State Champ Radio Grammys
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Sabrina Carpenter, who took home her first Grammy awards last weekend, has given fans a glimpse at her celebratory night — on film. Featured in her photographs are industry peers Taylor Swift, Jack Antonoff, Chappell Roan and Beyoncé, among others.
The Short n’ Sweet singer seemingly went to a Grammys after party also attended by Swift, Antonoff, Margaret Qualley and Amber Mark. She shared a snapshot of herself getting cozy with the group on a couch, and another in which Swift, wearing the jacket that she caught from Janelle Monáe during Sunday’s (Feb. 3) ceremony, embraces her with a big hug.
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Carpenter posted her pictures on Instagram on Friday (Feb. 7), captioning the collection “film from Sunday,” with a smiley face.
In the slideshow of 15 pictures is a shot of Carpenter with Roan, both with wide, ecstatic grins. Another special moment captured on film is the “Espresso” star getting a hug from album of the year winner Beyoncé.
Carpenter’s photos also document her glamorous Grammy Awards look: that backless, baby blue gown.
She left the 2025 Grammy Awards as a winner in the best pop vocal album and best pop solo performance categories.
Post-Grammys, Carpenter announced a deluxe edition of breakthrough album Short n’ Sweet, with Dolly Parton on a remix of “Please Please Please.” The deluxe release also features bonus tracks “15 Minutes,” “Couldn’t Make It Any Harder,” “Busy Woman” and “Bad Reviews.” It’ll be out on Feb. 14.
The original Short n’ Sweet debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart in August. Three singles from the album charted on the Hot 100, led by “Please Please Please,” which reached No. 1.
This might have been the year that both The Beatles and The Rolling Stones won Grammy Awards, but older demographics who watched the show are wondering why rock music had such a low profile during the televised ceremony.
Sure, rock music had a token presence during the telecast: The show began with an uplifting performance from Dawes covering Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.,” backed by an all-star band consisting of Brad Paisley, John Legend, Sheryl Crow, Brittany Howard and St. Vincent as a tribute to the people of Los Angeles who are still trying to recover from the devastating wildfires in January. Also, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis and Chad Smith presented the best pop vocal album Grammy to Sabrina Carpenter for Short n’ Sweet, while the alternative band Khruangbin played a very abbreviated segment of their shoe-gazing song “May Ninth”; and Coldplay’s Chris Martin played a ballad during the In Memoriam section.
But the awards for best rock album, best metal performance and best alternative music album, among others, were relegated to the non-televised afternoon Grammy Award presentation.
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Why weren’t there any artists from that genre rocking out during the telecast? After all, rock music still dominates the live show marketplace. And while there are many ways that various genres can be measured against one another, Luminate’s audio consumption album units genre report shows rock music is still the second biggest genre at 22.3%, Billboard calculates, when unassigned albums are deducted from the total. That’s almost two and a half times as large as Latin, which has an 8.3% market share; and slightly more than twice as large as country, which has a 10.4% market share.
In album units, rock is 50% larger than pop music, which has a 14.8% market share, but pop was featured prominently during the show. As was R&B/hip-hop, which is still the biggest genre at a 27.8% market share.
But even though rock may have a big presence collectively, it also has some missing ingredients that probably make it difficult to include it in the televised Grammy Awards these days.
Age is a factor — not only the demographics of the Grammy show viewers, which undoubtedly plays a role in what artists and music are featured on the TV broadcast, but the age of the rock music that makes up those market share numbers. Luminate tracks releases in two age brackets: current, which counts all sales and streaming activity in the first 18 months after a song or album is released; and catalog, which counts everything older than 18 months.
That is one of rock’s biggest issues: By the catalog category — again using audio consumption units minus activity from titles unassigned to a genre — its 25.5% of the market is comfortably No. 2 in the industry, still behind R&B/hip-hop. But by current releases, rock slips all the way to fourth, at 11.9%, behind R&B/hip-hop (27.2%), pop (18.7%) and country (14.8%) and barely ahead of Latin (10.6%).
