When news broke that Justin Bieber will headline Coachella 2026, the reaction was oddly split: some rolled their eyes in disbelief, while others cheered with a kind of obligatory enthusiasm. Neither felt especially sincere.
Because here’s the truth: no one is really a Justin Bieber fan anymore – we’re just fans of 2010.
Bieber’s career has always been inseparable from that moment, and his staying power has been less about the songs themselves and more about timing: the last days of innocence before algorithms learned how to give us profitable eating disorders, before every teenager became a micro-influencer for Botox, before ‘the future of democracy’ was a dark, glaring question mark.
Because of this, his debut hit Baby isn’t just a track; it’s a portal to an era when computers still lived in a special room in the house and the internet felt like a playground rather than an addiction. But teens were increasingly online for the first time in history, many of them more tech literate than their parents and therefore largely unsupervised online.
As a result, the intense feelings of devotion that Bieber evoked – reminiscent of Beatle-mania, teen girls’ reactions to Elvis, and countless other instances of teen heartthrobs – took on a brand-new, hyper-online facet.
In 2013, Twitter reported Bieber was the most-tweeted-about person in the world. His fans dominated hashtags, trended topics daily, and organised mass voting campaigns for awards.
On YouTube, he became the first artist to hit one billion views (Baby again), proof that his audience lived online in ways no previous teen fandom had.
Fans of Bieber’s weren’t just uniting at his concerts or in line to buy his music as in years past; they were spending countless hours watching YouTube videos of him, talking to each other about him in chat rooms, and bidding on eBay for merch and Justin-related items.
They built a sense of identity that was tied to him more than any previous fandom, and it was only made possible by the internet’s ability to intensify and reward obsession.
That collective identity has outlasted his catalog. Ask an adult fan today what keeps them invested, and they’ll rarely mention his voice or lyrics. Instead, they’ll talk about the feeling of being 13, of making their first online friends, of discovering community through a crush on a pop star.
At the same time as the internet created Bieber’s career, it was also new enough not to be oversaturated with things vying for our attention the way it is today. Now, the hyperfixations of teenagers can exist in niches isolated enough to avoid detection by those who aren’t in the know.
In the early 2010s, Bieber was such a force on the internet that he was inescapable even for those uninterested.
That ubiquity makes him less a single celebrity than a symbol of the entire era – something no star today could quite achieve in the vast, overcrowded landscape of today.
His recent albums – Swag and Swag II – aren’t cultural events so much as Easter eggs for Beliebers to decode, tribute acts to the deity that was Justin Bieber and the phenomenon that was Bieber Fever.
Is Justin Bieber a nostalgia act at Coachella 2026?
That’s why, at just 31, Bieber already feels like a nostalgia act.
Nostalgia in music isn’t new, of course – plenty of bands extend their careers by transporting listeners back to another era – but what’s striking in Bieber’s case is how quickly it happened.
His explosion to global fame coincided precisely with the tech revolution’s first acceleration of cultural turnover.
That speed is, genuinely, new: in the ’90s, thirty-somethings looked back at the 70s, a 20-year cycle. By the 2010s, Tumblr was already rebranding the 90s just a decade later.
Bieber embodies that acceleration because his fame hit in the final days of a now-bygone era and in 2025, 2010 already feels like a long-ago age of innocence.
That’s why, while his peers – Taylor Swift, Drake, Lady Gaga – are still framed as evolving artists, Bieber is usually described in terms of ‘returns’ and ‘comebacks.’
Even his 2021 hit Peaches was hailed by Rolling Stone as a ‘grown-up sequel to Baby,’ proof that his story always circles back to the white-hot poignancy of his cultural importance at the beginning of his career.
Politically, too, it was a time that we can now see as a hinge: the Obama years still bathed the US in optimism, Brexit and Trump were unthinkable, the Arab Spring had not yet curdled.
For millennials and early Gen Z, Bieber became a monument to that brief, naïve era when we really believed things would get better.
So it will be the die-hard Beliebers cheering loudest when he takes the stage at Coachella 2026 – but they won’t be alone. Those of us panicked by the cultural and political now, craving the simplicity of then, will be singing along too.
We’re not lining up for Bieber, we’re lining up to briefly feel like we’re back in 2010, and maybe that’s as good a headlining act as we can ask for.
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