source: Spotify

Should Mitski have stayed a TikTok trending sound? Is NATHTM as experimental as the marketing led us to believe?

IS MITSKI A REGULAR ON OUR PLAYLISTS? No. And probably won’t be.

source: Instagram @mitskileaks

Chamber pop meets rock meets teenage poetry in song form. It’s very easy to understand why there seems to be a phenomenal amount of teens and early 20’s in love with Mitski. That’s not to say there isn’t any depth in the work, but occasionally the lyrics do slide into a teenagery melodramatic style.

Maybe it is something in the way that the songs feel artificially spiced up with some rock or some real-world textures. But it’s repeated a little to often to have a decent impact.

Sidenote: Two things that don’t totally go hand in hand are a quote from Mitski saying Sad Girl is over, and then releasing another album that fits firmly into that category.

Musically, the album is good; it thrums along with little to no deviation per track. But, according to fans, it is an intentional move for the album to glide into The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We. And the reason we’re saying this is because, for us, after LIGHTNING finished, I’M YOUR MAN came on, thanks to autoplay, and we thought it was still NATHTM.

Conceptually, because this is a concept in album form, it sits evenly in the ‘isolated women narrating her isolation’. She is precise with her lyrics, though some lack the depth and nuance we would’ve appreciated. CATS felt like one of the most perfect tracks on the album; it had a distinct Joni Mitchell flavor.

There is some art in the way she has woven deeply suicidal ideation or the obsession with death, physical and metaphorical, with dancing keys and steel. For fans of Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads, you’d do well to listen to both DEAD WOMAN and CHARON’S OBOL. While not as violent in delivery and a tad more conceptual, you’ll likely appreciate the storytelling.

NATHTM doesn’t feel radical; it doesn’t bite; it simply doesn’t have the teeth for it. Perhaps the passiveness is deliberate, perhaps the nothing that is about to happen is this album. Maybe somewhere in all this, the message is that Mitski is happily retreating into a house filled with cats and doom.

Or maybe we’re giving her too much credit for an album that says and does nothing when it isn’t earned. We may never know.

It’s sonically fine. Vocally fine. Lyrically fine. But perhaps it is time to stop the glaze. 2/5 Cups

source: Spotify Store

SongsBrew Editorial

What is mid?

Gif by allsxxing on Giphy

When we’re talking about mid, we’re really just saying mediocre. But there is some added context to mid, sure, it covers the ‘not being impressive’, but it tends to have more meat to it. Unexciting, boring, disappointing, and even more so if other people are hyping something. Now, we always need to take personal taste into consideration; it makes a big difference to what we, or you, think is just... meh.

And, as we know, we’re not critics, we don’t have that finely tuned ear - though we are always all working on it.

Is the good stuff hiding? Are we too lazy to find it? Is there just too much slush-pile music that we don’t even care about waiting for the new stuff?

The rise in mediocrity hasn’t been slow. The cynic in us is yelling somewhere right now that we are drowning in competent art. And, we’ve been here before, we’ve been saying it for a while - there is simply too much of it. The only barriers between an idea and a release are a Wi-Fi connection and less than $100. But we don’t have to listen to the cynic. We can maybe pull from a personal reflection. Spending more than 20 minutes looking for something new (and good) to listen to, only to find that we’re going back to our ‘liked’ playlist.

Perhaps there was something good there, there isn’t a lack of music, there is just a surplus of lazy.

Taste vs Mid

It’s not them, it’s you. Or is it? Here is where the ‘you just don’t get it’ can come into play. Our personal taste can significantly influence what we consider to be rubbish. So how do you begin to tell when something isn’t you, it is them? ‘Not my taste’ usually happens when you are listening to something totally outside of your genre(s). If the song’s identity and DNA just aren’t a fit, it's probably outside of your taste profile, and you’re not the best judge of whether it is good or not. It would be like asking a classic jazz enthusiast to judge death-metal-EDM with a rolling sub-bass. They might think it sounds interesting, but they can’t judge if it’s ‘good’ because they don’t know the genre.

So that bit aside, there are so many middle-of-the-road songs released. They aren’t deep into their own ‘genre’; they sit in a safe middle ground. It’s listenable to anyone and everyone. It’s like a person who has no hobbies, interests, isn’t funny, and just agrees with everything that is said. They just exist.

If you can’t find anything you hate or really enjoy in a song, that isn’t a taste thing; taste will give you a love-hate reaction, it’ll be polarizing. A meh response is usually a tell-tale sign for mediocrity. You shall not be moved.

A Litmus Test

We’re living in a big attention economy, everything is fast, songs are short, releases are high speed, for most artists. Scrolling Instagram or TikTok for a few minutes will give you so many songs, so much to hear. But for the most part, we’re not really listening. And then it’ll happen, in the sea of ‘same’, you’ll hear a vocal or bridge, and you’ll need to know what that song is. The sign of great art is that it grabs you and makes you pause or feel something. It makes you want to go and search the streaming services to find it. It makes you go the extra mile and tap more buttons in a world where you don’t really have to; if nothing moves you, you can move on with a single swipe.

Because how we interact with music has changed, and the rate at which it is available is so much faster, we’re more like users now and less like listeners.

We asked people what their mid tracks were. Here is a short playlist for you:

Believe it or not, we did some slush-pile math, all concept thought-experiment, no tech or rigor.

Infinity N Limited Gs

We’re calling it the Signal-to-Noise Ratio. In 2025, according to Luminate, there were approximately 253 million tracks on streaming services.

• N = 106,000 new tracks every day, one new song every 0.8 seconds.

• Deadzone = Over 50% of those had less than 10 streams.

• The ‘Mid’ Majority = 88% of all music never gets more than 1,000 streams.

Here is some fun stuff for you:

• N = Total volume of music (The Noise).

• G = The absolute number of "Great" tracks (The Signal).

• A = The number of tracks a person can realistically encounter (The Attention).

Even if G increases, your A is fixed. This is the bottleneck. As N approaches infinity, the probability of you stumbling on something great reduces to almost zero. Nada.

Indie labels and independent releases account for 96.2% of uploads (Luminate 2025 report). The slush-pile size is increasing to the point that looking for a 10/10 becomes a futile use of time. When variance is high in the total population, but low in your filtered subset, your perception of quality flattens.

20 minutes looking at music doesn’t amount to looking through 253 million songs; it actually is closer to the 0.2% that hits the algorithms. In numbers, that’s about 541,000 tracks, accounting for 49.4% of all global streams. So we’re not developing a clear critical ear; we’re just learning to find the upper-mid.

Algos don’t give you N; you have access to N. And no matter how much N you have, your A is fixed. So even if your G grows proportionally, your window of greatness stays the same, but the room gets more crowded.

When it comes to taste, variance is required; if everything is 5/10, the standard deviation becomes nonexistent.

So, wait… is everything mid? Errrr… it would be difficult to say something different, when a song isn’t bad or good, it really is just somewhere in the middle. So what if taste becomes less about what we like and more about what we don’t? Maybe by employing a high level of song rejection, you're successfully removing the noise from your day and refining it down to songs that are actually good, and not just your own tastes.

When 106,000 tracks pop up daily, your "Yes" is cheap. The algorithm already knows what you'll tolerate. But it doesn't know what you’ll reject. Because most of us don’t bother to block, because well… it was an easy, effortless listen and totally inoffensive… and mid.

Passive listening, flattening the perception of greatness.

Update

The update you have all been waiting for (or not) is our AI-generated and recently released track. Which means we'll share it with you now (you don’t have to play it if you're avoiding AI music).

Introducing our AI-generated track, LaziiBee, with SWAMPS. Here’s a smartlink listing places you can hear it. If you want.

Swamps

Listen to Swamps

ditto.fm/swamps

Right now, we have 3 plays on Spotify. And… they were probably us. We have successfully thrown our own hat into the ring, competing with the other 106,000 tracks-per-day, and us with zero musical talent and no record label.

At 3 plays, we aren't just in the Deadzone; we are the statistical definition of it. We are currently part of the global releases that fail to hit double digits.

Some show don’t tell for the average release experience.

Missed the other AI-gen music posts? Check out the first posts here:

How Easy is AI Music to Create?

The answer is, depends on the prompt.

songsbrew.com/p/is-ai-music-easy-to-create

Automated Cul-de-Sac

We're all in the bottom...

songsbrew.com/p/automated-cul-de-sac

The next goal is to hit 1000 streams and see what that looks like. Will there be revenue? Which platform will give the highest plays/pay?

Who knows. What we do know is that thanks to the passive listeners, who make up the largest amount of streaming service users, we stand a chance of reaching millions of ears.

And that is a scary thought.

Until next time,

SongsBrew Editorial

The steak is too juicy.

Gif by heyarnold on Giphy

It wasn’t that long ago that we dreamed of a way to have our lives soundtracked, perfectly, all day, every day. After sitting watching a movie, hearing the carefully selected tracks to each scene as characters lived their lives. Having the perfect song at the perfect time, imagine if that could be us? What would that sound like?

Wishing that the vinyl, tapes, and CDs we did have could just have our favorite songs. One after the other.

And then we could. But they never held enough, not for people who just couldn’t get enough music into their ears.

Fast forward (a lot), and we had huge playlists and carried them around on MP3 players and iPods. Glory. And while switching songs in and reordering was always enjoyable for many people, it was a chore for others. Still wistfully dreaming about something that could do it for you…

And then it happened. An algorithm so smart it could process what you add and what you listen to and do it for you. You can have a playlist for every mood, including not-doing-anything-should-be-doing-something-wednesdays. Endless.

And then the steak got too juicy. And the lobster really is too buttery.

