Innholdsfortegnelse for June 5, 2021 i Billboard Magazine

BTS’ “BUTTER” ROLLS IN AT NO. 1 ON THE BILLBOARD HOT 100, marking the superstar South Korean septet’s fourth leader on the chart. With all four No. 1s banked in the last nine months, dating back to the fellow chart-topping debut of “Dynamite” on Sept. 5, 2020, BTS completes the quickest accumulation of four initial leaders since Justin Timberlake in 2006-07. Among groups, BTS has landed its first four No. 1s the fastest since The Jackson 5 in 1970. The Beatles hold the overall record by having notched their first four over four months in 1964. Released May 21, “Butter” drew 32.2 million U.S. streams and 18.1 million radio airplay audience impressions and sold 242,800 downloads in the tracking week, according to MRC Data. The single also starts atop…

The vinyl boom only accelerated during the pandemic, generating $626 million in revenue in 2020 in the United States, where it became the No. 1-selling album format — and so far this year, sales have almost doubled compared with the same period in 2020, according to MRC Data. In a special Deep Dive report, “How Vinyl Got Its Groove Back,” Billboard looks at what’s driving the market for vinyl, as well as the problems that could threaten it. While limited editions and exclusive pressings have become new forms of merchandise drops, supply-chain issues have exacerbated pre-pandemic pressing-plant delays. Can green manufacturing help? A Billboard Pro Spotlight with the same title, sponsored by the RIAA, looks at both the format’s remarkable comeback and its post-pandemic future, with panels about what’s…

AT SPOTIFY, “OUR continued focus is on reaching more listeners, as ultimately this will translate into long-term value for our investors,” said CEO Daniel Ek on an October 2020 earnings call. The company’s strategy has always been that growth comes before everything else — to the occasional frustration of creators, who are sometimes more interested in today’s royalty payouts than tomorrow’s valuation. On the same call, CFO Paul Vogel said, “For us, it has historically been about really thinking about growing users and subscribers first before worrying about the monetization part.” Some rights holders don’t like that. They’re less focused on how many subscribers a music service has than on how much money it takes in from each. That number is the average revenue per user, or ARPU, and…

AS VINYL HAS GROWN FROM an almost obsolete format into a significant driver of revenue — up 74.3% to $619.6 million over the past five years in the United States, according to the RIAA — exclusivity has helped drive the boom, creating the same sort of demand as limited-edition merchandise. And that demand has now moved beyond the confines of Record Store Day exclusives, which still drive headline-grabbing sales — RSD’s Black Friday promotions helped move 1.3 million records in 2020, according to MRC Data, which at the time was just the second week that vinyl sales had surpassed 1 million since MRC Data began tracking music sales in 1991 — but are also available elsewhere. One example is Taylor Swift’s folklore, released last July through her webstore with…

A FEW YEARS AGO, RINA SAWAYAMA was starting to wonder if she was unsignable. There was the casual racism, like the time she found out that a senior record executive jokingly referred to her as “Rina Wagamama” behind her back. Or that time a major-label A&R executive backed out of a deal at the last minute, leaving her scrambling to cover lawyer’s fees she had planned to pay for with her advance. Her infraction? The demo for “STFU!,” a thrashing, nu metal romp that sounds like the reincarnation of Limp Bizkit if Fred Durst were JoJo. The song’s chorus — “Shut the fuck up,” intoned over and over again in a feathery singsong — was both absurd and intimate, aimed at the very sort of person in the industry…

It’s an ode to an ex-lover that sounds like any other at first. On the buoyant synth-pop track “Fuimos Amor,” Colombian pop star Esteman sings in Spanish of what it’s like to fall under someone’s spell: “I have you here by my side, I can’t control it/I don’t care about anyone else here or who they are.” But the track, from his critically acclaimed 2019 album, Amor Libre, is something that, for decades, has been all too rare in Latin music: one man proudly recalling his love for another, with a male love interest cast in the music video. When Esteman broke out in 2009 with the viral hit “No Te Metas a Mi Facebook” (“Stay Off My Facebook”), “I was out of the closet and had [shared] my…

