July 9, 2012 – Past continues to be prologue for pop music in 2012. In SPIN's March/April Now Issue, Retromania author Simon Reynolds delved into the various ways artists are copping from the now-constantly-present past as they map out our musical future. Industry data tracker Nielsen SoundScan has unveiled its 2012 mid-year report, and while the headline stats are pretty bland — Music sales are up modestly! Album sales are almost flat! The two sweetest words in the English language are "de-fault"! — a closer look reveals several glimmers of retroactivity. In other words, the charts are finding room for the ridiculously old ... and the blindingly new. Here are five indications 2012 is falling down the Instagram/vintage-YouTube-rip rabbit hole, where analog meets ephemeral (and it's probably a good time to pick up some used CDs for real cheap): 1.

July 9, 2012 – In January, My Chemical Romance shared a video for "The Kids From Yesterday," from 2010 album Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys. The clip's nostalgic trip through MCR's now-decade-plus as a band brought to mind the days when the New Jersey emo-punks drew next-Nirvana hype, the type of unfair music-biz hyperbole that now routinely gets extended to the American dubstep and EDM crowd. Naturally, then, My Chem's Gerard Way has lent his vocals to a new track by U.S. post-Daft Punk figurehead Deadmau5. Titled "Professional Griefers," this strobe-lit dance-pop track is due out on September 2, and you can hear a radio rip below via Deadmau5's YouTube channel. "Give me the sound to see / Another world outside that's full of / All the broken things that I made," Way appears to be singing atop the straight-ahead electronic beat.

July 9, 2012 – Kevin Parker, who wrote, played, and recorded Tame Impala's 2010 debut Innerspeaker himself at a house in Australia, hinted at his plans for a follow-up in a SPIN interview early last year. "It's a lot more — what's the word? — decadent," Parker said of his then-still-in-the-works psych-rock sophomore outing. "I'm giving in to temptation more. It's like if you got the album that's out now and gave it the Ninja Turtles ooze and turned it into a mutant version." That Ninja Turtles ooze is all over "Apocalypse Dreams," the first offering from Tame Impala's newly christened Lonerism, due out this October on Modular Recordings.

July 6, 2012 – Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" recently chalked up another long-overdue week at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, but that hardly captures the extent of the song's ubiquity. In January, Justin Bieber first tweeted about the song. Since then, aside from the 140 million-plus views racked up by the original video, there's also the inevitable Barack Obama mash-up, the Arrested Development montage, the business card, the "supercut" of Katy Perry and everybody else's viral "Call Me Maybe" covers, the Donald Trump cameo, the meme images, the Colin Powell rendition, the "Chocolate Rain" guy's version, and, bringing everything full circle, the impromptu Bieber cover. The last one's a little pitchy, but people seem to love that guy. Critics have been going through their own cycle with the song.

July 6, 2012 – 50 Cent turns 37 today, and to celebrate, the G-Unit leader has shared a free 10-track set. On Twitter this week, 50 billed 5 (Murder By Numbers) as an "appetizer" for next "official" album Street King Immortal, which he said will be out in November. Intriguingly, though, he also described his current offering as not a mixtape but an "album"; as the title indicates, it would be his fifth. Guests on the mixtape include Schoolboy Q, Kidd Kidd (who joined 50 on one of our hip-hop blog's favorite songs of the year so far), Hayes, and Brevi. Havoc, Hit-Boy, and Trax are among the producers. Stream or download 5 (Murder By Numbers) below. 50 Cent isn't exactly Lil B, but he's been churning out new music at what for a rapper of his commercial stature is almost a Based God-like pace. In May, he released The Lost Tapes mixtape.

July 6, 2012 – Amy Winehouse might not be returning in quasi-hologram mode just yet, but her posthumous career looks like it might take the surprisingly prolific Tupac route. As quoted by Fact, Winehouse's father has told BBC 6 Music we can expect at least one — and maybe two — more albums of previously unreleased material. He did suggest, however, that whatever's left in the vault skews toward covers rather than original songs. Mitch Winehouse reportedly said he's "not sure that there is much more, but I'm sure that we will get at least another album out, if not two … There are loads of covers, loads of them, but the problem is we don't want to rip anybody off.

July 5, 2012 – Iggy Pop and Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino have collaborated on a track for HBO's True Blood, and the result is an organ-streaked garage-rocker about a subject one suspects is familiar to both. Available on iTunes now and airing on a July 8 episode, "Let's Boot and Rally" avoids vampire imagery — well, beyond the obvious idea of Pop drawing vitality from SPIN's current cover star — and focuses on, just, booting and rallying, you know? Co-written by KCRW DJ Gary Calamar and collaborator James Combs, it's not gonna make anybody forget Best Coast's excellent new album, let alone the Stooges — but it might help you block out the Stooges' instantly dated 2007 reunion album.

July 5, 2012 – Next year's Coachella could be the last in Indio, California, where the music and art festival has taken place since 1999. Indio's Desert Sun reports the festival's promoters are warning they will take the shows out of Indio if the city goes through with a proposed admissions tax. The proposal would put a tax of 5 to 10 percent on admissions to entertainment events with more than 2,500 in attendance. Promotions company Goldenvoice, which runs Coachella and the country-oriented Stagecoach festival, says that's a deal-breaker. "If the tax initiative of putting $4 million to $6 million onto Coachella gets on the ballot, we're going to take off 2014," Goldenvoice president Paul Tollett told the Desert Sun. "2015 we'll be at a new facility outside of Indio." At this point, the threat is merely hypothetical.

July 5, 2012 – The video for Muse's official 2012 Olympic Games theme "Survival" has hit YouTube, and it's a montage of footage featuring athletes from previous Olympics. In keeping with the song's Muse-ly grand scale, the video has an expansive scope, spanning from black-and-white footage of long-ago sprints to more recent clips of beach volleyball, Michael Phelps, and, yup, dressage. The images are well-chosen, quickly edited, and should keep your attention throughout the five-minute anthem. "I'm gonna win," Matthew Bellamy theatrically repeats on the Queen-echoing mini-epic, as the athletes express the fuller array of emotions associated with sports competition. Again appropriately, the video ends with a torch, not a gold medal — the London games are still weeks away.

July 5, 2012 – Nas' upcoming album is titled Life Is Good, but the track that includes the title phrase carries a mournful undercurrent. On "Cherry Wine," the latest song to emerge from the rapper's 10th LP, due out on July 17, the late Amy Winehouse delivers a previously unreleased vocal. The posthumous collaboration is smooth and languidly paced, a contemplative complement to the take-no-prisoners rap of previously emerging album tracks such as "The Don," "Accident Murderers," and "Nasty." Salaam Remi, a longtime producer for both artists, sets out a gorgeous backdrop, with soft drums, nimbly gliding bass, jazzy guitar chords, sultry horns, and more. Nas, in a relaxed mode, waxes as gracefully about his ideal woman or his attempts at "quiet time" as he does elsewhere about gritty crime stories.