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This story is part of Billboard‘s K-Pop Issue.
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 its pillars and a big part of what has helped it reach new audiences — as has cultivating groups with members from countries outside of South Korea. Today, it’s common for trainees to come not only from China, Japan and Thailand but also countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada and, now, the United States.
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“The whole strategy often started with having a member able to speak the language for the targeted market,” says John Yang, a U.S.-based entertainment executive who has spent 15 years in the Korean music business. “The K-pop industry realized the power of having members of that nation propelling more of the engagement among the fans and a much quicker local expansion.”
Now, with the genre’s growing popularity in major markets, K-pop stars are defined not by nationality, but by industry standards: years of rigorous training, contracts signed under a Korean agency, visual hallmarks (glossy videos, coordinated choreography) and release strategies involving multiple album drops each year.
“K-pop means ‘Korean popular music,’ ” Yang says. “I see this less as where it’s made, but more of who made it and how it’s produced. I may compare this with the restaurant business: It’s not the location defining it as ‘American,’ ‘Italian’ or ‘Korean,’ and also not about the ethnicity or race of its CEO, managers or even customers that defines cuisine, but more of cuisine consisting of the ingredients, recipes and techniques developed across that respective country.”
Despite the growing number of countries represented in K-pop, nearly all the artists are from Asia or of Asian descent. But the expanding definition of who can be a K-pop star is now seeing Korea’s industry leaders incorporating America’s diverse young talent into their system, regardless of race or ethnicity.
Initially, HYBE was the front-runner in this global gamble. A month before Big Hit Entertainment rebranded as HYBE in March 2021, chairman and then-CEO Bang Si-hyuk, alongside Universal Music Group chairman/CEO Lucian Grainge, revealed a strategic partnership that included assembling a “global” K-pop boy group in the United States under a new joint-venture label between Big Hit and Geffen Records. The plans to air worldwide auditions in 2022 with a “major U.S. media partner” changed a bit: HYBE and Geffen subsequently announced five American cities holding auditions for a “global girl group” in March and April 2022 before expanding the auditions to Japan, Australia, the United Kingdom and South Korea for December 2022-January 2023.
In that time, A2K launched its own American Idol-style auditions, bringing Park to Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Dallas and Los Angeles to select contestants to attend an L.A. “boot camp” reminiscent of The X Factor’s, with semifinalists then flying to JYP Entertainment’s Seoul headquarters for what A2K described as “intensive training” with music, dance and business executives. Winners will be part of a supergroup under JYP and Republic Records for all music releases — just like TWICE, Stray Kids and ITZY, which have earned seven top 10 albums on the Billboard 200, including two No. 1s by Stray Kids, since the companies partnered in 2020. TWICE, Stray Kids and JYP’s Japan-based girl group NiziU were all created on similar competition shows and officially debuted three to six months after their respective finales.
While JYP and HYBE worked directly with label partners, SM Entertainment connected directly with MGM Worldwide Television Group for its global venture. SM announced a partnership in May 2021 with MGM and its then-chairman, Mark Burnett, for a competition series forming NCT-Hollywood, a U.S. offshoot of SM’s boy band collective NCT, which has splinter groups across Korea, China and Japan. At the time, an insider told Billboard the show had been in development even before the pandemic — but Burnett’s late-2022 exit from MGM, Lee Soo-man’s controversial ousting from SM earlier this year and an announcement from SM’s new CEOs that the NCT system would halt expansion after a Tokyo-based team launches in 2023 raise questions about the project. (SM declined to comment for this story, as did Republic Records and Geffen Records — a reluctance likely born out of the high degree of competition and similar timelines to launch that they’re operating on.)
While no major U.S. label has made an earnest attempt, American and British “K-pop” groups have been launched before. Dubbed “the world’s most controversial ‘Korean’ band” by the BBC, EXP EDITION began in 2014 as Columbia University student Bora Kim’s master’s thesis that explored the meaning of K-pop music. Kim held auditions to form a band of six non-Korean men who would undergo a truncated version of the years of rigorous training K-pop hopefuls commit to in Seoul with voice coaching, dance rehearsals, language lessons and media training. Supporters donated $30,000 through Kickstarter and, with the help of a private investor, Kim and four of the six EXP EDITION members moved to Korea.
EXP EDITION booked prime K-entertainment TV slots like Mnet’s M Countdown and KBS2’s Immortal Songs, but experts criticized its inability to achieve captivating, onstage perfection — and the group’s 2018 debut EP, First Edition, was its sole release.
KAACHI, created by Frontrow Records and branded as the first London-based K-pop group, faced similar criticism. Unlike EXP EDITION, KAACHI did have one Korean member. Its 2021 music video “Get Up” was sponsored by a Seoul theme park, and the group performed publicly alongside top K-pop stars at the time. Still, the group disbanded in less than two years.
But crucially, today’s ventures to create global K-pop groups have the backing of some of the most powerful companies — Korean and American — in the music business. Whether or not the artists these initiatives yield break through on the Billboard charts, Yang sees future group launches as the ultimate indicator of a healthy, locally grown K-pop presence in America — much in the same way SM, JYP, HYBE and their counterparts have done for decades now in Asia.
“The most obvious indicators of the success of these projects would be Billboard charting, which will only result with the support of their fans without doubt,” he says. “However, the longevity of these partnerships and the birthing of more groups consistently will be the significant historical marker.”
This story originally appeared in the April 22, 2023, issue of Billboard.
This story is part of Billboard‘s K-Pop Issue.
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 executives are concerned about the extent to which the genre can continue to produce massive international hits without BTS’ firepower while the group is on hiatus. “Although I wouldn’t go so far as calling it a ‘crisis,’ I do share [Bang’s] underlying sense of urgency that the Korean music industry is very much at an important crossroads,” says Bernie Cho, president of DFSB Kollective, a Seoul-based artist and label services agency.
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K-pop’s ascent to global prominence was, Cho says, “inextricably linked [with] and heavily reliant on the singular artistic visions” of executives at a few key companies — notably SM Entertainment, YG Entertainment and JYP Entertainment. “It has become an open source of debate these days, from boardrooms to chat rooms, that steadfastly sticking to this single-lane approach may no longer be the right direction” if the industry hopes to “futureproof” K-pop.
Executives who work in and around the genre are quick to pinpoint one big reason for the recent lack of K-pop in the upper reaches of the Hot 100: In June 2022, BTS — which has topped the chart four times on its own and twice more as a collaborator with Western artists — announced its potentially yearslong hiatus. “Their vacancy is definitely going to put a bit of a hole in the market,” says Eddie Nam, CEO of EN Management (Eric Nam, Epik High).
But there’s disagreement on whether hit singles in the United States are the best gauge of the genre’s health in the first place. On the Billboard 200, K-pop albums continue to hit No. 1 thanks to robust physical sales of CD variants; last year, K-pop groups topped the chart four times — Stray Kids twice and BTS and BLACKPINK once each — setting a new high-water mark for K-pop. “Most K-pop groups are built on a strong fan base, and their loyalty and support for their artists is much more organized than in the past,” says YG Entertainment USA’s former president Joojong Joe. “These fandoms know that Billboard chart positioning is important to their artists, and they organize album purchases and promotion within their fandom in the first week of an album’s release in order to get it to the top of the charts.”
But recently, K-pop acts haven’t scaled the same heights on the Hot 100. The biggest recent non-BTS K-pop hit was BLACKPINK’s “Pink Venom” last year, which peaked at No. 22. In the United States, the genre’s singles often perform phenomenally on the downloads chart — mirroring their dominance in physical sales — but less well on the streaming and radio rankings. “Like Crazy,” for example, sold 254,000 downloads, easily topping Digital Song Sales, but clocked in at No. 35 on the Streaming Songs chart. BTS’ previous No. 1, the Coldplay collaboration “My Universe,” also topped Digital Song Sales in its first week but landed at No. 21 on Streaming Songs.
Getting airplay in the United States remains K-pop’s biggest challenge: BTS has spent 17 cumulative weeks atop the Hot 100 but hasn’t made it past No. 5 on Billboard’s Pop Airplay chart, and BLACKPINK hasn’t even cracked the top 20 on Pop Airplay. The airplay audience for “Like Crazy” is the lowest for a Hot 100 No. 1 this decade. “I don’t think we’ve seen Korean music take over U.S. radio in any way,” Nam says. This remains true even as most of the biggest K-pop acts now work with American major labels, which have long-standing radio promo teams.
As Joe points out, K-pop artists aren’t necessarily so different from others outside the United States when it comes to that airplay disadvantage. “You’re in the country for promotion for only a short amount of time,” he explains. “You have to prioritize — you have a late-night show on TV; you have a concert; you have a photo shoot. It takes a lot of time to build relationships at radio, and it has not been easy for Korean artists to do that in the short amount of time they have here.”
