Innholdsfortegnelse for October 8, 2022 i Billboard Magazine

THREE QUARTERS into 2022, Bad Bunny continues to dominate the U.S. music landscape, with Un Verano Sin Ti (The Orchard) comfortably the biggest album of the year so far and the only one to reach the 2 million mark in equivalent album units, according to Luminate. It and the next three top-performing albums released this year — Harry Styles’ Harry’s House (Columbia), Future’s I Never Liked You (Epic) and Lil Durk’s 7220 (Alamo) — helped Sony Music Entertainment grow its third-quarter market share to 26.68%, shaving away some of rival Universal Music Group’s double-digit dominance. UMG’s 37.16% third-quarter finish, down from 37.25% last quarter, was aided by the continued success of 2021 albums by Morgan Wallen, The Weeknd, Olivia Rodrigo, Drake and the cast of Encanto, all of which…

SEOUL — Will BTS take a forced break for military service? That question has vexed many in the music world for over two years as some of the seven members of the K-pop group come of military age. Even before BTS announced in June it was taking a break from group activities to focus on solo projects, sentiment inside South Korea’s government seemed to be building for the boy band to become the first K-pop group to receive a special exemption to mandatory military service, which is required of all able-bodied Korean men ages 18-28. In recent months, the band’s soft power has surged to the forefront of discussions in Korea, the world’s seventh-largest music market. So much so that Defense Minister Lee Jong-sup said during a parliamentary hearing…

I THINK WE NEED a bigger table,” says Brad Pitt with a proud grin. It’s a rare rainy day in Provence, France, and for the first time, the superstar is about to sit down to a family-style lunch at the newly rebuilt Miraval Studios. An elevated-rustic assortment of tarts, salads, fresh cheese and bread spread out before him. He just needs to find a chair. Tucked away within Château Miraval’s 2,200 acres — grounds so vast and lush that getting lost driving through them would be easy, but not so bad — Miraval Studios is as private and exquisite a place as any music (or music history) buff could imagine. And yet, it has sat dormant for nearly two decades. Today, Pitt relays how eager he has been to…

ON THE TINY ISLAND of Giske off the northwest coast of Norway, in a region best known for its fishing industry, sits a studio that’s one of the most in-demand in Europe — despite being (almost) in the middle of nowhere. Since opening in 2009, Ocean Sound has become a destination for acts including Arcade Fire, Swedish House Mafia, Sampha, Flume, a-ha, Madeon and Kygo, who come in search of the tranquil mindset that working amid crashing waves, fishing boats, snow-capped mountains and the glowing Northern Lights can inspire. “Even when you don’t look out the window because you’re working intense days deep in the computer or your instrument, things are happening around you in a slow, nice way that actually triggers something in your brain,” says studio manager…

PLENTY OF DESTINATION STUDIOS have cushy accommodations for visiting artists. But it’s a fair bet that only Space Mountain Studios, located in the hills of Albuñuelas in southern Spain, has “Hobbit rooms” inspired by the residences of J.R.R. Tolkien’s pastoral-dwelling Lord of the Rings characters. The cave-like rooms, with round walls and windows, also have “a fair bit of Roger Dean inspiration, the artist who did all the Yes album covers,” says producer and studio owner Youth (real name: Martin Glover), who co-founded British band Killing Joke and has worked with acts including Paul McCartney and The Verve. Dean, he adds, “was also an architect, and some of his architectural designs have played a good influence in the design.” Middle-earth is just one of the many inspirations for Space…

IN JUNE, PORTUGUESE singer-songwriter and 2022 Eurovision finalist MARO headed to the lush green mountains of Nova Lima, Brazil, to record at Sonastério, one of the country’s largest studio retreats. She only spent four days there, but she hasn’t stopped thinking about returning since. “I could have spent a whole month at Sonastério,” she says. “As we drove into the mountains toward the studio, it seemed like we were leaving our worries behind. It felt therapeutic.” Located a half hour from Belo Horizonte, the capital of the southeastern Minas Gerais state, Sonastério is nowhere near the metropolises of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, where Brazilian artists tend to congregate. But the studio’s founder and majority partner, Bruno Barros, decided to build it when he was quite far from…