Psychologists often point to the "Paradox of Choice" here: the idea that while we crave options, having 100 million songs at our fingertips actually creates a kind of decision fatigue. Instead of feeling free, we feel paralyzed, often retreating to the same five albums just to stop our brains from whirring. ¹

Maybe it is human nature to always want more or less than we have. We used to have less, and wanted more, and now we have more more than we have ever mored before. By any standards, the progression to where we are now was much slower for a long time, and then, as we had more predictive technology available, it’s been much faster.

We have adapted (at speed) how and where we listen to music, and even the why.

The adaptation is interesting. Some age groups had to learn to use it as it came along, while others have never known anything different. Collectively, we changed the landscape.

We’ve gone all in on access; we do want more for less. Because, as a consumer, we’ve been trained to want that. We’ve been trained not to pay too much attention to where something comes from. We shifted away from selective listening sessions and moved to binge-listening all day long. And why not? We'd never had this before; we were dogs chasing our tails.

Although we are seeing a change at the moment, most listeners still opt for playlists over albums. And, for most people, as they work, or clean, or commute, music is their companion. Researchers in the Psychology of Music have noted this shift toward "affective regulation," where we use music as an auditory bubble.² Studies show that people often have it as background, not to listen but to drown out the world's sounds. We aren't consuming art; we're managing our environment.

Our easy adoption of these changes allowed the machines to learn how we interacted and offer us playlists built around that. This was revolutionary. We got everything we ever wanted, so much of it, right there at our fingertips.

Slowly, though, over the last few years, we are becoming disillusioned with it all. Be careful what you wish for.

Surprisingly to many, Spotify began recommending content as early as 2013. So they have had many years to become the perfect thing that they are now. Other platforms have had these playlists too. They’re not new; they just function better and pump out recommendations faster than ever. Most of us are familiar with Discovery Daily; it is the playlist that became synonymous with AIgo-playlists.

Perhaps it is rose-tinted glasses, but those early playlists felt like you got more new music. It felt closer to receiving a CD from your favorite person than to an automated playlist. And, while it might just be nostalgia taking over, there were fewer big, well-known household names in them. You were more likely to get an unknown gem. But there are millions of tracks being uploaded every week now, so it is easy for new artists to get lost.

But there is too much of a good thing. Since those early days, we’re inundated with playlists, and for the most part, they have the same artists you already listen to.

Data scientists call this "Algorithmic Homogenization." It happens because the math is designed for "precision," giving you exactly what you like, rather than "serendipity,³" which is giving you the weird, wonderful thing you didn't know you needed.

Suddenly, we’re in an automated music cul-de-sac, going round in a circle and missing the exit.

You have a choice of about 7-12 made-for-you playlists on any given day. And we slowly create an echo-chamber, a self-reinforcing set of music.

By getting everything we wanted, we got everything we didn’t.

The algos were designed to anticipate what we enjoy, to increase our time on the platform. And they did for a while. Over time, they shot way over that and served us what we fed it.

If we don’t want to, we don’t have to do anything about it. We can just enjoy what we always listen to. Or, we can switch on the headlights and leave the dead-end we’re in.

The data tells us one thing, but our ears tell us another. The irony isn't lost on us: we built the most sophisticated mirrors in human history only to be disappointed when all they did was reflect us back to ourselves. We wanted a world where the music never stopped. Now that it hasn't stopped for a decade, we find ourselves craving the silence of a deliberate choice.

If we are going to leave the dead-end, we have to embrace the possibility of hearing something we don't immediately like. That is the secret the algorithm can't grasp. Real discovery requires the risk of a "bad" song, because that friction is what makes the "good" songs stick. It makes the discovery feel earned rather than served.

We can keep driving the same loop, letting the ghost in the machine pick our soundtrack (we all do it; it is one less decision in our day), or we can reach for the search bar and type something random in.

We got everything we wanted. Now our fingers are greasy, and we have juice dripping down our chins.

An update

Last week, we made a song with AI with the goal in mind to get it on platforms, check the process, and see if people are really making money, and just how easy it is.

• The song is now being sent to stores and is scheduled for release on 1st March, so it has passed the review check.

• Here are the stores that rejected the track:

  

• Total cost: $49 for Suno Pro and Ditto Music Pro.

• Only one person said they would know for sure that the tracks we shared last week were AI.

• Stores pay out sales royalties with a minimum delay of 2 months, according to Ditto Music's disclaimer.

We will share dashboards after release.

Something new:

We've recently opened submissions for review, and you’ll find these on our reviews page. Alongside that, we have a new dedicated Instagram for sharing new or unsigned artists > SongsBrew.radar.

Until next time,

This is an unusual one for us; it’s not an album. Introducing David River.

IS DAVID RIVER A REGULAR ON OUR PLAYLISTS? Wasn’t. He is now added to both our public New Artists SongsBrew playlist and our personal ones.

source: Instagram @thekidlaroi

EMPTY HOUSE. Typically, our reviews are reserved just for LPs; not only do we love an album, but it also gives a better view of an artist. A full body of work shows their range and identity. Every so often, a track seems to stand up alone, and this, for us, was one of them.

What is immediately striking is the maturity of David’s vocal delivery and lyrical perspective, which seems to far outpace his chronological years. While the track stands on its own merits, the underlying context provides a much deeper understand and you know we love that context.

We know that artists often infuse their work with personal experience, but they don’t always stick the landing - this one does And we’re sat, seated, and sitting for it.

What hit us first was that the vocal profile has both an airy, vulnerable quality and has that raw power that we heavily associate with Lewis Capaldi. Our favorite thing about that is that it always favors an emotional transparency over that crisp perfection and overworked sound. Leaning into the subtle loss of the end of the word, the cracks in the delivery, while holding a roughness. It’s about what they’re the artist is telling, the how seems to matter less - but in the right way.

According to the press release:

“David's artistic path began during an incredibly challenging period in his life. The year his father passed away, a man he never had the chance to meet, became an unexpected catalyst for his creative expression. Grappling with profound grief and an inability to process such a unique loss, David turned to music as his sanctuary.”

Applying that to a third or fourth listen does give you the full scope of what the song means.

The intro to EMPTY RIVER carries a melodic style that we’ve seen recently with Mon Rovia. The space between the intro and where the vocals come in is minimal.

It feels like the production here is very disciplined; the intro, followed by stripped-back keys and vocals, was a good move. The vocals and keys interplay easily, neither one pushing, and the space created between them works well. The dynamic swell we are looking for arrives around the 0.43 mark, and eases you into the hook, and the structural integrity makes it feel like a payoff. You get what you want here.

By 1.37, the track is fully opened up, and the vocal arrangement here feels incredibly organic, and how David phrases things here, elongating with a rasp, feels close to James Arthur.

What we particularly enjoy is the ease with which the track is bookended, the intro and outro are mirrored. For use, we wished they lasted a few bars longer, because they bring a childhood nostalgia, without being on the nose.

We’re looking forward to more from David.

David makes us feel the same way Lewis Capaldi and James Arthur do. We can’t wait for what comes next. For a standalone single, we’re very happy. 4/5

Source: Instagram @thekidlaroi

SongsBrew Editorial

With zero skills, can you be on Spotify?

Getty Images

There is a joke to be made there about artists who are a bit zero-skilled already on streaming platforms like Spotify. But we’re looking at how easy it is to generate a song and get it published on DSPs, with zero talent or musical skill.

And what better way to explain it than to show you what we did and share the output (music)?

For this, we’re using Suno’s Pro Plan (which includes commercial use rights) and Ditto Music. There are a couple of things to be aware of: not all platforms will accept the AI track - it depends on their policies. Another thing to know is that if you are using other people's lyrics or parts of their song, you don’t have 100% exclusive rights to them. And, which we learned the hard way, signing up for a pro plan on Suno AFTER generating music doesn’t give you a retroactive license, and so nothing there can be monetized. Drat.

Also, YouTube might be off-limits to you due to ContentID, and yes, that includes YouTube Shorts. BUT you have 159 other platforms that might accept your music, so the odds are in your favor of going live somewhere (clicking the first two links below will take you to the song and the Udio platform).

Big Fail

Initially, we tested out Udio. Here are two tracks generated by different members of the team (without discussion of how we were using the tool):

Sample1
Prompt used: Suspenseful piece for opening a bag of chips too loudly in public, cinematic, horror

Sample2
Prompt used: A melancholic, atmospheric track featuring bittersweet, gravelly male vocals with heavy reverb and subtle "telephone" filtering. The production should feel lo-fi and "crusty"—think dusty vinyl crackle, a deep, side-chained sub-bass, and a slow, purposeful trip-hop drum beat. Incorporate a sad, repetitive piano melody and lush, sweeping string pads that swell during the chorus. The bridge should feature distorted vocal layering and a sense of "beautiful chaos", experimental, synth-pop, Lo-fi R&B, Trip-hop, Neo-soul, Experimental Pop, Cinematic Sadcore.

It’s not hard to see a huge difference in how they sound. Obviously, the prompts had a significant impact here. But you can be as lazy as you want, type the style of music you’d like to create into Gemini or Claude, and ask it to generate a prompt of around 1000 characters.

Then we ran into an issue (after using all of the free credits to make a bunch of tracks). Udio doesn’t have an in-built download option anymore. You can play around and publish them on the platform, but the downloading of audio, video, and stems has been disabled. Annoying, but that’s what you get when you don’t read the FAQs first.

Next option, Suno.

