genre pop
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Like millions of other fans, Kelsea Ballerini idolizes Taylor Swift, but when it came to starting her own music career, the former quickly learned that she’d need to find her own identity in order to stand apart from the superstar.
While speaking to Variety for her Power of Women Nashville cover story published Tuesday (April 29), the “Peter Pan” singer reflected on the struggle of coming up in Music City in the wake of the Eras headliner’s unprecedented success. At the time, the hitmaker’s shadow loomed especially large over aspiring stars such as Ballerini, who, like Swift, was also a young, blonde, female singer-songwriter — something that forced The Voice coach to find ways to stand out from the 14-time Grammy winner in order to be successful.
Recalling how one label executive dismissed her early on because, as Ballerini recalled him saying, “‘There’s already a Taylor Swift,’” the country artist conceded, “And he was right.”
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“There weren’t a lot of young female singer-songwriter girls in country music to look up to,” she continued. “I had to grow into my own identity as an artist and a songwriter and learn to differentiate myself.”
Distinguishing herself from Swift was even more difficult given Ballerini’s personal obsession with the “Love Story” singer — “Taylor was the North Star for me, and still is in a lot of ways,” she told Variety — but the Tennessee native eventually found her own distinct voice. Her self-titled debut EP dropped in 2014 via Black River Entertainment and earned Ballerini her first-ever Billboard Hot 100 entry with “Love Me Like You Mean It,” soon after which the project even got a cosign from none other than Swift.
“Driving around with the @KelseaBallerini EP on repeat.. SO lovely:)” the country-turned-pop behemoth tweeted in March 2015.
Swift quickly took Ballerini under her wing, with the latter telling Billboard the following year, “She’s like my big sister … She’s walked this so gracefully, so she’s the person that I go to when I’m like, ‘Hey, this is what I’m struggling with right now. How do I navigate this?’”
Also in her Variety cover story, Ballerini gushed about someone else who’s also been hugely influential in her life, but for very different reasons. Of boyfriend Chase Stokes, the singer recalled how patient the Outer Banks actor was as she released her 2023 EP Rolling Up the Welcome Mat — which is famously about her divorce from Australian musician Morgan Evans — as well as Stokes’ reaction to hearing Ballerini’s love song for him, “To the Men That Love Women After Heartbreak.”
“He loved it,” she said. “When we first started talking, I hadn’t put out Welcome Mat yet, and he stood beside me through that whole musical chapter. But when it was time to write Patterns, I wanted to write about the things we were learning in our relationship. And I think with a lot of patience and therapy, we mutually have grown a lot in these last two-plus years.”
Neil Diamond is set to receive the Inspirational Lifetime Achievement Award by the Children’s Diabetes Foundation at the 39th Annual Carousel Ball on Oct. 11. The event will be held at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Denver, near the home of CDF’s primary operations and its clinic and research facility, the Barbara Davis Center for Diabetes.
Proceeds from The Carousel Ball benefit CDF and focus on patient support, awareness and diabetes research. The Carousel Balls, which date to 1978, collectively have raised more than $117 million.
Diamond, 84, has served on CDF’s advisory board and has attended the organization’s fundraisers for many years, including performing in Denver in 2001, as well as at The Carousel of Hope Ball in Beverly Hills in 2012, where he memorably sang an impromptu duet of “Sweet Caroline” with George Clooney.
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“Neil Diamond is a once-in-a-generation talent,” event chair Dana Davis and honorary chair Barbara Davis said in a joint statement. “As a bestselling recording artist the world over, he is an undeniable force whose songwriting has earned him countless musical accolades. … For over 35 years, Neil has lent his timeless voice to our efforts to find a cure for diabetes. On behalf of the patients and researchers his generosity has touched, we can’t think of anyone more deserving of our Inspirational Lifetime Achievement Award.”
Diamond’s career spans nearly 60 years. He landed his first top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, “Cherry, Cherry,” in October 1966. He has notched three No. 1 hits on the Hot 100 — “Cracklin’ Rosie” (1970), “Song Sung Blue” (1972) and “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” a duet with Barbra Streisand (1978). Diamond finally topped the Billboard 200 in 2008, nearly 42 years after he first made that chart, with Home Before Dark.
Diamond was elected to the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1984 and has received two additional awards from that organization — the Sammy Cahn Lifetime Achievement in 2000 and the Johnny Mercer Award (their top honor) in 2018.
Additionally, Diamond received MusiCares’ Person of the Year Award in 2009, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2011 and a lifetime achievement award from the Recording Academy in 2018. He was voted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2011. His achievements also include a Grammy, a Golden Globe Award, an American Music Award, an ASCAP Film and Television Award and a Billboard Icon Award.
