Innholdsfortegnelse for December 19, 2020 i Billboard Magazine

MARIAH CAREY’S “ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS YOU” returns to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song, originally released on her 1994 album, Merry Christmas, and which first led for three weeks last holiday season, adds its fourth frame at the peak. It matches the reign of the only other holiday song to have topped the chart: “The Chipmunk Song,” by The Chipmunks with David Seville, which spent four weeks at No. 1 in 1958-59. “Christmas” leads the Hot 100 with 31.4 million U.S. streams (up 19%), 27.1 million radio airplay audience impressions (up 11%) and 7,000 downloads sold (up 8%), according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data. It posts a seventh week at No. 1 on the Streaming Songs chart and crowns the multimetric Holiday 100 for…

MUSIC STREAMING services have continued to add subscribers in the United States this year, according to MIDiA Research, growing by 11 million paying users from January to September, to 117.9 million. But in a potentially troubling sign for the recorded-music business, the number of total streams has remained the same. Since August, audio music streams have averaged 17.5 billion a week, according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data. That’s up slightly from the early-March pre-pandemic peak, before the lockdown cut music listening by 13% to a year low of under 15 billion streams, as consumers stopped commuting and obsessed over the news. Streaming gradually rebounded, increasing 15% by the end of June — but has plateaued since then. This could actually be good news for streaming services, which for the past…

MUSIC STOCKS ARE RISING AGAIN: Spotify has tripled in value since mid-March, iHeartMedia is on the rebound, and even Live Nation is close to its 2020 peak. Some equity analysts think it’s time to stop the music though. As compared with an average of analyst price targets, four out of seven key music stocks — Spotify, Live Nation, iHeart and Tencent Music Entertainment — have more downside than upside. (The graph below lists the closing price of a stock on Dec. 14 and an average of its analyst price targets, along with the distance between them — the “upside” or “downside.”) In the case of Spotify, which is up 26.2% since June to $325.83 on Dec. 14, investors have been buying based on any news that suggests the company…

DROP INTO RECORD LABEL and music collective Soulection’s 3,400-member server on the chat platform Discord, and you’ll find members debating the best home recording equipment, collaborating on a song or suggesting ideas for Soulection merchandise, their usernames endlessly populating the platform’s gray chat with flickers of emojis and GIFs. They may even be coupling up, says Soulection co-founder Joe Kay. “It’s literally a matchmaker,” he says, “a new community connector with people.” Kay launched Soulection’s invite-only Discord server — which acts as a digital conversation hub — in April to give the label’s fans a place to gather online during the pandemic. But it turned into something bigger, where Kay gets fan feedback on unreleased music, offers first looks at merch and hosts listening parties for Apple Music’s weekly…

As the pandemic forced lockdowns around the world in the spring, Timbaland and Swizz Beatz swooped in to entertain fans at home with a virtual DJ battle on Instagram Live in March. They’ve since grown the concept into Verzuz — a show that pits the catalogs of two legacy artists, producers or songwriters against each other in an unscored competition — which has evolved into a cultural phenomenon. As Billboard reported earlier this year, Verzuz did more than provide a distraction — it renewed interest in Black legacy acts in what became known as “the Verzuz effect.” As shown by the gains in stream totals of over 100% from the day before to the day after their appearance on the series, according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data, these pairs earned…

Mac Miller, Circles After Miller released his Grammy-nominated album Swimming one month before his death in September 2018 at 26, the Pittsburgh rapper’s family, along with veteran producer Jon Brion (Fiona Apple, Kanye West), announced Miller’s posthumous project, Circles, this January. His sixth studio album followed its predecessor’s blueprint, as Miller hopscotched his way through hip-hop, funk and soft rock. Circles debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200; lead single “Good News” reached No. 17 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming Miller’s highest-charting solo hit. The song’s music video, which has over 58 million views on YouTube, opens with behind-the-scenes footage of the artist in the studio. Pop Smoke, Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon Following the New York rapper’s death at age 20 in February…