MORE THAN 40 YEARS AGO, when Robin Crow was a young artist signed to RCA, he visited Caribou Ranch, producer James William Guercio’s barn-turned-studio in the Colorado Rockies where Elton John, Chicago and Dan Fogelberg recorded now-classic albums in the 1970s. “ ‘Well, this is heaven,’ ” Crow recalls thinking at the time. His career as an instrumental guitarist never took off — and he never got to record at Caribou, which was damaged in a fire in 1985 — but the studio left a lasting impression on Crow. It was exactly what he had in mind when, in 1993, he opened Dark Horse Recording in Franklin, Tenn. — charging $134,000 on multiple credit cards to foot the bill. THE INSPIRATION Like Caribou, Dark Horse is in the woods;…

STEPS AWAY FROM THE COAST of the Atlantic Ocean in New Providence, Bahamas, there’s a striking structure that very much resembles the waves surrounding it — a white edifice by starchitect Bjarke Ingels, set on the 600-acre grounds of a luxury resort community. It could well be the tropical hideout of a star like Drake, or Mariah Carey, or Sting. But while all of those artists have inhabited it at some point, this isn’t any of their mansions away from home: It’s Sanctuary Studios, where they have all recorded. The 19 narrow windows on the facade let the Caribbean sunlight into a Finnish oak-paneled live room, designed with the help of acousticians from U.K.-based White Mark to achieve sound quality as pristine as the scenery outside. “You have the…

“SHAKING UP THE ROUTINE can lead to great creativity,” says Peter Coquillard, head of international at the management company Milk & Honey. As part of his enviable roles there and at his own firm, The Invitational Group, Coquillard helps songwriters and artists do just that by setting up trips for them to make music together in far-flung locations. Industry folks know these types of excursions as songwriting camps, and while some involve camping out in urban centers like Los Angeles, Coquillard often sends his teams to far more unexpected locales — say, on an all-expenses-paid trip to make songs in a converted Transylvanian castle, including a private dinner at the location that inspired Dracula (as Coquillard did this past year). The idea that creatives can thrive — and be…

ONLY ONE OF THE recording sessions for British hard-rock band Enter Shikari’s eight albums was interrupted by a monsoon. “The rain was falling the size of shotgun shells,” singer Rou Reynolds recalls of recording 2012’s A Flash Flood of Colour. “After that, all the bugs come out. One of us made the mistake of leaving the doors open to the kitchen area, and it was full of dragonflies.” That’s just another day at Karma Studios. In the 12 years since former Abbey Road Studios producer and Sony executive Chris Craker opened Karma on a two-acre plot in the Thai fishing village of Bang Saray, acts including Enter Shikari, Jessie J, Bullet for My Valentine and The Libertines have recorded there. It’s a place where someone can schedule an ice…

A best new artist nod was “a goal from the beginning” for the label team surrounding Muni Long, says Def Jam executive vp LaTrice Burnette. A veteran songwriter whose swooning R&B ballad “Hrs and Hrs” hit the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100 in January, the 34-year-old artist has followed a textbook path to a nomination: She finalized her Def Jam deal in March, promptly performed at the pre-Grammys Black Music Collective ceremony the following month to showcase her vocal skills to industry players and delivered her Def Jam debut, Public Displays of Affection: The Album, on Sept. 23 — a week before the 2023 Grammys eligibility deadline. “First and foremost, we wanted to make sure Muni was happy with the body of work,” says Burnette. But also,…

WHEN BILLBOARD’S most recent report on top music business schools was published in late April 2020, we optimistically wrote that colleges and universities were “preparing to reopen” that fall. Remote learning, of course, continued throughout the past year due to the persistence of COVID-19 and its variants. So like many students, this report took a “gap year” in 2021, awaiting the return of in-person classes, internships and encounters that fuel the finest educational experiences. Billboard’s top music business schools are chosen based on industry recommendations, alumni information provided by honorees from our multiple power lists, information requested from each school and nearly a decade of reporting on these programs. At a time of cost-consciousness, we have prioritized the inclusion of more affordable public colleges and universities. This is our…

