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28 Jul 2023

Offset & Cardi B Make ‘Jealousy’ Video a Family Affair: See Kulture & Wave’s Cute Cameos

Families that make music videos together, stay together. In the self-directed visual for Offset‘s new song “Jealousy” featuring his wife, the one and only Cardi B, one of hip-hop’s biggest power couples works through their issues onscreen while keeping hold of what’s most important: their kids, each of whom makes a cute cameo in the project.

After walking out on a screaming match with Cardi, Offset indulges in some boy time with their almost 2-year-old son, Wave, while playing mini-basketball and riding bikes with his sons Jordan and Kody from previous relationships. Kulture, his 5-year-old daughter with Cardi, and 8-year-old Kalea, whom he shares with Shya L’amour, are later captured giggling adorably together in the front seat of a car.

But just because the video was a family function doesn’t mean it was strictly PG. One scene, for instance, featured Cardi crouching down to mimic a NSFW action on ‘Set, who is leaning against a vintage convertible.

All the while, the two superstars take turns getting things off their chest, both of them using their respective verses to call out haters who speculate on their relationship.

The couple first started teasing “Jealousy” earlier this week, enlisting Jamie Lee Curtis to play a reporter questioning their relationship drama in a spoof on James Brown‘s memorable 1988 CNN interview. Later, Cardi shared a video co-starring Taraji P. Henson, in which the “WAP” rapper rants about Offset’s past infidelity and Henson encourages her to stay with him.

“Jealousy” may or may not be Cardi and Offset’s response to their own recent real-life relationship issues, which went public last month after the Migos rapper accused his wife of cheating on him via Instagram Stories. Shortly afterward, Cardi jumped on Twitter Spaces to emphatically deny the accusations.

But based on a few public appearances in the weeks since, and now, their new collaboration, it definitely seems like the two have resolved the conflict. Plus, an insider tells Billboard that Offset’s family is “his No. 1 priority,” adding, “He’s making sure they are involved.”

Watch the “Jealousy” music video above.

28 Jul 2023

Spotify Study on ‘Super Listeners’: Small Numbers of Fans Drive Big Streaming Numbers

So-called “super listeners” make up an average of 2% of all artist’s listeners, but account for 18% of all streams for the artist — a figure that can grow to 30% of all streams for the biggest artists in the world, according to a new study released by Spotify For Artists.

That’s the headline takeaway from a new report by the leading digital service provider, which focuses on how an artist’s most dedicated fans drive streaming activity and engagement on the platform. For the study — which tracked listening behavior during several different periods across the first half of the year — Spotify broke down percentages for artists based on their monthly listeners, identifying how small segments of an artist’s fan base contribute higher percentages of streams than the majority of listeners. The company doesn’t explicitly lay out how it defines a “super listener,” other than to say that it is “your most dedicated active listeners in the past 28 days” who “are also the most likely to keep streaming your music.”

While the 18% figure is an overall average, super listeners tend to drive the highest percentage of streams for the biggest and the smallest artists, the company found. For artists with 0-10,000 monthly listeners, 1% of super listeners drove 22% of all monthly streams; for artists with 25 million or more monthly listeners, 5% of those fans drove 30% of all monthly streams. Artists with between 5 million and 25 million monthly listeners also scored highly, with 3% of super listeners driving 20% of all monthly streams, while those with between 1 million and 5 million saw 2% of listeners drive 16% of streams. Both the 10,000-100,000 range and the 100,000 to 1 million range saw 1% of listeners drive 13% of streams.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, those super listeners are also much more likely to purchase artist merch through Spotify, too. For artists with more than 10,000 monthly listeners, 2% of their super listeners accounted for 52% of all merch purchases, while the remaining 98% of listeners made up the remaining 48% of merch sales. And there is a top 10 market breakdown for where those super listeners come from, too: four of the top 10 markets are in Latin America (Chile at No. 1; Mexico at No. 2; Argentina at No. 6; and Colombia at No. 7) and three are in Asia (Hong Kong at No. 4; Japan at No. 8; the Philippines at No. 10). The remaining are Canada (No. 3), the United States (No. 5) and Poland (No. 9).