The platforms are almost a copy-and-paste of each other, so it doesn’t take long to get to grips with them. This time we can download. Nothing can stop us now…

We know that AI music from The Velvet Sundown and Breaking Rust have both done exceptionally well. Breaking records and stacking the revenue high in 2025. And we also know that most people who use streaming services are ‘laid-back listeners’. Vocals can be a giveaway on AI tracks, sounding robotic or thin, so we aimed to use fewer sections with demanding vocals. The styles most likely to trickle into playlists are lo-fi, chillbeats, chillhop, and lo-fi trip-hop, and anything that fits neatly into those genres should be a green light. They all sound the same after 20 minutes anyway.

Giving ourselves the best chance of making our way, with zero skills, to the masses. With a commercial license and some good prompts, we’re on our way.

Should it be this easy to create music? And, just because it sounds like music, are we going to classify it as music?

We know that 97% of people can’t tell the difference between what is AI music and what isn’t. Even we can’t tell anymore.

So, with a revised prompt, a new platform, and a bit of time (please note clicking play will take you to the web version), this is what we ‘created’:

slow ur row

So now we are starting to produce sounds similar to the millions of lo-fi tracks on so many platforms. It seems like low-hanging fruit, but the process is so easy that we’re starting to wonder why more people don’t do it, rather than hoping everyone stops.

When you’re listening to something that has no vocals, does being human matter? Murky waters.

How fast can you get on platforms?

We mentioned we’re using Ditto Music to publish, and we have. Though we didn’t want to stump up the extra £40/$40 for a 3-day release, we’re now in a free 10-day queue. But that gives you plenty of time to use their pre-release bundles and get people excited about whatever you’re releasing.

Was it difficult? No, it was fast and easy. Ideally, we’d have known there was a 10-day until release timer, but we’ll update you with actual live links when we have them, and follow what the published side looks like too. For this, we will use a combination of Ditto Music (streaming data) and Music24 for playlist add analytics.

For a very reasonable $59 for a year, you can get unlimited releases for two artists on Ditto Music. There are other perks too, but if you want to keep it even simpler, it’s $19 for a starter plan. But we also know that under 1000 plays don’t get paid (88% of tracks never break the barrier), and there are something like 27-50k songs uploaded every day. The chances of seeing a return on that investment are very small, but not impossible. And then, if the experiment works out, we will be able to report any income. An interesting experiment to see roughly how long, if ever, you can recoup your cash (these tracks included here don’t count and won’t be released on any streaming platforms). And, if you can get paid anything at all for just a few hours’ work.

We’re not advertising any of these platforms; we're just sharing the process.

So what about something different? Not lofi, but something with lyrics and a different genre?

If we hadn’t introduced the newsletter as AI, would you have known that the next song was AI-generated? And, if you enjoy it, would it even matter?  

folded napkins

We ran it through SubmitHub’s AI checker. Here is the folded napkins score:

• Temporal analysis:

  • Pure AI: could be (48%)

  • Hybrid (AI + Human): could be (45%)

  • Human: probably not (7%)

Interesting results. Because we all know these are 100% AI-generated, but to someone else listening, would they be able to tell if an AI checker can’t tell? Feel free to test the theory. To the casual ear, or even a trained one, we are at the point that AI-gen music is fooling the best of us.

In the end, our experiment is ongoing, so we don’t have a hard conclusion yet. But with a few hours and a minimal financial investment, there is barely any distance between having an idea and achieving it. It doesn’t matter if we call it art, music, or just utility audio anymore. Streaming platforms have very few guidelines for what will and won’t be accepted. The true gatekeepers are the distribution platforms, who can review and reject at will.

At no point did we need to feel anything to make what you’ve heard here. The tester track that is going out into the world just needs to be sorted, slotted into an algorithm, and fed to listeners. Platforms are moving away from ‘delete and ban’ toward disclosure; the floodgates are now wide open.

We’ll let you know when we’re live and if our zero-effort experiment generates a single cent.

A Final Note

Until next time,

SongsBrew Editorial

Deities of Monoculture

Photo by Doyoun Seo on Unsplash

What do we mean when we say untouchable? Now, in most cases, it is the physical sense, because over the last ten years, we have lost more of the original rockstars. Sure, the long lens will show Elvis. Maybe that is where it started? We went from having performers to having Idols and Kings. Jimi Hendrix gave us an almost shamanic person to look up to. Grace Jones, an alien goddess, and Little Richard showed audiences what power, energy, and loudness looked like.

Prince, Ozzy, Bowie, Mercury - so iconic that we don’t need to add a first name here. Such is their legend. Such is their rockstarism. They are referred to as the kings and queens of their genre, the gods of their instruments, or the gods of the stage.

An untouchable. They never seemed to exist the way we do. Mythologized and the blueprint for so many that came after, who will never reach their heights. The thing was, it was expected that these, and many others, would be the epitome of behavior that would see them cancelled before their third studio album in modern times.

You didn’t want Prince to be seen in an Adidas tracksuit with his hair dishevelled. He was to be adorned and adored. Bowie wasn’t allowed to be too relatable; he was to be an alien who wasn’t beholden to the gravity that we suffer from.

It is only now that the conversation around Ozzy is focused on the fact that actually shooting cats, beating your wife, but being funny doesn’t all balance out. But it somehow didn’t seem to matter, and his death took away what might be one of the last rockstars that aren’t run into the ground with social and corporate audits. For more than a couple of decades, the live-fast, die-young lifestyle was cool because it fuelled their art. It fed us new music, stunning visuals, and artists that had become vessels for our collective shadows, whereas now we want them to be role models and spokespeople.

Nick Cave has previously described artists like Tom Waits, Van Morrison, and Leonard Cohen as having a mysterious power. Interestingly, in a BBC interview, he cited the church as the source of his love of music (as evident in his music) and Johnny Cash as one of his inspirations. Maybe they all become one and the same.

Auditing Artists

Previously, this untouchable power was okay; it was cool and rare when an artist went on stage with a t-shirt for a cause. Sinéad O'Connor. RATM. Now, if artists aren’t using their platforms, they are called out for it. Because how dare you garner millions of fans and be silent? That silent power is being smashed to smithereens with a humanizing mandate. Rockstars used to do drugs, have wild illicit and explicit parties, launch TVs out of the windows, and live in chaos that we couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Their behavior was a test for the genius, so what if they went to rehab 7 times? So what if they caused thousands of dollars of damage - so what? Because at the end of the run, fans would’ve seen them live, and we’d have a CD in our palms.

Now? For those who dare to step into the light, we demand even the smallest star to take a stance on every geopolitical crisis, to fend off rumors and complaints, and to be relatable and human. Touchable, bendable, and yet hold the voices of millions in their throats and present them at every given opportunity. And never, ever express an opinion that is ‘other’.

Going back to Prince, just for a moment, had he stepped out in grubby sweats and been that human for a moment, it would’ve crumbled his gravitas. It’s not what you would’ve wanted for him (though you can buy his monogrammed ones). Some artists needed and still do need to be other than human. The masses always want idols. We need them.

The passing of Ozzy was surrounded by the talk of - where does the torch go? A collective understanding that we were running out of rockstars. That version of what a rockstar was and is.

We’re plucking away the alien, ethereal, untouchable energies once assigned to the greats, shaving everything down to fit them into the ‘authentic’ influencer bucket. We slide carefully and comfortably into the age of health, accountability, and safety.

But is it the end of the road for rockstars as they once were?

Maybe, somewhere in our relentless pursuit of authenticity and role models, we have forgotten that what made a rockstar was their ability to be human and a myth. We have arrived at an age where the Prince of Darkness becomes the Prince of the Algorithms. We have to ask: do we, as the audience, even deserve the legends of old anymore? We demand green juices, workout routines, clean makeup, no swearing, several palatable political stances, and, at the same time, demanding work that feels as rich, dangerous, and artful with nothing to feed it. We’re not saying you need to be a menace to society, but maybe that was what made rockstars so intriguing.

We want humans without flaws to perform for flawed masses. We wanted to bring the Idols, Kings, and Rockstars to walk with us, and perhaps we didn’t know at the time they’d lose the power to fly when they did.

The Algo Ceiling

The heights of these phenomena were built by radio DJs, magazines, visionary labels, and a world that was easier to travel in. They bet on the weird, the wild, the loud, and the revolutionary. Today, we have lazy algorithms betting on average (mediocre): the stuff that slips in unnoticed.

We’re talking about that thing the artists had that can’t be measured by retention and data. Where is it?

Artists who never would’ve had an Instagram. Those who reinvent themselves and shift personas (though Tyler, the Creator, does this perfectly) would now be seen as inconsistent branding. It’s almost like the infrastructure to hold the legends no longer exists. Or maybe how we judge them, and the goalposts have shifted. It’s hard to focus on your work when somewhere, someone is telling you you need to hit the FYP.

Grace Jones, perhaps not the only living exception, but one nonetheless. As untouchable and impenetrable as she was at the start. Not a relic of times bygone, but perhaps a reminder of what we had. Never trading access and mediocrity for success on an algorithm. Artists of now are almost expected to film and post BTS hourly, giving us gross access to them 24/7/365. It’s odd.

We’re suffering a physical loss; as the years go by, we have fewer of the greats left, if any. The social calling to make sure they are not problematic (at all, and to varying standards). And the industrial loss, because the machines as we have them now wouldn’t have known what to do with these behemoths, other than to slide them in a playlist between The Lumineers and Harry Styles.

Do we even deserve true rockstars anymore?

A Final Note

Until next time,

Source: Spotify

The teasers we got for this project were genuinely exciting, but Piss In The Wind is incredibly frustrating.

IS JOJI A REGULAR ON OUR PLAYLISTS? Yes, and has been for years. We even have a couple of Pink Guy in rotation.

