Innholdsfortegnelse for April 1, 2023 i Billboard Magazine

IN MAY 2022, the German Music Industry Association (BVMI) set its sights on “curbing streaming manipulation and streaming fraud.” These issues are “a central concern” for the music business, the organization wrote in a confidential document reviewed by Billboard, due to their “distortion of the chart ranking and/or influencing of royalty payments.” As a result, BVMI issued a call for proposals to “establish a ‘Fraud Detection System.’ ” Related discussions have been taking place around the music industry recently. In January, the French government published what appears to be the first-ever national analysis of streaming fraud. In the United States, the outline of a fraud-mitigation proposal is circulating among several distributors, publishers and streaming platforms, while the annual Music Biz conference in Nashville in May will feature not one…

ON MARCH 4, hundreds of metalheads stormed into Pierce the Veil’s pop-up store in Glendale, Calif., scooping up T-shirts, hoodies and other merchandise. In the process, they helped boost sales for an ostensibly dying product: compact discs. “Kids would look at the display and pick every single one of our records on CD,” says Michele Abreim, the band’s manager. “It definitely felt like CDs were a merch item, not just a means to listen to music.” A relic of the record industry’s pre-Napster boom period thanks to megastars like *NSYNC, Britney Spears and Eminem, U.S. CD sales accounted for $13.2 billion in 2000, their peak year, according to the RIAA. But though the format has been in steady decline throughout the streaming era, retail, manufacturing and management sources say…

AGE 22 LABEL n/a FOUNDATION While interning at a local Eswatini TV station in 2020, Lungelihle Zwane stumbled upon 15-year-old DJ decks, which a DJ who often visited the office then taught her to use. Having grown up on South African house and kwaito acts like Black Coffee, Lebo Mathosa and DJ Kent, Zwane studied the rising amapiano movement — a South African subgenre of house and piano-led jazz — that was hitting clubs right before lockdown. Using it as inspiration, she practiced DJ’ing eight hours a day during the pandemic. “This makes me feel the way I’ve always thought my purpose would make me feel,” she says. “It made me feel whole.” Zwane’s high school friends picked out the stage name Uncle Waffles because, as she reasoned, “nobody’s…

AS LUKE COMBS’ booking agent, WME partner Aaron Tannenbaum, began plotting the European leg of the country star’s massive 2023 world tour, he encountered some promoters, in places like Hamburg, Germany, and Zurich, who were skeptical that a country act would sell tickets in Europe. So he repeated a kind of mantra to them: “You can always count on Luke Combs.” He was right: Combs sold out all nine European dates he booked (and in substantially larger venues than initially planned). But the mantra — a testament not only to Combs’ dependability as a global touring act but to his rock-solid character — has plenty of less glamorous applications, too. Today, Combs, 33, is sitting in his manager’s Nashville office (a memento-filled monument to, well, him) at the beginning…

LAST JULY, FANS FUMED over the high cost of Ticketmaster’s dynamic pricing — the model that responds in real time to consumer demand and can cause prices to skyrocket, especially at on-sale — for Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band’s 2023 tour. Then, in November, Ticketmaster’s presale for Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour sold over 90% of the trek’s inventory — breaking the record for the most tickets sold in a single day by a touring artist — but online traffic stranded millions of infuriated fans in digital queues and caused website outages. Ticketmaster canceled the general on-sale for the remaining inventory, and Swift lambasted the company in a statement: “We asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand, and we were assured they…

MUMBAI, INDIA — India is driving Spotify’s international expansion, vaulting into the top five territories in total users for the platform after just four years of operation in the country. “India is the single market that has contributed the most to our global growth over the last year,” says Gustav Gyllenhammar, Spotify’s vp of markets and subscriber growth. The company’s user count in India has tripled over the last two years, according to Gyllenhammar. Spotify did not provide numbers, but Comscore estimates the platform has about 55 million monthly active users (MAUs) in India, and Spotify is the country’s top audio-streaming service in terms of engagement, with nearly 10 billion tracks streamed in India in January alone, sources close to the company say. Despite this, India is not a…

Mexican pop band RBD, which scored five top 10 hits on the Hot Latin Songs chart in the early 2000s, performed its last show in 2008, during which the act announced it was disbanding. Its members — Anahí, Dulce María, Christian Chávez, Maite Perroni and Christopher von Uckermann — haven’t stepped onstage together since. And yet, when RBD recently announced it was reuniting for 40-plus shows in arenas and stadiums around the world, dubbed the Soy Rebelde Tour, over 1.5 million tickets were sold in just 24 hours, according to RBD’s manager, Guillermo Rosas. The Soy Rebelde trek is the latest in a string of Latin reunion tours that are raking in millions of dollars. The trend started in 2020 when bachata supergroup Aventura reunited after 10 years for…

AS THE LIGHTS DIMMED FOR RAUW ALEJANDRO’S sold-out show at Miami’s FTX Arena in April 2022, Rosalía — wearing head-to-toe black, eyes hidden behind enormous shades — was quietly ushered to a second-row seat. For once, the spotlight was not on the stylish Spanish artist, but on her boyfriend: a compact, wiry dynamo who, for the next two hours, steamrolled relentlessly from hardcore reggaetón to ’90s-inspired dance bops, supported by a troupe of dancers performing dazzling choreography. “What Raúl does — sing and dance in a show from beginning to end — no other Latin artist does that,” Rosalía whispered, her voice low but bursting with pride. A year later, the moment still encapsulates the dynamic of perhaps the most fascinating couple in music right now. Rosalía and Puerto…