Other statistics in the report: new releases can boost the number of listeners to super-status by almost 20%, while retention of those fans appears to be high, with more than 2/3s of those new superfans still listening six months later. Check out the full report here.

The study comes amid an industry-wide conversation about streaming royalties, how exactly they should be allocated and whether a mechanism should exist to reward artists with dedicated fan bases, and how that should be implemented. But super fans are boosting artists in other ways in addition to streaming numbers — CD, cassette and vinyl sales are all up this year so far, according to Luminate’s mid-year report, which it attributes to superfans, with 15% of the U.S. population spending 80% more than the average fan in a given month.

28 Jul 2023

JoJo Siwa Doesn’t Regret Calling Out Candace Cameron Bure: ‘I Gotta Stand Up for My People’

In the months since internet star JoJo Siwa publicly called out Full House actress Candace Cameron Bure, she’s had a lot of time to reflect. Now, she’s ready to talk about why she doesn’t regret her statements.

During her appearance on the Thursday (July 27) episode of The Viall Files, Siwa looked back on her public spat with the actress and said that in hindsight, she stands by her statements. “It gave me a sense of, ‘OK, you and her are never going to agree, you and her are never going to be friends’ … I am never going to be able to change her,” she told host Nick Viall. “I wish she was able to be a little more open, a little more accepting. I’m OK with calling her out in the way that I did.”

The controversy began when Siwa posted a TikTok in July 2022 in which she quietly referred to Bure as the “rudest” celebrity she’d ever met. When fans pressed her for the story, Siwa shared that Bure refused to take a photo with her at the premiere of Fuller House when she was 11 years old, which hurt her feelings.

Eventually, Bure and Siwa talked and patched things up, with the YouTube star deciding that she would just not speak about the actress publicly anymore. “I actually had a little bit of [a thought] like, ‘Ah I shouldn’t have posted that,’” she told Viall. “She didn’t need that, I didn’t need that, so let’s learn the lesson for next time.”

Then in November, Bure did an interview with The Wall Street Journal, during which she said that her new slate of Christmas films on Great American Family would “keep traditional marriage at the core” by not including LGBTQ storylines. Siwa, at the time, responded to the news by calling her statement “rude and hurtful” to queer people everywhere. “Honestly, I can’t believe after everything that went down just a few months ago, that she would not only create a movie with intention of excluding LGBTQIA+ [people], but then also talk about it in the press,” Siwa wrote at the time.

Talking to Viall, Siwa said that the intention behind Bure’s exclusion is what got her particularly angry. “She wanted to do a movie about that to put down LGBTQIA [people], and that she was specifically going to make movies that had no representation of LGBTQIA [people],” she said. “When you’re doing it out of spite to say that, ‘Too much is about LGBTQIA [people] and you guys suck and I want to make a movie about traditional marriage and you’re not traditional,’ that got to me a little bit.”

While Siwa said that she once felt bad about her criticism of Bure, she’s since decided that she doesn’t need to apologize for disagreeing with someone who doesn’t support her community. “That’s my people,” she told Viall. “I gotta stand up for my people.”

Check out Siwa’s full interview on The Viall Files above.

28 Jul 2023

Drake Shoots At Pusha T & Pharrell On Travis Scott’s “MELTDOWN”

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Drake and Pusha T‘s feud might not have the spotlight it once did but it appears to be far from over. The Canadian superstar took a light shot at King Push and Pharrell on Travis Scott’s new album UTOPIA, and fans have their thoughts per usual.

Travis Scott dropped UTOPIA on Friday (July 28) and so far the early returns on the album say that Cactus Jack has another one in the can. Among several standout features that include the likes of Beyoncé, 21 Savage, Future, SZA, Young Thug, Playboy Carti, and more, Drake is also part of that star-studded list. Drizzy shows up on the track “MELTDOWN” and the last few bars of his feature had the aforementioned targets.