SEPT. 25 TIKTOK USER @DOGGFACE208 POSTS A VIDEO OF HIMSELF SKATEBOARDING TO “DREAMS” A 15-second clip of 37-year-old Nathan Apodaca cruising on his longboard while singing along to “Dreams” and swigging from a bottle of Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry juice quickly captured the public’s imagination — and sent sales and streams of the song skyrocketing. “You started seeing the video translate into streaming numbers virtually overnight,” says Jeannette Perez, chief experience officer of Kobalt, Fleetwood Mac’s publisher. OCT. 5 MICK FLEETWOOD JOINS TIKTOK, POSTS HIS OWN “DREAMS” VIDEO Fleetwood Mac’s management group, Shelter Music, seized the opportunity to get the band engaged with Apodaca’s viral moment, as CEO Carl Stubner enlisted group co-founder Mick Fleetwood to film his own nofrills response video (skateboard and Ocean Spray bottle included), keeping the…

A MID THE ON GOING pandemic, 300 Entertainment senior vp A&R Selim Bouab recalls, he played music by a new signee, Lil XXEL, while working from home soon after his team had closed the deal. To Bouab’s surprise, his oldest son came into the room and said, “That’s my favorite song. How do you know this?” The 9-year-old had already heard the hiphop artist’s song “LMK” on TikTok, where he often discovers new music through dance challenges. (“LMK” is tagged to 1.6 million TikTok videos, and an upload from Charli D’Amelio of its viral dance has 4.8 million likes.) Bouab says a similar situation recently unfolded with Jeris Johnson, a genre-hopping 300 signee whose song “damn!” recently hit No. 2 on Billboard’s Rock Digital Song Sales chart. That kind…

SHORTLY AFTER THE CORONAVIRUS forced widespread lockdowns in March, Secretly Group’s monthly record club, Secretly Society, noticed an uptick in direct-to-consumer sales. “As we got deeper into the spring, it became clear this was A: growing faster than I anticipated and B: growing more durably than I anticipated,” says Hannah Carlen, Secretly Society’s U.S. marketing director. By the fall, subscriptions had more than doubled. Longtime record-of-the-month club Vinyl Me, Please has had a similar spike, reporting a 108% increase averaged between subscriptions and e-commerce since April, while Discogs recently reported its best six-month period to date. Overall, according to the RIAA’s 2020 midyear report, vinyl sales outpaced CD revenue for the first time in nearly 40 years; plus, despite the pandemic’s impact on physical retail, vinyl accounted for 62%…

RAPSODY SPENT 2020 RELEASING MUSIC that was by turns sad, soulful and cautiously hopeful. But when she wrote “12 Problems,” she was furious. Asked to contribute a song to Reprise, Roc Nation’s social justice compilation released in October, the North Carolina rapper collected a booming beat from CuBeatz and Don Cannon and let her anger over police brutality and racial violence flow through the mic. “All we see is murder, murder, murder, murder,” she seethes on the track, “and you wonder why we gotta disorder?” For Rapsody, police brutality against Black Americans was such an emotional issue in 2020 that it couldn’t help but dominate her song-writing. One day she would be filled with rage; the next, supreme sadness over historic discrimination, or deep emotion for the families of…

In February, Australian artist Kevin Parker released The Slow Rush, the first album from his psych-rock project Tame Impala since 2015’s critically adored Currents. While Janick knew fan anticipation alone would translate into strong album streams and sales, he also knew getting the rollout strategy right would be tricky: The famously reclusive Parker shies away from most self-promotion, which has earned him plenty of devoted fans — but also poses a marketing challenge. “That’s the beauty of him: He won’t do anything that doesn’t feel organic and natural,” says Janick, who signed Tame Impala in 2013. To preserve that authenticity on The Slow Rush, Interscope focused its efforts on pleasing Parker’s core fans by creating products and digital content that would lead to what Janick fittingly calls the “slow…