In addition, many K-pop singles are only partially in English, which may make them a tougher sell at radio — a medium not known for taking risks. (Bad Bunny is one of the biggest artists in the world, but he has never made it past No. 19 at pop radio as a lead artist.) Three of BTS’ biggest hits were entirely in English; two others were collaborations with prominent Western acts singing in English.
Others, like Michael Martin, senior vp of programming for Audacy, the second-largest radio company in the United States, dismiss the idea that language might be limiting K-pop’s airplay. Representatives for two other prominent radio conglomerates, iHeartRadio and Cumulus, declined to comment on K-pop airplay, though iHeart has been supporting rising acts like NewJeans, especially in cities on the West Coast, and had some of the few stations that played “Like Crazy” during its debut week.
However, there’s also an argument that in an increasingly global music marketplace, hits are no longer the most important indicator of a genre’s health — and that K-pop’s difficulty getting U.S. radio play ultimately doesn’t matter to its momentum. “I don’t think K-pop groups must have hit singles in the U.S. to succeed globally,” says Inkyu Kang, an associate professor at Penn State and the author of K-Pop: The International Rise of the Korean Music Industry. “K-pop had already been enjoyed by people around the world with diverse backgrounds before it reached the U.S.”
Those listeners continue to seek out music from the genre: K-pop groups accounted for four of the top 10 albums in the world last year, according to the most recent report from IFPI, up from two in 2020. Looking just at sales rather than overall consumption, K-pop acts have a whopping eight out of the top 10, up from four in 2020. “Last year, the K-pop industry had the highest album sales overseas in history,” though growth in album sales slowed significantly, says Stephanie Choi of SUNY Buffalo’s Asia Research Institute, who is working on a book on K-pop. Japan, China and the United States were the three biggest importers of K-pop albums.
“You have to look at the whole pie,” says Lucas Keller, who manages Jenna Andrews, co-writer of BTS’ runaway hit “Butter.” “K-pop has one of the most committed fan bases in the history of music. You have to look at the touring, the merchandise and the audience, not just the charts.”
“When I speak to folks in the industry,” Keller adds, “we all believe that Korean pop acts have a real seat at the table now — including a shot at Western success in a way that was more difficult in past years.”
This story originally appeared in the April 22, 2023, issue of Billboard.
In Billboard’s monthly emerging dance artist spotlight we get to know Yunè Pinku, the 20-year-old artist building fantastical realms with her otherworldly voice and textured sonics.
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The Project: Babylon IX EP, out April 28 on Platoon
The Origin: Born and raised in London, Malaysian-Irish artist Yunè Pinku worked a number of odd jobs before becoming a musician — including, as she told The Line of Best Fit, as a bartender, and as an intern both at Prada and at a crystal shop. Though she had learned to play piano, she seemingly found her comfort zone at her computer, where she began carving out ambient soundscapes with downloaded production software. Soon after, she started writing songs inspired by bedroom pop and what she described as “Bladee-weird Drain Gang stuff.”
During lockdown, Pinku channeled the energy she missed from dance music and going out into her experimentations. “Then I tried adding vocals on top of that, which were originally just gonna be placeholders,” she tells Billboard. By the time restrictions were lifted, she had made over 150 songs.
Despite not having any official releases to her name, Pinku earned a big co-sign from U.K. stalwart Joy Orbison (with whom she worked in music sessions), who invited her to contribute a guest mix to his Radio 1 residency in July 2021. Two months later, she featured on Logic1000’s single “What You Like,” followed by her solo debut “Laylo” in November.
To start 2022, she found another big supporter in The Blessed Madonna, who named Pinku one to watch on her BBC Radio 6 New Year’s Day broadcast. Last April, she released her debut EP, Bluff, which led to billboard support from major streaming services and one of its tracks, “DC Rot,” landing on the FIFA 23 video-game soundtrack. (“My inner hooligan’s gassed,” she wrote on Instagram).
The Sound: Pinku has called her work “music for introverted ravers.” It juxtaposes electronic productions — an ever-evolving blend of U.K. garage, breakbeats, house, trance and more — with pop-structured songwriting to create a sound that’s animated enough for bedroom raving, yet mellow enough for introspective night drives.
But beneath the dance-y beats, a shadowy undercurrent runs through Pinku’s lyrics. Bluff, for instance, reflects the anxiety and angst of spending lockdown in isolation before re-learning how to navigate the outside world. Newer song “Night Light” takes the perspective of an AI searching for its maker.
“I would say I’ve got a default setting in my brain that’s quite existential,” she says. “A small thing could send me off into a doom scenario where I’ll be like, what’s the meaning of life, who are we? So I think it’s sort of these traces that come through.”
Part of Pinku’s strength is her use of textures, no doubt a remnant of her early soundscape sketches. Subtle sonics such as glittering synth constellations, the whirs of a machine powering up and softened glitches make her songs seem like they transcend the aural into the physical world.
“I’ve always really liked anything that sounds a bit twinkly or sparkly,” she says. “Textures are to me like 50% of a song, ‘cause you could have like a really good beat, but the textures and extra effects are how you make it interesting and more emotional.” Pinku even often treats her own otherworldly vocals as an instrument to blend and manipulate. But as she’s grown confident in her voice, she’s more open to bringing it closer to the forefront.
The Record: As Pinku was writing her new EP, she envisioned it taking place in a metaverse or cyber-realm — “So I thought, like, the idea of Babylon,” she says, “or like, the hanging gardens and cloud nine, where it’s these fantastical realms of existence.”
Pinku’s own fantastical realm took time to mold. Before Bluff, music had simply been a hobby. Post-release, she realized just how many eyes were on her. “There was like a five-month period where I literally couldn’t come up with any music, ‘cause I was like, ‘Oh god, they’re all gonna hate the music,’” she recalls. Then, during a breakthrough studio session in which she says she felt like she was “dying of hay fever,” she made two tracks in one day. One of those was recent single “Fai Fighter,” a bright, bouncy track which opens with an unhinged scream and features Pinku’s voice slicing through the air with its piercing whoops.
Whereas Bluff dons a shield of bravado and toughness, Pinku describes Babylon IX as being “gentler” and “more vulnerable on the lyrical side”: “This one is more about a delve into parts of desperation or being honest with yourself about yourself.” Her newest single, “Sports,” laments the idea of someone putting their screens before their IRL relationships over barraging drums and thunderous synths, while on opening track “Trinity,” she softly muses, “I never wanna be this lonely.” Additional tracks “Heartbeat” and “Blush Cut” bring out the EP’s dreamier, more delicate side with their crystalline production. It’s intimate yet vast, sad but sweet.
“Me and my friend were talking about it the other day,” Pinku says, “and we were saying [the EP sounds as] if a DJ was trying to summon a spirit on a mountain or something.”
Managed By: Emma Reid & Ferdy Hall, Outlier Artists
Management Strategy: “Our main aim managing Yunè has always been to make sure that this whole process remains not only fun and creative for her, but grows at a rate that she’s comfortable with,” say Reid and Hall. “This means saying ‘no’ to things is just as important as saying ‘yes.’ Growing her team independently via artist services company Platoon has allowed us the space and time to consider each step forward. Focusing on her long term ambitions rather than being preoccupied with short term trends that can often box in an artist’s growth rather than encourage it. This plays into our measurement for success, as long as we take a step forward with every move, then our plan and strategy is working.
“Her biggest strength as an artist,” they continue, “is the quantity of quality music she’s able to make fast and her ability to envision the world that should sit around her releases. All we need to do is lean into that and put the pieces around her to make sure it’s all coming to life.”
First Song That Made Her Love Dance Music: Pinku was not a dance music fan growing up, thinking it to be only the trance her mother played around the house, but lockdown led to a change of heart. When she left her Spotify running in the background, the algorithm’s resultant “clubby drums” breached her subconscious. Pinku specifically remembers hearing songs from New York-based artist Eartheater’s 2019 album Trinity during those run-ons:
“They’re like trappy, kind of electronic, weird, blend stuff,” she says. “It’s cool ‘cause it’s quite experimental. It’s a mix of multiple genres and it kind of made me think, club music and electronic are like a whole [spectrum], and not just this or that.”
Advice Every New Dance Artist Needs to Hear: “Don’t be afraid to experiment or get quite weird with it. It’s electronic: you have so much space and there’s no rules with it, really.”
Why She Makes Music: “I think it’s just something I just do regardless of if anyone was listening to it. To me, it’s like getting things out of your soul in a way, which sounds very deep, but it’s like a diary for me. You free yourself a bit when you put it into a song.”
