On any given night in Ibiza, the difference between a good set and a memorable one is hard to explain but easy to feel. It’s not just about the tracks or the crowd, it’s about what carries beyond the room. That’s the space BLOND:ISH has been moving towards, whether she’s playing to packed dancefloors, building out her Abracadabra parties, or holding down a residency at Pacha Ibiza.
Her trajectory through electronic music followed a familiar arc at first. Releases across labels like Anjunadeep and Defected Records, a steady global touring circuit, and tracks like “Waves” and “Never Walk Alone” finding their way into sets far beyond her own. But over time, the focus began to shift. The music stayed central, but it stopped being the only thing.
Through Bye Bye Plastic, she’s pushed for tangible changes within live music, from eco-riders to reducing single-use plastics at shows. At the same time, her Abracadabra events have evolved into something more layered than a typical club night, bringing together elements of community, intention, and shared experience without needing to fully define them.
It doesn’t read like a reinvention as much as an expansion, one where the dancefloor, the message, and everything around it are part of the same system. And increasingly, that system seems to be what BLOND:ISH is building towards.
You’ve turned BLOND:ISH into something that goes way beyond DJing. When did that shift happen for you—when it stopped being just about gigs and started becoming something bigger?
I always thought I was just a DJ. But when you go through life—and music—you start to realise your why. For me, that shift really happened when things were falling apart. I had no money, I couldn’t get records signed, I was just trying to survive. And that’s when I started visualizing, meditating and asking bigger questions.
That’s when I understood: my music isn’t just about playing gigs and making people dance. It’s bigger than that and bigger than me. I recently put it into words that I want to help 1 billion people live their best lives, and my music is the catalyst for that. Once I felt that path for myself, everything expanded naturally. And the best part is, I planted those seeds in Stoney Creek, Ontario, Canada.
Your residency at Pacha Ibiza is being talked about as a landmark moment. From your side, did it feel like a real shift or just another step in the journey?
Honestly, it feels like a step in the journey—something consistent where people can come find their magic, like a church. But also, there’s something there. We came into Pacha with our own twist on a party… give them something familiar like the party, and then there is something much deeper happening in the background if anyone wants to discover it.
I don’t over-label it too much. I’m living it. But I do feel like we’re bringing something fresh, something intentional, and people are responding to that.
Through Bye Bye Plastic, you’ve been pushing for structural changes—from eco-riders to cutting single-use plastics at shows. From where you stand, is the industry actually changing, or just becoming more aware?
There are a lot of hurdles when going up against the fossil fuel industry because they have endless cash, and promoters often prioritize securing a bag over the planet. But it’s definitely changing, and for the better.
95% of our Abracadabra events are plastic-free, and a high percentage of BLOND:ISH shows are also plastic-free. When we started, it was 0. We’re just planting seeds everywhere we go, leaving mini movements in different regions for the community to take over.
The most notable one I loved was the zero-plastic club initiative in Paris, where we got 25 clubs together to go plastic-free. They got so inspired during those initiatives that they took further action together after we left. That’s where we can shine—starting those mini movements, leaving cities with the tools, and then human nature takes over.
You talk a lot about wanting to help people live their best lives through music. What does that actually look like for you in a set, or in the music you make?
For me, it’s about energy and intention. No preaching. Even just a hug, eye contact during my set, a smile, a shared experience—those little energy moments plant seeds.
The most important thing I put into the party and my music is intention. I literally sit in the green room 10 minutes before I go on stage and picture sending good energy to every single person at the party, into every single cell of their body so they can take that energy back into their lives and use it for something positive.
One plus one equals 11. Intention is a crazy thing. It was an experiment for me—I had no idea if it would work, but now I can safely say it does and I’m doubling down on it.
Across everything you do, there’s a strong sense of connection and community. Was that something you set out to build, or did it grow naturally over time?
It grew naturally. I didn’t sit down and say, “I’m going to build a community.”
