

So that’s my scorecard, and I’m leaving it open on purpose. Between now and 14 August I’ll be watching three things. Whether tomorrow’s single re-spikes her past that old trends data baseline or collapses back to 24 like the last one. Whether she waterfalls or sits on a single song. And whether any sign of capture - a list, an SMS, anything she owns - finally surfaces.

She earned the right to disappear. Now we find out whether she built something ownable to come back to.

Holly Brace is a writer, photographer and digital influencer strategist covering music, pop culture, fandom and the creator economy. She writes Up All Night, a newsletter about the ideas and internet behaviours shaping modern culture.

Fallow years like this are when the cows get the field back, and the rest of us get twelve months to argue about a lineup that doesn’t exist yet. Which is exactly what I’m going to do.

👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀

A blank page is dangerous. When Worthy Farm has nothing booked and a year to fill it, the gravitational pull is always toward the safe names - the Coldplays, the Arctic Monkeys, the Florence & The Machines - acts so safe you can announce in March and lose no interest.

I love a lot of those acts. But Glastonbury is the biggest festival in the world and right now its sitting in the middle of an unprecidented British music boom. The 2027 Pyramid Stage should reflect that.

I wrote a few months ago about the British music paradox — the British scene is exporting fully realised musical worlds globally, while the people building them can’t afford the rent. The flip side of that boom is a generation of home-grown artists going off globally right now.

If we flashback to the 90s, Glastonbury gave coveted headline slots to Pulp, Oasis and Radiohead when they were still newish and hungry (Emily Eavis still calls 1995 her heyday). So the question for 2027 isn’t “who’s safe.” It’s whether the festival is brave enough to do in 2027 what it did in the 90s: put its own on the biggest stage before someone else claims them during their peak.

These are my predictions. Some are sourced. Some are vibes. Most are both.

Killing the “they need another album” rule

The standard gatekeeping line and one I ran into when thinking about my predictions is that an act needs two or three big album cycles behind them to “justify” a Pyramid headline.

Fine in theory. Except the festival doesn’t apply that rule consistently. Olivia Rodrigo closed the Pyramid in 2025 on the back of two albums. Dua Lipa headlined in 2024 a few cycles in. Olivia in particular is still a baby in pop years - a handful of releases, a few summers of relevance, and she more than earned that closing slot.

My side reccomendation this week is to watch Olivia Rodrigo’s cover of CMAT’s When A Good Man Cries in the Radio 1 Live Lounge.

So the bar moves depending on who’s asking. A US pop star can headline three years into her career. A British or Irish act almost a decade deep gets told to come back with more product. That’s the inconsistency I want to push on, because most of my picks clear the Rodrigo bar comfortably.

The shoo-in: Harry Styles

If I’m being honest, my first prediction is a luke-warm take at best. But it’s still just right.

Harry dropped his fourth album, Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally., in March - a No.1 in the UK, the US, Australia and most of Europe, and a vinyl drop big enough to make headlines on its own. He’s already kicked off the Together, Together world tour, which runs to the end of this year and could roll straight into a 2027 festival summer. He’s a home-grown British superstar, he’s never headlined Glastonbury, and there’s already reporting that his label is shaping the whole tour rollout around Worthy Farm.

The bookies have made him the runaway favourite, somewhere around 1/3. There’s also the Coachella-2027 chatter - a second desert headline slot - still a rumour, so take it with a pinch of salt. But the Glastonbury case writes itself: new album, live tour winding down, no prior headline to tick off. It’s his to lose.

The one they keep relegating: Charli XCX

Here’s where I get very loud.

Charli headlined the Other Stage at Glastonbury 2025 and the reviews said what everyone in that crowd (including me) were all thinking - her set overshadowed the actual Pyramid bill-toppers.

NME called her the biggest British artist on the planet. She did all of that from the second stage, the same way she’s was parked just below the top line at Coachella in the same year. The pattern is always the same: give Charli the slot beneath the slot she’s clearly ready for.

This is a woman who turned Brat into one of the defining music moments of the decade so far - a whole aesthetic, a colour, a vocabulary the entire internet borrowed (I dug into that machine in the paradox piece). She cleaned up at the Brits and the Grammys. She has an extensive back catalogue, almost two decades of graft, one of the most talked about live shows of 2024 AND 2025, and a crowd that would register on the richter scale. And she’s already started a new era - her new single Rock Music landed earlier in May, followed swiftly by SS26 and an album announcment - so the timing lines up for 2027.

Every box the festival claims to care about, she ticks twice. Put her on the Pyramid. There’s no version of “she’s not ready” that survives contact with that Other Stage set, or any performance since Brat was released.

The home-grown mainstays: The xx

This is my precition I’ll defend hardest.

The xx haven’t released an album since 2017, and the new one is confirmed-in-progress rather than confirmed-with-a-date. They’re playing a huge 2026 festival run - Coachella, Primavera, the lot - as a comeback year. So yes, on paper, “they need to put the record out first.”

But apply the Olivia Rodrigo standard. The xx are a decade-plus into being a fixture of British music, and as individuals they never went anywhere - Jamie xx alone is one of the most important figures in UK dance music right now, Romy’s solo record was a club landmark. If the festival can hand the closing slot to a two-album US star, it can give a homecoming-album moment to a band that helped define the modern British sound. The record dropping in late 2026, early 2027 would make this a layup. I think it’s coming.

The fresh blood: Fontaines D.C.

We are overdue a brand-new band at the top of the bill, and Eavis knows it - she’s publicly admitted there aren’t enough new rock acts coming through and pined for her Pulp-and-Oasis heyday. Fontaines are the answer to her own complaint.

Fontaine’s album Romance was a huge leap in 2024: a No.2 album, a Mercury nomination, two Grammy nods, Choice Music Prize, a run that turns a great band into a headline act. Mojo literally reviewed their last Glastonbury set under the line “future headliners.” A fifth album in time for 2027 would seal the deal.

If I’m being honest with myself: 2027 is more likely to land them a Pyramid sub-headline or the Other Stage top slot rather than the closing slot itself, with the full headline one cycle later. But they’re the most credible “new band” pick on the board, and exactly the bet the festival used to make in the 80’s and 90’s without flinching. And sorry Emily, but we have to stop wheeling out Colplay and Arctic Monkeys out every single time we need a band on the bill.

The NEED, not the want: Kylie

I have a bone to pick about 2019.

Kylie Minogue’s Legends slot that year became the most-watched set in Glastonbury history at the time. She is as much a national treasure in the UK as she is here in Australia, with a back catalogue that embarrasses half the acts who’ve actually headlined. And right now in 2026 she’s having yet another moment that won’t quit: the Chanel campaign recreating “Come Into My World” with Margot Robbie, the Netflix documentary, new music, the AFL Grand Final halftime show here in Aus. She is booked, busy, and everywhere. Quite right too.

The honest complication is that the Legends slot tends to be an artist’s Glastonbury moment. Nobody graduates from the Sunday teatime singalong to a Friday-night headline. I will die on the hill that the Kylie legends slot was one of the biggest festival booking faux pas in history. It’s not like Kylie is relying on back catalogue alone, either. She is still releasing hits, claiming one of the songs of the summer in 2023 with Padam Padam, and follow-up album Tension shifting over half a million units worldwide and clocking over 1 billion streams.

So this is less a prediction than a demand: the back catalogue and the cultural standing were always headline-sized. The teatime slot was the festival under-rating her, and I’d love to see them correct it.

The wildcard: Sabrina Carpenter

Fresh of the back of Sabrina-chella, the “Sabrinawood” set that got the rave reviews with the Madonna guest moment that broke the internet. At Coachella, Sabrina proved she can carry a festival-closing slot.

The Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish precedent does the rest of the work for me here - a young US pop star headlining the Pyramid is no longer a huge leap, and Rodrigo nailed it in 2025. Sabrina has the showmanship, the songs and would bring in the crowd. The catch is that a 2027 headline probably does need a new album to hang it on in this case, and I can’t find anything confirmed for that window yet. So she’s a genuine wildcard rather than a banker - but if the record lands, watch this space.

The home-grown artists I’d love to see

If the festival is serious about championing its own, the names are right there.

Sam Fender is the one the bookies already have near the front - People Watching was the best-selling British album of 2025, and he’s stadium-sized now. I haven’t included Sam in my main predictions because of chatter behind the scenes of him taking a break - but this hasn’t stopped the bookies putting their backing into him with their whole chest. I think he would be a fantastic headliner at any point from now.

Olivia Dean has also had the year of her life - Artist and Album of the Year at the Brits, a Grammy for Best New Artist - and her duet with Fender, “Rein Me In,” has spent a record-tying run at No.1 and is shaping up as the song of the summer. She’d join him on that stage in a heartbeat. Also, the 4 year pipeline from BBC Introducing Stage in 2023 to headliner in 2027 would be a British music success story I’d LOVE to see - she’d bring in the crowd too.

And then there’s RAYE - the patron saint of that fan-powered, label-defying British success story I keep writing about. By 2027 she’ll be two albums in and still hold the record for the most Brits won in a single night, all of it built independently with no major label behind her. While she’s not at someone like Adele’s commercial scale, no - but the voice, the songbook and the showmanship are headline-sized already. She belongs in any serious conversation about who tops a bill.

That’s three home-grown acts the festival could build a whole weekend around. The talent isn’t the bottleneck. The nerve is.

What the early bookies are saying

For balance, here’s where the money is going currently.

The early markets and online chatter are dominated by

• Harry Styles

• Sam Fender

• Oasis - though Liam’s made his feelings about the Pyramid Stage very clear.

• Taylor Swift -whose 2020 headline slot was killed by the pandemic and never rescheduled - some reporting has her close to “nailed on” but I’m sceptical.

• Lady Gaga - another I would actually love to see, but again sceptical it will actually happen.

And then there’s the usual Ed Sheeran safety net, the perennial Radiohead-reunion fantasy and a sentimental push for Pulp off their 2025 comeback (which I wouldn’t be opposed to - they were one of the highlights of Glasto 2025).

These odds are closer to bookmaker theory than insider knowledge though, and Eavis has a long history of calling early headliner stories “nonsense.” Treat the lot - mine included - as the fun part of a fallow year boredom.

And there’s a structural reason to watch the female names being floated. Glastonbury’s pipeline of women at the top of the Pyramid is still thin, Eavis has acknowledged it repeatedly, and 2027 is a chance to do something about it.

Bet on your own

Glastonbury will always book for who’s popular, and it should - it’s a festival, not a charity for my taste. But it’s also a British institution sitting on top of the most exciting era of home-grown music in a generation, an era built, as I argued last time, on the backs of people who can barely afford to make it.

The least the biggest stage in the world can do is point the spotlight back at them.

So I think Harry or Sam are the locks, Charli’s the one they owe, The xx and Fontaines are British and Irish band bets I’ll die on, Kylie’s the overdue correction, and Sabrina’s the wildcard. Tell me where I’m wrong.

Up All Night is a weekly(ish) read on music, pop culture and the marketing machine underneath it. If you want the next one in your inbox, you know what to do.

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If you’ve just landed here: this is your fortnightly briefing on music, fashion, pop culture and marketing - written for people who want to understand what’s happening, not just what happened. You leave each edition knowing the why behind the moment before everyone else has caught up. Glad you’re here.

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This fortnight Ariana Grande takes UK charts from Sam and Olivia. Burberry drafted the World Cup into a fashion campaign. Dua Lipa married Callum Turner in custom Schiaparelli. Madonna partnered with Grindr. Euphoria ended, Alexa Demie rises from the ashes.

A lot happened. Here’s what you need.

MUSIC & ENTERTAINMENT

• Ariana Grande is running a release like an expert marketing campaign - and it’s working on three fronts at once. “hate that i made you love me” debuted at UK #1, her 8th chart-topper and first since “Positions” in 2020, with 8.7 million day-one Spotify streams. She also launched the Eternal Sunshine tour in Oakland on 6 June and a strawberry-bright Swarovski campaign which landed in the same window. The single isn’t the product, the coordinated rollout is.

• Taylor Swift’s not-so-surprise release of “I Knew It, I Knew You,” her Jack Antonoff–produced song for Toy Story 5, trailed the by Toy Story–coded “TS” billboards and countdown teasers. Pixar has borrowed the Swift-scale fandom to revive a franchise that you could argue should have been left alone in 2010.

• The first night of Primavera Sound 2026 became a case study in how fast festival prestige evaporates when weather meets patchy contingency planning. Forecasts had already flagged storm risks, and by the end of the night gusts of around 80km/h had compromised the two main stages - taking Alex G, Mac DeMarco, Massive Attack, Doja Cat and Bad Gyal off the bill. Doja Cat jumped on socials in a tearful apology in her full stage getup.

• The weekend recovered into the kind of live moment that defines an album era. On Saturday at Primavera, Olivia Rodrigo played a surprise set and brought out The Cure’s Robert Smith to debut “What’s Wrong With Me”. It’s the payoff to a year of Cure-coded breadcrumbs, from their Glastonbury 2025 duet to naming a single “The Cure,”. Smith’s own 29-song set the night before — the band’s first show in 18 months - only sharpened the moment.

• Lily Allen & JADE released the “Beg For Me” remix - a smart intergenerational British pop co-sign and a percussion-heavy reimagining picked out by The Times in a crowded release week, with JADE already hinting she could push it into her live set, after joining Lily Allen on stage at Mighty Hoopla for the live debut of the remix.

• Madonna teamed up with Grindr to take over Times Square to perform “Hung Up” — turning the world’s most expensive billboard into a free, content-ready stage. Announed in the app just 30 minutes before the pop up happened, the moment served Spectacle as earned media, from the person who more or less invented the move. This is part of an ongoing partnership with Grindr as she gears up to release the hotly anticipated Confessions II.

RISING STAR: F3miii. The Nigerian-Irish producer-vocalist took “NOBLE” to #34 for his first UK Top 40 single, with the same track at #23 on the ARIA chart. Cross-market traction on a debut hit is a very positive signal.

• Euphoria Season 3 came to an emotional close. The finale matters less as television than as a release valve for its cast - a reminder that a show’s end is a talent-strategy starting gun.

• Toy Story 5 hits cinemas on the 19th June 2026, prompting a lot of brand collaborations a la Barbie - most noteably Adidas, who dropped their Toy Story capsule collection on June 5th.

POP CULTURE

• In what is the major pop culture story of the week Dua Lipa married Callum Turner in custom Schiaparelli at London Old Marylebone Town Hall — the bride wore wide-brim hat, opera gloves, the full quiet-luxury bride said to be inspired by Bianca Jagger and Callum wore a tone on tone Ferragamo suit.

• Google also teamed with Dua Lipa’s editorial platform Service95 to drop 12 shared lists inside Maps - her favourite spots across cities including London, LA, Tokyo, Paris, Mexico City and Melbourne each with a personal recommendation and a pic from her own camera roll. The last few years has established Dua as the tastemaker of cool, and bringing this to a tool everyone uses stopped behaving like an ad and starts behaving like a genuine useful feature.

• Steven Bartlett became official face of optimisation fatigue - off the back of a resurfaced clip with his line that a couple of glasses of wine “ruined three days” because he slept worse, trained worse and even “podcasted worse,” all tracked on his Whoop. The pile-on widened past him into a rejection of quantified-self culture — Greg James posting that “optimisation is killing fun,”. Steven is the officialy the UK figurehead for unnessary optimisation culture making ordinary pleasures sound like an operational failure.

• Susan Boyle partnered with Cornetto and it was glorious. The wiped Instagram, the blonde-bobbed "new era" makeover (prompting a full write up in British Vogue) and the studio teasers all read as a music comeback, right up until the reveal: it was a Cornetto campaign, culminating in "Just One Cornetto (reMAXed)," a dance remake of the old jingle. A faux-comeback as the ad, during a time where the UK is aboslutely Susan “Boyle-ing” - bravo!

• Alexa Demie of Euphoria fame appeared in a limited-edition i-D cover shot by Petra Collins, and a Hollywood Reporter cover story timed to the show wrapping. The Shameless podcast did a great break-down of the politcs around Euphoria fame, and why these covers signal a new move for Alexa.

• And - last but not least - the FIFA World Cup kicks off on the 12th June. Gird your loins.

