Innholdsfortegnelse for July 25, 2020 i Billboard Magazine

HALFWAY THROUGH 2020, U.S. music fans have consumed 361.2 million album units of music — 9.4% more than they did during the first six months of last year. Physical sales have taken a 20.3% hit during the pandemic, but audio streaming growth remains robust: up 16.2% to 419.82 billion streams from 361.14 billion at the same time in 2019. The top album so far in 2020 is Lil Baby’s My Turn, which racked up 1.467 million consumption units, while Roddy Ricch’s “The Box” is the top song, with nearly 1.07 billion streams. Five albums have surpassed the 1 million album consumption-unit milestone, compared with three during the first half of 2019. Universal Music Group’s U.S. market share dominance grew slightly, up to 38.16%, as measured by distributor ownership. Sony…

DURING THE FIRST week of June, as thousands of Americans across the country marched against racial injustice following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, the first wave of new protest songs reached streaming services. That week, YG returned with “FTP,” a spiritual sequel to his 2016 anti-Donald Trump anthem “FDT,” aimed at the police; Detroit rapper Tee Grizzley teamed with rising R&B singer Queen Naija and members of the Detroit Youth Choir for the poignant “Mr. Officer”; country singer-songwriter Mickey Guyton released “Black Like Me,” a reflection on her experiences with systemic racism; and Leon Bridges unveiled “Sweeter,” a collaboration with Terrace Martin told from the perspective of a Black man taking his last breath before dying. “A song like ‘Sweeter,’ I wrote that…

IN MARCH, RIGHT BEFORE CALIFORNIA enforced its first lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, Jason Derulo met with TikTok at his Los Angeles home to discuss best practices. According to Isabel Quinteros, TikTok U.S. senior manager of artist relations and music partnerships, the meeting spanned two hours. “When Jason commits to something, he commits 100%,” she says. “Once he decided this was going to be his platform, he told me, ‘I want to be No. 1.’ ” Since he started posting on the platform regularly at the end of 2019, his follower count has skyrocketed from 6 million — a number that carried over from Musical.ly, which TikTok absorbed in August 2018 — to over 28 million, making him one of its top 15 creators along with Will Smith…

Ciara Elwis grew up in Scotland, singing along in the car to The Beatles and obsessing over Disney’s Fantasia. “I used to watch it three times a week,” she says of her earliest memory putting music to picture. As a teen, she discovered American indie bands on One Tree Hill and Gossip Girl, later studying music at university in Edinburgh. In her final year, she worked as a brand manager at Spotify, making event and genre-specific playlists, and soon after took an office assistant job at London-based music company Air-Edel. “I was reading how music supervision is one of the things they did and was like, ‘I cannot believe this is a real job,’ ” recalls Elwis, 27. “I started bothering Matt Biffa, the supervisor I worked with on…

1978 Taito’s Space Invaders, with its simple bum-bum-bum-bum bassline, becomes the first video game to feature a continuous backing soundtrack. 1981 Konami’s Frogger breaks from the linear music mold, adding game-over and level-start themes, and employing 11 tracks that often change throughout gameplay. 1983 In Midway’s arcade game Journey, the user must retrieve the band’s instruments from different planets, then act as bouncer at a concert, during which “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)” plays. The song peaks at No. 8 on the Hot 100 the month of its release. 1985 Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. arrives with an iconic theme song by Koji Kondo. It will spend over 100 consecutive weeks on Billboard’s now-defunct Hot Ringtones chart and spawn countless remixes. 1987 The first installment of Final Fantasy has a soundtrack…

WRLD Record Juice WRLD’s Legends Never Die makes a smashing debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, capturing the largest week of 2020 for any album. The late star’s release earned 497,000 equivalent album units in the United States during the week ending July 16, according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data. It beats the year’s previous high that The Weeknd’s After Hours logged when it bowed at No. 1 with 444,000 units on April 4. The debut of Legends Never Die is powered by 283,000 streaming equivalent album units (equating to 422.63 million ondemand streams of the album’s tracks; the largest streaming week of 2020 and fourth-biggest ever), 209,000 in album sales (boosted by over 100 merchandise/album bundle offers) and 3,000 track-equivalent album units. Legends Never Die is Juice…

