Innholdsfortegnelse for August 5, 2023 i Billboard Magazine

JASON ALDEAN’S “TRY THAT in a Small Town” rises to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. The single, released in May, reigns amid buzz after CMT pulled its video — which premiered July 14 — from rotation after three days, resulting in a surge of attention regarding both the song and clip’s intent and messaging. (The video features footage of an American flag burning, looters breaking a display case and thieves robbing a convenience store, among other images.) The song drew 30.7 million streams (up 165%) and 8.8 million radio airplay audience impressions (up 21%) and sold 175,000 July 21-27, according to Luminate. A week earlier, it scored the largest digital sales week — 228,000 — for a country title in over 10 years. Aldean achieves his first…

Taylor Swift rewrites the record for the most No. 1s in the three-decade history of the Mainstream Top 40 airplay chart as “Cruel Summer” becomes her 12th leader. She surpasses the 11 each for Maroon 5, Katy Perry and Rihanna. Swift claims the mark all to herself with a song that has been out for nearly four years: Originally released on her 2019 album, Lover, and now promoted by Republic Records as a single, “Cruel Summer” has been gaining momentum in recent weeks. Swift has performed the track on The Eras Tour — the first trek on which she has been able to spotlight songs from Lover. Additionally, “Cruel Summer” climbs 11-8 on the Adult Top 40 airplay chart. It becomes Swift’s record-extending 29th top 10, pushing her further…

Chris Tomlin’s “Holy Forever” hits No. 1 on Christian Airplay, up 4% to 6 million audience impressions July 21-27, according to Luminate. The song is his 11th leader on the chart, a run that began in April 2006 with “How Great Is Our God.” Tomlin co-authored “Holy Forever” with Jason Ingram, Brian Johnson, Jenn Johnson and Phil Wickham. “I remember over 20 years ago being told that radio wouldn’t play worship music,” Tomlin says. “So fast-forward to today, and not only do I have another No. 1 at radio, but also the ongoing opportunity to help give people a voice to worship God through radio, streaming, live events and through songs being led in the church. It’s something I will never take for granted. I could never have imagined…

WHEN A YOUNG Evan Bogart tried his hand at writing a few pop songs for a girl group he managed, he had no idea he would score one of the biggest Billboard hits of 2006. When the act disbanded, Bogart decided to pitch the songs to labels. One of them landed with a then-fledgling pop artist named Rihanna, who was signed to Def Jam Recordings. Bogart’s song, “S.O.S.,” not only broke Rihanna — it jumped 33 spots to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in a single week — it minted his songwriting career. Multiple hits later, Bogart runs his own publishing company and label, Seeker Music, where he encourages his songwriters to create “pitch records” — demos sung by a hired vocalist or the writer — that…

AFTER SIFTING through millions of sampled sounds, including typical instruments from snare drums and synthesizers to more exotic fare like kopuz (a Turkish string lute) and yanggeum (a Korean dulcimer), it’s easy to see how the sample library Splice has become a cornerstone of modern music creation. At a time when almost all producers record on laptops, Splice functions as a cache of sounds that can be dragged and dropped into a recording. Since its 2013 launch, the music tech company has amassed millions of users, and it’s not uncommon to discover a Splice sample in a song from Billboard Hot 100 stars like Justin Bieber, Bad Bunny and Travis Scott, among many others. One consequence of the company’s catalog size is the difficulties it can create for musicians…

Pierce the Veil (above) hits No. 1 on a Billboard airplay chart for the first time as “Emergency Contact” crowns Alternative Airplay. The band, which formed in 2006, previously appeared on the list with “Circles,” which peaked at No. 31 in 2016. The group last reached No. 1 on a Billboard songs chart in August 2022, when “King for a Day” (featuring Kellin Quinn) topped Hard Rock Streaming Songs, following the track’s revival on user-generated-content platforms. Two other tracks reach the summit on rock airplay charts. Staind earns its fifth leader on Mainstream Rock Airplay with “Lowest in Me,” the Aaron Lewis-fronted band’s first since “Not Again” in 2011. Additionally, Beck and Phoenix’s “Odyssey” tops the Triple A chart. Beck’s fifth No. 1 and Phoenix’s fourth is helping promote…

HARRY STYLES IS NO. 1 ON Billboard’s Top Tours chart for June. It’s the first time that he has earned a monthly victory — following 12 prior appearances in the top five — and it coincides with the end of his Love on Tour trek. After kicking off as one of the first major post-pandemic tours in September 2021, it wrapped in Italy on July 22. According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, the tour’s last full month of dates earned $105.4 million and sold 967,000 tickets across 15 shows. That makes Styles only the second artist to earn a nine-figure monthly gross. (Bad Bunny first accomplished the feat in September 2022 on his World’s Hottest Tour, raking in $123.7 million.) He also scores the highest monthly attendance total…

