A lot happened. Here’s what you need.

MUSIC & ENTERTAINMENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POP CULTURE

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

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

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

FASHION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few quieter drops worth logging:

• Aimé Leon Dore launched SS26 Part Five

• Adidas x AVAVAV returned with another collaboration.

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

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

TRENDS & INFLUENCERS

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

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

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

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

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

CREATOR ECONOMY

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

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

LOCAL SPOTLIGHTS

UK

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

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

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

AUS

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

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

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

See you in a fortnight.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing’s partner list is its distribution strategy

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

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

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

The playbook has four pieces:

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

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

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

• Cap-table-as-marketing.

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

Counter-cultural marketing has a built-in expiration date

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

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

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

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

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

What to watch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Where did the remix album come from?

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

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

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

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

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

When digital killed the physical album

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

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

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

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

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

The art and science of the 2020s remix album

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is this an official revival or a copy?

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

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

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

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

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

Predictions for the next big remix album

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Short answer: probably not.

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

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

If you somehow missed it…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re-watch Bieber’s set with context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But would a woman actually get away with this?

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

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

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

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

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

However…

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

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

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

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

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

Cultivating a brand and using it on stage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HOWEVER.

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

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

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

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Music Moments

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

Weekend One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weekend Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brand Moments

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

Weekend One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weekend Two

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

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

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

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

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

Pop Culture Moments

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

Weekend One

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weekend Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marketing, influencer and content teams…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also performing this weekend:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brand activations to watch:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fashion predictions:

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

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

  Things To Keep 👀s On

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What really happened in 2016?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The children adults yearn for the digital town square.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does this say about 2026?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I want to see from marketing in 2026

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

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

So my recommendations for brands:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then, slowly, slowly, it stopped.

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

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

Viewers noticed. And many left.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Internet killed the ritual, not the video.

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

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

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

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

So what replaces MTV?

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

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

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

That’s what actually killed MTV the video star.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Expert Influencers

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

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

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

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

What this means for brands:

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

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

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

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

The Death of Virality

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

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

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

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

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

Key takeaway for brands:

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

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

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

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

Creator Director to Investor Influencer

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

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

We’ve already seen early signals of this shift:

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

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

Proof this shift is already underway:

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

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

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

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

Key takeaway for brands:

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

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

Creators and Shoppertainment

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

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

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

Video credit: @kimkardashian

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

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

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

Key takeaway for brands:

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

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

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

The Human Premium

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

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

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

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

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

Key takeaway for brands:

• Prioritise recognisable humans over perfect output.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My prediction is we’ll start to turn if:

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

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

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

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

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

Will any of that actually happen, though?

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

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

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

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

Tell me your Spotify Wrapped results below!

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

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

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

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

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

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

World-building is now an itemised product

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So who’s making all of the money?

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

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

• Club nights themed around artists sell out

• Festivals act as “pilgrimages”

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

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

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

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

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

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

British music is an export success built on a fragile foundation

…and this is the part that should worry people.

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

• music education

• local scenes

• affordable rehearsal spaces

• small venues

• independent promoters

• artists who persist despite low pay

• fan communities

• freelancers and contracters keeping the wheels turning

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

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

What happens next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The story behind the story

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

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

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

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

The power of silence

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

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

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

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

Precisely.

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

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

Stranger Things have happened

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

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

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

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

Oh, the theatrics of it all

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

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

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

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

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

Purposeful USB butt plugs

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

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

As Lily sang in Pussy Palace:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*BONUS MOMENT*

Literally HOT OFF THE PRESS as I am writing this.

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

This is genius. You have:

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

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

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

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

Welcome to West End Girl winter

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

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

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

And who the f**k is Madeline!?

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

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

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

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

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

But how did we get here?

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

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

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

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

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

Must we pine for the glory days of depression?

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

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

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

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

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

On Mean Girls Day, no less.

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s what you could have won!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Primavera Sound 2025, to be specific.

And while I could easily spend hours talking about what I saw and experienced, the thing that’s actually stuck with me since getting back is how insanely right the headliner bookings were. It took what fans had already declared — Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan and Charli xcx are pop's answer to the Powerpuff Girls. And while this has marketing gimmick written all over it, it didn't read as that. It felt like a genuine framework that made the lineup feel fresh, fun, and bizarrely cohesive.

And the festival organisers didn’t even have to try that hard.

The internet did the heavy lifting months ago for them. The fan-made PowerPOP Girls T-shirts were already in circulation. TikTok was already filled with people talking about which one is which. Olivia Rodrigo fans had already expressed their feelings of being left out (I knowww you really want her to be Bliss, but let's not go down that road).

