International
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U.S. labels and musicians have long counted on welcoming international audiences to turn home-grown successes into global stars. Just as people around the world snap up tickets for Hollywood blockbuster movies, consumers abroad have been typically eager for English-language music from the world’s leading entertainment exporter.
In recent years, however, U.S. pop stars have increasingly heavy competition from artists most Americans will never know. In France, the top song of 2022 was “Tout va bien” by Alonzo featuring Nino and Naps, according to French recorded music trade group SNEP. Only one foreign song, “As It Was” by Harry Styles, cracked France’s top 10. The top of the chart’s composition looked drastically different from previous years. In 2017, when Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” reigned supreme with French music fans, five of the country’s top 10 songs came from foreign artists. In 2012, eight of France’s top 10 songs were from foreign artists.
To Will Page, author and former chief economist at Spotify, the changing fortunes of French artists is evidence streaming and online platforms have changed the balance of power. “When the cost structure changes, local [music] bounces back,” he says. The CD era involved higher costs — mainly manufacturing and marketing — that favored international artists. Despite France’s rule that a quarter of the songs played on radio must be French, the system still tilted toward foreign artists with greater financial backing.
But with streaming and digital distribution, those costs are all but eliminated. Local artists are free to create and distribute music in far greater numbers, satiating a demand that had been unfulfilled. Consumers who previously listened to American pop stars are all too happy to stream artists singing and rapping in their native tongue. “An unregulated free market has achieved what regulation failed to do,” says Page.
In a paper titled Glocalization of Music Streaming Within and Across Europe, Page and Chris Dalla Riva, a musician who works at music tech startup Audiomack, showed France is hardly alone in this trend toward “glocalization” — local entertainment succeeding in an increasingly globalized digital economy. In other large European markets such as Italy, Poland and Sweden, consumers are also gravitating toward local artists who create music in local languages. These countries — along with Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and the U.K. — matched or reached their peak domestic share of top 10 songs in 2022. In 2012, less than a fifth of the top 10 songs in Poland, France, Netherlands and Germany were local artists. In 2022, local music’s share of the top 10 songs reached 70% in Poland, Italy and Sweden, 60% in France, 30% in the Netherlands and Spain, and 20% in Germany.
Similar results are echoed on TikTok, which has transformed how people discover music around the world. In France, Italy, Poland and Greece, 80% of TikTok’s top 10 songs of 2022 were by home grown acts. Local artists accounted for 60% of the top 10 in Spain and 50% in the U.K. Local hip-hop is especially popular on TikTok in these markets, says Paul Hourican, the platform’s global head of music operations. Drake and Eminem may have a universal appeal but don’t connect with audiences the way local musicians can. “When you think about what hip-hop is, it’s amazing beats and truth telling, and speaking their truth in local language,” says Hourican. “That seems to be really, really connecting, and kind of forwarding the culture of hip-hop into into all these markets.”
The localization shift doesn’t surprise Sylvain Delange, managing director, Asia Pacific at French music company Believe. “We knew that the market would grow domestically, and that the local music would take a bigger share of the music consumption,” he says.
“When streaming came in, there was a very natural effect that skewed consumption towards international music for the simple reason that when streaming music comes, it serves, first and foremost, the higher income, large, tier one cities that are more open to international influence,” says Delange. “So, it’s very logical that in the beginning, international music would over index on streaming platforms. But then it would progressively switch back towards a fairly natural trend — which is domestic music.”
Early on, streaming services’ curation was much more focused on English-language music, adds Dominique Casimir, chief content officer at BMG. “You couldn’t put an Italian song in the middle of that playlist, that just certainly makes no sense.” But as streaming exploded in popularity, the services hired more staff to service the local music market and put a greater emphasis on local music. With boots on the ground, streaming services created channels and playlists that focused on local repertoire, she says. “That did change massively the work we can do together with DSPs.”
Supply alone doesn’t explain the trend toward globalization, though. An additional explanation, “is generally people’s need to identify with their culture,” says Golnar Khosrowshahi, CEO of Reservoir Media. “That is driving listenership and the importance of that identification, whether it’s around the subject matter or the sound or the person. This is not new news. People identify with their culture. Their culture is important to them. Maintaining that culture is important.”
To take advantage of the forces shaping globalization, Khosrowshahi has targeted investments throughout Latin America and the Middle East. Among Reservoir Media’s recent acquisitions are the catalogs of Latin songwriter and producer Rudy Perez and, in conjunction with PopArabia, the catalogs of Egyptian company RE Media and Egyptian rap duo El Sawareekh. Additionally, in June, Reservoir Media and PopArabia formed a joint venture with Saudi Arabian hip-hop label Mashrex and acquired some of its back catalog.
