Innholdsfortegnelse for November 19, 2022 i Billboard Magazine

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…

TOKYO — This summer, the Japanese entertainment company Avex launched the seven-member girl group XG on a weekly music TV show — in South Korea, instead of Japan. The move was strategic. Rather than promote the group, which was five years in the making, at home, Avex leveraged Korea’s K-pop-rich media market to make an international splash. It’s a prime example of the newest chapter in K-pop’s globalization: non-Korean acts tapping into the training, promotion, styles and strategies that made the genre an international success. Korean networks’ many music programs showcase dozens of bands and live performances, which are readily available on YouTube — a key factor in K-pop’s international expansion, according to industry experts. In stark contrast, Japanese TV networks have been slow to embrace YouTube because sharing…

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AS JOB APPLICATIONS go, Tim Hinshaw’s wasn’t quite traditional. While angling for a position in the hip-hop & R&B division of Amazon Music in 2018, Hinshaw recruited a few old friends to record themselves hyping him up. “Oh, hey. This is Donald Glover/Childish Gambino saying you should probably hire Tim,” the multihyphenate star says, winking at the camera. Cut to Anderson. Paak: “I’m telling you, he’s the one. You need him on your squad.” “Tim is a good dude, and he knows what he’s doing!” Scarface adds before noting that he himself is an Amazon Prime member. The video closes with the late Mac Miller playing a white grand piano, then turning to the camera to implore: “Hire Tim. I know I would.” Hinshaw edited the clips together, then…

Sixty-six years ago, Jerry Lee Lewis, who died Oct. 28 at the age of 87, shook America’s nerves and rattled its brains. The Dec. 22, 1956, issue of Billboard savored his debut single, “Crazy Arms,” as a “flavor-packed disk,” and the magazine went on to track the rise of “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On” and “Great Balls of Fire,” which scored on the country, R&B and pop charts all at once. And as Elvis Presley turned his attention to Hollywood and then to the U.S. Army, Lewis seemed poised to vie for The King’s throne until a British journalist learned that the girl accompanying him on his U.K. tour was his third wife — as well as his 13-year-old cousin. ‘BALLS’-OUT STYLE Lewis raised hair as well as…

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,…

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;…

ATRAMPOLINE PARK in Austin isn’t the first place you’d expect to see hundreds of SZA fans. Yet on a Friday night in October, there they were — lined up, excitedly chanting the lyrics to “The Weekend” from the singer-songwriter’s 2017 debut album, Ctrl. And in fact, it wasn’t a completely unexpected sight: SZA had just wrapped her headlining set at the Austin City Limits festival and sent an open invite on Twitter to “randomly jump w me” till 2 a.m. The former competitive gymnast flipped into the foam pit with the utmost joy, just like her fans. Altitude Trampoline Park, which bills itself as the “world’s best trampoline park,” also might not be where you’d expect to hear a preview of what RCA Records chairman/CEO Peter Edge calls “one…

THIS PAST FEBRUARY, the rising star Blxst got an unexpected text: Anthony Saleh, Kendrick Lamar’s manager, wanted to connect him with his client — and soon enough, the two artists were on FaceTime. “[Kendrick] was like, ‘Yo, I respect what you got going on. I’m a fan of your last project. I want you to be a part of my album,’” Blxst recalls. He had no idea if what he recorded would end up on the album — or when the album would even arrive. “This album is never finna come out. He ain’t dropped a project in four years,” Blxst remembers thinking at the time, with a laugh. Lamar sent him an instrumental and told Blxst to “do whatever you want to it,” he says. “He came with…

SINCE THE ACADEMY Awards handed out their first statuettes for best original song in 1935, almost two-thirds of the winners have been writing duos, including such legendary twosomes as Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. Now, 87 years after composer Con Conrad and Herb Magidson won the inaugural trophies for penning “The Continental” from the 1934 film The Gay Divorcee, some observers say the Oscars need to update their rules to better reflect how songs are now created. Current academy rules favor fewer songwriters at a time when the number of writers per song is increasing. So far this year, the average number of songwriters credited on a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 is 6.4, compared with 4.77 over…

IN 2011, EBONIE WARD was preparing for the grand opening of her boutique, Fly Kix ATL, a men’s clothing store in Atlanta’s Castleberry Hill district that would soon become a stomping ground for high-fashion sneaker heads and up-and-coming rappers such as Kendrick Lamar and Nipsey Hussle. She knew she needed the perfect artist for the launch, so she reached out to a close friend of a rapper she had recently seen at a local showcase. The burgeoning artist, Future, had no Billboard Hot 100 hits to his name — just a commanding, charismatic presence that pierced her core the first time she saw him onstage. Future accepted the offer and performed at the grand opening, where he also met Ward for the first time and was immediately intrigued by…

EARLIER IN NOVEMBER, Heather Lowery announced that Femme It Forward, the female-led music and entertainment platform that she founded, was holding its first Give Her FlowHERS Awards gala. The event, held Nov. 11 in Los Angeles, was conceived as a fundraiser for Femme It Forward’s mentorship program, Next Gem Femme. The gala “is a realization of the work we do year-round with Femme It Forward,” Lowery says, “to champion, empower and celebrate the women who are pushing our culture forward every day.” First-time special awards honorees, announced before the gala, include breakthrough hip-hop star Latto (Big Femme Energy Award); actress, social media personality and entrepreneur Tabitha Brown (Self-Love Award); songwriter-artist Jozzy (Pen It Forward Award); R&B singer-songwriter Muni Long (Bloom Award); Lashon Jones, mother of rapper Lil Baby (Moms…