Innholdsfortegnelse for July 30, 2022 i Billboard Magazine

LIZZO’S “ABOUT DAMN TIME” clocks in at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 dated July 30. The buoyant disco anthem becomes the Detroit native’s second leader on the chart, after “Truth Hurts” dominated for seven weeks beginning in September 2019. “Time” is from Lizzo’s new album, Special, which concurrently debuts at Nos. 1 and 2 on the Top Album Sales chart and the Billboard 200, respectively. The single tops the Hot 100 with 88.2 million radio airplay audience impressions (up 3%), 14.3 million streams (up 18%) and 14,000 downloads sold (up 29%, aided by discount-pricing in the iTunes Store) in the July 15-21 tracking week, according to Luminate. The track adds a third week at No. 1 on the Radio Songs chart and a second atop Digital Song…

Bad Bunny (above) and Chencho Corleone’s “Me Porto Bonito” rises to No. 1 on Streaming Songs, becoming the first all-Spanish-language leader in the chart’s nineyear history. “Bonito” rises to the top slot with 21.1 million official U.S. streams in the week ending July 21, according to Luminate. The song marks both Bad Bunny’s and Chencho Corleone’s first No. 1 on the chart. Previously, Bad Bunny had risen as high as No. 2 on three separate occasions: alongside Cardi B and J Balvin on “I Like It” (2018), with Jhay Cortez on “Dákiti” (2020) and as a solo act on “Yonaguni” (2021). The only other largely Spanish-language No. 1 on Streaming Songs came from Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, whose “Despacito,” featuring Justin Bieber, led for 16 weeks in 2017…

IN MARCH, TikTok launched SoundOn, a distribution and marketing service. TikTok’s global head of music, Ole Obermann, said the aim was to ensure that “every aspiring musician in the world” wants to start their music career on TikTok. Music distribution is one of the industry’s recent gold rushes, and streaming platforms are among the companies that have taken an interest in the space. Spotify for Artists launched in September 2018 (though it was discontinued the following July). SoundCloud started offering premium users distribution in 2019. This year, Tencent expanded its Tencent Musician Platform into an initiative dubbed One-Click for All, which allows artists to distribute their music to more than 150 platforms. Executives at longtime distributors, speaking on the condition of anonymity, view these new entrants with a shrug.…

THOUGH HE HAD been on the front lines of creating a fairer system for digital music licensing since the CD era, in 2000 Keith Bernstein took a job at Napster. “I was not a fan of what they were doing,” he says. “I thought they should get sued until they were out of business.” But the file-trading service wanted to rework itself as a properly licensed music provider and heard of a program Bernstein had developed to track digital sales. It was software he had created because he understood early on, while working for A&M and then Universal Music Group, the potential of digital to cannibalize the music business. So Bernstein spent two years flying from Los Angeles to Silicon Valley every day, determined to build a new Napster…

Em Beihold Beihold, 23, cracked the top 20 on the Hot 100 with “Numb Little Bug.” She received attention on TikTok for her songs “City of Angels” and “Groundhog Day,” which led to her signing with Republic Records in January. Zach Bryan Bryan’s third studio album, American Heartbreak, reached No. 1 on Top Country Albums and No. 5 on the Billboard 200. The album’s fifth single, “Something in the Orange,” climbed to No. 3 on Hot Country Songs. Bryan would be the third male country artist to be nominated in this category in the past five years, following Luke Combs and Jimmie Allen. Dove Cameron The Grammy screening committee may have a lively debate regarding whether Cameron should be considered a new artist, due to her extensive previous work…

Rethink An Old Song We must support organizations that provide access to safe, legal abortion and reproductive health services. This is what I am doing with my rerecorded version of “Sally’s Pigeons” [a song about a lethal back-alley abortion]. “Sally’s Pigeons” was a common story when I was growing up. It is a story we all thought we wouldn’t have to relive. Proceeds from the rerecorded version, as well as other efforts I am working on, will go to the Girls Just Want To Have Fundamental Rights Fund. When I saw the Dobbs draft, my team and I decided to create this fund in order to support organizations that protect safe, legal abortion access and reproductive health, like AbortionFunds.org, and get-out-the-vote efforts, like Vote411.org. —Cyndi Lauper Use Those Air…