“One of the reasons we’re compelled by the Middle East market and the Arabic-speaking market is because of the size of that diaspora,” says Khosrowshahi. “The geographical reach of that diaspora goes to Malaysia and Indonesia. You have substantive Arabic speaking populations, granted different dialects, but music seems to be able to transcend them a little bit.”
Through both catalog acquisitions and frontline label partnerships, companies are finding opportunities in an increasingly online global music market. Investments are now commonplace in developing markets that were previously overlooked by music companies. Believe acquired Indian music company Venus Music, partnered with Indian imprints Think Music and Panorama Music, and partnered with Viva Music and Artists Group in the Philippines. In August, Universal Music Group-owned Virgin Music Group acquired United Arab Emirates-based Chabaka. In 2022, Warner Music Group purchased a majority stake in Africori, the top digital distributor in Africa.
While TikTok and streaming services’ international popularity have leveled the playing field for local music around the world, Delange says YouTube has been the biggest driver of this trend over the last decade. For years, a debate raged throughout Europe and the U.S. about YouTube’s “value gap,” the difference between its ad-supported royalties and per-stream payments from competing subscription services. While the West was hesitant to embrace YouTube, Asian artists and labels embraced the opportunities for promotion, marketing and monetization, says Delange. In the West, YouTube was a problematic free platform. In the East, YouTube was a free platform with a massive audience. “That was revolutionary in a market that had been decimated on the physical side,” says Delange. It’s now proving the driver for a new stage of growth in the global music market.
SESAC Performing Rights has chosen the private company Soundreef to manage its offline performing rights in Italy, withdrawing them from SIAE, the Italian collective management organization. Although the EU rights collections market has been open for a decade – the national societies are no longer national monopolies, especially when it comes to online rights – this is one of the larger moves so far. SIAE was founded in 1882 – Soundreef in 2012.
“It’s very rational,” Alex Wolf, president of international of the SESAC Music Group, tells Billboard. “What made us change is, we were very convinced about their IT, their administration and their management.”
This is the first time one of the ten biggest performing rights organizations (PROs) has withdrawn its repertoire from one of the major European societies in favor of a relatively young, private company. Italy is the sixth largest rights collections market in the world, according to CISAC’s data from 2021, the last year for which information is available.
This shows how competitive the rights market is becoming – especially, but not only, in Europe. SESAC is the third-biggest rights collection entity in the U.S., and it is building an international operation – much of it international. Some of this is through MINT, a joint venture with the Swiss society SUISA that manages Soundreef repertoire online in much of the world. Although that deal is completely separate, Wolf says he respected how Soundreef operated.
“You get a good insight into how a company works,” he says.
Soundreef is a Rome-based private company that initially focused on background music, then raised investment money to expand in 2016. It now has 40,000 affiliates, 26,000 of whom are Italian.
“We thought we could create a different system where technology was at the center of the operation,” said Soundreef CEO Davide d’Atri. “That means three things: analytical distribution, where what is played is paid; transparency, and quick payment.”
Analytical distribution essentially means reducing the amount of royalties that are distributed statistically, as opposed to tracked directly. D’Atri says that Soundreef distributes 85% of its payments this way, while some societies pay out as much as 60% based on statistics – extrapolating which songs are played in bars and restaurants by tracking which are played on radio or television, for example.
“Some of the bigger societies are very efficient,” d’Atri says, “but others sit on a lot of money” that can’t be directly attributed to specific rightsholders. Soundreef, he added, is now trying to attract other Anglo-American companies.
The RIAA has asked to have AI voice cloning added to the government’s piracy watch list, officially known as the Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy.
The RIAA typically writes in each year, requesting forms of piracy like torrenting, stream ripping, cyber lockers and free music downloading to be included in the final list. All of these categories of piracy are still present in the RIAA’s letter to the U.S. Trade Representative this year, but this is the first time the trade organization, which represents the interest of record labels, has added a form of generative AI to their recommendations.
The RIAA noted that it believes AI voice cloning, also referred to as ‘AI voice synthesis’ or ‘AI voice filters,’ infringes on their members’ copyrights and the artists’ rights to their voices and calls out one U.S.-based AI voice cloning site, Voicify.AI as one that should specifically face scrutiny.
According to the letter, Voicify.AI’s service includes voice models that emulate sound recording artists like Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, Elvis Presley, Bruno Mars, Eminem, Harry Styles, Adele, Ed Sheeran, and others, as well as political figures including Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Barak Obama.
The RIAA claims that this type of service infringes on copyrights because it “stream-rips the YouTube video selected by the user, copies the acapella from the track, modifies the acapella using the AI vocal model, and then provides the user unauthorized copies of the modified acapella stem, the underlying instrumental bed, and the modified remixed recording.” Essentially, some of these AI voice cloning sites train its models on stolen copyrights.
