Innholdsfortegnelse for June 4, 2022 i Billboard Magazine

AS A YOUNG TRANSGENDER artist growing up in Las Vegas, FEWOCiOUS — one of the digital art world’s fastest-rising stars — says music offered him an introduction to “what art is — and how to tell a story with your feelings.” Today, the 19-year-old’s digital creations have generated over $50 million — his Pride collection, auctioned by Christie’s last June, brought in more than $2 million — and music remains core to his art. For his FewoWorld “paint drop” on Nifty Gateway, a 24-hour public non-fungible token sale that generated $20 million, each collectible featured a unique audio composition. And he continues to draw inspiration from musicians ranging from Bob Dylan and David Bowie to Missy Elliott and Kanye West, whose works he sees as expressions of “authentic identity.”…

ARTISTS HAVE PREVIEWED unreleased songs on radio and in concert for decades, but thanks to the rise of TikTok and a handful of successful DIY social media campaigns — Lil Nas X’s efforts for “Old Town Road” on Twitter and Triller are early examples — the practice has become de rigueur. But not everyone thinks it’s good business. What started as a low-cost method for unsigned acts to casually test audience reaction and build up streaming service pre-saves has become the norm for even household names hoping to break their next hit before committing to a release date on streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. The Billboard Hot 100 contains ample proof that this works: SZA earned her first solo top 10 debut with her 2021 single “I…

HONG KONG — Since Chinese regulators forced music streaming platforms to end exclusive licensing deals with global labels last year, Tencent Music Entertainment has portrayed itself as China’s public face of copyright adherence. In its most recent annual report, the company says it is “committed to protecting music copyright, and our leading role in China’s music copyright protection efforts has made us a partner of choice for major domestic and international music labels and other content partners.” TME’s biggest rival in China, NetEase Cloud Music, doesn’t see it that way. The Hangzhou-based streaming company claims that, domestically, TME is engaging in brazen acts of copyright infringement that constitute “unfair competition” that has “been intensifying [in] the last two years.” In a lengthy statement in April describing a lawsuit against…

SINGER-SONGWRITER Orla Gartland is the first to admit that her reflective 2019 single “Why Am I Like This?” started out as a joke. “The title sounded really snarky to me and was something that my friend and I said a lot in a very self-deprecating way,” Gartland says from her childhood home in Dublin. But the song recently found a serious second life soundtracking a pivotal scene in Heartstopper, the Netflix adaptation of the popular queer coming-of-age webcomic that author Alice Oseman began publishing in 2016. In the closing moment of the series’ second episode, Nick (Kit Connor) starts to question his feelings for newfound BFF Charlie (Joe Locke) and heads to Google to type out the question achingly familiar to anyone who has come out: “Am I gay?”…

FEEL GOOD Netflix Pankiw believes directing Feel Good — a semiautobiographical comedy about addiction, gender and sexual fluidity — was “a testament to how the queer community gives each other opportunities.” Having known show creator and star Mae Martin as “young queer kids in Toronto,” Pankiw had been following their comedy career ever since. Turns out, Martin had been following Pankiw’s career as well: “Because we really liked each other’s tastes and knew we had the same sense of humor, they really went to bat for me.” SILK CHIFFON” MUNA featuring Phoebe Bridgers Pankiw immediately knew “Silk Chiffon” was a special song for how the band explored the idea that it’s “radical to express joy as a queer person,” saying she wanted to do that justice. As she and…

When opera star Anthony Roth Costanzo began plotting the follow-up to his Grammy Award-nominated 2018 album, ARC, the Durham, N.C.-born countertenor was sure of one thing: “I really didn’t want it to be one of these boring classical music albums,” he says with a laugh. So, like any self-respecting member of the LGBTQ+ community, Costanzo looked to trailblazing women for inspiration. During a chat with New York cabaret iconoclast Justin Vivian Bond about their opposites-attract friendship, Costanzo was reminded of a 1976 TV special that paired two stage legends — soprano Beverly Sills and comedienne Carol Burnett — to “hilarious and bizarre” effect. Drawing on “that high-low dichotomy, but also high and low culture,” Costanzo and Bond began developing a live show that morphed into January’s Only an Octave…

