Innholdsfortegnelse for April 22, 2023 i Billboard Magazine

ESLABON ARMADO and Peso Pluma’s “Ella Baila Sola” soars to No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 — and makes history as the first regional Mexican song to ever reach the chart’s top 10. It’s also both acts’ first such hit on the Hot 100. Their collaboration drew 24.4 million streams in the United States, up 30% (good for top Streaming Gainer honors), in the April 7-13 tracking week, according to Luminate. It jumps to No. 3 on the Streaming Songs chart. California quartet Eslabon Armado and Mexico’s Peso Pluma continue the mainstream ascent of regional Mexican, which has surged in the 2020s thanks in part to social media exposure. In addition to “Ella Baila Sola” (which translates to “She Dances Alone”), Peso Pluma also has the second-highest-charting hit…

Drake’s “Search & Rescue” debuts atop Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, marking his record-extending 27th chart-topper, and the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 2, where it’s his record-padding 68th top 10. With 33.8 million first-week U.S. streams, according to Luminate, it also launches as his 16th Streaming Songs No. 1. NO. 25 Caesar’s Career Bests Daniel Caesar makes his Billboard Artist 100 debut, driven by the arrival of his third studio album, Never Enough. The set, his first on Hollace/ Republic Records, starts with 32,000 equivalent album units and opens at No. 2 on Top R&B Albums, No. 6 on Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums and No. 14 on the Billboard 200 — all new bests for the 28-year-old, who became a Grammy Award winner in 2019. Four tracks from Never Enough hit…

IN THE FIRST THREE MONTHS of 2023, two albums defined the year to date: SZA’s SOS, on RCA, and Morgan Wallen’s One Thing at a Time, on Republic Records. To say these albums have had a profound effect on first-quarter label market-share rankings is an understatement. Combined, SZA and Wallen have spent all but two weeks atop the Billboard 200 this year, and Wallen’s first-week numbers were so large that nearly one in every five album-consumption units that week was a Republic release. In terms of current market share — albums released in the past 18 months — Republic has had a white-hot start, posting a 12.45% mark and besting the second-highest label, Interscope Geffen A&M (7.75%), by nearly five full percentage points. Republic continues to benefit from an…

IN MARCH, AS HE weighed a takeover of one of his company’s biggest rivals, SM Entertainment, Bang Si-hyuk decided he could use some privacy. So to gather his thoughts, HYBE’s 50-year-old founding chairman shut himself in at his house in Seoul, stopped taking calls from friends outside his inner circle and made a careful list: all the pros and cons of making a potential move he long dreamed of that would bring the world’s most popular boy band, BTS, under the same roof as dozens of Korea’s biggest artists such as NCT DREAM, SuperM and aespa. “After several days of being alone, taking stock of everything, I reached out to my mentors that I usually seek advice from — and to be honest, they opposed the idea,” Bang recalls…

In March, HYBE founder/chairman Bang Si-hyuk issued a dire warning: “K-pop,” he concluded, “is in crisis.” HYBE is the music company behind BTS, the group that spearheaded K-pop’s dramatic international growth in recent years, but Bang sounded alarmed about the genre’s health. K-pop’s momentum was faltering, he said, claiming fewer tracks from the genre charted on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2022 than in 2021. The following month, BTS’ Jimin released his solo debut album, and the single “Like Crazy” arrived at No. 1 on the Hot 100. Still, his comments dovetailed with general industry anxiety about the dearth of new acts breaking into the mainstream and the challenge of maintaining growth in a ferociously competitive landscape, where around 100,000 new songs hit streaming services daily. Within K-pop, some…

We are living in an electronic age and electronics is changing the world.” This bold-for-the-time declaration, from the June 24, 1967, issue of Billboard, came from an unlikely source: Limeliters banjo player Alex Hassilev. For an acoustic musician, he was pretty savvy about electronics: Over the years since, we’ve gone from classical compositions played on synths to music created by artificial intelligence. What’s next? Only ChatGPT knows for sure. COME ON, MOOG! A year after the Summer of Love, Billboard hailed the age of computer love. The Oct. 12, 1968, issue predicted that “computers would someday allow operators to obtain overnight, or at least weekly, reports of record popularity on jukeboxes.” A month later, Billboard reported that “[a]n electronic Bach album is being issued by Columbia Masterworks this month,”…

