On the pop culture podcast Iconography (hosted by Ayo Edebiri and Olivia Craighead), there was a segment called Celebrity Stock Market where they would make picks on what celebs to buy, sell, and hold because, as Ayo says: “Celebrities aren’t people—they’re meat and money”. As a listener, I bought stock in Edebiri very early, which was an incredible investment. A quick browse of her IMDB shows she has 22 credits in the last two years alone. Her stock price has risen so much that Iconography has been deleted from the internet and is now, unfortunately, impossible to find. That means her stock market concept is up for grabs, and I’m stealing it outright.

Most actors can star in a bad movie and walk away completely unscathed, but it’s a different story for musicians. An awful album or song can ruin a career almost instantly if you’re famous enough (or if it’s bad enough). It may sound preposterous in the year of our lord 2025, but Chance The Rapper was shaping up to be a massive artist in the late 2010s. However, his 4th album The Big Day (2019) was such a giant failure that it effectively ruined his career. Shortly after releasing it to near-universal disdain, Chance fired his manager, canceled the tour, got divorced, and was sentenced to a fate worse than death: being a host of NBC’s The Voice. The inverse of this happens all the time too; an artist like Ice Spice can blow up on TikTok with a single song out of nowhere and be propelled to stardom, or a song from 30 years ago will randomly get popular for seemingly no reason, causing a once-obscure band like Duster to gain millions of new teenage fans.

We’re living in unpredictable times; That's why I’m here to tell you what to invest in. We’re analyzing a stock market where you’re not earning money, but instead something much more important: social clout. “I liked them before they were cool” is more valuable than a check for a million dollars, and judging someone for still liking Brockhampton in 2025 is priceless.

Bartees Strange makes indie rock/pop with influences ranging from Parliament Funkadelic to Neil Young and a bit of the hazy bedroom sound of Mc.Gee. His first project, an EP of The National covers, was released in 2020. Since then he’s dropped two full-length LPs and has toured with Japanese Breakfast, Boy Genius, and Car Seat Headrest, and gained a reputation for putting on a killer live show. For the last couple of years, he’s been on the precipice of being the next big thing and it looks like it might happen now.

Bartees Strange: Buy!

Bartees Strange’s third album, Horror, is set to be released on February 14th and is produced by Jack Antonoff, who is a controversial figure in the pop world. He’s produced albums like Midnights (Taylor Swift), Masseduction (St. Vincent), Melodrama (Lorde), Short n’ Sweet (Sabrina Carpenter), and most recently Kendrick Lamar's newest album GNX. Love him or hate him (and people are very vocal about both of those things), it’s undeniable that practically every project he’s touched in the last decade has been critically or commercially successful. Based on the singles from his new album, I think he will turn Bartees Strange into a superstar. Right now the song “Wants Needs” only has 59,000 plays on Spotify. Give it a couple months and it’s gonna blow up on TikTok or be in a Target commercial; I can feel it.

Image: Luke Piotrowski

In January 2024 Apple's stock price was 193 dollars a share. Someone might hear that and say “That's a lot! How much can it really go up from there?” Well, as of writing this, Apple stock is currently 221 dollars a share. Just because it’s high doesn’t mean it still can’t go higher, and that’s how I feel about Lady Gaga. Nobody stopped loving Gaga, and they never will. She had a string of hits in the late 2000s / early 2010s that made her one of the biggest pop icons of all time, but she hasn’t had the best couple of years. She released Chromatica (2020), an album designed to be played at clubs, months after the pandemic. It was well received by gay people online but did not make the commercial impact she wanted.

Lady Gaga: Buy!

Since then she’s starred in the very silly movie House of Gucci (2021), the enormous disaster Joker: Folie a Deux (2024), released Harlequin, a cover album to tie in with the godawful Joker movie, and Love For Sale, another Tony Bennet collab. Her stock is the lowest it’s been in a while, which means now is the perfect time to buy. Gaga just announced her 7th full-length studio album, Mayhem, is coming out this March. Last fall, she dropped the first single for the album, Disease, and it was a return to form. It has her classic sound with its synth-pop production, propulsive chorus, and dark lyrics. Just last week she put out the song "Abracadabra" which also sounds like it could’ve been on any of her first three albums. She may have never left, but as soon as I heard her singing gibberish on the chorus I knew that Gaga was back!

Lady Gaga, "Abracadabra"

I became enamored with Marcus Brown's 2023 Debut album when I first heard it that December. Erotic Probiotic 2 is a perfect announcement of a wholly unique artist. It’s a sexy, dancey, moody mix of sophisto-pop, bedroom pop, and R&B. Brown recorded the project entirely on his own in his parent's basement in Baltimore. His deep voice isn’t traditionally perfect and some of the production choices sound a little scrappy, but these things only add to the music. The songs “Shed That Fear” and “Daddy” are like pop music from another world. Incredible hits that are made for nobody but you. It’s not quite the same sound, but the DIY aspect of his music reminds me of how exciting and fresh Grimes was when her first albums came out.

Nourished By Time: Buy!

His follow-up EP Catching Chickens (2024) proves that Erotic Probiotic 2 wasn’t an anomaly; he’s got the juice. It was another collection of catchy unique songs, most notably “Hell Of A Ride”, which was one of my favorite tracks from 2024. Right now he’s on tour with Panda Bear and Toro Y Moi, which are fantastic artists to be aligned with because I can hear their influences in his work. Although he hasn’t officially announced his next album yet, Brown has been teasing new music on Instagram. I’m hopeful that his Sophomore LP will come out sometime this year and propel Nourished By Time into the mainstream where he belongs.

