Justin Bieber Doesn't Own His Own Songs Anymore

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Justin Bieber rose to fame at the dawn of the YouTube era. And yes, I don't typically write about pop stars or pop culture. But I think this moment is an accurate cultural mirror of an entire generation, and one that often goes un-talked about.

A few weeks ago, Bieber headlined Coachella. He came out on stage wearing a hoodie. No backup dancers. No elaborate sets. No choreography. After briefly performing new material, he walked over to a desk in the center of the stage, opened a MacBook, and started playing YouTube videos of his younger self (Sharp, 2026).

For nearly thirty minutes, the Millennial popstar sat at a laptop and sang along to his old YouTube clips like "Baby." Clips of his younger self. And as I saw people posting about this moment, there were so many Millennials wiping tears from their eyes, watching little Justin and his YouTube legacy.

The tears were nostalgic. I think it's because it reminded them of a brighter day on the internet.

In 2007, YouTube was receiving about 6 hours of video per minute (Geraldes, 2010). Today, that number is over 500 hours per minute, roughly 100x more (Statista, 2022). It was at the very beginning of that curve, in a church in Stratford, Ontario, Pattie Mallette uploaded the grainy footage of her 12-year-old son Justin, so friends and family who couldn't attend could watch. A year later, a talent manager named Scooter Braun clicked on the video by accident while searching for a different singer. He tracked down the school, then the theater, then the mother, and eventually introduced the boy to Usher (CBC Music, 2019). The rest is history.

For the Millennial generation, this was a defining moment. You could be whoever you wanted to be on the internet, and your true self could be discovered.

Every generation is sold a dream by the dominant medium of its era. For Boomers, the dream was the American Dream itself. 2.2 kids. The white picket fence. Stable jobs. Work harder, climb higher. You can make as much money as you want and have whichever house you want.

For Millennials, the dream was different. It was: if you are remarkable, put it online, you will be found, and your life will change. Notice the through line. The Boomer and Millennial dreams were both aspirational, both driven, both premised on the individual climbing toward something. The generations on either side of them, the Silents and Gen X, were more focused on family life and being present at home. It is a sweeping generalization, one worth unpacking another time, but the shape holds.

Bieber was the proof of the Millennial version of that dream.

The Bieber video was not the only early artifact of that promise. On April 14, 2009, a forty-seven-year-old unmarried Scottish woman named Susan Boyle stood on the stage of Britain's Got Talent and sang "I Dreamed a Dream." The studio audience laughed before she even opened her mouth. Simon Cowell rolled his eyes. When she finished, the judges' faces had completely changed (NBC Insider, 2025). Simon was emotional. The clip was uploaded to YouTube and watched by millions within days.

A year earlier, on April 26, 2008, a senior at Western Oregon University named Sara Tucholsky hit the first home run of her college career. It was a three-run shot over the center field fence. In her excitement, she missed first base, turned back to tag it, and tore her ACL. She crawled to the bag and could not stand (CBS News, 2008). Under the rules, her own teammates could not help her. The umpire told her coach that a pinch runner would have to replace her and the home run would be recorded as a single. Then Mallory Holtman, the first baseman for the opposing Central Washington team, who happened to hold her school's career home run record, asked the umpire if she could carry Tucholsky around the bases herself. The umpire allowed it. Holtman and her teammate Liz Wallace picked up Tucholsky and walked her around, gently lowering her to touch each bag with her good leg (Hays, 2008). Western Oregon won four to two. Central Washington was eliminated from playoff contention because of that home run.

The video went everywhere. It won an ESPY. It was the kind of story the early internet made visible in a way no other medium ever had.

These were the artifacts of what the internet felt like in 2008 and 2009. A place where human goodness and raw talent could find an audience that would lift them up.

That era is what the Millennials at Coachella were remembering.