Reconnect With Your Community... At a time like this, it is important to remember that we are not alone and have so much more in common than we know. It has always been important to me to serve as an example for women, particularly women of color, in the music industry. This time has made me even more resolved to lean into and support my community, whether that be on an individual level by being a mentor, currently serving in the 2022 Universal Music Group Black Label Uplift mentorship program or on a larger scale by finding ways to volunteer with music and female-led organizations like She Is the Music. —Erica M. Paul vp/head of digital marketing, Island Records We are preparing a safe-space session now in response to…

Sing Your Truth A simple but effective way to help is to talk, write, sing and create about abortion experiences. Humanize and destigmatize the word and the process. Share powerful stories, everyday stories, our own stories and experiences about abortion. So it can become something we can be open and talk about without fear or shame. —Alicia Keys Share Your Story Being vulnerable and sharing your story is powerful. As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, coming out of the closet created a new connection to the community around me and helped show LGBTQ+ kids that life does get better when you are authentically you. We all know someone who has had an abortion, we just might not know who specifically has had one, the reasons they made the…

IT WAS A SWELTERING DAY in Washington, D.C., and George Johnson was running late for an appointment at the James Madison Memorial Building, the massive, bright-white marble box that is part of the Library of Congress. Inside, a high-priced lawyer for Pandora, impatient to move on with a 2016 hearing to set royalty rates for webcasting recorded music, suggested that the three-judge Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) simply call the next expert witness. But the judges decided to wait just a little longer. Finally, an hour after his scheduled time, Johnson, now 55, burst into the room, drenched in sweat and wearing a “Still Pissed at Yoko” T-shirt. (He was out of suits, and his Metro had stalled.) “It looked like he’d just run a marathon,” remembers Chris Harrison, then…

IT HAS BEEN THREE LONG YEARS, but Ed Sheeran is back atop Billboard’s monthly Top Tours chart with a $60 million haul across 12 shows in June. According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, his Mathematics Tour grossed $63.8 million and sold 750,000 tickets throughout the month. After playing to a number of smaller-capacity crowds in late March and early April, Sheeran switched to stadiums across Ireland and the United Kingdom in late April and is up to an average of $4.8 million and 57,000 tickets each night. That’s up 8% and 10%, respectively, from the figures of his 2019 European leg of his record-breaking Divide tour. Sheeran’s run is one of seven European arena/stadium treks to rank in the top 10 tours in June. He’s followed by Elton…

IT WAS THE SPRING OF 2021, and Cory Andersen wasn’t sure what he was still doing in Los Angeles. The pandemic had brought the city’s social scene to a standstill, and paying rent for his West Hollywood apartment didn’t make sense when his talent management company, Prysm, went fully remote. So in March 2021, Andersen packed his things and moved 2,300 miles across the country to Miami. He wasn’t the only one. When the pandemic untethered many music industry workers from their offices — and from the industry’s hubs of New York and L.A. — Miami and South Florida’s tri-county area (Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach) became a major destination. Since the spring of 2020, music executives from across genres have relocated to Miami and the tricounty area, finding, they…

THE CONCERT INDUSTRY is officially in recovery mode, but not everyone is experiencing a sustained rebound. While data from Live Nation shows that the record year predicted by CEO Michael Rapino has materialized, many independent promoters in the concert business are sharing anecdotal evidence that sales are beginning to soften and costs are continuing to rise. Despite these persistent fears about oversaturation, high ticket prices and inflation pressure on consumers, pent-up demand from the pandemic has continued to propel consumer spending. As of March 31, more than 70 million tickets were sold for shows in 2022, which is up 36% compared with the same point in 2019, according to Live Nation. Moreover, the number of shows on the books as of late April, when the last Live Nation earnings…

Bad Bunny Bad Bunny has earned an album of the year nod two years in a row: in 2021 for El Último Tour del Mundo and in 2020 for both YHLQMDLG and Oasis (his joint release with J Balvin). It’s a feat matched only by Spanish star Alejandro Sanz, who won in 2001 and 2002 with El Alma Al Aire and MTV Unplugged, respectively. Unlike Sanz, Bad Bunny is yet to win in a Big Four category, but if he does score a nomination for Un Verano Sin Ti, he’ll become the first artist to get three album of the year nods in a row. The artist has also taken home four Latin Grammys across other categories. Bizarrap Argentine producer Bizarrap was a quadruple threat in 2021, scoring nods…

I was raised by a single mom in a small, economically distressed town in Pennsylvania. After my father died when I was 3, I watched my mother struggle to build a new career in an America where a woman couldn’t get a mortgage or even a credit card in her own name until 1974. I knew I wanted to wait to become a parent until I had gotten an education and built my career. For me, becoming a mom at 40 was the right choice. Many women I know chose different paths. The point is, for women of my generation and every generation that came of age since 1973, it has been our choice. You can’t plan an education, a career, a life without planning your family. In the…

