I love the smell of a new year in the morning! You get this teensy window of a tabula rasa, a fresh start, even if it’s purely symbolic. I mean, it’s not like debt disappears, fascists suddenly fuck off or Harambe returns from the dead to lead us all into the light. (Where are my Harambe cultists at?) No, the turd sandwich that was 2025 still happened, and a quick flip of the calendar doesn’t erase the unsavoriness of the previous year, as much as we might wish it were so.
And yet, hope remains — if you allow it to penetrate the armor of cynicism. It would be seductively easy to look at the state of the music industry and the very act of creating music in 2026 and throw your hands in the air. Existential threats surround, from a largely broken streaming model to all-time-high concert ticket prices to the horror movie-like creep of AI slop. Times are hard out there for those just trying to rock out.
And yet…
Music, and the human reaction to it, transcends late-stage capitalism. One note of your favorite song lights up the hippocampus and amygdala, engages the limbic system, and floods the body’s motor system. That’s the power of music; it’s encoded in our brains and bodies. There are even studies that show listening to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major helped people suffering from epilepsy by reducing spikes of tension that lead to neuron activity.
If that’s not sorcery, I don’t know what is. While tech bros who couldn’t summon a note from a recorder in fifth grade are trying to hijack the industry and devalue the art, they’re no match for an ancient spell that calls back to our earliest evolutionary memories.
Nonetheless, it’s obvious the coming year will present both lingering and new challenges to musicians and fans. To help guide us once more into the breach, I’ve prepared a series of predictions and resolutions. Some are informed by years of experience and research, some are straight vibes, and some are just to make me look stupid come December.
2026 Predictions
As I rub my scrying orb (hey now!), images come to me like the murky answers of a Magic 8 Ball. What will 2026 hold for the Vermont music scene?
The changing topography of the live music ecosystem will continue to be a big story. 2025 was a turbulent year for music venues in the Green Mountains, with Nectar’s, Despacito and ArtsRiot all closing in Burlington and Bent Nails Bistro leaving Montpelier to become Bent Nails Roadhouse in Middlesex. The New Year will continue to pose all sorts of challenges for live music spots (see Ken Picard’s story on the Phoenix gallery and music hall in Waterbury) and issues such as soaring insurance costs and rapidly declining alcohol sales (see “New Beer Resolution”) aren’t just going to disappear.
Vermonters have already started responding, though. Shows in unconventional venues like houses and barns, along with underground raves and DIY mini music fests, emerged to fill the void with some regularity in 2025, and I foresee that trend accelerating.
Consider the growing scenes at the Burlington Odd Fellows lodge, the Underground — Listening Room in Randolph, Billsville House Concerts in Manchester Center, Stage 33 Live in Bellows Falls, the What Doth Life collective in Windsor and many other independent outfits across Vermont. I think 2026 will be the year of the DIY venue.
Less DIY, but no less exciting, is what the folks at the South End Arts + Business Association are doing on Pine Street in Burlington. SEABA took over the old ArtsRiot site in October, sparking hope in the community that what was once a South End music hot spot might return. The new space made its public debut on New Year’s Eve with performances by the likes of Dwight + Nicole, Kat Wright, Bob Wagner, and members of theWood Brothers; the event doubled as a fundraiser for a new sound system for the club.
With Wagner, Brian Nagle of Waking Windows, and photographer and frequent Seven Days collaborator Luke Awtry coming on board to handle booking and all things music, it’s looking like a big year at the SEABA space. Stay tuned for more news on the endeavor in the coming weeks.
My other prediction is that we’ll see more AI-produced music, even among local artists. My disdain aside, AI music is here, and it’s not going anywhere. Expect legal challenges and backroom corporate deals as AI swallows more and more data (in other words, music made by humans) and aggregates them into tools for AI producers to use. With streaming giants such as Spotify all too happy to platform AI music, it’s only going to get more difficult to ascertain what’s real and what’s been slapped together with machine learning.
I think this only adds to the appeal of live music. As streamed music becomes less authentic, the experience of seeing a group of actual people perform actual songs onstage grows more attractive. While there’s no putting the AI genie back in the bottle, I predict some silver-lining side effects.
Finally, some quick-fire, perhaps less thought-out predictions for 2026:
1. Dead Boomer Hologram Tours! I’d pay every dollar I have to see the holographic Eagles have a fight onstage. It’d just be Don Henley trying to sue the projector for royalties.
2. Every genre becoming protest music as America descends further and further into fascism. Are you ready for angry jamgrass? How about a 23-minute ambient track about the dangers of media consolidation? The era of feel-good, escapism pop is about to wash up dead onshore, methinks.
2026 Resolutions
1. Rethink streaming options. Less Spotify, more Bandcamp. Stay tuned!
2. More sousaphone players in bands. Somehow I will manifest this into reality.
3. Uncover the truth of the Brattleboro Crystal purported to lie beneath the town.
4. Listen to fewer guitar solos and more scat breaks and/or rapping animated animals.
5. Any band with the words “beach” or “wolf” in its name must be chased from the venue with pitchforks and torches.
6. No more smoking weed before hardcore shows. I already look too old to be there; standing quietly in the corner and eating a bag of chips while the kids mosh is a bad look for Unc.
7. Per requests from a few of our older readers and my own mother, I will use exactly 15 percent fewer f-bombs in Soundbites. Not including this fucking one.
8. I will meet “Weird Al” Yankovic at his show this summer in Essex Junction and become his best friend, before making an album together where we spoof only Noah Kahan and Phish songs. Do you know how hard it will be to “Weird Al” a song like “Golgi Apparatus”?
9. I’ll be nicer to tribute acts that combine multiple bands into one. But only the ones I don’t hate. And even then, I don’t know. This might be a failed resolution, y’all.
10. Stop eating the chicken tenders at venues. What am I, 5? (I already broke this resolution twice as of the first week of January.)
Will I manage any of these? Judging by last year’s attempts, it’s not looking good. But let 2026 be a year of wild hope in the face of savage challenges. I’ll see you out there at the shows, Vermont. Happy New Year!
This article appears in Jan 7-13 2026.
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