FASHION & BEAUTY

The campaign of the fortnight is Burberry’s “A Good Sport” - and it’s a masterclass in heritage brands buying cultural relevance through casting and timing.

Timed to the World Cup kicking off this month, it fields a squad that crosses sport, screen and fashion: Romeo Beckham, Son Heung-min, Declan Rice, Eberechi Eze, Lionesses captain Leah Williamson, US defender Naomi Girma, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, Ted Lasso‘s Jason Sudeikis and British national treasure Stephen Graham. Chief creative officer Daniel Lee leaned the whole thing on a very British idea - that “being a good sport” is a national character trait - and stitched the check across trenches, Harringtons and a new Knight Runner sneaker. The genius is the breadth of the casting - every name imports a different fandom and demographic, and the trench sits in the middle of all of them.

It also lands on real numbers. Burberry just swung back to a £21 million net profit from a £75 million loss, with comparable store sales up 2% - its “Burberry Forward” turnaround, high-visibility activations (this summer it’s taking over the F. Scott Fitzgerald–era Hôtel Belles Rives on the Riviera) and culturally plugged-in casting (their influencer marketing game is something I refer to in my day job constantly) are explicitly there to convert brand heat into sales.

The wider luxury fortnight:

• Hermès showed Fall 2026 in Los Angeles

• Haider Ackermann dropped his pre Autumn 2026 Tom Ford campaign

• Margiela’s personal items went to auction. The creative director’s worldview is now the asset, and houses are selling it as such.

This fortnight’s celebrity tie-ups all run similar plays, and fragrance is the category everyone’s storming.

• Phlur x Suni Lee

• QUAY x the Nader Sisters

• Bottega Veneta dropped its first fragrance collection, Alta.

• Touchland built an entire LA pop-up (”The Blush Factory”) around a single body mist.

Beauty’s colour story has moved on from copper to creamy.

• Painted by Esther - widely credited with popularising the transition-blush technique - was named MAC’s official “blush blueprint” after a public row over Patrick Ta claiming the look.

• Niche to watch: the Korean lash lift, up a frankly unhinged 20,082% year-on-year in UK searches per Fresha - the natural-lash correction to a decade of heavy extensions.

• Speaking of Korean beauty, Anua has brought on Kendall Jenner as their global ambassador.

• Vaseline also collaborated with Jennie as global ambassador to prove that basic doesn’t mean boring.

TRENDS & INFLUENCERS

• “Women Belong in the Kitchen” / “fine, I’ll cook” - Creators flip the phrase to show off how they “cook” in their actual niche, over BTS b-roll. Niche fit: Founder and process content, beauty, food - anything with a craft to show.

• “Food Jutsu” - A deliberate camera shake masks a cut, so a food/drink/product etc. appears mid-transition. Low skill, high payoff, easy to brief, looks more expensive than it is. The BTS of this is also trending.

• “You have until the end of this song” - A race-the-clock hook over a niche task, the tension does the retention work. Using a sound with dialogue from Apex out to the track of Go by the Chemical Brothers. Frame a genuine constraint - a sale window, a restock - as the clock.

• “Reaching Out” - Using an audio clip of Human Nature by Michael Jackson - strike a pose when the beat drops to show the instant you change the second the right thing is said. For brands the “right thing” is your offer or feature; the pose is the reaction.

CREATOR ECONOMY

• YouTube wired Google’s Gemini Omni model into Shorts’ Remix tool, letting anyone AI-rework a creator’s video. For marketers, this is the moment “remixing” graduated from light editing to realistic, scaled manipulation of other people’s content.

• MrBeast’s Beast Industries confirmed it’s building an AI-driven, two-sided creator marketplace connecting creators to Global 1000 brands — the programmatic creator economy, arriving.

AI remix is the format story - content is becoming raw material others rework from creator content, which changes the brief meaning building for remixing.

LOCAL SPOTLIGHTS

UK

• Peter Phillips - the King’s nephew - married NHS paediatric nurse Harriet Sperling on 6 June in custom Emilia Wickstead, with the full senior-royal turnout.

• Aimee Smale (founder of Odd Muse) stepped into the celebrity space, appearing on Olivia Attwood’s podcast to talk business and balance - a founder built on documenting the journey now engaging TV personalities rather than other founders. A small but real signal of where founder-influence heads next.

• Marc Jacobs Beauty ran a London takeover in Selfridges, a tidy read on how a legacy beauty brand re-earns Gen-Z attention using IRL experiences.

AUSTRALIA

• G Flip’s “Bed on Fire” jumped to #33 on the ARIA chart after appearing in Amazon’s runaway hit Off Campus — a rare home-grown bullet in an import-heavy Top 50, and a good prompt to back Australian talent before the ARIA Awards conversation starts.

• Kylie Minogue’s Netflix docuseries KYLIE is having a sustained cultural moment - a reinvention-and-resilience story that’s pulled fresh waves of praise and press this fortnight, and a neat local bookend to the narrative-control thesis above.

See you in a fortnight.

A lot happened. Here’s what you need.

MUSIC & ENTERTAINMENT

• Ella Langley is the music story of 2026 and I’m not sure enough people are saying it. She’s holding #1 and #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 simultaneously — “Choosin’ Texas” at the top, “Be Her” right behind it - the first artist this year to do that, with “Choosin’ Texas” now 30 weeks on chart. “Be Her” is one of the dominant TikTok audio of the month right now, and the two songs are propping each other up. The flywheel between the algorithm and the chart is the actual story.

• In the UK, Sam Fender and Olivia Dean’s 12-week run at #1 looks like it may end soon. Drake is projected to take it this week with two tracks in the Top 4, Olivia Rodrigo looks like she might also land her 5th UK #1. Let the battle begin, do you think Sam/Olivia will hold on for song of the summer status?

• Spotify announced something worth watching this week. They’re launching “Reserved” - a feature that holds two tickets back from general sale for an artist’s most engaged Premium listeners, with eligibility determined by actual streaming behaviour, not presale codes. It rolls out this summer with select tours. A small idea with enormous ambition, Spotify is inserting itself between artists and the live events industry, and streaming data is the leverage. For fans: being a genuine top listener now has a tangible reward beyond Wrapped.

• Eurovision happened. Bulgaria won with DARA’s “Bangaranga” and the song debuted at #12 on Spotify’s Global Top 50 within two days of the final. Five countries boycotted this year over Israel’s participation — Ireland, Spain, Slovenia, the Netherlands and Iceland. The UK finished last again with one point, nul from the public vote (“but Eurovision is never political!” 🙄) More on that below.

• The highly anticipated Off Campus got renewed for Season 2 before its Season 1 premiere had even aired. The Prime Video hockey romance debuted 13 May and already has an 8.3/10 on IMDb and 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. Pre-renewal before broadcast is a streaming signal, not a courtesy — it means Amazon already knows what it has. Watch for the fandom content wave to build; this is the next BookTok-to-screen pipeline a la The Summer I Turned Pretty. It’s already taken over my FYP.

• The Devil Wears Prada 2 crossed $545.6M globally. Miranda Priestly audio clips are still running four weeks in. Anne Hathaway singing the official Arsenal song “North London Forever” are also resurfacing, alongside her carrying an Arsenal shirt at the DWP2 London Premier - if you want to die from cringe watch here.

• Jeff Probst accidentally spoiled part of the Survivor Season 50 finale before it aired, which somehow became a bigger story than whoever won.

• Emily in Paris is ending with Season 6 — Netflix and Lily Collins confirmed it this week. I predict the “Emily in Paris” aesthetic is about to become the “Sex & The City” of retrospective fashion content, but with more risk of being seriously dated.

POP CULTURE

• Kendall Jenner and Jacob Elordi were spotted on a Hawaii getaway alongside Kylie Jenner and Timothée Chalamet. Neither has confirmed anything, but the double-date is what moved this from rumour to story. The Coachella and Oscars afterparty sightings had people talking; Hawaii with your sister and her boyfriend is confirmation.

• Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper announced her first pregnancy this week. The audience that grew up listening to her talk about sex and situationships is about to watch her become a mother. That’s a lot to do in public.

• Miley Cyrus received her Hollywood Walk of Fame star. The Hannah Montana-to-icon arc getting the official plaque of approval.

FASHION

• The show of the week is Jonathan Anderson’s Dior Cruise 2027 at LACMA (13 May). His first Cruise collection for the house, and it arrived as a thesis statement. Starting point: a 1949 Haute Couture jacket worn by Marlene Dietrich in Hitchcock’s Stage Fright. From there: California poppy florals, Philip Treacy headpieces spelling “DIOR” and “STAR” in Isabella Blow-style featherwork, and Ed Ruscha shirts stamped with bold text.

• More from Dior - the shirt everyone’s talking about reads “Says I, To Myself, Says I” - the catchphrase of Uncle Colm from Derry Girls, which is where Anderson is from (Magherafelt, County Derry). Irish and Northern Irish publications flooded socials connecting their identity to the Dior house for arguably the first time. A blink-and-you-miss-it reference for one specific cultural community. That’s what fashion storytelling looks like when it’s working - earned specificity, not paid reach. Anderson filed it under a shirt, all hail JA.

• Also in cruise shows: Paris Hilton walked the Gucci Cruise 2027 runway as a brunette with side bangs — swapping the most recognisable blonde in two decades for one show. Fashion press called it a rebrand and Gucci seemed to get more coverage from her hair than most of the collection.

• Juicy Couture UK timed a WAG-inspired collection to the World Cup — velour, low-rise, “Juicy WAG” across the chest and partnering with none other than iconic WAG Abbey Clancy. Whether you take it seriously or not, it’s sharp cultural calendar-jacking and probably my favourite fashion story of the week. The 2000s WAG aesthetic has been bubbling as a reference point for years now, and someone at Juicy read the room.

• There was a lot of celebrity-brand crossover this week, and the pattern is worth noting. Zara launched a “Benito Antonio” capsule with Bad Bunny — high street giving a global superstar the hero-product treatment to access his fanbase directly.

• Jungkook announced a Calvin Klein collection - the K-pop x American heritage brand axis continues.

• Emma Chamberlain fronted Mugler’s Angel fragrance in full bald-cap, high-fashion mode — the visual is doing serious heavy lifting and it works.

• A$AP Rocky teamed with Puma for the Mostro 3D Mule. Stars aren’t just fronting campaigns anymore they’re attaching their names to product, and the line between ambassador and collaborator/investor is disappearing.

A few quieter drops worth logging:

• Aimé Leon Dore launched SS26 Part Five

• Adidas x AVAVAV returned with another collaboration.

On beauty: soft copper is the hair colour of the season per Glamour UK, dominating salon trend predictions and Pinterest searches. It works across skin tones, which is why it’s breaking broad. Hailey Bieber teased Rhode’s summer launch — fans are reading it as a bronzer and possible highlighter ahead of summer. And Birkenstock launched five vegan nail polishes — its first beauty product ever.

The playbook for non-beauty brands entering beauty as cultural strategy is now settled: heritage aesthetic, category extension, cultural access. Watch for more footwear, homewares and beverage brands to move in this direction before the year is out.

TRENDS & INFLUENCERS

• “Put The Phone To Your Ear” — Volume still thin, surfacing consistently on UK and AU FYPs over the last 10 days. Creators ask viewers to physically hold the phone to their ear so the audio whispers a confession, a secret, something intimate through a Voice Note — breaking the fourth wall and simulating a private conversation. Fits beauty confessionals, music teases, anything that trades on closeness with an audience.

• “My Camera Roll is Full” — Creators open their camera roll to delete photos, immediately abandon the mission because every single one is too good to go. Nostalgic, emotionally satisfying, endlessly rewatchable. The format works for anyone with a visual archive worth showing — travel, food, behind-the-scenes, life moments. Brands with strong imagery can use it as a soft portfolio flex that doesn't feel like a portfolio.

• “Don’t Post Your Work…” — Tame Impala, “Dracula”. #2 on the UK Singles Chart. BTS of working - showing raw process, late nights, imperfect realities. Works for any brand with a production process worth showing: beauty labs, kitchens, recording studios, campaign shoots. The talent is your staff, not an influencer.

• “Skinny Waist” — Slayyyter, “DANCE”. Volume still building in mainstream, Slayyyter’s TV debut of the song may increase trend relevancy. Low barrier to entry, high visual payoff — the kind of trend that rewards commitment over technical skills.

• Doing What The Top Comment Says — Some accounts are using this to really blow up their engagement. Being super specific here works, especially since the public could have this backfire on you. Proceed with caution, great for creators needing engagement.

CREATOR ECONOMY

• Revolve posted its strongest Q1 revenue growth in four years — 16% up — with influencer-led marketing directly credited alongside AI shopping tools and FWRD demand. The concrete return on outcome-based creator spend is now in an earnings report. Brands still optimising for impressions should take note.

• The conversation everyone’s going to be having at Cannes Lions in June is already happening in trade press now: the one-off post deal is structurally over. Creators are being contracted on performance metrics, treated as long-term partners, and integrated across the full funnel — not activated for a campaign and ghosted until next quarter.

LOCAL SPOTLIGHTS

UK

• The UK finished last at Eurovision 2026. One point — nul from the public vote. The BBC’s internally-selected entry “Eins, Zwei, Drei” by Look Mum No Computer, performed in a league of its own, just not the right one. The calls for an open national selection process are now louder than they’ve been in years, and the post-mortem has dominated UK culture coverage all week.

• Celebrity Traitors Season 2 started filming at Ardross Castle this week. The cast is genuinely formidable: Maya Jama, Bella Ramsey, Michael Sheen, Richard E. Grant, Leigh-Anne Pinnock, James Blunt, Joe Lycett, Joanne McNally, Ross Kemp, Jerry Hall. Maya Jama appearing as a contestant in a show that overlaps with Love Island filming windows has the press asking pointed questions about what her long-term presenting future looks like.

• The ‘Vivienne Westwood & Jewellery’ exhibition is due to make a debut at V&A Dundee — a significant institutional moment for a house that doesn’t always get the full retrospective treatment it deserves.

AUS

• Delta Goodrem came 4th at Eurovision 2026 with “Eclipse” — 287 points. Australia’s best result since Dami Im came second in 2016. She’s now reportedly generating UK chart conversation for the first time in over 20 years. Watch the charts next week.

• I’m A Celebrity Australia has been axed. Pedestrian.TV reported this week that Paramount has scapped the Network 10 format, with ITV reportedly shopping it to rivals. Network 10’s response was non-committal. Viewer numbers dropped from 651K (2025 finale) to 571K (2026 finale), and the winner this year was Triple J’s Concetta Caristo — which tells you exactly where the format’s audience has migrated.

• Robert Irwin’s Columbia Sportswear campaign launched globally this week — the one where he outruns 100 life-sized inflatable crocodiles in the Australian outback to show off the Tellurix Titanium OutDry shoe. The pre-launch fake movie trailer stunt drew 34K Instagram likes on the tease alone. As a case study in making a footwear campaign feel cinematic without a film budget, it’s excellent.

See you in a fortnight.

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However, we’re seeing the replacement model finally take shape: creators demanding ownership instead of fees, and brands finally catching up. Case in point: Charli XCX just became Nothing’s first global brand ambassador. And their newest shareholder.

On May 12, Nothing announced the deal, adding Charli to a roster of music industry partnerships that includes recent Swedish House Mafia collaborations. Financial terms weren’t disclosed, but the framing was explicit: this isn’t a traditional endorsement. Charli will be helping directly build the brand by putting skin in the game rather than just promoting it.

This validates something I predicted back in December: 2026 would be the year creators started to stop renting their influence and started negotiating for equity. Turns out, I was early but not wrong. The shift is here.

Equity doesn’t just change the economics - it changes the creative output

The Charli deal is being reported everywhere, and is profound because equity restructures the incentive in a way that changes what the output from the partner actually is.

Look at Alix Earle and Poppi. She invested in May 2024, which meant her content after that point wasn't contractual - it was self-interested in the best way. Protecting her own money produced a different level of conviction for her audience.

This paid off for Earle when PepsiCo acquired the brand for $1.95 billion in March 2025. Industry estimates put her proceeds between $20-40 million, an insane takeaway compared to what Poppi would have paid for a simple TikTok deliverable. She’s since repeated the play with SipMARGS and Gorgie - this is now an investment portfolio strategy, not a one-off.

