Before music became a career, Josh Ross thought his future would be on a football field.
Raised in the small Ontario community of Waterdown, near Hamilton, Ross spent years pursuing sports seriously before injuries forced him to reconsider what came next. After briefly playing football in the U.S., he pivoted toward songwriting, eventually relocating to Nashville and emerging as one of the few Canadian country artists to gain meaningful traction inside an overwhelmingly American industry.
His rise has coincided with a broader shift in country music itself. Modern country increasingly started incorporating rock, pop, and alternative influences while rewarding emotional openness in ways the genre once resisted, especially among male artists. Ross fits naturally inside that moment: his songs pair arena-sized energy with emotional directness, often centering heartbreak, loneliness, self-doubt, and recovery without overcomplicating the feeling.
Your path into music came after a very different chapter in your life. Looking back now, do you feel like losing football gave you a clearer sense of who you were supposed to become creatively?
Absolutely. At the time it felt like the worst thing that could've happened to me, but looking back it forced me to find out who I was outside of a sport. Losing one dream made room for another, and I don't know if I would've chased music the way I did if football had worked out.
A lot of your music balances vulnerability with this big, raucous energy. How do you keep emotional honesty at the center when the songs are built to hit on such a large scale?
For me, the emotion has to come first. If the song isn't honest, it doesn't matter how big the production is. I've always tried to write from real experiences and real feelings. The energy is what makes people move, but the honesty is what makes them stay.
Usually feeling comes first when I'm writing. If I know what emotion I'm trying to capture, everything else tends to fall into place. The story and atmosphere help deliver it, but the feeling is what drives the song.
You've become one of the Canadian country artists most visibly crossing into the American mainstream. Does that success change the way you think about identity, or where your music comes from?
Not really. I'm proud to be Canadian and I'm proud of the road that brought me to Nashville. The success hasn't changed where I come from. If anything, it's made me appreciate it more and appreciate where I am now. I feel like I have a role representing Canadians in the country music industry around the world. The stories and values I grew up around still shape every song I write.
Modern country music is increasingly blending with rock, pop, and alternative sounds, while younger listeners care less about genre. Do you feel connected to country traditions, or more interested in pushing beyond them?
I think both can exist. I grew up loving country music, but I also listened to a lot of rock and other genres. The goal isn't to leave country behind. It's to tell honest stories in a way that feels true to who I am. If that means pulling influences from different places, that's exciting to me.
Younger listeners definitely care less about categories than previous generations. People build playlists based on how music makes them feel, not necessarily what genre it belongs to, and I think that's opened a lot of doors creatively.
There’s a very physical energy to your live shows. Does performing still give you some of the same adrenaline or release that sports once did?
Definitely. Walking on stage feels a lot like taking part in a motocross race, which was a big part of my upbringing. There's an adrenaline rush, an intensity, and a connection with the crowd that's hard to describe. It's probably the closest thing I've found to that feeling.
Country music feels more global and commercially competitive than ever. Do you ever feel pressure to fit a certain mold as your audience grows?
There's always pressure, but I've learned that the only thing I can control is being myself. The minute you start chasing trends or trying to be someone else, people can feel it.
At its core, songwriting hasn't changed for me either. I still walk into a room hoping to write something that feels real. The audience is bigger now, but if anything, I've become even more protective of that honesty.
There's been a broader shift in country music toward artists being more emotionally open, especially male artists. Do you think audiences are looking for a different kind of honesty now?
I think people just want something real. Life is complicated, and everybody is going through something. The more honest artists are willing to be, the more fans can see themselves in the music.
You've spent a lot of time touring and building momentum on the road. What do you think people outside the genre still misunderstand about country audiences?
I think people underestimate how diverse country audiences are. They come from all walks of life. At the end of the day, they're showing up because they want songs that make them feel something and remind them of their own lives.
Future of Music is about artists shaping what comes next. Do you see yourself trying to redefine modern country music, or simply telling your story as honestly as possible?
I don't wake up thinking about redefining anything. I just want to tell my story as honestly as I can. If that connects with people and helps move the genre forward in some way, that's a bonus.
I try to remember why I started. I never got into music to chase numbers or attention. I got into it because I loved songs and I wanted people to understand me. Keeping that perspective helps me trust my gut.
What does success actually mean to you now, and what do you think the future of music in Canada looks like for artists trying to break beyond the country's borders?
I try not to put a title on me being Canadian when it comes to my career. Success used to be more about trying to break into the industry. These days it's more about impact and chasing bigger dreams. It's about making music I'm proud of, spending time with the people I love, and knowing the songs are helping people through different moments in their lives.
As for Canada, I think the future is incredibly bright. Canadian artists have always pulled their weight globally. Technology has made the world smaller, and great music can come from anywhere. I think we're going to keep seeing more Canadian artists break through internationally.
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?