It additionally claims that there is a violation pf the artists’ right of publicity, the right that protects public figures from having their name, likeness, and voice commercially exploited without their permission. This is a more tenuous right, given it is only a state-level protection and its strength varies by state. It also becomes more limited after a public figure’s death. However, this is possibly the most common legal argument against AI voice cloning technology in the music business.
This form of artificial intelligence first became widely recognized last spring, when an anonymous TikTok user named Ghostwriter used AI to mimic the voices of Drake and The Weeknd in his song “Heart On My Sleeve” with shocking precision. The song was briefly available on streaming services, like YouTube, but was taken down after a stern letter from the artists’ label, Universal Music Group. However, the song was ultimately removed from official services due to a copyright infringement in the track, not because of a right of publicity claim.
A few months later, Billboard reported that streamers were in talks with the three major label groups about allowing them to file take down requests for right of publicity violations — something which previously was only allowed in cases of copyright infringement as dictated in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Unlike the DMCA, the newly discussed arrangement regarding right of publicity issues would be a voluntary one. In July, UMG’s general counsel and executive vp of business and legal affairs, Jeffery Harleston, spoke as a witness in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on AI and copyright and asked for a new “federal right of publicity” to be made into law to protect artists’ voices.
An additional challenge in regulating this area is that many AI models available on the internet for global users are not based in the U.S., meaning the U.S. government has little recourse to stop their alleged piracy, even if alerted by trade organizations like the RIAA. Certain countries are known to be more relaxed on AI regulation — like China, Israel, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore — which has created safe havens for AI companies to grow abroad.
The U.S. Trade Representative still must review this letter from the RIAA as well as other recommendations from other industry groups and determine whether or not they believe AI voice cloning should be included on the watchlist. The office will likely issue their final review at the start of next year.
As the Palestinian group Hamas continues to attack Israel and the country retaliates by bombing Gaza, survivors of the terrorist attack at the Paralello Universo Supernova Sukkot Gathering electronic music festival near the Gaza border are continuing what has become a grim search for hundreds of people who are still missing.
So far, the Israeli search and rescue organization Zaka has reported that it found 260 dead bodies at the festival site in Re’im, Israel. An unknown number of attendees have been abducted by Hamas terrorists. At least 150 Israelis were abducted on Saturday (Oct. 7), according to the New York Times, and some of them were taken from the rave.
On Tuesday morning (Oct. 10), President Biden referenced the massacre during remarks on the Israel-Hamas conflict, naming “young people massacred while attending a music festival to celebrate peace” among the violent incidents of the last few days.
As of Sunday evening, 600-700 festival goers were believed to be missing in the immediate aftermath of the attack, according to artist manager Raz Gaster, who was at the event and represents several acts on the lineup. The exact number of the remaining still missing has not been verified, although two sources in Israel put this number at approximately 150, accounting for bodies that have since been recovered and identified as well as survivors who have been identified; though another source on the ground there says it’s still hard to tell how many remain missing.
Gaster, an artist manager who was at the event and represents several acts on the lineup, told Billboard Tuesday (Oct. 10) that he and members of the festival production team are working to locate survivors and gather information about festival attendees who remain missing.
“At the end of the day, it’s our responsibility as human beings to [provide] the families of these missing people whatever information we can get,” Gaster says. “We will keep working until we get information about each and every one of them.”
The Israeli offshoot of the longstanding Brazilian festival brand Paralelllo Universo, Supernova Sukkot Gathering was named in honor of the Jewish Sukkot holiday, and hosted approximately 3,000 attendees on a rural site with two stages.
Those who escaped the festival describe the terror on the ground when at about 6:30 a.m. Saturday rockets began flying from Gaza, with some landing near Re’im. Within 20 minutes, terrorists armed with guns and RPGs arrived in ATVs, pickup trucks and motorcycles, as well as by paraglider, and immediately began shooting attendees.
Shelly Barel, who sells jewelry and clothing at music festivals throughout Israel, had been on the site since Thursday, Oct. 5. At that time, the outdoor space was hosting another psytrance festival, Unity, with Supernova Sukkot Gathering starting on Friday. Supernova Sukkot was only moved to the Re’im site two days prior, after another site in southern Israel fell through.
“The festival was so much fun,” Barel says of Supernova Sukkot through a translator. “Amazing people, it was really full of joy.”
Everything changed when rockets started falling early Saturday morning. Barel and her husband hit the ground and lay there for at least five minutes, until festival security made an announcement telling attendees to run to their cars and leave the site. Barel and her husband spent 10 minutes packing their belongings, then loaded them into their vehicle and drove away, with Barel’s husband behind the wheel. At the time, they assumed they were being asked to evacuate because of a rocket attack, a relatively regular occurrence in Israel.
