Can’t believe I’m posting for the first time since leaving Team 10 to comment on Justin’s Coachella set lol…
Anyone calling it lazy is missing the business.
He sold his publishing and artist royalties to Hipgnosis in 2023. UMG owns the master recordings. Every minute he spends performing the old catalog is a minute he's putting in work for other people's royalty checks.
Playing the YouTube videos costs him nothing. No band, no backup singers, little production. Fans still get records like Baby, Sorry, Beauty and a Beat, and Never Say Never. All the nostalgia, none of the overhead. He saved his actual performance for Swag, which is the era he owns.
He also got discovered uploading videos to YouTube as a kid. A laptop on the main stage is the most intimate, on-brand, and authentic thing he could've done.
And he's in a completely new chapter doing it the way he wants. No Scooter, new team, new business structure. Full control for the first time in his career.
If you didn't like it, you're just not a Belieber 🤷🏼♂️
I keep thinking about all the YouTube stuff in the Justin Bieber Coachella set, like it’s some kind of commentary on what it meant to grow up online from 2007-2016, in that era of all these new platform technologies. Deez Nuts, Double Rainbow, his own YouTube work..
He’s the ultimate megastar that played all the cards right and rode all the waves of that era. Just a complete and complex mix of talent + time + place + technology, like Elvis with television. He was who Mr. Beast studied before he pressed record on his first video, whether he realized it or not.
We are never going back to an era like that with this technology in our hands. In the era of creators, anyone with a little talent can get those views. Doesn’t mean that will lead to a compelling paycheck, but the views will be there. Justin Bieber pioneered that route to talent and fame…. And now it’s hard to say if anyone can achieve something similar in today’s Internet.
Internet virality on those same platforms is so commonplace now. But… it’s really only special to the person with the account trying to parlay it into something bigger for themselves, and only very rarely to others. But the dopamine rush of fleeting Internet fame in a system designed to do exactly that million times a day, to max attention spans, is crazy intoxicating.
The more I think about it, Bieber’s set was a memorial for a digital frontier we’re never getting back.
The Wild West of that YouTube era is very paved over, and everybody's just paying rent to the feed.
hot take but i actually LOVE the minimal production justin bieber had at coachella. throw it back to his youtube roots. be intimate and connect with the crowd. arguably takes more risk than other pop stars whose focus on the music is lost in their stage act
we live on a planet where trees warn each other of danger through underground networks. where octopuses dream. where elephants return to the bones of their dead and stand over them in silence. where bees communicate through dance, showing each other where to fly. where flowers bloom...where crows remember human faces -especially those who were cruel to them - and pass that memory on to their young. where ants build entire cities. where cats purr at a frequency that can help heal bones. where forests, after fires, grow flowers first.
Bieber being discovered on YouTube and selling his music catalogue is a full circle chella moment and I’m here for it. It’s like we were hanging out on the couch together
Denver is gonna go from a low of 10° Monday morning to a high of 80° on Wednesday, because Mother Nature in Colorado has the impulse control of a golden retriever in a room full of tennis balls.
I feel like younger people don't realize that the internet wasn't always optimized solely to make you as angry and miserable as possible, and people are having a lot of nostalgia for 2000s internet vibes now because it wasn't like that back then