Up Next: In Pinku’s words: “A lot of shows.” She embarks on the next leg of her U.K./European tour next month, and in June she’ll venture this side of the pond for her first U.S. live shows at Brooklyn’s Elsewhere (June 15) and Los Angeles’ El Cid (June 22). SoCal fans can catch her again at HARD Summer (Aug. 5).
The rest of 2023 isn’t all planes and stages, though. Pinku’s also thinking about her eventual debut album. “I always enjoy the early stage of putting a project together ‘cause you’re just throwing out ideas of what you want it to be,” she says. “So I’m still kind of in the early stage where I’m just making tracks here and there and seeing if there’s any sound overall that’s coming out clearly and then just tweaking away at them.”
Matthew Schonfeld and RaShaad Strong used to play a simple game to pass the time while working at Manhattan’s Only NY boutique.
“We started going on SoundCloud to find the artist with the least followers [who had] the song that was more fire than the next one,” Schonfeld says. The pair would alternate playing “SoundCloud rabbit hole” finds from now-established acts. While Strong usually had the best picks, Schonfeld unwillingly admits, both music lovers emerged as winners.
In 2016, the duo began their music discovery podcast Not97 — its name, of course, a “tongue-in-cheek” reference to renowned New York hip-hop FM station Hot97. “We love Hot97,” Schonfeld says. “It does its thing for [big] artists, and we’re going to do what we do for [emerging] artists.”
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Five years later, Not97 was picked up by Human Re Sources and The Orchard after seven seasons, and recently landed at No. 2 on the Apple Music Podcasts Chart. Along with their newest co-host Athena Yasaman, the trio of music lovers — who double as professional managers, curators and fashion industry creators — search the depths of the internet to find the best under-underground artists and pass the aux back and forth, highlighting their favorite finds across genres.
“What I liked most about Not97 is how it felt similar to our mission as a company of being disruptive,” says Human Re Sources CEO and EVP of creative development at Sony Music, Jay Erving. “They have a very high taste level and batting average in terms of picking artists that are ultimately going to have success.”
Each episode also features guests who bring two of their own music picks — including fashion designers, curators, DJs, A&Rs, music journalists, artists, music executives and directors. This season’s guests will include artists Jordan Ward, Fana Hues and Alex Vaughn.
“[Not97] has given artists an outlet that’s less abrasive,” explains co-founder Strong. “We’re one of the few platforms that if you come on to the show, we’re not even going to ask you many questions about your actual artistry. It’s a safe space.”
Instead, the artists spend their time uplifting other artists smaller than them that they admire, leaning into a community-based approach that is uncommon in the world of music interviews.
Founded in 2016, Not97 carved out its own uncharted space amidst an influx of music podcast start-ups, including Drink Champs and The Joe Budden Podcast (formerly known as I’ll Name This Podcast Later), among others. While wildly popular podcasts from known veteran music personalities like N.O.R.E., Joe Budden and Angie Martinez have thrived with superstar guests, co-founders Schonfeld and Strong made a name for themselves by leaning into the exact opposite.
“I got bored of blogs — I didn’t feel like I was finding new music there,” Schonfeld explains. “I was trying to figure out how I could effect some sort of change within music discovery for young artists. The podcast is kind of built as a means to an end for that.”
Schonfeld’s strategy has remained the same over the years: going down those SoundCloud rabbit holes in the hopes of finding a diamond in the rough. And his strategy has worked: Not97 featured Baby Keem, King Princess, Giveon, Kenny Mason, Arlo Parks, Tierra Whack, Fousheé and plenty of other now-notable acts before their breakout moments.
“You can read 500 words about an artist and still not press play on the song,” he says. “So [we thought], ‘Let’s streamline it and create a way to listen to a podcast and to eight songs.’”
Not only does Not97 expose small artists to an audience of thousands, but the platform has also become a strong networking tool for small acts to secure otherwise inaccessible opportunities. Schonfeld says he and his collaborators spent the first year of Not97 building relationships with artists, reaching out to ask permission before playing their songs. Featuring recorded tracks soon turned to holding full performances, when the team began their Not a Showcase series in Los Angeles and New York, setting the stage for a few acts to perform live for a ticketed audience and creating opportunities for those acts to profit from their art.
Beyond opportunities directly tied to Not97, the podcast allows for the show’s guests to be exposed to music from acts with small audiences. Over the course of nine seasons, Not97 has had music industry guests including artists, sync licensing coordinators, label executives and music journalists, with some artists whose music was featured going on to secure booking agents and performances thanks to their inclusion on episodes.
“When we started this, we didn’t set out to be the biggest podcast — we were using the podcast medium as a means of sharing music,” Schonfeld says. “We were like, ‘This is the easiest way for us to play this music, have these conversations and get it out there.’ In the last, like, four or five years, everybody started a podcast — it’s just gone crazy. That being said, I do think that the music podcast world is still fairly untapped.”
But despite the boom of podcast listenership, some companies are cutting back. In March, NPR announced that it would be canceling four podcasts — Invisibilia, Louder Than a Riot, Everyone & Their Mom and Rough Translation — to close a $30 million budget gap. In an article from NPR announcing the cancellation and a layoff of 10 percent of their staff, the platform attributed the slashing of those podcasts to “advertisers’ growing reluctance to spend money, particularly on podcasting, in an uncertain economy.”
“The problem is a lot of these companies don’t necessarily know what they’re doing with this content,” Schonfeld says. “I don’t think NPR realizes how important what they have is. They’re going to be producing Louder Than a Riot for this whole season and I hope by the end of it, NPR rethinks their [decision].”
When asked if he worries for Not97, Schonfeld is confident. “Not97’s tagline is, ‘Not a podcast, not a radio show.’ That has put us in a space that’s one foot in, one foot out,” he says. “A lot of our success up until now has been on the music side of things. I think of Not97 as an overarching brand and the podcast being the nucleus of that.”
Schonfeld says that the collaboration with Human Re Sources and The Orchard will allow them to provide resources to artists that they otherwise wouldn’t have access to. “Having a global distribution platform behind us where I can pitch artists to internal teams that [handle] music distribution, marketing, digital marketing services,” he lists. “The Orchard really builds itself out to be a full support system for artists.”
“Both Spotify, Apple and others are really leaning into podcasts,” says Erving. “I think we’re gonna start to see them behind the paywall, which will lend itself to a lot more revenue in the space.”
When it comes to the future of Not97, co-founder Strong has big plans for expansion. “[We’re thinking about] potentially going to a larger platform to amplify what we already do in terms of video,” he says. “Matt has always wanted to do a label from when I met him, before we even did the podcast. So a label would be the next thing. That was the ultimate goal.”
This weekend an album made in the forced seclusion of lockdown sees the light of day — and the darkness of the dancefloor — as Amtrac hits the road for the 17-date run behind his Extra Time LP.
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Released in February via the Los Angeles-based producer’s own Openers label, the album is a warm voyage of synth and feeling, with the smart productions spanning moods from melancholy to longing to joy and catharsis with lush sophistication.
Audiences can partake in these many vibes starting tomorrow at Toronto club The Velvet Underground, with the tour then working its way across the U.S. through early June.
Ahead of this affair, one entirely out of reach during the making of the album behind it, the artist born Caleb Cornett offers the backstory on the album, his hobbies and sampling the legends of Motown.
1. Where are you in the world right now, and what’s the setting like?
Currently on a flight back from Miami Music Week; the setting is tranquil.
2. What is the first album or piece of music you bought for yourself, and what was the medium?
Pretty sure it was a cassette single of The Prodigy’s “Firestarter.” Also I remember the first CD I ever bought was the soundtrack for [1997 comic book adaptation] Spawn.
3. What did your parents do for a living when you were a kid, and what do or did they think of what you do for a living now?
My mom has always worked at a bookstore, and my dad works for the food distributor Sysco.
4. What’s the first non-gear thing you bought for yourself when you started making money as an artist?
I cant recall; it’s honestly almost always gear.
5. If you had to recommend one album for someone looking to get into dance/electronic music, what would you give them?
Tough question, how about two: Moderat’s [self-titled 2009] first album and Clark’s Body Riddle.
6. What’s the last song you listened to?
XTC, “Making Plans For Nigel.”
7. You wrote on Instagram that you made Extra Time to “cope with times of uncertainty.” How does this body of work help you cope in that way?
I made the majority of the record locked inside during lockdown; it was my outlet for what I was feeling. One of the few things that kept me sane, my way of coping.
8. Everybody’s so damn busy all the time. Are you able to find actual extra time in your life?
Luckily yes, I spend just as much time cooking as I do making music — that’s slowly but surely becoming more of a passion.
9. Tell me about getting the Four Tops sample on the album via “Nobody Else.” What did the inspiration strike to use it, and what was the clearing process like?