Robbie Williams also took equity in Heaps Normal. Basketball player Stephen Curry joined Unrivaled’s cap table. In the same vein, Hailey Bieber’s Rhode sold to e.l.f. Beauty for up to $1 billion. The pattern is clear: the smartest celebrity-brand deals of 2025-26 came with ownership, not just fees.

For brands, the math is lopsided once you compare: $500K/year in cash content over three years stops working the day you stop paying. Vesting 1% to a creator whose content drives equivalent results costs nothing unless there’s an exit.

Nothing’s partner list is its distribution strategy

Most challenger brands treat celebrity investors as validation for consumers. Nothing inverted this with bringing Charli on - which will help unlock editorial and cultural access that traditional tech marketing can’t buy.

Charli XCX doesn’t directly move smartphone units to her fanbase. She moves Nothing into Hypebeast’s coverage rotation. She makes Vogue Business cover a $1.3B tech startup like it’s a fashion collab. She will (hopefully) talk about it in droves on her social and in interviews.

Nothing has figured out that in a mature, commodified category, the key moat is taste-signal - which travels through cultural gatekeepers, not performance ads.

The playbook has four pieces:

• Product-as-brand (transparent backs, exposed Glyph LEDs)

• Founder-as-creator (Carl Pei posting competitor reviews on YouTube)

• Off-schedule cultural infiltration (Lyas’s watch party, Central Saint Martins partnership, Lakmé Fashion Week collaborations)

• Cap-table-as-marketing.

Nothing crossed 1 million quarterly shipments for the first time in Q2 2025, up 177% year-on-year. The fashion press footprint — Highsnobiety, Hypebae, Vogue Business, Russh — looks nothing like a smartphone OEM’s. That’s the point.

Counter-cultural marketing has a built-in expiration date

Beyond the celebrity investor strategy, Nothing is also sponsoring creators with genuine cultural pull — like French creator Lyas and his La WATCHPARTY.

The La WATCHPARTY worked for Nothing in March 2026 because it was the anti-Vogue option. French influencer Lyas broadcasts runway shows during live events to people who couldn’t get into the official shows. Nothing sponsored a PFW one because it was counter-cultural.

Vogue then tried to launch their own watch party. The value proposition — being counter to the mainstream — collapses the moment it succeeds with a mainstream brand.

There is a structural problem with off-schedule cultural infiltration as a strategy, though. Nothing are clearly great at getting there early, but the playbook only works until it doesn’t. The second every challenger brand sponsors a watch party, watch parties stop being cool.

Smart brands aren’t looking for one Lyas to ride for three years. They’re scouting the next underground operator with 47K followers doing something weirder. The half-life of counter-cultural partnerships is shrinking, and brands that don’t plan for expiration are renting cool they’ll have to eventually give back.

What to watch

If Nothing’s FY26 shipment numbers drop on their YoY growth, the cap-table-as-marketing thesis is probably in trouble.

If they hold, I predict at least three more major creator-investor deals in consumer tech within 12 months. (Side note - imagine Paris Hilton coming in as a Motorola investor.)

A key watch out for brands: If a creator says no to equity in your brand, they’re telling you they don’t believe in what you’re building. I would start looking at ownership for your top three creator partners, or they will most likely walk to a competitor who will. The big brands still operating on purely flat-fee ambassador contracts are sadly already behind.

Zara Larsson released Midnight Sun: Girls Trip this week and it’s landing sooo well.

Pitchfork named the title track remix Best New Track. The Fader compared “Saturn’s Return” to Madonna’s Ray of Light, a fitting comparison for a homage to the ethereal pop of yesteryear.

Every single track on Midnight Sun Girls Trip gets a female feature - PinkPantheress, Shakira, Robyn, Tyla, Kehlani - plus new unreleased material. At a Philadelphia soundcheck in March, Larsson confirmed she’d “literally” modelled it on Charli XCX’s Brat remix campaign - a rare instant where an artist didn’t pretend this was some spontaneous artistic decision.

Zara and her team saw something that has been working for her pop girly peers and built on it, which is exactly what the best remix albums have always done. Treating the song as a starting point, not a finished product.

What’s happening in pop right now isn’t really a comeback story. The remix album never fully died, but it spent around fifteen years underground while the industry tried to figure out what it was supposed to be for in a post-vinyl era.

Now it’s back -evolved, sharper, and doing something the streaming era genuinely needed. The question worth asking isn’t just why now, but why this format? Because the answer says something real about where pop is and who’s driving it.

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Where did the remix album come from?

What you might not know is that it was The B-52s who were one of the first to release a fully formed remix album. They probably didn’t know they were inventing anything when they released Party Mix! in 1981 - it was just a filler album, a way to buy time before their third album by splicing six songs from their first two records into club-ready medleys.

Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Ecstatic Dancing and The Human League’s Love and Dancing followed in 1982, formalising what the B-52s had stumbled into. But of course, it took no other than Madonna to prove the format could actually sell records.

Released in 1987, You Can Dance by Madonna moved five million copies. Not because people were desperate for remixes of songs they already owned, but because the versions on that record were genuinely different. Famed remixers like Shep Pettibone and Arthur Baker were rebuilding some of fans favourite songs from scratch.

Michael Jackson followed suit in 1997 with Blood on the Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix, which sold somewhere between 6 and 11 million copies and hit #1 across Europe. Sony initially wanted a 5-track EP; Jackson pushed for a full album because he knew what the format could sustain. Jennifer Lopez confirmed that this format worked in 2002 when J to tha L–O! The Remixes became the first remix album to debut at #1 on the Billboard 200.

By then, the remix album wasn’t a side project or filler albums anymore. It was a legitimate second album, and the golden age ran from 1981 through to the early 2000s - fuelled mostly by vinyl culture, where the 12-inch single ruled clubs.

When digital killed the physical album

iTunes and streaming killed the remix album for a time. Not immediately, and probably not intentionally, but when Apple unbundled the album in 2003, the incentive to package remixes into a coherent second project collapsed. Individual tracks were what people bought. The 12-inch became a relic of days passed.“Remix” started meaning adding a rapper to a pop song without touching the production.

Jermaine Dupri said it plainly: “Today when people do remixes, they don’t do nothing to the beats, they just put ten rappers on a record.” The creative reauthorship that made the format meaningful in the 80s and 90s had been gutted entirely.

The industry replaced remix albums with deluxe editions, and that’s where things went genuinely commercial.

Deluxe editions are structurally designed to game the streaming charts - they bundle new tracks with old ones, count them toward the original album’s performance, repeat. Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology nearly doubled an already long record the same night the original was released. The strategy became so transparent that even fans started rolling their eyes.

By 2024, critics were writing essays about deluxe fatigue. The format had exposed its own mechanics so completely that it stopped looking like anything other than a chart tool.

The art and science of the 2020s remix album

From 2020 onwards, we’ve seen a clear trajectory of pop’s slow reconciliation with club culture.The strategic math behind it is super clean - one album becomes 20 TikTok moments, 15 guest features, 12 more months of rollout.

Dua Lipa actually set the table in 2020 with Club Future Nostalgia - a full remix album with The Blessed Madonna, Yaeji, Moodymann, Gwen Stefani and Mark Ronson reworking tracks from Future Nostalgia. It worked because the original album was already disco-coded. The remix album felt like a natural extension rather than a commercial exercise.

Then came Beyonce, building an entire record as a continuous DJ mix paying tribute to Black and queer house, ballroom, and disco with Renaissance. It put club culture back at the centre of pop conversation for the first time since the 90s and created the cultural permission slip the remix album needed to mean something again.

Enter Charli XCX - she understood both the art and the science of it better than anyone. She’d always planned a remix album for Brat — but nobody planned for the remix tracks to become bigger than the original releases. Specifically, the Lorde feature on “Girl, So Confusing” extended the campaign and reframed the entire album — suddenly the remix album was the most interesting artistic conversation in pop. “Guess” with Billie Eilish hit #12 on the Hot 100, helping the album outlive Brat Summer.

Every collaborator dragged their own fanbase into Charli’s orbit. But the reason Brat worked where deluxe editions failed wasn’t just the strategy. Charli, like Dua before her, has genuine club credibility. Her whole world - PC Music, hyperpop, Boiler Room - is built from remix culture.

PinkPantheress understands this too. Fancy Some More? (October 2025) split 21 tracks across two discs - pop vocalists on one side: Zara Larsson, Kylie Minogue. DJs on the other: Kaytranada, Sega Bodega. PinkPantheress’s entire sound is built from Y2K UK garage and drum’n’bass samples, so a remix album featuring Nia Archives and Basement Jaxx didn’t read as gimmicky or a cash grab - it was acknowledgement of the source material. The Zara Larsson collab on “Stateside” became Pink’s first Billboard Global 200 #1. Another remix outperforming its original.

Which is exactly what led to Zara releasing Midnight Sun: Girls Trip this week.

Is this an official revival or a copy?

What makes this revival distinct from the original golden age is worth sitting with, because it isn’t a nostalgia bait or a simple format comeback.

The 80s and 90s remix albums served vinyl culture. The 12-inch demanded length, clubs needed tools, and remixers translated pop into something functional for DJs. The 2020s version does something more considered: it treats songs as living, unfinished things that other artists can jump in and genuinely transform — while keeping the emotional core of the original intact. The Lorde feature on “Girl, So Confusing” didn’t strip what made the original work. It deepened the production, the creativity and the lore around the original song.

There’s also something worth naming about who’s driving it. Charli’s collab list was overwhelmingly women and queer artists. PinkPantheress’s was similar. Zara’s Girls Trip is explicitly all-female. The original remix album economy was largely male producers remixing female artists, where creative credit rarely followed the actual contribution. The 2020s version has flipped that entirely - and it signals something about which artists are treating the format seriously, and which ones are just following a trend.

There’s still risk in the remix album. The format only works for artists whose identity is already rooted in club and dance culture. The moment pop stars with no genuine connection to that world start producing remix albums - and I assure you, they will - it becomes what deluxe editions became. Transparent. Tired.

For example, Taylor Swift or Benson Boone doing a full remix album would be the moment the format dies again. Not because they’re not talented, but because remix culture isn’t in the DNA of what they make. The format has cultural cover right now because the artists carrying it can justify it creatively. The second that changes, so does everything.

Predictions for the next big remix album

For now, the artists who should be doing this are obvious once you look through the right lens. Here are my predictions for the next big remix album:

Robyn: Robyn’s Sexistential already has Jamie xx on remix duty for “Dopamine.” The album’s so house-coded, and Robyn has been a reference point for this generation of club-rooted pop for upwards of fifteen years. Would love to see a remix album with The Blessed Madonna, Honey Dijon, Floating Points and - of course - features from fellow Scandi artists Tove Lo and MØ. It writes itself.

Madonna: Madonna’s Confessions II drops in July, and it would simply be malpractice not to follow it with a remix campaign. The original Confessions on a Dance Floor had a remix EP in 2006. Twenty years later, with Stuart Price back and Sabrina Carpenter already on the record, I’d love to see another one with the likes of Romy, Addison Rae, Arca, and Overmono (fellow Welshies) on the album to close that 2005-to-2026 loop in the most satisfying way imaginable.

Slayyyter: Slayyyter’s Worst Girl in America is begging for a remix album. “iPod Music” and “electro punk” is her framing point, and she has Columbia Records budget behind her, Boiler Room credibility already built and just coming off the back of a hugely successful Coachella debut. umru, That Kid, Alice Longyu Gao, Kim Petras and Cobrah - would love to see the entire extended universe in one project.

Maribou State: The wildcard worth mentioning for me is Maribou State. Hallucinating Love dropped in January 2025 and they have history with the format - Kingdoms in Colour Remixed in 2019 featured HAAi, Maceo Plex, and DJ Tennis. A proper remix album for Hallucinating Love with clear frontrunners for features from Fred again.., Joy Orbison, Nia Archives, and Jayda G would be UK electronic’s thoughtful answer to what the pop girlies are doing. Less TikTok, more Boiler Room, extended Holly Walker versions too. The thinking person’s remix album.

Side note: would love to see this and have it debuted in a surprise popup with Save Our Scene or Homebass, and a Maribou State live band remixed event.

The format survived 40 years because it kept finding new reasons to exist. In the 80s it served vinyl. In the 90s and 2000s it extended celebrity. In the 2020s it feeds the algorithm - but the best versions are doing something more interesting than that.

Songs aren’t finished. They’re just released. The artists who understand that are the ones making remix albums worth listening to.

This has to have been one of the most polarising headliner sets in recent Coachella history. Some people called it performance art. Some people called it “the worst Coachella set in history.” And a very vocal corner of Pop Twitter & TikTok has spent the entire time asking the same question: would a woman get away with this?

Short answer: probably not.

Longer answer: I think we’re asking the wrong questions about this.

All of the discourse (which I know I’m adding to with this) is flattening what’s actually a way more interesting conversation about brand fit, origin stories, and what reclamation looks like when a big break is also the beginning of an exploitation.

If you somehow missed it…

Weekend 1: Bieber opens with songs from Swag and Swag II - which I’ll admit I did not stream when they came out but DAISIES is a bop - on a mostly bare stage. Then he sits down, pulls out his MacBook, and just... starts YouTubing himself. He pulls up old music videos, sings along— sometimes just mouthing the words — while teenage Justin Bieber plays on the festival’s massive screens. Oh, and there were memes (deeeez nuts…).

He does this for like 30 minutes. “Never Say Never.” “Beauty and a Beat.” His 2008 cover of Chris Brown’s “With You” that now has 64 million views. The whole thing feels like watching someone’s memories on the world’s biggest stage.

Weekend 2: He does the whole thing again, but this time Hailey Bieber pushes Billie Eilish onto the stage mid-set. And if you know anything about Billie’s history, you’ll know she was the biggest Belieber pre-fame. Bieber sits an overwhelmed Billie on a stool and serenades her with “One Less Lonely Girl”, while she ugly-cries in front of everyone. That clip went more viral than anything from Weekend 1.

With the reception split cleanly down the middle - with Rolling Stone saying it was “too basic to warrant the hype”.

On the other side: Slate said critics were missing the point entirely. The Conversation called it “performance art that references 50 years of music history.”

So which was it? A lazy cash-grab or conceptual genius?

Re-watch Bieber’s set with context

What most people are dancing around is that Justin Bieber didn’t discover YouTube and try to make it this new thing on stage, it was YouTube discovered him.

His mom uploaded videos of him singing Ne-Yo and Chris Brown covers in 2007 when he was 12 years old. Scooter Braun then watched those videos by complete chance, tracked down a literal child through his school board in Stratford, Ontario, and flew the family to Atlanta to get him signed to Island Def Jam at 13 with a 360 deal. By 16, he had the #1 album in the country. What a ride.

Sadly, this is where Justin’s origin story starts to cross over into the weird and slightly scary. In November 2009, Bieber’s team uploaded a video to his official YouTube channel titled “JUSTIN BIEBER’s 48 HRS with DIDDY!!” Sean Combs tells the camera he has “custody” of 15-year-old Justin for 48 hours, doing things “we can’t really disclose.” Promises him a Lamborghini at 16, a mansion at 18. The whole thing is... deeply uncomfortable to watch now (and still on YouTube).

Diddy was sentenced in October 2025 to 50 months in federal prison on prostitution charges. Bieber’s spokesperson issued a statement in May 2025 that carefully said Justin “is not among Sean Combs’ victims” while also acknowledging “individuals who were genuinely harmed.” Anonymous sources told Us Weekly Bieber is “completely disgusted” and in “a hard place mentally” about having “such a history with Diddy.”. Take that as you will.

It gets deeper when you consider Usher, who lived with Diddy at age 13-14 in what Diddy called “legal guardianship.” Who told Howard Stern in 2016 he saw “very curious things” at Diddy’s parties and said “hell no” when asked if he’d send his own kids to “Puffy Camp.” Who then introduced 15-year-old Bieber to that exact same world in 2008*.

So when adult Justin sits at that laptop and pulls up videos from that era? He’s not being nostalgic. He’s quite literally performing alongside the artifact that got him sold. The same YouTube clips Scooter Braun watched in 2008 are now projected on Coachella’s main screens while the 32-year-old version sings along.