Source: X @jojiontour

PIECE OF YOU with Giveon is beautiful, the annoying part is 2.15 isn’t enough. The best thing about the album is that it feels a lot like BALLADS 1 and SMITHEREENS; you can even throw in some heavy In Tongues (particularly DEMONS and I DON’T WANNA WASTE MY TIME). It is fat with the delicate layers, stacked distortion, and the melodic style that Joji fans are used to. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a track on here that doesn’t have Joji’s DNA all over it, so much so that you’d be forgiven for confusing a couple of the tracks with ones we’ve heard before.

Does it make them bad? No, it’s just his style, and people who’ve been here since Dirty Frank are ride or die.

Maybe there is a lesson somewhere in all the demo-length tracks, about not getting invested in that which can be finished so abruptly. While each individual track feels good, together on an album, it feels like we are missing something that would make it cohesive. The consistency does come from the quality, which doesn’t disappoint, but it doesn’t come from each song when listened to in order.

In fact, we might even be tempted to say, and we’d love to see someone out there do it, these should be in a different order.

CAN’T SEE SH*T IN THE CLUB, we almost sang ‘perfect vision’ after the ‘every time I close my eyes’ line.

The song that people are talking about is SOJOURN, and yeah, it’s good, we like it ‘cause it triggered a Gwen Stefani The Sweet Escape memory in parts. SOJOURN hits you hard because it starts off the tail end of the ballad leaning: CAN’T SEE SH*T IN THE CLUB.

Just like the rest of the tracks, it finishes way too soon, though. And as usual, just right before you’d expect a crescendo of sorts, or just another minute of track.

ROSE COLORED with Yeat, the layering of vocals that kicks in about 2.01 is incredibly pleasing to the ear. Though Yeat himself doesn’t feel like he was needed, Joji could’ve carried this one alone.

We get sweeps of the energy and sound we got in Nectar. And, LOVE YOU LESS intro sounds so much like Djo’s End of Beginning chorus (about 35 seconds in). You can sing Djo’s lyrics over the top of the LYL intro.

If there is one thing Joji does, it is build a universe around his work. You can very easily listen to a shuffled mix of BALLADS 1, SMITHEREENS, and PISS IN THE WIND. A couple of tracks from NECTAR. And, we dunno about you, but we’re still holding onto drips of the mythical CHLOE BURBANK when we remember how good HOLD MY BLOOD was, and what we could’ve had. If you happen to have a playlist with this combo, drop the link in the comments. We’d love to take a listen.

Despite people saying they are filler tracks and that it feels unfinished, a few more listens can easily move you in the opposite direction.

On first run-through of the album, you’d be tempted to say, listening to it start to end leaves you unsatisfied, because what do you mean 21 songs and only 45 minutes of music? Is there anything worth replaying?

He’s never been one to be pinned into one genre; in fact, he will switch in the middle of a track. ATTENTION (BALLADS 1) is a great example; we sway between soft piano and hit a brick wall of distortion, then right back to the piano.

For new listeners, PITW is going to be confusing, but for those who know ball, this is Joji. He delivers glimpses and vignettes, HOTEL CALIFORNIA and HORSES TO WATER should let you know, he knows exactly what he is doing. Firing out 21 ideas, and then we wait for the direction he takes next. Lyrically, the album is introspective, yearning (as always), heartsick, and sad, with lightness and texture burned into it all.

Who hurt you, Joji, and why must we suffer too?

Track least enjoyed: Forehead Touch The Ground
Most enjoyed track: Tarmac
Grower: Horses to Water
Going to be the big one: Sojourn.

Is it perfect? No. Is it bad? No. It is the album that we have to accept and get comfortable with. It might be the most authentic thing he’s made: a Joji scrapbook in album form. We just never felt finished. 3.5/5

SongsBrew Editorial

But you should be happy records are back!

You are right, and we are happy. For those who don’t buy vinyl, cassettes, or CDs, you don’t have to worry that a specific song is going to sell out; your stream will be there forever on one platform or another.

But are we now running wax ledgers? Is the turntable optional?

The rise of the special-edition, colored, liquid, limited-print, sold-out, waitlist vinyl. Once they’re gone, they’re gone, and you’ve missed your chance to scoop a once-in-a-lifetime piece of plastic. They are no longer just for music; they are something we collect and hang on the wall. Are we just “minting” physical records?

For vinyl lovers who like to add something special to their collection, there has never been a finer time than now. But there is a growing trend of people without record players investing their cash in limited runs of their favorite artists' releases.

Music Business stats from Luminate

Is that something to love or something to loathe?

Is the comparison between NFTS and vinyl new? No, we’re about a year late to this discussion, but a year ago, vinyl wasn’t where it is now in terms of sales. There was a short run of artists releasing music only attached to NFTs, and a couple of them got more invested in the whole market. So the two have been dancing for years now. This isn’t that; it is a comparison of how we’re approaching records.

Note: If you’re thinking wtf is an NFT, it’s a non-fungible token. A "fungible" item is like a standard $10 bill, or in our case, every play on Spotify is identical and interchangeable with the next. A "non-fungible" thing, or vinyl in our example, is a signed, numbered vinyl record; it’s a unique asset that can’t be swapped for another because its specific history and "serial number" belong to you alone. And if you sold that limited-run numbered vinyl, the person who buys it will own it and no one else (or you’ll be one of 500).

Twigs, Hair, and Liquid FOMO

Limited editions and limited runs have always been around. It’s not new, but it is more feverish now. A limited 500-run of a huge artist with something encapsulated inside the vinyl? Years ago, that wasn’t possible. Dermot Kennedy’s new album "The Weight of the Woods" could/can be purchased on vinyl with leaves inside. Chappell Roan’s "The Subway" had a "Bad World" edition filled with synthetic red hair. The list goes on. Not to mention the controversial liquid. Potentially unbalanced, potentially terrible quality, concerns about how to store them, and the chance of leaking. We’re HODLing (long-term buy-and-hold, aka Holding On for Dear Life) records; some of us have always done it, but now it is on a bigger scale.

When faced with the chance to own something limited FOMO kicks in, and next thing you know, you're $50(00) down on a vinyl with twigs in.

Let’s face it, though - they are beautiful.

We have to ask, are they to listen to? Or are they to look at and say that you own? Sure, it can be both. But is it? Really…?

Fear of missing out drives a lot of what we do, how we do it, when, and what we buy. Marketing people know that, and so do wise businesses. With vinyl sales rising and people talking about other ways to consume music, there has never been a better time to experiment with what people are willing to spend. Countdowns to vault openings and 500-print limits are too tempting. Pre-order pressings are announced long before the album drops, and we are buying on the assumption that we’ll love the album. It’s a big financial commitment, so adding ‘limited’ or ‘store exclusive’ to it is too much to ignore.

And that brings us neatly to Variants. 

Variant Roulette

Sure, you can buy the black one, but what about a purple splatter import that costs triple? Do they sound the same? Sure, but do they look the same? Not at all. It is the same way that NFTs were touted: unique. The Indie exclusive, Target/Walmart exclusive, Amazon exclusive, rinse repeat across hundreds of stores. And, some fans, most notably a recent Taylor Swift fan, purchase all variants.

@aidenwatson13

which ones did you guys get?? #taylorswift #TSTheLifeOfAShowgirl #swiftie #vinyl

The content is most often identical, but the ‘skin’ is different. In the NFT world, a different 'skin' makes a digital cat rare; in our world, a 'Blood Splatter' wax makes a common album a high-value asset. The ‘skin’ ultimately dictates the value for both original sale and resellers.

It then becomes a collectable, not something to unwrap and listen to the warmth a vinyl brings, or that slight crackle on those without dust covers. Sure, with NFTs, they are mostly pointless because you couldn’t really do much with them. Vinyl is different.

Big Flex

If you tell a group of people you have a real 0001 minted NFT from 2020, people aren’t going to pay much attention in most circles. If you tell people you have the first pressing of a Bob Dylan, even non-vinyl heads will know that it’s pretty cool.

There’s also the big online world of unwrapping and showing off a new vinyl, and double views for something that encapsulates twigs or moss.

Giphy

Same Same But Different?

If you look closely, our vinyl obsession is just the NFT market without the tacky feel. Our ledger is the Kallax shelf (big thanks to IKEA for the perfectly shaped shelving). While they’re tracking tokens, we’re tracking 12x12 sleeves. NFT traits like laser eyes or gold hats are just digital versions of our variant obsession. The audio doesn't change, but the skin determines if it’s a $30 standard or a $300 grail. Whether it is Ghostly White or Blood Splatter, the plastic is the point. A verified PFP on a social profile is just the digital version of a TikTok unboxing video because both exist only to prove you were fast enough to catch the drop.

While they HODL for the moon, we keep our wax in the original shrink-wrap, stickers and all. M/M or bust. We do it just to ensure the record never actually meets a needle. They get private Discord access as their utility, while we get synthetic hair, forest leaves, and liquid fillings encapsulated in plastic. It’s the same psychological hustle of buying into a gimmick that goes beyond the art itself just to say you were one of the lucky few to own the mint.

Maybe that is too cynical. Maybe we should just be happy that more people are buying, so we have a wider choice. Is it even our business if someone buys a 1-in-500 vinyl to pin it to a wall or make it into a popcorn bowl? Is it just a new way to police how people listen to music?

Any streaming giant can fold, we can lose all our carefully curated playlists, but you can’t lose the bright red etched vinyl. That’s yours forever. And you might think it’ll never happen, but it happened to Napster. Everything went. So then that $50, $500 or whatever becomes an investment in the stuff we love.

