Innholdsfortegnelse for March 26, 2022 i Billboard Magazine

GHOST’S IMPERA debuts at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart (dated March 26) with 2022’s biggest sales week for an album: 62,500 copies sold in the United States during its opening week (ending March 17), according to Luminate, formerly MRC Data. The album surges past the 37,000 copies that The Weeknd’s Dawn FM sold following its release on CD, sparking its reentry atop the Feb. 12 chart. The new album from the dynamic Swedish rock band — synonymous with its members’ striking, masked costumes (above) — earns the group its first Top Album Sales leader and its fourth top 10 entry. Of Impera’s opening total, physical sales comprise 51,000 copies, with 28,000 on vinyl, 21,000 on CD and 2,000 on cassette. The album was released on Loma…

The top 10 contemporary artists are the artists with the most catalog streams in the first six weeks of 2022 based on analysis of the top 10,000 audio on-demand streams from Luminate. The chart provides the numbers of catalog tracks and current tracks each artist has in the top 10,000. The chart also provides the total number of catalog and current streams for each artist’s entire repertoire in 2021. Source Luminate, formerly MRC Data…

AS REGGAETÓN HIT the mainstream market almost two decades ago, becoming a defining sound of commercial Latin music, its neighboring genre dembow — identified by its playful, rapid drum pattern and carefree energy — endured a slower climb to prominence. In the decade following its inception in the early 1990s, dembow music — born out of a sample of Jamaican artist Shabba Ranks’ anti-imperialist single “Dem Bow” — faced relentless criticism and resistance, with an unofficial TV and radio ban on the genre due to what one Dominican Republic government official referred to as “sexual and obscene content” (not too dissimilar to what reggaetón acts faced early on in Puerto Rico). But in the last year alone, Latin stars across the board, including J Balvin, Rosalía, Camilo, Natti Natasha…

SINCE RUSSIAN PRESIDENT Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, the live-music industry has rallied around the latter country with demonstrations of support and myriad benefit concerts across the globe, including, in New York, Metropolitan Opera’s A Concert for Ukraine at Lincoln Center and City Winery’s A Benefit for Ukraine Featuring Gogol Bordello & Friends, where Patti Smith announced a $50,000 donation to Doctors Without Borders on behalf of Yoko Ono and Sean Ono Lennon. Meanwhile, acts from Ed Sheeran to Camila Cabello have signed on to play an all-star benefit show on March 29 at Resorts World Arena in Birmingham, England. The live, two-hour special broadcast by ITV is expected to raise $4 million for Disasters Emergency Committee’s Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal. A CONCERT FOR UKRAINE LINCOLN CENTER NEW…

Old formats never die — they just spin around again. Compact disc sales first outpaced vinyl in 1987, but the CD has been slipping for almost 20 years, eclipsed by downloads and then streaming. But hold on to those CD towers: In 2021, new releases from Adele, BTS and Taylor Swift drove disc sales up 1.1% in the first annual increase since 2004, according to Luminate, formerly MRC Data. Could a future “CD Store Day” spark an eventual comeback? LASER-FOCUSED — ON MONEY “According to insiders, Sony’s launch of its Compact Disc digital audio disk system within the next year will be unparalleled in consumer electronics history in terms of ad and promo mega bucks,” reported the Feb. 13, 1982, Billboard. Big bucks weren’t just for the ad campaigns,…

AFTER RECORD-LOW GRO SSES IN JANUARY, a wave of new arena tours steered the live-music industry back on course in February. Bad Bunny led the way, earning both the month’s No. 1 tour and Boxscore: According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, the Latin star’s El Último Tour del Mundo trek — named after his November 2020 studio album — earned $39.8 million and sold 183,000 tickets. With an average of $3.3 million and 15,240 tickets per show, Bad Bunny sets a blistering pace for the year ahead, led by two shows in February at The Forum in Inglewood, Calif. The two-night stint rules the Top Boxscores chart with $9.6 million, or $4.8 million each night, setting a new high as the venue’s top per-show earnings, surpassing the Eagles’…

The top 10 catalog artists are the legacy artists with the most catalog streams in the first six weeks of 2022 based on analysis of only their catalog tracks in the top 10,000 audio on-demand streams from Luminate. Billboard defines a legacy artist as having a recording history of over 25 years and no current tracks in the top 100. The chart also provides the total number of catalog streams for each artist’s entire repertoire in 2021. Source Luminate, formerly MRC Data…

FROM DETROIT TO BERLIN to the metaverse, electronic dance music has always had a symbiotic relationship with technology’s cutting edge. Now history is repeating itself as a mega-festival lineup’s worth of electronic artists — including stars like deadmau5, Steve Aoki and Claude VonStroke — have emerged as early adopters and innovators of non-fungible tokens. And some are pushing it a step further, unlocking the potential of NFTs to engage their audience though gamification. Vivie-Ann Bakos — the DJ, producer and label owner who performs as Blond:ish — initially got into NFTs as a way of offering value to hardcore fans who were spending upwards of 12 hours a day on her Twitch channel, Abracadabra TV, during the pandemic. Bakos emphasizes that the value of many NFTs is not just…