They soon hit a bottleneck of cars trying to exit the festival. Without realizing that armed attackers had arrived, they took a hard right turn and drove across the dirt field adjacent to the site instead of waiting in the exit line. That decision, made as much out of impatience and an instinct to escape as anything else, might have saved their lives.
“In hindsight,” Barel says, “I understood that the terrorists shot the [people in the] first cars, so those cars couldn’t move, and the rest got stuck behind them. They formed a traffic jam for everyone coming after that. It was a death trap.”
When Barel and her husband drove off the field and back onto the road, they came upon two stopped vehicles, both of which had all their doors open. Then they saw the occupants of those vehicles lying dead on the ground.
Barel’s husband made a U-turn and minutes later received a text from someone in his army reserve group saying there were attackers in the area. “When we realized we had to fear the terrorists,” Barel says, “the missiles seemed like the smallest problem.”
He kept driving, following signs to the nearest city. “We decided to go as fast as we could, full gas, only slowing during turns,” she says. “The rockets were falling around us and at this point I thought it was the moment to say ‘I love you’ to each other and say goodbye.”
They didn’t get hit. Eventually, they made their way back to their home in central Israel. There, they found out that some of their friends from the festival had been killed, while others had been abducted. Many remain missing.
Nitay, a 26-year-old security professional from Tel Aviv who also attended Supernova Sukkot said that he was helping an artist pack up some gear when gunmen appeared and started shooting at the festivalgoers. As shots rang out, “my friend called me when I was running away from the attack and asked me to try and find his sister,” says Nitay, who did not wish to give his last name. “I really wanted to help him, but I had to flee and hide. I felt like I was constantly surrounded by gunfire.”
Nitay ran for several miles and eventually hid for 10 hours in an olive grove. At one point he thought the group he had taken shelter with had been discovered by armed men speaking in Arabic — they were about 20 yards away, close enough that he could see the men’s legs through the olive tree branches.
“I prayed to my father, who passed away several years ago and begged him to help me,” Nitay recalls. As he hid, the men began shouting and Nitay says he braced himself for an attack. The shouting went on for about a half-hour, then the armed men began backing away from the area in which he was hiding with several others, including two tourists from Argentina. They stayed there for several more hours until Israeli finally arrived and led them to a nearby police station. Nitay says he never found his friend’s sister.
In the days since Barel and her husband escaped, they, too, have been searching for information on their missing friends, but they haven’t found much, even as obituaries have started to appear. The trauma is so fresh in her mind that she says she became “hysterical” when the elevator door in her apartment building opened and a man she didn’t know was inside.
For decades, Israel’s dance music scene has been thriving. Psytrance, the electronic subgenre featured on the Supernova Sukkot lineup, became big in Israel in the late ’80s and ’90s, and it has been the country’s biggest electronic sound since, although house and techno have also grown in popularity in recent years.
On any given weekend, especially between March and October, there are several big parties like Supernova Sukkot throughout Israel, with crowd sizes ranging between 50 and 10,000, according to Amotz Tokatly, who’s been involved in the country’s electronic scene for more than 20 years as a promoter, manager, consultant and writer. “If you go to a psytrance party or a house or techno club, you see people from the age of 18 to 60 or even 70,” says Tokatly. “It’s a basic activity in Israel. We love to dance. We love to go out.”
It’s hard to tell what will happen to this scene in the aftermath of the attack, not to mention the war that is expected to follow.
“What happened here is a disaster. It’s unbearable,” says Tokatly. “The most important thing for us is to [show] the world that this is a crime against innocent people. They don’t belong to any political side. These were just kids going to a party.”
Additional reporting by Tal Rimon.
On Saturday, Bruno Mars was set to become the third American artist ever to perform two sold out concerts at the 70,000-capacity HaYarkon Park in Tel Aviv, Israel — following Madonna in 2009 and Michael Jackson in 1993.
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He played his first show there last Wednesday with two Tel Aviv acts opening, running nearly four hours in total. Both shows were promoted by Bluestone Group, which is owned by Live Nation Israel.
“I say Tel Aviv!” Mars shouted to the audience. “The Hooligans made it to Israel – thank you so guys so much for coming out,” Mars told fans after opening his show with his hit 2016 song “24k Magic.”
Mars’ Saturday show was supposed to be the second-to-last date on a brief world tour that previously stopped in Tbilisi, Georgia, on Oct. 1 and was headed to Doha, Qatar, for an Oct. 8 show to follow the Formula 1 Qatar Grand Prix.
Early Saturday, though, reports began to circulate of a coordinated Hamas-led terrorist attack that would escalate the ongoing Israel-Palestinian conflict. Later that day, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared on television and declared that his country was now “at war” with Hamas. By afternoon, Live Nation Israel issued a statement that the concert was canceled. (The following day, Mars also cancelled his planned Doha concert.)
