This year’s Palm Springs-based festival brought together some of the industry’s biggest names, from headliners like Tyler, the Creator to Doja Cat, as well as a raft of guests including Olivia Rodrigo and Shakira

• Doja Cat at Coachella review – an electrifying tour de force
• No Doubt at Coachella review – a joyous, high-energy reunion
• Tyler, the Creator at Coachella review – an exhilarating, high-stakes spectacle
• Lana Del Rey at Coachella review – a disappointingly lifeless start to the festival

Pop promos were once cultural events almost as important as the music they promoted. In an era of easily digestible bite-size content, the art form is in danger of being lost for ever

In increasingly turbulent times for the music industry, one aspect has remained steadfast: its passion for stats. At the start of the decade – with YouTube a strong metric of success after the collapse of CD sales – you couldn’t move for mind-bending figures being trumpeted about music video viewership. In 2021, for example, K-pop boyband BTS’s Butter video amassed a staggering 108m views in 24 hours, breaking a record that appeared to be eclipsed on a weekly basis. Butter now sits on a not-too-shabby 950m views, a figure dwarfed by Katy Perry’s jungle-based Roar (3.9bn), Mark Ronson’s retro fantasia Uptown Funk (5.1bn) and Luis Fonsi’s Justin Bieber-assisted 2017 smash, Despacito , which has 8.4bn views.

The two dominant global forces in recent years have been K-pop and Latin music, and their big-budget music videos still rule the roost (Shakira and the Colombian singer Karol G’s TQG video was viewed more than a billion times last year). For Anglo-American pop in 2024, however, a seismic shift has occurred: music video viewership has plummeted, Beyoncé and Drake have stopped releasing videos altogether and pop’s A-list are struggling to make a dent on a platform they previously dominated.

The Colombian pop star – and mother of two boys – disliked the global blockbuster, saying its message robs men of chance to ‘protect and provide’

In an unlikely dissension from what has become a critical and commercial consensus, Colombian musician Shakira has said that the Barbie movie is “emasculating” and suggested that it “rob[s] men of their possibility to be men”.

In an interview with Allure magazine that focused on the “she-wolf feminism” behind her work, Shakira said she had watched the Greta Gerwig-directed satire and said: “My sons absolutely hated it. They felt that it was emasculating. And I agree, to a certain extent.”

(RCA)
Despite a hit diss track so withering it affected the stock market and enlivening turns from Cardi B and leading regional Mexican musicians, the Colombian’s wan 12th album washes out her adventurous spirit

The cover of Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran features a closeup shot of Shakira crying, her tears turning into diamonds as they run down her face. It’s a neat summation of relatively recent developments in the singer’s career. Her 2023 single Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol 53 transformed the toxic fallout from her breakup with footballer Gerard Piqué into one of her biggest ever hits. Within days of release, it was the most streamed track in the world and had broken the record for the number of YouTube views for a Latin American song. It was so huge, it apparently affected the stock market. “You traded a Ferrari for a Twingo,” she railed, “you traded a Rolex for a Casio” – and, incredibly, both Renault and Casio’s share prices dropped.

Moreover, the cover suggests that there’s more where that came from, that Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran is Shakira’s big breakup album – her Blood on the Tracks, her Here, My Dear – a development that might cause long-term observers of her career to prick up their ears. Her arrival on the international stage with 2001’s Laundry Service was one of 00s pop’s more cheering events. Here was a 24-year-old Colombian who seemed to have a completely unique approach to being a pop star. She proffered mainstream bangers and AOR ballads alongside musical experiments off-the-wall enough to make you wonder how they’d got past reception at a major record label: Gregorian chants, surf guitars, bursts of music hall oompah and homages to Led Zeppelin. Her lyrics were so odd that some observers patronisingly suggested their author had a shaky grasp of English, but a quick scan of their Spanish-language equivalents revealed she was using exactly the same weird metaphors and imagery in her native tongue. It was all hugely entertaining, until the commercial underperformance of 2009’s She Wolf in the US seemed to rattle her: Shakira’s albums have been getting less idiosyncratic and more dreary ever since. Perhaps the hell-hath-no-fury mood here might inspire her to recover her sense of daring: after all, a woman who expresses her feelings about her ex’s mother by allegedly putting a lifesize model of a witch directly outside her home doesn’t seem minded to meekly curry favour.