On a Saturday night in April, Justin Bieber walked onto an oval stage at Coachella in a red hoodie and dark sunglasses, opened his set with “All I Can Take”, and then did something that no streaming-era headliner had quite attempted. He carried a laptop to the centre of the vast platform, opened it, and began playing his own grainy YouTube videos from more than a decade earlier. As the clips rolled — “Baby”, “Favorite Girl”, “That Should Be Me” — he sang along live, pausing to joke about wifi connections and paparazzi, turning a festival tent into something that felt, witnesses said, like a private living room. The performance, his first large-scale show in four years, was later released as the live album Swag Live From Coachella (Weekend I), with guest turns from The Kid Laroi, Tems, Wizkid and others.

Some observers noted the staging was strikingly minimal for a headliner, yet the effect on streaming was immediate and quantifiable. In the days after the first weekend, Bieber placed seven albums simultaneously on the Billboard 200, a career record that eclipsed his previous high of four set in January 2012. The laptop moment, part nostalgia trip and part self-archiving, functioned as a bridge between the bedroom-born YouTube fame of his childhood and the machinery of a global pop career now entering its second decade.

Half a world away, another pop star was building a different kind of bridge to the past. On Saturday, Dua Lipa will open a permanent library in Porto, Portugal, housed in the Livraria Lello — a 1906 bookstore often described as one of the most beautiful in the world. The Biblioteca Manifiesto, a collaboration between her book club Service95 and the historic shop, gathers a hundred titles organised around four themes: power, control, voice and memory. The collection includes works banned in some school districts for addressing race or sexuality, books aimed at LGBTQ+ readers that have been hidden from display, and texts by authors who, Lipa said, “have paid with their life for their words.” The library will sit inside a new cultural auditorium designed by Pritzker laureate Álvaro Siza.

Lipa’s curatorial act arrives as her own music continues to demonstrate unusual staying power. Her self-titled debut album this week reached 450 weeks on the UK’s Official Albums chart, a longevity milestone unmatched by any of her other projects; Future Nostalgia, by comparison, has logged 224 frames. On American radio, Bruno Mars was simultaneously extending a run of his own: the single “I Just Might” notched an 18th week atop Billboard’s Radio Songs chart, tying Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers” and the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” for the fourth-longest reign in the tally’s history. Only three songs — by The Weeknd, Shaboozey and Alex Warren — have held the spot longer.

Further down the same American chart, a legacy act was quietly marking a return to form. Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall, his 1979 solo breakthrough, crossed 200 weeks on the Billboard 200, becoming his fourth album to reach that threshold after Thriller (723 weeks), The Essential Michael Jackson (547) and Number Ones (242). The record also climbed back into the top ten of the Vinyl Albums chart, a format that barely existed when it was first pressed. In Porto, the books Lipa has selected — Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Reginald Dwayne Betts’s Felon, works by Salman Rushdie and Olga Tokarczuk — will sit permanently in Siza’s auditorium, a space conceived for readers who, as the singer put it, “refuse to be told what books they can read.”