There’s a clarity to Sofia Camara’s rise. Not the kind built on display, but one that’s come from steadily showing up, first through covers, then through songs that feel far more personal.
She first gained traction online with covers, building an audience before breaking through with her original single “Who Do I Call Now? (Hellbent)”, which went viral across platforms and charted on Spotify’s Viral 50 in multiple countries.
Since then, the Toronto-based artist has steadily built momentum. Her single “Girls Like You” reached the Top 10 on Billboard’s Canadian CHR/Top 40 chart and crossed onto the Canadian Hot 100, marking her first major radio breakthrough. Her 2025 EPs Was I(t) Worth It? and Hard to Love further established her as one of Canada’s emerging pop voices.
Her growth has extended onto larger stages too. She has performed at major festivals including Osheaga and Lollapalooza, delivered the Canadian national anthem at the CFL Grey Cup, and was nominated for Breakthrough Artist or Group of the Year at the 2026 Juno Awards, where she also performed.
Now, as part of a new generation of Canadian artists finding global audiences early, Camara is still figuring out what to hold close and what to share. It’s a process that sits at the centre of her music, and one she’s not rushing.
You were discovered through covers and short-form platforms. Do you think that’s changed what audiences expect from new artists coming up now?
I think so. What you put online, if people really relate to it and like the content you're sharing, it’s natural for them to assume the music you make will reflect that. So I would say yes.
Moving from covers to original music can shift how people see you. Was that transition something you had to manage actively?
Yes and no. The biggest change was that I was telling my own story instead of someone else’s. Singing covers lets you step into someone else’s life and journey, but when you’re writing your own music, you get the chance to talk about your own.
You’ve grown in the public eye, in real time. What’s been the hardest part of that kind of visibility?
There’s definitely pressure, but I don’t think it’s from the public. You create that pressure within yourself because you want to be enough. I feel like I’m constantly searching for validation, whether it’s from the audience or somewhere else. Especially with my own music, because it’s so vulnerable and real, you just want people to like it. So there’s definitely that pressure of just being enough.
What do you think artists in your position today have to navigate that didn’t exist even a few years ago?
Artists today navigate a lot of marketing on their own. Working with a label is incredibly helpful, but now a lot of artists are responsible for much of that themselves, posting online and constantly showing up. It adds another layer, and it can sometimes feel a bit uninspiring when your main focus should be the art and your craft. Social media being such a big part of how music is shared definitely adds another level.
When everything is moving this fast, how do you know what’s actually you versus what’s just working?
It depends on who you surround yourself with. When things feel overwhelming, I try to lean on people I trust and care about to keep me grounded and remind me who I am and where I came from. Having that helps guide my decisions.
Is there something you’ve consciously pulled back on sharing, even though the internet rewards openness?
Yeah, for sure. The most heartbreaking things are the scariest to talk about because they come with a whole other level of pain and heartache. There are definitely layers I haven’t shown the world yet, but that’s something I’ll get more comfortable with as the years go by.
What are your thoughts about the Future of Music in Canada?
There’s so much talent here. There are so many artists with the inspiration and motivation to work really hard. It’s all here, I just think more people need to be aware of it.
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?