When it comes to limited runs, should these be for people who’re actually going to listen, or does it even matter? Does a vinyl lose its meaning when it’s never used for what it was made for? Does buying a limited-edition item to put on a shelf, without a turntable, make it one of the best or most useless NFTs around?

Maybe the "meaning" has just shifted. In the NFT world, the value isn't in the JPEG; it's in the provenance, the digital proof that you own the original, and the ‘whatever’ value that you could sell it for. Vinyl has become the physical version of that proof. When you hold a 1-of-500 pressing, you aren't just holding music; you're holding a "Physical Smart Contract." It’s a verifiable piece of history that doesn't require a server to stay alive.

Vinyl might have just reached what a digital NFT never could, though. A token that looks spectacular and is coveted by the hundreds who will never touch it. A piece of ‘art’ that will stay with you when streaming services fold.

Perhaps in a world where everything digital is rented, it doesn’t matter if the record is purchased to sit on a shelf and get dusty or if the needle is dropped on it.

Maybe owning the wax without the turntable is the ultimate in consumerism. Or maybe, since the world is burning, collecting $1000 of the same thing, be it pixels or plastic, makes someone happy, and who cares?

A Final Note

Until next time,

SongsBrew Editorial

WTF Harry?

That’s what the internet is collectively asking this week. We’ve been here before with Taylor Swift when we heard people were getting a second mortgage to pay for tickets, though the average price was somewhere in the $400-$600 for the nosebleeds (reportedly). Beyonce’s Reddit ticket discussion thread had tickets in the $166 range for the nosebleeds, while some people saw prices closer to $500 plus fees.

And sure, fans were mad. But something changed this time around - even the marketing stiffs on LinkedIn are asking, “What on earth?” Maybe it’s because this one seems to impact a wider range of people? Or maybe, because Harry was already in the spotlight ‘cause of his surprise album drop, and it is a quick content win? (‘cause music isn’t in their remit for 99% of their ChatGPT slop posts - but, still, they are showing up now).

Either way, the public is annoyed. This one, unlike the others, also made it into the industry WhatsApp group chats.

It also seems that many people have just learned what dynamic pricing is, and are throwing it around like it’s the worst thing in the world.

Anyway, let’s have a look at what is going on and why people seem to care more this time around, to the point we’re seeing fans boycott…

His guests are pretty high profile: Robyn, Shania Twain, Jamie xx, Fousheé, Jorja Smith, Fcukers, and Skye Newman. They’re worth a pretty penny ticket-wise themselves. Rather than hopping from city to city, running night after night, Harry is in each venue for at least 2 nights, with London and Amsterdam running for 6 days, a whopping 30 evenings in NY, and then 4 dates in Australia.

A residency isn’t new for him; he did one in 2022, with a run of 15 shows at Madison Square Garden and 12 in LA at the Kia Forum. Maybe the length of time this one runs for has surprised people. Maybe it is the pricing. Speaking of.

Dynamic pricing is in play for these tickets - so what does that mean? In this case, fans are pointing out that Platinum is dynamic pricing, renamed, and something that artists can opt out of. When tickets are in high demand, pricing can automatically increase before they go on sale (based on sign-ups and pre-public sales, etc.), and before the sale of ‘regular’ tickets appear, too. Which is why we are seeing some eye-watering high prices. It’s so close to scalping your own fans it hurts.

Note: sometimes dynamic pricing drops ticket prices a lot, if you’re lucky. But it is a rarer occurrence for big artists.

The dynamic pricing might sound familiar because Olivia Dean recently went with dynamic… sorry ‘platinum’ pricing, and when she and her team realised they refunded those who had paid way over the odds, and shut it down. This earned some fabulous PR because she took action to protect fans. But you have to wonder: if there were no complaints, would she and the team let it slide?

If a fan is willing to pay $1,000 for a terrible seat, whose fault is it? Ticketmaster for being trash? The artist and their team for being trash and doing nothing about it? Is the artist blameless, having “zero control over it”? The fan for being willing to drop the cash?

Maybe it is so much worse, and just before we hit your inbox, Harry and his team will pull a PR blinder and refund people. Pinning the problem firmly on the system and looking like the good guys. It becomes too easy to be so cynical.

We’re so (as a collective) convinced that $200+ is the norm, $500 starts to look okay, and then $1,000 feels bad, but people are still paying it… while shaming the celeb for the charge.

What an intricate and sticky web we have woven for ourselves. (Let’s not even get started on resellers.)

The truth is, millions of people could boycott any of these artists, and a million silent ones will pay whatever the price is. And we can talk about relationships with artists like Beyonce, Taylor, Adele, and Harry as much as we want, but the truth is, we don’t have a relationship with these artists. Not a real one. We can turn them into whoever we want based on what we see and hear. And we can be sure they don’t have a relationship with Trisha, who lives down the road and is $2500 in medical and ticket debt, but who will turn up to every venue that she can while sliding further into a hole.

We should remember that, always. Sure, they give us music that fills up our silence; it becomes what we lean on when times are tough. But the person we are looking at on the stage isn’t someone we know, or who knows us.

We pay them to perform for us. Just like we pay a plumber to fix the toilet.

This is business. It isn’t personal to them; it is personal to us. Sure, we might be the reason they are even on the stage in the first place. But we are one of one million. We’re not saying that all artists see it only as a business, or that when faced with upset fans or meeting them in person, they aren’t moved by it. But there are a lot of people between them and us. And 90% have money on their mind and a job to do.

The job is recouping tour costs, paying wages, paying studio fees, covering marketing, covering the thousands of people who work on an artist's campaign, paying Harry, and paying hundreds of unseen costs. And your $1,000 is split into 1,000 pockets.

So while we might be seeing people say, “Harry is a multi-millionaire - he can make the tickets as cheap as possible,” there comes a point at which the economics stop making sense, and much of the cost is beyond his control. Would fans be happy without the sparkle, bands, glitter, and costumes? Everything that makes the show what it is, and what fans expect, comes with a price tag.

Always remember, it is the fans who beg for the tour. A tour becomes a duty attached to the thing they loved doing in the first place: making music and recording the album.

So, while Scammin’ Harry has made a chump of everyone, he’s not the first, he won’t be the last. This is the state of play.

Enjoy the game, or sit it out.

A Final Note

Until next time,

source: Spotify

We went into this promising to be as objective as possible. No doubt he’s been gone a while, something in the region of 8 years since his last release. We were looking for a reason to say he’s still the king of the aesthetic, and he always will be ‘cause he’s a pretty boy. But is the album what we were waiting for?

IS A$AP ROCKY A REGULAR ON OUR PLAYLISTS? Not really. And this album isn’t changing that. We wanted the ultimate banger to throw us off the planet, but instead, we got a mixed bag.

source: Instagram @asaprocky

ORDER OF PROTECTION slides in with a smooth synth intro and the line ‘It’s been a lil’ while since I been in the league’. It’s an introduction to his current reality, asserting that absence doesn't mean he lost his spot; he’s still in the lead.

But is the album actually convincing?

HELICOPTER, he had to defend the video for this one because it looks like something the GTA team would do - in the best way possible. Love. The lineup for the video is nuts. The track itself could’ve fooled you into thinking that’s the style for the whole album. It feels like a fever dream.

STOLE YA FLOW It’s not "officially" a diss track, but come on. When you drop lines like “First you stole my flow, so I stole yo’ bitch,” we all know he’s aiming straight at Drake. It’s so light touch, it didn’t need to be in there at all.

Then we hit STAY HERE 4 LIFE, Brent Faiyaz brings a necessary calm, and honestly? We love the R&B switch-up.

ROBERRY is the genre-bend that actually works. We know the Reddit critics are feverishly typing about how Doechii’s part was too long, but we love the chop-and-change into something so distinct and crisp. They both shine on this one.

STOP SNITCHING is blunt. But as a song? One we won’t be coming back to. Don't even get us started on STFU. We’re sorry (not sorry), but it is the worst track on the album. Chaotic electro-techno beats that are unbearable to listen to. Just a huge NO. But like we’ve said before, not everything is for us.

DON’T BE DUMB has crisp, clean production, but they know that; he even says don’t bother mentioning it. Confidence. What ASAP has delivered is a sell-out album. Is it perfect? Maybe not. What makes it interesting to listen to is the mix. You can never settle into one genre on the album, and instead, he made something that shows off more than just rapping over some beats. He’s given people something worth chewing over and talking about. While the claims of replay/relisten value are saying low - we disagree.

This album isn’t bad. It’s just confusing for some. There are some smart lyrics in there, and he carefully pieces together a fantastic line-up and mixes genres like a pro. 3/5 Cups

Source: Instagram @asaprocky

source: Spotify

THE GOOD LIFE as an opener slaps you on each cheek, then pours a pint over your head, and slaps your crisps out your hand. Yes. Add in Gwendoline Christie screaming and BIG SPECIAL’s dulcet tones, we’re sold.

ARE SLEAFORD MODS A REGULAR ON OUR PLAYLISTS? No, but they should be for anyone who enjoys The Streets, British humor and observation, or straight talking.

source: Insatgram @sleaford_mods

If you don’t like the line “I want big bumhole to suck me up”, you can stop reading; this is not for you.

You’ll be forgiven for thinking that is just word soup based on that, but the album is very clearly a rage-written observation about the world around them. It’s just delivered in a punchier, swear-filled brutality.

ELITEST G.O.A.T is something we need; it’s punk in every way it needs to be. Shouty, but for a reason. Being followed up with MEGATON, keeps pushing the thumb on your forehead. If you’ve been oblivious to everything that’s going on in the world, they peel your eyes open and force you to look.

The title track running to The Magic Roundabout is something of a revelation. It feels grim, but that’s the point, isn’t it? Dirty mouth, clean heart.