From “MELTDOWN”:

My schedule is out, come spin us, for real
Man, f*ck all that spinnin’ the narrative sh*t
I melt down the chains that I bought from yo’ boss
Give a f*ck about all of that heritage sh*t
Since V not around, the members done hung up the Louis, they not even wearing that sh*t
Don’t come to the boy ’bout repairing some sh*t
Don’t come to the boy about sparing some sh*t
You lucky that Vogue was suing, ’cause I would’ve been with the Wassas in Paris and sh*t

As it stands, Drake is alerting his opposition that he’s on his “It’s All A Blur” tour and inviting the smoke in the first line of the lyrics quoted above. On Twitter and Genius alike, fans are noting that the “melt down the chains” line is directed towards Pharrell, who reportedly designed a series of chains the rapper wore in the “Jumbotron Sh*t Poppin” video from Her Loss, his collaborative album with 21 Savage.

The lyric that begins with “Since V not around” is a clear nod to the late Virgil Abloh, who was the artistic director of Louis Vuitton’s menswear line, a role Pharrell now occupies.

On X (formerly known as Twitter), Drake, Pusha T, and Pharrell’s names are trending. We’ve got the best reactions below.

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Photo: Getty

28 Jul 2023

Drake Takes Aim at Pharrell & Pusha T on Travis Scott’s ‘MELTDOWN’

Drake was the topic of conversation on Friday (July 28) after he linked with oft collaborator Travis Scott on La Flame’s fourth studio album, Utopia. Social media hummed when he unleashed shots aimed at Pusha T and Pharrell on the track “MELTDOWN.”

Drake fired scathing bars targeting Pharrell’s newly appointed position as men’s creative director for Louis Vuitton, a title held by the late Virgil Abloh — a friend of the OVO commander. “Man, f–k all that spinning the narrative s–t/ I melt down the chains that I bought from your boss,” spews Drake in the latter half of his verse, taking slight aim at Pusha’s relationship with Pharrell. “Give a f–k about all of that heritage s–t/ Since V not around the members done hung up the Louis/ They not even wearing that s–t.”

While promoting his joint album Her Loss with 21 Savage earlier this year, Drake flaunted his accessories that once belonged to Pharrell in the “Jumbotron Shit Poppin” video. From the iconic N.E.R.D. brain pendant to the famed skateboard pendant chain, Drake sported most of P’s auctioned pieces from last year’s Joopiter auction. 

In 2022, Joopiter — Pharrell’s first global auction house and content platform — presented different items once worn by the Virginia powerhouse, including a jeweled-out pair of Oakley glasses at the New York City pop-up. 

Later on in “MELTDOWN,” Drake continues with his verbal assault, rapping, “You lucky that Vogue was suing/ ‘Cause I would’ve been with the Wassas in Paris and s–t.”

In June, Pharrell hosted his debut Louis Vuitton fashion show at the French capital, where Jay-Z, LeBron James and more supported his endeavor. Pusha T was also on hand, performing a new track that took shots at Jim Jones — a staunch supporter of Drake. 

Drake and 21 settled with Vogue earlier this year after using a faux cover to promote their album, Her Loss, last November. 

Listen to “MELTDOWN” below. 

28 Jul 2023

Troye Sivan ‘Rush’-es Onto the Hot 100, Dance & Global Charts

Listeners are feeling the rush! Troye Sivan’s newest single debuts across a wide spread of July 29-dated Billboard charts, spanning genres and geographical borders.

“Rush” is new on the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 77. That marks Sivan’s first entry on the list since 2021’s “You” with Regard and Tate McRae, and first solo appearance since “My My My!” in 2018. The new track scored 6.1 million on-demand streams and sold 2,000 copies in the week ending July 20, according to Luminate.

Sivan adds eighth career Hot 100 hit, having hit a No. 23 high with “Youth” in 2016.

Sivan released “Rush” on Thursday, July 19, spurring enough activity to debut on last week’s Hot
Dance/Electronic Songs at No. 30 from one day of consumption. This week, it blasts to No. 3. It’s his first solo hit on the chart; he spent eight weeks at No. 1 with “You” in June-August 2021.

“Rush” also hits No. 1 on Dance/Electronic Streaming Songs and Dance/Electronic Song Sales.

The song’s success extends beyond these U.S.-based charts, debuting on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. survey at No. 29 and the Billboard Global 200 at No. 34. Worldwide, “Rush” drew 23.4 million streams and sold 4,000 downloads in the tracking week. It’s Sivan’s first time in the top 100 of the Global 200, much less his first in the top 40.

