Innholdsfortegnelse for June 26, 2021 i Billboard Magazine

I REALLY BELIEVE TIKTOK GAVE IT A HUMONGOUS JOLT BACK into the pop-culture forefront,” says Erik Bradley, music director at KNOU (97.1NOW!) Los Angeles and assistant program director/music director at WBBM-FM (B96) Chicago, of Dua Lipa’s “Levitating,” featuring DaBaby. “There was a period as it was reemerging at radio when you couldn’t open TikTok without seeing it all over your feed.” More than a year after the original was released on Lipa’s album Future Nostalgia — the remix with DaBaby arrived in October, and the song subsequently entered the Billboard Hot 100 — “Levitating” holds at No. 3 as it hits a new No. 2 high on the Radio Songs chart, up 4% to 81.1 million impressions, according to MRC Data. It first reached No. 6 on Radio Songs…

IN AN INDUSTRY WHERE smart executives look for angles others don’t see, Sony Music Group’s June 11 announcement that it would begin to pay royalties to artists with unrecouped balances that were signed to its labels before 2000 and haven’t received an advance since, was greeted with surprise, enthusiasm and also a bit of cynicism. The move, part of Sony Music’s new Artists Forward initiative, is designed “to increase the ability of those who qualify to receive more money from uses of their music,” the company said in a letter to its partners obtained by Billboard. The label will not modify its contracts or even adjust the balance — just ignore them in order to prioritize “transparency with creators.” It’s hard to find anyone in the industry who doesn’t…

LONDON — Buried almost 1,000 feet below a snow-covered mountain, on an arctic island midway between Norway and the North Pole, a Norwegian company is planning to create what it says will be a doomsday vault to preserve the world’s most important music recordings for at least 1,000 years. Using future-proof digital storage, the Oslo-based Elire Management Group wants to store recordings of everything from major-label pop hits to Australian Indigenous music with the same safeguards offered by the Arctic World Archive and the Global Seed Vault, two existing storage facilities housed underground in the Svalbard archipelago. “We want to preserve the music that has shaped us as human beings and shaped our nations,” says Luke Jenkinson, managing director of the Global Music Vault and managing partner at Elire,…

“I LOVED IT AS A KID. I had the merch, the shirts, the shoes, everything,” says Damian Lillard, current NBA superstar of the Portland Trail Blazers, of the 1996 pop culture phenomenon Space Jam. The intergalactic basketball comedy starring Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes became a must-see family event; its original soundtrack was arguably even bigger — with top 10 Billboard Hot 100 hits in R. Kelly’s “I Believe I Can Fly” and Seal’s cover of “Fly Like an Eagle” — selling 4.7 million copies, according to MRC Data. Twenty-five years later, Warner Bros. Pictures’ long-in-the-works stand-alone sequel, Space Jam: A New Legacy (now starring LeBron James alongside Bugs Bunny), will arrive in U.S. theaters and on HBO Max on July 16. Its soundtrack, featuring an all-star squad…

A FEW WEEKS AGO, T.J. OSBORNE — half of the powerhouse country duo Brothers Osborne — received a particularly memorable text message. Earlier this year, T.J. came out publicly as gay in a landmark moment for a genre with few out superstars, and his fellow artist Jamey Johnson was the latest of countless peers who reached out with a message of support. “It’s better to be hated for who you are,” texted Johnson, “than loved for what you’re not.” “I just thought, ‘Fuck yeah,’ ” says T.J., recounting the story over Zoom to a group of artists who are intimately familiar with what it’s like to challenge the status quo in country music: his brother and bandmate, John (sitting in front of his Nashville fireplace); Mickey Guyton (feeding her…

