Innholdsfortegnelse for May 23, 2020 i Billboard Magazine

WE JUST WANTED TO MAKE SOMETHING FUN THAT ALSO makes people feel less alone,” Ariana Grande told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe on May 13 of “Stuck With U,” her new duet with Justin Bieber. Net proceeds from the song’s streams and sales (for its first year of release) will benefit the First Responders Children’s Fund amid the coronavirus pandemic. “We wanted to put music out because music is the thing that speaks most to people’s spirits.” Released May 8, the single debuts atop the Billboard Hot 100 with 28.1 million U.S. streams, 26.3 million airplay audience impressions and 108,000 sold — the best sales total in over a year (aided by physical/digital offers, including autographed copies) — according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data. The duet launches as Grande’s third Hot…

IN 2019, RECORDED music-industry revenue increased 8.2% — a figure that sounds substantial, but that nonetheless left some analysts and executives fretting that the business’ streaming-fueled growth rocket might now be coming down to earth. After four years of booming expansion, last year’s gains were down 1.5 percentage points from the 9.7% growth that IFPI reported for 2018. And that was before the coronavirus pandemic halted touring, shuttered record stores and convinced some of the world’s biggest artists to postpone releasing music. But a closer analysis of IFPI’s 2019 Global Music Report, which was released earlier in May, suggests the industry’s future is actually brighter than it appears — and reveals some surprising trends that could shape the way artists and labels will market their music in the years…

WITH 286 MILLION active monthly users, Spotify dominates the audio streaming business globally. When it comes to the increasing number of digital service providers vying for hundreds of millions of African ears, however, Boomplay is the brand to watch. The streaming platform, which is controlled by two Chinese companies — NetEase, a streaming/mobile gaming competitor to Tencent, and Transsion, Africa’s largest seller of smartphones — launched in 2015 as a preinstalled music player on low-cost Transsion handsets. Today, around 86% of Boomplay’s 75 million global users are in sub-Saharan Africa, says CEO Joe He. The region is home to one-seventh of the world’s population, but a much smaller fraction of its internet users. Boomplay sees that as an arbitrage opportunity. Over the past 18 months, the Shenzhen, China-based company…

NIGERIAN AFROBEATS STAR NAIRA Marley has become so popular internationally that his home country — Africa’s largest, with a population of over 205 million — doesn’t have a live venue large enough to contain his burgeoning fan base. Overseas, the 26-year-old artist’s popularity expands far beyond West Africa’s diaspora. In 2019, he sold out London’s 4,900-capacity O2 Academy Brixton in under three minutes for a show in February, and he’s considering playing an arena when he returns. “In the [United Kingdom], he would graduate to the next venue size,” says Chinedu Okeke, promoter-creator of the Gidi Culture Festival in Lagos, Nigeria, which launched in 2014. “But [here], there’s not really anywhere he can do his own show beyond a 5,000-capacity venue, because they just don’t exist right now.” The…

FROM Algiers, Algeria AGE 30 LABEL Affranchis Music FOUNDATION Born and raised in a northern suburb of Algeria’s capital, Abderraouf Derradji grew up in the middle of a civil war. He first worked as an acrobat and dancer, later discovering rappers like 2Pac, The Notorious B.I.G. and French rapper Booba. Before founding a rap group of his own, which had relative success in Algeria, he had drummed in a rock band. By 24, he moved to Paris, where he lived and worked illegally — sometimes in restaurants, or by selling cigarettes on the street — and created music on the side. “I paid for my studio sessions, was producing everything myself and paying for my advertisements on the internet,” he recalls. “It was a challenging moment in my life.”…

THE WEEK OF MAY 10, Universal Music Central Europe & Africa senior vp A&R Joe Chialo’s packed schedule included conference calls with the music company’s offices in Nigeria, Kenya and the Ivory Coast. On the agenda: Universal’s recent signing spree in Africa, which over the past few months has included deals with Afropop singer Yemi Alade, Nigeria-based label Aristokrat Group and Kenyan Afropop group Sauti Sol. “A huge wave of entertainment is happening,” says Chialo, who also launched his new Universal Music Group Africa joint-venture label, Afroforce1, in South Africa in April. “Now is absolutely the right time.” While artists like South African Zulu choir Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Beninese singer Angélique Kidjo have won Grammy Awards and achieved international acclaim, for many decades major labels have treated African…

STREAMING IS THE FUTURE OF THE African music business, but making it work means licensing local music in each of the continent’s very different markets. That isn’t easy on the publishing side, since most African performing rights collecting societies are relatively young, and some don’t have the technology to deal with the vast amounts of data streaming services generate. Also, until relatively recently, many societies had stronger ties to European societies than to their counterparts around the continent. CAPASSO (the Composers, Authors and Publishers Association), which acts as a digital licensing hub for Africa, is trying to change that. The Johannesburg-based nonprofit association of authors and publishers, originally set up to collect mechanical royalties in South Africa, now also licenses mechanical and performing rights for streaming in multiple territories…

IN 2017, MADONNA THOUGHT SHE WAS moving to Portugal to “be a soccer mom,” but instead, the 61-year-old icon found inspiration for her then-upcoming album, Madame X, thanks to a friend she calls her “musical plug,” Dino d’Santiago. One night, the Cape Verde-born, Lisbon-based singer — who coached Madonna on how to speak Portuguese and sing in Portuguese and Creole — had arranged a concert for her by Batukadeiras Orquesta, a group of female drummers specializing in batuka, a rhythmic call-and-response style created in Cape Verde during the early days of the slave trade. “I’d never seen anything like it, never heard anything like it. So of course, I couldn’t get it out of my head,” says Madonna. She invited several members of the collective to perform on her…