AFTER MOUNTING THE BIGGEST LATIN TOUR in Billboard Boxscore history earlier this year with $117 million for his El Último Tour del Mundo dates, Bad Bunny is now conquering stadiums with his World’s Hottest Tour. It becomes his second chart-topping trek of the year — and third month leading Top Tours, after doing so in February and March — grossing $91.1 million and selling 404,000 tickets throughout August, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore. Bad Bunny amassed the total despite only playing nine shows, averaging $10.1 million and 45,000 tickets per date. While other artists near the top also played to massive crowds at U.S. stadiums, their grosses, though still impressive, range from $5 million to $7 million each night. World’s Hottest Tour, though, went stratospheric, pushing eight…

WITH INVESTORS PLOWING billions of dollars into public music companies, Billboard will now track key stocks with its new Global Music Index, which premieres here and will initially be featured in the weekly newsletter The Ledger sent to Billboard Pro subscribers. The Global Music Index provides a snapshot of the stock performance of 20 companies traded on exchanges in seven countries: the United States, the Netherlands, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Germany, France and China (Hong Kong). It is a market capitalization-weighted index that reflects the relative size of its constituent companies, each of whose market capitalization has been adjusted to remove long-term shareholders such as corporations, private equity firms, corporate executives and directors. What’s left is a more accurate representation of the shares being traded on the markets.…

WHEN THREE of the biggest song-catalog sales were announced in early 2022, the media focused on the astronomical prices. Warner Music Group acquired David Bowie’s publishing for $250 million; Sony Music purchased Bruce Springsteen’s publishing, as well as his master recordings, for $500 million (with the involvement of Eldridge, an investor in Billboard’s parent company, PMRC); and Universal Music Publishing Group paid $360 million for Sting’s song catalog. What didn’t make headlines was the complexity of these deals or pressure faced by a team of partners at the entertainment law office of Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks — led by self-described “point guard” Joe Brenner — to finalize them before the end of 2021. “Some of these clients have very intricate, sophisticated tax structures,” says Brenner, 57, a 30-year…

RIKSMIXNINGSVERKET — better, and more simply, known as RMV Studio — is “an impossible name, also for Swedes,” admits co-owner Ludvig Andersson. But there’s a good reason for its lengthy, official moniker. Ludvig’s father, ABBA’s Benny Andersson, who co-owns the Swedish studio, had wanted to use the name (a suggestion by ABBA’s former engineer, Michael Tretow) for the group’s Polar Studios, but was legally unable to use the word verket, meaning “institution.” “At the time in the ’70s, you weren’t allowed to call anything that wasn’t an actual institution or department that. But in this day and age, they don’t care anymore,” says Ludvig, who helps his dad with myriad aspects of ABBA’s business. Thus, the National Institutional Department of Mixing was born. “It’s a joke,” Ludvig explains, “and…

NESTLED IN A FOREST just outside of Seattle stands a cathedral-like barn with huge windows that allow sunlight to soak the structure’s interior. But Bear Creek Studio stands apart from traditional, stuffier recording spaces in another key way: its atypical business structure. “Because this has been my family’s place, it has a real family vibe to it,” says Ryan Hadlock, whose parents Joe and Manny Hadlock built the studio in 1977. “It’s a home studio that was built the right way.” After purchasing the former “dilapidated” dairy farm on 10 acres in Woodinville, Wash., Joe and Manny, both producers, “built a house here and they’d travel downtown to rent studios and work” on ads and short-film soundtracks, says Ryan, who followed his parents into the world of music production…