IN 2017, GOOGLE REACHED OUT to Peter Bittenbender for his input on an edition of the search engine’s daily Doodle. The tech giant had called on Bittenbender, CEO of entertainment company Mass Appeal, to help it recognize hip-hop’s 44th anniversary. As he and Mass Appeal worked on the Doodle — which ended up featuring a graffiti version of the Google logo — Bittenbender had a realization: The genre’s 50th anniversary was right around the corner. “It was all focused on 50,” he says of his game plan since. “Let’s get ahead of this. This is the most important moment in this generation of hip-hop and, culturally, the most important movement of our lifetime. So let’s not think about it a month before — let’s set it up years in…

ON MAY 1, ICE SPICE attended her first-ever Met Gala. By the end of that month, she had appeared on an even bigger public stage: as the featured artist on the remix of Taylor Swift’s “Karma,” which she live-debuted with Swift in a surprise appearance at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., the same day the track dropped. A week later, “Karma” vaulted to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, earning Ice her third top 10 on the chart and her highest-reaching hit to date. Then, in June, Ice reconnected with her idol Nicki Minaj (they had already released the Hot 100 No. 4 hit “Princess Diana” in January) for the Aqua-sampling “Barbie World” from the Barbie movie soundtrack; the song debuted at No. 7 on the Hot…

Just nine weeks after Chayanne captured his first top 10 in more than 14 years on the Tropical Airplay chart, he regains command of the list — with his first No. 1 since 2008 — as “Bailando Bachata” rises 2-1 on the Aug. 5 chart. It’s his third leader overall. The song earns Greatest Gainer honors fueled by an 18% increase in audience impressions, to 8.9 million, earned in the week ending July 27, according to Luminate. “Bailando Bachata” tops the list after his last leader, “Amor Inmortal,” dominated for five weeks in late 2008. The break between new chart-toppers is the longest gap by any artist since December 2016, when Jennifer Lopez ended a 17-year wait between No. 1s with “Olvídame y Pega la Vuelta” with Marc Anthony.…

WHAT DOES IT MEAN to “break” an artist? It’s a question that has plagued the music industry in recent months. If a singer has billions of streams but walks down the street unrecognized, have they broken? Is a lone billion-stream single enough, or is a second hit proof of staying power? And what if an artist racks up multiple hits but can’t pull off a major headlining tour? The consensus among label executives is that the last pop artist to break big was Olivia Rodrigo, who had four top 10 Billboard Hot 100 hits during 2021 and, in July 2023, debuted at No. 1 on the chart with “Vampire.” It’s a track record, they say, that today makes her seem like a unicorn. “Nobody knows how to break music…

FOR ROUGHLY half a century, John Fogerty had tried to recover the rights to dozens of hits he wrote for Creedence Clearwater Revival. At the age of 77, he had almost given up hope, when he and his wife, Julie Fogerty, who also works as his manager, realized they were on the cusp of a second chance thanks to the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976. The law is intended to give musicians, songwriters and other creators a second bite at the apple by enabling them to recapture the copyrights to compositions and recordings, in the United States only, that they may have signed away earlier in their careers. Songs dating from before 1978 can revert to their creator or heirs after 56 years, and songs from after 1978 can…

FIVE YEARS AGO, Lil Wayne sat down in his Miami recording studio and spoke in depth with Billboard for the first time in almost a decade. The trailblazing rapper and entrepreneur stood at a crossroads: On the verge of releasing what he had declared would be his final album, Tha Carter V, he had finally settled the three-year lawsuit against his former label Cash Money that had delayed the project’s release and just been awarded sole ownership of the Young Money imprint he had launched in 2003. So as Aug. 11 — the 50th anniversary of hip-hop — fast approaches alongside Young Money’s own 20th birthday, it’s fitting to be sitting down with Lil Wayne once again. One of the genre’s most innovative and still influential artists, the 40-year-old…

IN FEBRUARY, TIKTOK’S BILLION-PLUS users received an unexpected gift for Valentine’s Day: exclusive access to the catalog of one of hip-hop’s most revered labels, Death Row Records. Snoop Dogg had purchased the catalog in 2022 and pulled it from streaming services. So the only place to hear tracks from Snoop’s classic Doggystyle or 2Pac’s 10-times-platinum All Eyez on Me was TikTok. This partnership — as unusual as it was savvy — was the handiwork of veteran music executive Larry Jackson, 42, who seized the attention of the industry this year when he launched his new entertainment company, gamma. Backed by $1 billion in financing and focused on putting that capital to work “in particular and acutely on Black culture,” Jackson has created a deep-pocketed alternative to the major labels.…