2003: THE IRAQ WAR The George W. Bush administration became the subject of scathing releases from rock legends like Neil Young (“Let’s Impeach the President”) and R.E.M. (“The Final Straw”) following the year’s U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, while Green Day’s 2004 anti-war rock opera, American Idiot, became one of the best-selling albums of the decade. The Chicks, meanwhile, were harangued by the conservative-leaning country community for their criticism of Bush. 2005: HURRICANE KATRINA The music world’s response to the government’s mismanagement of the devastating New Orleans hurricane was defined by these seven words, spoken by Kanye West during a relief telethon: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” Artists ranging from Lil Wayne (“Georgia… Bush”) to Elvis Costello (“The River in Reverse”) also admonished the Bush administration’s inaction in…

In 1999 at the Berkeley (Calif.) Community Theatre, Metallica performed 21 songs alongside the San Francisco Symphony, a mix of reimagined material plus two new tracks. The subsequent live album, S&M, reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200, while the song “The Call of Ktulu” won a Grammy Award for best rock instrumental performance. Last September, the rockers reunited with the symphony 20 years later for two concerts to commemorate the opening of San Francisco’s Chase Center, the new home of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors. Now, on Aug. 28, those shows will arrive as a new live album and film, Metallica & San Francisco Symphony: S&M2. While the original concerts were the idea of late composer-arranger Michael Kamen, who conducted them and died in 2003, this time Metallica…

In 1993, when Jimmy Humilde was 14, he organized his first neighborhood party in Los Angeles — and nearly 400 people showed up as local DJ G-Minor performed. Humilde continued to host parties throughout high school, booking rising regional Mexican artists Gerardo Ortiz and Alfredo Olivas, but was eager to expand his presence in the music industry. In 2008, he launched his own independent label, Rancho Humilde, along with business partner José Becerra. (Roque Venegas later joined as CFO.) Now Humilde, 41, is leading the regional urban music scene with chart-topping marquee signee Natanael Cano — who released his first trap album, Trap Tumbado, in alliance with Republic Records in June — and other urban corrido artists like Junior H and Ovi. Humilde, who in 2019 signed a global…

FROM Adelaide, Australia AGE 23 LABEL 4AD FOUNDATION Growing up in Zimbabwe, singer-rapper Tkay Maidza’s musician father kept plenty of studio gear in the house. It wasn’t until her family moved to Australia — and she started watching MTV every Saturday morning — that she began using his equipment to remix rap songs at age 15. She posted a few on Facebook (and has since deleted them all), including remixes of “Power” by Kanye West and “Roman’s Revenge” by Nicki Minaj. Citing Major Lazer, M.I.A. and Santigold as influences, Maidza has always had global stardom as her goal, though her parents encouraged her to attend university first. She studied architecture but deferred in her second year once she started booking local club shows. DISCOVERY In 2013, Maidza uploaded…

OMEBODY FUCKING SMOKED ME?!” It’s the evening of April 23, and Travis Scott is addressing roughly 230,000 viewers over Instagram Live. He’s about to perform the biggest concert of his career — maybe the biggest concert of anyone’s. The 28-year-old rapper is streaming from home in Los Angeles while tuning in through his gaming console to the premiere of “Astronomical” — his pretaped performance as an avatar within the massively popular multiplayer video game Fortnite Battle Royale, in which groups of 100 players battle on a deserted island until only one of them remains. That means he gets to join the fun as a player, and unfortunately, sometimes lose (or in gamer-speak, get smoked). “I’ll let y’all know when I respawn” (come back to life), he says with a…

No. 7 ON BILLBOARD’S RAP AIRPLAY CHART In March 2016, Young T & Bugsey’s hypnotic hip-hop track “Glistenin’ ” prompted Sony’s Black Butter Records to reach out over email. Soon enough, the duo was meeting with co-founders Joe Gossa and Henry Village, as well as A&R executive Cian Cooper Davies, and six months later signed a recording contract. Following an opening gig on labelmate J Hus’ tour, Young T & Bugsey also partnered with J Hus’ managers, 2K Management co-founders Kilo Jalloh and Moe Bah. “We knew they could make very good, different types of songs and hooks,” says Bah, “and they just looked like superstars.” Young T & Bugsey (both 23, they were born Ra’chard Tucker and Doyin Julius, respectively) racked up hit singles in the United Kingdom…