SONORAMICA IS A RECORDING STUDIO in Argentina’s Traslasierra Valley, not far from a national park designed to protect the Andean condor population — though looking at photos, it’s hard to imagine even a hardened workaholic getting anything done in such a stunning location. Maybe an artist might prefer to hunker down at Durbuy Music, tucked away in the Belgian Ardennes in a renovated riverside villa. Then again, natural beauty can be a distraction here as well: “If you keep your eyes peeled,” the studio’s website notes, “you may see beavers, deer, squirrels, kingfishers, herons, woodpeckers and many other wonders.” Sonoramica and Durbuy are just two of the more than 175 recording facilities around the world that Miloco Studios either owns or partners with. The company not only operates and…

IN 2015, JAMES SHAW, founder and lead guitarist of the band Metric, was attempting to squeeze recording sessions in during days off on tour. “We booked studios all over,” he recalls, but Guilford Sound in southern Vermont left a lasting impression. “The land is bonkers — rolling hills, something like 400 acres,” Shaw says. “The only person who didn’t enjoy it was the bus driver trying to get the tour bus down that dirt road.” Guilford Sound belongs to Dave Snyder, who left New York in the 2000s in search of a place where — after years spent drumming in the band Ruth Ruth, then turning a Lower East Side rehearsal space into a recording facility and owning additional Manhattan studios “with varying degrees of complexity” — he could…

RANDALL WALLACE was mid-air when he first noticed Glen Tonche, an 85-acre mountaintop property overlooking the Ashokan Reservoir in upstate New York. It was 1998, and he was flying to visit a friend, folk musician Jay Ungar, who ran a fiddle camp in the area. The trip was cut short when Wallace contracted Lyme disease, but his impression of the estate (originally built as a summer home for Pennsylvania magnate Raymond Pitcairn’s family) and its spellbinding surroundings stayed with him. The property, he discovered, was for sale, and he had a “novel idea” of what he could make out of it: “a recording studio with a view.” Wallace — a fashion photographer and also the grandson of former U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace — had little recording studio experience.…

HOW DO YOU KEEP A RECORDING STUDIO in a remote location running for six decades? For Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire, Wales, the secret is animal magnetism. Literally. “Cows, sheep and horses!” exclaims lead Pixies guitarist Joey Santiago of why the alt-rock forefathers always return to a facility located outside a village that’s home to fewer than 200 people. “The laid-back, countryside feel of the studio enables you all to concentrate on the work.” That bucolic quality has attracted icons such as Queen, Rush, Black Sabbath, The Cure, Robert Plant and Coldplay to the recording studio, which brothers Kingsley and Charles Ward opened in the early 1960s — and to this day functions as a working farm. (Yes, cows are milked each morning.) And, over the years, the simple setting…

EVERYTHING’S BIGGER in Texas — including the recording studios. The Sonic Ranch, a sprawling compound in tiny Tornillo, about 40 miles southeast of El Paso and a short car ride from the U.S.-Mexico border, claims to be the “world’s largest residential recording studio,” with five studios and distinct mixing and mastering rooms, 35-odd bedrooms spread throughout several different structures, a pool and a basketball court, all contained within a 3,300-acre working pecan orchard that founder and proprietor Tony Rancich inherited several decades ago. Lush and green under the widest, bluest Texas sky, Sonic Ranch has served as a respite from the frenetic pace of music industry hubs for acts from Jenny Lewis to Portugal. The Man to Midland, which named its 2021 album for the place. It’s not just…

At the now-infamous conclusion of the 2017 Grammys, Adele took the podium to accept the award for album of the year for her blockbuster 25, then devoted a big chunk of her speech to another nominee — Beyoncé, whose Lemonade did not match 25’s historic sales, but whose cultural and artistic impact that year was without peer, particularly to Adele. “I can’t possibly accept this award,” the teary singer-songwriter protested. “My artist of my life is Beyoncé, and this album to me, the Lemonade album, was just so monumental.” Nearly six years later, a sense of déjà vu looms. Adele and Beyoncé will again likely vie for the top prize, as both artists’ long-awaited comebacks arrived during the eligibility period for the 2023 awards: Adele’s 30 last November and…

