6 Culture Trends: AI Music, Heated Rivalry, Mr. Brightside, and More

Welcome back to the Monday Roundup!

The Monday Roundup is a weekly bonus edition featuring data-driven culture stories, curated datasets, and recommended reading.

Your regular Wednesday essay stays free for everyone—this is strictly additive.

Today’s edition has six new data stories. Free readers get the first two; paid subscribers get the full thing, plus datasets and recommended reading. Enjoy!

In Today’s Roundup:

• Original Data Stories: Spotify’s AI crackdown, the franchise revival effect on streaming, TV’s biggest winners and losers of 2026, the speedy death of the blockbuster soundtrack, Marvel’s surprise superhero resurgence, and the immortal cultural relevance of “Mr. Brightside.”
• Recommended Reads: Notable data journalism and pop culture reads from around the web.
• Unique Datasets: Ten publicly available datasets, covering everything from Pokémon stats to college tuition to chocolate bars.

Trend 1: Spotify’s AI Strategy

Last week, Spotify announced it will tag AI-generated music with an “AI Persona” badge and subsequently remove these tracks from its algorithmic recommendations, to which I say: took you long enough!

The platform will utilize three different approaches to generative music detection:

1. Voluntary self-disclosure: This will likely yield a cumulative total of 10 profiles flagged as “AI Personas.” If I’m wrong, then I’d be fascinated to know why someone would upload a track to Spotify and then censor their own account.
2. Programmatic AI investigation tools: Using AI to detect AI!
3. Human moderators: Flagged accounts will be reviewed analog-style—by humans who possess the God-given right to make a bad decision.

This policy is in response to the mass proliferation of generative music on streaming platforms, with Spotify competitor Deezer flagging an estimated 90,000 AI-generated tracks per day.

A recent study estimated that 40% of new music uploaded to Spotify each week is AI-generated, with AI-produced tracks now accounting for 5% of the platform’s entire catalog.

And while many of these songs receive minimal streaming activity—amounting to a meager 0.3% of royalty payouts—there have been a handful of tracks that reached the Billboard digital charts and would have graced the Hot 100 absent the intervention of chart-makers.

It’s easy to take potshots at a multibillion-dollar tech company like Spotify—because they have a lot of money and I have significantly less money—but today is not one of those days. So it is through gritted teeth that I say the following to our foremost music-tech-overlord: good job on this particular thing!

Trend 2: The Franchise Flywheel (on Streaming)

There is a widespread stigma against Hollywood executives: namely, that they are bad at their jobs. I frequently receive emails from readers saying, “You should consult for [insert studio name]—then they’ll start making better movies!” And while I’m flattered that a few graphics and pithy remarks could inspire such confidence, the reality is that if I were making production decisions purely based on data (and nothing else!), I would find the behavior of Hollywood executives exceedingly defensible. Said differently, my data-driven advice would be: “Keep churning out franchise slop, no matter how artistically bankrupt!”

The franchise model thrives in today’s entertainment landscape for dozens of reasons. Consider, for example, what happens on streaming in the lead-up to a new franchise release: audiences routinely revisit earlier installments, turning every sequel into an advertisement for the films that came before it. Earlier this year, anticipation for movies like The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Spider-Man: Brand New Day saw fans fire up HBO Max and Disney+ to stream previous installments as a means of preparation.

This is what the not-at-all-cynical Bob Iger once called “the [franchise] flywheel effect,” where each installment in a cinematic universe supports a network of business assets that includes soundtracks, toys, theme parks, and earlier movie entries (which sit on a studio’s streaming platform). Gross!

As long as this behavior continues, we’ll keep getting franchises. The only heartening exception to this trend is Christopher Nolan, whose filmography is consumed and revisited as if it were one cohesive franchise. Every single movie within Nolan’s filmography saw a sizable jump in online activity in reaction to The Odyssey.

My great hope is that the interest surrounding Nolan’s work represents a new cultural pastime, one where auteur filmmakers like Jordan Peele, Ryan Coogler, and Quentin Tarantino are subject to a “director flywheel effect.”

Trend 3: TV’s Winners and Losers of 2026 (Thus Far)

Nielsen released its monthly Gauge report this past week, giving us insight into where Americans go for their daily dose of television. Now that we’re more than halfway through 2026 AD, I decided to use this data dump as an opportunity to highlight television’s biggest winners and losers of the year thus far.

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