In addition to the award to Diamond, The MacMillan Family will be honored with the High Hopes Tribute Award for their nearly three decades of commitment as supporters of CDF. To purchase tickets and tables and learn more about the event, visit the Children’s Diabetes Foundation’s site.
Ed Sheeran has launched a new Instagram account to celebrate his upcoming single “Old Phone.”
The account @teddysoldphone is a nostalgic look back through the Suffolk-born songwriter’s mobile phone that he retired in 2015. The account features a number of never-before-seen pictures, texts, lyric notes and more, and arrives ahead of the release of his new single at 11 a.m. ET Thursday (April 29), the four-time Grammy winner confirmed in one post.
Sheeran was inspired to write the new song when revisiting his old phone during the copyright lawsuit around his 2014 single “Thinking Out Loud.” It was alleged by the estate of Marvin Gaye that he had copied elements of Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” during the song’s production, but in November 2024, Sheeran was cleared by a jury and found to have created the song independently of the Motown classic.
“It felt like a time capsule, a time of life that I was in, and living at that time in 2015,” the musician captioned one post on his new account. “Turning it on really spun me out, I found myself scrolling messages and conversations with people who are no longer here. … I found old photos of me with people I was so close to then, but we’ve lost touch since. The whole experience was such an emotional journey.”
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The new Insta account features a number of intimate moments from Sheeran’s life and career. He shares memories between himself wife Cherry in their early stages of dating, a selfie with Harry Styles at the London Olympics in 2012 and a touching message from his father following a performance with Stevie Wonder.
Also included are behind-the-scenes snaps with Taylor Swift, Calvin Harris and One Direction at the Billboard Music Awards in 2015, touching moments with his late friends and collaborators Mac Miller and Jamal Edwards (creator of SBTV) and an insight into the songwriting process for hit songs like “Bloodstream” and “Love Yourself” See a selection of treasure trove below.
“Old Phone” will be the second single from Sheeran’s upcoming album, which he recently confirmed to be called Play. It follows “Azizam” — which translates to “my dear” in Farsi — which was inspired by producer Illya Salmanzadeh’s Persian heritage. The song peaked at No. 28 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Sheeran also shared how his upcoming song came about in one of the posts on his new account. “I wrote the song Old Phone on my own at 2am whilst jet lagged in India finishing the album, and recorded it that morning. It feels like a song that should’ve been on my debut album, but also a song I couldn’t have written until I experienced real life things happening to me,” he explained. “It makes me emotional to sing, I hope it finds some emotion in you too. Maybe it makes you switch on your old phone and have a look at where you were a decade ago too. Whatever it does, I’m glad I wrote it.”
He also built a bespoke pop-up British pub called The Old Phone at this year’s Coachella festival, where he performed the song live for the first time.
All three of the Carter girls made their Cowboy Carter Tour debuts Monday night (April 28), with Blue Ivy and Rumi both joining Beyoncé on stage for an emotional performance of “Protector” during the trek’s opening night at SoFi Stadium.
In clips taken by fans in Inglewood, Calif., both of the superstar’s daughters accompany her about a third of the way through the show for the tear-jerking Cowboy Carter ballad about motherhood, which samples Rumi’s voice in the recording. As the 7-year-old sits next to Bey on a set of stairs flanked by backup dancers, 13-year-old Blue crouches behind them, wrapping her arms around both her younger sister and their mom.
“Born to be your protector,” Bey sings before standing up, taking Rumi’s hand and walking with her downstage. “Even though I know someday you’re gonna shine on your own, I will be your projector.”
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At one point, the little girl turns around and gives her mom a big hug, at which point Bey can’t help but stop singing and giggle. “Give it up for Rumi, y’all!” the Destiny’s Child alum then says proudly as the crowd cheers, while Rumi excitedly waves.
Though Monday’s kickoff marked Rumi’s first time ever joining her mom on stage, Blue has long been working with her mom as a backup dancer. The teenager first started dancing on Bey’s Renaissance Tour in 2023, and on Christmas Day 2024, Blue was on the field with the “Texas Hold ‘Em” singer for the star’s NFL Halftime Show.
Blue also had a couple shining moments to herself during the Cowboy Carter show, showing off synchronized choreography with her mom during “America Has a Problem.” She also had her own dance solo set to Bey’s “Deja Vu,” commanding a line of other dancers in a brown leathery fit as fans went wild.
Performing tracks from past albums as well as a bulk of the songs from her Grammy-winning, Billboard 200-topping album Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé kicked off about three months of touring with her show at SoFi. The vocalist will stay at the stadium for four more nights before embarking on a run of performances across the United States and Europe this summer.
Donald Trump hosted the 2025 Super Bowl LIX champs the Philadelphia Eagles at the White House on Monday (April 28), where he took the opportunity to once again lash out at Taylor Swift. The President took his latest swipe at the pop star during the visit when he lauded the Eagles for their commanding 40-22 win in February over the Kansas City Chiefs.