Abracadabra, for example—it’s a party on the surface. But underneath it's a community. It’s a registered church in the U.S., and it’s a meme. It’s people knowing and questioning that there’s more to life than what we’ve been told growing up. We want more out of life, we want to thrive, and we’re figuring out how to do that. "Energy maxxing" is what we call it now.
Can you tell us a little bit about your upcoming projects in 2026?
Always creating and expanding on this vision of how to unlock 1 billion people living their best lives. I just made around 30 songs in Jamaica in March, so a lot of that music is coming out.
Now we’re releasing that music as the ENERGY TAPES. There’s music for your body, music for your mind, and music for the masses. It all comes from the same place, it just hits in different ways.
I also built an app called $NRG for my fam, so you don’t have to DM me anymore and hope you get an answer. It’s made for claiming guestlist, backstage access, unreleased music, etc. at my shows.
Right now, what I’m focused on is how to release music closer to the time I made it. I don’t love the old system of waiting a year. I want the energy of the studio to translate faster into the world. It’s just how we work these days.
We’re just getting started.
You’ve spent a lot of time between Canada and the rest of the world. When you think about Canada now, what do you feel is happening in the music culture there?
I have no idea! I haven’t lived there in a minute. But I do know that Canadian fans are the best fans when I see them around the world. We’re so proud and just up for a party.
Canada gave me everything culturally when it comes to electronic music, from my Toronto days to raving in Montreal. That’s where I really absorbed the scene and got my education, spending long hours researching music on the dancefloor as a raver with a dream.
And remember, I’m just like you. I come from a small town in Canada, but I stayed curious and driven. Two traits I feel are even stronger than talent.
There’s no immediate resolution in any of this. There’s no surrender either — and a lot of great escape. White’s slide guitar in “Dollar Bill” sounds like a National Steel on steroids until the solo, when it turns into what seems like a theremin gone postal. “I Can’t Believe What I’m Hearing” has a great pop-wise chorus closer to the Pretty Things than Son House. And don’t miss White’s wry aside to the White Stripes’ old creation myth in the second verse of “G.O.D.,” on the way to the real business at hand. “Well, it’s the beginning of the world now,” he declares at the song’s end. “Let’s do it all over again.”
Jay-Z has turned the 30th anniversary of his classic debut album into a major marketing event
Jay-Z Knows the Past Still Pays
There’s a pleasant absurdity to the advertisements for JAŸ-Z30 that are currently found across New York’s subway tunnels. Their dramatic imagery — a stark black backdrop pierced through the center with a pair of hands, presumably Jay’s, fixed into the famous Roc diamond — invites a kind of religious authority that feels a touch ironic for anyone who’s old enough to remember all types of handwringing over those very hand symbols only a few years ago. And maybe that’s the point. By now, nostalgia’s grip extends layers deep. So much so that you could find yourself waiting for the train, reminiscing on the days when people still made jokes about the so-called Illuminati.
Jay-Z’s months-long campaign commemorating the 30th anniversary of Reasonable Doubt and the 25th anniversary of The Blueprint has indeed resurfaced the rapper-turned-mogul’s success story. Reasonable Doubt, released in 1996, positioned Jay as not only a resonant voice in hip-hop but also in the increasingly lucrative business around it. After major labels passed, the album was released independently through Roc-A-Fella Records and Priority Records, setting the tone for Jay’s career as a business…man.
And in the full-court press campaign around this summer’s anniversaries, culminating in this weekend’s trio of performances at Yankee Stadium, Jay’s business acumen is again at center focus. You’d be forgiven for throwing around buzzwords like “multichannel” or “cross-platform” to describe the slate of festivities. There was a Spotify-backed takeover of the J and Z trains; custom JAŸ-Z30 subway maps and a Google Maps guide; commemorative Brooklyn Public Library cards; and most recently Bowery Station and DUMBO pop-ups with archival footage and merch. (That these Yankee Stadium shows come on the heels of Taylor Swift’s wedding at MSG suggests some sort of mega-rich takeover of cultural institutions, but let’s leave that one for another day.)
