Innholdsfortegnelse for June 13, 2020 i Billboard Magazine

THE WEEK AFTER George Floyd’s killing on May 25 and the protests that followed, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group all launched multimillion-dollar initiatives to fight racism and support social justice, with pledges to curb bias endured by black artists, executives and staffers. It’s not the first time the business has tried to tackle these problems. But UMG executive vp/general counsel and Def Jam interim chairman/CEO Jeff Harleston believes that this effort will lead to real, sustained change. “The particular ingredients that have gone into where we are now have created more opportunity,” says Harleston, who UMG just announced will co-chair the company’s Task Force for Meaningful Change with Motown Records president and Capitol Music Group executive vp Ethiopia Habtemariam. “Certainly, the black community is…

CHIKA The Alabama rapper’s major-label debut EP, Industry Games (Warner), focuses on her refusal to kowtow to commercial expectations and landed her a slot on NPR’s Tiny Desk series. LIDO PIMIENTA A Polaris Music Prize winner, the Colombian-Canadian’s second album, Miss Colombia (ANTI-), brought her Spanish-language electro-pop to American audiences. MOSES SUMNEY After this experimental indie artist promoted his 2020 double album, græ (Jagjaguwar), with a U.S. TV debut on Late Night With Stephen Colbert, it hit No. 28 on Billboard’s Album Sales chart. RINA SAWAYAMA The Japanese-British alt-pop sensation released one of 2020’s most exciting debuts, the retro-leaning and future-looking Sawayama (Dirty Hit) — and increased her passionate internet following. PHOEBE BRIDGERS Before releasing her highly anticipated second solo album, Punisher (Dead Oceans), the indie-rocker collaborated on full-length…

WHEN THE COVID-19 pandemic brought the music industry to a near halt this spring, Todrick Hall had some ideas about how he would spend his time social distancing. He was in the process of transforming his bedroom into a scene from The Wizard of Oz — a favorite movie he has paid tribute to in songs and videos — and hired an artist to paint a tornado on the ceiling. He planned to turn his bed into a replica of Dorothy’s house, complete with the ruby-slippered heels of the Wicked Witch of the East poking out. But in early June, as protests against police brutality and killings of unarmed black people erupted across the nation, Hall decided his energy would be better spent in the eye of the storm…

Here, indie rock darling JAY SOM gets studio tips from pop favorite CARLY RAE JEPSEN How much freedom do you have when working with producers and co-writers? How do you know if a collaborator is right for you? I’m lucky that I’m able to take full rein of my creative process. I have a team to help suggest like-minded collaborators, and I [scout] different talents as well. I travel a lot when I’m writing, and it’s very important to me that a friendship is established before we dive in. Good music comes from enjoying the process of making it. How has the pandemic impacted your work style? I’ve been working on tunes from Zoom parties with my longtime collaborator Tavish Crowe. It’s a much slower process, but the time…

Gaga’s Sixth No. 1 Lady Gaga notches her sixth No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 with the chart-topping debut of Chromatica. The set starts with 274,000 equivalent album units earned in the United States during the week ending June 4, according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data — the biggest week for any album by a woman in 2020. In addition, Chromatica is just the second title by a woman to hit No. 1 in 2020, following Selena Gomez’s Rare in January. Notably, 65,000 of Chromatica’s first-week units are streaming-equivalent album units. That sum equals 87.2 million on-demand streams of the set’s songs — the biggest streaming week for a non-R&B/hip-hop or Latin album in 2020. Elsewhere on the Billboard 200, G Herbo’s PTSD flies 143-19 (27,000 units; up 260%)…

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Obviously there have been gay metalheads since metal was invented, but [back in the 1970s and ’80s] we were invisible. After a Priest show, a lot of us went back to working at the Ford plant or a Walgreens or working as a schoolteacher, but we were all gay. We had to hide, basically. There was a time when disco music was huge, and for a lot of gay people and minorities, that was our music. We embraced it and danced to it, and we expressed ourselves with joy. But then there was a rock DJ who had [Disco Demolition Night in 1979 in Chicago] where you went to a stadium and burned disco music. The vast majority of the people who burned that music were rockers and metalheads,…

Since their debut in 1998, twin sisters Tegan and Sara Quin have advocated for LGBTQ and gender equality amid a recording career that has sold over 1 million albums and earned three Juno Awards and one Grammy nomination. The Vancouver-based duo — who in 2019 released a memoir, High School, and a new album, Hey, I’m Just Like You —launched the Tegan and Sara Foundation in 2016 to improve the lives of fellow LGBTQ women and girls. In March, TSF established a series of community grants to meet the immediate needs created by the coronavirus pandemic among LGBTQ people, who are particularly vulnerable to the virus due to factors including “compromised immune systems, higher rates of tobacco use and provider discrimination,” according to TSF. The program provided $29,000 to…

AT THE END OF MARCH, THE TAP Music team gathered virtually — calling in from New York, Los Angeles, London and elsewhere — to celebrate the release of Dua Lipa’s highly anticipated second album, Future Nostalgia. The album debuted and peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard 200 (dated April 11) — and set an early precedent for how to successfully promote a project under a pandemic lockdown, including late-night performances in front of green screens and at-home photo shoots. Two months later, on June 2 — when the industry honored #TheShowMustBePaused, an initiative to recognize and take action against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd — the team’s companywide Zoom had a far more somber tone. Artist managers and TaP Music co-founders/co-CEOs Ben Mawson, 42, and…

IN JANUARY, ORVILLE PECK WAS SEATED at his first Grammy Awards after walking the red carpet with his friend Diplo. Peck recalls sitting “five rows from the front having the time of my life when I hear someone calling my name during the commercial break. I turn around, and Shania Twain is running down the aisle.” By mid-March, the queer troubadour was recording a duet with Twain at her Las Vegas ranch just before the pandemic forced a lockdown. The session yielded the rollicking track “Legends Never Die” from Peck’s upcoming EP, Show Pony, out this summer on Columbia. “I’ve been the biggest Shania fan my whole life, and she was literally the last person I got to hang out with before [self-isolating],” he says over Zoom, calling from…

Dancehall is from a country where the culture of homophobia is praised and embedded in its fabric. It has evolved in the past few years, but there is still violence against us. I didn’t publicly come out as bisexual until 2014, and several friends told me, “Don’t do it. You’re in a good space.” But I was like, “No, I have to find comfort within myself to move forward.” I made the decision to write an article on my website, and it made the front page of Jamaica’s No. 1 tabloid, The Jamaica Star. I got a lot of support, but for two years after that, I had no clients. Nobody wanted to work with me, nobody wanted to touch me. There were death threats, online harassment, bullying —…

In the past, classical music was very conservative. I got into this business in the ’90s, when it was the end of the old world. It was mostly older straight white men with white hair as far as I could tell. I started at [sheet-music publisher] Carl Fischer, and it was hard for someone like me to be out without getting a look or two, which did happen. I was very sensitive to that, so I wouldn’t go around tooting whom I was with. I wasn’t very brave. You had people like Leonard Bernstein that were gay and were open, but that was not the norm. There were composers who really broke down some barriers, like David Del Tredici, who is very open and always has been — sometimes,…