FOLLOWING A FOUR-MONTH HIATUS, Coldplay returned to the stage in March — and despite playing just three Brazilian markets, the band still compiled numbers large enough to secure honors as the top-grossing live act of March. According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, the British act earned $65.4 million and sold 736,000 tickets between March 10 and March 28. That eye-popping total was amassed from $40.1 million over six shows in São Paulo, $8.1 million from two shows in Curitiba and $17.2 million across three dates in Rio de Janeiro. The slate of stadium concerts in São Paulo marks the seventh-largest engagement in Boxscore history in terms of both gross and paid attendance. In total, the Music of the Spheres tour has grossed $407.7 million and sold more than…

IN 2015, BEFORE LUKE COMBS had broken through, his manager, Chris Kappy, gave fans a merchandise discount at concerts for showing they paid to subscribe to Spotify or Apple Music. “I was trying to push people into the digital age as quickly as I could,” he says. “And the fastest way I knew I could do it was giving them $1 off a T-shirt.” Combs was one of the first country superstars who built his career digital-first. Though most of the recorded-music industry has been streaming-focused for over a decade, until recently country music — and its fans — have remained driven by radio play and album sales. Thanks to artists like Combs, Morgan Wallen, Zach Bryan and others, from 2019 to 2022, country audio streaming jumped 58%, according…

When J.Y. Park and Monte Lipman announced their forthcoming competition series A2K — standing for America to Korea — in July 2022, the respective founders of JYP Entertainment and Republic Records vowed to jointly produce “the first American artist made out of the K-pop system.” It was something of a full-circle moment for Park, who has eyed South Korean-to-American crossover success since JYP’s Wonder Girls became the first K-pop act to enter the Billboard Hot 100 in 2009. American artists are now clamoring for Park and other top Korean labels to notice them — and help them achieve their big break — in what has become a global race to launch a first-of-its-kind K-pop act. While K-pop is short for “Korean pop,” genre fusion has always been one of…

ON APRIL 3, Billboard broke the news that Jimin’s track “Like Crazy” reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — a first for a solo Korean artist — while his album, FACE, debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200. Released by Big Hit Music, one of the labels under Korean entertainment company HYBE, “Like Crazy” currently marks the best performance by a member of K-pop supergroup BTS, whose hiatus announcement last year presented a significant challenge to HYBE’s ability to forge another chart success in the United States. “Like Crazy” reached only No. 11 in South Korea, although FACE topped album charts in South Korea and Japan. Investors took note of Jimin’s U.S. accomplishments. The following day, HYBE’s share price on Korea Exchange rose as much as…

WHEN UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP emailed Spotify, Apple Music and other streaming services in March asking them to stop artificial-intelligence companies from using its labels’ recordings to train their machine-learning software, it fired the first Howitzer shell of what’s shaping up as the next conflict between creators and computers. As Warner Music Group, HYBE, ByteDance, Spotify and other industry giants invest in AI development, along with a plethora of small startups, artists and songwriters are clamoring for protection against developers that use music created by professionals to train AI algorithms. Developers, meanwhile, are looking for safe havens where they can continue their work unfettered by government interference. To someday generate music that rivals the work of human creators, AI models use a process of machine-learning to identify patterns in and…

IN LONDON in late March, at the unveiling of its annual report, IFPI offered a world of good news. “Hot off the press,” said IFPI CEO Frances Moore, while holding up the trade group’s Global Music Report at a March 21 press conference. “We’re announcing that global recorded-music industry revenue grew by 9% in 2022, up to $26.2 billion. The growth came on top of the 18.5% increase last year, so it’s growth on top of growth” — driven by streaming, which now accounts for 67% of the overall music market. While acknowledging that the higher 18.5% increase in 2021 reflected increased music consumption during the second year of the pandemic, Moore adds, “This is the eighth year of growth. So for those of us who lived through the…

KEEP YOUR EYE on us!” declares New Orleans music entrepreneur Nate Cameron Jr. “We’re in a very unique renaissance now.” Cameron, a co-founder of the New Orleans creative collective glbl wrmng and tour/space production manager for the Grammy Award-nominated group Tank and the Bangas, gives a shoutout to the global music community with an enthusiasm that reflects the current upbeat mood in New Orleans music industry circles. Such excitement is sparked in part by the emergence of a sophisticated music business infrastructure in a city where that essential knowledge has been conspicuously absent in the past. Despite the abundant talent in New Orleans — one of the world’s great musical locales — this shortcoming previously made some view it as something of a business backwater. As a result, hometown…