Trend Taster: retro music edition
In this week’s edition of the Trend Taster, we round up the snackable trends, stats and insights from around the world, including:
35% of consumers are simplifying skincare post-procedure
Students bypass school phone bans by turning to Google Docs
Gen Z is walking away from brands over AI mistrust
Explainer: retro music platforms
Should Apple bring back the iPod?
35% of consumers are simplifying skincare post-procedure
Beauty sales climbed nearly 10% in the US, but the real shift is structural. Online sales grew 21% whilst in-store barely moved. Meanwhile, 35% of consumers are simplifying skincare post-procedure, and wellness products are expanding the category by 64%. Beauty's no longer just cosmetic: it's clinical, digital, and adjacent to health. Where does the category end now?
Students bypass school phone bans by turning to Google Docs
Students in at least 18 US states are bypassing school phone bans by turning Google Docs into live chat rooms: typing in real time like AOL Instant Messenger. Teachers call it resourceful but worry it still enables distraction, cheating, and bullying. The ban didn't stop communication. It just redirected it to a platform adults already approved. If the tool changes but the behaviour doesn't, what exactly did the policy solve?
Gen Z is walking away from brands over AI mistrust
Gen Z is walking away from brands over AI mistrust. Despite their digital fluency, they're 9 points less sceptical than millennials about artificial intelligence, and 18% have stopped shopping with a business in the past year because they didn't trust how it used AI. Are younger generations signalling that innovation without transparency has a cost?
Explainer: retro music platforms
Retro Play offers ad-free access to pre-2011 music videos with no login required: a curated nostalgia platform banking on seamless playback and shared cultural memory. It's positioned as anti-algorithm, anti-clutter, pro-feeling. But here's the tension: nostalgia only monetises if scarcity holds. Once retro content saturates every platform, does curation alone justify a standalone service?
Should Apple bring back the iPod?
Thirty-one US states now restrict phones in schools, with four banning them outright. One pitched solution? Revive the iPod as a Bluetooth-enabled, download-only music player with no camera or apps, a device that's clearly not a smartphone. Students would need to shift from streaming to owned files. Is the answer to digital distraction really a stripped-back gadget, or just nostalgia dressed as policy?
