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Country

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Since the age of 14, Jelly Roll has been in jail upwards of 40 times on a variety of drug charges. But the 39-year-old “Save Me” singer (born Jason DeFord) told People that before he became a best new artist Grammy nominee and landed three No. 1 country chart hits he realized he needed to […]

12/13/2023

Our 10 favorite sets from the world of country this year, from breakout artists to underground favorites and established stars.

12/13/2023

Luke Combs apologized Wednesday after he accidentally sued one of his fans in federal court and won a $250,000 judgment against her, saying she had been caught up in a lawsuit aimed at “illegal businesses” and that she was “never supposed to be involved.”

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The apology came a day after news broke that lawyers representing the country star had sued a woman named Nicol Harness for selling Combs-themed mugs on Amazon. Harness, who suffers from congestive heart failure, sold only 18 tumblers for a total of $380 but was ordered to pay a whopping $250,000 in damages for infringing Combs’ intellectual property — all before she ever realized she had been sued.

In an Instagram post on Wednesday, Combs said he had just learned about the situation and that it “makes me absolutely sick to my stomach.” He said he had already contacted Harness directly and apologized for the incident.

“I spent the last two hours trying to make this right and figure out what’s going on, because I was completely and utterly unaware of this,” Combs said in the video. “We do have a company that goes after folks only, supposedly large corporations operating internationally that make millions and millions of dollars making counterfeit tee shirts, things of that nature, running illegal businesses. Apparently, this woman, Nicol, has somehow gotten wrapped into that.”

The lawsuit against Harness, filed in June in Illinois federal court, accused more than 200 online entities of selling unauthorized Combs merchandise on the internet. It included screenshots of unauthorized t-shirts sold on Amazon that directly copied real apparel the country star sold on his own site.

“This action has been filed … to combat online counterfeiters who trade upon the reputation and goodwill of the American artist Luke Combs,” his lawyers wrote. “The aggregated effect of the mass counterfeiting that is taking place has overwhelmed the plaintiff and his ability to police his rights against the hundreds of anonymous defendants which are selling illegal counterfeits at prices.”

The case highlights a common legal tactic used by big brands like Nike and Ray-Ban to fight fake products on the internet. Filed against huge lists of URLs, such actions enable brands to shut down pirate sellers en masse, win court orders to freeze their assets, and continue to kill new listings if they pop up. They usually result in large “default judgments” against many defendants who never even saw the lawsuit, ordering them to pay large sums in damages.

Though they’re more often employed by retail brands, artists and bands have increasingly turned to such lawsuits to combat counterfeit merch. Nirvana sued nearly 200 sites for selling fake gear in early 2022; a few months later, the late rapper XXXTentacion’s company filed a similar case; in January, Harry Styles filed one.

Such lawsuits are effective at combating a difficult problem, but they’re also increasingly controversial. In a study released last month, professor Eric Goldman of Santa Clara University’s School of Law called the mass-defendant counterfeiting cases “abusive,” saying they allow rightsholders to bypass “basic procedural safeguards” like making sure each defendant is properly served with notice of the lawsuit.

Harness says that’s what happened to her. As reported by Tampa’s local NBC outlet WFLA, she says she had no idea she had been sued until she returned from a hospital visit and saw her Amazon account had been frozen. Harness says she later found an email from Combs’ lawyers, sent to an address she rarely uses and stuck in her spam folder, notifying her of the lawsuit. By the time she was fully up to speed, she says the case had been closed and a judge had granted a default judgment ordering her to pay Combs $250,000.

Though the lawsuit was filed directly in his name, Combs’ Instagram post on Wednesday suggests that it was handled entirely by outside attorneys or other entities empowered to enforce his rights. The attorney who filed the case, Keith A. Vogt, did not immediately return a request for comment.

Combs’ manager Chris Kappy declined to comment on how the case came to be filed, but confirmed that Combs had absolved Harness of any legal debt. And in his Instagram post on Wednesday, Combs said he was committed to making things right.

Since a total of $5,500 was still frozen in her Amazon account, he said he was “going to double that, send her $11,000 today, just so she doesn’t have anything to worry about.” Combs also said that he was going to make his own tumblers to sell in his official online merchandise store and that money from sales of those tumblers will also go to Harness to help with her medical bills.

“This is not something I would ever do,” Combs said. “This is not the kind of person I am, greedy in any way, shape or form. Money is the last thing on my mind, I promise you guys that. I invited Nicol and her family out to a show this year so I can give her a hug and say sorry in person.”

