If you’ve been anywhere near Punjabi music over the last few years, you’ve already heard Ikky’s work. The Toronto-born producer, Ikwinder Singh, has been behind some of the records that pushed the sound well beyond its core audience — from Shubh’s “Baller” to his long-running collaboration with Karan Aujla across Making Memories and P-Pop Culture, along with crossover records like “Tell Me” with OneRepublic.
What’s changed over time isn’t just the scale, but where the music is landing. His records are now moving between Punjabi audiences and global pop spaces without feeling like they’ve been reworked to fit either. That comes from how he’s built his sound — rooted in Punjabi music, but shaped by growing up in Toronto, where those influences naturally overlap.
Alongside producing, he’s also building through 4N Records and expanding into projects like Punjabi Takeover Radio on Apple Music, putting more focus on how artists are developed and heard early on. With billions of streams behind him and major recognition, including a JUNO win alongside Aujla for P-Pop Culture, he’s now in a position where he’s not just contributing to the moment — he’s helping define where it goes next.
You’ve worked on records that have travelled far beyond their initial audience. When you’re producing, what tells you a track has that kind of reach?
When the melody and the music come together quickly. There’s something about simplicity. When it feels effortless, it’s a good sign that a track can travel and be perceived as more complex than it ever was in the studio.
Your sound often sits between Punjabi music and global production styles. How do you approach that balance without losing what makes the record feel rooted?
I grew up primarily listening to Punjabi music, so that’s always been my natural foundation. At the same time, being in Toronto surrounded by global pop influences, the overlap came to be organically. I’m not trying to sound like I’ve taken up roots, but sometimes it just happens. I’ve never really questioned whether something needs to be more or less rooted.
You’ve collaborated with artists at very different stages. Does your approach in the studio change depending on who you’re working with?
It does, but more in a “what do you need from me?” way. I’m there to serve the song first, and I try to find my role within that to help make the best record possible. Check the ego at the door and honour the song above all else.
As a producer, you’re shaping not just individual songs but how artists are heard. How do you think about that responsibility when building a record?
It’s a huge responsibility. I don’t think I have one specific sound or genre, so the stylistic direction, what sounds are used, in what era, for what artist, is what becomes really important. I always challenge myself to make each project feel distinct, because that’s what ultimately gives the music its fingerprint.
With 4N Records, you’re now involved in developing artists as well. What are you focusing on early when you’re building something from scratch?
Work ethic. Talent only takes you so far. The work has to be done, especially the unglamorous, put-your-head-down kind. Along with that, it’s about whether an artist can absorb what we bring to the table and come back with something even better. That’s the dealbreaker.
Punjabi music is reaching bigger audiences globally right now. What do you think will define which artists from this space sustain that momentum?
Identity! You can be talented, but still not recognizable. The music, lyrics, and tone, it all contributes to that identity. Anyone who’s dialed in on their concept, lyrics, attitude, sound, and performance has a real shot at longevity.
What are your thoughts on the future of music in Canada?
There’s still so much left to be discovered. The generation of Drake and The Weeknd helped bridge a lot of gaps for artists like us. I’m excited to see what happens when the next generation builds on that and mixes today’s sound with whatever comes next.
Holzman and Hughes at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.Courtesy of Ekko Astral
Holzman and Hughes in Brooklyn, May 2026.Griffin Lotz for Rolling Stone
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?