Long-form essays on the albums, artists, and moments that shaped music history.
The relationship between a song and its producer has always been more complicated than credits suggest, but streaming has made that complexity more visible and the questions more...
The summer festival model that defined outdoor music events for decades ran into a wall in the years following the pandemic, and the shape of what survived tells...
The album cover was a commercial invention that became an art form, and the story of how that happened is also the story of how music became visual....
The math has always been ugly. A stream pays a fraction of a cent. Millions of streams pay a few thousand dollars. The artist who earns a few...
Eurovision is going to Asia. The announcement came this week through Billboard: an Asian edition of the contest is launching in 2026, with Bangkok as the host city....
Bob Dylan is 84 years old, a Nobel Prize laureate in literature, one of the most studied and mythologized figures in 20th century culture, and he has launched...
The Sphere in Las Vegas opened in 2023, and the argument about what it means for live music has not resolved itself. It probably should not. The venue...
There is a clip circulating of David Byrne at the close of “Life During Wartime,” the lights shifting and actual ICE footage appearing onscreen for thirty or forty...
The charts and the critical consensus have never been further apart, and nobody seems particularly bothered by that. At the top of the Billboard 200 right now: BTS....
The economics of live music have been warping for years, but 2026 feels like the moment when the pressure has become unavoidable at every level of the touring...
Into The Music