Image: Max Touhey

In 2024 I saw Courtney Barnet at ACL Live (the best venue in Austin). Her openers were Indigo De Souza and Ethel Cain who, at the time, I was only vaguely familiar with. I ended up missing almost all of her set but I caught the last song and thought she seemed cool. Months later I went back and listened to Preacher's Daughter and fell in love with it. Around this same time, it got very popular on TikTok. It seemed odd that a concept album about a girl running away from home and eventually being killed and eaten would have any commercial appeal but it did, which seemed to annoy Ethel Cain. Obama named "American Teenager," the only pop song on the album, as one of his favorite songs of the year. She responded with a tweet that said “Did not have a former president including my anti-war, anti-patriotism fake pop song on his end of year list on my 2022 bingo.”

Ethel Cain: Hold!

Image: Avery Norman

Winter 2016 was a really depressing time in my life. Driving around aimlessly and listening to music was one of my main hobbies because I had nothing better to do. I remember listening to Japanese Breakfast's album Psychopomp (and Pinegrove's album Cardinal, but that’s a story for another day) on a loop while speeding down country roads in the middle of nowhere 45 minutes outside Plano Texas. Psychopomp was a total bolt of lightning album; a deeply personal and devastating record Michelle Zauner wrote about caring for her dying mother, and processing her death. It’s music that can rip your heart out one minute and then comfort you the next. I absolutely loved it. Since then my enthusiasm for Japanese Breakfast has only grown. I’ve seen them 4 times, including meeting Michelle and getting a very awkward photo with her in Dallas in 2017 that I’m too embarrassed to include in this article (I didn't know what to do with my hands). I love all 3 of her albums, and her Bestselling memoir Crying In H Mart made me sob uncontrollably.

Japanese Breakfast: Hold!

Image: Peter Ash Lee

Chilean producer Nicolas Jarr is one of the best electronic musicians alive right now. His solo work can vary between ambient electronic that transports you to another world with its rich textures and atmosphere on albums like Space is Only Noise (2011), or he can work in a more dancey mode like his album Nymphs (2016). In addition to the work he does under his own name, he also has put out two house albums under the Against All Logic moniker, both of which are incredible. He’s produced for FKA Twigs on her album Magdelane (2019) and did the original score for the Pablo Lorrain film Ema.

Darkside: Hold!

Image: Jed DeMoss

Post-pandemic, the world was going bananas for Boy Genius, the supergroup of Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, and Lucy Dacus that made music to be played in Starbucks everywhere. Their self-titled EP in 2018 was pretty great, and the follow-up Record (2023) was solid enough, but the amount of people who were completely obsessed with them was a little puzzling. Don’t get me wrong, I like mid-tempo indie rock by sad women just as much as the next guy. I just don’t understand why people are lining up to their concert 5 hours before doors.

Lucy Dacus: Sell!

After a 4 year hiatus Lucy Dacus is back with her new solo album Forever Is A Feeling which comes out this March. If I’m being honest, I think the album might end up being good. The single didn’t touch the greatness of some of her earlier songs like Night Shift, but it was pleasant enough. I simply hate the album cover so much that I’m selling my Lucy stock because of it. The ironic religious figure thing is played out – every dumb Etsy store sells votive candles with Harry Styles or RBG as a saint on it. It’s an annoyingly smug aesthetic that’s only worsened by the godawful tattoo right in the middle of it. It’s hideous. They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but If the cover is this tacky and garish, how can I not judge it?

Image: Matador Records

LCD Soundsystem was one of my all-time favorite bands for years and years and I would continuously look the other way when people criticized them because the music was that good. I didn’t get mad at them for being sellouts when they broke up, made a big deal about it, and got back together just a couple of years later. It did put a really bad taste in my mouth when I heard that they played an NFT event in 2022 (Remember when the dumbest people got tricked into spending thousands of dollars on jpegs of monkeys?) but hey, they made All My Friends and Dance Yrself Clean. I can look the other way when you’ve made three albums of wall-to-wall bangers.

LCD Soundsystem: Sell!

James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem

Right after finding out the concert was canceled. Photo courtesy of Serena Ramsey

Official Statement from LCD Soundsystem

Just last week they finally announced proper Austin dates, and despite all of the previously mentioned grievances I still wanted to go. The Facebook post after the canceled show said “The fans get first access to tickets” but I was not given any access. I tried to get tickets and of course, it sold out immediately. Thanks, James for fucking me one last time.

Sean “Diddy” Combs is a totemic figure in American music both as a producer and a musician. We all love his early music and laugh until it hurts when he pops up in movies like Get Him To The Greek and Muppets Most Wanted, but now the thing that’s most wanted from Diddy is a hit song! His 2023 album The Love Album: Off The Grid was his first in 13 years and is a total disappointment. It’s not an enormous disaster, but instead disappointing for being boring and uninspired which Diddy has never been. I don’t want to accuse Diddy of anything, but I feel like he wasn’t even trying with that one.

Since putting out that total dud he’s seemingly disappeared. I’m hoping Diddy has another banger in him but unfortunately, I think it might be time to sell. This one is tough for me, but I’ve broken up with an artist like this before. I adored R Kelly‘s music but had to stop listening to him after his criminally bad 2015 album The Buffet. I just hope that the next project from my favorite jazz musician, Woody Allen, isn’t a disappointment.

P-Diddy: Sell!

Image: Chelsea Lauren/Shutterstock