Billboard Magazine November 19, 2022

DRAKE AND 21 SAVAGE’S collaborative album, Her Loss, debuts at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 (dated Nov. 19) with the year’s biggest week for an R&B/hip-hop set and the fourth-largest streaming week ever for any album. It starts with 404,000 equivalent album units earned in the United States in the week ending Nov. 10, according to Luminate. Streaming drove the bulk of the numbers, compiling 513.6 million on-demand official streams of its 16 tracks. Her Loss boasts the biggest week for an R&B/hip-hop release since Drake’s own Certified Lover Boy bounded in with 613,000 units atop the chart dated Sept. 18, 2021. The new album is Drake’s 12th Billboard 200 No. 1 and 21 Savage’s third. Drake now has the third-most leaders, after The Beatles (19) and Jay-Z…

ASK MUSIC BUSINESS EXECUTIVES TO characterize their relationship with TikTok and the response is typically a variation of, “It’s complicated,” as one major-label executive puts it. As the short-form video streaming platform continues to dominate pop culture — last September, it claimed 1 billion monthly active users globally, a figure that has surely ballooned in the 13 months since — it has continued to draw the ire of the music industry for its low payouts to rights holders, even as labels, managers and publishers increasingly rely on the platform to market singles and break artists. That relationship will almost certainly become more convoluted now that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has signaled, rather cryptically, an intention to dive headfirst into the music streaming world that is currently dominated by Spotify,…

BILLBOARD ASKED CORRESPONDENTS in the three countries where Resso already operates — Brazil, India and Indonesia — to test-drive the app. The platform’s biggest difference from Spotify and other major music streaming services is its level of interactivity. Users can comment on a song and share it on social media including “lyric quotes” (with the ability to choose specific lines). They can also discover other people’s profiles through the comment section or from the list of those who liked the songs. User profiles have a picture, an “about me” and a cover image that can be personalized. It also displays a user’s music preferences, playlists, following and followers, and on Resso, users can follow and send messages to one another. LYRIC INTEGRATION By clicking “lyric feedback,” users can flag…

LAST YEAR, MILANA RABKIN LEWIS, co-founder and CEO of distribution company and payment platform Stem, was among those who read a series of frustrated tweets from rapper Meek Mill. “I haven’t got paid from music, and I don’t know how much labels make off of me!” Mill wrote. “How much have you spent on me as an artist? How much have you made off me as an artist?” “Why can’t he know that?” Rabkin Lewis asks. The problem has frustrated her since she was an agent at UTA and saw “just how messy the whole process” of royalty accounting was. “We were working with major artists who realized they had no visibility into when they were going to get paid and how unrecouped they were,” she recalls. Part of…

IN EARLY OCTOBER, Lil Yachty uploaded the 83-second track “Poland” to SoundCloud along with a grumpy message: “STOP LEAKING MY SHIT.” “Poland” consists of two keening hooks and some slack rhymes; a veteran publishing executive calls it “almost a tweet” more than a song. Either way, it’s a hit — it reached No. 40 on the Billboard Hot 100 — and it’s indicative of a larger trend: The average length of popular songs has been shrinking steadily for years. “Everyone’s aware of it; it’s a reaction to the culture of sound bites that we moved toward,” says Vincent “Tuff” Morgan, vp of A&R at independent publisher peermusic. “I have producers in the studio this week just going through and making songs shorter.” “Poland” isn’t the shortest Hot 100 hit;…

FOR THE SECOND CONSECUTIVE QUARTER, Sony Music Publishing and Universal Music Publishing Group split the top honors on the publisher rankings. Sony topped the Top Radio Airplay chart in the third quarter with a lead over No. 2 UMPG of more than seven percentage points, while the reverse occurred on the Hot 100 Songs chart: UMPG squeaked to a No. 1 finish, surpassing Sony by close to one percentage point. This is each publisher’s second quarter in a row atop those brackets. Harry Styles’ “As It Was” came in at No. 1 on Hot 100 Songs for the second quarter in a row and held steady at No. 2 on Top Radio Airplay for the same period. Lizzo’s “About Damn Time” finished first on Top Radio Airplay and second…