![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/SEC_293141845-4cd9.jpg\")
\n\t\tJustin Bieber fans are missing the point of his Coachella performance (Picture: Getty Images)<\/p>\n
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\n\t\tJustin Bieber fans are missing the point of his Coachella performance (Picture: Getty Images)<\/p>\n
Justin Bieber<\/a>\u2019s highly anticipated\u00a0Coachella<\/a>\u00a0set has been brutally criticised by some as \u2018low-effort\u2019 or \u2018a snoozefest.\u2019 <\/a><\/p>\n But those fans are missing the point, and, in fact, Bieber\u2019s performance might have been the most moving and self-aware piece of art in the festival\u2019s history. <\/p>\n Because, in a staggering feat of self-awareness, the pop star\u2019s show acknowledged a difficult truth: no one is really a Justin Bieber fan anymore; they\u2019re fans of 2010.<\/p>\n The 32-year-old Canadian singer is\u00a0one of three acts headlining this year\u2019s festival\u00a0<\/a>alongside\u00a0Sabrina Carpenter<\/a>\u00a0and Karol G \u2013 with the event also marking his\u00a0major live performance comeback<\/a>.<\/p>\n Midway through the show at the famous California festival, he pivoted to his back catalogue in a way that was almost absurdly literal: playing his old music videos on YouTube on a laptop, buffering and all, as if dragging his own mythology back through the same technological portal that created it. <\/p>\n Songs like Baby, Sorry, and Never Say Never were not performed in the traditional sense, but mediated through the technology that made them ubiquitous in the first place. <\/p>\n He even played the covers that led to his discovery, Chris Brown\u2019s With You and NeYo\u2019s So Sick, harmonizing with the pre-teen version of himself. <\/p>\n At one point he mimed the viral \u2018it\u2019s not clocking\u2026\u2019 paparazzi video word for word as it played behind him, a meta comment on his own early-internet celebrity.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\tOnline reaction to Justin Bieber’s Coachella set\t\t\t<\/p>\n \u2018The way Justin Bieber is just doing karaoke to his own songs at Coachella\u2026I\u2019m so disappointed!! I wasn\u2019t expecting anything too big or long, but to do sing a longs & cut the songs off and not do a proper medley with transitions\u2026kinda lame,\u2019 user Tristan posted on X.<\/p>\n \u2018Justin Bieber supposedly got paid TEN million dollars to sing at Coachella only for him to show clips on a laptop? This is below bare minimum,\u2019 Kay declared.<\/p>\n \u2018No artist has been less interested in playing their Coachella set less than Justin Bieber is,\u2019 Evan shared.<\/p>\n \u2018Justin Bieber currently has a laptop set up on the Coachella main stage, pulling up his own YouTube videos and basically karaokeing whatever comes to mind from his searches. No setlist \u2014 just whatever he finds on YouTube. A few videos have even had to buffer. Honestly\u2026kind of incredible to watch,\u2019 FestiveOwl wrote.<\/p>\n \u2018Can\u2019t believe that this is a headliner this is just a mess no good production, horrible visuals, no outfit changes, no backup dancers and performing khia songs. Who made him headline,\u2019 Cyberstar added.<\/p>\n Others called it a \u2018snoozefest\u2019, \u2018lazy\u2019, and even \u2018garbage\u2019.<\/p>\n \t\t People who are criticising the performance as a \u2018YouTube karaoke night,\u2019 are missing the power of the statement Bieber was making.<\/p>\n His career has always been inseparable from the moment in which he became famous, and his staying power has been less about the songs themselves and more about timing, and his Coachella set proved that. <\/p>\n He was originally a phenomenon in the last days of innocence before algorithms learned how to give us profitable eating disorders<\/a>, before every teenager became a micro-influencer for Botox, before \u2018the future of democracy\u2019 was a dark, glaring question mark<\/a>. <\/p>\n \t\t The current music landscape is as fractured as the political landscape, and it\u2019s impossible to point to any one sound or artist as representative of the moment. <\/p>\n So festival planners are banking on the one thing that can define this era: Nostalgia for a simpler (surprisingly recent) past. A past that Bieber\u2019s music and persona represent, and that he played on beautifully in his set. <\/p>\n Why is Justin Bieber so synonymous with the 2010s?<\/p>\n Bieber\u2019s debut hit Baby from 2010, is 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.