“All ticket purchases to the show will receive an automatic refund to the credit card through which the purchase was made,” said a statement that Bluestone Group shared online.
Securing the venue, located inside Tel Aviv’s one-and-a-half-square mile Yarkon Park, along the banks of the Yarkon River, during active fighting would present unnecessary risks to concertgoers, a source tells Billboard, noting that the decision to cancel was made a few hours after the attacks began that morning. By 2 p.m., Bruno Mars and his 60-person crew were at Ben Gurion Airport, where they boarded a flight to Athens.
From Athens, Mars was supposed to travel to Doha for his performance, but he was reportedly unable to pack up and transport his production gear out of Israel in time for that performance. On Sunday, hours before he was scheduled to take the stage in Doha, Lusail International Circuit racetrack announced on Instagram that Mars would not perform, and that French producer and artist DJ Snake would take his place.
Mars’ concert cancellation represents a symbolic setback for Israel’s touring business. For more than a decade, artists announcing plans to perform in the country faced harsh public criticism from activists and artists like Roger Waters and Brian Eno, who urged musicians to boycott the country over what they describe as its unjust treatment of the Palestinians.
In 2018, Lana Del Rey was booked to headline the Meteor Music Festival when Waters urged her to reconsider. (Her trip fell apart due to scheduling issues.) Waters, a proponent of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a Palestinian-led campaign to isolate Israel, has also targeted Radiohead, Bon Jovi and Jennifer Lopez, albeit unsuccessfully.
New generation promoters like Tel Aviv-based Bluestone Group — which Live Nation bought in 2017 as a joint venture of several investors, including Maverick’s Guy Oseary — has worked to increase the potential gross artists can make playing Israel, while also helping them to navigate anti-Israel backlash. In 2023, the country hosted a number of top tier Western acts including Imagine Dragons, Tiesto, Ozuna, Christina Aguilera, the Black Keys and Guns N’ Roses.
21 Savage has officially made his first live appearance outside of the United States.
The U.K.-born, Atlanta-raised rapper was welcomed with open arms by frequent collaborator and current tourmate Drake during the Canadian superstar’s concert at Scotiabank Arena in Toronto on Saturday (Oct. 7).
Earlier in the day, it was confirmed that 21 Savage had officially become a permanent U.S. resident and was legally cleared to travel outside the country. Drake also recently revealed in his song “8 AM in Charlotte” that “Savage got a green card” after nearly being deported in 2019 due to an expired visa.
“To who it may concern, Shéyaa Bin Abraham-Joseph, known officially as 21 Savage, is now cleared to travel up north and perform for his beloved fans,” a man announced onstage during Drake’s show on Saturday. “He has chosen Toronto as his first destination. Ladies and gentleman…,” the man continued before getting interrupted by Drizzy.
“No, no. Let me do it,” Drake said. “Ladies and gentlemen, performing for the first time outside of America in his life. Make some noise for the brother, 21!”
From there, 21 Savage walked out wearing a Canadian flag and joined the 6 God in a crowd sing-along of Canada’s national anthem, “O Canada.” 21 Savage is featured on the track “Calling for You,” from Drake’s just-released eighth studio album, For All the Dogs. The pair is also touring alongside each other as part of Drake’s It’s All a Blur Tour of North America.
21 Savage shared several clips from his onstage appearance in Toronto through his Instagram Story. “Dreams come true,” he captioned one of the videos.
In an Instagram post on Saturday, 21 Savage teased his return to the U.K. with a brief video — soundtracked by Skylar Gray’s “Coming Home” — that featured memories of his childhood. The post included a comment from Drake, who simply wrote, “*we’re.”
“This marks a milestone for the superstar as he will soon perform for the first time in London. More information to follow soon,” a press release from 21 Savage reads.
A source previously told Billboard that 21 Savage is planning an international tour.
21 Savage, who was born in the United Kingdom and legally arrived stateside at age 7, was arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in February 2019. At the time, officials said the rapper was “unlawfully present” in the U.S. on a 2005 visa that expired one year after his arrival.
Bruno Mars‘ concert in Tel Aviv on Saturday (Oct. 7) has been canceled following a deadly attack by Palestinian militants. Mars, who performed his first concert in Israel on Wednesday (Oct. 4) at Tel Aviv’s Park HaYarkon, was scheduled to return to the venue on Saturday. The show was put on halt after Hamas launched […]
Mavin Records, the hot Nigerian label that’s home to Rema and Ayra Starr, is seeking investment or eying a potential full sale with bidding coming from the the Universal Music Group, HYBE and strong interest from music asset investors in the financial sector, according to sources.
Mavin’s valuation in the proposed deal is above $125 million and could be worth $150 million to $200 million, according to those sources. (It’s unclear if the label owns music publishing and if that is involved.) Sources further say that Shot Tower Capital is shopping the deal.
