Innholdsfortegnelse for April 25, 2020 i Billboard Magazine

AS THE WEEKND RECLAIMS THE NO. 1 SPOT ON THE BILLBOARD Hot 100 with “Blinding Lights,” following a one-week interruption by Drake’s “Toosie Slide,” singularly billed acts continue a notable run atop the chart. No duets or songs with features have led for 34 consecutive weeks, dating to the start of Lizzo’s seven-week command with “Truth Hurts” on the Sept. 7, 2019-dated survey. The streak, which also encompasses No. 1s by Travis Scott, Lewis Capaldi, Selena Gomez, Post Malone, Mariah Carey and Roddy Ricch, is the longest since a 38-week stretch (also including Carey) in 1997-98. Further, 76% of all Hot 100 top 10s in the past 34 weeks belong to solo-credited acts. In the prior 34 frames, only 50% did. While timing factors into the current trend (Future’s…

RECORD LABELS WERE expecting another year of heady revenue growth, with no end in sight — until the coronavirus arrived. Now, as the live-music business considers when, and how, to reopen, labels are trying to figure out what the pandemic means for them. Some label executives expect their companies to bring in less revenue, partly because many of their new releases are on hold and the physical market has collapsed. But there’s also hope that profits could be spared, since spending on tour support, promotion and travel is way down. Although Universal Music Group’s first-quarter revenue jumped 17.8% to 1.77 billion euros ($1.946 billion), compared with 2019, analyst Julien Roch, Barclays’ managing director of European media equity research, projects that UMG will finish the year with revenue down 1%.…

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MOST OF THE TIME, when Cedella Marley’s son Skip begins to sing, she closes her eyes. Not out of any parental apprehension or superstition, but so she can listen for pitch and sharpness — a remnant of the time she spent singing with her siblings Ziggy, Stephen and Sharon as part of The Melody Makers in the 1980s and ’90s. These days, she has been hearing Skip sing a lot more often. While half of the world is confined at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, the 23-year-old songwriter-musician is livestreaming pop-up concerts and interacting with his fans online. Cedella and Skip are themselves isolating in their home in Miami — all of the Marley offspring but Ziggy and Karen, who are in Los Angeles, live near each other…

AS SOCIAL DISTANCING AND SELF-isolation become the norm, it’s easy to forget that only last month in March, rock bands, rappers and pop stars were out on tour. Filling 20,000-seat arenas and 50,000-seat stadiums around the world, their concerts generally continued through March 12 in the United States and stopped worldwide by midmonth. In that time, artists were able to squeeze in handfuls of shows, kicking off tours before rescheduling the rest of the dates or wrapping up runs that carried over from earlier in the first quarter. Plans for stadium tours in North America and Europe are on hold, but the Southern Hemisphere’s summer season allowed artists to play outdoor venues and push their nightly capacities. The most successful of these was that of the Backstreet Boys, who…

On March 17, The Recording Academy and its charitable arm, MusiCares, established the COVID-19 Relief Fund to help music creators and community members affected by the coronavirus pandemic. The fund launched with a $2 million base donation from the academy and MusiCares and has since ballooned to over $10 million, with support from key business stakeholders across the industry. Creators can apply for grants of up to $1,000 to compensate for canceled work and basic living costs for rent or mortgages at MusiCares.org. Mason, who became interim chief in January, says the academy lobbied on behalf of the music community in Congress and had “a small hand” in helping to pass the $2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act in March. On April 6, the organization…

THE NEWS IS FULL OF “unprecedented” situations, but Billboard is 126 years old, and we’ve seen it all — including the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed an estimated 675,000 Americans and shut down public gatherings in many big cities for weeks or months. A look at the magazine’s archives shows that the issues facing the entertainment business at the time seem frighteningly familiar. (Back then, Billboard covered it all — Broadway to burlesque, circuses to state fairs.) History may not repeat itself, as the saying goes — but it often rhymes. DOLLARS AND SENSE The Oct. 12, 1918, issue of Billboard described the theater business as “practically paralyzed” by the pandemic. Some of the fairs Billboard covered at the time went ahead against the advice of medical experts, but…

BARCELONA — For over four decades, the Spanish island of Ibiza has captured the imaginations — and wallets — of international clubbers who want to hear the masters of dance music take them on hourslong musical journeys in a beachfront bacchanalia. Back in the late 1980s, Paul Oakenfold and other British DJs famously took the island’s iconic music style to London and branded it “Balearic beat.” David Guetta turbocharged his 2000s EDM popularity with his fuchsia-decorated F*** Me I’m Famous party at Pacha, a club that opened in the ’70s as a hedonistic escape from the conservative Franco dictatorship. British techno legend Carl Cox, who famously spun a nine-hour set at a closing party for the club Space, hasn’t missed a season since 1984. Until now. The chances that…