The Streaming Service LAURA OHLS, senior editor, folk and AAA, Spotify I’ve always thought of “alternative” as referring to any artist creating music that challenges what’s being popularized in the mainstream. In the ’90s, rock music was still very much at the core of popular music culture, and as a result, “alternative” [was more] guitar-driven in sound. Fast forward to 2020, where hip-hop, pop and Latin are the titans of genre, and you’ll find that the class of artists defying what’s expected are doing so within these genre spaces. As a result, there is an amalgamation of genres that make up modern “alternative” sounds. JOHN STEIN, team lead, music culture and editorial, Spotify Hip-hop is such a core part of youth culture right now that alternative is starting to…

IN THE HISTORY OF THE Billboard Hot 100, only nine No. 1 singles have been credited to two or more women artists (and no other billed acts). Even more surprising is the fact that four of them were released in 2020: Doja Cat and Nicki Minaj united for a remix of “Say So,” Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande hit a high note with “Rain on Me,” and Megan Thee Stallion got an assist from Beyoncé on “Savage” before teaming with Cardi B for “WAP.” Ashley Calhoun, senior vp/head of creative at Pulse Music Group, partly credits the increased frequency of these all-female collaborations to the COVID-19 pandemic. “A lot of women want to collaborate with other women, and typically it’s just a lot about timing — artists having the…

OWNERS OF INDEPENDENT music venues across the United States have been waiting since July to see if long-delayed federal coronavirus relief funding might include support for their struggling businesses. After Congress’ attempts to pass a second round of COVID-19 stimulus have repeatedly stalled, leaders at the National Independent Venue Association are exploring how to leverage its 3,000 members for an advantage once concerts resume. NIVA has already taught some small promoters the value of collaboration with organized campaigns to raise awareness for the Save Our Stages Act, which would establish a $10 billion federal grant program to support indie venues, promoters and booking agencies. A May survey found nine out of 10 indie venues faced permanent closure by year’s end without federal support, but so far, the worst hasn’t…

DRIVERS ON THE NORTHBOUND 405 in Los Angeles can’t miss a deep-red billboard that stands out amid the gray of Culver City. Against a forest-green wreath with gold and silver ornaments, it shows a figure dressed in red — not Santa, but Mariah Carey, promoting her Magical Christmas Special, available exclusively on the Apple TV+ subscription service. The Queen of Christmas is defending her realm because streaming has turned the holiday season into the most lucrative time of the year — but just for a relatively small number of recordings. Last year, between Halloween and Christmas, Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” was streamed 148.6 million times in the United States, making it the most popular track during that time. But unlike most hit singles from late…

I DON’T THINK A LOT OF PEOPLE expected us to get the Jackson deals done,” says Shot Tower Capital managing director David Dunn. He’s talking about his team’s 2007 maneuvers to extricate Michael Jackson from the onerous debt that threatened the superstar’s stake in Sony/ATV and his ownership of his own Mijac publishing company and the Neverland estate. “We were able to get his debt away from Fortress Investment Group, which wanted to wind up owning those assets, to lenders who just wanted to be paid. That was a huge win.” Dunn is speaking from the barn outside his home in the suburbs of Baltimore — a combination open-loft office and garage where he has spent the pandemic shepherding deals, with the occasional break to tinker with classic cars…

LATIN MUSIC’S BIG year started in February with Shakira and Jennifer Lopez delivering the Super Bowl halftime show in Miami. It ended with Bad Bunny as Spotify’s most-streamed artist of 2020, while his November album, El Último Tour del Mundo, became the first all-Spanish No. 1 on the Billboard 200. In between, Maluma’s “Hawái” became the first Spanish-language track to top the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. list (Billboard launched its global charts in September), and stateside, over 40 tracks sung predominantly in Spanish entered the Billboard Hot 100, up from 19 in 2019. All of which indicates that in 2020, three years after “Despacito” broke through at American top 40 radio, Latin music (defined as music performed predominantly in Spanish, regardless of genre or provenance) experienced the biggest boost…