The immediate success for “Rush” builds upon the slow-burn rise of Sivan’s “Angel Baby.” Released in September 2021, “Angel Baby” first appeared on Global Excl. U.S. seven months later, on the April 16, 2022-dated chart. It ultimately rose to No. 75, and No. 156 on the Global 200, largely backed by consumption from Asian countries. It topped Billboard’s Hits of the World charts in Malaysia and the Philippines and hit No. 2 in Indonesia and Singapore.

“Rush,” on the other hand, opens at Nos. 13 and 14, respectively, on Australia Songs and Ireland Songs, while hitting No. 40 on the Billboard Canadian Hot 100. While traditional ballads like “Angel Baby” are welcomed Asia (Justin Bieber’s similarly paced “Ghost” was the lone other English-language track in the top 10 in Malaysia at the time), these primarily English-language markets, particularly in Europe and Sivan’s native Australia, tend to be riper for a pop-dance track like “Rush.”

28 Jul 2023

Taylor Swift Fans Cause Seismic Activity Comparable to Small Earthquake at Seattle Eras Tour Shows

Flashback to her mistakes, her rebounds, her earthquakes. In another case of life imitating art (this time, the art being lyrics to Taylor Swift‘s 2017 Reputation track “Dress”), Swifties at the Eras Tour in Seattle last weekend danced so hard, they generated enough seismic activity to rival a low-grade earthquake. The discovery was found by Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a geology professor at Western Washington University, who measured the “Swift-quake” at Lumen Field to be equivalent to a 2.3 on the magnitude scale.

“For Taylor Swift, I collected about 10 hours of data where rhythm controlled the behavior,” Caplan-Auerbach explained to CNN Thursday (July 27). “The music, the speakers, the beat. All that energy can drive into the ground and shake it.”

The findings called back to another incident at Lumen Field in 2011, when fans watching a Seattle Seahawks game went wild over an impressive touchdown by running back Marshawn “Beast Mode” Lynch. The rumblings from the game showed up on the same local seismometer as the activity from the Eras show, according to Caplan-Auerbach.

“The shaking was twice as strong as ‘Beast Quake,’” she added. “It absolutely doubled it.”

Comparing activity from the Saturday (July 22) show with the Sunday (July 23) show, Caplan-Auerbach shared that there wasn’t one crowd of Swifties that was discernibly more raucous than the other. Both groups danced equally enthusiastically, the only main difference being that the second show started about half an hour later than the first due to delays.

It wasn’t just scientists who noticed the record-breaking movement at the stadium, by the way. Even Swift was impressed by all the energy she greeted with, afterward writing on Instagram, “Thank you for everything. All the cheering, screaming, jumping, dancing, singing at the top of your lungs.”

The conclusion of the Seattle shows means that Swift has just one more state to visit on the U.S. leg of the Eras Tour, which she’ll wrap up with two performances at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., followed by six concerts at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif. From there, she’ll embark on months of international shows, traveling through Latin America, Europe, Asia and Australia with support from Sabrina Carpenter and Paramore.

And even regardless of seismic activity, fans at the rest of those Eras Tour venues have a lot to live up to following Seattle. While onstage Sunday night, Swift doubled down on a diary entry she recalled writing during 2018’s Reputation Tour: “Seattle, Washington is the best crowd I have ever played for.” 

28 Jul 2023

‘Last Case Standing’: Pandora Beats Final Lawsuit Over Pre-1972 Songs

More than nine years after members of the 1960s rock band The Turtles filed a series of groundbreaking lawsuits over the legal protections for so-called pre-1972 sound recordings, a federal judge has now dismissed their final case — a lawsuit against Pandora that he called the band’s “last case standing.”

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In a decision issued Wednesday, Judge Philip Gutierrez ruled that the Sirius XM-owned Pandora had not violated California state law by streaming the band’s songs, like the iconic 1967 cut “Happy Together,” without permission and without paying sound recording royalties.

In doing so, the judge recounted the decade-long story of how the two founders of the Turtles (legally Flo & Eddie, Inc.) filed such cases against music services in courts around the country — and how they had lost in every one of them.

“This case is one of many lawsuits brought by Flo & Eddie, seeking to hold internet and satellite radio services liable for the unauthorized public performance and reproduction of its sound recordings that were fixed prior to February 15, 1972,” the judge wrote. “Flo & Eddie’s action against Pandora is the last case standing.”