I’ve been sampling Motown records for a while now, usually just as place holders for inspiration. “Nobody Else” just felt right — I wanted to see if we could get the sample cleared. Luckily Motown was into the record and we made it all work. My tracks “Those Days” and “Hold On” also included some cleared Motown samples from Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye.
10. How did you celebrate finishing the LP?
I went out for some nice szechuan cuisine.
11. This album has the distinction of having a beer made in its honor. Fun. How did that happen?
My lifelong friends opened a brewery in my hometown in Morehead, Kentucky a few years back. I approached them with the idea and magic happened. It was such a blast. I have little to no knowledge when it comes to brewing beer, so it was a great learning experience as well; I loved helping with the whole process.
12. What’s the best city in the world for dance music currently? Why?
I would say Los Angeles is pretty great when it comes to diversity. I’ve seen all walks of electronic over the past few years here.
13. You’re about to embark on a major tour. Have you done anything special to get mentally and physically prepared for this run?
Mainly just trying to be a as healthy as I can prior, eating my greens and working up a sweat in the gym.
14. The most exciting thing happening in dance music currently is _____?
I would have to say the parties, especially the underground — It’s constantly evolving and theres always new crews popping up. Los Angeles has some great things going on with Lights Down Low, Rhonda, Cyclone & IYKYK to name a few.
15. The most annoying thing happening in dance music currently is _____?
Copycats. There are tons of producers out there trying to sound like someone else. You can see right though it; it’s just lazy to me. Don’t be afraid to take risks, venture into the unknown.
16. Do you have guilty pleasure music?
I probably play OMC’s “How Bizarre” too much.
17. The proudest moment of your career thus far?
Being able to put out music myself, setting up my own label.
18. What’s the best business decision you’ve ever made?
Also, starting my own label, 100%.
19. Who was your greatest mentor, and what was the best advice they gave you?
I would have to say my managers, they’ve been with me for over a decade now and started working with me when I hadn’t really released any music. They were the first people who saw a bigger picture with what I was doing, just the mere fact they believed in me changed my outlook, having a team has made the world of difference.
20. One piece of advice you’d give to your younger self?
Don’t let anyone else tell you what’s cool, decide for yourself. Also, you’re cool.
Daniel Caesar holds himself to a predictable and impossible standard: “perfection,” he says.
It explains the title of his upcoming third album, NEVER ENOUGH (out April 7), which is the Toronto native’s first release since signing with Republic Records two years ago. It will also usher in a new, more alternative sonic chapter for the 27-year-old singer-songwriter. “If I was a punk artist, then I would want to be something else,” he says. “It’s really just not wanting to be boxed into anything.”
Caesar veered close to perfection in the early days of his rise, entering the industry with his 2017 debut, Freudian, which positioned him as R&B’s burgeoning golden child from north of the border. Freudian landed two singles on the Billboard Hot 100: “Get You,” featuring Kali Uchis and “Best Part,” alongside H.E.R. The latter — one of three Adult R&B Airplay chart-toppers for Caesar — earned him a Grammy Award for best R&B performance (“I crossed that off much sooner in my life than I ever thought I would,” he says of the win).
By year’s end, he landed two songs on former President Barack Obama’s favorite tracks of the year list. Perhaps most impressively, Caesar did it all as an independent artist working alongside a tight-knit team of fellow Canadian creatives and close friends. Together, they founded Golden Child Recordings after attending a handful of label meetings and realizing they already had all the resources to succeed. “The music was making some money, so we just kept reinvesting in ourselves,” says Caesar. “I’d never made any sort of music without them. It was everything I knew.”
Daniel Caesar photographed March 16, 2023 in New York.
Lea Winkler
But Freudian’s follow-up, 2019’s Case Study 01, struggled to replicate its predecessor’s success after Caesar shared controversial opinions on race relations on Twitter and Instagram Live. During one particular livestream, where he said he was drunk, Caesar questioned why the Black community was being “mean” to white people, saying, “That’s not equality.”
The subsequent backlash took him by surprise, and Caesar says he underestimated the reach and impact of his opinions. “I understand why it happened. I understood it then as well. I’m just so combative, and I didn’t think that I was wrong,” he admits today. “I was trying to move through the world [according to] how I think it should be and not how it is.”
It’s his comfort with vulnerability that makes Caesar’s introspective take on music feel like a deep sigh of relief, each sonic exhalation breathing new life into the R&B space. It is also what made his fall from grace an even harder pill for fans to swallow.
“I try to keep my privacy and not to speak too much to the public [out of] fear of being misunderstood,” he explains today. “My best mode of communication is music.”
Daniel Caesar photographed March 16, 2023 in New York.
Lea Winkler
Despite the overshadowing controversy, Case Study further cemented Caesar’s avant-garde take on R&B and proved a cohesive, replay-worthy body of work that boasted a No. 1 record on the Adult R&B Airplay chart, the Brandy-assisted “Love Again.”
Less than a year later, as the pandemic hit, Caesar took refuge at the “middle-of-nowhere” 36-acre farm he had bought his parents, located in a town two hours outside of Toronto. It was there that the Bajan-Jamaican artist began reconciling the last few years of his come-up — and contemplating how to advance his career.
Like many, Caesar maintained sanity by picking up quarantine hobbies, such as chess and studying Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. He also went back to work: In 2021, he scored a Hot 100 No. 1 for his feature on Justin Bieber’s smash “Peaches” (alongside Giveon), and last year, he featured on Omar Apollo’s “Invincible.”
At the same time, he was focused on NEVER ENOUGH. Unlike the star-studded Case Study 01, Caesar returned to what he knows best: working both independently and with Toronto collaborators like badbadnotgood, Jordan Evans and Matthew Burnett and even his little brother, Zachary Simmonds, who co-wrote and co-produced “Valentina.”
The tracklist went through three iterations, with Caesar saying he initially felt anxious ahead of the album’s release. But he found reassurance in remembering why he makes music in the first place: “For me,” he declares, “it’s literally just to get these feelings off my chest. To make myself proud.”
Caesar’s demeanor is refreshingly self-aware. As he sits at a desk in his sunlight-soaked Manhattan loft, he weaves through the questions that kept him up at night and inspired the 15-track set. “If you dangle enough money in front of me, will I change my belief system? Can a woman make me change my world view? Or the proposition of sex? What do you fold on yourself for?” he asks rhetorically. “I’ve [folded] on myself and it’s hard. Those are the things that I beat myself up over.”
NEVER ENOUGH centers the introspective bars, soothing blend of woozy guitar and hypnotic harmonies fans have come to expect from Caesar, with hints of cross-genre influences. Phrases like “Do I titillate your mind?” do just that while suspended chords and R&B structure on tracks like “Always” and “Cool” resonate with purist listeners.
“When people ask me what kind of music I make, I always say R&B. Just to simplify things,” he says, adding that he senses a lack of innovation in the space. Luckily at Republic, Caesar has even more resources to continue expanding the genre space.
“I was finding it hard at Golden Child to be a record exec and an artist at the same time,” he says. “This was something I needed to do for myself for my development. I was like, ‘If I don’t do it, it’s because I’m scared.’ And I hate living in fear.”
Daniel Caesar photographed March 16, 2023 in New York.
Lea Winkler
Caesar met with eight or nine labels, saying he considered Columbia and Warner before signing with Republic. “Republic was actually the label where I said, ‘I would never go there,’ ” he recalls. “It’s just such a big label. They have all the biggest acts. I would be the least important person there.” But after meeting with label founder/CEO Monte Lipman and then-senior vice president of A&R Julian Swirsky, it became clear the label’s help would allow him to do exactly what he wanted: focus on his craft — and his fans. “I felt for a while, especially over [the pandemic], like I didn’t have a relationship with them, or it was severely fickle,” he says. “Like they love the songs, but they don’t care about me — which is completely reasonable. Why should they care about me?”
To reconnect, he met fans where they were: from the favelas of Brazil during Carnival (a country where he realized he has a large listenership) to his newly launched Discord channel (“It’s some Gen Z sh-t for real,” he jokes). He’ll celebrate the album’s release by kicking off his intimate North American and European underplay tour, One Night Only: An Evening With Daniel Caesar, which will begin April 7 in Los Angeles.
For Caesar, NEVER ENOUGH chronicles his path to becoming his own man while finding a balance between longtime trusted collaborators and welcoming well-established executives into the mix. “I always tell people, ‘I don’t believe in God. I believe in myself and the people around me that I love,’ ” he says. “I believe in our capabilities.”
A version of this story originally appeared in the April 1, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Libianca will always remember last year’s Friendsgiving — after all, she ran to the bathroom sobbing in the middle of it.
The former contestant on The Voice had recently quit her job as an independent living skills worker, and had been questioning her future as a professional singer. She was no longer interested in covering already established hits; she wanted to create a life-changing one of her own.