Primavera simply said, “Alright then,” and rolled out a full-blown Powerpuff Girls activation at the entrance. Pink cowboy hats. Brat green. Baby blue bows. It was everywhere, not because it was forced, but because it felt natural.

Personally, it felt like what would happen if my Spotify Wrapped 2024 got handed the keys to the festival’s creative direction, and crucially, it wasn’t sanitised by too many brands wanting to capitalise on it.

Anyway, here's what I saw and, more importantly, what I think some people missed.

Pop is no longer about The One. It’s about The Trinity.

There was a time when pop culture insisted on a single Queen Bee at a time. Madonna. Britney. Gaga. And you best believe they were all pitted against each other. You simply had to pick a side. Worship one. Debate their worth in forums, fight about them on stan Twitter. There was a time when headline-worthy pop drama was all we (well, I) lived for: Taylor Swift vs Katy Perry, Britney vs Christina.

But now? Now it’s a shared universe full of girls who support girls.

Sabrina = Bubbles. Chappell = Blossom. Charli = Buttercup. And you didn’t even need a press release to tell you. It was obvious from the off, and fans of all three made it happen together. They assigned the archetypes. Built the narrative. Primavera just let it happen and backed it with a healthy budget.

Primavera bosses even went as far as flying to London to pitch Chappell Roan in person. That’s how obvious and important her inclusion was. The Holy trinity of pop wasn’t a neat booking coincidence; it was the entire point.

As one Redditor pointed out, “You just don’t sell 65,000 tickets with Pavement, Pulp and Pixies anymore.” And yes, pop girls have always drawn crowds, but not like this, not with this much creative control, fan-driven narrative, and space to headline without being the token woman on the lineup. Let's not forget that many music festivals have had to be shamed into booking 50% female acts, as if they had to scrape the barrel to find enough female talent.

This wasn’t that. This was a trio of women headlining because they’re the moment, not because of a quota. That’s not selling out. It means Primavera can still programme bands like Spiritualized to perform nothing but 90s deep cuts.

Hey, remember this?

In marketing, I hear the word 'nostalgia' waaay too much.

However, this wasn’t just Primavera jumping on a throwback for the sake of it. It was nostalgia with a purpose. Something that made the whole weekend click into place. It was used deliberately, almost architecturally. The Powerpuff Girls weren’t just a throwback reference; they were a working concept that had been cooked up for months in the best parts of TikTok and Instagram. Something fans could latch onto and Primavera could build a moment around.

Young adults in their 20s and 30s – a core demographic of Primavera – feel a warm nostalgia for Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup. The festival tapped into that wistfulness deliberately. As one journalist quipped, “Where Glastonbury seems forever stuck in its nostalgia mud, Primavera has always embraced the now" – yet here Primavera managed to embrace the now by reviving the past. The Powerpuff Girls nod was modern and self-aware, almost meme-like in execution. For most of us there, seeing them blown up like that instantly hit the memory bank of Saturday morning cartoons. Sitting in front of the TV, bowl of cereal in hand, without any clue that this would soundtrack an entire weekend in Barcelona, over 25 years later.

Booking Sabrina, Chappell and Charli applied the visual language and energy of that era to something brand new and exciting. Sabrina channelled dreamy Y2K pop with a wink and a kiss. Chappell layered camp and theatre with the stage presence of an 80’s glam rock star. Charli brought the grit and unfiltered energy of Brat that makes her sets electric. And together, they made sense. Not because they sounded alike, but because they slotted into a larger narrative that fans already knew how to read.

That’s what made the official Powerpuff Girls activation near the entrance feel clever, not cringe. It connected dots the fans had already drawn, but made them real. Tangible. Something you could point at on-site and say, "See? They get it."

Colour did the heavy lifting.

Let's be honest, you could probably write a whole dissertation on Brat Green alone.

The colours of each Powerpuff Girl acted like a code. A visual handshake which was used by brand activations and fans throughout the festival. Magnum’s Brat ice-cream, dyed in Charli’s Brat green, fans turning up in handmade, colour coded, outfits each day.

The colour wasn’t just marketing, it inspired Pinterest boards that fans used to build outfits and co-ordinate with friends. It wasn’t just some top-down branding exercise by the corporate partners, it was a shared language that made the whole thing feel cohesive.

Queer culture authored the entire weekend.

And during Pride Month, no less.

We've seen so many stories of Pride celebrations around the world losing corporate sponsors this year, which has made the community acutely aware of Rainbow Marketing's double-edged sword. This wasn't performative allyship, though. No surface-level rainbow washing. It was messy, it was sincere, it was unfiltered pop theatre, and authentic extensions of the headliners pop artistry.