“It was an incredible game. A little surprising, but right from the beginning of the first quarter of the big game, which I was there I watched in person,” said Trump before adding a diss aimed at the billionaire pop superstar who is, of course, dating Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. “I was there along with Taylor Swift, how did that work out? How did that one work out?”
Trump, the first sitting President to attend the NFL championship game, has made a habit of lashing out at world-beating pop star, including on the night of the Super Bowl, when he wrote, “The only one who had a tougher night than the Kansas City Chiefs was Taylor Swift. She got BOOED out of the Stadium. MAGA is very unforgiving.”
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While Swift was met with some audible boos from the crowd when she was shown on the jumbotron that night, Trump’s latest comments come on the eve of the 100-day mark of his second term in office at a time when, according to a new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll 45% of those polled gave him an “F” for how he’s handled things so far, compared to just 23% giving him an “A.”
Trump’s overall approval rating is 42%, which stands as the second-worst approval rating for any president at the 100-day mark in the past 80 years, bested only by the 41% lodged by Trump during his first term; in a different Washington Post/ABC News/Ipsos poll, his approval rating was ahistoricallylow 39%. And while Trump promised to fix the economy on day one and lower the nation’s debt by slashing government agencies, his onerous across-the-board tariffs and DOGE-led mass firings have resulted in a 39% approval rating to date on his handling of the economy, a new low for Trump.
As is his wont, Trump lashed out in all-caps at the dismal poll numbers, decrying them as “FAKE POLLS FROM FAKE NEWS ORGANIZATIONS” and saying that they should be “investigated for ELECTION FRAUD!”
The White House visit is a tradition for some championship teams, but a number of prominent players skipped Monday’s event, including QB Jalen Hurts, as well as star players A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith, Jalen Carter, Jordan Davis, Brandon Graham and six others; the Eagles turned down a visit to the White House after winning their first Super Bowl in 2018 during Trump’s first term.
Hit songs are generally quick — Billboard Hot 100 top 10s ran an average of three minutes and 40 seconds in 2024, according to Hit Songs Deconstructed — but no Hot 100 hit has ever been as brief as Jack Black’s “Steve’s Lava Chicken.”
The track — at just 34 seconds in its original form (with a still-swift 1:15 extended mix also released) — breaks the record as the shortest Hot 100 hit ever by run time, dating to the chart’s Aug. 4, 1958, inception. The cut from the soundtrack of A Minecraft Movie debuts at No. 77 on the list dated May 3, 2025. It continues to gain in streaming, surging 62% to 7 million official U.S. streams April 18-24, according to data tracker Luminate.
Black co-stars in A Minecraft Movie, which has grossed $816 million globally over its first four weekends of release. Black and the film’s director, Jared Hess, co-wrote “Steve’s Lava Chicken” and John Spiker produced it.
Black earns his second Hot 100 hit, after “Peaches” reached No. 56 in April 2023. That song was from the soundtrack to The Super Mario Bros. Movie, likewise co-starring Black.
Elsewhere, “Steve’s Lava Chicken” hits the top 10 on the Hot Rock Songs chart, pushing four spots to No. 10.
Meanwhile, the track is one of four by Black on the A Minecraft Movie soundtrack, along with “I Feel Alive” — featuring Dave Grohl on drums — and two others each less than a minute long: “Birthday Rap,” with co-star Jason Momoa, and “Ode to Dennis.”
“Steve’s Lava Chicken” surpasses Kid Cudi’s “Beautiful Trip,” which runs 37 seconds long, as the quickest Hot 100 hit by song length.
Below, take a look, as long as you’d like, at the 10 quickest Hot 100 hits by run time over the chart’s history, with assistance from Paul Haney at Joel Whitburn’s Record Research. (Conversely, here the longest Hot 100 hits.)
:34 — “Steve’s Lava Chicken,” Jack Black
There’s nothing messy about Taylor Swift‘s recording process, according to the superstar’s “Clean” collaborator, Imogen Heap.
In an interview with People published Monday (April 28), the producer opened up about the day more than a decade ago that Swift visited her home studio to hammer out one of the most beloved tracks on 1989, with Heap revealing that the pop star was “extremely efficient” the entire way through. “She turned up looking immaculate, and we didn’t really know what we were going to do,” Heap explained.
“She had an idea on her phone, she played it to me, and I was like, ‘That’s good. Should we go and record it?’” the “Hide and Seek” songwriter continued. “We went downstairs, we had our cup of tea by the fire, and she wrote the next verse. I started to make music around us. And then by the time she left, which was, like, just after dinner, we had managed to write the song, produce the song, record the song, chat, meet, have tea, sit by the fire, eat lunch, eat dinner, do an entire record all by ourselves.”