The move is expected to raise funding to help position the label for more growth. The African continent is anticipated to be the next geographical repertoire to have a commanding presence on the global stage, similar to how Latin and K-pop have had an impact on the international marketplace in recent years.
Even if the investment comes from a strategic investor like UMG or HYBE, or results in another label or music company taking a stake in Mavin or even buying the African music company outright. The Mavin management team, led by legendary Nigerian music business executive Don Jazzy, is expected to remain in place and retain some form of control over its destiny.
Selena Gomez & Rema
Courtesy of Rema*
Among strategic music industry suitors, sources say HYBE is in pole position with UMG in second place, even though some of Mavin’s bigger artists are distributed in the U.S. through various UMG entities. For instance, Rema’s big hit “Calm Down” — which peaked at No. 3 on the Hot 100 and remains in the top 10 on the chart after 56 weeks — was distributed by Virgin, one of UMG’s indie distribution arms; the subsequent remix version by Rema and Selena Gomez is licensed to Interscope; and sources say some other Mavin artist or artists might be going through Republic, as Mavin is listed under that label in Luminate.
Both Rema and Ayra Starr have racked up more than 1.5 billion global on-demand streams, according to Luminate, though Rema’s collaboration with Gomez on “Calm Down” is not counted under his artist page; that song has reached 9.07 billion global streams, with 164.5 million and 165.7 million in just the last two weeks, as of Sep. 28. Several other Rema collaborations are also listed elsewhere in Luminate, which means his overall share of streams is multiple times larger than what he is credited for solely under his own artist page in that system.
Moreover, both Rema’s and Starr’s emergence on the global stage is far bigger than their impact in the U.S. where Rema has 287 million streams and Starr has 203 million streams. Put another way, Rema’s collaboration with Gomez in the U.S., at 861.2 million streams, accounts for less than one tenth of the song’s total activity of over 9 billion streams.
In addition to hot artists like Rema and Starr, Mavin’s roster features more up-and-coming artists like Ladipoe, Crayon, Boy Spyce and Magixx, while its catalog includes music from Tiwa Savage, Wande Coal, Iyanya and Reekado Banks.
For a strategic suitor, the deal comes with other promising benefits besides landing a strong artist roster in a leading music company on the African continent. Winning the Mavin auction would catapult that bidder into a key player in the Nigerian Afrobeats scene — the umbrella genre that encompasses Afropop, Afro fusion, high life and others continues to explode around the globe. In the past several years, artists such as Wizkid, Davido and Burna Boy have blossomed into global superstars, while the likes of Rema, Starr, Tems, Ckay, Asake and Fireboy DML have led a wave of young, emerging talent coming from the African continent. The movement has gained momentum to the point that the Recording Academy has introduced a new Grammy Awards category for best African music performance, which will be awarded for the first time at the forthcoming awards in February.
Beyond that, the buyer would also land the executive talent of Don Jazzy, born Michael Ajerehwho, who has already established Mavin as one of the leading record labels on the continent. Don Jazzy has become a leading figure in the development of the music business in Nigeria, having established Mo’ Hit Records alongside iconic recording artist D’Banj in 2004, before launching Mavin in 2012.
All companies mentioned in this story either declined to comment or didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.
Punjabi music history is being made in Canada. An innovative new wave of diasporic artists is blurring boundaries between genres and setting chart records. They’re blending traditional and contemporary sounds to create something undeniably their own — and it’s spreading worldwide.
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With its massive population and an ultra-profitable entertainment film and music industry, India is one of the top entertainment markets in the world. Punjabi music has emerged in its own right, with labels like New York hip-hop legend Nas’s Mass Appeal and Universal Music teaming up to spotlight the music in both India and North America. This year, singer/actor Diljit Dosanjh became the first to play a set at Coachella entirely in Punjabi.
It’s not only an Indian phenomenon, but a Canadian one. Diplomatically, the relationship between the two countries is suddenly tense, but it hasn’t dulled the power of the music. There are over 2.5 million people of South Asian heritage in Canada, and they account for some of the most popular music on both sides of the world. Three of the top 10 tracks in India in 2022 were made by Canadian artists. On Spotify, the top streamed track was “Excuses” by AP Dhillon, Gurinder Gill and Intense, who broke out from British Columbia. Canada, where artists blend cultural heritages fluidly, is proving to be fertile ground for an international movement of genre-spanning music.
Collectively, artists like Dhillon, Gill, Karan Aujla, Jonita Gandhi and Ikky continue to amass billions of streams on Spotify and YouTube and perform on the country’s biggest stages. They’ve starred in documentaries, collaborated with hip-hop stars like YG, and turned audiences who might not speak a word of Punjabi into overnight diehards.