“I was talking to God, [thinking], ‘This life is so hard.’ I don’t know what the next step is, but I was working, working, and working, and not seeing anything in return,” she recalls over Zoom.
But the Friendsgiving breakdown left her inspired, and later in November, the embattled singer — who has been diagnosed with cyclothymia, a rare mood disorder that can cause extreme emotional highs and lows — chose to detail her pain through songwriting. She went on YouTube and found a beat that captured her discomfort, then recorded on Apple’s Logic Pro. Within a day, what began as a therapy session formed the foundation for “People,” the 22-year-old R&B-Afrobeats artist’s breakout hit and long-awaited ticket to stardom.
Born in Minnesota, Libianca Kenzonkinboum Fonji moved to Cameroon with her family when she was 4. There, she drew inspiration from her first babysitter, who enjoyed singing while cleaning around the house. Their relationship sparked Libianca’s initial love for singing, and by the age of 10, she began writing her own songs.
At 13, she moved back to Minnesota and joined a local choir, learning how to engineer, record and mix her vocals soon after. By her late teens, she was covering songs like SZA’s “Good Days” and Billie Eilish’s “Everything I Wanted,” the latter of which she also performed on The Voice in 2021.
Though she was ultimately eliminated after making the show’s top 20, her departure was soon followed by a string of independent one-off releases, including her cover of “Everything I Wanted” at the end of 2021 and a spin on Doja Cat’s “Woman” the following spring.
Libianca photographed on March 17, 2023 in Los Angeles.
Liam Woods
Yet the original single “People” is the one that cut through — and is a shining example of how sourcing your pain can have impactful results. While the track bursts with Afrobeats flavor, poignant lyrics like the opening line “I’ve been drinking more alcohol for the past five days/Did you check on me? Now, did you look for me?” ground the song while addressing the impact of substance abuse on mental health.
Libianca played the song for her manager M3tro, whom she met five years ago during her time as a student at the University of Minnesota (the two creatives became fast friends, and eventually roommates). And while he raved about the record, he instantly became concerned while listening to the lyrics. “Once she played the song, I asked her, ‘I know something’s going on, but what’s up?’ ” M3tro remembers. “That’s when I was like, ‘I really have to pay more attention.’ ”
Several days after writing and recording the breakthrough hit, Libianca posted a teaser clip on TikTok in which she was holding a bottle of wine as a snippet of the song played in the background. According to M3tro, within 30 minutes of uploading the clip, likes and comments started flooding her notifications. “Waking up the next morning to so many people feeling so connected to the song [was special],” Libianca says. “I saw families sending me videos of their babies singing the song, and [had] women messaging me about the sh-t that they go through in their homes and how this song needs to drop ASAP because it’s calling to their hearts.”
To date, the viral clip has compiled more than 4.8 million views on TikTok. Less than a week after the initial post, she upped the ante with a live rendition of the track in front of a simple color backdrop. The DIY clip has since earned 1.3 million views on Instagram and 2.5 million on TikTok.
The buzz surrounding the unreleased track soon caught the attention of acclaimed U.K. producer Jae5, who quickly reached out in hopes of signing Libianca to his 5K Records label, and did so last December — just one month after her memorable Friendsgiving. Once the deal was done, Jae quickly mixed the record and helped with the song’s final arrangement before its official release on Dec. 6.
“When it comes to music, that man is my big brother for life,” says M3tro of Jae5. “Not only is he that, but he’s also humble and genuine. He comes in like, ‘How can the music be the best way it needs to be?’ And we applaud him for that.”
Libianca (left) and M3tro photographed on March 17, 2023 in Los Angeles.
Liam Woods
“People” debuted on the Billboard U.S. Afrobeats Songs chart in mid-December — where it has held at a No. 2 high since January — and has 288.7 million official on-demand global streams through March 30, according to Luminate. The song also became Libianca’s first entry on the Billboard Global 200 and Billboard Global Excl U.S. charts. And in March, she dropped multiple remixes to maximize the crossover momentum, including one with fellow Afrobeats stars Omah Lay and Ayra Starr and another with Irish singer-songwriter Cian Ducrot.
“We were very particular about who else was gonna hop on this song, because the message is very crystal-clear,” says Libianca. “[‘People’] is very vulnerable, and anyone that comes on there has to be vulnerable as well in their own way.”
Libianca says that her next single, due later this month, will be about “a bunch of real sh-t we don’t like to talk about.” An EP will soon follow. “It doesn’t have to be sad, per se, but if it’s not something I can feel, I’m not gon’ release it,” she explains. “I want every single one of my songs to be an experience rather than just doing what I need to do to get the next check.”
A version of this story originally appeared in the April 1, 2023, issue of Billboard.
As Luke Combs’ booking agent, WME partner Aaron Tannenbaum, began plotting the European leg of the country star’s massive 2023 world tour, he encountered some promoters, in places like Hamburg, Germany, and Zurich, who were skeptical that a country act would sell tickets in Europe. So he repeated a kind of mantra to them: “You can always count on Luke Combs.”
He was right: Combs sold out all nine European dates he booked (and in substantially larger venues than initially planned). But the mantra — a testament not only to Combs’ dependability as a global touring act but to his rock-solid character — has plenty of less glamorous applications, too. Today, Combs, 33, is sitting in his manager’s Nashville office (a memento-filled monument to, well, him) at the beginning of our interview when a staffer pops her head in. “Nicole [Combs’ wife] needs your keys,” she says. The base of his 9-month-old son Tex’s car seat is in Combs’ truck, and Nicole needs to take the little guy to daycare.
“Do you know how to get it out?” Combs asks hesitantly. He starts to explain, then jumps up. “I’ll just do it, it takes literally one second.” He turns to me. “Baby stuff!”
You can always count on Luke Combs, and that is basically his brand. Without a shtick beyond “everyman,” Combs now fills stadiums nationwide as the Country Music Association’s reigning entertainer of the year, hot off his 15th No. 1 single on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart. Just your neighborhood consistent, reliable global sensation, on the cusp of bringing country to one of the widest non-pop crossover audiences it has ever had, signature red Solo cups in hand and fishing shirt on as he constructs a kind of fame that’s built to last.
“He’s just Luke, our friend, you know?” says his longtime tour manager, Ethan Strunk, who has been with Combs since he pitched himself to the singer when Combs walked into the Opry Mills Boot Barn in Nashville, where Strunk was working in 2016. “How little Luke has changed is baffling to me. There’s no way I could do it. He’s the same funny, funny guy. People say that all the time, but it’s just the truth.”
With his fourth studio album, Gettin’ Old (which arrived March 24 on River House Artists/Columbia Nashville), and an ongoing 16-country international tour, which kicked off at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, on March 25, Combs not only wants to cement his place at the top of the country heap but prove that he can transcend it — without changing anything about himself or his music. As Combs puts it, “The music has the ability to reach a lot more people than the marketing behind it does. We have a little bit of something for everybody, and that’s the way I want it to be.”
HB shirt, Harbor Bay T-shirt, Joe’s Jeans jeans, M.L. Leddy boots, Miller Lite vintage hat.
Eric Ryan Anderson
The North Carolina native has colored outside of country’s lines from the start. He built buzz on social media and through local live shows before signing with Lynn Oliver-Cline of River House Artists, and though he did eventually do some conventional radio circuits and a little time in the opening-slot trenches, it only took him two years to go from playing 250-capacity clubs to headlining his first arena tour.
His team, which has remained more or less the same since he started touring heavily in 2015, attributes his massive and rapid success in part to the unorthodox approach it has taken from the beginning. “The strategy was, ‘Let’s play the rooms that a rock act would play,’ ” says his manager, Chris Kappy, of the early days. “We didn’t play all the honky-tonks like everybody else did.”
“We had the mentality that we needed to push the limits of what you would think a country artist can and would do,” adds Tannenbaum. He booked Combs outside the genre at festivals like Lollapalooza (2018), Bonnaroo (2017) and Austin City Limits (2017) — and out of the country (in the United Kingdom and Australia), building a foundation for the international draw he has now. “Everything we’re doing as far as expanding globally, it’s not really off-script,” Tannenbaum says. “It’s just a different iteration of the same thing we’ve been doing since the beginning.”
That thing is an ever-growing iteration of Combs, the singer-songwriter, which, to the outsider, hasn’t changed all that much from his 250-person club dates. “Even when we started out in arenas, we didn’t want any fire or any crazy stunts,” says Combs. “You just come out and do the show, right? I think sometimes that can be so powerful in and of itself.” (He adds with jovial self-deprecation: “I’m not running around like Kenny Chesney.”)
Combs started sprinkling in stadium dates when he resumed touring following the pandemic pause in 2021, starting with Kidd Brewer Stadium at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., his would-be alma mater had music not come calling. Some initial trial and error was necessary because no one on his team had ever been part of a stadium tour.
