Innholdsfortegnelse for August 6, 2022 i Billboard Magazine

BILLBOARD GLOBAL 200 1 “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 52” Bizarrap & Quevedo LAST WEEK 1 PEAK POSITION 1 WEEKS ON CHART 3 BIZARRAP, FROM A RGENTINA, and Quevedo, from Spain, boast the biggest song in the world for a second consecutive week as “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 52” leads the Billboard Global 200 and Billboard Global Excl. U.S. charts. The collaboration — which marks each artist’s first No. 1 on both lists — drew 92 million streams (up 4%) and sold 1,000 downloads (up 34%) worldwide the July 22-28 tracking week, according to Luminate. While 94% of its streams and 79% of its sales were from outside the United States during that span, the song enters the U.S.-based Billboard Hot 100 at No. 98 on the Aug. 6-dated chart.…

ON THE DAY that Russia invaded Ukraine, Feb. 24, Russian pop-punk dance group Little Big posted the message “No war” on its social media. A few hours later, the act received an unsettling phone call from an anonymous person ordering the band to take it down. “We don’t know if it was a prankster or someone from the government,” says Little Big founder/singer Ilya Prusikin. “Right after those calls, we decided it was better to leave.” Less than a week later, Prusikin and co-vocalist Sonya Tayurskaya made the 6,000-mile trek from their home in Moscow to Los Angeles, where they have been living ever since. “We love our country. We have our families there. My kid is there,” says Prusikin, who formed the four-piece band in St. Petersburg in…

SIR NEVER INTENDED on becoming an R&B star: Although the 35-year-old singer was born in Inglewood, Calif., into a musical family (his brothers are artists D Smoke and Davion), he worked full-time at LA Fitness, only taking a chance on music after getting married at 22. “I started to test the waters, and the shit went crazy,” he says. Since his last album, Chasing Summer, arrived in 2019, life has provided its fair share of tests — from the birth of his first child to relationship struggles with his longtime partner and battling drug addiction — all experiences that the Top Dawg Entertainment (TDE) signee unpacks on his fourth, as-yet-untitled full-length, out this fall. As he puts it: “During a lot of what was the worst for me, I…

AN 11 PERCENTAGE-POINT surge by Universal Music Publishing Group resulted in a split decision for the top honors in Billboard’s second-quarter 2022 publisher rankings, while Atlanta rapper Latto’s “Big Energy” and Harry Styles’ “As It Was” took the No. 1 spots on the Top Radio Airplay and Hot 100 Songs publishers charts, respectively. For the third time since Billboard began ranking the publishers of the top Hot 100 songs in 2019, UMPG finished first, with a whopping 31.25% market share, up from 20.40% in the first quarter of the year. That growth spurt was fueled by the publisher’s song count ballooning quarter to quarter from 46 to 67 songs. UMPG last topped the Hot 100 publisher rankings in the first quarter of 2020 and, before that, in the second…

IN 2020 the Black Promoters Collective came together, beginning with weekly phone calls to discuss COVID-19’s impact on touring, especially for Black and independent promoters. After the killing of George Floyd that May, the BPC’s mission took on even more urgency as the group sought to prove that its more than 100 years of collective experience and success should not be disregarded and ignored by agents, artists and venues. Two years later, the BPC is making good on its pledge. During the first quarter of 2022, the collective helmed New Edition’s 30-city The Culture Tour with Charlie Wilson and Jodeci, Maxwell’s 25-city The Night Tour with Anthony Hamilton and Joe, as well as six dates for Patti LaBelle. According to Billboard Boxscore figures, together those three runs grossed over…

TWO YEARS A GO, Tom Cruise asked Ryan Tedder a simple question over Zoom: “What do you hear?” Having been connected through a mutual collaborator at Paramount, the actor was showing the veteran producer and OneRepublic frontman a rough cut of the dogfight football scene from Top Gun: Maverick, and Tedder could imagine quite the sonic blend. “I said, ‘I hear a little Beach Boys… Gorillaz… and this kind of whistle thing,’” Tedder recalls. Taking cues from those references, as well as other acts like Foster the People, Tedder and his bandmate Brent Kutzle turned the whistling melody in his head into OneRepublic’s latest single, “I Ain’t Worried.” The shuffling groove — which appears halfway through the blockbuster sequel that was 36 years in the making and premiered in…

“I WAS JUST THINKING TO MY SELF, ‘Jesus Christ, oh my goodness. I need to retire soon,’” says Willow. “This is crazy.” Very few artists could credibly declare that at the age of 21, but it’s understandable why Willow would consider calling it a day. A handful of dates into her supporting role on Machine Gun Kelly’s Mainstream Sellout tour, she’s sprawled out on an old leather couch in Los Angeles, theorizing about when she’ll get a break — sometime after the 20 dates with MGK end in August, she figures, and certainly not until after she has promoted coping mechanism, her next album, due this fall on Roc Nation. The last four years have been nonstop for Willow. In 2019, she released a self-titled psychedelic R&B album, followed…

IN ONLY ITS SECOND YEAR of existence, Music Tectonics — the annual industry conference that explores the convergence of music and technology — was forced to shift to a completely online event as the pandemic took hold in the United States. But it wasn’t the first time that organizers’ best laid plans had been undercut by an act of nature. “You know, it’s funny. By the time the pandemic had arrived, we already had to pivot because that first year [in 2019] was the year of the brush fires in [Los Angeles], where our conference was supposed to be held,” says Music Tectonics founder/director Dmitri Vietze, who also serves as founder/CEO of music tech PR firm Rock Paper Scissors. “We had to move our conference within 24 hours. So,…