Ontarian singer-songwriter Ruby Waters has built momentum in a way that feels increasingly rare: through constant motion, word of mouth, and live shows that turn songs into something sweatier, louder, and less fixed than their recorded forms. While streaming and social media helped widen the audience, Waters’ music still carries the energy of someone figuring things out in real time, letting instinct outrun polish.
Her songs move easily between rock, pop, folk, and something harder to pin down, but genre rarely feels like the point. There is looseness in the writing, chaos in the delivery, and a refusal to flatten personality into something easier to package. Even as her audience has grown, Waters continues to make music that feels emotionally immediate, sometimes messy, and entirely uninterested in sanding itself down for mass approval.
That instinctive quality sits at the centre of her work. Whether she is writing from a feeling, chasing a colour in her head, or reshaping songs onstage night after night, Waters treats music less like a fixed product than a living thing.
You’ve built your career on the road as much as online. How has that balance between live momentum and digital growth shaped the way you make music?
The way I make music has never really been too affected by its outcome other than just wanting it to be kickass. Writing and the music itself has always come first. That said, getting to share music with people both on the road and online has been life-changing. Creating an online presence has been fucking weird and terrifying, but I’m continuing to learn how to be one with the times (sort of).
There’s something in your music that feels almost instinctive. How do you protect that feeling as your audience and expectations grow?
I really like being able to switch lanes and do my thing. “Fitting in” has never really been something on my agenda, especially creatively.
As long as I’m following my instincts, then hopefully the authenticity of the music will be there inevitably. There’s definitely a lot of pressure to try and make me and my art more digestible to help meet societal expectations and reach a larger audience but fuck that. I’m playing the game a little bit for sure, but it’s always been about the music and I think that whoever’s listening knows that.
A lot of your writing feels immediate, like it’s coming straight from a moment rather than being heavily constructed. Has your process changed at all as things have scaled?
Not much has really changed in terms of the writing process. Sometimes it’s the beat that drives the song, and I draw inspiration from how it makes me feel. Other times, the music is built around a more personal feeling or experience. Sometimes, I feel like I can see the song's colour while I’m making it, and when that happens I try to play within the same colour palette.
There’s a sense of freedom in your work, but also a kind of chaos. Do you feel like you’re chasing control in your music, or trying to stay in that unpredictability?
I definitely like to think that I thrive in chaos, maybe a little too well sometimes. Navigating madness can be a really good exercise for going with the flow. The music needs to stay wild, and unpredictability can be a really good time.
Your live shows are a huge part of how people connect to your music. Does performing reshape how you think about the songs after they’re released?
The way I perform versus the way I write definitely have their own little worlds. My songs sometimes sound a little different. I think it keeps them fresh for me, so I can play them over and over but breathe a little bit of new life into them at the same time.
Do you think audiences right now are looking for something polished, or something that feels real and a bit unfiltered?
I think the world will always want both. Shiny things will always draw us in, but that raw, unfiltered good good will always call us in and bring us back down to earth.
When someone hears your music for the first time, what do you want them to feel?
I want people to know and feel that they’re not alone, and that they have a right to be here. Ultimately though, I hope everyone who hears my music for the first time has their own human experience with it and feels what they feel.
Future of Music is about artists shaping what comes next. Do you feel like your role is to refine what’s already there, or to break away from it?
I think two things can be true at once! I think artists have really been blazing their own trails, while still being part of this bigger community that’s refining how music is being shared daily. Breaking away is good, but so is building on what’s already there.
What does success look like to you now, especially after having songs connect at a larger scale?
I guess everyone’s definition of success is different, but today I would say that success is just being happy and grateful for what you have. It’s easy to forget sometimes. I’d love to get my family straight someday, open up a food kitchen, have a farm, maybe start a sick festival.
What are your thoughts on the future of music in Canada?
I think the future of music in Canada is looking fierce as fuck, and that Canadian musicians are just getting started. Let’s fucking go baby!
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?