And suddenly I was watching it completely differently. Grinning like an idiot because it was silly and sweet and human in a way Bieber rarely lets himself be.

Billie joining him on Weekend 2 makes so much sense too. It’s the same reclamation, just from a different angle. Both of them honouring younger versions of themselves that maybe got flattened by the machine.

Watching Youtube on a laptop with Justin was the through line that tied all of this together.

*The same weekend as Coachella 2026, Usher gave a Forbes interview defending Diddy’s legacy and cultural contributions. Days later, he announced a 40-date stadium tour with Chris Brown. Bieber unfollowed Usher in early 2025. They reportedly got into a physical confrontation at Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s Oscars afterparty in March.

But would a woman actually get away with this?

It’s the one question ive seen discussed far and wide on my algorithm. The blunt answer is no. And the receipts we have for this are extensive.

Billie Eilish headlined Glastonbury at 20 - the youngest ever—and critics called it “underwhelming” and said it “lacked variation of energy levels.” Lana Del Rey showed up to Coachella 2024 on a motorcycle and NME called her“an odd choice of headliner.” SZA ran her SOS tour script at Glastonbury 2024 with mic issues for the first half-hour and Rolling Stone UK explicitly compared it to Billie’s “underwhelming” debut.

Meanwhile, Bon Iver at All Points East 2019 got praised for “true craftsmanship to hold adoration with a greatly hushed sound.” Frank Ocean’s shambolic Coachella 2023 set got reframed as “innovative drastic reimaginings” a week later. James Blake told 10,000 people at Alexandra Palace there were “no laptops or weird automated shit” and it read as artistic integrity.

The vocabulary gap is real. Male intimate sets get called “raw, vulnerable, auteur.” Female intimate sets get “underwhelming, low energy, didn’t rise to the occasion.”

Women are expected to go above and beyond. Full production, costume changes, high notes, visible effort. That’s just the tax for being taken seriously at festival-headline scale.

However…

The “women could never” take only works if you ignore brand entirely. Because the question isn’t just “would a woman be allowed to do this” — it’s “which women could pull this off even if they wanted to?”

Sabrina Carpenter or Karol G could not do the laptop set. Not because they’re women. Because spectacle is their brand. Same with Taylor Swift and the Eras Tour. Same with Beyoncé and literally everything Beyoncé does. Their brand promise is maximum effort = maximum return. Stripping that away doesn’t reveal vulnerability — it breaks the contract they have with their fans.

But I do think someone like Billie Eilish could absolutely do a version of this. Her whole brand is tomboyish refusal of the pop-girl playbook. Anti-spectacle is the spectacle. Charli XCX could make it weird and funny and self-aware. The Brat tour was 95% white lighting with zero dancers or band, and it worked because ironic minimalism was baked into the Brat experience.

The structural problem is that the women whose brands would support this kind of set — people like Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski, Adrianne Lenker for example — are never getting offered headline slots in the first place. Phoebe played Outdoor Theatre at Coachella 2022, not the main stage. The industry assumes intimate-leaning women won’t “scale” to a headliner slot. So the women who could test that assumption hardly ever get the platform, and the women who get the platform are expected to be maximal.

That’s the actual double standard. Not that women can’t be minimal. It’s that minimal women don’t get the shot, and the women who get the shot can’t afford to be minimal.

Cultivating a brand and using it on stage

So here’s what I think Justin Bieber’s headline set was actually about:

Brand fit matters more than gender in this specific case. Bieber is the only pop star at headline scale whose origin story is YouTube bedroom videos. Taylor’s origin is playing bars in Nashville and Tim McGraw. Beyoncé’s is Destiny’s Child and Tina Knowles making her costumes. Bieber’s is a 13-year-old in Stratford uploading grainy covers to a website that barely existed yet.

When he pulls up those videos and sings along, he’s not phoning it in or insulting the crowd. He’s performing a duet with the version of himself that existed before Scooter Braun, before Diddy, before the sale of his back catalog, before all of it. And because YouTube is the through line, it landed perfectly.

No other headliner could do this because no other headliner has this specific origin story. And the reason some women could do versions of it is because their brands accommodate the same refusal of spectacle that Bieber was staging.

To me Justin Bieber was using this moment to honour every version of himself, even the exploited ones, even the cringey YouTube kid ones, even the ones he’s still figuring out how to reconcile with who he became (I assume).

And yeah, women are held to a higher standard at festival-headline scale. That’s real and documented and very unfair. But the more interesting conversation isn’t “women could never” - it’s which women could, and why don’t they get the chance to even try?

Because I’d watch the hell out of Billie Eilish sitting at a laptop playing her bedroom SoundCloud uploads from 2015 (please!).

To me, that is the double standard worth interrogating here. Not whether Justin Bieber’s set was lazy. But who gets to decide what reclamation looks like on the world’s biggest stages.

I had opinions. I had intel. I had, apparently, several things very wrong.

HOWEVER.

Who could have predicted everything that went down this Coachella and that we’d come out of the two week supercycle with both YouTube and Vanessa Carlton as the clear winners.

Here’s what I got right, what I completely missed, and — more importantly — everything that happened for those reading this who care about music, culture, and how brands show up in the world.

Buckle up. This one’s long but so worth it, I promise.

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Music Moments

The headline from Coachella 2026 is that the festival has fully become a content machine first, music event second — and the headliners who understood that walked away with the biggest numbers.

Weekend One

• Sabrina Carpenter opened the festival Friday night with “Sabrinawood” — an Old Hollywood mega-production complete with a Walk-of-Fame runway, four Jonathan Anderson for Dior costume changes, and scripted cameos from Sam Elliott, Susan Sarandon, and Will Ferrell. I predicted she’d arrest someone for Juno, however she ditched the bit completely, including the Juno Position. Instead: a Samuel L. Jackson voiceover and a gong. She packed 20 songs into the set and closed seated on a throne rising through a water fountain. Critics called it the most ambitious headline set in years.

• Justin Bieber performed Saturday night and immediately became the most debated headline set of the weekend — possibly the decade. He sat on a stool beside an open MacBook, streaming his own YouTube videos. Kid covers. Bedroom recordings. The stuff his earliest fans are so glad still exists. He sang along. He let 100,000 people on the Coachella grounds watch him watch himself grow up. Critics said “lazy.” Defenders said intimate. Both were right and wrong simultaneously. Meanwhile his brand SKYLRK sold $5.04M in merch in a single day — more than doubling the festival record. His Spotify streams spiked 250% globally, with 24.6M US streams on April 12 alone. The laptop was a misdirect.

• Karol G closed Sunday as the first Latina ever to headline Coachella in the festival’s 27-year history. Her cave-stage — a three-storey tribute to Colombian geography — cost roughly three times what Coachella paid her. She brought out Becky G with a full all-female mariachi band, Wisin, and debuted a new collaboration with Cigarettes After Sex’s Greg Gonzalez. Her speech — “I am Carolina Giraldo from Medellín… this is for my Latinos struggling in this country lately” — landed as one of the weekend’s only explicitly political moments. +14.3% global Spotify streams, +35% US, 1M new listeners in the week that followed.

• Anyma — who was meant to debut his ÆDEN audiovisual show Friday night — had his entire set cancelled due to high winds. Posted a heartbroken statement. Salvaged the weekend with a spontaneous Do LaB set with LISA appearing for “Bad Angel.” Full story below.

• Notables W1: KATSEYE made their Coachella debut, the first HYBE global girl group on the Coachella stage. Australian artist Ninajirachi played Sonora on Friday. The xx and The Strokes both played Saturday main stage and crushed it. CMAT got the crowd to do the now-legendary Dunboyne two-step set that nobody who attended is likely to forget. Teddy Swims brought out a mariad of guests including the GOAT of piano riffs Vanessa Carlton.

A fashion detour — because I predicted 2016 Indie Sleaze and got exactly half of it.

My full prediction was more nuanced than “2016 is back.” But here’s where I actually landed after watching two weekends: the festival aesthetic bifurcated and nobody saw it coming.

Influencers delivered the playbook I predicted: Indie x Y2K, influencers making their own outfits, boho revival, fringe boots. The full cycle, executed. Signed. Sealed. Delivered.

Meanwhile Kendall Jenner wore a white tank top and denim shorts. Hailey Bieber wore a vintage 1998 Galliano Dior slip dress to Rhode World and that became the defining fashion image of the weekend. The celebrity set went quiet, minimal, and archival.

Here’s the thing: when influencers (and as an extension, us normies) fully adopt an aesthetic, the tastemakers tend to abandon it. The Coachella trend pipeline is inverted. Influencers used to chase celebrities, now influencers set the festival aesthetic and celebrities run from it. But there’s a layer underneath that too. When you’re Kendall Jenner, a white tank is a flex. You don’t need the outfit to do the work for you. Influencers dress for the camera. Celebrities dress for the people who already know who they are. The 2016 prediction didn’t fail — it bifurcated. And the status move is minimalism for celebrities.

Weekend Two

• Sabrina Carpenter returned in five custom Jonathan Anderson Dior looks — his first major onstage costuming statement since taking the creative director role at Dior. Ruby-red V-neck minidress, champagne draped micro dress, metallic pink retro minidress, a black lace bodysuit with Elizabethan-collared cape, and a white bridal lace finale bodysuit with tulle veil and hanging beaded fringe. Then — the biggest moment of the whole weekend — Madonna rose from the stage mid-set and performed Vogue and Like A Prayer to a very young crowd. Sabrina had worn Madonna’s 1991 Oscars dress to the VMAs. She’d channelled the cone bra for Vogue. She studied the arc and then she brought her out, 20 years after Madonna first headlined Coachella. Sabrina has cemented herself as an artist who knows whose shoulders she’s standing on. Terry Crews also appeared recreating his “White Chicks” moment — singing along to A Thousand Miles — and racked up millions of views and cemented Vanessa Carlton as the true winner of Coachella.

• Justin Bieber W2 addressed the laptop backlash the only way he could — by going bigger on feeling and nostalgia. Hailey pushed Billie Eilish past the barricade and onto the stage, where Justin serenaded her with “One Less Lonely Girl” — performed live for the first time in over a decade. Eilish, who first met Bieber at Coachella in 2019 and has credited him as a mentor, later posted she “can’t stop crying.” SZA joing to duet “Snooze”. Big Sean delivered an emotional tribute to Bieber’s recovery journey. Sexyy Red joined to debut “Sweet Spot.” If weekend 1 was intimate, weekend 2 was full of joy.

• Karol G W2 brought the extended guest list — Peso Pluma, J Balvin, Ryan Castro (a full-circle callback to Balvin joining her 2022 Coachella debut), Becky G also returned. She closed “Provenza” with “Nos Vamos de Tour” on the screen — confirming her first tour in two years.

• Anyma’s ÆDEN finally happened, a digital Renaissance production with crumbling marble columns on a stage-length screen, Matt Bellamy of Muse joined, withb LISA returning for “Bad Angel” with a mirrored angel avatar tracking her movements in real time, and Joji closing with “Beautiful.” Worth the wait.

• Olivia Rodrigo crashed Addison Rae’s Saturday set for the live debut of “Drop Dead” — timed precisely at the lyric “I compare myself to the new It Girl” during “Headphones On.” One of my predictions which actually came true, in roundabout way. The single had dropped that morning. It opened at #1 on Global Spotify with 10.7M first-day streams — the biggest opening of her career, and the strongest debut by a female artist in 2026. Olivia’s new album You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love arrives June 12th.

• PinkPantheress turned her Saturday Mojave set into a full birthday party — Zara Larsson, Janelle Monáe, Manon from KATSEYE, Blood Orange, Slayyyter, Ninajirachi, and Megan Stalter all on stage. Larsson sang “Midnight Sun'“ and announced PinkPantheress features on the deluxe of her remix album. Tyriq Withers surprised her with a birthday cake offstage.

• The Strokes — and this one hasn’t got nearly enough coverage — closed their W2 set with “Oblivius,” a song they hadn’t played since 2016. On the screens behind them: a video montage of CIA-backed regime changes across Latin America, the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, MLK, and footage of a building in Gaza being demolished. The caption: “Last university standing in Gaza.” The chorus repeats one line: “What side are you standing on?” One of the most significant political moments of the entire festival. It barely made the news cycle. 👀

• Notables W2: Kacey Musgraves rode a horse into Coachella for the live debut of “Middle of Nowhere. Swae Lee turned his set into a surprise Rae Sremmurd reunion with Slim Jxmmi. Slayyter became the unexpected Coachella headliner during her debut. Taemin played a solo set Saturday — quietly one of the most significant K-pop solo moments on the Coachella stage. Sydney duo Royel Otis played Mojave and made it look easy. Australian representation STRONG 👀.

Brand Moments

If W1 was the year brands decided Coachella was a media vehicle, W2 confirmed it’s now a full content ecosystem. The gap between who won and who just showed up has never been wider.

Weekend One

• Rhode World dominated — and the numbers make that impossible to argue with. 68.4M engagements across the festival (Traackr, tracking 1,200 influencers, via Business of Fashion). Huda Beauty was second at 22.5M. Medicube at 18.8M. Neutrogena at 16.5M. Every other brand didn’t come close. And sitting at #4: e.l.f. Beauty at 16.9M — Rhode’s parent company. Two brands from the same corporation in the top five simultaneously, without most people connecting those dots. Rhode World also generated $10M in Media Impact Value (Launchmetrics).

• 818 Outpost ran for its fourth year (presented by Cash App, Kaytranada headlining). Both Kendall and Kylie Jenner were present — 818 Tequila + sister brand Sprinter generated a combined Visibility Impact Total of 7,110 from 290 creators across 536 posts at a 6% engagement rate — outperforming every other F&B brand tracked. Kylie launched her k2o electrolyte brand from the activation. The Jenner sister alcohol empire is a thing, and nobody’s talking about it loudly enough.

• Pinterest ran the festival’s first phone-free activation — charm-making stations, printed postcards, stickers, guided by trend data. Influencer Quenlin Blackwell went phone-free as a paid partner for the activation. Counter-intuitive at a festival that runs entirely on content creation. The principle is to committ to what the brand already was.

• Gap’s Hoodie House debuted as the festival’s first exclusive apparel sponsor and drove a reported 5,000% spike in brand searches. EJAE — singer-songwriter and K-pop Demon Hunters voice actor — performed. A once ”outdated” legacy brand re-entering the cultural conversation through smart PR, off the back of an incredible partnership with KATSEYE.

• Neutrogena returned with mirrored SPF tower dispensing stations across the grounds — this year adding QR codes and giveaways, making the product a purposeful part of the experience rather than a logo on a lanyard. 200 gallons of SPF dispensed. Photo opportunities built in. It’s the fourth year they’ve done this and the activation keeps getting smarter.

• Barbie debuted with a pop-up built around “You Can Be Any Barbie” — framed photos of Barbie dolls with culturally specific captions including “Nepo Baby Ken” and “Crash Out Barbie.” The kind of detail that gets screenshotted and shared because it’s actually funny and relevant to their audience. The activation I’d be studying for a client brief.

• Medicube — I predicted it would be the breakout K-beauty moment of Coachella. The Glowtel Desert Oasis ran April 9-13. It did not break through in the way I expected. Rhode ate the room at 68.4M engagements vs Medicube’s 18.8M — although a figure not to be sniffed at. A lesson in what happens when the founder isn’t also the headliner’s spouse.

• Heineken's "The Clinker" was the brand activation I'd file under genuinely clever. In their 23rd year as Coachella's official beer sponsor, Heineken debuted a smartband that wraps around your can or glass — sync it with your Spotify or YouTube Music data, clink drinks with another Clinker wearer, and the device lights up if your music taste matches. A shared playlist auto-generates, you swap social handles, and the "cheers" becomes a contact in your phone. On the surface: a fun festival gadget. Underneath: a first-party data engine dressed as a social experience, pulling streaming preferences and social handles at scale across 100,000 festivalgoers. Part of their broader "Fans Have More Friends" platform which rolls out across their full global sponsorship portfolio — Champions League, F1, more festivals — through the rest of 2026. The shift from sponsorship to system design is the interesting bit here as they're embedding themselves in how people behave inside these events.

Weekend Two

• Rhode x The Biebers dropped their collab on April 13 — the slot between the two weekends. The timing was surgical - a product launch, a live performance, and a cultural moment compressed into one five-day window. The gap between Rhode and second place at Coachella was bigger than second through tenth combined. This Coachella put Rhode in a complete different echelon.