USUALLY WHEN Lyle Lovett performs, the stage does not move. But the 2010 Cayamo music festival took place on a luxury liner in the Caribbean — and 14-foot waves shook him out of his usual stoicism. “I grew up being the carsick kid. Couldn’t ride in the back seat,” says the Texas singer-songwriter. “I was doing an interview with Steve Earle for his Sirius radio show [while on board], and I had to step out of the room and come back in.” Cayamo is one of 18 festivals this year run by Sixthman, an Atlanta-based company founded in 2001 when Sister Hazel’s then-manager, Andy Levine, invited 400 of the rock band’s superfans to take over 200 cabins of the Carnival Jubilee. It ended up kicking off an appealing new…

WHILE THE FIRST DAYS OF SPRING in the Western Hemisphere have brought a rise in temperatures, Oceania keeps bringing the heat to the Billboard Boxscore charts as stadium shows in Australia and New Zealand continue delivering blockbuster numbers. After Elton John earned the highest-grossing tour in January, Ed Sheeran picks up the mantle in February: According to figures reported to Boxscore, The Mathematics Tour — also stylized as The +–=÷× Tour, in accordance with his sign-themed album titles — grossed $50.6 million and sold over 475,000 tickets throughout the short month. Sheeran played three shows in New Zealand and five in Australia, and his stints in Brisbane and Sydney, respectively, captured Nos. 1 and 2 on Top Boxscores. Seven of February’s top 10 boxscores are from Oceania: three by…

WITH SOME HIGH-FLYING markets falling to single-digit recorded-music revenue growth in 2022, there are rising expectations that Spotify will follow Apple Music and Amazon Music and raise the price of its individual plans in the United States and other major markets. Last year, growth in U.S. music subscription revenue fell to 7.2%, down from 22.2% in 2021, according to the RIAA. It was the lowest annual rate since the subscription market grew just 2.9% in 2010 — a year before Spotify launched in the United States and transformed a business that depended on downloads to one ruled by streaming. With subscriptions now accounting for 57.9% of U.S. recorded-music revenue, overall revenue growth slowed to 6.1% from 23.2% the prior year. A similar scene played out in the United Kingdom…

WHEN IT comes to the red-hot market for music rights, the only people who may be more important than the buyers and sellers are number crunchers like Nari Matsuura. The Ottawa, Ontario, native is the partner of Barry Massarsky and founder of the valuation division of their music economics and valuation services practice at Citrin Cooperman, one of just a handful of firms that calculate the future growth rates and discounts essential to determining a music catalog’s market value. From 2021 to 2022, Matsuura estimates she oversaw 750 catalog valuations totaling $15.5 billion for such clients as Hipgnosis Songs Fund, Primary Wave and Reservoir Media. But as billions have flooded the music intellectual property market, the practice of valuing catalogs has encountered unexpected controversy, with Massarsky and Matsuura’s team…

LIKE MANY STANS of music superstars, Dre’s devotion to her favorite artist, Ni’Jah, is boundless. She’ll battle internet trolls and haters, and max out credit cards for stage-side concert tickets. She lives and breathes her adoration — and, as it turns out, will kill for it, too. Dre is a fictional character (Ni’Jah, too — though she bears a more than passing resemblance to Beyoncé). But as portrayed by Dominique Fishback in Swarm, the Amazon Prime series from co-creators Donald Glover and Janine Nabers that premiered March 17, Dre feels unsettlingly real. And the world of Swarm is a genre-mash of eerie, unexpected and playful thrills. Swarm comes four months after the conclusion of Glover’s widely beloved FX series Atlanta — but he and Nabers, the series’ showrunner, began…

IN AUGUST 1989 — 26 years after releasing their first single, and seven years since their last tour — The Rolling Stones hit the road. Over the next calendar year, the Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle Tour took the rock legends around the world, playing over 100 shows and reaffirming their commercial clout. Two similarly epic yearlong treks — 1994-95’s Voodoo Lounge world tour and 1997-98’s Bridges to Babylon tour — followed; the three outings grossed $661.7 million combined, according to Billboard Boxscore, or roughly $1.3 billion today, adjusted for inflation. In the process, the Stones defined what middle age could look like for rock artists and proved that established acts with deep catalogs and legions of fans still had touring potency. As the Stones crisscrossed the globe in the ’90s,…

WHEN ARTISTS, songwriters or music business executives face a legal challenge, they can’t just shake it off. Sometimes they need a good attorney. Billboard’s 2023 class of Top Music Lawyers — nominated by their firms and peers, and chosen by our editors — are an essential resource for the music industry’s rising artists, songwriters and superstars alike. In courtrooms and boardrooms, their work last year involved conflicts over some of the hottest hits on the charts, song lyrics — and even tattoos. Attorneys on this list took part in battles involving the originality of the lyrics to Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off,” in a case that was settled in December without a final ruling; Ed Sheeran singing in a London courtroom to successfully prove he didn’t steal “Shape of…