Don’t be mistaken, though, as much as the delivery is dry and going for the gullet, it can be funny too. It’s that perfect line that only the British get right; they’re cutting you to the core, and you’ll laugh along.

Rolling on to SHOVING THE IMAGES, FLOOD THE ZONE, and KILL LIST. If you weren’t feeling disillusioned with the world already, you will be - and that is the point.

THE UNWRAP is the perfect ending. While the rest of the tracks covered everything from war to social media rot, and many, many maggots. THE UNWRAP finishes us on numb overconsumption.

It’s a car crash. Meaning you can’t look away, and in this case, nor should you. 4/5 Cups

source: Instagram @sleaford_mods

source: Spotify

Bloodline is one of those records that doesn’t ask for your attention; it assumes it. The opening BLACK COULDRON shows off with ease the sway between styles.

IS MON ROVÎA A REGULAR ON OUR PLAYLISTS? Wasn’t, but will be.

The kind of album that arrives like a conversation you’ve already been having, no need for introductions. Warm, measured, mature, and oh so human - and we’re more than happy to be involved. Straight away, we recommend you listen to this one with headphones, and do nothing else. While it is dreamy on speakers, there are some textures that are easier to catch through headphones - AirPods will work just fine.

The danger zone here is obvious: this could’ve easily drifted into “nice” territory. The kind of nice that disappears the second you put the kettle on. That background sh*t you just don’t listen to. It didn’t, it doesn’t. There are some albums that you select and play start to end, this is one of them.

Mon Rovîa understands something a lot of soft, introspective records don’t: restraint is only interesting if there’s tension underneath it; we want to be held there. This Afro-Appalachian singer-songwriter from Liberia, who grew up in the United States, has stories to tell. And we were more than ready to listen.

The songs sit in that folk-soul, story-first space. Not in a cosplay way, not in a “look at my influences” way, there is nothing that screams ‘I stole this from somewhere else’. More like someone who actually uses music to think out loud, his writing invites us to join him for a while, and the easy guitars move us along with the tracks. There’s a raw, exposing quality to the writing, like these songs weren’t engineered for impact, but they have it, oh boy, do they. BLOODLINE is an example of that.

If you’re here for hooks, big moments, or anything that smells like a chorus that’s been overworked for pop catchiness, you’re not going to get it; you’re going to get bored. Probably by track three. This is not a record that performs for you. It walks along, and you can walk with it or miss the point. The upbeat, foot-tapping, head-bobbing catchiness of FIELD SONG is fabulous, but never for a second let the indie-folk-country beat fool you - always keep an ear for the lyrics. Church, rifles, childhood, war with an overarching sense of yearning.

If you’re the kind of listener who likes sitting inside someone else’s head for a while, Bloodline (as the full body of work) works brilliantly. The introspective writing is very inviting, but leaves you with questions, so like us, you’ll probably end up reading more about him. And you should. Between the guns, violence, and news audio, you can build a picture; he makes it so easy, but you’ll want the full story. Go and read more about him, and your third listen becomes richer.

There’s no theatrical suffering; it’s not an overt trauma dump with a tune or oversized drama. HEAVY FOOT is a perfect example, on first pass you’ll be nodding your head along, second time around you’ll catch ’and the government, staying on the heavy foot, tryin’ to keep us all down, no they never gunna keep us all down’. It’s just honest work.

You can pick any track from PRAY THE DEVIL BACK TO HELL or SOMEWHERE DOWN IN GEORGIA and the delivery is still flawless.

Does the album run a little long? It’s barely over 42 minutes, and feels complete by the time we finished WHERE THE MOUNTAINS MEET THE SEA.

But as a full statement, Bloodline feels honest and warm, regardless of the topic, which in itself is cold and brutal. Not “sad-boy honest.” Just… someone trying to put their story somewhere outside their own head, and succeeding. We’re being invited to listen along for experiences that most of us have never had, and if luck is on our side, we never will.

This isn’t a record you recommend to everyone. This is a record you recommend to specific people. The ones who don’t need to be impressed. The ones who know what excellence in delivery is. Who appreciate clean production, thoughtful musicianship, and lyrical precision.

We’re looking forward to not being able to afford tickets to his future concerts because he blew up so big. 5/5 Cups

Lyrics from Running Boy.

source: Spotify

Ой Ти Дубе Кучерявий is the opening track, and honestly, the intro bassline reminded us of Tin Tin Out - What I Am ft. Emma Bunton.

IS MONARHA A REGULAR ON OUR PLAYLISTS? No. New artists for us. Is unlikely to get put into heavy rotation.

source: Spotify

Straight away, we’re not going to be deeping the lyrics. Mostly because any song, when translated into English, in almost any circumstances, lack their real meaning and becomes bland. So we’re just going in to see what we’re feeling and how it is to listen to.

The opening track reminds us of something late 90’s, early 00’s - thanks to the bassline. It rolls along beautifully, letting the keys move us up and down. Vocal crisp, enjoyable to listen to, then suddenly out of nowhere we switch from lounge-esque vocals to speedier rap, then a bit of flair at the end. Lovely.

Here’ the track listing:

1. Oak (Ой Ти Дубе)

2. In Thoughts (Думками)

3. Thank You (Дякую Тобі)

4. I’m Going Up the Mountain (Я іду на Гору)

5. A Story About Love (Історія про Любов)

6. I Will Disperse (Я Розвію)

A note from the artist herself:

“These songs were written in the first months of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, when MONARHA remained in Kyiv. Days were spent volunteering for the military; nights were spent at the piano, composing by candlelight - during blackouts, under air-raid sirens, between explosions. What began as emotional survival became a body of work carrying both the rawness of wartime experience and the resilience of a heart refusing to close. The album explores themes of identity, inner liberation, awakening, vulnerability, and love as an act of courage.

In a bold artistic choice inspired by the golden era of funk, the entire album was recorded in a single take, with all musicians performing live together in one room. No overdubs. No edits. No reconstruction.”

It’s fun to listen to, because for those who don’t speak Ukrainian, you miss the nuance and the subject in the lyrics. Icoupl

A heavyweight for the debut album to carry, but the funk-jazz-lounge-fusion feels light and easy. Musically, she is enjoyable and highly skilled, and you can tell vocally that she has a great range, flitting easily between jazz lounge and pop belters. We’re looking forward to hearing more from Monarha. 2.5/5 Cups

Source: Spotify

source: Spotify

ROCKET leans a little more guitar-heavy than you might be expecting, but it has the ‘90s feel with ease. Sonically incredible, until he starts singing - rinse repeat for 11 tracks.

IS ROBBIE WILLIAMS A REGULAR ON OUR PLAYLISTS? No. We won’t be expanding further on this one.

source: Instagram @robbiewilliams

Approaching the album as if we hadn’t seen the documentaries released on Netflix is the only way to do this right. There is an age group who are probably running this on repeat. The ones who remember young Robbie, Robbie of ANGELS, Robbie of 90s bad-boy rude-boy. And are begging for this to come back around.

The title doesn’t lie, it’s so BRITPOP it is almost painful. It’s not that cheesy Britpop, though; it's just trying too hard to take itself seriously.

The guitar is doing most of the heavy lifting. And while tracks like BITE YOUR TONGUE could’ve been something, the juxtaposition between pop beat and sharp lyrics has been done, and done better elsewhere. The rest is rhyming 101.

Are we really back in the wham bams and the doo doo doos? Then, somewhere tucked in between all of the ‘90s flavors, we have ALL MY LIFE, the country-leaning piece. Cool.

More than once, he sounds like Liam Gallagher without the power. The weakness in his voice comes through in IT’S OKAY UNTIL THE DRUGS STOP WORKING, until they put that reverb back on.

And what is the point of the MORRISSEY diss track at Robbie’s big age? We’re bored.

Trying too hard to be something, but always unsure what those things are. Well, except for him saying this is the album he always wanted to make.

We can tell.

Self-indulgent ‘if i can’t be me I’ll die, and your opinions suck and and and, these are my world observations’. Okay. 40 minutes we’ll never get back, and we’ve listened to some sh*t. 0/5 Cups

Source: Instagram @robbiewilliams

source: Spotify

If you’re really lucky, you’ll have tickets to their UK tour before they blow up, because we’re calling it now, they’re do big things this year.

IS NIGHT FLIGHT A REGULAR ON OUR PLAYLISTS? Since we received their links, they’ve been added to regular rotation.

source: Instagram @nightflightband

COLD TO THE TOUCH is a soft opening, and actually might fool you into thinking there is no bite to the album. There is. A couple of tracks are particularly outstanding. And while we appreciate Edith Bowman’s pick of ALIMONY on BBC Radio, we’re firming in camp FORGET YOU. 

Though it’s a tough call because LUCY and THE HEARSE are tough to beat. 

The easy guitar and generally relaxing speed of the tracks make it almost easy to tune out and let it wash over you. But their lyrics are razor sharp. And we’ve said on more than one occasion, we’re suckers for the lyrics. 

Nothing in the album feels overworked or heavy; it’s a beautiful example of less being more. It ended up on repeat, not because of laid-back, lazy listening, but instead because with each listen, you appreciate it a little more. 

The songwriting feels deeply familiar to those who like Snow Patrol; it’s clear, full of story, and has that difficult-to-get-right blend of resignation to the moment and hope in equal measure. A SONG UPON THE WINDOW is regretful in words, but the strings in the back lift it, so you’re placed firmly in a thoughtful moment of your own. 

There is a maturity in the language used, too; it’s not a ‘miss U come bk’. It’s not even ‘I’m sorry I was wrong, come back’. It’s more than that. It is a breathy, emotional, and mental exploration, sitting delicately on rich, simple guitar work. 