And the Grammy Awards are all about current music; in fact, current music is literally written into the eligibility criteria of which music releases can be considered for its awards. For the 2025 Grammys, the Recording Academy only considered recordings released from Sept. 16, 2023, to Aug. 20, 2024. Mathematically speaking, all the releases that meet that criteria to be eligible for a Grammy Award, and thus to be included in the show, would be current releases.
But there could be another, more significant factor as to why rock music wasn’t front and center during the televised portion: The sales and streams for the nominees in the rock categories paled in comparison to those of other genres. Big sales and streaming activity clearly indicate widespread popularity and TV shows are all about drawing big viewing audiences. And the nominees in the rock categories turned in the weakest collective performance when it came to sales and streaming activity among the genres highlighted on the show.
Of the albums nominated for album of the year, only Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft could be remotely considered rock — and alternative at that, or more accurately dark pop. The other albums, not so much: Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department, Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of A Midwest Princess and Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet got pop covered; Charli XCX’s Brat represents electro-pop; and Andre 3000’s New Blue Sun and Jacob Collier’s Djesse Vol. 4 are R&B and jazz, with smatterings of funk thrown in. In fact, Beyoncé’s country album, Cowboy Carter, has been cited for bringing other genres into the mix.
Collectively, the eight albums nominated for album of the year averaged 2.043 million album consumption units in 2024, even with the Andre 3000 album only hitting 44,000 units and the Collier album lower, at 33,000 units.
Sales and streaming activity was also a likely distinguishing factor in determining if the big awards of the Latin, pop, country and R&B genres were featured on the televised show. Let’s take best pop vocal album, with the Grammy nod going to Carpenter’s Sweet album, which garnered 2.504 million U.S. album consumption units. Collectively, the five nominees in that category averaged 3.01 million album consumption units, with Swift’s Tortured Poets leading the way with 6.962 million.
In best rap album, Doechii’s Alligator Bites Never Heal won the Grammy, despite having the second-lowest sales/activity of the nominees at 133,000 album consumption units. Collectively, the five nominated albums averaged 712,000 units, led by Future & Metro Boomin’s We Don’t Trust You at 2.046 million units and Eminem’s The Death Of Slim Shady (Coup De Grace) at 1.01 million album consumption units.
In best country album, the Grammy nominees collectively averaged 856,000 album consumption units, with a pair of artists new to the genre leading the way in Post Malone’s F-1 Trillion, with 1.598 million units, and winner Cowboy Carter, with 1.42 million album consumption units.
Shakira, who performed and was acknowledged for her historic role in bringing Latin music to the masses, won best Latin pop album with her Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran album, which had 306,000 album consumption units. Collectively, her activity combined with the other four nominees for best Latin pop album averaged 171,000 album consumption units.
Even dance/electronic music, which ranks sixth with 3.8% in U.S. market share as calculated by Billboard based on Luminate data, made the cut for the televised portion of the show. While its overall market share is meager compared to rock, its collective current album consumption units were bolstered by Charli XCXs Brat album, which garnered 1.159 million album consumption units. In total, the five nominees in the category earned a collective average of 273,000 units.
Rock, in comparison, is a different story. The Rolling Stones won the best rock album award with 91,000 album consumption units for its Hackney Diamonds, while Green Day, which was the category leader, had 158,000 units. Collectively, the rock category nominees averaged just 81,000 units, by far the smallest of the bigger genres.
There may be plenty of reasons why rock was relegated to the back burner at this year’s Grammy Awards — the Stones and the Beatles, after all, are not the hottest names with kids these days. But the numbers certainly tell at least part of that story.
Canadians loomed large at Sunday’s Grammy Awards — even some who weren’t actually there in person — heading into it with many nominations for songwriting and producing.
The Weeknd’s surprise performance, ending his Grammys boycott, was probably the most notable, though Kendrick Lamar’s multiple wins for “Not Like Us” — accepted in a Canadian tuxedo, no less — made Drake a major talking point.
The most-decorated Grammy-winner of all time finally scored her white whale. Beyoncé, who holds 35 wins and 99 career nominations, had been denied album of the year four times before, losing to Taylor Swift in 2010, Beck in 2015, Adele in 2020 and Harry Styles in 2023. Each of those losses was for a culture-shaking album, from I Am…Sasha Fierce to her self-titled record, to Lemonade and Renaissance.