• SULT — founder Milly was invited three days before, jumped on a flight, and ended up at TikTok Shop’s pool party villa. The founder-led content documenting the chaos — the last-minute scramble, the BTS, the “I manifested this” framing — became the story. Proof that the scrappy version can compete with the produced one when the storytelling is right.

• Call Her Daddy and YouTube Presents turned Karol G’s historic set into a two-part content series — BTS access plus a sit-down podcast interview with Alex Cooper. Extending the moment beyond the stage, bringing in fans who couldn’t attend. Interesting timing given Cooper’s very public feud with Alix Earle detonated that same week — more on that below.

• Pinterest extended their offline activation into W2 with an e.l.f. Beauty partnership for glam touch-ups and workshops — expanding the brand footprint without abandoning the original concept. The brands that refreshed intelligently for W2 got more out of two weekends than those who just repeated.

The pattern across every brand that broke through: they committed to what they already were. Rhode didn’t try to be something new at Coachella. Pinterest leaned into its brand ethos harder than usual. Gap leaned into the hoodie — the one thing they already owned. At any scale, that’s the principle.

Pop Culture Moments

Coachella 2026 delivered more celebrity drama per square kilometre than any year in recent memory. Here’s everything.

Weekend One

• Kendall Jenner + Jacob Elordi were reportedly spotted kissing at a Justin Bieber afterparty, described by DeuxMoi as “all over each other.” No photos. No confirmation. Both remained silent. The internet did not. People reported this week thye’ve been quietly hanging out for months but this is unconfirmed.

• Alex Cooper vs Alix Earle — this detonated on April 14, mid-festival. Cooper posted a TikTok directly calling out Earle to “stop hiding behind other people.” Earle was filmed waking up to it and responded: “Wait, that literally just made my whole day.” Barstool’s Brianna Chickenfry entered the chat alleging Cooper was “a very, very mean person.” Cooper posted receipts of their friendly DMs. It was chaotic and very good for both of their respective brands: Reale Actives (which launched at Coachella) and Call Her Daddy.

• Chappell Roan made her first public appearance since the March hotel incident involving Jude Law’s daughter Ada — attending the festival in a toned-down pirate-inspired outfit. Security guard Pascal Duvier has publicly taken full responsibility for the moment. A quietly significant moment.

• Euphoria Season 3 premiered the same night as Karol G’s Sunday set (April 12) to deeply divided reviews. Five-year time jump. Breaking Bad-adjacent territory. Zendaya universally praised as per usual. Labrinth’s absence universally mourned. Viewership topped Season 2’s debut despite the reception being, let’s say, complicated.

• BTS launched the ARIRANG World Tour April 9. Two massive cultural moments running simultaneously for two completely different global audiences. The stans were not at Coachella clearly.

• Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau were spotted watching Bieber’s set together and became an immediate meme. Perry was quoted saying about Biebers’s set: “Thank god he has YouTube Premium, I don’t wanna see no ads.”

Weekend Two

• Billie Eilish posted she “can’t stop crying” after Bieber serenaded her with One Less Lonely Girl onstage. Hailey pushed her toward the stage while Billie covered her face and could barely walk. The video went everywhere and became the most-shared single clip of both weekends.

• Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drop Dead” opened at #1 Global Spotify with 10.7M first-day streams — biggest opening of her career, strongest debut by a female artist in 2026. The live debut with Addison Rae happened the same day the single dropped. Do I hear rumblings of a future Coachella headliner?

• Karol G announced her tour live from stage — “Nos Vamos de Tour.” Her first in two years. J Balvin joining her W2 (he was there for her 2022 debut) was the kind of full-circle moment that lands even if you don’t know the whole story.

• Variety asked why Weekend 2 crushed Weekend 1 in cultural moment-making. The short answer: the surprise guests were bigger, the emotional resonance was higher, and the live debut moments — Drop Dead, One Less Lonely Girl, Sabrina x Madonna — were impossible to manufacture. Weekend 1s crown may well have been taken by Weekend 2.

The through-line across all of this: Coachella 2026 was the year of album cycles, tour announcements, brand drops, feuds, fashion moments — all timed to detonate inside this two-week window because that’s where attention is priced highest right now.

Who’s already looking forward to Coachella next year? 👀

Marketing, influencer and content teams…

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We’re right at the beginning of the annual two week content and brand supercycle that is Coachella. What comes out of the headline sets in the comings days will shape what performs on TikTok and Instagram for the month that follows. The brand activations will sit in agency pitch decks, inspo folders and be copied and transformed for the coming year.

Here’s everything you need to know before Friday 10th April.

Headliners: Sabrina Carpenter (Friday main stage, 9:05pm), Justin Bieber (Saturday main stage, 11:25pm), Karol G (Sunday main stage, 9:55pm).

Sabrina Carpenter dropped her Bling Ring homage video for “House Tour” this week. Her directorial debut, co-directed with Margaret Qualley and also stars Outer Banks’ Madelyn Cline. Inspired by Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, the trio play the “Pretty Girl cleanup crew” ransacking a mansion. The easter eggs include Qualley reading Are You There, Margaret? and Sabrina Carpenter stealing a Grammy (a direct reference to her six nominations and zero wins this year). Grabbing upwards of 3.5M views in under 12 hours, and the song is currently #2 YouTube Music Charts. Sabrina is perfrming on Friday in the headline slot and she walks onto the Coachella stage already at peak cultural moment for herself (we’re getting flashbacks to releasing Espresso hours before her daytime slot in 2024). Her set will generate fashion content, fan edits and trending audio within hours. Keep eyes open for who she will pick to arrest during her Juno slot - my prediction is Margaret and Madelyn, but could we also be seeing a former rival who also happens to be releasing music this week join her?

Justin Bieber Biebchella is looking likely to be the biggest music comeback narrative of 2026. Rumours are swirling on TikTok and IG that there will be a documentary filming his comeback prep and Coachella performance - framed as his Beyoncé Homecoming moment. Rhode also announced a “The Beibers” spot set (designed with Justin) which drops on April 13, so expect to see Rhode all over the festival this weekend and next, with Hailey 100% likely to be in the artist viewing area for Justin’s set. His setlist is being leaked all over Instagram already, with some earlier hits being heared during soundcheck just today.

Karol G is set to be the first ever Latin American Coachella headliner during a time where tensions toward Spanish speaking American’s is at an all time high. Her set comes just months after Bad Bunny’s historic all-Spanish superbowl performance and she’s already set headlines waving by claiming her team would kill her if she said “ICE OUT” during her set. Rolling Stone is also predicting that Bad Bunny himself could be Karol G’s potential special guest on one of the Sundays.

Also performing this weekend:

• Addison Rae on the main stage Saturday at 5:30pm. I’m predicting that she Addison will tease or even outright release a new song/era. She just announced that her performances will no longer be The Addison Tour show and will be the new Fame and Glory Show format. Nevertheless, fans are expecting a complete new setlist and possible new music.

• The xx play the main stage Friday at 7pm — continuing their run of first shows in 8 years, and fresh from three nights in Mexico City where they debuted a new track, “Silhouettes.” New album and tour expected this year with huge slots at Coachella, Primavera and Lollapalooza (I also have a prediction that they will be the Glasto 2027 headliners).

• Slayyyter at Mojave Friday 3pm - bringing a full live band inspired by Soulwax to her set. This is Slayyyter’s Coachella debut and, while pro-claiming to not want to be a main pop girly, she is predicted to be the standout performer. Let’s see if she gets her Chappell Roan big break moment.

• KATSEYE (sans Manon) at Sahara Friday 8pm, they were just announced as Matrix hair brand partners. This will be their first performance since Manon decided to take a break from the group, so all eyes will be on their set.

• Jack White added as surprise act to Mojave Saturday. Jack released two new singles last week, hosted SNL with Jack Black — new album incoming and new material most likely being played during his set.

• The Strokes hit the main stage on Saturday. They just released their new song “Going Shopping” and announced their new album “Reality Waits”. I expect they will also debut new material during their set.

• PinkPantheress at Mojave Saturday 8:55pm. The biggest collab of the year, and global #1 for the past few weeks, “Stateside ft. Zara Larsson” will no doubt be a highlight of the set. Zara Larsson surely will be joining her on stage in some capacity over the next two weekends, if not, one of the many collaborators from her Fancy Some More remix album (praying for Kylie Minogue, personally).

• Australia’s Ninajirachi at Sonora Friday 7:10pm. For those wanting to be ahead of the curve, watch this space because Ninajirachi is about to be huge. From her Coachella slot to today being announced on the lineup for Harry Styles’ Meltdown festival, she is going to have a significant mark on music culture this year. Pink Pantheress also co-signed her by voting for her on the Triple J Hot 100 this year, so let’s see if they’ll hit the stage together over the next two weekends.

Brand activations to watch:

• REVOLVE Festival (Saturday, The Grand Revivre theme) - Don Toliver, Khelani and Mustard to headline.

• REVOLVE confirmed brand activations are from partners Affirm, PopSockets, DC Studios’ Supergirl and more. Drink offerings will be provided by PATRÓN, Hennessy and Bloom; among many food offerings will be a selection of carnival classics from SONIC. Plus a curated fashion edit from Leslie Amon, Amanda Uprichard and LAMARQUE.

• Pinterest phone-free activation is trying to tackle digital overwhelm, and the phone-up-no-dance epidemic that plagues Coachella. Guests lock their devices in secured pouches on entry and spend time doing hands-on analog activities including charm-making, styling touch-ups and junk journalling. This comes after Pinterest Trends found that searches for "analog aesthetic" are up 260% on that Platform.

• medicube Glowtel Desert Oasis poolside creator experience (April 9–13). The globally known Korean skincare brand medicube is hosting their Glow Oasis Pool Party on Thursday, April 9th. They are the first Korean beauty brand to show up at the festival.

• Kylie Jenner’s new k2o electrolyte brand is launching at Kendall’s 818 Outpost. Speaking of…

• 818 Outpost is back for a fourth year with Kaytranada headlining the invite-only activation. Confirmed brand partners will be CashApp, Blank Street coffee, amongst others, and of course Kardashian/Jenner backed brands like Khloud, UPDATE and Kylie Cosmetics.

• Full list of vendors/brands can be found on the Coachella Activity Page.

Fashion predictions:

• With millenial nostalgia at an all time high, expect a lot of callbacks to the Coachella outfits of past with this years fashion coverage. “Club Girl Revival,” a nostalgic trend rooted in the “cultural fixation on reviving the mid-2010s, especially 2016” is emerging as a crucial festival fashion theme according to WWD.

• Vogue has crucially banked their predictions on the boho and florals featured in recent runways from Isabel Marant and Chloe, and predicting that we will (finally) see a return to form with indie sleaze dressing, mirroring WWDs prediction.

  Things To Keep 👀s On

• Coachella Weekend 1 content wave (from Friday 10 April) — Monitor TikTok and IG from Saturday AM for new trending audio from headline sets. Best-performing sounds emerge within 12–24 hours of a headliner finishing. Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber and Karol G will each generate their own content cycle that won’t exist in silos.

• Rhode x Bieber drops Sunday 13 April — Tracking sell-out speed and which creators are getting seeded with product first. This will be the beauty story of the week, should Rhode have an activation at the festival grounds too.

• Euphoria S3 Episode 1 (Sunday 12 April) — Beauty looks, quotes used as Coachella content audio, reaction content at the festival. Beauty brands with any cultural relevance should have a point of view ready by Saturday night latest, and keep their eyes on the festival for any references especially Euphoria-inspired makeup looks.

• Olivia Rodrigo “Drop Dead” (Thursday 17 April) — First taste of the new album era. Will dominate music conversations next week, while not on the official Coachella line up, she will most likely be doing the rounds with a possible appearance at brand activations, artist areas, even an on-stage appearance (pray for Sabrina Carpenter to have her as a Juno girl and break the internet)

• BTS World Tour kicks off Saturday 11 April — Fan content, setlist reactions, outfit breakdowns, and tour audio. Watch for chart movement and conversations which may eclipse Coachella in the days following the first show.

• UK Wireless fall-out continues — Industry reaction pieces and debate about who can replace three headline slots at a major London festival at three months’ notice (if the festival even ends up coming back and going ahead). Worth monitoring for what it reveals about the broader artist booking landscape.

There’s also a rumour going around that SZA has been paid a significant amount of money to be “on call” in case Justin does a Frank Ocean on weekend 2. What do we think?

Who/what are you most looking forward to from Coachella?

You may have noticed it aall over your socials — 2016 is so back.

And not ironically, either. This time, it’s an aesthetic movement, an emotional safe space, and, as it turns out, a fascinating case study in just how quickly cultural nostalgia now moves.

We used to wait 20 years before a style came back around. Millennials revived the ‘90s. Gen Z gave Y2K another spin. But now? A mere decade is enough for myth-making.

At first glance, this appears to be just another round of internet nostalgia. But zoom out, and this trend tells a much deeper story about how people are feeling in 2026, what they miss about the internet (and the world), and what kinds of content, community and culture we’re longing for.

What really happened in 2016?

Let’s not pretend it’s the politics of the time that we’re missing. 2016 was, by many metrics, an absolute bin fire: Brexit, Trump, “post-truth” was crowned Word of the Year. We lost some of the All Time Greats: Bowie, Prince, George Michael, and Alan Rickman. But that’s not the 2016 we’re remembering here.

Culturally, 2016 was rich in music and media. Beyoncé basically owned the year – she dropped her groundbreaking visual album Lemonade and had the world obsessing over “Becky with the good hair”. Other blockbuster albums included Rihanna’s Anti, Drake’s Views (with the hit single “One Dance” dominating the summer), Frank Ocean’s Blonde, and Zara Larsson released the feel-good pop banger “Lush Life”. In TV, 2016 was still the golden age of Netflix originals, giving us phenomena like the debut of Stranger Things and The Crown. With the likes of Atlanta & Fleabag all debuting in the same year.

Chokers were the must-have accessory – virtually every 2016 cool girl from Kendall Jenner to Rihanna rocked a choker necklace in 2016. Streetwear and merch also went mainstream that year: Justin Bieber’s Purpose tour merch (designed by Fear of God) had fans lining up for hours to snag a hoodie.

The typical 2016 outfit might include a bomber jacket (Alpha Industries bombers were everywhere; Google reported searches were up 600% that year), paired with ripped skinny jeans or leggings, or perhaps a slip dress over a t-shirt for the Tumblr-inspired look. Makeup in 2016 was all about heavy contouring, bold “Instagram brows,” the launch of Kylie Jenner’s lip kits, and lots of highlighter – a far cry from today’s “clean girl” rhode girlies of the internet.

But it was really the internet-driven content that defined the year’s entertainment. 2016 was meme heaven.

It gave us the Mannequin Challenge, where groups of friends filmed themselves frozen in place like mannequins while Rae Sremmurd’s “Black Beatles” played. We also all remember the Water Bottle Flip Challenge, sparked by a high schooler’s talent show trick, which had everyone flipping half-filled plastic bottles trying to land them upright. And who could ever forget Harambe – the Cincinnati Zoo gorilla whose shooting turned into a global meme and rallying cry online. From “Damn Daniel” to the nonsensical “Pen-Pineapple-Apple-Pen,” 2016’s internet culture was defined by a mix of silly, wholesome fun on a major scale.

We’re remembering when social media wasn’t as surgically optimised, when timelines were messy and chronological, when you could post without thinking about your personal brand. Back then, you thought nothing of making an obscured photo of yourself with a dog’s nose and ears taken directly from Snapchat as your profile picture.

On the flip side, 2016 was the beginning of the curated influencer feed, just before they all started flogging their perfect lightroom presets and editing workshops. It was influencer culture that was aspirational, but not yet aggressively monetised. We were watching the Instagram aesthetic take full form, blissfully unaware that soon it would become a job description.

2016 marked the peak of Coachella as cultural capital, where the likes of Vanessa Hudgens and Selena Gomez were the blueprints. Their flower crowns and boho lace maxis birthed a generation of influencer copycats and dictated festival fashion for years. It was Coachella’s final era of organic cool, before it became a showroom for influencers trying to manufacture the same engagement Hudgens could conjure by simply showing up. You could argue 2016 was both the apex and the death of Coachella-as-a-vibe — after that, it shifted from cultural moment to branded backdrop.