Ever since I was a little girl, if I felt the need to say something, I had a pressure in my chest,” says Tokischa. “My heart would start beating fast, my blood pressure would rise. I felt obligated to say something, [and] I would get in trouble for it a lot of times.” The 26-year-old Dominican rapper giggles, then adds: “They’re not punishing me for it anymore.” With her racy rhymes dripping with local lingo, dembow drums and rhythmic moans, Tokischa has amassed enough fans (plus plenty of can’t-lookaway haters) to sell out shows from Queens to Rome. Those crowds may come in part to witness her onstage antics (licking milk out of a cat’s bowl; locking lips with Rosalía at the Billboard Latin Music Awards), but they’re also…

HARRY STYLES’ Harry’s House debuts atop the Billboard 200 (dated June 4) with 521,500 equivalent album units earned in the United States during the week ending May 26, according to Luminate — the largest week of 2022 for an album and the biggest total since Adele’s 30 arrived with 839,000 units (Dec. 4, 2021). Styles scores his third Billboard 200 No. 1 and best weekly units sum among his three solo releases. Fine Line debuted with 478,000 units (Dec. 28, 2019), and his self-titled album opened with 230,000 (June 3, 2017). Harry’s House also breaks the record, since Luminate began tracking sales in 1991, for the most single-week vinyl album sales in the United States: 182,000. The project surpasses Taylor Swift’s Red (Taylor’s Version), which previously led with 114,000…

Shav Garg and Connor Lawrence, the CEO and COO of indify, respectively, met in fourth grade when both played on the championship Little League baseball team in Scarsdale, N.Y. A decade later, in 2015, the pair, along with Lawrence’s pre-K classmate and future indify chief technology officer Matt Pavia, founded the company in the basement of Garg’s family home and, over the next seven years, grew it into one of the most disruptive and unlikely successes in the music business. Indify is an angel investing platform that pairs strategic investors with songs by emerging talent that, using proprietary data, the company has identified as poised for a breakthrough but in need of financial and marketing resources. Investors in the company include Kerry Trainor, the former CEO of SoundCloud and…

FROM Perry, Fla. AGE 28 LABEL RCA FOUNDATION “I’ve always been lit, even as a kid,” says Saucy Santana, who grew up in Perry, a Florida town just shy of 7,000 residents. “I knew I had star power.” It’s why at 24, he relocated to Tallahassee to become a celebrity makeup artist, soon working for City Girls. Around the same time, he started a Facebook podcast with friends, for which he rapped its theme song and set his career down an unexpected path. His first official upload, a freestyle to Blueface’s “Thotiana” that he posted to YouTube in early 2019, led to club appearances and showcases. “They would be like, ‘Who’s this boy with the cheetah shirt and red lipstick?’” he recalls. “And the whole club is going crazy.”…

Dove Cameron realizes you might not believe her when she says “Boyfriend” — her seductive, overtly queer and currently inescapable pop anthem — was a “total fucking accident.” But, she promises, it really was. “It took on a life of its own,” she says. “We’ve basically been on a three-and-a-half-month train that just has not stopped. It’s the song that kind of took over my whole universe.” Happy accident or not, “Boyfriend” has redefined Cameron’s career. It’s her highest-charting single yet on the Billboard Hot 100 (peaking at No. 31 in May), a commercial breakthrough driven by TikTok — where, on the advice of her label, Disruptor Records, Cameron posted various demo clips and watched “Boyfriend” blow up, accumulating over 700,000 videos to date using its sound. It’s also…