THROUGHOUT THE BILLBOARD Hot 100’s 62-year history, only five all-female collaborations have hit No. 1. But this year, in the span of just one month, three superstar female alliances hit the chart’s peak: Doja Cat and Nicki Minaj’s throwback-sounding “Say So” remix (May 16 chart), Megan Thee Stallion and Beyoncé’s swaggering “Savage” remix (May 30) and Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande’s empowering anthem “Rain on Me” (June 6). Later in the summer, Megan Thee Stallion revisited the Hot 100 summit, alongside Cardi B, on the industry-shaking sex jam “WAP” that spent four weeks at No. 1 in August. Then Grande — who tends to work with a brain trust of fellow young women — recruited Angelina “Sherie” Barrett and Nija Charles to co-write the R&B single “Positions” (the lead…

Kenny Chesney’s Here and Now Here and Now’s debut-week sales of 220,000 (according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data) were powered by a concert ticket/album sale redemption offer for Chesney’s upcoming tour. His 2019 trek neared $10 million in sales (according to Billboard Boxscore), but it was his 2018 Trip Around the Sun Tour that became his highest-grossing outing ever, earning $114.3 million (and the Billboard Music Award for top country tour). Chesney was forced to push his Chillaxification Tour to 2021 due to the pandemic, with new dates set to start in May. Lady Gaga’s Chromatica Lady Gaga’s dancefloor-ready No. 1 album earned 274,000 equivalent album units in its first week. Chromatica’s sales were bolstered by a concert ticket/album sale bundle (for Gaga’s three since-postponed U.S. stadium shows) plus dozens…

23 Nonholiday country songs that hit the Streaming Songs chart, up from 13 in 2019 No. 2 Combs’ “Forever After All” became the first nonholiday country song to reach this rank on the Streaming Songs chart 102M The most weekly streams for a country album (Nov. 8-14), earned by Combs’ deluxe What You See Is What You Get 399% Gain in consumption units for the album’s October deluxe reissue, which returned it to the Billboard 200’s peak x Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s NSFW single “WAP” topped the Billboard Hot 100 in August with 93 million U.S. streams, the highest first-week total for any track.…

WHEN BARRY WEISS SIGNED 24kGoldn to his RECORDS label in late 2018, he thought he had found a rap star in the making. That changed when Weiss heard the 20-year-old’s “City of Angels,” a single off the artist’s 2019 debut EP, Dropped Outta College. Weiss recalls the reaction he shared with his colleagues at Columbia Records, senior vp rock and alternative promotion Brady Bedard and senior vp rock formats and public radio promotion Lisa Sonkin: “We were like, ‘This is a fucking alternative record.’ ” Indeed, the guitar-laden track became a top 10 hit on Billboard’s Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart in June, as part of an ongoing trend of alternative radio powering crossover rap-rock hits. Sonkin believes it’s a direct response to the influence of younger listeners,…

DO YOUR HOMEWORK When “Dynamite” songwriters Jessica Agombar and David Stewart learned BTS was looking for an English-language single, they did a deep dive into BTS’ world, riffling through the group’s Spotify and YouTube channels for weeks in addition to watching subtitled Korean interviews. “Like an actor gets into a role and becomes that person, we want to walk into the studio and think, act and feel like that artist,” says Agombar. “It had to feel like it came from the boys, not two Londoners from across the ocean.” KEEP IT CLEAN Songwriter Bekuh Boom, who has crafted several hits for Blackpink that mix Korean and English, knows a few things are always off the table: drug references, most profanity and explicitly sexual lyrics. Yet Boom, a huge hip-hop…