When it comes to nostalgia about 2016, though, it was never really about the content – it’s about the feeling. And in 2026, people are clearly desperate to feel like they did a decade ago: young, plugged in, emotionally available to joy.

The children adults yearn for the digital town square.

The 2016 revival isn’t just a stylistic trend — it’s extremely emotional. The mid-2010s were weird and wonderful; they were still full of semi-cringe, millennial sincerity and collective silliness on the internet.

It’s hard to describe to someone who wasn’t there, but for a brief moment in the mid-2010s, we were still all kind of experiencing the same digital reality. There were only a few dominant platforms – Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, and, of course, Vine – and they all had different functions, so you felt you could differentiate between them more.

Contrast that with now, when algorithms have atomised everything. Your For You Page is nothing like mine. The feed is no longer a timeline; it’s a hyper-personalised slot machine serving brainrot dopamine hits every 30 seconds (or less). Every single platform is trying to be everything for everybody. So it’s no wonder people are flocking to a moment where it felt like the entire internet was a digital town square. We want that again. We want the mass meme. The universal moment. Even if it means pretending we’re all back in 2016.

2016 could be the last moment of unified pop culture before everything online splintered. According to Sam Cummins, the co-host of culture podcast Nymphet Alumni:

“People remember 2016 as the last moment of true mass culture. Social media hadn’t yet fully fragmented us into algorithmic echo chambers, so virality still felt like a collective phenomenon.”

In the years since, our feeds have become more and more separate – today’s TikTok/Instagram algorithms silo people into niche micro-trends, so we rarely feel that worldwide shared experience anymore. The 2016 nostalgia expresses a longing for that lost communal feeling. That kind of “we’re all in this together” vibe is scarce now in 2026’s polarised, algorithm-driven digital landscape.

What does this say about 2026?

The 2016 revival isn’t about being obsessed with chokers and contouring our lips within an inch of their lives. It’s about what we’re lacking now, and what we’re trying to re-manifest through looking back:

• Shared digital rituals. We’re nostalgic for the days of doing the same thing, at the same time, on the same platform. That feeling of a global inside joke is vanishing.

• Low-stakes fun. So much of today’s content is painfully self-aware, optimised and professionalised. In 2016, content was so so dumb. But it was also earnest. People were being real rather than begging for likes (see: Aura Farming).

• Platform personality. Back then, platforms had quirks. Now, every app looks the same and behaves like a storefront. The result is a user experience that feels frictionless and soulless, which is only going to get worse with the rise of AI content.

• Using nostalgia to self-soothe. 2016 might have been chaotic, but on the whole it didn’t feel like crisis after crisis after crisis. In a time of ambient anxiety in almost every area of life and the world, nostalgia becomes a comfort product – one that marketers would be wise to treat with care.

There’s also a generational aspect here. Older Gen Z and younger Millennials see 2016 as their prime years. For an almost 33-year-old like me in 2026, we were 23 in 2016 – revisiting that time taps into powerful core memories. As for Gen Zers, as Cosmopolitan pointed out, 2016 is when the oldest Gen Zers were entering adulthood, and the youngest were just becoming aware of pop culture, so it holds a “coming-of-age” nostalgia for that whole cohort. No wonder the trend’s biggest cheerleaders are in their 20s.

What I want to see from marketing in 2026

Now, if you’re a brand and thinking, “Great, let’s just reference 2016 on our next brand drop or piece of content,” please just take a pause.

This isn’t a permission slip to go rifling through your campaign or product archives. The 2016 trend is about emotion, not aesthetics. People don’t want to see a perfect recreation of a 2016 lookbook. They want to feel like they did when that lookbook dropped. Back when the internet was stupid, sincere, but still sort of magical.

So my recommendations for brands:

• Ditch the overproduction. Try imperfect. Try funny. Try cringe (with caution).

• Give people something they can join, not just view and scroll past. A challenge. A remix. A moment.

• If your brand peaked in the mid-2010s? Good news: you’re officially nostalgic. Lean in, but make it feel fresh. Reflect rather than repeat.

• Above all, don’t try to control the narrative. Let your audience take the lead. They’re already writing the best throwbacks anyway.

As for me? I’m still umming and ahhing about posting my 2016 carousel, but you can find it on my stories if you’re quick.

MTV shut down its remaining music video channels in the UK at the start of the year. The last thing they aired was Video Killed the Radio Star. A poetic end, airing the first ever music video they aired… one last time.

To make things confusing for you, MTV music channels like "MTV Classic” & “MTV Live” will continue to run without change in the US. MTVs flagship channel is also still on air, and was airing eps of The Big Bang Theory just the other day. Confused? As am I.

The easy conclusion to make in the post-mortem of MTV music channels (including the fate of the remaining ones) is the obvious one — “The internet did this!”, “YouTube did this!”, “TikTok did this!”, “Attention spans did this!”

But that version of events actually lets MTV off far too easily.

If you actually look at the timeline, MTV didn’t die when the internet arrived. It started dying much, much earlier — you could say the moment it actually stopped caring about music videos. The thing that made it matter in the first place.

When MTV launched in 1981, it was the first ever dedicated space just for music videos. A radical move, for the time. Music suddenly had a visual language. Artists weren’t just heard on the radio; they also had to also be seen to be consumed. And that visibility mattered a lot to artists. Record sales jumped after videos went into rotation. Some music careers were made because a clip was played enough times to become unavoidable. It was a fact that musicians knew they’d made it if MTV aired their video.

For a while, MTV had a clear north star. Music first.

This created a very lucrative shared attention. Everyone was watching the same things at roughly the same time. Music video premieres meant something. Countdown shows meant something. Cultural moments like Madonna’s Like a Virgin performance, Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged (the only one second to this is Tash Sultana’s MTV Unplugged), Yo! MTV Raps, Headbangers Ball.

MTV organised and reflected the youth culture at the time. Former MTV Europe VJ Simone Angel has reflected on that golden era, saying MTV was “a cultural bridge that made the world smaller, louder, and more connected,” uniting artists and their fans in a global musical conversation.

Then, slowly, slowly, it stopped.

In the early 1990s, MTV began experimenting with non-music programming. The Real World arrived in 1992 and became an instant hit. Reality TV proved cheaper to make and easier to sustain. More shows followed suit. At first glance, you could say this was just the industry evolving, a channel growing up with its audience.

But over time, the balance tipped. Music videos were trimmed back. Then pushed later. Then shifted to the spin-off channels. Then quietly deprioritised altogether. By the 2000s, MTV’s flagship channel was dominated by shows like The Hills, Laguna Beach, Jersey Shore and Teen Mom. And while I personally loved all of these shows, it was clear music still existed in MTV’s brand ecosystem, but it was no longer at the centre.

Viewers noticed. And many left.

A common refrain that popped up again and again in my research for this post is that MTV lost its soul when it stopped airing music videos. Even artists were saying it out loud. Slash later remarked that

“the MTV we grew up with died in the ’90s” and that the channel should always have been about music videos — “hell, it’s in the name” .

While we can all blame the internet and on-demand streaming for MTVs cultural decline, MTV didn’t lose music fans because the internet stole all of them overnight. It lost them because it stopped serving them. When you replace the thing people come to you for with something adjacent — or entirely unrelated like Catfish or Pretty Little Liars — loyalty erodes quietly but quickly. People didn’t stage a big protest; they just stopped tuning in and went to something else.

TRL delayed the inevitable for a while. It worked because it was still anchored in music. But when TRL ended, nothing meaningful replaced it. And by the time YouTube launched in 2005, MTV had already basically trained an entire generation to not associate the channel with music discovery.

So when the internet arrived with a better, faster, on-demand way to watch music videos, there was no loyalty left to defend.

YouTube didn’t kill MTV. It filled a gap MTV had already created for itself.

And the irony is that music videos didn’t suffer at all. They flourished.

The research is very clear on this — the audience for music videos is bigger than it’s ever been. Today, videos that would reach millions via MTV can rack up billions of views via YouTube – reaching a global audience far beyond anything MTV ever did in one sitting. In fact, according to Rolling Stone, the audience for music videos is bigger than ever — even as MTV’s viewership has died a death.

By the mid-2010s, most music lovers (especially those under 30) were discovering new songs via YouTube or streaming services rather than TV. If you loved a song, you didn’t wait for MTV to play it – you went to Vevo or YouTube and watched it immediately. And with the rise of smartphones, music videos became portable – available in your pocket, not just on the living room TV.

Social platforms then accelerated this shift. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts. Fifteen seconds of a song could now travel further than a full video ever did via TV. That didn’t make music videos irrelevant, it just changed their role and the way we consumed them.

On top of that, music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music changed listening habits. These platforms, primarily audio-based, meant people were consuming music more flexibly – making playlists, listening on demand – rather than relying on a VJ’s curation. (Even Spotify is now experimenting with music video content and vertical short videos in its app, further encroaching on what was once MTV’s domain.)

The internet has not only offered more choice but also shorter content to suit shrinking attention spans. The fast, jump-cut style that MTV pioneered in the ’80s has evolved into the frenetic swiping of TikTok and YouTube Shorts. As media professor at the University of Colarado Jared Bahir Browsh noted, MTV’s non-linear, random playlist of diverse videos in the ’80s actually anticipated our modern relationship with YouTube, TikTok, and social media feeds – but those platforms then delivered that experience more efficiently to consumers.

Internet killed the ritual, not the video.

MTV created a ceremony around music. Premieres mattered because everyone watched together. The internet is brilliant at access, but terrible at shared timing. We don’t tend to arrive at music moments collectively anymore. We just stumble across it.

MTV’s final shutdown feels very symbolic, even if it’s not that surprising. It marks the end of linear music television — but that end was sealed long before Paramount pulled the plug for cost-cutting reasons. By 2025, the remaining music channels were running on nostalgia and inertia. Most people under fifty weren’t watching them anyway.

When MTV signed off those channels by replaying Video Killed the Radio Star, it felt neat and a full circle.

The internet didn’t kill the video star. MTV sealed its own fate the moment it decided music was no longer its core purpose.

So what replaces MTV?

Nothing, in the way people usually mean it. There won’t be a single channel or platform that does everything MTV once did. Culture doesn’t move like that anymore. Discovery is fragmented, run by algorithms. Community is distributed across different platforms now, and taste is even more personal.

But the impulse MTV tapped into — the desire to see music, not just hear it — is still very much alive.

The lesson here isn’t about the internet being destructive. It’s about focus. If you stop doing the thing that makes you essential, someone else will do it better.

That’s what actually killed MTV the video star.

Last year, I wrote about my 2025 predictions at Zeno London – all about the death of the follower count, the rise of private communities, and creators quietly stepping out of the “post-and-go” box and into something closer to consulting. At the time, these shifts weren’t controversial — but they weren’t fully priced into how brands were operating. What wasn’t obvious was how quickly those shifts would harden into the structure of the creator economy. Across campaigns, briefs, and creator negotiation I’ve worked on this year, these shifts stopped being theoretical and became real.

2025 felt like a coming-of-age year for the creator economy. It moved from GRWM-style performance to content rooted in explanation and learning.

With that maturity came clarity about what no longer works like the endless flex culture, vapid aspiration and discount codes attached to mediocre content, and the outdated idea that reach alone equals influence. Audiences grew up. They got discerning. And brands and creatives, whether they were ready or not, were forced to follow suit.

Of course, a few of my 2025 predictions still stand:

• Communities matter more than reach. Private, high-trust spaces continue to outperform — not as a “nice to have,” but as the core unit of influence (especially when it comes to IRL events).

• World-building beats one-off content. Creators who build narratives, formats, and interactive elements for their audiences are still winning over those chasing one-off viral moments (more on that later)

• Micro-creators still punch above their weight. Smaller audiences with higher trust continue to drive stronger engagement and conversion.

If 2025 was the year the rules changed, 2026 is the year these changes become impossible to ignore. These are the shifts that will define influencer marketing next.

The Expert Influencers

For a long time, influence on social media was about aesthetics and access. Who you knew. Where you were. What you could show. Were you on a luxury trip or getting the motherload of PR in the post? There was an unspoken promise that if you, dear watcher, followed closely enough, you might get a slice of that life too. It kinda worked, until everyone actually wanted a slice of that life.

As cost-of-living pressure, algorithm fatigue, and AI-generated content collided, audiences stopped asking ‘how do I look like you?’ and started asking ‘can you explain this to me?’.

This is where CLWM (Come Learn With Me, it’ll catch on, I promise) comes in. The creators gaining real traction in 2026 are going to be the ones explaining why and how things work. The girl explaining stock buybacks while doing her makeup. The cultural commentator unpacking why a trend works instead of just pointing at it and calling it viral.

Platform signals are increasingly aligned with depth over flash — favouring retention, repeat engagement, and meaningful interaction over raw view counts alone. Expertise has become a form of social proof – a creator who can explain how your product works is infinitely more useful than one who can merely display it.

What this means for brands:

• Hire for expertise, not just aesthetics. Creators who can explain why something works now carry more authority than those who simply make it look good.

• Brief for explanation. The strongest content starts with a question, tension, or problem — not a product shot or brand-approved talking points.

• Measure understanding as a conversion. Saves, replays, comments, and search lift matter more than clicks if trust is the goal.

In 2026, the most valuable creators aren’t the ones who can make your product look good — they’re the ones who can make your product make sense.

The Death of Virality

Virality is no longer scarce — retention is. We’ve seen creators rack up millions of views only to discover that none of it translates when it matters — no loyalty, no turnout, no reason for audiences to follow them anywhere else.

In 2026, the industry will need to finally confront the gap between visibility and actual influence.

The creators and brands who win this round will be building a routine that people return to. Formats with memory and audiences who know where to find them next week, and who will notice when they don’t return.

Some of my favourite creators doing this right now – Lottie Lashley @lottielashley, Zara @whatzaraloves and Sam Murphy @popsamcam. All three have built recurring formats people actively wait for and return to, with weekly or bi-weekly schedules — proof that routine and retention now matter more than one-off viral hits.

Video credit: @popsamcam and a nice little link to my British Music Paradox piece 😏

Key takeaway for brands:

• Invest in creators with recurring formats, scheduled lives, or recognisable series — not one-off viral spikes.

• Measure engagement differently — repeat commenters, familiar names, and ongoing conversation signal long-term influence more than isolated view counts.

• Use silence as a test. If a creator didn’t post for a week, would their audience notice — or move on?

If a viral creator is like a massive billboard on a busy motorway — thousands of people passing at speed — then the opposite side of the coin is the community builder, like the host of a beloved dinner club. People set aside time to show up because they trust the host and care who else is in the room.

Creator Director to Investor Influencer

Last year, I predicted the rise of the Creator Director: creators moving upstream into creative consultancy and decision-making roles within the brands they work with. In 2026, I predict that the role will get more serious.

Creators are increasingly aware that if they’re helping drive demand and validate products in the eyes of audiences, then flat fees are now a poor reflection of the value they create. When creators don’t have a genuine seat at the table, they’re going to start negotiating for something else instead: ownership.

We’ve already seen early signals of this shift:

• Creator Jake Krantz was brought into Doing Things Media as a creative leader to help shape formats, tone, and long-term narrative from the inside out.

• Alix Earle negotiated equity in Poppi, positioning herself as a growth partner who can take her audience on the journey through her content.

Proof this shift is already underway:

According to data from TikTok’s Creator Marketplace, 93% of brands plan for creators to take on significantly larger marketing roles in 2026 — signalling a move away from creators as distribution and toward creators as strategic partners.

As Katie Ferrigno, Head of Social and Group Social Strategy Director at Havas New York and Annex88, put earlier this year: brands have finally started viewing creators as “true co-creators rather than just media placements.”

Brands like SULT also show why the model actually works (congrats if you haven’t heard of SULT, they were EVERYWHERE this year).

SULT was built publicly by its founders, influencer Milly G and Henry Popora (edited the name typo - if you know you know 😉). Instead of leading with product, it led with backstory, process, and belief. Watching the brand being built in real time felt like founder narrative, employer branding, and influencing all at once. The product was sold as a by-product of trust – because the audience wasn’t being sold to, they were being brought along.