At the upcoming Grammys, the Recording Academy will debut the best score soundtrack for video games and other interactive media category, expanding its awards opportunities to the music composers in the $200 billion video game industry — a valuation roughly seven times the current music industry’s. “By creating this pathway to recognition specifically for the global gaming/interactive media industry,” academy president Panos A. Panay explains, “it’s our hope that we can connect with and recognize a vast community of composers whose music is equally as important as the art being created for records, film, television and other mediums. More importantly, we hope that a Grammy recognition, bestowed upon by peers, will only accelerate innovation and creative expression in the space.” Here’s a closer look at the scores that are…

Though it may not come as much of a surprise, winners at the Grammy Awards very often experience success on the Billboard charts, too — particularly for trophy recipients reaching the top 10 of both the Billboard 200 albums chart and the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart. Below, Billboard looks at the intersection of critical and commercial achievements over the past decade, and beyond, for chart-based insights into what to potentially expect on music’s biggest night in February 2023. —GARY TRUST 95% Of the 64 album of the year winners, 61 — or 95% — have hit the Billboard 200’s top 10 (two of which did so for the first time following their Grammy victories). Twenty-six in a row did so from 1996 to 2021, the longest streak of…

MUNI LONG’S “HRS & HRS” is giddy and impassioned, a contemporary R&B single built on the sturdy framework of classic soul ballads. Muni Long released the track last year on her own label, Supergiant, and it climbed to No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 at the end of January, giving the singer her first hit and an opportunity to partner with Def Jam. There’s a sense around the music industry right now — from managers to marketers to A&R executives — that stories like Muni Long’s are few and far between in 2022. “It’s a bigger and more level playing field, and everything is getting lost,” says Chris Anokute, who co-manages Muni Long. “Everyone’s an artist, but almost nobody’s breaking.” There are many ways to judge what “breaking”…

FOR THE RECORD … We’re hiring!” reads the lawn sign in front of Nashville’s United Record Pressing, the largest vinyl pressing plant in the United States. With an expansion underway that will bring in 48 new presses — upping the manufacturer’s count to nearly 100 and more than doubling its total output from approximately 40,000 to over 100,000 units of vinyl per day — the need to staff up is crucial. And URP isn’t the only Tennessee plant on the prowl. As the vinyl boom continues — the format generated $570 million in revenue through June 2022 (up 22% year over year), according to the Mid-Year 2022 RIAA Music Revenue Report — pressing plants around the world are not only striving to keep up with demand but planning how…

TWO YEARS AGO, Jay Sweet, executive producer of the Newport Jazz and Folk festivals, was approached by his friend Chad Pike, founder of adventure lodging company Eleven Experience, about putting together a festival on a property the company owned in Haganesvik, Iceland, four hours north of Reykjavík. “Within 10 minutes” of surveying the area, Sweet recalls, it became clear a festival would not be feasible in such a rugged, remote location, where daylight hours vary wildly. (In summer, it receives up to 21 hours of full daylight; in the colder months, as little as five.) But the veteran event producer noticed two dilapidated buildings nearby — one, a former grocery store; the other, an old butcher’s shop — and had a thought: “Maybe you could create a ‘music hang’…

TUCKED INTO THE ROLLING COASTAL HILLS of Exmoor in southwest England, Devon Analogue caters to electronic artists yearning to get out of the club and into nature. Since opening in 2017, the space has hosted acts like Disclosure, Skream, Yaeji, Bicep and Calvin Harris. The lattermost artist brought collaborators including Pharrell Williams, Busta Rhymes, Normani and Tinashe along with him while recording his most recent album, this year’s Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 2, at the studio. “The workflow in there is perfect and really motivated me and [my live engineer Francine Perry] on how we want to build our new studio,” says U.K.-based producer HAAi, who recently spent time working with Devon Analogue’s vast synthesizer collection and taking in views of the area’s expansive fields — and the cows…

OWNER KOSTAS KALIMERIS was still adding the finishing touches to Black Rock Studios when he welcomed his first guest, blues musician Joe Bonamassa, in 2009. Kalimeris had built the space overlooking the Aegean Sea on the Greek island of Santorini with the hope of putting the country on the map of the international recording industry, but he hadn’t had time to take promotional images for it before a friend recommended Bonamassa — a lover of Greece — to come record. “They asked me for photos and I said, ‘I have no photos, just drawings like blueprint plans,’ ” says Kalimeris. “So, I sent [the drawings] and they booked a month.” The next year, Bonamassa’s album, Black Rock, debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s blues chart. The whitewashed residential studio,…