“We always wanted the show to be about the music and to feel intimate somehow — which is a mega challenge in a stadium,” says Combs. “How do you entertain that many people? How do you make it an experience worth coming back to? There are people traveling a long way to come to this.”
Yet so far he has resisted the temptation to entice return customers by adding more eye-popping elements to his set. The show is Combs and seven band members, with strategically positioned video monitors to make everyone in the stadium feel as close to Combs as possible — and that’s basically it.
“I’m not flying in on a motorcycle,” he quips. “Live band, no tracks. Everything going out of the speakers, we’re f–king playing it when you hear it.”
That’s not to say Combs doesn’t see the value in elaborate stadium production — it’s just not for him. “Taylor Swift is like going to see Ringling Bros., and my show is like going to a demolition derby,” he jokes. “You’re coming to drink beer and be like, ‘Hell yeah.’ ”
Luke Combs photographed on March 14, 2023 at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium.
Eric Ryan Anderson
There has been something of a learning curve as Luke Combs Inc. has adjusted to a stadium-size setup. For example, the thrust stage used at Combs’ first stadium shows — Kidd Brewer in 2021 and Atlanta, Denver and Seattle in 2022 — was 8 feet tall, making it nearly impossible for Combs to see, much less connect with fans in the pit.
“Especially coming off doing the 360 arena thing, where you’re right in the middle and everybody feels pretty close, you go out in the stadiums and man, once the spots hit you out there, you almost can’t see anything,” says Combs. “You can see two rows of people, and then there’s just like infinite blackness.”
This time, the thrust will be both larger and at a lower level than the main stage. “You’re more in the crowd,” Combs adds. “I really wanted to feel that. I love playing small clubs, and feeling like people are right there is really nice.”
“Fans first” is the slogan of Kappy’s Make Wake management company, and one that permeates its decisions. Combs’ fans, called the Bootleggers, are so named for one of his early “hits” (his scare quotes), “Let the Moonshine,” and its ties to his Appalachian upbringing. He and Kappy started a private Facebook group for Bootleggers in 2015, the same year Kappy began managing a then-unsigned Combs; today, it has over 175,000 members, despite being entirely separate from the official Bootleggers club that fans can now sign up for on Combs’ own site to access perks and presales. One of those perks is the VIB (Very Important Bootlegger) meet-and-greet giveaway — which is the only VIP offering on Combs’ tours and completely free.
“I’ve always just felt really weird about, like, charging people to meet me,” he says. “Maybe that’s just me feeling like, ‘Well, it’s not worth it.’ ” By making meet-and-greets almost completely random (25 fans are chosen per show through a lottery on Combs’ site), Combs gets to see “a real representation of who’s there,” as he puts it. “I just want to meet people who came to the show, whether it’s their first show or their 50th show. It’s like people who would have never gotten the chance to meet me or could never have afforded it. Because I couldn’t have afforded that growing up.”
His manager is willing to put it more bluntly. “That’s not the type of people we want,” Kappy recalls telling a banker when turning down a $5,000 offer to meet Combs at the AT&T Stadium show. “I’d rather have the guy who can barely afford to come to the show because that’s more of a real fan than you wanting a picture with Luke for your Instagram.”
“I always want my fans to understand that I’ve never made any decisions based off how much money I can get out of them,” Combs says. “It already costs so much to do anything, right? I want them to love the music and feel like they saw a great show that someone put a lot of f–king thought into and did it at a price that was affordable to them.”
Asos shirt, Harbor Bay T-shirt, Joe’s Jeans jeans, Bass Pro Shops hat.
Eric Ryan Anderson
That’s why he has kept ticket prices at pre-pandemic levels (an average of $88) and has a section of $25 tickets at every show; why he has free preparties and tailgates attached to most of his stadium dates; why he refunded fans after a set in Maine last year because he felt like his voice wasn’t up to snuff (despite the fact that he did perform a shortened set); why he doesn’t only tour in the places where it’s most straightforward and lucrative. Combs is playing the long game.
“We’re trying to build a career so people can meet at a Luke Combs show and then eventually bring their kids to it and be like, ‘This is how it all happened,’ ” Kappy explains.
“Could I have gone out and done super-mega platinum tickets at even more stadiums and made an assload of money? Probably so,” Combs adds. “But I think eventually the fans will be like, ‘I’m not doing that again.’ ”
And it’s still more efficient for him: nearly 1 million tickets sold for 2023, for the fewest dates (39) he has worked in years. For 16 weeks, he’ll bus into North American cities on Thursday night, rehearse Friday, play Saturday and return to his home outside Nashville on Sunday. Then, after three weeks in Australia and three weeks in Europe and the United Kingdom (with a sizable break in between), he’s done for the year, without needing to bring Nicole and baby Tex along for the ride. “One show a week is like … dude!” he says. “People dream about doing one show a week.”
Combs’ international appeal is rooted in that same fans-first ethos. He went to play in Australia when it wasn’t profitable; now, the only reason he’s not booking multiple nights at stadiums there is because his trip coincides with the Women’s World Cup and all such venues are booked.
“There was a trust factor between he and I,” Kappy explains. “I said, ‘Look, I need you to do this, and you’re going to lose money. But instead of going and playing Raleigh every July at the amphitheater, you’re going to build markets.” Now Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, Australia, are among Combs’ top 10 streaming cities worldwide; some of the cities in Oceania where Combs is selling out arenas on this year’s tour, he has never even played before.
“People in our genre have always been so content with just doing [the] lower 48 because that has been good, that has been great. That has been safe. That’s where the money is,” says Combs. “But I feel like country music has such a place in the world outside of just the States.”
Luke Combs photographed on March 14, 2023 at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium.
Eric Ryan Anderson
There is no template for what Combs has been able to accomplish internationally, and the biggest hurdle, according to his management team, has been getting promoters on board without any comparable artists to reference — mostly by insisting repeatedly that the demand is nearly insatiable. “We didn’t come here to punt,” Kappy says. “So the goal is like, ‘Let’s throw a Hail Mary.’ And a lot of our Hail Marys are getting caught.”
A favorite anecdote among Team Combs is about when the singer played Quebec City’s multigenre Festival d’Été last summer — a booking that apparently made some of the event’s organizers nervous.
“I had personally been aggressively pursuing that opportunity for Luke for five years, and I kept getting back, ‘No, country doesn’t really work up here. He’s not a headliner,’ ” says Tannenbaum. Combs drew upwards of 70,000 people.
“Everybody was singing every word to every song — even the deep cuts — but then he would stop and everyone was speaking French,” Kappy recalls.
“He’s a unicorn,” says Tannenbaum. “I don’t really know how else to say it.”
That Quebec City date helped raise their expectations for this international tour. “We believed we had something really big with this,” Tannenbaum explains. “However, there wasn’t much precedent for the promoters to calibrate their expectations on, and the comps the promoters did have didn’t perform very well.”
So Tannenbaum and his colleagues at WME agreed to book European venues they felt confident Combs could fill several times over, because those were the ones they could get promoters to sign on with, and were prepared with options to upgrade all of them to larger rooms if tickets sold well enough. Every single European date got upgraded. Combs’ Copenhagen show in October, for example, was initially booked in a 1,500-capacity club; due to demand, it was upgraded to a 12,000-seat arena. “We’re not stopping there — South America is our next big, big goal,” says Tannenbaum. “By and large, this is virgin territory for artists coming from the world Luke has established himself in. But we’ve overcome similar barriers and precedents elsewhere in the world, and we expect to achieve the same success in these markets.”
And incredibly, Combs has been able to reach pop star levels of global success with nary a whiff of pop crossover, aside from a CMT Crossroads special with Leon Bridges and a cover of Ed Sheeran’s “Dive.” (He does cover Tracy Chapman on his new record, a decision made partly out of his personal fear that some people today might not know “Fast Car.”)
“Luke Combs is a country artist, and Luke is very happy being just a country artist,” says Kappy. “If the opportunity presented itself to do something in that world, sure, but we’re not looking to take a song to [adult top 40] or something like that when we’re still reaching new ears. Three chords and the truth work everywhere.”
Though he might make it look easy, taking over the world as Luke Combs, regular guy, has its challenges. “I think what has been one of my biggest assets has also been one of the things that was the hardest for me,” Combs says. “I am just me. There’s not, like, an act. My driver license says ‘Luke Combs’ on it. I’m 300 pounds with a neck beard. I can’t go out and not wear a hat and people don’t know who I am.
“I struggled with that a lot because I almost felt trapped, like a zoo animal or something,” he continues. “Now I don’t even think about it anymore.”