Heap specificially praised Swift for having a clear artistic vision for herself from the outset of her career. “She is extremely efficient. I’ve never done that from start to finish with anyone,” she explained. “And I felt very excited. I really appreciated her. There was one moment when I was trying out something a bit different for the middle section, and I was like, ‘What about these chords?’ … She was like, ‘You know what? I think we’re going to lose them here, so let’s just do this.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, that’s fine.’ What I learned, I suppose, [is] just she’s very good in the studio, and she knows what works.”
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The interview comes more than 10 years after “Clean” arrived in 2014 on Swift’s critically acclaimed fifth studio album 1989, which spent 11 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Shortly after the album dropped, Heap gushed in a blogpost that her studio session with the 14-time Grammy winner was a “special one” and clarified, “I’ve also been reading the odd report or tweet here and there that the reason the lyrics to ‘Clean’ are so good is because I wrote the song with her but FOR SURE they are all hers she deserves all the credit!”
In 2023, when Swift re-released 1989 as part of her ongoing Taylor’s Version re-recording project, she once again tapped Heap to produce the updated “Clean.” “This is Taylor playing a bada– card to stay in control of her work in a commercial music industry that largely works against musicians,” Heap wrote on Instagram after the reissue’s release. “Thank you Taylor for inviting me into your world!”
Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’ “Die With a Smile” adds an 18th week at No. 1 on the Billboard Global 200 chart. The song also scores a 15th week atop the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. survey. The ballad first led both lists last September.
The Billboard Global 200 and Global Excl. U.S. charts, which began in September 2020, rank songs based on streaming and sales activity culled from more than 200 territories around the world, as compiled by Luminate. The Global 200 is inclusive of worldwide data and the Global Excl. U.S. chart comprises data from territories excluding the United States.
Chart ranks are based on a weighted formula incorporating official-only streams on both subscription and ad-supported tiers of audio and video music services, as well as download sales, the latter of which reflect purchases from full-service digital music retailers from around the world, with sales from direct-to-consumer (D2C) sites excluded from the charts’ calculations.
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“Die With a Smile” continues its Global 200 command with 83.9 million streams (down 8% week-over-week) and 6,000 sold (down 6%) worldwide April 18-24. At 18 weeks, the song moves to within one week of potentially tying the longest No. 1 run since the chart began:
19 weeks at No. 1, “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Mariah Carey (2020-25)
18 weeks, “Die With a Smile,” Lady Gaga & Bruno Mars (2024-25)
15 weeks, “As It Was,” Harry Styles (2022)
14 weeks, “Flowers,” Miley Cyrus (2023)
12 weeks, “APT.,” ROSÉ & Bruno Mars (2024-25)
Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” holds at its No. 2 Global 200 high; “APT.” is steady at No. 3; Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather” keeps at No. 4, following three weeks at No. 1 last August; and Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things” bumps 7-5, after it logged seven weeks on top in February-April 2024.
“Die With a Smile” tallies a 15th week at No. 1 on Global Excl. U.S., with 67.7 million streams (down 8%) and 3,000 sold (down 3%) outside the U.S. The song solely claims the second-longest rule in the chart’s archives:
19 weeks at No. 1, “APT.,” ROSÉ & Bruno Mars (2024-25)
15 weeks, “Die With a Smile,” Lady Gaga & Bruno Mars (2024-25)
14 weeks, “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Mariah Carey (2021-25)
13 weeks, “Flowers,” Miley Cyrus (2023)
13 weeks, “As It Was,” Harry Styles (2022)
The rest of the Global Excl. U.S. remains in place from a week earlier: “APT.” at No. 2; “Ordinary” at its No. 3 best; JENNIE’s “like JENNIE” at No. 4, after hitting No. 3; and “Birds of a Feather” at No. 5, following three weeks at No. 1 last August.
The Billboard Global 200 and Billboard Global Excl. U.S. charts (dated May 3, 2025) will update on Billboard.com Tuesday, April 29. For both charts, the top 100 titles are available to all readers on Billboard.com, while the complete 200-title rankings are visible on Billboard Pro, Billboard’s subscription-based service. For all chart news, you can follow @billboard and @billboardcharts on both X and Instagram.
Luminate, the independent data provider to the Billboard charts, completes a thorough review of all data submissions used in compiling the weekly chart rankings. Luminate reviews and authenticates data. In partnership with Billboard, data deemed suspicious or unverifiable is removed, using established criteria, before final chart calculations are made and published.
Cyndi Lauper is bopping into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and she couldn’t be happier. “I’m humbled to be in the company of so many of my heroes – Aretha, Tina, Chaka, Joni, Wanda, to name just a few,” she shared in an Instagram post on Sunday (April 27), after the class of […]
04/28/2025
A select few hits have led the chart for at least 10 weeks.
04/28/2025