Innholdsfortegnelse for June 1, 2024 i Billboard Magazine

THE INTRODUCTION and rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence apps and tools since late 2022 have understandably resulted in a fair amount of doomsaying about song creation. But some AI music executives say they’re not seeing the predicted rush by users without musical training to create tunes using their tools. “For whatever reason, you’re just not seeing an extreme level of adoption of these products yet among the everyday consumer,” says one founder of an AI music company who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Where’s the 80 [million] to 100 million users on this stuff?” “We were all talking about how artists are screwed” — replaced by civilians who will suddenly be able to unlock their creativity — “because that’s a dramatic story,” says Antony Demekhin, co-founder of…

Tyler Arnold President MERCURY RECORDS WHEN REPUBLIC RECORDS offered Tyler Arnold a full-time assistant role five months into his six-month internship with the label in 2014, taking it was “a no-brainer” — even if it meant dropping out of Northeastern University one year before graduating. “This is my dream,” Arnold recalls thinking. “I have to go for it.” Arnold quickly became an A&R executive extraordinaire: His first signing to the label, in 2015, was a young Post Malone (“I signed him on my 23rd birthday,” Arnold recalls); his second was superproducer Metro Boomin in late 2016. By 2020, Arnold was Republic’s executive vp of A&R. “I really loved discovering music in high school and college, finding new artists and seeing them grow,” he says. “I also wanted to work…

ON SEPT. 13, 2004, Van Halen was the first major music act to perform at the newly inaugurated Coliseo de Puerto Rico José Miguel Agrelot in San Juan. That same year, local and international artists performed at the arena, including Draco Rosa, Daddy Yankee, Juan Luis Guerra, Andrea Bocelli and Korn. “We wouldn’t have been able to have those shows if we didn’t have El Coliseo,” says ASM Global regional GM Jorge Pérez, who manages the venue. “It was the need we had at that moment in history.” Mariela Vallines, executive director of the Puerto Rico Convention Center District Authority, which owns the building and contracts with ASM to operate it, notes that over the past 20 years, the coliseum “has become a cultural hub for the island, bringing…

Post Malone’s “I Had Some Help” (featuring Morgan Wallen) spends a second week atop the Billboard Hot 100 following its debut at No. 1 on the chart dated May 25. It drew 55 million official streams and 42.2 million radio airplay audience impressions and sold 21,000 in the United States May 17-23, according to Luminate.…

CONCERT INDUSTRY EXPERTS generally thought 2024 would be a down year — or at least less busy than 2023, when Taylor Swift and Beyoncé catapulted the sector to new heights and challenged the personnel within it to keep pace amid its growth. But so far, 2024 hasn’t brought much rest for the weary. The touring business is entering summer fueled by huge concert grosses unprecedented for the midyear mark, according to Billboard Boxscore. At midyear, grosses for the top 10 entries on the Top Tours chart total $1.5 billion, up a staggering 83% from last year’s figure of $814.9 million and marking the first time that the total gross of the top 10 tours combined have crossed $1 billion at the halfway point. Last year, only two tours —…

THIS JULY, roughly six years after the debut of Hipgnosis Songs Fund (HSF) on the London Stock Exchange, the relatively short-lived experiment of publicly traded catalog funds — also known as investment trusts — will likely end. Global investment giant Blackstone is expected to win over at least three-quarters of HSF’s shareholders with its $1.6 billion offer to buy the 65,000-song catalog. The only other listed fund, Round Hill Music Royalty Fund, was taken private in November when Concord acquired it for $468 million. But though their runs were short, these funds transformed how the investment world sees music. Hipgnosis founder Merck Mercuriadis led the charge to convince institutional investors of the stable, noncyclical nature of song rights, and they poured billions into the asset class, bid up the…

IT’S A SUNNY MAY AFTERNOON in Miami’s lush Coral Gables neighborhood, and Camila Cabello greets me at her family’s one-story home accompanied by a small menagerie: four dogs — including her golden retriever, Tarzan, and German shepherd, Thunder — along with her rescued cockatoo, Percy. Cabello is home “to recharge” amid a hectic few days that included time in California and will soon take her to New York for the Met Gala. But today, with her messy pigtails, Daisy Duke shorts and silver flip-flops, Cabello looks more like a college girl on break than a major pop star about to release her fourth solo album — a fearless artistic statement coming June 28 titled C,XOXO. Her father washes the driveway, her mother offers me cafecito, and her aunt plays…

When Pat Boone turns 90 on June 1, it will be almost 70 years since he debuted on a Billboard chart. Back then, he was pushed as clean-cut counterprogramming to Elvis Presley — so successfully that he became bigger than the King, as measured by Billboard Hot 100 hits from the Aug. 4, 1958, debut of the chart through the end of the decade. From his first hits to his recent work with veteran artists, Pat has always been a boon to Billboard. HE’S SO SQUARE, WE ALL CARE “Pat Boone, Dot’s new young find, comes off as a potential bobby sox grabber,” noted the May 21, 1955, Billboard when “Two Hearts” hit No. 16 on the Most Played in Juke Boxes chart. After “Two Hearts,” Boone didn’t miss…

ARTISTS AT COUNTRY singer-songwriter Ashley McBryde’s level of popularity can sell $16,000 to $20,000 worth of T-shirts and hoodies when they play 1,500-capacity venues. Layne Weber, director of merchandising and fan engagement for McBryde’s management company, Q Prime, says some venues took a 20% to 25% cut of her merchandise sales during her spring tour — which is standard in the industry but, he says, exorbitant for services rendered at many clubs. “I went to a show the other night and the merch table was next to the bar,” Weber says. “The merch seller was having to compete with the bartender who’s trying to sell the drinks. That was a venue taking 20% of the sales.” Weber’s complaints, which many artists and their representatives share, are at the center…

AT THE BEGINNING of 2013, Mike Luba says he dragged Mumford & Sons’ Ben Lovett to Forest Hills Stadium in Queens on a sort of vision quest. He was working with the band on its Gentlemen of the Road Tour and knew that Lovett had grown up in the tennis town of Wimbledon, England. An avid tennis fan and player himself, Luba wanted to sell the band on “playing a gig at the Wimbledon of New York.” Built in the 1920s, the stadium, which adjoins and is owned by the West Side Tennis Club (WSTC), had been the site of the U.S. Open for six decades and, in the ’60s and ’70s, hosted a series of landmark concerts by The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Barbra Streisand, Jimi Hendrix and…

BY THE TIME Hootie & The Blowfish released their Atlantic Records debut, Cracked Rear View, on July 5, 1994, the band had already been together for more than eight years. Singer Darius Rucker and guitarist Mark Bryan met while attending the University of South Carolina and began gigging as a cover band called The Wolf Brothers. They were joined by bassist Dean Felber and drummer Brantley Smith, who was eventually replaced by Jim “Soni” Sonefeld. And Hootie & The Blowfish was born. During the height of the grunge movement, Atlantic Records A&R executive Tim Sommer signed the quartet, which had already built a strong regional following for its jangly, harmony-filled pop rock songs and Rucker’s rich baritone. But the label’s expectations for the album were low. “The only people…