It’s an incredibly cohesive body of work that holds your hand and walks you through each moment. Knowing that it was recorded across multiple locations makes it all the more impressive.

This album is built on lived experiences, and you can feel it. Nothing is light or superficial in the lyrics; the writing is incredible, and you’re lifted or laid down at their whim through the instruments. 5 Cups

Source: Instagram @nightflightband

source: Spotify

HIT MY HEAD ALL DAY is a strong opener; it sets the tone for the rest of the album. Straight out the gate, this isn’t an album for everyone, because not everyone can make the offbeat spoken word mentally fit with the guitar ripping underneath.

IS DRY CLEANING A REGULAR ON OUR PLAYLISTS? Nope. It’s a cool find, probably due to the massive bump it got from promo and PR on release. The album cover is cool, and so is the general feel of the album, but on this occasion we might not be cool enough to get it. And that’s ok.

source: Instagram @drycleaningband

We’d bet that some people will skip through each track, at high speed, and declare it is not for them. But just like we’ve spoken about in our newsletters, you need to give something a dedicated listen, at least twice. So we have. We have come back to it a few times, we are responsible for some of those 100k and counting streams on each track.

MY SOUL / HALF PINT feels a little looser than the two tracks before it, and in a good way, the bass carries so well through this one.

Musically, the album is great; it’s crispy and clean, production is wonderful, and it easily pushes you to find the space between the deadpan delivery and the twangy guitar. 

If you get to that space (and not everyone will), listen to the lyrics. While it might be a pointless pursuit to try to sing along, reading the lyrics will get you through. There is something addictive about the idea that they are just saying whatever pops into their head, whether mundane or interesting.

After a first run through, it reminded us of something, and it took about 48 hours to work it out. Moby, If Things Were Perfect, but maybe with less feeling. 

Is it interesting? Yes, in the way that new music that doesn’t sound like every other release is. Is it good? Yes, in the way that it has great production, is lyrically smart, and they got 11 songs out of it.

Would we recommend it? Yes, on the basis that it isn’t your run-of-the-mill album.

If you like Sofia Isella, give these a go.

Perhaps this is for the people who get it, and perhaps we don’t. Or maybe it really is just overhyped and dull. 3/5 Cups

Source: Instagram @drycleaningband

source: Spotify

Coming in hot with ME+YOU feels like the kind of song that plays after hours, when the doors are locked, and it’s just real ones left in the room.

IS THE KID LAROI A REGULAR ON OUR PLAYLISTS? No. And honestly, he’s not about to become one. In places, especially when he stretches for those high notes over the backing, he gestures toward The Weeknd, but without the weight or range to actually stick the landing. JULY is the clearest example of that gap.

source: Instagram @thekidlaroi

PRIVATE is an easy, summery listen, but it sits uncomfortably close to muzak - it is laid-back, inactive listener material. A little (maybe more than a little) Justin Bieber-y, in the modern, polite, inoffensive sense. For clarity, we like a lot of Bieber’s catalog. That’s not a dig. It’s an observation about how safely this song wants to exist. And maybe in more than one place throughout the album.

A PERFECT WORLD flirts heavy with Michael Jackson in tempo, bounce, right up until around the 1:29 mark, where we slide into lines like “my mind was racin’, you cried on vacation,” and then we’re off somewhere else.

Clara La San’s airy, delicate vocals are genuinely beautiful, but they are not enough to save THE MOMENT on their own.

The second half of the album is more engaging than the first, with more texture and more intent, but make no mistake, this is a breakup album through and through - and you are supposed to know it. Introspection, yearning, and eventually acceptance. The usual emotional journey. But we’ve been blessed with much heavier breakup albums, and of course, we’re still in the WEST END GIRL breakup era, so we’ve had raw writing elsewhere.

We know artists draw on their own lives, and nothing fuels a record quite like heartbreak. But 15 tracks is a long runway for material this cautious… and almost boring. By track 8, even though we are anti-skip, the finger was hovering over the button.

This album isn’t bad. It’s just too comfortable. And comfort is rarely what makes something stick; the most interesting and genreless thing on the album is 5.12AM. It is not bad. It is highly polished, almost too clean. It makes us wonder what was on the album he scrapped in favor of this one. 2/5 Cups

Source: Instagram @thekidlaroi

SongsBrew Editorial

2025 Walking In

If there is one thing we know for sure about Thom Yorke, it is that he is an intentional artist. You can see it spread across Radiohead’s work, yes, even the stuff like The Gloaming that doesn’t get the recognition of, say, the Jeff Buckley-inspired Fake Plastic Trees. But that doesn’t mean these pieces were less intentional; it just means we didn’t get the intention. Or maybe we’re just used to High and Dry. Either way.

Artist playlists give us something that those algorithm-built ones don’t. We know the system is wired to give us a lot of "sounds like" this artist. But this is not that.

Playlists, when thoughtfully curated, aren’t designed just to fill the space that silence takes up. And when they come from artists we respect and admire, they hold a little more weight.

2025 Walk In was played for people attending their recent tour before the band got on stage. They released the track list this week.

Before listening to the playlist ourselves or even checking the tracklist properly, we expected something rich, something that would take you on a journey.

In this case, you managed to survive the many hoops to get a ticket in the first place; your journey is from your house to the venue, which becomes Thom’s house. It becomes Radiohead’s living room. The seat you make your way to was hard-won after years of waiting. The playlist encapsulates that. It is the start of the real experience.

But it still feels like more. For those who have listened to any amount of Radiohead’s work or Thom’s many, many side quests, you’ll know he pulls fine threads of inspiration from many places. We mentioned Fake Plastic Trees. As the story goes, Thom Yorke saw Jeff in his stripped-back, bullsh*t-free best at The Garage. When he left the gig, he went back, and Fake Plastic Trees, as we know it, was born.

Giphy

2025 Walk In is unlikely to be a complete blueprint to Yorke and the rest of the band’s work and thought process, but you can, if you listen, find those subtle influences. And the overt ones.

Perhaps what is most interesting is that… you know what? Let’s just get into it.

WHO, WHAT, WHERE, AND WHY

Going back to where we said intentional: We’re going to get the scalpel and dissect this. Before we feast, a note: if you find yourself on the Spotify playlist (or any streaming site), you’ll be missing Radiohead’s Seattle Ambient Recording (from the Minidisks). This was played right before the doors opened, ahead of Leonard Cohen.

In terms of pacing, it’s fascinating. We’ve spoken before about the importance of guiding the listener somewhere, and this is kinda cool. We’ve got an average BPM of about 98, but that doesn’t really tell the story.

The front half of the playlist is slower, lacking rigid percussion or anything too taxing. It’s nice; the majority of people will be shuffling to their seats. The second half gets more interesting: the BPM increases, which coincides with how the audience feels, excited, closer to Radiohead coming on stage. We get interesting skitters, changing rhythms, and an increase in electronics.

You’re ready for that mix when Radiohead hit the stage.

More? Sure, why not.

Mark Pritchard’s Lock Off is one of Thom’s closest peers in terms of what they produce. Thom was featured on one of Pritchard’s tracks in 2016 called Beautiful People. Check it out.

Sakamoto’s stunning piano, glitch, and experimental ethereal work is always a joy to hear. A Moon Shaped Pool draws heavily on the textures and space that Ryuichi infused into his compositions. If you haven’t heard Async, go listen, and you’ll feel it.

You might be feeling like billy woods’ BLK XMAS comes out of nowhere, but Thom is a long-standing fan and friend of billy woods, having played him plenty of times on his radio shows. (We’re not being rude with no caps; that’s how it is). Both Thom and billy don’t care for standard writing; it can be obscure, it can be obtuse, it can be anything they want. They bend the words into the shapes they need.

Thom has always been a fan of "found sound," which is why it wasn’t at all surprising to find it on the playlist. The 1963 Smithsonian Folkways tape is exactly on brand, in this case, Greece: Kimísu yé mu.

As a playlist, it is designed to manipulate the room. Thom sets the entire space up ahead of even hitting his first note. You go between intimate and disarming, tension and increased speed, and disorientation with Ian William Craig and Pierre Henry.

There’s more, there always is. Have fun looking for the links you can find.

Without context, you might think the playlist is just… blah. Unless you like being thrown across multiple genres and speeds for fun (we do, so that’s alright).

But with the idea that this playlist is as intentional as we said at the start?

It’s purposeful, and indeed a masterclass in curation.

Or in other words: Everything in its right place.

Tap for the playlist.

A Final Note

Until next time,

SongsBrew Editorial

Send Us Back

You might’ve noticed that 2016 is the year that the internet wants back, unless you’re not as chronically online as we are, in which case, we salute you. But what was it about 2016 that's become so coveted? Was it even that good, or are we all wearing the same pair of rose-colored glasses and romanticizing it? Well, we’ve done some digging to unearth the music changes that were making a splash. Thanks, Nielsen, for your 2016 music mid-year report.

THE YEAR THE STREAM TOOK OVER

2016 was the year that music streaming started to change the gravity of the whole industry. It went from 44% of the market to 54%, big numbers at the time. Keeping in mind how much that market has grown, we’re now in a more "mature" phase in 2026, code for “almost everyone who is going to subscribe already has”. Our audio-specific market share now sits at roughly 51.9%. While that looks like a decrease on paper, the market is massive now, and short-form video has a total chokehold on how we consume media. 

Top-performing albums for 2016 were by Drake, Adele, and Beyoncé. While Drake has solidly stayed at the top of the charts ten years later, he’s been joined by The Weeknd, who just became the first artist to consistently cross 120 million monthly listeners. While Adele still does well, her streaming numbers don’t compare to the streaming-first giants of today.

