Despacito and the Year Latin Music Stopped Asking Permission
For most of the twenty-first century, the global music industry has been a market that converts other languages into English.…
Gangnam Style, the K-Pop Watershed That Forced YouTube to Add a Bigger Counter
On 21 December 2014 YouTube engineers updated the platform’s view counter. It had previously been a 32-bit integer, capable of…
Bad Bunny and the Strategy of Refusing to Sing in English
Between 2020 and 2024, the most-streamed artist on Spotify three years running was not Drake, not Taylor Swift and not…
Taylor Swift, the Eras Tour and the Economic Footprint of a One-Person Cultural Industry
By 2024, Taylor Swift’s career had moved beyond the conventional vocabulary of pop stardom and into the territory of macroeconomic…
Cocomelon: Inside the Three-Billion-Dollar Children’s Brand That Almost Nobody Has Heard Of
Cocomelon is not a household name in the way Disney or Sesame Street are. Most adults without small children would…
Afrobeats Goes Global: How Lagos Became a Center of Gravity for Pop Music
Ten years ago, “Afrobeats” was barely recognised as a coherent category outside Lagos, London and a few American urban radio…
K-pop on Streaming: How Korean Groups Built a Global Charts Strategy From Outside the English-Language Mainstream
K-pop’s relationship with global streaming is the result of a generation-long strategic project by Korea’s major entertainment agencies. From the…
YouTube Shorts and the Quiet Counter-Programming of the Short-Form Era
For most of YouTube’s history, the platform’s identity rested on long-form video. The horizontal player, the recommended sidebar, the channel…
Snapchat’s Quiet Decade: How a Disappearing-Messages App Survived Three Existential Threats
By any reasonable standard, Snapchat should have died several times over. Facebook offered to acquire it for three billion dollars…
Drake and the Architecture of the Streaming-Era Hit Machine
Few artists have understood the structural shift from album-and-radio music to algorithmic streaming as clearly as Aubrey Drake Graham. The…