Key takeaway for brands:

Use creators to help tell the story of building something, or investing in something, together. Not force-feeding a finished product, but narrating its creation, evolution, and ambition publicly with a creator.

2026 will be the era of the Investor Influencer. Equity, revenue share, and royalties become the evolved form of affiliate marketing — a recognition that creators can be brought in to build the brand rather than just distribute it.

Creators and Shoppertainment

Last year, I wrote about brands using creators for repeatable formats – creator-tainment. In 2026, that logic finally crosses over to social commerce.

As influencer trust has become scarce, the traditional influencer-to-purchase journey has also collapsed. However, on TikTok, product discovery, entertainment, and checkout now happen all in the same moment and often in the same piece of content.

While I loathe to talk about Kim K too much, I loved the SKIMS “Kimsmas Live!” event on TikTok. It showed what happens when commerce is designed like entertainment programming, not marketing.

Video credit: @kimkardashian

SKIMS treated their shoppable Live as a variety show – there were celeb guests and fun segments, signalling that this was something to watch, not just shop. That decision to prioritise entertainment is what made the commerce side work. People didn’t buy because they were told to, they bought because staying felt fun and social, and leaving felt like they were going to miss something. Awareness, consideration, and purchase all happened inside the same 45-minute window.

John Lewis also ran a creator-led live shopping event over Christmas with sisters Bronte and Chessie King. It worked for the same reason as SKIMS: the creators were hosting, entertaining, and holding attention long enough for buying to feel like the natural next step.

My prediction for 2026 is that social commerce is going to stop sitting at the end of the funnel. Entertaining content will becomes the storefront, and creators are going to take on the role of presenters, producers, and programming strategy all at once. A nouveau QVC, if you will.

Key takeaway for brands:

• Work with creators who can entertain for long-form and hold audience's attention

• Invest in formats and production that work for specific platforms like TikTok LIVE

• Design commerce inside the content, not bolted on at the end (no more #linkinbio).

The Human Premium

If 2025 was the year AI content became unavoidable on social, 2026 is the year its side effects become impossible to ignore. As AI floods platforms with competent, frictionless content, the value of being human is going to only increase.

Audiences are getting better at spotting what’s AI-generated — and more selective about what they trust and give their attention to.

A 2024 survey conducted by The Influencer Marketing Factory found 53 percent of people already follow at least one virtual influencer, but only 15 percent trust them.

The brands winning in 2026 will work with creators who carry history, context and creativity. They will want people to know where they’ve been, what they’ve said before, and whether they stand behind what they’re promoting. That’s why Employee-Generated Content, founder-led storytelling, and long-term creator partnerships are outperforming synthetic brand voices. In an AI-saturated feed, human credibility will be a premium.

AI won’t cheapen the creator economy, it’s going to clarify what creators are actually for. I expect platforms and creators to increasingly signal a human-created-guarantee, not unlike an organic guarantee in food at your local Tesco.

Key takeaway for brands:

• Prioritise recognisable humans over perfect output.

• Lean into real voices. Employee, founder, and long-term creator partnerships.

• Optimise for trust. High-effort and creative human content will outperform scaled AI content over time.

It’s been a week since Spotify Wrapped dropped — basically, a public holiday for the music-obsessed among us. Within hours, my feed was a festival of listening ages, top genres and albums, “roles” (hello, I’m a recruiter), and whether you are a top 0.01% listener of your faves (I made it as a 0.4% global fan of Mk.gee this year, but that’s beside the point).

While we’re here… I may as well drop my stats. It was a big year for Mk.gee and Lorde and Lime Cordiale were dethroned after a solid three-year reign (sorry lads, love ya though). Oh, and apparently I’m 56? Bit of a jump scare to wake up to, but fair enough given the sheer volume of Roxy Music and Don Henley I blasted to romanticise my hot girl walks.

Spotify Wrapped Day is now entrenched in the social media calendar and for good reason.

But every year I wonder: are we ever going to get tired of all this?

Spotify Wrapped has been running in some form for over a decade. It’s as familiar now as advent calendars and Mariah Carey announcing Christmas season with her TikTok war cry on December 1st (“It’s TIMMMEEEEEEEE”). Each year, the slides get brighter, the genre labels get more chaotic (still not over the slur that was Pink Pilates Princess), and the internet (see: me) obliges with millions of eager posts saying, “Look at me, I listen to music!” And each year, I lap it all up.

Underneath the fun surface, Wrapped is a corporate feature from a multi-billion dollar company accused (with reason) of underpaying its artists. It’s predictable, driven by data we unconsciously fed it, and it operates through an algorithm we have little control over. And yet, come December, we post our Wrapped slides like we just took one of those online personality tests (I’m an Enneagram 7, if you hadn’t guessed.)

Last year tested this goodwill. Spotify Wrapped faced rare backlash after leaning too heavily into AI-generated recaps and stripping back fan-favourite features like top albums and genres. The result? A soulless product that felt like it was assembled on a tight deadline. Users called it creepy, bland, and uninspired. For a feature that normally sparks joy, it was a miss — and the backlash proved something critical: the emotional contract Wrapped holds might be fragile.

This year, Spotify course-corrected. Spotify’s Marc Hazan told Hypebeast this week that the backlash fuelled a redesigned Wrapped 2025 with a return to fan-favourite features, a refreshed visual identity, and a much-needed human touch. Club-inspired designs, more artist shoutouts, and more slide-by-slide personality-infused content made it feel like a return to form.

Even with full awareness that I’m being duped by clever marketing, I can’t help but feel a buzz when Wrapped drops. Even when I know I’m doing free advertising for Spotify, I post it anyway. Why? Because it makes me feel seen. It flatters me. It rewards my listening and premium subscription. It gives me a sense of identity.

And I’m sure it does for you, too. That’s not accidental.

Wrapped is a masterclass in user-generated content at scale. The mechanics are deceptively easy: track your passive behaviour, dress it up in cute colours, and give you a single tap to share to IG. In 2025, Wrapped generated 500 million shares in the first 24 hours — from screenshots to story reposts to TikTok’s. And every one of those is a free ad for Spotify.

It’s also memified to hell and back. People remix the graphics, roast their stats, drag their most-played songs, or create parodies. And the virality isn’t confined to Spotify anymore — Wrapped has basically become a genre. Everyone wants their own slice of the cultural moment. Duolingo posts its users’ yearly stats, I saw Strava’s “Year in Sport” shared around this year; year-end wrap-ups have become the seasonal content format du jour.

One of my favourites this year was Grindr’s version. (Shoutout to my friend and former colleague Ben Cooper, their Director of Consumer Content — an absolute genius of the game!) It was bold, hilarious, extremely on-brand, and proved that even platforms that don’t deal in music can turn user participation into shareable, joyful content. Wrapped isn’t just a Spotify thing anymore.

Psychologically, it hits us everywhere: self-recognition, dopamine reward, social status, identity. Whether it’s nostalgia, ego-flattery, or sheer curiosity, Wrapped satisfies a craving. Socially, it’s a flex and a connector. “You’re a top 0.1% Olivia Dean fan? Me too.” “Your #1 was 100 gecs? Very bold.”

Culturally, it fills a gap we didn’t realise was there. Digital life can feel devoid of rituals. Wrapped is our music solstice. Our internet Christmas, if you will. It helps us close the year with meaning, with music. It makes our invisible digital selves feel real, seen, and celebrated.

And then for Spotify, it’s marketing gold. Wrapped not only retains users, it attracts new ones due to the FOMO effect, fends off competitors (sorry Apple Music Replay), and mobilises fans and artists alike. It even fuels downstream sales: Spotify reported that post-Wrapped weeks are the biggest for artist merch and ticket purchases.

Wrapped seemed to dodge a bullet in 2024. But the question lingers: if they slip up again, or if user fatigue grows, what would kill the magic of Spotify Wrapped?

My prediction is we’ll start to turn if:

• It becomes too predictable. Familiarity breeds contempt (thank you, Taylor Swift). Even the slickest and most sharable format can go stale if it doesn’t evolve meaningfully.

• The social status currency devalues. If too many people share similar results, or if the “top 0.01% listener” badge loses its cachet, the incentive to post and feel different drops.

• The format becomes easily replicable. Wrapped’s power is the cultural dominance it enjoys. If dozens of platforms flood feeds with year-end recaps, Wrapped risks becoming background noise even if it is the OG.

• It loses its human touch. As we saw in 2024, the more Wrapped feels like AI output, the less it resonates with the humans putting in the work. Wrapped’s success hinges on feeling hand-crafted and emotionally aware (even if it is built on algorithmic data).

• Our relationship to platforms changes. If the ongoing threat of streaming fatigue deepens or Spotify’s artist payout controversies gain more traction, users may become less eager to do its bidding. We’re already seeing a trending surge in CDs, iPods and even pirating music again. If this grows, it could put Spotify Wrapped at risk as a feature.

Will any of that actually happen, though?

Maybe, but not yet. Spotify has made Wrapped an annual ritual, and rituals, when done right, don’t age; they simply evolve.

If Spotify wants to keep Wrapped alive, it needs to do what it failed at in 2024 and nailed in other years: keep the human touch. Keep innovating without over-automating. Keep giving users enough delight, surprise (the age!) and identity. And if that ever falters, it’ll take just one misstep to remind us that this is just plain ol’ marketing baby.

But for now, you and I are willing to play along, unpaid. Because somehow, it still feels like a lovely end-of-year gift.

And that is the power of turning data into pop culture.

Tell me your Spotify Wrapped results below!

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British music is having one of its most successful eras on record. In the last year alone, the industry pumped in around £8 billion (according to the UK industry’s latest report) into the UK economy and broke export records. Charli XCX. Raye. Olivia Dean. Lola Young. Wolf Alice. Beabadoobie. Pink Pantheress… I could go on (but I won’t).

This isn’t just a UK phenomenon — the dynamics are global. But what’s striking right now is how British artists are not just holding their own, they’re dominating global charts, TikTok trends and streaming stats, going head-to-head with the biggest American and K-pop acts — and winning. They’ve driven tourism to the UK and beyond, powered festivals, club nights, marketing campaigns and TikTok trending sounds.

On paper, it looks like we are in the midst of The British Invasion 2.0.

But, when you look underneath the glamour, headlines, streaming records, etc., the picture flips completely.

Nearly half of the people working in the music industry in the UK currently earn under £14,000 a year. Grassroots venues — the small, sweaty rooms where most major acts have their start — are closing at a rate of around two per week (special shout out to Moon Club in Cardiff… RIP my shayla!). Independent festivals are holding on for dear life. And most of the people who work behind the scenes like producers, session players, crew all live extremely unstable, freelance lives.

So how can the industry be booming and broke at the same time?

World-building is now an itemised product

British music is spreading so widely because British fans are great at free distribution. The UK is no longer exporting just songs, albums or even artists. It’s exporting fully realised musical worlds, propped up by lore and fashion and fandom …. and the people building those worlds on behalf of the artists and record labels are the ones being underpaid, or not paid at all.

When Charli XCX released BRAT she created a whole aesthetic to go with it. Neon green posters, private group chats, pop-up raves, memes, and a visual language that fans were able to instantly recognise and replicate. It became a world people wanted to live inside, and it spread far beyond the walls of traditional music marketing. Suddenly every corner of the internet turned green.

That kind of cultural wildfire would traditionally cost labels millions, but now it’s largely built on fan labour. TikToks, memes, edits, dance trends, and a never-ending stream of user-generated content. All (mostly) unpaid. When Kelley Heyer created the ‘Apple’ dance for free, she had no idea how much money and relevance it would generate for Charli and her label. No wonder she later tried to sue Roblox for using it without compensation or credit — everyone was benefiting from her idea except her.

I dove into the cultural machine Brat became in more detail when I was at Zeno London — which you can read here.

We saw the same thing with Raye. She left her major label after years of being blocked from releasing any albums. She put out Escapism independently, it caught fire on TikTok, and fans dragged it to Number One through edits, dance challenges and trends. Raye suddenly had a global hit — but the engine wasn’t marketing spend at first. It was built on community action.

The fan machine is brilliant and it’s brutal. Brilliant for visibility. Brutal for sustainability.

Look beyond TikTok, and you’ll find entire fandom infrastructures all over social media. Discord servers, Reddit threads, and who could forget the Twitter campaigns of the 2010s.

Discord servers dedicated to artists now act as 24/7 content engines. Some UK artist servers (like Beabadoobie’s 19k strong fan Discord) have grown into full-blown communities that act like volunteer digital agencies.

According to Levellr, Discord communities may contribute up to 131 billion Spotify streams annually. Meanwhile, the benefits flow upwards — to platforms, promoters, and execs. The fans generating the buzz? Still doing it for free.

So who’s making all of the money?

These fan-built worlds feed directly into the UK (and global) economy:

• Pop culture tourism is exploding (I went into this more in my piece about the 2025 Primavera lineup)

• Club nights themed around artists sell out

• Festivals act as “pilgrimages”

• Cities build full tourism campaigns around scenes (Liverpool’s Beatles economy, anyone?)

• Bars, hotels, airlines, merch shops, promoters, and local councils profit

But the people who create and feed the culture like the artists, grassroots venues, freelancers, producers, and the fans doing the labour, aren’t seeing much of this money.

A small venue can put on 200+ shows a year, pull in hundreds of thousands in revenue collectively, and still end up with margins of 0.5%. One bad electricity bill can close the place for good. Even worse, housing developments around cities are threatening (and closing) so many venues where artists would previously have their first shows. The most recent victim of this is Corsica Club in London, closing its doors in 2026 due to a £1.5bn redevelopment project in Elephant & Castle. The likes of Moth Club in Hackney are also fighting developers to retain their licence — a club that laid way for the likes of Jarvis Cocker, IDLES and even Lady Gaga (who now has one of the most loyal fandoms out there) to put on some of their first shows in London.

Meanwhile, major promoters and ticketing platforms report record profits and the top 1% of artists take the vast majority of streaming revenue. Just this week, Olivia Dean put Ticketmaster and Live Nation on blast for profiting so widely off of their artists’ ticket sales, and passing the crazy costs onto the fans who prop them up. Streaming payouts remain so tiny that even the artists themselves could rack up millions of streams and still struggle to pay rent.

In short, the cultural value is massive, but the financial value flows upward rather than trickles down. Which leads to my next point…

British music is an export success built on a fragile foundation

…and this is the part that should worry people.

The UK’s music economy thrives because it constantly produces new talent and new cultural moments. That pipeline only exists because of:

• music education

• local scenes

• affordable rehearsal spaces

• small venues

• independent promoters

• artists who persist despite low pay

• fan communities

• freelancers and contracters keeping the wheels turning

But every part of that foundation is under threat — venues are closing, touring is harder, education budgets are shrinking, fans and content creators are the ones doing the heavy lifting for free, and too many artists give up because they simply can’t survive long enough to break through.

The economic boom from UK music is real, but it’s being carried on the backs of people living in financial precarity during a cost of living crisis.

What happens next?

The worlds being built are extraordinary detailed and engaging on social media. The people who built them are exhausted and struggling to pay rent, and the gap between the two is getting wider.

Labels should focus on investing in local venues. Funding paid fandom pipelines. Legislate for fairer pay and streaming splits. Because without the people building these worlds, there won’t be any music left to export.

If the UK wants to stay a global cultural powerhouse, it needs to protect the very people and places that make that possible — not just celebrate the profits at the top.

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I don’t think Lily Allen set out to be the main character of Q4. But here we are. “West End Girl” has truly yanked the pop zeitgeist off its axis.

I’m thinking back to the end of summer, where we were still rinsing BRAT summer and arguing which Powerpuff Girl represents which pop girl (guilty as charged). Give it one month later, and we have Lily detonating a marital bombshell album, which for the last week has had all of us well and truly SAT.

Call it West End Girl Winter… a season where Lily Allen, quite unexpectedly and 7 years after her last record, has delivered a divorce album that feels uncomfortably fresh.

Released on 24 October 2025 after a seven-year hiatus, the record immediately became a “headline-grabbing” sensation according to The Guardian. Today, I’m deep-diving into how Lily Allen has masterfully orchestrated this iconic new era – from a shrewd marketing rollout and perfect timing, to the absolute scathing lyrical storytelling and rapturous reception among critics and stans alike.