The epitome of camp, Chappell sang to a wig on a mic stand and read out confessions from fans about their bad exes, pulled out of a bowl held by a "monk". Her set lived up to her Blossom moniker: the leader of a new pop vanguard. Chappell’s queer roots span way beyond the festival, in fact her music video “My Kink is Karma,” for example makes an intertextual nod to a Powerpuff Girls character – the gender-bending villain HIM – reappropriating a once-negative queer coding into an empowering narrative for herself.

Charli came armed with Brat’s snarling bass and DIY spirit, a sound shaped by the queer artists who came before her. As PinkNews put it, Charli’s journey from underrated mainstream act to cult favourite pretty much shows how the queer community championed her before anyone else really got it. Critics didn’t understand her, but the gays did, and they backed her from the jump. And, of course, she brought bestie Troye Sivan along for the ride.

Sabrina (arguably the least queer-coded of the three) tailored her performance to align with this celebratory, campy tone. All tongue-in-cheek Americana, innuendos, and kitschy faux-infomercial video interludes. Sabrina has been dubbed "aggressively straight" online thanks to her very suggestive lyrics and constant nods to the male gaze, but that hasn't dulled her impact on queer audiences. Like the Britney’s and Christina’s before her, she doesn’t have to perform queerness to be embraced by it; she just has to bring the camp.

A big ol' response to the fans (and social media).

This all came together not long after the Powerpuff comparison took off. The fans built the moment. Primavera followed.

Between April 2024 and June 2025, Carpenter, Roan, and Charli each benefited enormously from their respected viral moments and savvy online engagement, through dances and trends all over social media.

And each of them had their own viral moment over the weekend. Sabrina debuted her unreleased track 'Manchild', which immediately took off online. Chappell had the crowd hanging on every word as she read fan-submitted ex-stories on stage. And Charli gave us the Apple dance moment, with Chappell herself joining her on screen for a crossover that lit up social media within hours.

The Powerpuff alignment was fan-cast (hard to say exactly who made the connection first, but whoever it was, fair play, you nailed it early). It didn’t feel like someone in a boardroom cooked it up for our consumption. It felt like someone finally paid attention to what people were already saying online.

One Redditor even said, “This was a rare chance to have them all together. Music is always changing — there’ll be new headliners to complain about next year.” And maybe they’re right. But that’s why this worked. It didn’t try to manufacture a legacy. It responded to a very specific pop moment and gave it a stage big enough to match. Would this have landed quite the same in 2026 and beyond? Who knows. Right now, though, it hit exactly when and how it needed to.

A festival cemented in internet history.

The conversations around Primavera 2025 underscore a savvy social listening strategy that other festivals should note down for the future. Booking three solo female pop acts (all under age 35) as the main headliners was a bold evolution for a festival once rooted in indie rock.

Primavera also pulled off an eclectic lineup. Pop headliners on one stage, indie rock and electronic on the next. The mix didn’t feel forced, it felt like how people actually listen to music now.. By scheduling pop headliners alongside indie rock staples (e.g. LCD Soundsystem, Turnstile, and Haim also played that weekend), they signaled that modern audiences don’t silo themselves by genre the way they once might have. A festival can have Chappell Roan and Central Cee on the same night and people will enjoy both – or at least coexist. Sure, there were a few gripes — people camping out at the barriers all day, hotel prices skyrocketing — but overall, it was a smart move to open things up to a more diverse crowd.

Primavera also demonstrated a keen understanding of experience-driven festival culture by partnering with the likes of Amazon Music, who livestreamed key sets on Twitch/Prime Video. Festivals now extend way beyond the physical venue, and streaming deals like this are crucial to ensure the key moments reach a global audience in real time, amplifying Primavera's appeal well beyond Barcelona, and cementing those viral moments in internet history.

The "Chemical X" in music marketing

I’ve got more to say about this. About how pop girlies are branding better than some brands. About fan-fuelled mythology. About why eras are back in a big way (and not just because of Taylor Swift).

Social media, especially TikTok, acted as the wind beneath these pop stars wings (or perhaps, the “Chemical X” in their formula) – turning key moments into global trends overnight and letting fans be not just consumers but active contributors to the narrative. A headline set at a festival now lives on as a series of viral videos, fashion influences, and inside jokes– all elements that Carpenter, Roan, and Charli wield with finesse.

But for now, just this: Primavera didn’t engineer the moment. It recognised it. It handed it a mic and let the fans do the talking.

And in doing so, it gave us something rare — not just a good show, but a pop moment that actually meant something.