<\/p>\n Many of us can recall gathering around the family PC with a group of friends after school, dancing along to the Baby music video, and that\u2019s the experience Bieber offered to the enormous festival crowd. <\/p>\n \t\t It was a period when teens were increasingly online for the first time in history, and many of them were more tech literate than their parents and therefore largely unsupervised online.\u00a0<\/p>\n As a result, the intense feelings of devotion that Bieber<\/a> evoked \u2013 reminiscent of Beatles-mania, teen girls\u2019 reactions to Elvis, and countless other instances of teen heartthrob earning followings \u2013 took on a brand-new, hyper-online facet among his young fandom. <\/p>\n 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 in a way the world had never seen before. <\/p>\n 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 \u2014 something his Coachella set so cleverly referenced. <\/p>\n \t\t Fans of Bieber\u2019s weren\u2019t just uniting at his concerts or in line to buy his music as in years past; they were spending countless hours watching\u00a0YouTube\u00a0videos of him, talking to each other about him in chat rooms, and bidding on eBay for merch and Justin-related items.<\/p>\n As a result, they built a sense of identity tied to him more than any previous fandom, and this was only made possible by the internet\u2019s ability to intensify and reward obsession.<\/p>\n At the same time as the internet created Bieber\u2019s career, it was also new enough not to be oversaturated with things vying for our attention the way it is today. <\/p>\n Now, teenage hyperfixations play out in niches obscure enough to go unnoticed by outsiders, and with so many competing options online, each obsession tends to burn out quickly before being replaced by the next.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n In contrast, in the early 2010s, Bieber was such a force on the internet that he was inescapable even for those uninterested.<\/p>\n He truly managed to become the most famous pop star in history \u2013 before or since \u2013 thanks to the specific global moment in which he found fame. <\/p>\n That collective identity established by his fans has outlasted his catalog.<\/a> Ask an adult fan today what keeps them invested, and they\u2019ll rarely mention his voice or lyrics. Instead, they\u2019ll talk about the feeling of being 13, of making their first online friends, of discovering community through a crush on a pop star.\u00a0<\/p>\n That ubiquity makes him less a single celebrity than a symbol of the entire era \u2013 something no star today could quite achieve in the vast, overcrowded landscape of culture. \u00a0<\/p>\n His recent albums \u2013 Swag and Swag II \u2013 aren\u2019t cultural events so much as Easter<\/a> eggs for Beliebers to decode, tribute acts to the deity that was Justin Bieber and the phenomenon that was Bieber Fever.\u00a0<\/p>\n The absolute feral energy of the crowd at Coachella proved this more effectively than anything else could. <\/p>\n @metroentertainment<\/a> <\/p>\n Is this why he didn\u2019t perform his old songs in full? \ud83d\udc40 @Justin Bieber allegedly didn\u2019t perform his old songs in full at @coachella due to him selling his full music catalog to Hipgnosis Songs Capital for $200 million in 2022, according to Daily Mail \ud83d\udc46\ud83c\udffc Music industry expert @nickcromp on Twitter also claims it wouldn\u2019t be financially liable for Justin to perform those songs, hence why he focussed mainly on SWAG and SWAG II for the 2-hour performance \ud83d\udcbf Metro Entertainment reached out to Justin Bieber\u2019s UK representative for comment and they responded saying that \u201cnostalgia was at the heart\u201d of the performance \ud83d\udc46\ud83c\udffc #justinbieber<\/a> #coachella<\/a> #coachella2026<\/a> #pop<\/a> #popmusic<\/a> <\/p>\n \u266c audio originale \u2013 nss magazine<\/a> <\/p><\/blockquote>\n Why Justin Bieber is already a nostalgia act at Coachella 2026<\/p>\n Nostalgia in music isn\u2019t new, of course \u2013 plenty of bands extend their careers by transporting listeners back to another era\u00a0 \u2013 but what\u2019s striking in Bieber\u2019s case is how quickly it happened.\u00a0<\/p>\n His explosion to global fame coincided precisely with the tech revolution\u2019s first acceleration of cultural turnover.\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\t \t\t That speed is, genuinely, new: in the \u201990s, thirty-somethings looked back at the 70s, a 20-year cycle. By the 2010s, Tumblr was already rebranding the 90s just a decade later.