The story behind the story

At the heart of West End Girl is its lyrical candour.

The concept album plays out as a chronological story of Allen’s marriage breakdown: relocating to New York for marriage, work pressures, an open relationship proposed, and the entire thing collapsing under the weight of jealousy, betrayal, and rage.

Cue the cultural response. Within days, tabloids and Reddit threads began trying to identify “Madeline” — the recurring antagonist who appears first as a suspicious text, before receiving her own namesake track. A woman even came forward in the press, claiming to be the inspiration and saying she was “a little bit scared.” Whether or not she’s real is almost beside the point. The album’s specificity demanded an investigation — and the internet happily obliged.

In West End Girl, Lily doesn’t rely on metaphors or coy allusions. She names the wound and prods it until it bleeds. It’s no wonder people are calling it the definitive album of winter — if not of the year.

The power of silence

The first thing Lily did ahead of West End Girl was… nothing. She receded. The Instagram grid thinned out, with any echo of David Harbour vanishing without any eulogy. At the time, it barely registered. In hindsight, it reads like a starter pistol.

Shoutout to Paola and the Sosig Socials team — pretty sure they’re behind Lily’s socials and honestly, the rollout so far has been 🤌. It’s a smart move: outsourcing the socials allows Lily to stay away from the noise of socials, while being very much present in the entire story.

What makes this rollout interesting isn’t that it was a “surprise”. Surprise drops have been done to death at this point. What Lily executed was controlled withholding. No countdowns, no singles, no visual universe pre-baked for TikTok to munch on and dissect and get bored with before the album even arrives. Just: it’s coming now. Figure it out.

An expertly timed Vogue profile arrived a week before the release, soft-launching the emotional premise — a record made “to process what was happening in my life,” but “not all gospel.” It was deliberately blurry but enough in shape to appease curiosity, enough ambiguity to keep everyone, from journalists to fans to TikTok comments talking. “If what you’re doing isn’t provocative, what’s the f**king point?” she told journos.

Precisely.

Other artists could take plenty of notes here. We know the instinct now is to feed the machine constantly — pre-saves, 12-week teaser campaigns, a million vinyl variants before the album even exists. Lily did the exact opposite. She removed all the noise, left a deliberate gap, and let the audience build their own anticipation before giving them anything.

Sometimes the strongest hype engine isn’t noise, but scarcity. The confidence to disappear… and trust people will notice when you return.

Stranger Things have happened

Crucially, West End Girl arrived at what can only be described as obscenely perfect cultural timing. The album, which all but names and shames her ex-husband, David Harbour, dropped just before the final season of Stranger Things, where Harbour is, you know… quite a central character.

All I can say is… Spectacular, give me 14 of ‘em right now.

I couldn’t love the almost Machiavellian timing of this all more. Lily’s narrative is now eating up the oxygen just as Harbour should be entering his press-tour redemption arc. A PR coup so potent I can imagine the Netflix big dogs are quietly chewing drywall.

By colliding her album with the pre-existing pop culture machine of Stranger Things, Lily has reframed her story. The timing meant West End Girl wasn’t competing for attention; it was piggybacking on a global promotional window and then rerouting the conversation entirely. A smart strategy disguised as a simple coincidence, showing that cultural timing can outrun some of the biggest budgets.

Oh, the theatrics of it all

And just when we all thought we’d caught our bearings on this… one week after the album release, a 2026 theatre tour was announced. Lily will perform West End Girl front to back in small West End venues.

It feels obvious in hindsight because the choice is so correct. The album is sequential and reads like a script. It wants needs a stage. I saw a TikTok claiming she’d read the whole thing as a musical, and Lily even replied, “I’m on it babe” — fully aware that the West End Girl experience was, quite literally, heading to the West End.

This is where the West End Girl rollout crosses from smart to true creative vision. We go from album to story to theatrical event in one clean line. You don’t need 50 TikTok dances and challenges when the work already is a performance.

And other artists can emulate this, if your record has a narrative spine, staging it is not a gimmick, it’s the final form.

Side note: I’m also extremely here for artists performing their new albums front-to-back (see: Lorde’s secret Glasto set on the day Virgin dropped — chef’s kiss).

Purposeful USB butt plugs

I’ve saved the best (so far) till last. Enter: the launch party.

Influencers, celeb friends, and… butt-plug USBs. Yes, Lily Allen handed out actual USB butt plugs, housing the entire album, handed out in beautifully displayed boxes.

As Lily sang in Pussy Palace:

“Duane Reid bag with the handles tied,
Sex toys, butt plugs, lube inside”

The takeaways are a physical manifestation of the world she’s built— sex, betrayal, absurdity, humour, humiliation, reclamation — and something people can immediately post about and dissect online.

There are three reasons why they are the perfect party favour for reach, relevance, and resonance:

It exploits the return of physical media — We’re deep in the vinyl/CD renaissance… yet West End Girl has neither (until January 2026 at least). Which means the USB butt plug, absurd as it is, becomes the only physical artefact of the album. It’s not just plastic tat for influencers to post then throw away — it literally plays the record. At a moment when fans are desperate for physical keepsakes, Lily creates scarcity so extreme that only the most exclusive party-goers leave with a physical manifestation of the album.

It makes the audience complicit —Celebs and influencers are participating in the spectacle, which causes FOMO for us everyday suckers. Nobody can Instagram a USB butt-plug and then politely pretend they didn’t understand the premise of the album.

It reframes shame — A butt-plug linked to marital betrayal could’ve been humiliating. Instead, Lily hands it out as a party favour — she now owns it, and therefore owns the narrative.

This is brand world-building at its most delightfully unserious and narratively airtight.

Other pop girlies could take notes — not the literal sex-toy stunt (JADE’s already worked that territory with her butt-plugs-come-merch), but the principle. If you want people to care, don’t just tell them a story. Put them in the room, and collapse the distance between audience and narrative. Make them feel like they’re trespassing.

*BONUS MOMENT*

Literally HOT OFF THE PRESS as I am writing this.

For Halloween this week, Lily has dressed up as “Madeline” (yes, the Madeline from the 1998 movie, and the lyric from her song “Madeline”) for a Backgrid pap walk that instantly set the internet off.

This is genius. You have:

Story extension beyond the music — The album now has even more image propaganda and cultural signage. By turning up in character, Lily extended the narrative into IRL territory. Fans and media see her, dress as her, talk about her costume. That amplifies the album without an extra lyric.

Earned media overload — Rather than a paid ad, this is free press. Pap shots, tabloid clicks, TikTok memes, owned content (Lily’s TikTok revealing the costume has already racked up half a million views in less than 12 hours).

When your album is itself narrative-driven, the rollout isn’t just digital posts and playlists, it’s lived theatre, lending itself beautifully to the West End-ness of it all.

Also, shout-out to Coco Mocoe, who coined the “Halloween Costume Theory,” which lends itself perfectly to Lily’s album rollout strategy.

Welcome to West End Girl winter

People like to pretend the pop landscape belongs to the newest, youngest, shiniest. And yet — here’s Lily Allen at forty, still writing circles around girls half her age, dropping a divorce album with no singles and no lead-up, hijacking a global franchise’s PR cycle, and staging her heartbreak like a West End production. The audacity. But that’s Lily Allen.

West End Girl reminds us that confessional pop doesn’t have to be coy or poetic to land — sometimes it just needs clarity and a sense of humour about how ridiculous real life can be. There’s no mythologising; it’s simply a woman narrating her own downfall and resurrection with both hands on the mic.

And yes — there are clear nods to the new pop girls of late (Charli XCX on “Ruminating,” PinkPantheress on “Relapse”), but at its core, the album is unequivocally and recognisably Lily Allen.

And who the f**k is Madeline!?

Taylor Swift’s 12th Studio album, The Life of a Showgirl landed on all of our respective streaming services on Friday. You could say this was the album rollout of the year, where the feathers and sequins landed first and the lyrics… well we’ll get to those won’t we.

The reception to the release was immediate and intensely polarised - something any swiftie is by all means used to. On one side, publications were bestowing perfect five-star reviews, celebrating its sonic choices and “vulnerabilities”. On the other hand, some were delivering as low as two stars. I (on another, third hand) walked in expecting Chicago on Broadway levels of razzle-dazzle. Max Martin - the architect of “Oops!… I Did It Again” - was back in the room with Swift, Shellback alongside. For all intents and purposes, we were ‘so back’.

However, on first listen I made it three tracks deep before the curtain sadly dropped. I think everyone can agree “The Fate of Ophelia” is a lock-in earworm. “Opalite” is definitely something you’d hear on a hen do (complimentary). “Elizabeth Taylor” is lacquered to a high shine, but for me there was very little under the gloss. From there on the writing buckled so hard I had to switch it off halfway.

“Take me back to the The Tortured Poets Department!” I yelled, kicking and screaming while being chucked in a padded room.

For all its commercial success, the album has fractured both critics and fans, creating one of the most divisive moments of Swift’s career. The fallout from The Life of a Showgirl reveals several surprising and counter-intuitive debates about Swift’s unparalleled position in the pop culture landscape.

But how did we get here?

Was the “Showgirl” the friends we made along the way?

For me, one of the main jarring elements of this whole rollout is the gigantic gap between the album’s visual identity and its actual music. The promotional materials, shot by the famed fashion duo Mert & Marcus, presented a high-concept, glamorous “showgirl” aesthetic complete with sequined bodysuits, feathers, and dramatic makeup. It promised a world of showbiz sparkle and vintage flair - the likes of which we’d already seen in 2025 with Gia Coppola’s “The Last Showgirl”.

The music, however, largely failed to deliver on that promise for many listeners. Critics described the sound as polished pop and soft-rock (a very indirect interpolation of Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind” adds to this confusion). To my own dismay, there was little in the sonic landscape - no big-band moments, no theatrical interludes - to connect the songs through to the visual theme. This disconnect suggests a tension at the heart of Swift’s current imperial phase: the need for a high-concept, marketable ‘era’ versus an artistic impulse that remains grounded in the familiar, more intimate territory of her previous work. As one reviewer bluntly put it:

I scribbled in my notes for this post that smaller artists have already shown how to stitch that sensibility into pop without tipping into a visually tired Broadway kitsch. Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” lives in the world of neon cabaret; Caty Baser’s “Showgirl” slips jazzy basslines into clean pop; even Miley’s “Beautiful That Way” manages pathos and glamour. Those songs built or expanded on a world through the music. Showgirl mostly read as a Pinterest board of what Taylor fancied dressing up as in this era.

For many, the mismatch between the elaborate visuals and the conventional sound left them feeling that the showgirl theme was an afterthought - a fun costume for an album whose heart was somewhere else entirely.

Must we pine for the glory days of depression?

Another strange and counter-intuitive theory which emerged from the album’s discourse is that Taylor Swift’s personal happiness has led to less compelling art. The lyrical content of The Life of a Showgirl is dominated by themes of domestic bliss and romantic stability, particularly in the song “Wi$h Li$t,” where she dreams of “two kids and a driveway with a basketball hoop. Swift’s politics trend left (as far as we know) her romantic worldview remains a storybook.

Then there’s “Wood” - which is where I had to take my bow out from the first listen. Look, she’s allowed to be horny on main; she’s also allowed a red pen.

Sabrina Carpenter has made horniness a bit of an art form as of late, and it works for her. But Taylor hasn’t built that brand, and she’s still unpicking the “good country girl” casing she’s worn in since 2005. When Sabrina does it, it’s wry and precise, yet here it’s a knock-knock innuendo that feels extremely juvenile to listen to.

Still, if you’d told me there’d be a track on 1989 about being “dickmatised” (her words!), let me tell you — 21-year-old me would have been gagged.

On Showgirl, Wood plays like the age-old superintendent Chalmers meme: “At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localised entirely within your kitchen your twelfth album?!” And when the puns about Travis Kelce’s “new heights of manhood” fall flat, you start listening harder to how bad the lyrics are - which is how we arrive at “Actually Romantic.”

On Mean Girls Day, no less.

The album’s most controversial moment arrived with “Actually Romantic,” a song widely interpreted as a diss track aimed at fellow artist Charli XCX, and a response to Charli’s introspective Sympathy is a Knife - which dissects her feelings of inadequacy and internal self-loathing when around a certain popstar. Obviouslyyyyy, assumed to be Taylor.

For a significant portion of the audience (including me), the track was a HUGE misstep. Critics and fans argued that a superstar of Swift’s stature taking aim at a less famous artist was inherently “punching down.” However, as the biggest pop star and most famous person on the planet, wouldn’t any diss be “punching down”?

The song’s tone was described as high-school cattiness, with one commenter capturing the vibe as being bullied by Regina George (someone Taylor Swift has been accused of acting like being before, see below). Makes it all kinda ironic that the album was released on Mean Girls day.

While I did see a lot of “Actually Romantic” defenders out there, questioning the double standard applied to feuding female artists, for many, the issue was one of execution, not intent. The track’s explicit naming of grievances felt clumsy, lacking the clever anonymisation of Taylor’s past work that keeps people guessing (let’s just ignore Dear John and the entirety of TTPD in this instance).

I’m no prude, but the sheer explicitness of this track feels embarrassing and cheap compared to Charli’s more vulnerable take on her own self-esteem and where she sits in the world of music stardom.

Here’s what you could have won!

In hindsight, the delusion was mine. Why did I expect Taylor - flanked by Max Martin and Shellback - to deliver something genuinely experimental and new?

Who was I to assume that sonically the album would bake in the showgirl interludes, chatting in the wings in between scenes, brassy horns, snare rolls that cue the curtain, a few crumbs from the Eras Tour mic feed, samples of historic showgirl music and lines stitched into each song. Maybe a sample of iconic showgirl Marlene Dietrich saying “I’m a baaaaad influence” at the beginning or middle of “CANCELLED!”. Lyrics that take the effort of the Era’s tour grind - adored yet exhausted - and make it a metaphor for her ghost of relationships past.

Who was I to assume all of that… even though the entire visual identity and album branding led us all to assume that.

For me, Showgirl reached timidly for that kind of architecture in the first three songs - especially the music video for The Fate of Ophelia - then steps back into sixth form romance and teenage politics. By the end, the title track with Sabrina Carpenter barely pulls it back out of the trap door for me.

Too big to fail, or a victim of her own success?

The final paradox of The Life of a Showgirl is its simultaneous existence as a commercial monster and a seemingly critical disappointment. I can’t pretend I’m not fascinated by this, and agree that you can dislike the record and still admire the PR gravitas of it all.

The numbers are staggering: the album sold 2.7 million copies in its first week and soared to #1 in 100 countries. It was an undeniable global event, so pervasive that Trump even posted an insane, since-retracted tweet about her (so like, where was the Trump diss-track?).

Even the geography of the promo felt calculated in a way I weirdly admire. The heavy London press day on the 3rd - schmoozing with Fleur East and Jordan North on breakfast radio and inviting Greg James to her wedding - read as strange to U.S. fans, but clearly obvious to anyone who’s fought the Official UK Charts. You go where the rules are rules-ier and the lift is there to be had I guess. Two American late-nights for optics, but the incremental effort sat here in the UK. Territory management, if you will.

Yet, this success stood in stark contrast to the brutal language from some critics and fans. The Atlantic called the album a “charmless chore,” and a portion of her own fanbase declared it “the worst album she’s ever released.” This disconnect highlights a new reality for a star of Swift’s magnitude, where a release becomes a cultural event so massive it operates outside the normal metrics of artistic success. As Esquire critic Alan Light astutely observed:

So I’m left with the question I suspect a lot of you have too: has Taylor Swift become too big to fail, or is this what being a victim of your own success looks like?

The marketing machine is immaculate - the brand world can be seen from space, the funnel activates almost everyone whether you like her or not, the community incentives are clear and clever. But I still keep coming back to this - when the campaign so persuasively promises showgirl, and the music mostly opts for domestic bliss wrapped up in dad rock references, the conversation shifts from “is it good?” to “is it honest?”.

And maybe that’s the lesson I’m taking back to my day job: scale can carry you to week one, but expectation is what decides week four. Showgirl proves you can win the sprint and still trip the finish line. The songs, for many of us, didn’t break the ribbon. Which doesn’t make the rollout any less brilliant - it just makes the disconnect impossible to ignore.