THE STORY OF THE BLACK EYED Peas is one of relentless hustle. It began in 1988 at Estrada Courts, the housing project in predominantly Chicano East Los Angeles, when 13-year-old will.i.am (born William James Adams Jr.) met 14-year-old Apl.de.ap (born Allan Pineda Lindo). Will was the self-described “neighborhood dude, the guy who could dance,” while Apl had grown up in the Philippines, where he didn’t speak a word of English. The duo bonded over break dancing and rap battles and started to work on beats together, eventually competing with their own crews. It was at Ballistics, a Hollywood club for aspiring and established rappers, that the group’s lineup took shape after they met Taboo (born Jaime Luis Gómez). He was a tall kid from the San Gabriel Valley, half…

TWO YEARS AGO, Anthony Martini’s teenage daughter showed him an Instagram profile for a green-haired rapper with tattooed arms, hypebeast style and glitched-out trap tracks getting hundreds of thousands of plays on SoundCloud. Martini — a former artist manager who helped develop artists like Lil Dicky and MadeinTYO, and in March became CEO of Royalty Exchange — signed the rapper, who now goes by FN Meka, to his record label, Factory New. Since then, FN Meka has released three official singles and acquired 9.7 million TikTok followers. It’s a typical story about online artist development, but with a twist: FN Meka isn’t real, and Factory New isn’t for human artists. FN Meka is a virtual avatar, de-signed by Martini’s business partner Brandon Le, which performs music created with artificial…

CONCERTS ARE COMING BACK with what looks to be a busy, competitive fall season. But the Small Business Association’s sluggish rollout of the $16 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant program that Congress approved in December is leaving independent venues and promoters ill-prepared for a robust return. For the past 15 months, venues have been largely shuttered due to COVID-19 restrictions. The SVOG was created to save indie venues from permanent closure and level the playing field with corporate competitors Live Nation and AEG, which relied on borrowing during the pandemic — except that the checks haven’t gone out yet and no one’s certain who’s getting one. As of June 21, only 677 venues and promoters had received SVOG funds from the SBA, about 13.5% of those that applied. And…

WHEN GINA MILLER WAS GROWING up in South Memphis, one of her school bus stops was in front of the abandoned Stax Records studio on East McLemore Avenue. “It was graffiti-laden and looked like nothing else would ever be born from it,” she says. The soul label had been forced into bankruptcy in 1975 after a local bank foreclosed on the loans keeping it alive — a move that one of its co-owners, Al Bell, in the 2014 documentary Take Me to the River, attributed to Memphis’ white establishment and its determination to destroy successful Black-owned businesses. “All of the things I saw and experienced there helped shape me,” says Miller, who moved to Nashville in 1995, and, while rising through the ranks of Entertainment One’s outpost there, has…

IN THE MID-’80s, LESLIE FRAM WAS A FLEDGLING DJ WORKING HER WAY through college at top 40 station WABB-FM in Mobile, Ala., when its program director critiqued her aircheck in a manner so harsh, it’s still seared in her memory. “He threw the cassette across the table and said, ‘You haven’t improved one bit,’ ” she recalls. “I remember thinking, ‘Hey, I can’t take that tactic if I’m ever in the position to mentor or help someone.’ ” Fast forward a few decades, and Fram is in precisely that kind of position as CMT’s senior vp of music strategy and talent. She mentors artists daily — and it’s safe to say that she has never flung anything at them other than a compliment or some helpful advice. Since starting…

CANDICE WATKINS HOPED THE beginning of 2021 would feel like a fresh start — a long-awaited calm to process a year that brought the murder of George Floyd, nationwide social-justice protests and a racial reckoning across the music industry. “Then February came,” she says, “and I experienced a whole new level of ‘survival mode.’ ” Watkins, vp marketing at Big Loud Records, is referring to the video made public that month of Morgan Wallen screaming the N-word (among other expletives) outside his Nashville home. For Watkins, who is Black, the ensuing furor hit home on another front: Wallen is part of the artist roster she works with at Big Loud. A week after the story broke, she met with Wallen in person — at his request — for a…

