Into The Music
Bruce Springsteen and the Question of What Music Owes to the Moment
Bruce Springsteen opened his 2026 U.S. tour with a political statement that was direct enough to leave no room for interpretation, and the conversation around it followed a...
Deep Dives
Long-form essays on the albums, artists, and moments that shaped music history.
The Lost Album Is a Genre Now: Ted Lucas and the Art of the Rediscovery
Third Man Records announced this week that it’s releasing Images of Life, a three-LP box set of rare and previously unheard recordings by Ted Lucas, the cult Detroit...
Why the Music Industry Is Spending Billions Buying the Past
The music industry has always had a complicated relationship with its own history. The catalog business, the buying and selling of rights to recordings made decades ago, has...
The Music Blog Era Is Over. What It Left Behind Is More Complicated.
The music blog era is over in the sense that no one calls it the music blog era anymore, but the cultural infrastructure that era built has not...
The Opening Band Has One of the Worst Jobs in Music. It Is Also How Careers Are Made.
The opening band has one of the worst jobs in live music. They play to an audience that is there for someone else, often in a venue that...
Riot Grrrl at 35: The Anger That Built a Movement and Why It Keeps Getting Rediscovered
Every few years, riot grrrl gets rediscovered. Not by the people who were there, not by the writers who covered it in the early 1990s, but by a...
AI Music Is Already Here. The Music Industry Has Not Caught Up.
The conversation about AI in music has moved faster than most conversations about technology in creative fields, partly because the outputs became audible to general audiences before most...
Mental Health in the Music Industry: What Has Actually Changed and What Has Not
The music industry’s relationship with mental health has changed significantly in the last decade, driven partly by the deaths of several high-profile artists and partly by a generational...
The Guitar Solo Did Not Die. It Just Stopped Being Mandatory.
The guitar solo is not dead. It has been declared dead several times, most insistently in the early 2010s when guitar-based rock music ceded significant cultural space to...
The Music Video Was Supposed to Die. Instead It Found YouTube and Got Bigger.
The music video was supposed to die when MTV stopped playing them. That was the conventional wisdom in the early 2000s, when the channel shifted toward reality programming...