It’s been a busy news week.
The Grammys.
The upcoming Super Bowl.
The Winter Olympics kicking off.
That insane Australian Open final.
We’re swimming in “water cooler moments”—the kind of cultural events everyone is supposed to care about.
And I love seeing great artists, colleagues, and teams win. With hundreds of awards, the Grammys are a real reminder of how much talent exists in the galaxy: artists, songwriters, producers … entire ecosystems of creativity.
These moments are still smart places to premiere things. We saw:
- The Michael Jackson biopic trailer
- A new Bruno Mars record premiered for the first time live
- A new Devil Wears Prada trailer
Even the tech layer is getting more interesting:
Prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi nailed most of the winners, reinforcing that collective intelligence, when aggregated correctly, starts to feel like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Amazon’s “click to buy merch” integration was also quietly futuristic, turning live viewing culture into nearly instant at-home commerce.
There were also some smart brand integrations. Mastercard premiered the world debut of Noah Kahan’s video for “The Great Divide,” timed perfectly inside the broadcast, paired with early tour access and pre-sale messaging.
However, the song and message of the ad did set this song up to be a big hit. Not because of the dated marketing strategy, optimized for attention inside a system that’s quietly dissolving, but because it hit on the thing that’s most important right now. I’m talking about what feels like what’s on everyone’s mind…
The intersection of two forces:
1. It feels like we are on the brink of a civil war. Noah Kahan’s song actually hits it on the head and is going to be a big hit. More and more protest songs are starting to cut through.
2. The unreal opportunities at our fingertips with AI. Culture is changing. AI is changing music, and the industry as we know it, is not going to look like this anymore.
Everything else is commentary.
And then enter Bad Bunny, who, based on all of the streaming data, is and already has been the biggest pop star of this era. But why does Bad Bunny suddenly feel like more than a pop star?
Winning Album of the Year.
Headlining the Super Bowl.
Performing in San Francisco, the epicenter of tech, AI, and cultural tension.
That’s not just a booking. It’s the perfect confluence.
The NFL doesn’t love politics, but you can feel the pressure building. When Bad Bunny won the biggest award of the night at the Grammys on Sunday, you could feel everything on his back. This is a moment like we’ve never seen before and everyone in the world will be watching.
Does he play it safe?
Does he lean into identity?
Does he turn the biggest stage in the world into a message or a party? Is it possible to thread that needle?
When he said at the Grammys that “the only way to combat hate is through love,” it landed differently. Less like a speech, more like a thesis.
It’s starting to feel like a modern Bob Marley energy with a global audience, and the right person to deliver the political subtext and culture as emotional infrastructure.
Pressure makes diamonds, and I believe in Benito. I know how amazingly talented he is at everything he does. I know how much he cares and how hard he works. If anyone is, he’s built for this kind of moment.
The Real Headlines:
Protest music is back. AI is eating the industry alive in ways that are both terrifying and insanely exciting. This is the biggest and fastest moving opportunity I’ve seen in my lifetime. It’s that institutions are quietly moving from TV to YouTube while pretending nothing is changing. It’s that culture feels more decentralized than ever, but power feels more concentrated than ever.
It feels like we’re stuck in between two worlds: one trying to hold society together, the other accelerating faster than any of us can process. And no one knows how it ends.
Which is why Bad Bunny at halftime doesn’t feel like just another performance. It feels like a stress test. For culture. For identity. For whether music still has the ability to carry something emotional, political, and human at scale.
Not in a preachy way.
Not in a slick campaign.
Just in a “this is what the moment feels like” way.
And honestly…
That’s way more interesting than any award show ever will be.
Jesse Kirshbaum
Co-Founder of Nue
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