In 1994, everything was cool. Music, movies, TV—the cultural output felt alive. People were also very cool, or they were achieving cool by trying not to be. Anyway, 30 years ago I was not cool and didn’t have much to do on Friday nights. That’s why, on April 8, 1994, …
Read More »An Iconic CD Changer Is Back to Challenge Streaming Fatigue
Today, Bang & Olufsen—the audio company that has made what we called “the prettiest gadgets in the world”—is rereleasing its iconic CD player, the Beosound 9000. If you were alive in the 1990s, you definitely saw this CD player standing in a place of honor, six discs and glass lid …
Read More »Nas’ 'Illmatic' Was the Beginning of the End of the Album
Music consumption and discussion in 2024 bears little resemblance to fandom from one decade ago, let alone three or four. Old songs gain new life on TikTok; AI creates original music trained on data from the world’s most popular artists; drill rappers post a song on YouTube on Tuesday, and …
Read More »The Taylor Swift Album Leak’s Big AI Problem
On Thursday, Taylor Swift did a very Taylor Swift thing: She posted an Instagram story with a link to buy “Fortnight,” the first single off of her new album, The Tortured Poets Department. It was cute, maybe even unnecessary. Taylor Swift is one of the biggest recording artists in the …
Read More »The More People Say 'Megalopolis' Is Unsellable, the More We Need to See It
Of all the utterly depressing things printed in the Hollywood trades on any given day, this has got to be among the worst: “It’s so not good, and it was so sad watching it … This is not how Coppola should end his directing career.” This was in response to …
Read More »'Fallout' Nails Video Game Adaptations by Making the Apocalypse Fun
For decades, it seemed like Hollywood couldn’t get a video game adaptation right. Movies like Double Dragon, Super Mario Bros., and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider were all critically panned, with their creators called out for either sticking too close to the source material, failing to capture the magic of the …
Read More »Did Social Media Kill the Pop Song?
Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That” landed with the force of an atomic bomb. Released last month, the thumping diss track hit the Billboard Hot 100 in a flash but went dynamite across X, Instagram, and TikTok thanks to a surprise verse from Kendrick Lamar, the Compton rapper who won …
Read More »Disney+ Has a New Look—Which Is No Look at All
Are you one of those people who arranges your apps by color? Do you keep folders? Or are you, like me, a moron who just keeps a loose memory of what color any particular app is and swipes and scrolls until their eyes catch a familiar glimpse? If you are …
Read More »One Man’s Army of Streaming Bots Reveals a Whole Industry’s Problem
A man in Denmark was sentenced to 18 months in prison today for using fake accounts to trick music streaming services into paying him 2 million Danish kroner ($290,000) in royalties. The unusual case reveals a weak spot in the business model behind the world’s biggest music platforms. The 53-year-old …
Read More »Netflix’s '3 Body Problem' Adapts the Unadaptable
Scientists keep taking their own lives, and no one knows why. That’s the central mystery at the start of 3 Body Problem, the new Netflix series based on a trilogy of sci-fi novels by Chinese author Cixin Liu. But it soon unfolds into something far grander: There’s a mysterious VR …
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