Over the years, I’ve tried nearly every method, hack, and rumor floating around on the internet. I’d heard from friends who claimed they had it “all figured out,” only to watch them freeze up and lose it at the last second. So here’s the thing I’ve learned after a decade of Glastonbury ticket mayhem: there is no guaranteed way. None. Just a mix of strategies, luck, and, well, possibly divine intervention.

Blind Hope and The Refresh Button

The first few years were pretty naive attempts. I’d log in right at 9 a.m., armed with one device, maybe a cup of tea, and a slightly optimistic outlook. Back then, I genuinely thought that all you had to do was be on time and keep refreshing, and voilà, I’d get through. But Glastonbury is a beast, and the ticketing system? Ruthless. I remember those first few years, just staring at the “Please wait…” screen, hitting refresh with more and more desperation until finally seeing that dreaded “Sold Out” notice.

Then I discovered the so-called “tricks” people swear by. Refreshing every 10 seconds but not too often so you don’t get blocked. Using multiple browsers, multiple devices, asking friends to try from different locations. It became this annual scramble, where suddenly I’m no longer just one person trying for tickets, but this mini army with devices spread all over the room.

The Spreadsheet Era

Eventually, it hit me that winging it wasn’t cutting it. If I wanted any chance at all, I needed organization. And so, the spreadsheet era began. I put together a roster of friends—usually a group of six of us, the maximum allowed on one purchase. We’d gather everyone’s registration numbers, postcodes, and email addresses, double-checking every detail. We’d meet up or hop on group chats, dividing ourselves into groups, each with its own tab in the spreadsheet.

The morning of ticket day felt like setting up for a heist. We’d be logged in on two laptops, phones ready, and Wi-Fi and mobile data split between devices just to keep things moving. And here’s the kicker—no one could celebrate until we had that confirmation email. I remember once getting to the payment page, feeling like I was finally there, and the site crashed just as I hit submit. By the time I got back in, every ticket was gone. It was one of those moments where I had to laugh to keep from screaming.

It’s mostly luck - but we can dream of hacks right?

After a few years of this organized chaos, I started noticing patterns. People would tell me things like, “Oh, if you try using a VPN to pretend you’re overseas, it works better!” or “Phones work better than laptops,” or “Chrome is better than Safari.” I tried all of these at one point or another, including using a VPN while abroad. I thought buying from a different country might somehow give me a secret advantage. Spoiler: it didn’t. One year, I was in Los Angeles trying from my hotel’s Wi-Fi, thinking I’d found the magic trick. But, as usual, I watched that spinning “please wait” screen for half an hour before giving up.

And then there’s the refreshing technique. Some people say to refresh manually every 10 seconds. Some swear by letting the page auto-refresh. Honestly, I’ve tried both, and neither feels like it changes much. You’re either lucky that day, or you’re not.

The Year I Finally Got Through

Then came the year I finally got tickets. And was it my most organized attempt? Not exactly. I’d say it was actually one of my messier ones. I had two laptops and my phone set up, one on Wi-Fi and one on mobile data. We had our spreadsheet with everyone’s details, and I was there on the main See Tickets page, refreshing away.

Suddenly, I was in. Like, actually in. I hit the payment page, felt my heart racing, and was so nervous I almost mistyped my card details. There’s this moment of surreal panic that hits when you realize, “This is it, don’t mess it up.” I pressed “Submit,” and then stared at the screen, half-expecting it to crash again. But it didn’t. The confirmation email came through, and I remember just sitting there in disbelief.

Even then, I didn’t really celebrate until the tickets actually arrived in the mail weeks before the festival. Because you never know—you just never know with Glastonbury tickets.

So, what’s the real trick?

After all that? The real trick is honestly just persistence. Every year, millions of people try for these tickets, and only a fraction get through. Sure, having a spreadsheet, a group, and multiple devices ready is smart. It’s worth trying the coach packages, aiming for the April resale if you miss out, and even volunteering. But at the end of the day, there’s no surefire way.

The closest thing to a “trick” I can offer is this: go in with a plan, but expect chaos. If you reach the payment page, stay calm, check your details, and don’t rush. And don’t get your hopes up too high; treat it like a lottery with slightly better odds.

Was it worth it? (yes, even after ten tries)

Glastonbury is like no other festival I’ve been to. There’s this feeling on the farm, dancing under the open sky, that justifies every frustrating ticket attempt. I’ve been to many other festivals, but none come close to the sheer magic of Glastonbury.

If you’re in the ticket trenches this year, good luck. Remember, even if you don’t get through, there’s always next year. And when you finally do make it in? Every single second of ticket-day stress will feel worth it.

If you’re super interested in some actual, worthwhile hacks for Glastonbury - you can check out my blog where i’ve gone into more detail: www.wheresholly.com