Before the music started landing, Cameron Whitcomb was back home in Nanaimo, B.C., figuring things out as he went. His run on American Idol in 2022 put him in front of a bigger audience, but it didn’t immediately translate into a clear next step. What followed was slower — writing, releasing, and building a connection online through songs that felt direct and unfiltered.
That’s the space his 2025 album The Hard Way comes from. The project is built to play straight through — concise, intentional, and rooted in his own experiences, including addiction and recovery. It moves across folk, country and alternative, but never really settles into one, which lines up with how he approaches writing in the first place.
As things pick up, that approach hasn’t really shifted. He’s still writing day by day, pulling from what’s happening around him, and letting the songs land as they are — which is exactly why they connect as quickly as they do.
The Hard Way introduced people to your songwriting in a very direct way. When you were putting that project together, what were you most particular about getting right?
What was most important in creating The Hard Way was making sure that every song lined up like a coherent album. That the songs were concise, and that the project was easy to listen to from front to back.
Your music pulls from folk, country and alternative spaces without sitting fully in one. Does that give you more freedom, or does it make it harder to position your work as things scale?
It gives me a lot more freedom to do what I need to do creatively without putting myself in a box. It allows me to write songs I love, and put them out to the world, without being too precious about genre or identity.
You’ve built a strong connection online, but your songs also feel very suited to live settings. How has performing them changed the way you think about writing new material?
Songwriting and live performances are so different, I’ve never let one influence the other. I write songs day by day. What songs become in the writing room are what they were supposed to be. Some songs are better from a writing standpoint, some perform better live. Some are both, and that's OK.
There’s a rawness to your records that people connect with quickly. As your audience grows, how do you keep that intact without repeating yourself?
My life is moving so quickly these days. New experiences, new people, new places, new cultures. It gives me tons of material to write about. As I collect moments, I write about them. It helps keep the music fresh while staying consistent, because it’s all from my perspective.
You’ve entered the industry at a different stage of life than a lot of artists. Do you think that’s shaped how you approach this moment?
Because I’m young and new to this, it makes my craft a lot less refined. Everything is less polished and more raw.
What are your thoughts on Future of Music in Canada?
With social media, it’s much easier to for Canadian artists to access the rest of Canada, and the rest of the world. Canadian artists are able to be less regional. I think Canadian artists will be much more recognized and have a bigger footprint than they have in the past.
Chappell Roan performs onstage at the YouTube Brandcast event at Lincoln Center on May 13, 2026 in New York City.
Singer Karol G during the Monaco Grand Prix at the Circuit de Monaco, Monte Carlo. Picture date: Sunday June 7, 2026. 
Marcello Hernández attends the 2026 Met Gala celebrating "Costume Art" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 04, 2026 in New York City.
Albritton’s early sketches of Beatles George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and Ringo StarrJames Brosher/Indiana University
In the 2000s, Albritton used molds to make copies of her art to fund a nonprofit for struggling artists.(Photo by James Brosher/Indiana University)James Brosher/Indiana University
The original Plaster Casters of Chicago suitcase that Cynthia made in the 1960s is now housed in the Kinsey Institute archives in Indiana. (Photo by James Brosher/Indiana University)James Brosher/Indiana University
Albritton came up with the concept of making intimate casts out of dental alginate — and it became her calling card for years.© The Baron Alan Wolman Collection, Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
Albritton displays some of her artwork in her apartment in Chicago, where she spent most of her life.Jim Newberry
Later in her career, Albritton casted the breasts of female musicians.Richard Bellia
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?