YOUTUBE AND SPOTIFY may reliably push songs up the charts, but for country music in particular, terrestrial radio still rules. That means that the program directors for the 2,200 country stations in the United States wield unique power: They can break potential stars, keep superstars atop the charts and support or ignore the many critically acclaimed women artists still struggling for playlist slots. Their decision-making process may seem shrouded in mystery, but it’s anything but arbitrary. They draw on gut instinct, but also rely upon callout research and streaming service data. “We’re not an art form,” says one of five country radio PDs who spoke anonymously for this story. “We’re a business.” A MALE PD IN THE SOUTH How would you describe your station’s relationship with labels? Labels are…

OVER THE PAST YEAR, ROBLOX HAS BECOME A popular online platform for kids and teenagers to create and play simple but addictive games — and apparently also upload unlicensed music by artists like Olivia Rodrigo and The Weeknd to listen to at the same time. Now, the National Music Publishers’ Association is demanding that the company behind it stop playing around and start paying for music in a $200 million lawsuit filed June 9. Now that streaming is an established business, the trade associations that represent rights holders are focusing more on ensuring they get paid by companies that incorporate unlicensed music into their products. One early battle was against the exercise bike startup Peloton, which the NMPA sued for $370 million in 2019 and settled with the following…

BEFORE 2020, MIKO MARKS’ CAREER arc looked like those of many of the Black women who had tried to make it in Nashville before her own mid-2000s arrival: supremely talented vocalist-songwriter makes valiant push toward mainstream country music but ultimately gets rebuffed by the industry’s resistance to broaden beyond white and mostly male artists. Then came the pandemic and a national reckoning with racial inequity, during which Marks put out her first new music in 13 years — and she finally felt heard. In March, she released Our Country, which won broad critical acclaim. Asked whether she could have ever anticipated such recognition, Marks responds emphatically: “Absolutely not.” To get to that point, Marks had to leave Nashville. But her triumph is inspiring a new generation of Black female…

BOBBY REYNOLDS LIKED EVERYTHING coming across his desk. The senior vp for AEG Presents in Las Vegas knew that as the coronavirus pandemic waned, many major artists would be eager to get back to work — and as he began to book shows for the new Resorts World and Virgin hotels, he found managers and agents especially accommodating. What he wasn’t expecting was just how many A-list acts he’d juggle at once: in November, two nights of Old Dominion at the Cosmopolitan, as well as Luke Bryan and Carrie Underwood residencies at the Resorts World theater; in December, Luke Combs at T-Mobile Arena and Little Big Town at the Virgin Hotel’s theater. “It’s good to be creating a lot of opportunities for people who haven’t worked in a while,”…

Belmont University Nashville Enrollment: 8,428 California State University, Northridge Northridge, Calif. Enrollment: 39,179 Georgetown University Washington, D.C. Enrollment: 19,593 Middle Tennessee State University Murfreesboro, Tenn. Enrollment: 21,721 Tennessee State University Nashville Enrollment: 8,081 University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, Ala. Enrollment: 38,100 University of Arkansas Fayetteville, Ark. Enrollment: 27,559 University of Kentucky Lexington, Ky. Enrollment: 29,402 University of Tennessee Knoxville, Tenn. Enrollment: 29,460 Vanderbilt University Nashville Enrollment: 13,131 Enrollments source: U.S. News & World Reports…

BEFORE DOLLY PARTON WORKED “9 to 5” or Johnny Cash walked the line, Billboard has been in the saddle, surveying the field of country music. Early on, it struggled to get its due: The magazine’s first genre chart, in 1944, tracked Most Played Juke Box Folk Records (Hillbillies, Spirituals, Cowboy Songs, Etc.). But Billboard ponied up proper respect as “hillbilly music” grew into a uniquely American art form that shaped pop culture with smooth “country-politan” recordings, Urban Cowboy chic and stadium superstars like Taylor Swift. WHO LET THE DOG IN? Country cropped up in the Jan. 7, 1928, issue with a photo of early stars Otto Gray & His Oklahoma Cowboys Band that included the group’s mascot — a German shepherd named Rex. COWBOY LIFE DURING WARTIME “Operators of…