But despite all of their measurable success, it’s taken the Canadian music industry a long time to recognize and support the artists who have been proving themselves on their own terms. That’s finally starting to change, even during a challenging time.
Recently, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau set off a diplomatic crisis when he accused the Indian government of potential involvement in the assassination of Sikh activist and Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Tensions have been rising between the two countries since then, and artists have simultaneously found themselves facing scrutiny. Just weeks ago, Punjabi-Canadian rapper and singer Shubh had his Indian tour cancelled after facing criticism for sharing a piece of art that he says was politically misinterpreted.
“We are trying to make art that helps people on an individual level, regardless of their colour, race, religion, nationality [or] gender,” writes Dhillon in a recent Instagram post. “Division has gotten us to this point but unity is the key to the future.”
For Punjabi-Canadian artists, this is not a time to shrink away from the spotlight. It’s a time to engage and spread their music around the world. It’s a culmination of years of work that is now coming to fruition in a major way.
A home for Punjabi music in Canada
Karan Aujla and Ikky have some serious bragging rights.
Their addictive summer pop album Making Memories debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard Canadian Albums chart, making it the highest-charting Punjabi album debut in Canadian history. At launch, it sat above Midnights, the newest album from arguably the largest pop star in the world.
“All of my friends were joking around telling me, yo, you passed Taylor Swift!” Aujla tells Billboard Canada. “When we saw these numbers, and we saw that mark, we thought, okay, something is happening here.”
This summer, Warner Music Canada and Warner Music India came together to launch 91 North Records, a new label aimed at supporting South Asian artists across borders. At their industry launch event at their new office in Toronto, Warner Music Canada’s president Kristen Burke called the label a reflection of significant changes in the Canadian music industry.
The rise of music streaming and social media networks like TikTok have built worldwide exposure to music beyond local radio and opened the doors to new and different sounds. There’s been a rise in popularity for artists from all over the world, especially Punjabi music. “This music deserves a platform on the global stage and a dedicated label based in Toronto,” she said.
Ikky, the 22-year-old producer born Ikwinder Singh, is the label’s creative director. Internationally renowned playback singer Jonita Gandhi is one of their first signings. Gandhi, who sings in various regional Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Punjabi, said at the launch that she sometimes has a hard time figuring out where she belongs, but feels right at home at 91 North. “I feel like I’m finally being seen,” she remarked.
Ikky says 91 North gives him a chance to think beyond himself and build a unified front amongst the new Punjabi wave. The goal, he says, is to get Punjabi artists to a point where they can compete on a global level next to the biggest artists in the world. It’s not just global outreach, but major label infrastructure that he says many artists in India desperately need.
Aujla says that’s something he struggled with before he signed with Warner Canada and Warner India. He came to Surrey, British Columbia, from the small village of Ghurala in India’s Punjab state when he was 17 and built a career writing for other artists. But he didn’t know how he was supposed to be compensated for it. He’d never heard of SOCAN, for instance, which represents rights holders for music in Canada.
“When I was young, I didn’t know what I was doing. I really needed help,” he says. “I wrote over a hundred songs and didn’t know I was supposed to get royalties. Some people around me took advantage. And that’s still happening in Punjab a lot. It needs to be corrected ASAP.”
Back home, he says, some people actually pay TV stations and record labels to play their music, not vice versa. “They don’t know what’s going on with the business side of music,” he says. “But now they’re starting to know.”
Paving the path
One of the biggest stars of Punjabi music is AP Dhillon, whose mix of trap beats and melodic lyricism has made him a champion of Punjabi culture in both India and North America. AP Dhillon: First of a Kind, a recent Prime Video docu-series about his rapid rise, follows Dhillon, his collaborators Shinda Kahlon and Gurinder Gill, and his small team at Run-Up Records as they embark on their first Canadian tour.
Dhillon’s very first show was at his hometown hockey rink, Vancouver’s nearly 19,000-seat Rogers Arena, and it only went up from there. Though the venues may be large, staying small and independent helps him keep his vision in his own hands, where he collaborates on everything from production to music videos. But it wasn’t a conscious choice. It was a necessity.
“Early on, I tried to send my music to a few labels, to people in the industry. I tried to message producers,” Dhillon recounts. “It wasn’t going anywhere. They weren’t grabbing it. They were like ‘this ain’t it.’ So we just kept going, kept going, kept going, and we didn’t stop.”
Gurinder Gill, his former collaborator who’s now striking out on his own, had never even been to a concert before performing for crowds of more than 10,000.
“The first concert we went to was our own,” he says. “One day you’re living your daily life and then, boom, next thing you know you’re on stage with this many people cheering on your music, cheering your name. It’s just a blessing.”