<\/p>\n Bieber embodies that acceleration because his fame hit in the final days of a now-bygone era defined by the fact that it was even possible to get as famous as he was, thanks to the burgeoning internet.<\/p>\n And, perhaps more importantly, he\u2019s managed to undergo very little artistic evolution since those early days. The very fact that his latest albums are named Swag \u2013 a word almost as emblematic of the early 2010s as Bieber himself \u2013 makes that clear.<\/p>\n But it doesn\u2019t matter that he never recreated himself in Taylor Swift-style eras. When you\u2019re as famous as Bieber was in 2010 \u2013 when you created an army of zealous fans more devoted than any fandom before them -you can ride that wave for the rest of your life. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n While his peers\u00a0\u2013 Taylor Swift<\/a>, Drake<\/a>, Lady Gaga<\/a> \u2013 are still framed as evolving artists, Bieber is usually described in terms of \u2018returns\u2019 and \u2018comebacks,\u2019 largely because he just had nowhere left to go. <\/p>\n Even if Bieber had attempted to redefine himself, there was truly nowhere to go but down after his initial success. <\/p>\n Even his 2021 hit Peaches was hailed by Rolling Stone as a \u2018grown-up sequel to Baby,\u2019 proof that his story always circles back to the white-hot poignancy of his cultural importance at the beginning of his career.\u00a0<\/p>\n Politically, too, Bieber emerged at a time that we can now see as a hinge: the Obama years still bathed the US in optimism, Brexit and Trump were unthinkable, and the Arab Spring had not yet curdled.<\/p>\n \t\t For millennials and early Gen Z, Bieber became a monument to that brief, na\u00efve era when we really believed things would get better.<\/p>\n And now, with modern music offering little escape from or explanation for the scary reality of the world as it is now, it\u2019s clear why fans would gravitate towards nostalgia instead of new pop stars. <\/p>\n So while it was die-hard Beliebers cheering when he took the stage at Coachella 2026, they weren\u2019t alone. Those of us panicked by the cultural and political now, craving the simplicity of then, sang along just as loudly. <\/p>\n And at Coachella weekend two, fans are certain to once again line up for the fleeting chance to feel like it\u2019s 2010 again. <\/p>\n A version of this article was first published on September 16, 2025.<\/p>\n Got a story?<\/strong><\/p>\n If you\u2019ve got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the Metro.co.uk<\/a> entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@metro.co.uk, calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff<\/a> page \u2013 we\u2019d love to hear from you.<\/p>\n Arrow Arrow Arrow \t\t\tComments \t\t\t\tAdd as preferred source![\"INDIO,](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/SEI_293000750-df59.jpg\")
\n\t\tPeople have even begun referring to the festival as \u2018Bieberchella\u2019 (Picture: Kevin Mazur\/Getty Images for Coachella)<\/p>\n![\"INDIO,](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/SEI_293075110-7957.jpg\")
\n\t\tThe pop star managed to interrogate his own journey with fame (Picture: Kevin Mazur\/Getty Images for Coachella)<\/p>\n![\"Mandatory](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/SEI_266362635-19f2.jpg\")
\n\t\tWhen Bieber first came to fame as a fresh-faced tween, no one could have projected the trajectory of his career (Picture: Larry Marano\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n![\"LOS](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/SEI_263791725-b703.jpg\")
\n\t\tNow, Bieber still has massive star power \u2013 but it reeks of a strange yearning for a bygone time (Picture: Cassy Athena\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n![\"NEW](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/SEI_266360841-9256.jpg\")
\n\t\tAt just 31 years old, Justin Bieber is already a nostalgia act(Picture: XNY\/Star Max\/GC Images)<\/p>\n![\"Mandatory](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/SEI_266362630-8034.jpg\")
\n\t\tBieber Fever was inescapable in 2010 (Picture: Phil Mccarten\/UPI\/Shutterstock)<\/p>\n![\"INDIO,](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/SEI_293075097-63e8.jpg\")
\n\t\tBieber\u2019s Coachella set has secured his place as a generational icon (Picture: Kevin Mazur\/Getty Images for Coachella)<\/p>\n
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