For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard is counting down our staff picks for the top 10 pop stars of 2023 all this week. At No. 6, we remember the year in Morgan Wallen — who put up mind-boggling stats all year, but was still surprisingly invisible at times.
Few artists, if any, were as set up to put numbers on the board in 2023 as country superstar Morgan Wallen. 

It had been two years since the release of his massive-in-all-ways Dangerous: The Double Album and the backlash following his use of the N-word in a video captured on TMZ, making 2021 both the best and worst year of his career. He had spent the rest of that year mostly laying low as Dangerous continued to produce – it would ultimately break the Billboard 200 record for most weeks in the top 10 – and then took 2022 to reintroduce himself to fans. He set out on the Dangerous Tour that February, then began to release a slow trickle of music, leading to Billboard Hot 100 top 10 hits like the trap-influenced “You Proof” and mama-I’m-crazy ballad “Thought You Should Know,” which proved how hungry most of the public still was for new Wallen material.  

Billboard’s Greatest Pop Stars of 2023:Introduction & Honorable Mentions | Rookie of the Year: Peso Pluma | Comeback of the Year: Miley Cyrus | No. 10: Drake | No. 9: Doja Cat | No. 8: Bad Bunny | No. 7: Olivia Rodrigo | No. 6: Karol G

By early 2023, that slow trickle would turn into a broken dam. In late January, Wallen announced the March release of One Thing at a Time, to be a whopping 36 tracks long – Dangerous ran a scant 30 – and to be promoted on his One Night at a Time World Tour, kicking off that April, which would take Wallen to stadiums for the first time. Even before its release, the album was all but a pre-certified blockbuster, with the tracklist including the already-minted hits “Proof,” “Thought” and the pop-rocking title track, the latter one of three new songs he’d released along with his tour announcement in late 2022.

Matt Paskert

Matt Paskert

But one song he released while divulging the One Thing details would end up dwarfing them all, as well as anything on Dangerous. “Last Night” was part of another three-pack (along with the Allmans-interpolating “Everything I Love” and the cleverly Bible-wary “I Wrote the Book”) released by Wallen, this time to hype the One Thing announcement. The liquor-soaked, maybe-breakup anthem took off immediately following its mid-week release, reaching the top spot five weeks after its debut – not only a career first for Wallen, but a first for any solo male country star since Eddie Rabbit back in 1981.

The final push that got “Last Night” to No. 1 came with the March release of the full One Thing album, which unsurprisingly bowed with the biggest first-week total of the year to that point: 501,000 units, nearly doubling the 265,000 posted by Dangerous in its opening frame. One Thing would also chart all 36 of its tracks on the Hot 100 in its debut week, as Wallen blew past the previously Drake-held record of 27 for the most songs notched by an artist on the chart in a single week. If Wallen’s superstardom had escaped anyone’s notice to that point, it was finally unignorable.

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And it would stay that way for months. Both “Last Night” and One Thing would continue their rule on the Hot 100 and Billboard 200, respectively – occasionally getting knocked off by a big debut or surging hit, but seemingly always returning to their perch. All in all, both song and album would reign for 16 weeks total, giving Wallen the longest reign on each chart yet this decade – and the longest ever for any unaccompanied solo artist on the Hot 100.

In the process, Wallen also laid claim to territory that had largely eluded him to that point: top 40 radio. While he had been laying siege to country radio for a half-decade already, he’d yet to score much success on the pop airwaves. But “Last Night” was simply too huge to be overlooked, and it reached No. 5 on Billboard’s Pop Airplay chart – an extremely rare level of top 40 success for a country song without a major non-country guest or obviously crossover-aimed production. And of course, his dominance at country radio practically went without saying: four songs from One Thing (“Proof,” “Thought,” “Night” and “Thinkin’ Bout Me”) topped the Country Airplay chart in 2023, and a fifth (“Everything”) is currently lurking around the top five. 

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Meanwhile, all 2023, Wallen was leading the charge for a country takeover on the Billboard charts, with the genre particularly beginning to catch up to pop and hip-hop in its streaming presence. Though “Last Night” was the first country Hot 100 by a solo male in over four decades, it opened the floodgates for three more immediately after it – from Jason Aldean, Oliver Anthony Music and Zach Bryan (with Kacey Musgraves), all with songs that were massive streaming successes. In our December cover story on Wallen, Billboard’s Melinda Newman called him “the tip of the spear for the genre’s new generation,” and pointed out that while country grew by grew by 24% in on-demand audio and video streaming from 2022 to 2023, Wallen’s numbers alone accounted for 31% of that growth. 