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This year, Beyoncé took home album of the year for her country record Cowboy Carter, also winning best country album. It was a historic win for Billboard’s greatest pop star of the 21st century, recognizing her for an album that honours the contributions of Black musicians to country as well as blurring the lines between country, pop, dance and R&B. (Not to mention, she seemed genuinely surprised by the country album win, in a reaction that has already been meme’d — a rare moment of fluster from Queen Bey).
Cowboy featured some major Canadian contributions — songwriting team Nate Ferraro, Bulow and Lowell (who also won the inaugural Billboard Canada Non-Performing Songwriter Award) wrote the album’s lead single “Texas Hold ‘Em” while Dave Hamelin of The Stills co-wrote and produced a half-dozen songs. For his work, Hamelin will also receive an album of the year Grammy.
Another Canadian songwriter did well in a different category — Toronto’s Scott Zhang picked up a win in best R&B song for his work on SZA’s “Saturn.” Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin was the other big Canadian winner of the night, taking home best compilation soundtrack for his work on Bradley Cooper’s Maestro.
Canadian singer and Broadway star Deborah Cox helped kick off the Premiere Ceremony, which takes place before the evening Grammy Awards. That ceremony is where the majority of awards are handed out, and Cox was nominated this year as part of the cast of Broadway musical The Wiz, up for best musical theater album.
Though the cast of Alicia Keys’ Hell’s Kitchen took home the award — Keys was also honoured during the evening ceremony with the Dr. Dre Global Impact Grammy — Cox and her Wiz co-star Wayne Brady opened up the Premiere Ceremony with a heartfelt rendition of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
Read all of Canada’s impact on the awards here. – Rosie Long Decter
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Charlotte Cardin Scores A New ‘Feel Good’ Hit On The Billboard Canadian Hot 100
Canadian pop singer Charlotte Cardin can feel good this week.
The Quebec star has a new entry on the Billboard Canadian Hot 100, with her 2023 single “Feel Good” arriving at No. 94 on the chart dated Feb. 8, 2025.
It marks her first new entry on the chart since last year’s “99 Nights” — and like that track, “Feel Good” enters well after it was initially released, making its chart debut a year and a half after it appeared on her 2023 EP Une semaine à Paris.
The song is a mellow dance-pop track in a similar vein to her top ten hit “Confetti,” but where that one was driven by party malaise, “Feel Good” finds thrills in pleasure.
With lyrics in both French and English, the song has taken on a new life throughout her international tours and with a global, especially French-speaking, audience on TikTok and other social media platforms.
The new chart entry gives Cardin some good momentum as 2025 kicks off, and the Canadian singer — and Billboard Canada inaugural Woman of the Year — continues to expand her reach globally.
Read more on this week’s chart here. – RLD
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Executive Turntable: UMG announced a major move at the top of its Canadian office on Friday (Feb. 7), with Julie Adam succeeding longtime CEO Jeffrey Remedios in the top leadership role. Full story from Billboard Canada here.
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Remembering Artist Manager/Musician Jane McGarrigle
(Laury) Jane McGarrigle, a Canadian songwriter, musician, music publisher, artist manager and author who worked extensively with her sisters, folk legends Kate & Anna McGarrigle, died on Jan. 24 of ovarian cancer. She was 84.
Jane McGarrigle managed her younger sisters’ music careers from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s. As well as co-writing some songs with the duo, she performed with them in the studio and on tours of Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia.
In 2015, Anna and Jane McGarrigle co-wrote Mountain City Girls, a book detailing their Quebec upbringing. Commenting on the book (published by Penguin Random House), Emmylou Harris, a longtime friend of the McGarrigle clan, wrote that “From the moment I met The Mountain City Girls, Kate, Anna and Jane, I wanted to be a part of that magical McGarrigle circle — the songs, the suppers, the families and fellow travellers, and they blessed me with it all.”
Jane McGarrigle was long active in music publishing and copyright advocacy. She served as a board member of the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) where she defended publishing rights for musical authors. She also served on the board of the Songwriters Association of Canada for a number of years.