The moves come as nostalgia continues to drive a considerable chunk of the music industry’s profits. In an era when old songs can circulate infinitely on streaming platforms, gaining new life in the form of everything from samples to memes, and when superfans are willing to spend on physical goods, limited merch, and live experiences, album anniversaries have become their own product launches. Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt campaign is only the splashiest recent example.
No wonder, then, that Beyoncé already appears to be setting the stage for her own run of commemorations for the upcoming 20th anniversary of her album B’Day in September. Over the weekend, she released her first new song in two years, titled “Morning Dew (Donk),” to tease the upcoming reissue. According to Luminate, older music still dominates attention, with only 43 percent of U.S. on-demand audio streams in 2025 coming from tracks released in the previous five years. This is also one reason why vinyl and physical formats have seen renewed value in recent years, with the RIAA reporting that vinyl sold 46.8 million units in the U.S. in 2025, compared with 29.5 million CDs. Luminate says superfans are 20 percent of U.S. music listeners and spend heavily on live events and physical merchandise; 73 percent of these fans purchase physical merch, versus 26 percent of general music listeners.
In today’s industry, having a major anniversary is like having a new product to promote, a way to participate in an already thriving marketplace for nostalgia. The demand is visible well beyond official artist stores: Vintage concert tees now trade as collectibles, with one 1967 Grateful Dead shirt selling at Sotheby’s for $19,300 and rare rap tees treated as wearable archives of hip-hop history. Anniversary campaigns give artists and labels a way to reclaim that energy, turning the secondary market’s appetite for old symbols into new, officially sanctioned products.
Jay-Z’s official anniversary store turns that logic into a menu of objects: a $1,500 collector’s crate, a $300 cassette box, $400 Yankees jerseys, and four-figure varsity jackets. Of course, Jay is far from alone when it comes to legacy acts cashing in on nostalgia. He’s more like one salient example of a much larger wave of artists and promoters marketing anniversary products that includes the Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness 30th anniversary super-deluxe edition, My Chemical Romance’s Black Parade stadium tour, and the returned Warped Tour, among many others.
Five years before Reasonable Doubt became the occasion for library cards, pop-ups, collector crates, and stadium spectacle, its 25th anniversary was marked by an NFT. In 2021, Sotheby’s and Roc Nation auctioned a one-of-one Derrick Adams artwork tied to the album, billed as the only official Jay-Z-authorized commemoration of the anniversary. Around the same time, Roc-A-Fella was in court over co-founder Damon Dash’s attempted sale of a Reasonable Doubt-related NFT, a dispute that ended with a judgment making clear that no shareholder could sell or dispose of an interest in the album — including through an NFT — without the company’s authorization.
That ownership question is becoming harder to avoid as music enters the AI era, where the archive is not only something to reissue, exhibit, or sell, but something that can be scraped, modeled, and trained on. Last week, SZA took to Twitter to express frustration with AI music company Suno, notably calling out Diplo by name as one of the company’s investors. “DO NOT GIVE AWAY YOUR VIBRANIUM !!! DO NOT TRAIN AI WITH YOUR GENIUS,” she wrote on Twitter. Her complaint was joined by Kenneth Blume, who said Suno’s workers were “stealing from countless struggling musicians.”
For an artist with a legacy as impactful as Jay-Z’s, the current anniversary boom feel like the latest phase of a longer project of deciding who gets to turn hip-hop history into intellectual property. Jay-Z’s legacy deserves preservation; few catalogs have made a stronger case for it. But the more that preservation arrives through limited-edition objects, auction platforms, luxury merch, and authorized experiences, the more it has to answer a harder question: When does protecting the archive become another way of extracting value from it?