FROM Hobart, Ind. AGE 24 LABEL Warner Records FOUNDATION Prior to picking up a guitar for the first time as a 12-year-old, Apollo grew up in the Midwest listening to “old, romantic songs from the ’50s” by Mexican artists like Pedro Infante and Juan Gabriel while cleaning with his family on Sunday mornings. By 2017, without much training or guidance, he put his first song on Spotify, thanks to a $30 loan from a friend for the upload fee. Apollo’s parents thought pursuing music as a career was “a terrible idea,” and he admits that he had no idea what was to come. As for his friend, multimedia artist Matthew Brown, Apollo never got around to paying him back, though he says they now work together often. DISCOVERY Apollo…

WHEN MUSIC MEETS money, industry attorneys usually serve as matchmakers. Billboard’s 2022 class of Top Music Lawyers — nominated by their firms and peers and chosen by our editors — are cast in more complex and challenging roles than ever. In the past year, their behind-the-scenes work grabbed headlines with major publishing and catalog deals, live-performance agreements, a defamation case, a conservatorship battle and one very, very large initial public offering. Among many other matters, attorneys on this list were involved with Neil Diamond’s sale of his publishing and master recording catalog; Dr. Dre’s performance with a who’s who of hip-hop during the Pepsi Super Bowl LVI halftime show; Cardi B’s successful verdict in a defamation claim; Britney Spears’ release from a conservatorship that controlled her life for 13…

AT THE BEGINNING of the year, Luminate, formerly MRC Data, issued its 2021 annual report, which revealed that catalog music — traditionally considered a track that’s over 18 months old, although the term has different meanings in different situations — increased its share of U.S. music consumption from 65.1% in 2020 to 69.8% last year. The initial interpretation of that data was that, a year and counting into the pandemic, listeners were self-soothing with nostalgic songs — Fleetwood Mac, not Doja Cat. But a closer examination by Billboard reveals a much different picture. Listeners are increasingly gravitating to catalog tracks, but in the first six weeks of 2022, the average age of the 100 most streamed songs was just 20 months old (compared with eight months in 2020), according…

CHLOE ADAMS HAD RACKED UP 1 million followers on TikTok through her bedroom-pop covers of Lil Nas X, Shania Twain and Justin Bieber, as well as her own music, when someone from the platform contacted her late last year with a question: Would she want to be among the first artists to use its new in-app marketing and distribution tool, SoundOn, to release her next original song, “Dirty Thoughts”? Adams was already using one of the few dozen digital distributors that, for a small fee, will ensure that an artist’s music is uploaded and available across all streaming services and digital sellers — joining the deluge of the 60,000 songs uploaded to Spotify daily. But TikTok’s proposition was appealing: SoundOn, still in beta at the time, could not only…

WARSAW, POLAND — Before the global pandemic, Poland’s live-music industry had experienced two consecutive record years, in 2018 and 2019, for both local and international acts. “It was absolutely booming,” says Mikolaj Ziółkowski, president of SOIAR, the Polish promoters association. Now the Russian invasion of neighboring Ukraine — including a March 13 Russian missile strike on a military training base 15 miles from the Polish border — has created new tensions in a country that has long embraced Western touring artists. In 1984, Iron Maiden became the first Western rock band to perform in Poland, launching its World Slavery tour with five dates there before going on to play other former Soviet Bloc countries. Ever since, Warsaw has been a must-play city for touring rock acts, as well as…

CHARLIE DU NCKER’S PATH to dance world fame began while watching Instagram stories in bed one morning. After he saw a clip in which a friend showed off her new car with girl group Cherish’s 2006 R&B hit, “Do It To It,” playing as a backing track, his phone went glitchy, then the song started skipping — and inspiration struck. “I was like, ‘Wait, this could be sick!’” says the 26-year-old Orlando, Fla.-based producer, who performs as Acraze. Within minutes, he was at his computer to perfect the idea, pitching down vocals and adding drums. An hour later, he had a rough house edit of the 2006 original (which featured Sean Paul of YoungBloodZ and peaked at No. 12 on the Billboard Hot 100) that would soon become a…

“BUT I LOVE YOU SO MUCH. Don’t you love me? Do you want to see my car?” Colson Baker whispers to the kitten clutching his chest for dear life. Whiskey — named after his dad’s drink of choice — is a 15-week-old Bengal that looks like a leopard, if a leopard could sleep in a shoebox. They’re in the driveway of Baker’s Los Angeles home, appraising the cat-friendliness of his first ride, a mint green ’53 Pontiac Chieftain with Ohio plates. “What do you think?” Baker asks his tiny feline. “We’ll go cruising in this. You can have the whole back seat. You’re so beautiful.” Like a born rock star, Whiskey appears horrified by his proximity to early-afternoon sunlight, mewing from between Baker’s fingers, which glitter with pink polish…