McGarrigle and her family spent long periods of time living in California, and she often performed with local musicians, including s Dick Oxtot’s Golden Age Jazz Band. In recent years in Montreal, she played dobro and piano with her partner Peter Weldon in their band, The What Four. – Kerry Doole
Last Week: Live Industry Faces Venue Shortages Despite $10B Economic Impact
From the lounge staple “Volare” to the hip-hop smash “Not Like Us,” here are all the hits that won both of these top prizes.
“It’s like an overnight life change, kind of,” says Robbie Blue. It’s two days after the Grammy Awards, and the 24-year old choreographer still sounds like he’s in disbelief. “It’s really, really special. I guess I just didn’t know how big this was going to be.”
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Blue’s choreography for Doechii’s stunningly inventive, meticulously realized performance of her “Denial Is a River” and “Catfish” made for a moment that most observers considered the best of the night — and perhaps one of the best in Grammy history. Astonishingly, it was the first-ever live performance – and first Grammy appearance, period – for Blue as a choreographer. Among the flood of overwhelmingly positive reactions he’s received since that night are Doechii’s own: Blue says that the two have been “gushing over each other back and forth on text, talking about how epic this performance was.”
For Blue, whose complex, ultra-physical choreography has attracted talented dancer-artists like Tinashe, fka twigs and Tate McRae, Doechii’s Grammy performance was his biggest stage yet, and a long way from where he started out. Growing up in a small town in Ohio “in the middle of nowhere,” he was lucky to train at a “brilliant, epic queer dance studio” situated, as he puts it, “between a prison and like, the largest statue of Jesus in the world.” At 16, Brian Friedman — the “jazz funk legend” known best for his choreography for Britney Spears — took Blue under his wing as an assistant; by age 18, Blue was dancing professionally for major artists.
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Robbie Blue
Desiree Reed
In fact, he technically still was on Grammy night: he’s one of the performers in Lady Gaga’s “Abracadabra” video, which he watched “on a small hotel TV” after wrapping Doechii’s performance (he calls Gaga a bucket list collaborator: “I would die”). But as Blue puts it, choreography is now where he feels most at home. “I feel like through choreography I can truly speak,” he says with a smile. “I think I don’t want to do anything else right now.” He spoke to Billboard about Doechii’s exceptional taste and work ethic, their cast of Doechii “clones,” and precisely how that onstage conveyer belt worked.
It felt like the minute the performance ended the internet was going crazy calling it iconic, one of the great Grammy performances of all time, going down in history. It reminded me of the heyday of Missy Elliott performances. When you were working on it, did you have a sense that it was going to have that kind of impact?
This was my first time ever doing a live performance. It was my first time ever doing the Grammys — even as a dancer, I’d never done the Grammys. So really, I was not expecting it to be this great, to be honest! I knew it was good. I knew that we had ample time to rehearse and create and cultivate and really figure out all of the logistics of the performance. So I knew that every moment had been looked at, and that every moment was iconic and major.
But it wasn’t until we got there that I think I realized, “Holy shit, this is going to be legendary.” But all along [leading up to it], I’m so in it, it’s Doechii’s first Grammys too so she’s so in it and involved, we’re not even thinking “Oh my gosh, this is going to gag everybody.” We are just looking at it like, “Okay, this needs to be changed. This needs to be fixed.” We wanted it to be perfect for the first time out. That’s kind of what drove us to have this performance that was essentially flawless.
What kind of timeline did you have to put it all together?
We actually had a ton of time, four weeks in total of rehearsal. The first week was just me and some dancers, getting an idea of what the choreography was going to be like, what references we’re using, how I’m going to pump myself into this. Then we had three full weeks with the full stage — tech rehearsal, essentially, with conveyors, the lift, the whole stage set-up. The conveyor belts in particular, we got them on the first day. That’s definitely part of the reason that everything looked so amazing, because we had so much time to really look at every single moving aspect.
Robbie Blue with Doechii’s dancers
Eli Raskin
How would you describe your style of movement and your own influences?