AFTER 10 YEARS OF cramming The National into his Brooklyn garage-turned-studio, band member Aaron Dessner was ready for a change. In 2014, he and his family moved upstate to an 18th century colonial house in the Hudson Valley, complete with an old horse barn. “It’s right by this pond that’s quite long and thin and really beautiful, and I remember thinking, ‘That’s where a studio could be,’ ” recalls Dessner. So he hired architect Erlend Neumann to design a space that felt far removed, not only from that New York garage, but also from any studio he had been in before. “The idea was to create some cross between a barn, a garage and a church,” says Dessner. “Also with the feeling that you would always be looking at…

HANS ZIMMER CAN’T REMOVE HIMSELF from society completely while recording like some artists — after all, he explains, “I always like to be close to where I can get a hold of the great musicians.” But the revered film composer has still managed to build himself an escape at the seven-building Santa Monica, Calif., complex that houses his film scoring company, Remote Control Productions. With walls lined with vintage synthesizers, shelves of old books and even an original by the Austrian expressionist painter Egon Schiele, Zimmer’s surreal inner sanctum is, as he puts it, a place where “your ideas can run free and you can be a little bit naughty and a little bit wicked” — and the perfect setting to score some of the century’s most iconic movies.…

AFTER RECORDING HIS band’s seminal 2010 debut album, InnerSpeaker, at Wave House — an oceanside studio three hours south of Perth, Australia — Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker recalls telling a bandmate: “ ‘If I ever make any money on my music, I’m going to buy this place.’ ” Just in time for the album’s 10th anniversary in 2020, Parker fulfilled his pledge. During lockdown early in the pandemic, the urge to “create my own perfect world in the area I was stuck in” struck him. So he called an acquaintance to inquire about Wave House, where he had also recorded parts of Tame Impala’s third album, 2015’s Currents. “Oh, it’s kind of falling apart,” the acquaintance told him. “Hearing that triggered me,” says Parker. “I knew I needed to…

AS A FREELANCE ENGINEER in the 1990s, Tim Oliver mostly lived between London and Manchester, England, where he played in bands and recorded acts like The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays. But about 15 years ago, he decided to try working farther afield: He rented a room from Peter Gabriel at the iconoclastic artist’s Real World Studios, in the village of Box near the historic city of Bath. Oliver was familiar with the studio’s legend: New Order was among its first clients, and he still kicks himself for missing a party there that “went down in history” during the “heady rave days.” Once he started working at the space, the self-professed “country boy” realized he preferred its vibe, which is now much more peaceful. After its studio manager retired,…

Harry Styles’ 2020 tour, in support of his late-2019 second solo album, Fine Line, was a month from launch when COVID-19 shutdowns began. But even the world going on pause could not keep Styles grounded for long. “He doesn’t sit still well,” says his producer, co-writer and close friend Tom Hull, aka Kid Harpoon. “So he was just like, ‘Guys, I’m not going on tour. Should we go into the studio?’ ” Styles booked time at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La in Malibu, Calif., and invited Hull and writer-producer Tyler Johnson to the sessions. “I was like, ‘Is he insane? We can’t leave our houses!’ ” recalls the affable Hull one late afternoon in New York. Still, the trio showed up and immediately got to work. “Day one, we’re writing a…

As social change has swept the world over the past couple of years — most notably through a widespread reckoning with racial justice following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 — those within the music industry have doubled down on making meaningful change, too. That includes the Recording Academy, which in 2019 began an aggressive push to diversify its membership and, in 2020, created the Black Music Collective and hired its first chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer. In the spirit of those efforts, the academy has created a special merit award recognizing songs with profound influence: best song for social change. “There has been a great interest within our creative community to celebrate songs that have truly impacted our world and to do it in a way…

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