The Turtles first sued SiriusXM and Pandora in 2014, claiming that both companies had been illegally refusing to paying royalties for pre-1972 songs. That was a legal gray area at the time, since songs prior to that year had not been covered by federal sound recording copyrights. But the Turtles claimed pre-1972s could still be covered by state-level laws aimed at preventing misappropriation.

Initially, the band won a key ruling in California federal court, finding that California state law contained a so-called public performance right that would require services like Sirius and Pandora to start paying up. But then, slowly but surely, courts around the country — first the top court in New York, then the Florida Supreme Court, then a federal appeals court in California — ruled no such right existed.

“One after another, federal circuit courts and state Supreme Courts answered with a resounding ‘no’,” Judge Gutierrez wrote in Wednesday’s ruling.

In some ways, Wednesday’s ruling is anti-climactic. The larger issues raised by the Turtle’s pioneering lawsuits — whether the owners of a vast swath of American recorded music were entitled to a new revenue stream from services like SiriusXM and Pandora — were largely rendered moot by the passage of the federal Music Modernization Act in 2018. Among other major changes, that law required such royalties to be paid for pre-1972 records, ending the state-level ambiguity that drove the Turtles to sue.

But Judge Gutierrez had previously ruled that the MMA’s new requirements did not apply to pending lawsuits, meaning that the band still could have won a ruling forcing Pandora to hand over unpaid royalties from the years before the MMA’s enactment.

Barring a successful appeal, Wednesday’s ruling foreclosed that possibility: “The court grants Pandora’s motion for summary judgment. This order closes the case.”

In seeking to revive their lawsuit against Pandora, the Turtles argued that, even if no public performance right existed under California state law, the streamer had still violated their so-called reproduction right by illegally copying their music to make it available on the service. But those “repackaged” claims had also been rejected by the other courts, Judge Gutierrez wrote.

“Even if the Court would like to independently consider these claims, its ‘hands are tied,’” the judge wrote. “In the absence of an exclusive right to publicly perform its pre-1972 sound recordings, Flo & Eddie has no viable copyright claim against Pandora.”

28 Jul 2023

Friday Music Guide: New Music From Travis Scott, Post Malone, Offset & Cardi B and More

Billboard’s Friday Music Guide serves as a handy guide to this Friday’s most essential releases — the key music that everyone will be talking about today, and that will be dominating playlists this weekend and beyond.

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This week (July 28), Travis Scott takes listeners to Utopia, Post Malone introduces his fans to Austin, and Offset and Cardi B brush off the haters (with a movie star’s help). Check out all of this week’s picks below:

Travis Scott, Utopia

No pyramids, no problem: Even with its much-hyped premiere event in Egypt delayed until a date TBD, Travis Scott still dropped his long-awaited Utopia — five years after his 2018 blockbuster Astroworld — this Friday at midnight. Like Astroworld, the album is a winding journey through Scott’s sonic universe, with such A-list guests as The Weeknd, 21 Savage, Future and of course his old “Sick Mode” collaborator Drake — though you’ll have to actually listen to know that they’re on there, as the streaming tracklist is once again feature spoiler-free. The most exciting cameo this time around: fellow H-Town native Beyoncé, detouring from the Renaissance Tour to Utopia, with her first-ever appearance on a Travis Scott album.

Post Malone, Austin

Guitar Posty was promised, and Guitar Posty was (mostly) delivered. Which is not to say that Austin finally features Post Malone living out his Kurt Cobain fantasies in full — you probably wouldn’t even quite call it a rock album, more just a pop album with a power ballad or two, a disco jam (!!) and a good amount of six string over all of it. Some are fun, some are despairing, some somewhere in between, but all clearly more by the man behind “Circles,” than the one behind “Rockstar” or “Congratulations.” It’s an enjoyable listen — and an interesting career move for Post, who experienced a bit of a commercial downturn with last year’s wrenchingly personal Twelve Carat Toothache, and who has yet to really recapture the chart dominance of his late 2010s this decade.