I think my calling card has been kind of like, a f–ked-up Fosse. That is what I’m sought after for. The last five months is when I’ve really just started choreographing for major artists, and every time I get an inquiry that’s kind of where they’re coming from — they’re wanting something that feels Fosse, something that feels abstract. And when I talked to Doechii on the first day she said the same thing — she was like, “I want your Fosse element, but I also want it to be hip-hop and grounded and nasty and dirty.”
So that was kind of our jumping off point. Fosse is a master and he is everything to me, so that that is always my inspiration going in, and then I start to fuse that with my background in contemporary dance, modern dance, hip-hop. I try to take what I know of those Fosse references and basically just make it, like, nasty, if that makes sense.
Doechii performs onstage at the 67th GRAMMY Awards held at the Crypto.com Arena on February 2, 2025 in Los Angeles.
Christopher Polk
How did you two first link up? Did Doechii seek you out?
I’ve been a fan forever, but when I started to kind of gain some traction with my choreo [a couple years ago], she followed me on Instagram. I died, dead. So in the back of my head, I was like, maybe one day she’ll be like, I need you for this. And it happened so quickly. The same day that I got a call from my agent saying that Doechii was wondering about me for the Grammys, I was in the studio that night. Like, “Here we go!”
Artists like Doechii, fka twigs, Tinashe, who you’ve worked with — these are girls who can dance. And your choreography seems quite complex and rigorous, like it demands an artist who has significant dance background to begin with.
100%. I think the artists that seek me out are mostly artists that are willing to push themselves and really want to dance and love to dance. For me, the perfect artist is a Doechii, it’s Twigs, it’s Tinashe, it’s Tate [McRae], it’s somebody who really is willing to get in a studio and work really hard. Doechii was in the studio every single day, eight hours, beginning to end dancing — and that’s why she looks so good. She is naturally an amazing dancer, but on top of that she was willing to try all of these things. She was just fearless – and some of that s–t is really hard!
Yeah, like that lift where she’s in a full center split — did she tell you she was capable of doing that?
So I had actually created a vignette of five boys with her in some kind of shape [above], but I did not originally have her up there in the splits. That was her idea. It was our first day, basically, and and she was like, “Can I just try to hop up there in a center split?” And I was like, yeah, totally. Like, you can do that if you want to! [Laughs.] It was that moment of oh, she’s really willing to take it there.
Are there particular collaborative moments in the studio you remember where she had an idea that really inspired the final product?
For sure. When it came down to designating jobs, I really wrangled the dancers, the movement I created from scratch, that was all me. And then when we started working on her track, I started teaching it to her, and that’s when things got really collaborative, when I started to see, really, what she was capable of – like, she doesn’t want to just stand there, she wants to dance, she wants to do all this crazy stuff. She’d be like, “ I feel like I could do a lot more here.” And I’m like, great, let’s do it. Let’s take it there.
So I think some key moments that were super collaborative were that specific straddle lift moment, that center split. And the lift in “Denial,” where she walks up the staircase– that Chicago-esque thing was something she mentioned from the very beginning. She was like, I really want to feel like I am Roxie Hart, you know, walking along these people. I want to have that moment in there. And we all loved that idea. She knows exactly what she wants and she knows exactly the vibe.
What were conversations like with her about casting? The ensemble of dancers with Doechii seemed really intentionally chosen, especially after hearing what Doechii had to say about representation in her acceptance speech.
The concept from the beginning was clones: we wanted it to feel like Doechii was cloned. And so from the beginning of casting, it was, who looks the most like Doechii, who has her complexion, her features, that’s exactly what we’re looking for. It took a second to be that specific with each individual person, and all of us had our hands in it – it would get sent to me, it would get sent to [C Prinz, Doechii’s creative director], it would get sent to Doechii, to make sure that every single person fit that clone narrative. And it ended up just being so beautiful.
Doechii at the 67th GRAMMY Awards held at the Crypto.com Arena on February 2, 2025 in Los Angeles.
Christopher Polk
How and when did the idea of the conveyor belt happen?