A MID ALL OF THE challenges of the past year — office shutdowns, tour cancellations, a surge in social music platforms and even a vinyl supply backlog — the independent music sector has been thriving. Independents as a whole grew market share in 2020 from 29.7% to 31.1%, according to an analysis in March by MIDiA, which previously estimated that indie labels and artists account for nearly one-third of the global music market. Billboard’s Indie Power Players recognizes industry leaders — nominated by their companies and peers and selected by our editors — at independent labels and distributors. Labels are defined as independent, regardless of size, by their ownership through entities other than the three major music groups. This year’s list particularly reflects the strength of independent labels in…

OVER THE PAST SIX months, artists and producers have been rushing to sell their royalty streams in unprecedented numbers as investors pour into music assets and drive prices to heady new heights. So at least two artist representatives became concerned in May when they received messages from different executives at Universal Music Group about its “corporate policy” on the so-called “letters of direction” that artists have long sent their labels, publishers and performing rights organizations when they sell their royalties — notes that instruct the company to pay the artist’s royalty buyer directly. According to one of several such emails reviewed by Billboard, received mid-May by a representative of an artist who had recently sold a royalty stream on a recording: “UMG has instituted a new policy where we…

LAST JUNE, AMID THE GROWTH OF the Black Lives Matter movement and an ongoing conversation about diversifying the music industry, DJs Niks Delanancy and Kay Ferdinand created Black Bandcamp — a public Google spreadsheet of Black artists with links to their pages on the online music marketplace. The London-based duo hoped the resource would bring recognition — and revenue — to Black artists, especially in the electronic scene, which is dominated by white acts who benefit from the work of the genre’s Black pioneers. “The whole music industry has relied on the erasure and commodification of Black culture,” says Delanancy. “It has become so normalized that unless it’s called out … then there’s no change.” What started as a simple online spreadsheet rapidly grew into a community-run platform, and…

VINYL JAZZ REISSUES USUALLY COME IN two flavors: bare-bones budget releases or expensive audiophile editions. But in 2019, Blue Note Records president Don Was launched the label’s Tone Poet series, produced by Joe Harley, which offers high-quality reissues from the imprint’s storied catalog at a recommended price of $35 — more than most vinyl but a bargain by audiophile standards. Consumers are responding. Blue Note says projected orders for releases are up over 400%, to the point that this year’s reissue of Lee Morgan’s The Rajah has sold more than 9,000 copies worldwide, an impressive number for a lesser-known album. Says Was: “We sell everything we make.” How did you start doing these Tone Poet releases? DON WAS For our 75th anniversary [in 2014], we talked to independent record…

WHEN A2IM — THE AMERICAN Association of Independent Music (A2IM) — made the fast, tough call last year to move its annual Indie Week conference online, followed by a livestreaming edition of its Libera Awards, no one expected the same precautions would be needed a year later. But Indie Week and the Libera Awards will be virtual once again. Indie Week, the world’s largest independent music conference, will take place June 14-17 and is sponsored by SoundExchange, with keynotes, panels, networking sessions and more. The Libera Awards, presented by Merlin, will feature performances from nominees as well as the presentation of the Independent Icon Awards. For a second year, all proceeds raised during the show will go to A2IM’s charity partner, Sweet Relief, to help career musicians and industry…

GERARDO ORTIZ HAS HELPED USHER IN A regional Mexican music renaissance by collaborating with bachata and urbano acts from Prince Royce to Gente de Zona. When Ortiz released his first collaborations — bachata versions of his hits (“Sólo Vine a Despedirme,” “Eres Una Niña”) in 2014 and a duet with Royce (“Moneda”) in 2017, which topped Billboard’s Tropical Airplay chart — they came across as unprecedented and daring. A bona fide regional Mexican act known for bold corridos, Ortiz navigated the tropical realm with ease. “Bachata was happening at that time and I didn’t want to stay behind,” he says. “I had an itch. I thought, ‘I have to do a bachata,’ so I released two songs and my fans embraced them.” Before that, regional Mexican artists mostly stayed…