DIGITIZED & DEATHS

2016 was also the year of the first major releases that were "superboosted" by digital formats: Drake, Kanye West, and Beyoncé. We also saw the first streaming-only album to chart on the Billboard 200 with Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book. It was a move that basically rewrote the rulebook for indie artists everywhere. Digital first is now commonplace, though we are seeing some artists invest more into the physical and fanbases requesting that too. 

But 2016 wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Far from it. We lost some of the greats: Phife Dawg (A Tribe Called Quest), Glenn Frey (The Eagles), Maurice White (Earth, Wind & Fire), George Michael on Christmas Day, Prince in April, and we started the year with David Bowie’s death.

WE STOPPED OWNING, WE STARTED RENTING

Perhaps one of the coolest pieces of trivia from that year is that Hip-Hop and R&B took the top spot for streaming as a genre, while rock music remained the genre where physical sales were king. Streaming, in its 2016 form - which was clearly not its final form - turned the music industry around. After a 15-year decline, global revenues hit $16.1 billion. For the first time ever, digital revenues overtook physical sales internationally.

The downside? We started to shun paying for digital downloads (errr, apart from those of us who were pirating like our lives depended on it, we already weren’t paying) in favor of monthly subscriptions. At the time, this took shape in a 24% decrease in individual song downloads. We stopped owning and started renting. Something that hasn't changed at all is that artists and labels started talking about the "value gap." Seeing millions of streams on YouTube wasn’t paying the bills, while Spotify and Apple Music seemed to offer something better. Ten years later, we’re still having this same conversation. Except now none of the streaming giants pay fairly, with Qobuz topping any ethical streaming lists. 

A GOLDEN HOUR

Conversely, at the start of the digital revolution, vinyl saw its highest sales in 25 years, clocking 13.1 million units sold. Now vinyl is sitting pretty. Splatters, liquid-filled, split designs. Collectible and beautiful. Sales have nearly quadrupled since that 2016 peak.

While the wax was spinning, Tropical House was absolutely grabbing us by our ears and making us nod our heads. This was the year the "Bieber Pivot" happened, when he dropped the pop-star persona and leaned into the 110BPM bump. A spill-over from 2015 that we took with us into 2016. Thanks, Jack Ü (Diplo and Skrillex), though ‘cause Where Are Ü Now was the game changer. And we don’t hate it. How can you?

2016 felt warm, like a sun-drenched, synthesizer-soaked fever dream. Little did we know when it was gone, the music industry would never be the same again. You could still feel that injection in 2025, and we’re guessing the early half of 2026 will be fat with replays while we feverishly trawl Spotify for our 2016 bangers. ‘Cause we can.

Editor’s Note on the Timeline: You’ll notice a few 2015 tracks. We included these because, while the "data" says 2015, the "feeling" of 2016 would be empty without them. They are the carry-overs that refused to die.

DEATH OF THE DIGITAL OUTLAW

But there is a grit to 2016 that a mid-year report can’t capture.

2016 was the funeral for the scavengers. Before the 110BPM bumps on streaming platforms became the industry standard, we spent the late 90s and 2000s as digital nomads. We remember the frantic era of Limewire and Pirate Bay: the anxiety of a progress bar that might deliver a hit single or a computer-killing virus. If you were lucky, you’d get to feast on studio recordings you couldn’t get anywhere else; remixes with no names, unreleased demos, the "full album" before it even had a release date. One CD purchased, thousands of copies distributed.

We remember the stacks of Verbatim jewel cases; those burnt CDs with Sharpie-scribbled titles that now sit in attics, slowly oxidizing into unreadable plastic ghosts. We spent hours crafting the perfect 80-minute narrative, only for the disc to skip on the one song we actually wanted to hear, or the batteries to go dead. And god-forbid should it rain and a single drop hit the case and sneak its way down onto your overly saturated home-printed cover. Blooms of displaced ink sitting inside cracked cases.

This is the data that can’t be accounted for: the stuff that "never was" but felt like everything. Sure, there was stuff in between, but it was all leading up to where we are now.

Photo by Marija Zaric on Unsplash

THE GREAT MIGRATION.

Stepping into Spotify for the first time felt like being handed the keys to the Library of Alexandria. Suddenly, the music we used to "hunt" was just there. It was the start of everything, the end of the gatekeepers and the "storage full" notification, but it was also the end of a certain kind of intimacy. We traded the tactile scratch of a needle and the lawless thrill of piracy for a clean, algorithmic hum. Because like all new things, everyone wants it. But this became the standard. 

In 2016, we were standing on the fault line. We were just starting to realize that by clicking "Agree," we were transitioning from true curators (or maybe we mean selective thieves) to subscribers. We gained the world's discography but lost the heavy, dusty weight of "owning" well… anything.

Looking back from 2026, 2016 feels like the last year the internet felt human-sized. It was the sweet spot between the chaos of the early web and the hyper-optimized, AI-fed loops we inhabit now. We say we want to go back, but we don't actually want the slow download speeds. We want simplicity, with all the mod cons.

We want that feeling.

We want to feel like music is an event again. If you were showing up for music before 2016, it was always an event to you, not just background noise for a scrolling feed. But you can see the changes in action, you’ve seen the rise, the fall, and the multiple shapes of the industry. 

We don’t know how this ends. We’re in an AI-fuelled litigious space, we’re in a hype-release, 18-of-the-same-vinyl in different colors kind of time. We’re in a world of tens of thousands of new music releases every day, and more are on the way. And it never stops, and the feed never refreshes fast enough, and the algorithm is screaming at us to listen to something we don't even like. And,,.. and, and…

And the truth is, we can get back there. We do it every time we bypass the "Recommended for You" playlist to drop a weighty 180 (a vinyl) onto a turntable. We’re doing it by looking longingly at CD players and cassette players.

We do it when we listen to an album from start to finish, with zero effort and no thought of skipping. 2016 might be a decade in the rearview, but the soul of it is still ours. It’s still right there.

If you’re willing to find a balance between the physical and the digital, you can truly have everything.

2016 playlist.

A Final Note

“Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left.” - David Bowie.

Until next time,

SongsBrew Editorial

The Rundown

The Weeknd is starting 2026 strong (understatement). By the end of 2025, Abel’s catalog was valued at $1 billion, and he closed a deal with Lyric Capital Group. He and his team retained creative control as shareholders, making it a first-of-its-kind partnership.

It involves both publishing rights and master recordings, but future releases are excluded from the deal. Neither side would comment on the deal's final value, but at a $1 billion valuation, it is the largest artist catalog transaction to date. Nice!

He also made history as 30 of his songs now have over a billion streams each on Spotify.

Source: Anna’s Archive Blog (site currently down)

Next up, Anna’s Archive. Unfortunately, Anna’s Archive lost its .org domain a couple of days ago, though they say they don’t think it has anything to do with the enormous backup of Spotify data they recently performed.

Anna’s Archive has been around for a while, making written materials and books available via torrents. They turned to music piracy, scraped Spotify, and made a huge 300TB copy of the most-streamed songs and popular public playlists. (We said piracy was on the up a little while ago.) A list of their websites can be found on Anna’s Archive Wikipedia page and is kept up to date, should you wish to check them out.
Note: Some countries have completely blocked access to Anna’s Archive.

A new development in this news cycle is UMG partnering with NVIDIA to advance what they’re calling “responsible AI” in music. In practice, that means using AI to change how music is created, presented, and discovered, with a stated focus on enhancing human creativity while protecting artists and their rights. For most people, NVIDIA is associated with computer components, gaming, and little else. But they have made a deep shift into AI, which has been gradual since about 2006 and has been firmly considered an AI giant since 2023.

The concrete bet is on building systems that understand full songs, not just metadata, to make discovery more intelligent and interactive, while pulling artists into the product process rather than replacing them.

The real goal is to turn music catalogs into explorable worlds, not just slightly better recommendation engines. This is excellent positioning. But “responsible AI” is still a slogan (that everyone is throwing around) until we see whether it changes incentives, not just interfaces. This either becomes a genuine reset of how people find and engage with music, or it becomes another very expensive way to rearrange the same algorithmic furniture.

An odd coupling or a match that makes sense? To be determined by the outcome.

At the end of 2025, we sat in on some of the best names in music talking about what 2026 was going to bring. Clips, in-person, and tangible stuff were top of the list. In an unsurprising move, Gen-Z and Gen Alpha prefer tangible items and non-digital experiences. MP3 players are hot again, and some are going further with it. Analog Baby.

For old-skool music lovers, this is great, we’re gonna see more vinyl and CDs, but something else we called a while back was cassette tapes making a comeback. The highest UK sales since 2003 occurred in 2022 and have continued to rise. A 204% sales increase in the US was reported in 2025(63,288 units). If you haven’t got your deck yet, now is a great time. (yeah, we have a portable cassette player on order, and a box of tapes ready to go).

And, finally, the power of fans! The Best Babysitter in the world deserves it. Stranger Things fans have the power to put Kate Bush back in the charts a couple of times over the last few years, increase Prince’s song streams by over 300%, and, as of this week, knock T-Swift off the top spot. The coolest thing?

The Djo track ‘End of Beginning’ was released in 2022 and, years later, thanks to Stranger Things’ fan streams, is now firmly in the top spot. Djo is Joe Keery's side project.

Congratulations to Joe Keery, or should we say Steve ‘The Hair’ Harrington?

Here is what that massive impact looks like in action, playlist change data from Music24.

Kate Bush playlist changes

Djo playlist changes general

End of Beginning playlist position change… the big one!

A Final Note

Until next time,