As a terrified 18-year-old in 1965, I went through a botched abortion on top of a washing machine in Tijuana, Mexico. I ended up, still pregnant and hemorrhaging, in a San Diego hospital where the [dilation and curettage] actually took place. When I woke up, there were two police officers at my bedside taking information and charging me as a criminal. When Roe v. Wade passed in 1973, I thought it meant that no other girl would have to live through that nightmare. Today, after 50 years of women and girls having the right to our own reproductive health and freedom, forces of misogyny, ignorance and domination are taking control, and we’ve got to work together to defeat them. The Supreme Court majority believes in jurisprudence from the Middle…

As a woman born of an East Asian minority community in the United States (I’m Korean American), sexual and reproductive health was never talked about. All of us second-generation kids found out about sexual health through school, friends, the internet — you name it, but definitely not our parents. However, underneath the outwardly conservative and understated culture is a real deeply rooted sense of practicality and family. Our parents came to America from poverty-stricken countries, sometimes with upwards of eight to 10 siblings. They wanted better for their families. They worked harder and planned better. Behind closed doors are many aunts, nieces, cousins and friends that have had to make the tough decision to choose the path of abortion in order to dutifully care for their family and themselves.…

I hate to circle the narrative of race with a ruling that ultimately affects all women, femmes and gender-expansive human beings’ access to abortion care services. However, I can’t seem to shake the disparities that overwhelmingly place Black women at the top in maternal complications by death; according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, per 100,000 live births, Black women make up 41% of all pregnancy-related deaths, with deaths among American Native and Alaskan Native women closely alongside at 30% and white women at 13%. The National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda reports that although Black women only make up 13% of the U.S. population, we make up 38% of all U.S. abortions. Its 2021 policy agenda also informs that Black women are more likely to lack…

FESTIVALS HAVE TRANSFORMED the live-music business and become a vital revenue stream for the industry, reshaping live entertainment into an economic engine, and even occasionally challenging humanity to live by its own best principles in a way that celebrates both the individual and the power of the masses. Like other great art forms, festivals evolve by building upon the past — beginning with the idealism and counterculture movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s through events like Woodstock and Glastonbury, to the changing cultural landscape of the 1990s, when events like Lollapalooza, Warped Tour and the Free Tibet concert series served as a bridge to today’s biggest names. Ranking the festivals that have come to dominate today’s landscape will undoubtedly generate debate. Ten people could attend the same…

With his newest solo studio release, Gemini Rights, Steve Lacy (above) debuts with his first No. 1 entry on the Top Rock & Alternative Albums chart — as well as on the individual Top Rock Albums and Top Alternative Albums rankings. Additionally, it enters at No. 2 on Top R&B Albums, No. 3 on Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums and No. 7 on the all-genre Billboard 200, all of which are good for career bests. In the week ending July 21, Gemini Rights, released July 15, earned 34,000 equivalent album units in the United States, according to Luminate. Nearly the entirety of its sum was the product of streaming equivalent units. Though the genre-bending project is Lacy’s first album in three years — he released Apollo XXI in May 2019 —…

HALFWAY THROUGH THE YEAR, it’s still an Encanto world, but it wouldn’t be a summer without Bad Bunny, whose Un Verano Sin Ti is the biggest album released in 2022 to date and No. 2 overall. Bad Bunny helped lead the charge as Sony Music Entertainment grew its market share at the midpoint of 2022 with the three biggest albums of the second quarter: Un Verano Sin Ti (on the independent Rimas and distributed by Sony-owned The Orchard), Harry Styles’ Harry’s House (Columbia) and Future’s I Never Liked You (Epic). Sony’s market share is up 0.66% year over year to 26.34% at the midway point of 2022. Warner Music Group (up 0.08% to 16.26%) and the collective indies sector (up 0.56% to 20.15%) also grew thanks to significant gains…

GOIÂNIA, BRAZIL — For his first show in Brazil since early 2020, promoter-manager Marcos “Marquinhos” Araújo went big. Fifty-six thousand people attended the second BBQ Mix festival on July 3 to hear 10 acts, most performing sertanejo — the 10-string-guitar-driven country music of Brazil that remains the nation’s most popular genre — and to eat beef. There was plenty of the latter, 52,000 servings, which more than doubled the Guinness World Record for the most barbecued beef served in eight hours that was set at the first BBQ Mix two years ago. Araújo is one of Brazil’s most influential music entrepreneurs, as well as one of its most inventive. He founded the Villa Mix festival over a decade ago, expanding it from a single event to 27 cities at…