So if he had the No. 1 album of the year, the No. 1 song of the year, and was the biggest driving force behind arguably the most consequential trend in the (English-language) music industry this year – by the way, he also finished No. 4 on Billboard Boxscore’s Year-End Top Tours ranking, highest of any artist who released an album in 2023 – how is Morgan Wallen only our No. 5 Greatest Pop Star this year? 

Well, there’s no arguing that there were four artists with more impressive portfolios of commercial achievements and statistics this year. But were there four greater pop stars? We think so, mostly because as huge as Morgan Wallen’s music was this year, the man himself was a much-less-conspicuous presence. He had no major award show or late night appearances, released no official music videos, had no particularly viral moments (besides a fan brawl outside his show that he wasn’t involved with), barely posted on TikTok – the app once integral to his early success – and until Billboard’s cover story, made no major media appearances. Millions of people caught Wallen on the One Night at a Time tour, but if you weren’t one of them, you could’ve very easily gone the entire year without seeing the man in action. 

It’s an unsurprising and arguably wise strategy for an artist whose biggest career moments in the spotlight have mostly been embarrassing ones – from his 2020 arrest for public intoxication and disorderly conduct to his violation of SNL’s COVID-19 policy and subsequent removal from the show later that year, to, of course, his filmed racial slur usage in 2021. And while a large portion of the public appears to have moved on from these incidents, Wallen’s continual underperformance at major award shows – shut out at this year’s CMAs, and with no nominations at the 2024 Grammys (“Last Night” is up for best country song, but he’s not nominated since he didn’t write on it) – suggests there may remain (understandable) hard feelings from some folks in the industry. It makes sense that Wallen would continue to tread lightly re-inserting himself into the mainstream’s center. 

Meanwhile, his chart fortunes have clearly not suffered for his lack of national visibility or award wins – regardless of Wallen’s presence in the headlines or lack thereof, his commercial momentum has only ever trended upwards since his 2018 breakthrough. This year, he even proved he could cross over to the pop world without really playing the pop game. So as long as he can top the charts and sell out his tours while letting his music do the talking for him, there’s not necessarily a lot compelling Wallen to do more. 

Fair enough. But true pop stardom – from Madonna and Michael Jackson to BTS and Bad Bunny – has always been about more than just the numbers. It’s about impact, about presence, about being the whole package. It’s about putting yourself out there, in just about every way possible, and sometimes risking it all in the process. Wallen can and most likely will continue to top nearly every official Billboard chart while laying low, relatively speaking, but it’ll take him being a little more willing to step into the spotlight at his brightest to get to the top of these rankings.

A star-studded assembly of performers has been added to help Nashville count down the minutes to 2024 on New Year’s Eve in the music-spotlighting way that only Nashville provide, as part of the CBS special New Year’s Eve Live: Nashville’s Big Bash. Trace Adkins, Grace Bowers, Kane Brown, Jackson Dean, HARDY, Cody Johnson, Parker McCollum, […]

Producer and longtime Warner Music Nashville executive Scott Hendricks will be leaving the company at the end of the month. He joined Warner Nashville in 2007 and currently serves as executive vp of A&R/ creative advisor. Hendricks will transition back to being an independent producer and will continue his work with Warner Nashville artists Blake […]

Billboard revealed its year-end Boxscore charts, ranking the top tours, venues, and promoters of 2023. That coverage included analysis of the new wave of genre diverse artists crashing stadium stages, and in turn, our charts. This week, we are breaking down the year’s biggest tours, genre by genre. Today, we continue with country. Country music […]

Google released its list of the biggest trending searches of 2023 and when it comes to music, Jason Aldean‘s controversial “Try That in a Small Town” led the list of search inquiries for songs, with Aldean also hitting No. 1 as the top trending musician.

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In a year when Taylor Swift and Beyoncé were perpetually in the news thanks to their massive tours and the live concert films, the high placement for Aldean was not totally surprising given the weeks of attention he got for “Small Town,” which was  pulled from CMT and labeled by some detractors as being pro-gun, pro-violence and akin to a “modern lynching song” after the release of the track’s video.

The visual found Aldean performing the song in front of the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, TN, the site of the 1927 lynching and hanging of 18-year-old Henry Choate over allegations that he sexually assaulted a white girl, as well as the spot of a 1946 race riot in which two Black men were killed. Aldean rejected detractors’ claims about the song whose video featured images of an American flag burning, protesters clashing with police, looters breaking a display case and thieves robbing a convenience store; the video was later seemingly edited to remove images of a Black Lives Matter protest following the backlash.

