Connor Price didn’t come up through the usual music industry system. The Markham-born artist spent years working as an actor before the pandemic brought that side of his career to a halt, pushing him to take music seriously and build something of his own. What followed was a fully independent run shaped by consistency, sharp instincts for digital storytelling and a close partnership with his wife and manager, Breanna.
Together, they’ve built a hands-on operation that controls everything from releases to visuals, allowing Price to move quickly and stay directly connected to his audience. His Spin the Globe series expanded that world further, turning global collaboration into a format while introducing listeners to artists across countries.
With a catalogue that has crossed billions of streams and a fanbase built without traditional backing, Price stands as a clear example of how modern artists can grow on their own terms.
You stepped away from acting at a point where most people would keep going. What made you want to build something of your own instead of staying in that system?
When Covid hit, acting momentum took a huge hit. Auditions stopped entirely, productions paused, and I’m not the type of person who can simply sit back and wait for something to happen. I was also married with a kid on the way, so I had a family to support. My wife and I took the free time during quarantine to finally pursue music, which had been a dream of mine for as long as I could remember. It’s funny, because looking back, if I hadn’t been forced to take a step back from acting, we probably wouldn’t have been motivated enough to really chase music independently. Now that I’ve found a music career, acting has taken a natural backseat, but it’s still a passion of mine that I regularly work on when an opportunity presents itself. I’m independent, so my music career is entirely in my control, which I love. I love both crafts and will continue to create in both industries as long as I am able.
You’ve kept your team small and close, even as things have scaled. What does that actually change in how you operate day to day?
My wife and I are hands-on in every aspect of our business. From booking travel, picking and booking locations, sourcing all freelancers, planning release calendars, negotiating sync licenses, giving artwork feedback, sourcing production, approving mixes and masters, uploading the music to our distributor, submitting splits to publishers, being involved in all aspects of live performance, coming up with all marketing material and coordinating those shoots, even down to editing a large majority of the videos, etc. We’ve started to outsource the larger stuff regarding business management and legal, but everything else will always remain in-house because we prefer it that way.
You release music pretty consistently without long gaps. Is that something you’ve built into your process, or does it just come naturally?
It’s a solid mix of both. Especially when you’re independent, consistency and momentum are crucial to keeping your fanbase engaged. That includes both music and marketing. Each time I release a new song and hit Release Radar on Spotify, it gives my entire catalog a little boost. I am also able to work at a fast speed because I don’t need approvals from anyone else. There’s no label to tell us how or when we can release a track. So if I’m making music frequently, why would I wait to put it out? There are over 100,000 songs being uploaded daily to streaming services. The industry has never been more saturated. You gotta stay in the forefront of the fan’s mind, or they forget. It’s a harsh reality, but it’s important to realize and accept.
That global collaboration series you started brought in artists from all over. What made you want to build something like that into your releases?
My wife, Breanna, who manages me, actually came up with the Spin the Globe series. We had organically been connecting with independent artists from around the world, making music together, so the idea to spin the globe and turn it into a series just made what we were already doing hit a whole new level. Collaborating with artists from Zambia, India, the Netherlands, Germany, etc. brought a whole new sound to the music that we weren’t able to achieve on our own, or with artists that were in our circle. As a natural positive side effect, a lot of young listeners were exposed to new styles of music from around the world. We were also able to help a lot of smaller and insanely talented artists gain some very well-deserved attention through the series and change more lives than just ours.
You’ve stayed independent while growing your audience. What have you had to be more careful about because of that?
We’ve had to be extra careful about who we trust. Being independent comes with being an underdog in a very powerful industry, and if you trust the wrong people, they can try to take advantage of you. We’ve had larger artists steal our content (word for word, shot for shot, even down to the sound effects) and block us when we contact them to stop. We’ve had a larger artist re-distribute our song without our consent, and not pay us for almost 9 months. We have to stay extra diligent about posting content regularly, because we don’t have label-sized budgets to put behind every release, and we don’t have the access they often have to editorial playlists, etc., so we rely on the content and the fans to stream the music. Editorial playlisting makes up less than 1% of my streams. Every month, there are on average between 40 to 60 million streams on Spotify, to put that percentage into perspective.
A lot of people follow you for both the music and the personality. Has that changed how you think about what you put out?
That used to get in my head a lot, because I’ve evolved a lot over the years. A lot of the followers ask me to make music that was a part of who I was 3 or 4 years ago, but I’ve changed. I’m very thankful when the fans let me make the music I feel most connected to during that stage of my life and allow me to evolve beyond the persona I’ve shown online the last few years.
Is there anything you can tell us about your upcoming projects in 2026?
I have another album dropping with my best friend, Nic D, in June, right before we go on a mini tour. Then, after we drop that, I’m excited to focus on some more solo music since dropping my debut album last September. I have a really cool collab happening in November that I’m unfortunately not allowed to talk about at the moment, but I can’t wait to talk about it soon. Who knows. Maybe another album will happen before the end of the year.
What are your thoughts on the Future of Music in Canada?
I’m stoked to see where it goes in the next couple of years. Artists are taking their careers into their own hands more and more, and that usually comes with more experimental/authentic sounds. Canada is full of some of the most talented people I’ve ever met, and I firmly believe we haven’t even scratched the surface yet of what we’re capable of as a country. Global collaborations have always been a core part of Canadian music and I think that’s only going to increase in the near future.
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?