IN EARLY MAY, one album by a veteran artist now signed to her own independent label topped three Billboard charts and landed within the top 10 on three other tallies in its debut week. Bonnie Raitt, who began her career in the 1970s on Warner Bros. Records and reached super-stardom in the 1990s on Capitol Records, has recorded for the past decade on her own Redwing Records. Indie status has worked well for Raitt. Her latest album, Just Like That… arrived at No. 1 on Top Current Album Sales, Americana/Folk Albums and Blues Albums; No. 2 on Top Album Sales; No. 6 on Top Rock Albums; and No. 7 on Independent Albums. (Redwing has partnered with Sub Pop for U.S. physical distribution and ADA Worldwide for global digital and…

THE FIRST SIX MONTHS of 2022 have lived up to the hype predicted for the concert business, fueled in large part by a more diverse, younger demographic eager to attend live shows and willing to spend more of their money on music and culture. The leading 10 acts on the 2022 Top Tours chart grossed $722 million at the midyear point, 20% more than the top 10 for 2019’s Top Tours (the last complete year of touring prior to the pandemic), according to the 2022 Billboard Boxscore midyear charts that measure the top line of the live-entertainment industry. This year’s chart shows very healthy consumer demand and attendance, despite the ongoing global presence of COVID-19 and growing concerns about waning immunity among vaccinated people. While big-ticket goodbye tours from…

LATELY, BEN BRANNEN has been getting a lot of calls. The co-founder/president of atVenu, which designs software to aid merchandise sellers at concerts, says people are curious, confused and even angry about the tips that merch vendors are racking up at some live shows. Unexpectedly, tips in some cases have been so large — an “extraordinary amount of money,” according to one manager — that they’ve become divisive. “This is the hot-button issue right now in the tour merch world,” Brannen says. “We’re talking about five figures’ worth of tips in a night sometimes, a lot of money moving around. Everybody wants a piece of that. It’s the music industry — everyone has to have a piece of every dollar that’s out there.” The growing popularity of digital payment…

Ally Pankiw believes “a series of little moments” helped her realize her calling as a visual artist. After working as a choreographer and pursuing journalism at university, she gravitated toward broadcast and documentary studies. “I remember there was this moment where I was like, ‘Oh, I love shooting and editing stuff,’” says Pankiw, 35. “I wanted to create things that didn’t exist before.” Since then, the Toronto native has built quite the résumé, directing episodes of Hulu’s Shrill and The Great and working as a story editor on Schitt’s Creek. (She’s now developing a series and co-writing a feature with show creator Dan Levy.) After getting her start with a directing collective managed by French company Partizan, with whom she directed and produced music videos for Ariana Grande and…

BRANDI CARLILE IS HAPPY TO expound upon bad wine. Bad wine gives her a hangover. The pretension of wine culture leaves a bad taste in her mouth. “Without sounding like I’m judging wine as a concept, it’s annoyingly bougie and culturally hetero,” she says with a laugh. “It’s like golf.” So when it came to developing her own boutique wine label, XOBC, she knew what she did want. It would be a wine for folks who are “a little left of center.” Something a bit rugged — maybe for a camping trip, to be sipped out of a Solo cup — “but it’s not going to give you a fucking headache.” And like everything Carlile does, it wouldn’t just be good — it would do good, too. Because Carlile…

IN A SEASON OF comebacks for live industry events, the annual Libera Awards presented by A2IM — the American Association of Independent Music — will take place June 16 at Webster Hall in New York. The awards also will be livestreamed on YouTube. The event will conclude A2IM’s Indie Week, four days of keynotes, workshops and panels June 13-16 that are being held as a hybrid event, both online and in person. Japanese Breakfast, the four-member band headed by Korean American musician/director/author Michelle Zauner, leads the 2022 nominees with seven nods in categories including record of the year for Jubilee (Dead Oceans). The act also earned Grammy Award nominations this year for best new artist and best alternative music album. “Throughout the pandemic, A2IM continued to make a profound…