Right behind Aldean was buzzy rapper Ice Spice, followed by “Rich Men North of Richmond” country singer Oliver Anthony, Peso Pluma, Joe Jonas, Sam Smith, The 1975’s Matty Healy, Kellie Pickler, Kim Petras and Sexxy Red.

Google’s data shows the top trending searches in the U.S., referring to trending queries as searches that had a major spike in traffic over a sustained period in 2023 versus 2022, which is why despite being a near-ubiquitous search term who has a consistently high search interest, TIME‘s Person of the Year Swift (and Beyoncé) didn’t top the ranking for musicians; click here for Gizmodo‘s explanation.

The year’s most buzzed-about movies, Barbie and Oppenheimer (combined as Barbenheimer by fans) came out on top, followed by the controversial anti-trafficking movie Sound of Freedom and Oscar-winner Everything Everywhere All At Once, as well as Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Creed III, John Wick: Chapter 4, Five Nights at Freddy’s and Cocaine Bear. The No. 1 trending actor was Jeremy Renner, who suffered serious injuries in a snowplow incident in January.

Jamie Foxx, who was sidelined most of this year after an unexplained “medical complication” in April, was just behind Renner, followed by disgraced That 70’s Show actor Danny Masterson, comedian Matt Rife, Pedro Pascal, Jonathan Majors, Sophie Turner, Russell Brand, Ke Huy Quan and Josh Hutcherson.

The trending people list had Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin at No. 1 following his scary on-field cardiac incident during a Cincinnati Bengals game in January, followed by Renner and Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, likely due to his romance with Taylor Swift; Kelce was also among the top five most-searched athletes.

The TV tally featured mostly Netflix projects, including its originals Ginny & Georgia, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, Wednesday, That 90’s Show, Kaleidoscope, Beef and The Fall of the House of Usher. Other shows that got in the mix included Daisy Jones & the Six (No. 4) and The Weeknd’s one-and-done HBO series The Idol (No. 9).

Late Friends star Matthew Perry was No. 1 on searches for celebrity deaths, followed by Tina Turner, Jerry Springer, Jimmy Buffett and Sinead O’Connor, with Lisa Marie Presley coming in at No. 8. The news headlines that we searched the most were those related to the war between Israel and Hamas, followed by the sinking of the Titanic tourist submarine, Hurricanes Hilary, Idalia and Lee, as well as a mass shootings in Maine and Nashville, the Maui wildfire, the Idaho college campus murder trail and the Canadian wildfires.

Lee Thomas Miller, a writer on hit country songs including “In Color” (Jamey Johnson) and “You’re Gonna Miss This,” (Trace Adkins) has signed a publishing deal with SMACKSongs. Over three decades, Miller has become one of country music’s most prolific songwriters, as well as one of the songwriting industry’s biggest champions. He has earned 13 […]

His hometown — Willacoochee, Ga. — sounds a whole lot like “Chattahoochee,” so it’s not entirely surprising that indie artist RVSHVD’s current single, “Small Town Talk,” employs many of the same values that inhabit an Alan Jackson song.

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The red brick church, the tire marks he left on Main Street, his first broken heart and his grandmother’s grave marker all provide this relatable sense of RVSHVD’s upbringing, which is quite similar to the childhood that many country fans experience across America. In a very real way, “Small Town Talk” exists mostly because RVSHVD doesn’t tend to talk that easily about what he’s doing or where he’s from. He just kind of lives it.

“My dad will sit there and tell me the same story,” he notes, drawing an obvious contrast. “Even random people in the grocery store, if there’s somebody standing there, he’ll walk up — he don’t even know the guy — and he’s like, ‘This meat’s high, ain’t it?’ He don’t even know the guy! My mom, she ain’t going to say more than three words. That must be where I get it from.”

RVSHVD’s reserved nature was on full display in April 2021 when he took part in a writing retreat specifically designed to generate songs that fit him at The Penthouse, the home base for his manager, Jonnie Forster, located near the Beverly Center in Los Angeles. Four or five different rooms were set up with at least one “track guy” and one topliner, with each of those rooms aiming for a song in the morning and another in the evening across two or three days. It all started with a get-acquainted session, where RVSHVD shared a little about his personal history, his goals, his tastes and his philosophy. Still, the introduction wasn’t all that detailed.