WHEN THE JAM BAND Goose kicked off its five-night Bingo virtual tour last June, the Connecticut quartet wanted to mix things up beyond improvising through changing setlists every show. So it introduced a bingo machine that spit out balls with musical and aerobic challenges for the band — maybe covering Bob Dylan’s “Shelter From the Storm” or running a lap around the barn where they filmed the series. “They’re always looking for ways to make each show feel different,” says Ben Baruch, Goose co-manager and owner of management company 11E1even Group. Such spontaneity helped Goose gross nearly $500,000 in ticket sales at $15 per night or $50 for all five shows. Jam bands have quietly become the surprise earners of the pandemic thanks to devoted fans and compelling livestreams,…

BEIJING — Chinese competition regulators are considering a crackdown on Tencent Music Entertainment to bring the streaming giant down to size, but the company may already be losing its edge in the country’s rapidly developing music market. Since its formation in 2016, TME has built its strength by relying on exclusive distribution deals with record labels and artists like Mandopop star Jay Chou to muscle out competition for the streaming services it owns. Lately, though, those arrangements have been unraveling even without the interference of regulators. In the past two years, Universal Music Group (UMG), Sony Music and Warner Music Group (WMG) have decided to diversify their distribution and leverage intensifying competition for better deals offered by companies like NetEase Cloud Music. If regulators act, TME could essentially be…

IN 2013, WHEN MONTHLY record club Vinyl Me, Please first launched, “we had one of those blue classic Ikea bags and were walking to the post office like, ‘Holy shit, man, 12 people are paying us real money,’ ” recalls VMP co-founder/chairman of the board Matt Fiedler. “We had no idea it was going to be a real thing.” Within a year, the company had grown from 12 to 300 subscribers — and within two to 5,000. Now, with 80,000 active customers, the company just finished its highest-performing quarter with a 74% growth in membership from the same time period last year. (A three-month subscription costs $119.) VMP has become a significant outlet for major and independent labels alike looking to market reissues and also offer exclusive variant pressings…

IN 2018, CHICAGO GOT ITS first vinyl pressing plant in nearly two decades: Smashed Plastic. Even more exciting? Instead of purchasing vintage presses — the kind heated by big, energy-hungry steam boilers — the plant opted for newer, fully automatic units. As a result, Smashed Plastic became the first steamless plant in the United States. While vinyl sales have grown steadily since the 2008 launch of Record Store Day, the production of vinyl itself hasn’t changed much for the last 40 years. It’s a traditionally environmentally unfriendly business — one that relies on steam-powered presses, lead-containing polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pellets, plastic shrink-wrap and fuel-burning global distribution — that’s overdue for a face-lift. Though pressing plants in the European Union have been held to higher standards for over a decade…

Jordan Shulman has been hustling in the music industry since 2017. The singer-songwriter, who makes spare, intimate pop music as JORDY, used to cold-call producers and network his way into as many songwriting sessions as possible. But when he started posting his music on TikTok in March 2020, he stumbled into one of his most important career moves yet. Today, he has accrued over 150,000 followers, watched his streaming numbers skyrocket and signed a deal with 300 Entertainment thanks to heartfelt, hook-laden tunes like “Long Distance.” “I posted ‘Long Distance’ and everything changed,” says JORDY, 26. “When I’m reading through comments, there’s more than just a couple of people being like, ‘Oh, my God. The way you’re using [male] pronouns in such a casual setting — I’m hearing myself…

From rock’n’roll icon Little Richard to punk pioneer Jayne County, queer and trans artists have always pushed the aesthetics of popular music to the extreme. That includes the rising genre of hyperpop, whose biggest architects — like SOPHIE, Dorian Electra and 100 gecs — have used Auto-Tune, saccharine synths and ear-splitting distortion to make music that both celebrates and parodies the mainstream. “Hyperpop can really appeal to that teen in their bedroom who isn’t feeling very good about themselves,” says 17-year-old trans artist ElyOtto (aka Elliott Platt), whose manic breakout track, “SugarCrash!,” has soundtracked nearly 9 million TikTok videos. He explains the genre’s appeal. A lot of LGBTQ+ artists have defined hyperpop. What’s the relationship? Hyperpop is very filtered — you can manipulate it however you want. That’s appealing…