TOP LOCAL ACT Wally B. Seck 20.95M VIEWS “Faramareen,” “Taxi Love” and other hits have given this 35-year-old Senegalese soul singer international cachet. He hails from a family of singers, most notably Thione Seck of Raam Daan and (formerly) Orchestra Baobab. TOP LOCAL ACT Shatta Wale 13.26M YOUTUBE VIEWS Wale’s 2019 album is called Wonder Boy, and the 20-year-old singer-songwriter and actor seems determined to live up to that name. The country’s two biggest political parties have used his songs in campaigns; his 2018 album, Reign, hit No. 6 on Billboard’s Top World Albums chart; and in April, he organized the online Faith Concert to cheer up fellow Ghanaians during the COVID-19 pandemic. Afrochella Abdul Karim Abdullah and Kenny Agyapong launched Afrochella in 2017 out of frustration over how…

THE CAMELS STARE AS WE PASS BY. Gathered on the dusty shoulder of the road, they form lanky silhouettes against the sun setting pink and heavy on the outskirts of Marrakech. Through the window of the packed shuttle bus, I can see makeshift stalls selling produce and meat, horses pulling carts of soil, women in burkas pushing strollers and men in long robes playing hand drums and smoking hookahs. We stop at a sign written in Arabic, then take a left up a dirt road, where a very different picture unfolds: a sprawling resort complex of pools and palm trees called The Source. Meandering pathways illuminated with twinkle lights lead to tucked-away stages blasting house and techno music. Lanterns and hammocks hang from trees as visitors lounge on Moroccan…

IT WAS THE SHOUT heard ’round the world: “Awop-bop-a-loo-mop alop-bam-boom.” Billboard was there to hear it, but didn’t yet realize its significance. In an Oct. 29, 1955, roundup-style “reviews of new R&B records,” we called the breakthrough hit from Little Richard (né Richard Penniman), who died of bone cancer on May 9 at the age of 87, “a cleverly styled novelty with nonsense words.” It didn’t get the kind of praise reserved for Piano Red’s “Gordy’s Rock”: “The Solid South should cast its ballots for this typical pile-driving instrumental jump boogie.” Within a year though, Billboard warmed up to the red-hot hitmaker, one of the original architects of rock. THE PEN OF PENNIMAN For decades, labels and artists have celebrated big wins with ads in Billboard, but Little Richard’s…

AT HOME IN AFRICA With musicians across the world in self-quarantine, some of Africa’s brightest hip-hop talents — as well as others throughout Europe, Asia and South America — share snapshots from life in lockdown.…

A decade ago, rising music producer Piriye Isokrari was looking for an act to launch his new label, Aristokrat Records. Soon enough, he met a then-unsigned artist at a recording studio in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, who went on to become Burna Boy. Impressed by the 19-year-old’s Afrofusion music and raw charisma, Isokrari was quick to sign him to a recording contract in 2012, the same year Burna Boy broke out in Nigeria with his track “Like To Party,” included on his 2013 debut studio album, L.I.F.E, which was Aristokrat’s first full-length release. The label used the momentum — plus a $1 million investment from a venture capital firm — to develop four more artists. But by 2014, Burna Boy’s contract had expired, and Isokrari decided to transform the label…

Nearly a decade ago, singer-songwriter-guitarist Bombino told his longtime manager, Eric Herman, that he wanted to open a recording studio in his home country of Niger. “It is materially a very poor country,” says Herman. “It’s rare to find studios that would be up to world-standard in Africa in general.” Plus, since Bombino — who champions his Tuareg identity and culture in his lyrics — usually spends eight months of the year touring, Herman felt “it needed some sort of outside push to get going.” That push came in 2019 when Welsh producer-engineer-musician David Wrench (who mixed Bombino’s 2016 album, Azel) approached the artist about working together again. Only this time, he wanted to produce Bombino’s next album — and he wanted to do it in Niger. “That reignited…

THE NEXT MUSICAL REVOLUTION IS brewing in Africa. As the industry buzzes with — and profits from — new languages and sounds from all over, the prospects for artists across the continent have never been brighter or more numerous. There have, of course, always been African superstars — from Miriam Makeba to Hugh Masekela to Fela Kuti — as well as great respect for the continent’s music, thanks to projects like Paul Simon’s iconic 1986 album, Graceland, which famously put Ladysmith Black Mambazo and others on the international map. But despite major-label deals, chart successes and eyepopping sales figures, African artists have often been siloed from the popular music landscape, segregated under the “world music” banner or viewed as Africans first, artists second. “I look forward to when we’ll…

IN APRIL, APPLE ANNOUNCED a bold expansion of its Apple Music streaming service: It would move into 52 additional markets — including 25 in Africa — even amid the anxiety and belt-tightening necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, Denzyl Feigelson — a former flower farmer whom Steve Jobs had enlisted years ago to help build the original iTunes Store — was working on tackling an even more ambitious project for the continent’s musicians. As co-founder/CEO of Apple’s artist services company, Platoon, Feigelson was about to start offering health insurance to his artists, a first-of-its-kind initiative that felt all the more urgent as the world ground to a halt. By May, the program began covering 30 artists in South Africa, with plans to roll out into more…

In 2017, Grammy Award-winning icon Angélique Kidjo’s Batonga Foundation incorporated soap-making lessons into its education and mentorship programs, which currently serve nearly 4,000 girls and women in her home country, the West African nation of Benin. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, those skills have taken on a new urgency. Kidjo has now shifted the organization’s focus toward raising $25,000 to help those girls not only make soap but also set up hand-washing stations, distribute protective face masks and broadcast radio messages about COVID-19. The initiative is providing critical supplies to Benin’s hardest-to-reach communities, while also helping women develop entrepreneurial skills in a country where 34% of girls are married by age 18, according to UNICEF. Kidjo, a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2002, also collaborated with the organization in April to…