So Combs signs the autographs and takes the pictures, accepting them as a sometimes invasive part of the job he signed up for, and reminding himself that he would much rather people hate his music and think he’s a “pretty sick dude” than the opposite. He would prefer to insulate his son (and, soon, Tex’s little brother: Combs and Nicole just announced they’re expecting) from the craziness that comes with superstardom but knows that it’s only a matter of time before he has to explain why people come up to them in the grocery store.
“I don’t want him to be like, ‘My dad’s so great because he’s a country singer,’ ” he says. “I want him to be like, ‘My dad’s so great because he gives a f–k about me and goes fishing with me and listens to my problems and helps me when I’m scared.’ ”
It’s hard to find a chink in Combs’ grounded armor, a reason not to buy in the way that hundreds of thousands of fans now have — trusting that whether or not they speak his language, or relate to his songs’ Southern touchstones, or also wear hunting gear and cowboy boots and Crocs (with whom he has collaborated on a comfy clog), they can count on him to make them feel something. They can do that without spending their savings because accessibility is a top priority for Combs and his team, right after the music. “Look at how much money we’re making,” he says. “Does it really even matter if we make double? What’s the difference between having $5 million and $500 million? How much happier are you? Is it that much? Or is it like 1% happier?”
Instead, he wants to chart a career, and a life, that’s extraordinary in its very ordinariness.
“I didn’t get into music to be famous or rich,” Combs concludes. “I got into music because I love singing. I love singing for big crowds of people, and I feel like I’m good at it. People like to hear me do it. And I want to continue to do that as long as possible.”
This story will appear in the April 1, 2023, issue of Billboard.
In the fall of 2012, Richie Hawtin took to the road in the United States for CNTRL, a college campus tour intended to educate young audiences about the history of dance music. The run included lectures by day — and, naturally, dancing after dark.
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The timing wasn’t accidental. This was the dawn of the EDM era, with big room sounds lighting up mainstages at emerging festivals and mega-clubs around the U.S., pulling in a new generation of dance music fans like moths to a pyro flame.
Hawtin, sensing which way the wind was blowing, organized CNTRL to show nascent dance music fans electronic sounds beyond EDM, with Hawtin serving as a key figure of techno and minimal techno since the Canadian producer first got into the sound in the late ’80s. (His hometown in Windsor, Ontario was, after all, just a short drive from Detroit, the birthplace of techno.)
Over the last decade, Hawtin’s vision of getting the masses into techno worked — in fact, maybe too well. Over the last half decade the sound has thumped out of the underground and onto mainstages, with one strain of it in particular — tech house — becoming the United States’ most trendy and hyped dance music genre of the moment, supplanting EDM.
“It feels like what’s happened is, the sound of techno was actually influenced by that EDM boom,” Hawtin says over Zoom from his elegant home in Berlin. “What’s happening in the scene is really a mixture of techno from the ’90s and EDM sensibilities of big drops and personality-led music. It’s been a huge kind of jumbled-up, even confusing development the last four or five years.”
Once again reading the room, Hawtin decided it was time for another tour intended to educate audiences via the dancefloor. Wrapping earlier this month, this eight-show run — From Our Minds — hit cities in the U.S. and Canada and featured a crew of rising techno producers (“other like-minded weirdos,” Hawtin calls them) who he selected for their skills in making techno with a “faster, ferocious type of tempo and strength, but it’s much more minimal.” (One of the featured artists, Lindsey Herbert, in fact discovered techno while attending a CNTRL set back in 2012.)
Hawtin sees this crew — Herbert, Barbosa, Declan James, Decoder, Henry Brooks, Jay York, Michelle Sparks, with support from Deep Pedi, Huey Mnemonic and Jia — as part of a network of underground producers that gelled during the pandemic. He calls this time “a great incubator for new talent, as it kind of leveled the playing field. Anybody who could plug in a computer and stream or make good set had a better opportunity to reach fans sitting at home, and not going to clubs, and not expecting international tours. I think that was the thing, especially in North America, that helped a new generation of artists come through more than they had in the last couple of years.”
The post-pandemic moment in fact reminded Hawtin of his own early days in the scene — just one more full circle moment inherent in From Our Minds. Here, Hawtin reflects on the tour, and and on techno at large.
Given the prevalence of techno currently in the States, do you feel satisfied with where it’s all at? Are you satisfied with the sound?
Yeah, that’s a good question. “Satisfied” is a good word. I think part of me is satisfied that electronic music and even a form of techno has now really become mainstream. It’s huge. Where you could have said in the past on the big stages that it was a form of trance, or some form of house — now it is definitely a form of techno. And yeah, that satisfies the kid who always wanted to see more people come into the door of techno.
But it doesn’t satisfy my need to feel that I’m part of something which is alternative. Because I don’t think all the music that is played on the bigger stages now is actually made, created or enjoyed by people who feel a little bit different than the masses.
How do you mean?
I was talking to everyone on the tour, and we all kind of got into this music because we didn’t really fit in. We felt like we were the weirdos. I guess I don’t feel as weird as I used to be — maybe I’m pretty normal now — but that was a big part of the attraction, that it wasn’t what everybody else was listening to. So although part of my psyche can accept some satisfaction, part of my of my inner being was very excited and satiated and inspired to go back on tour with other like-minded weirdos playing stripped down, minimalistic music, and playing to crowds that when you looked out, felt like they were a bit of the outcasts and had found themselves on another dirty dance floor.
It’s almost like what you were trying to do with CNTRL, in terms of educating mainstream audiences about the roots of dance music, worked too well, and it’s like, “oh, no — it’s so big now that it’s become mainstream too.”
Yeah. Be careful what you wish for. I’ve thought about that a lot — how the juggernaut of techno grew to this size. I remember certain decisions [I made]; I even I reread a couple of old interviews back from 20, 25 years ago, and things I said or did to actually welcome people into this world. I never wanted it to be just so insular and insider that it became hierarchical.
Electronic music, techno music, the music that started my career and that grabbed me back in the late ’80s, was something very different than what else was going on [then.] It made me feel welcome and invited lots of diversity and introduced me to people I never would have met in any other circumstance. I hope those ideals are still on the dance floors I’m playing to. I think as the music and the scene gets bigger and does welcome all types of people, the bigger it gets, the less that happens and the more homogenous the dance floor becomes.
Why do you think size and growth induces homogenization?
Is there an answer? Can I make one without, like, talking down on someone? I think an open, eclectic, free-forming dance floor needs to be led and/or inhabited by lots of very open-minded people. And I actually think as much as the internet and social media has spread the idea of “let’s all be different,” it’s also spread the idea of “let’s all be the same.” When social media and these platforms are our main source of promotion, and marketing, and letting people know what’s out there — the bigger you get, the more focused it becomes on the image, on the sound, on the personality, on everything else.
The globalization facilitated by social media kind of flatlines things in a way where it all looks the same, regardless of territory.
When you’re thinking about music, and places like Spotify, and this long tail that they speak about, it’s all the weird stuff at the end [of that tail.] And the mass stuff isn’t just like, great pop music — it’s a lot of things that sound the same. It’s the same artists over and over again. I was just talking to a friend of mine about a rather large electronic musician who just had a new album out. I was like, “It just seems like they’ve invited a bunch of other people in to collaborate, just like every other pop album seems to do.” It’s so much the same.
You mentioned house big techno has gotten, but how is it evolving into those weirder spaces that you like?
Really, what I intended to showcase on the tour is the type of music I’ve always loved. It takes cues from what’s happening and from other strains of electronic music right now, which is definitely based upon a much faster, ferocious type of tempo and strength — but it’s much more minimal, which of course, I love. It’s stripped of most vocals and any other kind of sample references, and it’s just hypnotic.
I was talking recently with another artist who’d just done a gig in New York. It was a big warehouse party, but they were playing more of that [hypnotic] style of music and weren’t sure about the reaction, because people weren’t putting their hands up in the air. And nothing against hands in the air — [at] an outside venue or big festival, that makes sense. But in a warehouse where it’s dark and pummeling, I think the best thing you can do is let people lose themselves in music and maybe not react, maybe not look at you. Maybe you shouldn’t be on stage. At all of our events, we had everyone basically on the floor, or maybe one step up, just so people could see their heads.
A set-up that de-emphasizes the artist.
Yeah, it does. I don’t know if we want or need to go back to the the faceless DJ in the corner who never got any actual notice or respect — maybe that would be too far. As part of the tour we brought on a company called Aslice, which allows [artists] to upload [the setlist] after the event, and [people can] donate money to those songs — kind of like a tipping jar — to bring some more money to the producers who are making music, and who are just not making enough through all the different avenues out there, specifically streaming.
I’m part of [the company], and I feel very strongly about that kind of initiative. Because one, the artists and producers need that money, but two, it also reminds us that no matter how good the superstar DJ is at the head of the dance floor, if they’re not playing great music, they’re not gonna go anywhere.
