Raised in the small farming community of Mildmay, Ontario, Owen Riegling didn’t come up through the industry as much as he worked his way into it. Years spent playing bars and building a local audience laid the groundwork for what followed — from winning the Boots & Hearts Emerging Artist Competition 2022 to the breakout success of his platinum-certified single “Old Dirt Roads” and a run of over 100 shows across Canada. His latest album In The Feeling captures a period of transition shaped by life on the road, his recent marriage, and a growing sense of distance from home.
What hasn’t changed is how he approaches the music. Even as the scale shifts, Riegling continues to write from a place that feels close to him — treating each song less like a bid for momentum and more like a record of where he’s at. In a moment where country is opening up in every direction, that instinct to stay grounded is what sets his trajectory apart.
You built momentum through Boots & Hearts and a grassroots audience before things scaled. Do you think that path changes how you make decisions now compared to artists who start inside the system?
I don’t think I would be where I am today without the work I put in before anyone was watching. I spent so many hours in the corner of bars playing for people who didn't care. I gained a lot of confidence through that process and really started to find my voice there. Looking back at my career some of my fondest memories were during those times and I wouldn't want it any other way.
Country is expanding globally, but a lot of it is polished. What do you feel is missing from the current moment?
I don’t think there has ever been a better time to be a country artist; it feels like there are no rules anymore and you can really let the music that influenced you shine through. Lyrically, I feel like we could use some self-deprecating male artists; there are already enough people trying to look cool out there.
Your songs are very place-driven. As your audience widens, do you feel any pressure to step away from that specificity?
I don’t think about that. If it feels good as I’m writing it then that's what I chase. I think now that I’m out on the road most of the time, getting to see new places and meet new people, it’s hard not to widen my story lyrically.
When people position you as part of country’s “next wave,” what do you think they’re misunderstanding about where you actually sit?
I think ‘next wave’ sometimes makes it sound newer than it actually is. I’ve been doing this a long time now. Playing bars, driving myself to shows, learning the hard way. I don’t take it as a bad thing; I just think they’re missing all the reps that got me here. I don’t feel like I’m arriving, it just feels like I’m doing what I‘ve always done and now more people are aware of it.
There’s a version of success in country right now that’s very visible. What does success look like to you that people don’t really see?
To me, the marker of success has always been ‘Can I make a living playing music? Is music my career?’ and being able to answer both of those questions with ‘yes’ is success to me. I feel weird calling this a job because it's the thing I used to do in my free time after getting off of my real job. I’m blessed that things worked out the way they did, and as long as I get to wake up next to my wife and report to the writing room or the studio or the stage, I will be a happy man.
Has there been a moment recently where you’ve had to choose between what feels true to you and what would move things forward faster?
I think about this a lot, and I’m thankful to have a team of people around me that allows me to do it how I want to do it. Sure, there are more radio-friendly songs out there that I could cut that would likely push the needle faster. But I fear looking and listening back in 20 years to songs I don’t like. I want to treat my music like chapters in a book, time stamps on my life. In The Feeling is a timestamp on this coming-of-age era of my life and every time I listen to these songs, I’m reminded of that.
What are your thoughts about the Future of Music in Canada?
I think music in Canada is in a great place; we have some of the biggest stars in the world, and some of the most talented developing artists. Having the support of Canada has been a huge blessing in my career and I definitely wouldn't be where I am today without it.
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?