FOR OVER HALF THE CALENDAR YEAR, THE BLACK EYED PEAS RULED THE Hot Latin Songs chart with a pair of familiar-sounding hits: “Ritmo (Bad Boys for Life),” a J Balvin team-up built around Corona’s 1993 Euro-disco anthem “Rhythm of the Night,” and “Mamacita,” an Ozuna collaboration that uses the melody of Madonna’s 1987 single “La Isla Bonita.” Sampling, of course, is standard practice in hip-hop, and the appeal is understandable: If a song was a hit once, it may very well be a hit again. “You’re now connecting with two different generations,” says Rafa Arcaute, vp A&R at Sony Music Latin. “That’s the magical part about these tracks.” Yet in Latin music, experts say, sampling and interpolations have become increasingly prominent as genre lines have blurred. In addition to…

Blake Shelton, Beastie Boys, Fall Out Boy, Five Finger Death Punch and Rascal Flatts all brought a rare sight to the Billboard 200 in 2020: They were the only acts to have a newly released greatest-hits album debut on the chart during the chart year (Nov. 23, 2019, to Nov. 14, 2020). Shelton’s Fully Loaded: God’s Country was the highest-charting new hits set in 2020, and the only one to reach the top 40, having debuted and peaked at No. 2 on the chart dated Dec. 28, 2019. It closes 2020 at No. 54 on the year-end Billboard 200 list. Fully Loaded isn’t the only hits album on the year-end tally. It’s one of 26 such packages on the chart, and two of them rank higher than Shelton: Queen’s…

WHEN YOU SEE BAD BUNNY IS the most streamed artist on Spotify, people wake up and see dollar signs,” says Interscope Geffen A&M executive vp Nir Seroussi. “But it’s a very unique space.” Seroussi, the former president of Sony Music U.S. Latin, joined Interscope in 2019 to launch what he calls “the first full-fledged Latin operation within a major label,” as opposed to the Latin divisions that operate independently of their major-label parent and generally dominate the business. Interscope is only one of the mainstream labels that now want in on Latin music. Over the past year and a half, Caroline, the independent distribution/label services division of Capitol Music Group, has signed deals with Puerto Rican trap/reggaetón artists Brytiago and Omy de Oro and Bronx-based Dominican rap crew Sie7eTr3.…

JASON MILLS LEARNED TO RAP WHILE in prison on a robbery charge he picked up as a teenager. “I’m a middle-class person who went to prison partially because I went to a bad school in a bad area,” he says. “Then I go back four times on the same exact charge … because I didn’t take home detention or violated this or that. Knowledge and education are important, especially in the Black community.” Mills, now 28, went on to establish a name for himself as IDK (it stands for “Ignorantly Delivering Knowledge”), as an independent artist and entrepreneur, before his own Clue Records signed a joint venture with Warner Records in 2019 to release his debut album, Is He Real? His next act: professor. In partnership with the Boston-based…

CHEERS,” SAYS Taylor Swift during the opening scene from her Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions Disney+ special, clinking her wine glass against Jack Antonoff’s mug and Aaron Dessner’s cup while huddled around a cozy fire. Though the trio made one of the year’s most acclaimed albums — Swift’s stripped-down folklore, which she surprise-released in July — they had never all been physically together while creating it. Due to the pandemic, Swift had set up a home studio for the first time, sending files back-and-forth while working remotely over Face-Time with longtime collaborator Antonoff and Dessner, a member of The National whose work she had long admired. For folklore’s first and so far only performance, Swift and Antonoff met Dessner where much of the album was created — at…

IF YOU’RE A MUSIC fan of a certain age browsing through a list of Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 singles from the early 1980s (Men at Work’s “Down Under,” The Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”), you’ll almost certainly recall images of each song’s music video, made unavoidable through heavy airplay on MTV. If you’re a teenage music fan doing the same with 2020 No. 1s (Megan Thee Stallion and Beyoncé’s “Savage,” Doja Cat and Nicki Minaj’s “Say So,” 24kGoldn and iann dior’s “Mood”), you’d probably remember similar images. But rather than the artists’ own videos, they’d be of viral dance challenges born on TikTok. In 2019, TikTok became a household name among both teens and adults, in large part thanks to artists who used their…