By the time I got onto the project, I was already sent a treatment with conveyor belts. I believe the idea for them came straight from her — she wanted the whole stage to be a conveyor belt, constantly be sliding. But I guess the Grammys was like, that’s a hazard? [Laughs.] So she ended up doing three conveyor belts. It did take a lot of time to figure out exactly when they start, stop, how fast they go down to, like, point one seconds, when they reach center….things like that were very meticulous. But the conveyor belts were just fucking fun. Everybody wanted to be on the conveyor belt.
In the short time since the Grammys, have you already seen an uptick in interest in you and your work?
I have never received so much love, I think, in my life, from everybody that’s in my circle, and then also from choreographers that are my mentors, major celebrity choreographers I have looked up to forever who have reached out and commended me on the performance. I don’t even know what to say. I’m like, thank you so much. And when it comes to the work, I’ve never got this much inquiry from artists about upcoming projects, like almost immediately after the performance, that next morning. It’s really wild.
Looking back, because it is my first Grammys — she really did take a chance on me for this one. She kind of pulled me out to do this, and I appreciate her for that.
Besides Gaga, who else is on your artist collaboration wish list? I feel like you’d be great with Charli XCX, too…
I toured with Charli as a dancer when she did Crash — I’ve been a Charli fan since the beginning of time, she will always be on the list! Ashnikko is always on the list. Tate is on the list. FKA is always on the list. Gaga would be like, out of this world. But I love gay icons. I love powerful women artists. So to have done Doechii…. I’m still, like, processing that. [Laughs.] She. Is. The. Girl.
Five years ago, Doechii was vulnerable with followers in a YouTube video about getting fired from her job. Now, that same video is resurfacing online and giving fans new inspiration after the 26-year-old hip-hop star won her first Grammy last weekend.
In the 80-second video posted Jan. 12, 2020, Doechii snacks on chips while giving viewers a blunt life update. “So, I got fired today,” she says. “I don’t give a f–k, to be honest.”
“Tomorrow, I’m just going to go to a whole bunch of studios and ask if they have any internships open,” she continues. “I’m just going to go in and ask. Who gives a f–k? I have nothing to lose. I have no place, I have no job, I have no children.”
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Later that year, Doechii would release her EP Oh the Places You’ll Go. In 2022, she signed with Top Dawg Entertainment and Capitol Records, two years after which she’d drop her critically acclaimed project Alligator Bites Never Heal — aka the album that has now made her the third woman to win best rap album at the Grammys, where she tearfully accepted the 2025 prize Sunday (Feb. 2).
“I know there is some Black girl out there [watching] and I want to tell you that you can do it,” she said during her speech as the audience at Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena roared with applause. “Anything is possible. Don’t allow anybody to project any stereotypes onto you … you are exactly who you need to be to where you are, and I am a testimony [to that].”
Now that the Florida native is a Grammy winner, fans online are looking back at where she was half a decade ago and finding inspiration in her trajectory. “doechii’s story really is a testament to why you HAVE to believe in yourself and chase tf out of your dreams,” one person wrote on X, resharing a screenshot of Doechii’s “I got fired” video. “it is always worth the risk to bet on yourself.”
“unironically everyone should be clinging onto this for motivation,” another fan wrote, while a third person shared their takeaway, “you really got to bet on yourself no matter what.”
Watch Doechii’s resurfaced video below.
Kendrick Lamar and SZA are the latest stars to have this multi-platform triumph. Tony Bennett was the first.
A Grammy Awards producer is weighing in after Kanye West and Bianca Censori made headlines on the red carpet Sunday (Feb. 2). Ye and Censori stepped on the carpet in Los Angeles, with the latter wearing a floor-length fur coat. When the time came to take photos, Censori removed the coat to reveal a transparent […]
The 2025 edition of Clive Davis’ annual Pre-Grammy Gala — held Feb. 1 at The Beverly Hilton — had special meaning this year. The star-studded soiree transitioned into a fundraiser while celebrating a special milestone. “This year marks the 50th anniversary of this incredible night, but this one is a little different,” said Harvey Mason […]
Ye says he and his wife Bianca Censori one-upped the Grammys. In since-deleted Instagram posts, Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) shared a screenshot of Google stats that show Censori was searched more than the awards show itself. He then followed that up with a post proclaiming, “We beat the Grammies [sic]” and another saying, […]