“I think I remember Jonnie making some jokes about, you know, ‘Good luck trying to get a lot out of him, because he’s usually a man of few words,’ ” says singer-songwriter Josh Logan.

That’s apparently pretty accurate — it’s similar to the understanding that singer-songwriter Willie Jones, who shares Forster as a manager, has of him. “RVSHVD is like that,” Jones says, “simple, low-key, real chill, laid-back, really grounded and really thoughtful.”

Logan, Jones and Jason Afable all ended up in a room together that first morning, and as they sought a direction to write for RVSHVD, they fixated on that “man of few words” description. They batted around some ideas, then found themselves wondering what more they could learn about RVSHVD if, as an old adage suggests, the walls could talk. That became its own train of thought, and as they started chasing down what that could mean, Forster popped into the room for a bit. They told him where they were headed, and somehow the phrase “Small Town Talk” showed itself.

“Jonnie was a big part of that title,” says Logan. “I don’t remember if someone just threw out the title, or he really kind of got us going or encouraged us down that road.”

But it was enough to work from. Afable developed a bittersweet, arpeggiated chord progression on electric guitar, and they began building a hook that flipped the gossipy implication of “small-town talk” into a confident portrait of a man’s roots speaking for his character. The opening lines — “The way I was raised up/I don’t really say a lot” — came directly from the day’s conversation and set up the storyline that followed.

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The phrasing in that verse was conversational, leaning into a fluid, hip-hop vibe near the end of the stanza, then lifted into a chorus melody that emphasized repeated three-beat phrases: “small-town talk,” “grade school walls,” “right from wrong,” for starters. The chorus’ images and its melodic components were classically country, forming a contrast with the flowy, hip-hop lead-in. It hinted at an artistic range that also showed itself in the span from the verse’s lower melodies to the chorus’ higher notes.

“A lot of singers got maybe one sweet spot,” Logan notes. “But for RVSHVD, I feel like his low tone is so rich and deep, and I just love that tone. But then also he has that upper range that just soars. So when he hits that, it just makes our job easier  because we can really utilize a different range, and we have [fewer] rules.”

The second verse painted an image of a broken-hearted young man who narrowly escaped tragedy, recounting an 18-year-old who drank a fifth of his dad’s Jack Daniel’s after his girlfriend broke his heart, jumped into his dad’s Cadillac and left tire marks on the road. The story wasn’t exactly RVSHVD’s — he changed the road to Main Street, his first overindulgence in alcohol was actually with Wild Irish Rose, and the tire marks he left were from playing with the gear shift in his mom’s car around age 10. But the narrative still hit close to home.

“When I first recorded the demo for it, I was getting choked up, and my wife, Angel, she was there with me,” remembers RVSHVD. “I’m tearing up, and I keep looking at her over in the chair, trying to make sure she don’t see me.”

The initial demo relied on the electric guitar part and drum with some other programmed parts thrown in. Afable produced several versions of it, though they had a hard time getting it right. RVSHVD, at some point, seemed to lose faith in it, so Forster suggested that Jones cut it. The song, he sensed, was too good to let go. Jones agreed on the song quality, though the opening lines didn’t really suit him.

“I talk a lot,” Jones says with a laugh.

He changed the street name and substituted Shreveport for Georgia to personalize it, but it never felt quite right.

“It was cool, but I felt like I was lying,” he admits. “Then he came back around, RVSHVD, like, ‘I want to do a version.’ I was like, ‘Do it and do it well.’ They changed the production, and I was like, ‘Whoa, that’s what I like to hear.’ ”

For that last go-around, Afable reached out to a multigenre Los Angeles production team, Dream Addix (aka singer-songwriters Michael Ferrucci and Chris Valenzuela, both of whom participated in the original retreat at The Penthouse), and they were able to meld just enough classic country pieces, such as fiddle and baritone guitars, to capture the song’s small-town essence and still feel contemporary. RVSHVD recut the vocals, and — since he had lived with “Small Town Talk” long enough —he had a different physical reaction to the song.

“It wasn’t tears no more,” he says, “but it was still chills on that.”

RVSHVD shot a video to “Small Town Talk” in his hometown, performing on the same football field where he used to play bass drum in the marching band and receiving a key to the city. The video and the song itself, released Nov. 3, shine a light on the same sort of small-town ethics at the center of country’s lexicon. RVSHVD knows it firsthand, and he expects the rest of his first album will create an even fuller picture of that heritage.

“Hopefully,” he says, “it’ll come out next year.”