Every generation has had its stars. Elizabeth Taylor was the star of the Silent Generation's era of ascent, the Hollywood figure who embodied what glamour looked like to the parents of the Boomers. She rose through the studio system, signed with MGM as a child, and in 1963 became the first actress to be paid one million dollars for a single film role (appoximately $10 million in today’s dollars), for her performance in Cleopatra (Guinness World Records, 2022). Her contract and overtime eventually brought her closer to seven million dollars on that single film (Elizabeth Taylor Estate, n.d.).

Taylor was married eight times to seven men. She married Richard Burton twice (you would think he would have learned the first time). She battled addiction, survived multiple near-fatal illnesses, and lived through decades of public scrutiny. Her career arced across roughly five decades, from child star in the 1940s to screen legend in the 1960s to tabloid fixture to elder icon, and then a quieter final chapter of philanthropy and jewelry auctions that lasted until her death in 2011. The medium that made her was the Hollywood studio system. Her career spanned nearly 7 decades, deacdes to build and decades to unwind then ultimately recalibrate.

Bieber's entire arc has taken about 15 years.

He uploaded the church footage in 2007. Braun found him in 2008. "Baby" dropped in 2010. By 2012 he was the youngest solo male in forty-seven years to top the Billboard 200 (CBC Music, 2019). Then came the DUIs, the mug shots, the escalating tabloid fixtures of a child star unraveling in public. By 2022, he had cancelled his Justice World Tour and, according to reporting by TMZ's documentary TMZ Investigates: What Happened to Justin Bieber?, was so financially strained he allegedly borrowed a friend's credit card to play a round of golf. Bieber's representatives have denied those characterizations (NewsNation, 2025). In December of that year he sold his entire back catalog of 290 songs, including "Baby," to Hipgnosis Songs Capital, a fund backed by the private equity giant Blackstone, in a deal reported at two hundred million dollars (Aswad, 2023; Ingham, 2023).

The songs that had made him are no longer his.

That is why, some have theorized, he sat on that Coachella stage and sang along to YouTube clips of his younger self for his older catalog, while performing his newer material in full (Dainty, 2026). No contractual terms have been made public. No licensing restriction has been confirmed. But the image remains. A thirty-one-year-old man, on a Coachella stage, playing videos of the child version of himself because the adult version does not own them anymore.

The youngest Millennials turn thirty this year. The oldest are in their mid-forties. They are well into middle age. They are well into the family-bearing years. They are the generation that has lived long enough to audit the promises they were sold as teens.

Millennials were the bridge. They had one foot in the real world, grounded in reality. The other, was trying to find its footing on an online platform. They remember playing outside with friends. They remember the family desktop. They remember the dial-up screech. And then they watched the line blur. They watched the platform that discovered Bieber become the platform that monetized their attention, that sold their data, that rewired how they felt about their own faces. They bought into a dream of influence and curated lives and private jets posted to Instagram, and many of them are now quietly discovering the Bieber pattern in smaller scale. Asset rich, cash poor. Followings without foundations.

Gen Z has watched this play out and is swinging the pendulum back. They are leaning into authenticity, rejecting filters, building side hustles, telling themselves they will be their own boss (Deloitte, 2024). But the underlying promise has not changed. It has only been re-imagined.

Bieber at Coachella is a reflection on a generation. A generation that had a positive, play-based, experience-based childhood. That had the best of the internet when it was full of feel-good motivation before it was polluted with extreme polarity. Beiber’s moment is a reflection of a whole generation and the impact the internet had on it. He is not the exception. He is the reflection.

The church video was less than twenty years ago. And yet, it feels like it belongs to a different century.

That is all the faster it has taken for the internet to move from a place where a Scottish woman could make Simon Cowell cry, where two opposing players could carry an injured girl around the bases, where a twelve-year-old could be found in a church by accident, to a place where the Coachella headliner signs in to YouTube to sing his own songs back to himself because he had to sell a part of himself along the way.

The Millennials watching are not nostalgic for Bieber. They are nostalgic for the moment in history and social media that made it possible to discover young Justin. And somewhere between the church footage and the MacBook on stage, that version of the internet quietly stopped existing.