It’s been a few weeks since I wrote you. That doesn’t mean my team and I have been resting on our laurels. Instead, like many parts of my life right now, Beats x Bytes is going through a reinvention.
New logo. New website. New platform. And, I hope, a sharper vision underneath it all. More on that below. Let me know what you think.
More from Spin:
- William Orbit, Visionary Producer Behind Madonna, Blur LPs, Dies At 69
- Neil Young Blends Old, New On ‘Second Song’
- Sam Mendes’ Beatles Films Head To Abbey Road
In this issue: what Jay-Z and Radiohead each taught me about reviving a catalog, why I think “the Living Catalog” is one of the biggest opportunities in music right now, and a thought experiment involving the Beatles that I can’t stop turning over in my head.
The Living Catalog
In the last issue, The Halftime Report, I laid out where I believe the music industry is heading and the massive opportunities in front of us. Since then, I’ve been spending more time exploring those ideas and building concepts around them. It’s a dense read, but it’s full of ideas I keep coming back to and refining.
One of the biggest themes is catalogs.
Catalogs remain one of the largest opportunities in music, representing roughly 65% of recorded music streaming revenue. But what excites me isn’t simply owning catalogs. It’s what I call the Living Catalog: finding new ways for great music to keep creating value instead of sitting on a shelf.
Here’s the thought experiment that makes this concrete for me. Imagine someone took The White Album, Sgt. Pepper, every notebook John Lennon filled during that era, George Martin’s original session tapes, hundreds of Klaus Voormann sketches, unreleased demos, handwritten lyrics, and studio photographs—and instead of placing them behind glass in a museum or narrating them in a documentary, they built a dream you could walk through.
That’s not hypothetical. It already happened. Just not to the Beatles.
One weekend, two catalogs
One weekend in July, I experienced two completely different examples of how a 25-year-old body of work can be brought back to life.
I was lucky enough to attend Jay-Z’s The Blueprint show at Yankee Stadium.
The Blueprint wasn’t just another album. It was the masterpiece that set up Hov’s next few decades
He went from one of the best rappers alive to the greatest to ever do it.
From Roc-A-Fella to Roc Nation.
From the “$40 Million Dollar Boy” to the $4 billion man.
The show was one of the best I’ve ever seen. We relived the classics with surprise guest appearances (Eminem, Pharrell, Slick Rick), while the largest crowd in Yankee Stadium history sang along, and not at all off key.
It was nostalgia at its finest. No new music, just a celebration of an artist, an era, and a moment in time that had the entire city buzzing for days. There’s a reason the merchandise pop-ups in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx had lines down the block. The energy was electric and the execution played to Jay’s strengths. It was pretty much flawless.
The very next day, I found myself in a discreet warehouse deep in Brooklyn for the final NYC weekend of Radiohead’s Kid A Mnesia exhibition and film screening.
I was completely blown away.
When Thom Yorke, Stanley Donwood, and producer Nigel Godrich began creating the project, they gave themselves one rule: No new art.
Everything had to come from the Kid A/Amnesiac era): drawings, paintings, notebooks, lyrics, unfinished sketches, recordings, multitrack tapes, characters, and ideas.
The new creation wasn’t the source material.
It was the architecture.The editing.The pacing. The impossible spaces.The spatial audio. The experience itself.
There was no new music. Instead of simply replaying the albums, they exploded them apart and rebuilt them into something entirely different. Radiohead essentially opened every box in the attic from 1999 to 2001: sketchbooks, lyric notebooks, paintings, unfinished drawings, tape reels, alternate mixes, notebook fragments, typography, fax sheets, visual experiments. Then they asked a simple question: What if we’d built the museum we always imagined back then?
That’s why it feels so cohesive. It isn’t a retrospective. It’s as if the creative process itself—messy, unfinished, fragmented—became the exhibition.
The exhibition sold out over and over again, despite the band never being there. No giant photos of Radiohead. No documentary interviews. No timeline. No “here’s how we made the album.” Most artists build museum exhibits about themselves. Radiohead built a museum about their consciousness.
The film starts in nature, and the whole experience provokes ideas and inspires something closer to poetry than nostalgia. I left thinking, and unpacking the symbolism, for days: Your mind is not a library. It’s a forest. Thoughts drift through it like leaves. Some catch your attention. Some disappear forever. Some return years later and become the most important work of your life.
Why this matters for catalogs
That’s the opportunity I see with catalogs. Not simply reissuing old music. Not selling another anniversary vinyl (yes, of course, do that too). But asking how great art can evolve into entirely new experiences.
While I’m naturally more excited about what’s next than what’s behind us, in my experience nostalgia tends to peak somewhere between 20 and 30 years after a work is released. That’s roughly when memories start turning into mythology.
The challenge, and the opportunity, isn’t looking backward. It’s finding new ways to make timeless work feel alive again. Whether that’s a stadium concert, or an immersive dream you can walk through, the only real limit is creativity, and the willingness to do the hard work required to bring it back to life.
Reply and tell me: What’s a catalog you think deserves the Kid A Mnesia treatment instead of another reissue?
P.S. This issue comes to you from a new home: Beehiiv. If anything looks broken or you’d rather get this somewhere else, just hit reply and tell me.
Musically yours,
Jesse K.
To see our running list of the top 100 greatest rock stars of all time, click here.