Right. It also de-emphasizes the artist onstage and reminds people that it took a lot of artists to create that set.
This tour is also to remember and celebrate that we’re all wrapped up in music [made by people] who aren’t actually there. That’s a really special situation, where other people’s music is being played, and somebody else is controlling it and that people are losing themselves on music they’ve maybe never heard before or will never hear again. That’s not like 99% of people who go to 99% of the concerts out there, who are hoping to hear and sing along with their favorite song.
It sounds like this tour allowed you to present artists you’re excited about in a format you really believe in.
The the format of the dance floor, the dark warehouse, the simplicity of that, is the foundation of where this whole scene came from. As we said, we can be satisfied that it’s actually [become] so many different things. But if the foundation isn’t kept going, and if the foundation isn’t respected, and if the unseen artists and producers [aren’t respected], then it all starts to unravel. If I’ve played a little bit of a part in helping things grow over the last 30 years, and I also want to be part of making sure that foundation stays strong for the next 30 years.
In August 1989 — 26 years after releasing their first single, and seven years since their last tour — The Rolling Stones hit the road. Over the next calendar year, the Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle Tour took the rock legends around the world, playing over 100 shows and reaffirming their commercial clout.
Two similarly epic yearlong treks — 1994-95’s Voodoo Lounge world tour and 1997-98’s Bridges to Babylon tour — followed; the three outings grossed $661.7 million combined, according to Billboard Boxscore, or roughly $1.3 billion today, adjusted for inflation. In the process, the Stones defined what middle age could look like for rock artists and proved that established acts with deep catalogs and legions of fans still had touring potency.
As the Stones crisscrossed the globe in the ’90s, new rock heroes like blink-182 and Weezer were making names for themselves. Now, three decades later, those acts are as deep into their careers as the Stones were into theirs in the ’90s. And as older touring stalwarts like Paul McCartney, Elton John and the Stones stare down their golden years, alt-rock’s now middle-aged lodestars have started to assume the mantle of reliable, top-grossing arena and stadium artists (and at roughly the same time that their most loyal fans, who’ve aged along with them, have deeper pockets to afford such tickets). But the blueprint they’re using isn’t identical to their precursors.
The 2021-22 Hella Mega Tour took Green Day, Fall Out Boy and Weezer to stadiums in the United States and Europe — proving along the way to fans and industry insiders alike that alt-rockers of the ’90s and early aughts could now fill the kinds of venues that were once only the provenance of pop stars and classic rock acts.
“Hella Mega obviously laid some framework for, ‘Hey, these rock tours are still really, really big; these songs are still so relevant,’ ” says Live Nation global tour promoter Steve Ackles, who worked on the team behind the stadium run. “Green Day, blink-182, a lot of those bands in that genre, the songs really never went away. I think there’s an authenticity in their songwriting that has just created timeless music.”
With a gross of $92.2 million, according to Billboard Boxscore, the bill also proved the commercial viability of package tours, the format that forgoes lesser-known openers in favor of support artists who themselves can drive substantial ticket sales. “It was one plus one plus one equals five,” says Crush Music co-founder Bob McLynn, whose company manages Hella Mega’s three marquee bands. “I definitely know it influenced a lot of the different tours out there. A package is nothing new, but I think a package of that nature was definitely groundbreaking.”
On Hella Mega, Weezer played before Fall Out Boy and Green Day, but this year, the band will headline amphitheaters on its Indie Rock Roadtrip, a package offering with rotating support from Modest Mouse, Spoon, Future Islands, Momma, Joyce Manor and White Reaper. “I think their touring is stronger than ever,” McLynn says of Weezer, which toured the United States every year from 2008 to 2019. “I think the fan base is stronger than ever, and I think continuing to put out great new music is a part of that.”
Since 2019, Weezer has released four albums and four EPs, which have spawned four No. 1 hits on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart. McLynn recognizes that “there’s legacies tied to all these acts” but emphasizes the importance of “not just playing defense with the brand, [but] playing offense with it.”
“There’s definitely acts out there that just kind of rest on their brand and their catalog, and they go out and they do successful tours,” he continues. “But most of the acts we work with really are about innovating, and they’re still hungry to make new and better music.” In doing so, a band like Weezer can remain front of mind for existing fans while, critically, reaching new ones — who, thanks to the accessibility that streaming offers, can become superfans in short order.
Pop-punk legends blink-182 co-headlined the Bleezer Tour with Weezer in 2009, and this year will set out on a hotly anticipated trek of its own. While blink-182 toured in the latter half of the 2010s, it hasn’t hit the road with founding member Tom DeLonge since 2014, making its 2023 arena outing — which coincides with an upcoming new album by the original trio and a 13-week Alternative Airplay No. 1 in October’s “Edging” — a must-see for fans.
“This was by far the fastest-selling tour of their career,” says CAA co-head of North American touring and music agent Darryl Eaton, who has booked the band since 1999. “We’ve done the numbers in the past, but we’ve never done the numbers at this velocity.” For Eaton, while blink-182 has a strong foundation of classic hits and longtime fans, it’s far from a nostalgia act, narrowly defined. “I’ve always marveled at how they absolutely regenerate a young fan base,” he says.
Blink-182 hasn’t embarked on its tour yet — drummer Travis Barker sustained a gnarly finger injury in rehearsal, forcing a postponement of the run’s first leg, in South America, until 2024 — but Eaton makes informed predictions about its audience today based on the success of 2022’s pop-punk-focused Las Vegas fest When We Were Young, which blink-182 will headline along with Green Day this fall. At When We Were Young, “it was a lot of young kids,” he says. “Yeah, a lot of people in their 30s and 40s [were] going and reliving it, but it was also a huge amount of energy and interest in a much younger audience.”
Death Cab for Cutie debuted slightly later than Weezer or blink-182 — its first album, Something About Airplanes, dropped in 1998 — but has followed a similar path to becoming a road fixture: consistent touring, reverence for its catalog, commercially successful new material and a big-tent approach that welcomes returning fans along with new ones. This fall, Death Cab will embark on one of its biggest tours to date, and one that was informed partly by industry trends — albeit with a twist.
“COVID-19 happened, but even before then, we started seeing the proliferation of these package tours,” says Brilliant Corners founding partner Jordan Kurland, who has managed Death Cab since 2003, citing Hella Mega as an example. But for Death Cab frontman Ben Gibbard, this fall’s package tour will be an unusual co-headline — one with himself. Shortly before the pandemic, Gibbard had broached the idea of a tour featuring Death Cab and The Postal Service (his one-off project with producer Jimmy Tamborello and singer Jenny Lewis), pegged to the 20th anniversaries of their respective 2003 classics, Transatlanticism and Give Up, to Kurland and longtime agent Trey Many of Wasserman. “It took a little while to settle in, and then as we started seeing this trend, touring these packages, we’re like, ‘Holy sh-t, this is a great idea,’ ” Kurland says.
The tour announcement earned an immediate and passionate response as elder millennials cheered the sentimental bill — Gibbard will play the entirety of both albums at a mix of arenas, amphitheaters and theaters — and younger fans delighted in the opportunity to see The Postal Service, which has only toured twice (in 2003 and 2013) for the first time. But while the rare Postal Service outing, along with Death Cab’s decision to play Transatlanticism, make this tour unique, the latter band has, through reliable performances and consistent releases (including 2022’s acclaimed Asphalt Meadows, which yielded the Alternative Airplay No. 1 “Here to Forever”), cultivated the kind of loyal live following that transcends nostalgia. When Death Cab played Denver-area Red Rocks Amphitheatre in September 2021, “there were a lot of high school kids,” Kurland recalls. “Death Cab has now become a band that gets handed down, whether it’s from parents or older siblings. The band is still finding new people.”
“Gen Z, millennials, Gen X, boomers; it’s a little bit of everybody,” Many adds. “Death Cab has continued to gain those younger fans as they continue to work and play great shows and make great records.”
That may ultimately be the key to touring longevity for rock’s new classics. Acts like Weezer, blink-182 and Death Cab have matured without sacrificing creative vitality or commercial relevance; by comparison, consider Billy Joel, who hasn’t released a rock album since 1993 but still tours a beloved catalog that spanned 22 years in stadiums and arenas, or other peers whose token new songs have long been derisively classified as fodder for bathroom breaks.
“Songs will outlast any sort of genre spike,” Many says. “Great songs go beyond the initial scene that maybe helped make them popular.”
“These catalogs have always stood the test of time,” notes Live Nation’s Ackles. “And now, I think you might have more and more of these bands saying, ‘Hey, let’s go out on a tour.’ ”
This story will appear in the April 1, 2023, issue of Billboard.