OVER THE PAST decade, only one video-game soundtrack, for the 2012 title Journey, has received a Grammy nod, for best score soundtrack for visual media. That number could increase fivefold this year thanks to the addition of a new category: best score soundtrack for video games and other interactive media. While video-game scores may not be as mainstream as those of TV and film, renowned composers like Hans Zimmer and Michael Giacchino have validated the relevance and importance of video-game music, contributing scores for popular franchises like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. “People have come to realize that game music is serious music,” says Brian Schmidt, president of the Game Audio Network Guild. “Modern video games have scores that, in addition to serving as the emotional foundation…

Adele “Easy On Me” This tender piano ballad will almost certainly lead to Adele’s fourth nomination in this category, following nods for “Chasing Pavements,” “Rolling in the Deep” and “Hello.” “Easy on Me” topped the Hot 100 for 10 weeks, one of only two singles to stay on top that long in this eligibility period. Becky G Featuring Karol G “MAMIII” This would be the first all-Latin collaboration to be nominated. It would also be the third all-female pairing to get the nod in as many years, following Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage” (featuring Beyoncé) and Doja Cat’s “Kiss Me More” (featuring SZA). Hot 100 peak: No. 15 Beyoncé “Break My Soul” This dance smash would be Beyoncé’s eighth single to be nominated in this category, which would set a…

Eslabon Armado Siblings Pedro and Brian Tovar began making their sad sierreño tunes out of their garage in their early teens before their 2020 debut album entered the top 10 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart. Since then, Eslabon Armado has placed three albums at No. 1 on the Regional Mexican Albums chart and made history in May when its latest release, Nostalgia, became the first regional Mexican album to debut in the top 10 of the Billboard 200. Carin León After gaining traction with his live YouTube performances during the pandemic, León scored a No. 1 on Billboard’s Regional Mexican Airplay chart last September with “El Tóxico” alongside Grupo Firme. Five top 10 hits later, including another No. 1, he has gained fans across multiple countries thanks to…

I’ve put out two benefit tracks in the last couple of weeks. I wrote “Disorders” with [Pearl Jam’s] Stone Gossard, and we made it a benefit for the National Network of Abortion Funds. The lyrics are very much about the psychological heaviness of watching my reproductive freedom being taken but also everything from the [appointment of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh] to the hearings for [Supreme Court] Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — listening to these legal proceedings where I end up feeling physically ill from the experience and various traumas are triggered. And then there’s this other track I worked on with MILCK and Autumn Rowe and this producer BIIANCO called “We Won’t Go Back.” The day after the decision was leaked, there was this spontaneous demonstration outside the…

The overturning of Roe v. Wade has been a rallying cry across the country to get back to organizing as much effective opposition as we can. How exactly those of us in our music industry can have the biggest impact is up to each of us, to do the work to research, discuss and decide what feels like the right path to giving your support, using our platforms to educate and motivate others. As a touring musician, I’ve spent a lot of my career integrating my activism into the fans’ concert experience to raise both funds and awareness for causes I care about. Back in 1991 and 1992, reproductive rights were again being threatened, and together with Tom Campbell, a pioneer of music industry activism, and his Guacamole Fund,…

In one fell swoop, the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade denies more than 160 million women their constitutional right over their own bodies and jeopardizes their access to essential reproductive health care services. And, according to one of the court’s written opinions, puts countless other rights at risk — from our right to contraception to same-sex intimacy and marriage. As Americans we have the power to effect change, and it’s based in our power to vote. If we want government to reflect our best interests, we need to elect people at every level — local, state and federal — who will fight for us and our rights. That includes ensuring every woman’s access to reproductive health care services, as well as other essential issues like education…

ON A CLEAR DAY IN Manhattan, the rooftop of Snap Inc.’s Midtown offices offers an excellent view — especially of the giant purple robot and friendly-looking hot dog that are waving from behind skyscrapers. And no — no one here is on drugs. The characters, which can only be seen when looking at the skyline through Snapchat, seem hilariously out of place. But company executives hope they will look right at home at Lollapalooza Chicago, which runs July 28-31. Ideally, the festival’s 100,000 attendees will make them so by incorporating these characters into their photos and videos that can only be created at the show in Grant Park. Technology showing things on a screen that aren’t there in real life is augmented reality, an area of innovation that Snapchat…