“Falling” FEB. 28 STREAM TOTAL WEEK ENDING FEB. 27 3.3M STREAM TOTAL WEEK ENDING MARCH 5 5.9M After releasing a video for his top 10 hit “Adore You,” Styles delivered an equally emotive visual for the ballad “Falling,” which hit No. 62 on the Billboard Hot 100. The clip shows the singer sitting at a piano filled with water in a shadowy room, wearing a Gucci chiffon gown with a train long enough to float far above him as the piano eventually overflows. “Watermelon Sugar” MAY 18 STREAM TOTAL WEEK ENDING MA Y 14 3.3M STREAM TOTAL WEEK ENDING MA Y 21 8.4M Styles dedicated this clip to “touching” upon its May release, relishing a time pre-social distancing when sharing a watermelon with friends on a beach wasn’t high-risk…

“The Box” Roddy Ricch (right) released his debut album, Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial, in December 2019. By January, he was in a showdown with Justin Bieber as “Yummy” and “The Box,” written by Ricch and producer Samuel “30 Roc” Gloade, competed for the Hot 100’s top spot. While Bieber urged fans to stream his own song, Ricch tweeted “stream yummy by justin bieber” on Jan. 11. In the end, “The Box” claimed the top spot for 11 weeks. “Rockstar” After hitting No. 1 with “The Box” — and winning his first Grammy Award for best rap performance as a featured artist on Nipsey Hussle’s “Racks in the Middle” — Roddy Ricch jumped on DaBaby’s “Rockstar.” The song, produced by SethInTheKitchen, went to No. 1 on the Hot…

02.08 In February, BTS surpassed Justin Bieber for most weeks at No. 1 in the 10-year history of Billboard’s Social 50 chart. The mark was set when BTS spent a 164th week at the top. The group currently sits at 209 weeks (and counting). 09.05 BTS became the first all-South Korean group to rule the Billboard Hot 100 when “Dynamite” debuted at No. 1 on the Sept. 5 chart. 10.10 K-pop group SuperM debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 dated Oct. 10 with its first full-length, Super One: The First Album. 10.17 In October, Blackpink became the first girl group and third K-pop act to reach the summit of the Billboard Artist 100, after BTS and SuperM. 10.31 NCT’s all-team release, Resonance Pt. 1, debuted at No.…

DaBaby admits that he slow-played the biggest hit of his career, the same way a poker ace might linger before betting big on a winning hand. “When I made ‘Rockstar,’ I knew it was a monster record,” the Charlotte, N.C., rapper says of his collaboration with Roddy Ricch that was featured on this year’s Blame It on Baby. DaBaby previewed the April LP with lead single “Find My Way,” which introduced a more melodic approach following his 2019 album, Kirk; the track peaked at No. 22 on the Hot 100, but primed fans for his warbled hook on “Rockstar” — his first No. 1 single. “What I tend to do when I drop a project, the first song I throw out is not the one that I want to…

Barracuda Austin Big Texas Dance Hall & Saloon Spring, Texas THE BLOCK off biltmore Asheville, N.C. The Blue Light Dallas Boot & Saddle Philadelphia Brillobox Pittsburgh Bull McCabe’s Somerville, Mass. Burgundy Basin Pittsford, N.Y. The C Note Hull, Mass. The Cantab Lounge* Cambridge, Mass. Chameleon Club Lancaster, Pa. Chicago Bar Tucson, Ariz. Copacabana New York Cosmic Charlie’s Lexington, Ky. The Country Club Dancehall & Saloon Augusta, Ga. The Crocodile** Seattle Douglas Corner Cafe Nashville Eighteenth Street Lounge Washington, D.C. El Chapultepec Denver Fire on Water Milwaukee The Firefly Lounge Bellingham, Wash. The Funky Biscuit Boca Raton, Fla. Gas Monkey Live Dallas The Graduate San Luis Obispo, Calif. Great Scott Boston The Greenroom Flagstaff, Ariz. The Henry Strater Theatre Durango, Colo. Hodi’s Half Note Fort Collins, Colo. Honey Minneapolis Intrinzik…