LAST YEAR, NEWLY SIGNED Arista Records singer-songwriter JP Saxe was on a road trip with friends “talking about how Julia [Michaels] had revolutionized pop music,” he recalls. “And as I’m having this conversation, I get a notification on my phone saying, ‘Julia has mentioned you in her [Instagram] story.’ ” She had shared a clip of Saxe’s 2018 track “25 in Barcelona,” and within minutes, the two started direct-messaging to schedule a writing session. They linked up in Los Angeles that summer, writing what became “If the World Was Ending” — an apocalyptic love song about a past relationship — and recruited FINNEAS to produce the track, which arrived last October. Though the song was written and released long before the coronavirus pandemic and the advent of social distancing…

THE TWO OF US WILL DO THE best we can because one of us isn’t here,” declares Michael “Mike D” Diamond in the opening minutes of Beastie Boys Story while standing alongside Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz. In the heartfelt new documentary, available to stream starting April 24 on Apple TV+, the pair tells the origin story of its boundary-pushing New York hip-hop trio and pays tribute to its third member, Adam “MCA” Yauch, whose death from cancer in 2012 ended the group’s decades-spanning run. Diamond and Horovitz recently told their story in another medium: The nearly 600-page Beastie Boys Book became a bestseller in late 2018. “The documentary started with the book,” says Diamond. “Adam and I were like, ‘Oh shit, we have to go out and promote this. Are…

FROM HER HOME IN NEW Hampshire, Berklee School of Music songwriting major Lizzy McAlpine launched the Instagram #Berklee-AtHome streaming concert series on April 8. A few days earlier, on her SoundCloud account, Lizzy, as she’s known professionally, had posted a newly written song, “When the World Stopped Moving.” At the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, at the Jimmy Iovine Andre Young Academy, faculty fired up the school’s 3D printers to fabricate personal protective equipment for health care workers, in collaboration with other USC schools. Among those helping out, while practicing social distancing behind a face mask, was L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti. At the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music, professor Laura Sherman reached out to a superstar with whom she had performed on tour for a…

TO MAKE SURE ACTS like Elton John, Lady Gaga and Billie Eilish could perform the songs they wanted during Global Citizen’s April 18 “One World: Together at Home” concert, Julie Wadley and her team worked 12-hour days for over a week. “I woke up early, I worked late,” says the owner of Say Yes! Music, who cleared the rights for 130 songs so the event could be streamed live and shown on demand all over the world. Over a month into the pandemic shutdown, livestream music performances have evolved from cool curiosities into an essential way for artists to reach fans, and sometimes even make money. Besides the Global Citizen event, which raised $127 million from mostly corporate sponsors for food banks and coronavirus-related causes, Diplo and Major Lazer…

NOAH ASSAD FELL FIRST FOR THE voice: a deep bass with the ductile consistency of brown taffy, rapping over sparse trap beats. Then he discovered the voice belonged to a grocery bagger who called himself Bad Bunny. “Just from the name, I wanted to sign him,” recalls Assad, 29, speaking to Billboard from his airy home on the outskirts of San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he is sheltering in place with his wife and daughters, ages 6 and 2. “I loved the name.” So does everyone else. Three years after charting on Billboard for the first time, Bad Bunny is the most successful Latin music artist on the charts today, with 3.8 billion career on-demand streams, according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data, and a record 83 hits on Billboard’s Hot…

⚫ ROLLING IN THE GIGS Gabby Barrett was 10 years old when she first heard Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” on a car radio. One day, she was singing the chorus around the house and her father stopped her. “He said, ‘I want to video this,’ ” recalls Barrett, now 20. “He thought there was something there.” With her dad’s motivation, the Munhall, Pa., native soon booked her first gig, and for the next six years she performed at restaurants, malls and even grocery stores — as long as the “venue” was within driving distance, as her parents insisted she stay in school. “We could miss 29 [school] days a year,” she says, “and I missed 29 days every year.” ⚫ GIRL POWER In Barrett’s early sets she covered…

ABBEY ROAD INSTITUTE LONDON Abbey Road Institute draws on its location within the famous Abbey Road Studios. An advanced diploma in music production and sound engineering includes the study of acoustics, digital audio technology, electronic and analog equipment, studio etiquette, critical listening, music theory and production. A four-day song production master class, launched in 2019, immerses students in all stages of recording, mixing and mastering. The institute opened a Miami location early this year and also operates in Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam, Melbourne and Johannesburg. BERKLEE COLLEGE OF MUSIC VALENCIA, SPAIN A sister school to Berklee College in Boston, the Valencia campus offers study abroad opportunities for U.S. undergraduate students as well as a master of arts in global entertainment and music business. The one-year master’s program draws…

IN MARCH, THE TOP 30 tours grossed a combined $116.1 million and sold 1.4 million tickets, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore. Unsurprisingly, that’s among the lowest totals since Billboard launched its monthly boxscore recap over a year ago. (At the time of publication, the top 30 tours of January grossed $101 million, but that figure has since exceeded $150 million due to delayed reports.) Before March had even reached its midpoint, tours had stopped and venues had gone dark in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Of course, that was not part of the plan. March had plenty of stadium and arena tours scheduled around the world, from North America to Australia, from March 1 to March 31. And had that programming played out as intended, the big…