Offset feat. Cardi B, “Jealousy”

Cardi B’s absurd run of scene-stealing features continues with an overdue solo collaborator — her own husband, Offset. “Jealousy” doesn’t have much of a chorus or hook to speak of — it would just get in the way of the couple’s bars, as Offset insists “I’m Michael, I’m not no Jermaine” and Cardi attests, “B–ches don’t wanna go Birkin for Birkin/ B–ches ain’t got enough hits for a Verzuz/ B–ches be actin’ so different in person.” The song is helped by a sample of Three 6 Mafia’s “Jealous Ass B–ch” and a music video that sees the duo paying tribute to the 2001 John Singleton classic Baby Boy, with original star Taraji P. Henson even making a cameo.

Mitski, “Bug Like an Angel”

After 2022’s top five-debuting Billboard 200 hit album Laurel Hell, critics’ darling turned viral indie sensation Mitski is already scheduled for the follow-up LP, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, out in September. This week, we get the first taste: “Bug Like an Angel,” a Cowboy Junkies-like acoustic ballad with occasional jarring choral punctuations, and the kind of poetic lyrical exhaustion fans have come to expect from her the past half decade: “When I’m bent over wishin’ it was over/ Makin’ all variety of vows I’ll never keep/ I Try to remember the wrath of the devil/ Was also given him by God.” A year and a half since the last album? Already way too long a wait.

Gucci Mane, “Woppenheimer”



Never let it be said that Gucci Mane doesn’t give the people what they want. A meme nostalgic for Guwop’s peak mixtape run went viral last weekend, theorizing that if we were still 2009, we’d have gotten a Woppenheimer project pegged to the Christopher Nolan-directed box office smash. Today, La Flare says “fair enough” and does indeed release a “Woppenheimer” — with the fan’s proposed cover art and anything — though only a single rather than a full mixtape. The narcotic trap banger indeed could have appeared on an Obama-era Gucci release, as he raps on the hook, “Broke people like bringin’ up the past, I’m talkin’ recently/ I know what I did for you, but what you did for me?” The ball is indeed back in their court.

Carly Rae Jepsen, The Loveliest Time

In 2022, she was having The Loneliest Time — but those days are over, and the Canadian pop favorite is back this week and apparently having a much nicer go of it. From the jazzy friskiness of “Anything to Be With You” to the neon synth drama of “Kamikaze” to the Midnight Star-interpolating electro-pop of “Shy Boy,” Carly Rae Jepsen does indeed seem to be feeling loose and carefree, hopscotching from one sound to another and generally keeping the vibe consistent throughout. Fans can only wonder what set might be completing the trilogy in 2024: The Luckiest Time? The Looniest Time? The Languorousest Time?

28 Jul 2023

Jimmie Allen Announces Comedy Tour Amid Sexual Assault Allegations

Jimmie Allen is known for infusing jokes and humor into his concerts, but he’s now making an interesting career pivot. The country singer announced via Instagram on Thursday (July 27) that he will launch a three-date comedy tour, the I Said What I Said Tour, in October. No dates or venues have been shared at this time.

All shows on the I Said What I Said Tour are invite-only, and Allen encouraged his followers to sign up via email to learn how to win tickets to the show.

The comedy tour news comes amid sexual assault allegations that have been brought against Allen. In May, a Jane Doe filed a civil suit in Tennessee federal court against the country singer, claiming that he raped and sexually harassed her while she was a member of his management team. The case was filed by attorney Elizabeth Fegan, who has previously represented victims of Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein, as well as Dr. George Tyndall, a campus gynecologist at the University of Southern California, who was accused of sexually abusing patients. Allen responded with a statement saying that he and the Jane Doe accuser had a sexual relationship, but denied the rape and sexual assault allegations, saying that they “have no truth to them whatsoever.”

The fallout from the allegations were swift, as Allen was dropped by his label home, BBR Music Group, as well as his management company, The Familie, as well as his public relations firm, Full Coverage Communications. He was also suspended by his booking agency, UTA.

In June, a second unnamed accuser filed a suit against Allen, claiming the singer-songwriter assaulted her in a Las Vegas hotel room and filmed the encounter without permission. Earlier this month, Allen countersued both accusers, claiming that the first accuser defamed him, while the second accuser illegally took his cell phone.

See Allen’s announcement for his comedy shows below: