Justin Bieber’s Coachella set is drawing backlash for its YouTube scrolling and lack of production. But for an artist who was discovered on that platform and has spent his entire adult life living inside it, the laptop wasn’t a cop-out — it was the most coherent artistic statement he’s made in years.
On the Saturday night mainstage at Coachella, Justin Bieber brought his much-anticipated first of two sets focused on his latest album, Swag, before detouring into some of his old hits — pulling them up on a laptop via YouTube. Fans had waited all day for Bieber, setting up camp through performances by Jaqck Glam, Addison Rae, Givēon, and The Strokes. But despite all the hype — Coachella marks his only two major performances set for this year — critics called Bieber’s performance underwhelming. Fans, comparing it to Sabrina Carpenter‘s all-out spectacle the night before, called it lazy male privilege.
Justin Bieber’s Coachella performance
After a few songs alone on the stage, Bieber moved to a table with his laptop, telling the crowd, “Tonight is such a special night. I feel like we gotta take you guys on a bit of a journey.” He then opened YouTube and started scrolling.
Bieber appeared to be spontaneously looking up old videos to sing along with in the only portion of the set that delivered catalog material. It was, by conventional production standards, indefensible. No choreography, no set design, no pyrotechnics (they came later, though). And yet, it was the most honest thing a pop star has done at a major festival in years — a rarity for a headliner. The Coachella stage is typically a monument to control: every light cue rehearsed, every transition calibrated for maximum spectacle. Bieber brought a laptop. He dug up his own past, playing clips of himself as a child — including a nearly two-decade-old cover of a Ne-Yo song. He sang along. The crowd sang along. And, then, as it does, the internet fractured cleanly in two.
“I’m crying, this might actually be the worst performance I’ve ever seen. He’s literally just playing music videos from YouTube,” one user wrote on X. Others offered a different take: “These 8 minutes of Justin Bieber singing his old songs, I’m going to treasure them in my heart for the rest of my life.”
Katy Perry, watching from the crowd, posted an Instagram video joking, “Thank God he has Premium. I don’t want to see no ads.”
Other fans weren’t so forgiving.
“Justin Bieber being the most paid artist by Coachella and he offered a performance with literally no work, no budget and some people are praising him,” another person wrote via X. “Male mediocrity privilege is real.”
“What the hell is justin bieber doing bro you’re telling me he was the highest paid to do this bulls—?” another added.
The show felt too basic in its perseveration to warrant the hype, as Rolling Stone put it — and that’s, maybe a fair read if your metric is traditional live entertainment.
But it is also what the outrage missed: Bieber was Bieb-scrolling through YouTube while he was on YouTube — the late-night livestream drawing hundreds of thousands of viewers who weren’t in the desert. That recursive loop — a man watching himself being watched, watching himself as a child on the platform that made him — was, whether he intended it or not, a portrait of what it means to exist in public life in 2026.
Did Bieber miss the point or have we missed it? Because it’s wild.
The platform that made him
Bieber was famously discovered through YouTube covers as a teenager. His mother posted videos of him singing on the platform in 2007, and his popularity grew from there. While searching for videos of a different singer, talent manager Scooter Braun clicked on one of Bieber’s YouTube videos by accident — a cover of Ne-Yo’s “So Sick” — and within months, the 13-year-old from Stratford, Ontario, had a record deal.
YouTube was more than just his launchpad, though — it was his entire early identity. Every comment, every view count, every viral clip of the kid with a side-swept hairdo — it all happened there, archived and accessible forever.
This was before TikTok, before Instagram, and before the creator economy had real weight; Bieber was the template — the boy who got famous by being filmed being himself. “No one has ever grown up, in the history of humanity, like Justin Bieber,” Braun said in episode one of the 2020 YouTube Originals documentary series, Justin Bieber: Seasons. “No one has ever been that famous worldwide in an era of social media where every year of your adolescence you were the most Googled person on the planet.” And it’s the context for Bieber’s Saturday night performance. When he went to that laptop in front of the largest crowd Coachella’s main field has reportedly ever held, it was a full-circle moment, whether the crowd understood it or not.
The years between those early YouTube videos and Saturday night’s desert stage have been well-documented and deeply costly to Bieber. “I’ve been successful since I was thirteen, so I didn’t really have a chance to find who I was apart from what I did,” Bieber told Vogue in 2019. “I got really depressed on tour. I was lonely. I needed some time.”
In his YouTube documentary series, he spoke candidly about substance use as an escape. He later disclosed periods of suicidal ideation, describing the pain as relentless: “It was so consistent, the pain was so consistent. I was just suffering. So, I’m just like, man, I would rather not feel this than feel this.” Then came 2022, when he canceled his world tour after a Ramsay Hunt syndrome diagnosis left one side of his face paralyzed. “After getting off stage, the exhaustion overtook me,” he said. “I realized that I need to make my health the priority right now.”
He disappeared from live performance for four years. When he resurfaced, it was cautiously: a Grammy performance in February, and a small club show at The Roxy in LA just before Coachella. Then, the largest stage of his comeback, with the weight of the entire internet’s expectations behind it.
Was the performance self-indulgent? Was it genuinely endearing? That is, of course, a matter of perspective — possibly it’s both simultaneously. Either way, it gave audiences a Bieber who was completely off-the-cuff. He asked fans to drop their favorite songs into the livestream comments in real time and pulled clips from those suggestions on the fly, leaning further into what defines our world today: everything is accessible in nanoseconds.
If Bieber was ahead of all of the rest of us by leveraging YouTube to build his career two decades ago, perhaps his performance last night is once again leading us down a new path as he pulled clips of himself that weren’t flattering, like falling through a stage, hitting his face against glass in a revolving door, aggressively confronting the paparazzi. Since Bieber found megastardom out of YouTube, countless others have gone on to live performative lives on the platform; they’ve crafted versions of themselves they want the world to believe. But Bieber replaying a clip of himself smacking right into a pane of glass is the opposite of that curated always-on world that rode his coattails; it rips off the Band-Aid and exposes the real world we’ve all been hiding from in these over-produced, overlit, over-Botoxed versions of ourselves. For better or worse, Bieber seems to be done hiding, at least from himself.
The Internet Age is the Bieber Era
The internet has fundamentally changed what a live performance can mean. When Bieber looked up “Baby” on YouTube, he wasn’t filling time or failing to put on a spectacle — it was the spectacle; he was staging a very specific and contemporary experience. Anyone who has ever found themselves down a rabbit hole online at 2 a.m. knows that feeling intimately. Bieber just may be the first to turn it into art.
It’s also far more layered than it might appear after midnight in the desert; Bieber sold the rights to his back catalog through 2021, which means the songs he was scrolling through on that laptop are no longer even commercially his. He was watching someone else’s property — music he made, but a version of himself he no longer owns. (Also wild!) That is a modern condition with no clear historical precedent, and it is significant, especially watching him encounter it in real time, on stage, in front of hundreds of thousands of people wanting to hear those old songs.
The performance may have been messy at times; that also seems to be the point. His now-viral flub during Coachella rehearsals shows a hesitant performer; someone who is far less polished than his 13-year-old self and, seemingly, happier for it. It was also, by the metrics that seem to matter most in 2026, enormously effective. Bieber turned the main stage at one of the world’s most-watched festivals into something even more communal than slogging through the long, hot, dusty weekend, hungover and sunburned. He turned it into a reminder that we’re all human — flawed, messy, and evolving. Even, and especially, Justin Bieber.
Fans and critics may have wanted a spectacle. But what they got was something much harder to produce than quick costume changes and sexy choreography — and much more meaningful: a man reckoning honestly with how strange it is to have grown up at all, let alone in public, and to have your entire life catalogued, monetized, and endlessly retrievable. Maybe Bieber didn’t give Coachella the performance it wanted. But in a world obsessed with the next viral moment, he sure did give it a mirror.
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