Leer en español Young Miko is taking me for a drive to Piñones, the northeastern Puerto Rico hot spot known for its mesmerizing ocean views and long history as a stronghold of Afro-Caribbean culture. “I knew I had to bring you here,” she tells me. And she was right: A …
Read More »Teezo Touchdown Kicks Off Rolling Stone's Future of Music Showcase With Wild, Genre-Smashing Charisma
Six years ago, in the spring of 2018, Teezo Touchdown and some friends drove nearly 250 miles across Texas from their hometown, Beaumont, to the state capital of Austin. SXSW was in full swing, bringing thousands of people each day to the downtown thoroughfare of Sixth Street, where Teezo and …
Read More »Teezo Touchdown: Birth of a Rock Star
Y ou’re too old for this. It should have happened for you already. It takes no small amount of bravado to call yourself Teezo Touchdown, to walk around with metal nails dangling from your hair, to tap an aggro rap-rock vein few others are mining, to croon like a mutant …
Read More »Peso Pluma Broke All the Barriers. Only He Knows Where He's Going Next
Leer en español T he streets leading up to the Lab Studios, a recording complex in Miami’s lush Coconut Grove neighborhood, are full of bright, iridescent peacocks. Peso Pluma has set up a weeklong writing camp here in late January to work on his new album, which, he reveals later, …
Read More »Peso Pluma, Teezo Touchdown, Young Miko, Faye Webster, Flo Milli to Play Rolling Stone's Future of Music Showcase at SXSW
Peso Pluma, Flo Milli, Teezo Touchdown, Young Miko, Faye Webster, and others will grace the stage at Austin’s famed ACL Live at the Moody Theater for Rolling Stone’s weeklong Future of Music showcase at South by Southwest. The four-night concert series will take place between March 12 and March 15, …
Read More »Tequila Toasts and Manicures: The Wild New Landscape of Music VIP Packages
It’s 3.44 a.m. in the Strait of Dover and I’m lying awake on the top bunk of a tour bus parked on a ferry headed from France to the U.K. It’s been a day my 16-year-old Backstreet Boys-loving self could only have dreamed of — lunching with Howie Dorough, watching …
Read More »Is This $2 Billion Orb the Future of Live Music?
Ever since the Beatles first crossed the Atlantic, in 1964, major concerts have largely taken place at venues built for sports, even though that often means poor sight lines for many fans, and less-than-optimal sound for most everybody. But a new era of live entertainment begins in late September, when …
Read More »Twenty-One Numbers That Tell the Future of Music
“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” Operate in the modern music industry for any length of time and someone is bound to recite this famous …
Read More »How Discord Became the Most Important Platform in Hip-Hop
The producer Kenny Beats has noticed some strange phenomena at his shows over the past few years. For one, the crowds have gotten noticeably bigger, as have merch sales and streams. But most notably, he says, he’s grown accustomed to members of the audience viewing him more as a friend …
Read More »Tainy on Who's Pushing Reggaeton Forward, Hanging With Skrillex, and Why AI Music Can't Measure Up
The Future of Music Interview is a Q&A in which our favorite artists and producers share their vision of what’s next, weighing in on everything from AI to emerging scenes to the artists inspiring them the most. You could call Tainy reggaeton’s resident psychic. Since he started making beats at …
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