For major concert promoters, the numbers are becoming too big to ignore. Baldeep Randhawa is a talent buyer at Live Nation, and he says the company has big plans for Punjabi artists in Canada, the United States and the U.K. “We’re all collectively working on this on a global scale to really put some fuel on this fire,” he says from his office in Vancouver.
Used to seeing major Punjabi acts play in banquet halls and wedding venues, his initial goal was to break barriers and get them into “proper venues” of 500 capacity or more. The growth has been so rapid, however, that the company now has their sights set much higher: stadiums. That’s an achievable goal for artists like Dhillon and Diljit Dosanjh, who have already easily sold out arenas in cities like Toronto and Vancouver. But the strategy also includes breaking up-and-coming acts, like Calgary-based Prabh, who already have tens of millions of streams. Often, that means giving them the support they never had access to, which sometimes includes PR, management, even advice on merchandise.
That’s something new for many Punjabi artists, who are able to get huge numbers quickly without the tools to properly capitalize. For Gill, before coming to Canada as a student in 2015, he didn’t seriously consider pursuing music as a career. Though he’d perform at local singing competitions in Punjab, it wasn’t until he found a small community of friends who shared his passion for music that he realized music could be something bigger.
“We were not financially stable [at first], and we were finishing school,” he says. “It was a lot of work when we started taking it seriously. We had to do everything by ourselves.”
Now, his tracks have garnered billions of streams worldwide. His debut solo album, Hard Choices, which dropped this summer on Run-Up Records, showcases his lyrical prowess, blending Punjabi imagery, melodies and confident wordplay over steady hip-hop and trap beats. It represents a willingness to innovate, which is something he and his peers all share.
“We always try to do something new, something that hasn’t been done before,” he says. “That’s why the songs we release are a different sound for our industry or for the mainstream.”
A sound that crosses borders
The new sound of Punjabi music reflects a sensibility more than a genre. Combining classical folk stylings with elements of hip-hop, R&B and electronic music, it’s music that refuses to be limited.
Bhangra, an upbeat folk dance and music native to Punjab that originally celebrated the harvest season, is known for its accompaniment with live instruments like the dhol drum. Noticing a lack of heavy bass, artists in the 1980s and 90s began merging it with funk, reggae, dub and garage music that punctuated British soundwaves, making a global impact. In the process, artists have created points of connection for youth who may otherwise have been alienated from their language, art and culture — which is increasingly challenging to preserve with generations of migration.
Following this tradition, Punjabi-Canadian artists have put themselves on the map by creating music reflective of their specific worlds of influence. That’s especially true in multicultural cities like Toronto, where diverse sounds flow organically.
Gandhi, who has fielded questions about sounding “too Indian” or “too Western” throughout her career, says she now appreciates the blend of global influences that defined her early life in the Greater Toronto Area city of Brampton. “Being exposed to so many different cultures and people from around the world in my school opened up my mind to a lot of music that I might not have come across if I grew up somewhere else,” she says.
Ikky, who was born in Rexdale and now lives in Brampton too, says his music is also inextricable from his upbringing. The essence of his Punjabi heritage is in everything he makes, but so are reggae and dancehall, hip-hop and R&B, because those were the influences he was growing up around. “Our diversity is crazy in Toronto,” he says, “enough for you to be adding these cultures in your music without you ever knowing it.”
Ikky pushed Aujla to expand his sound while recording Making Memories in Toronto. None of his collaborators spoke Punjabi, but they built a shared musical language in the studio while jamming and trading records. Ikky curated an inspo playlist on Spotify ranging from hip-hop (Drake, J. Cole, Mobb Deep, 50 Cent, DJ Khaled) to R&B (Aaliyah, Ashanti, Keyshia Cole) to reggae (Wayne Wonder) to Punjabi-Canadian forebears (Jazzy B). You can hear it all in the smooth, effortless vibes of the music.
Aujla prides himself on being a writer first, but he’s proud of the cross-cultural audience his music is reaching. He’s a big fan of Bad Bunny, and he’s been obsessively listening to the Puerto Rican artist recently, trying to figure out how his specific melodies feel so universal despite the language barrier. Latin artists are dominating charts in and out of Latin America, and that inescapable global power is within reach for Punjabi artists.
“It’s just that one thing that we need to get right and what’s happened with Spanish music could happen to Punjabi music,” Aujla says. “We’re working day and night to get that right sound, that right melody that will just go everywhere in the world.”
A sound that lasts
Meanwhile, they’re still fighting for recognition at home. At this year’s Juno Awards, AP Dhillon did something that has never been done before.
Donning a dapper white tux, he crooned his recent single “Summer High,” giving the first ever Punjabi performance at Canada’s biggest music gala. It was a big breakthrough moment of recognition from the industry, but Dhillon says he fought to make sure it wouldn’t be a novelty or a one-off.
“I had a thorough talk with them before performing. I said ‘I’m honoured to do it. But there’s one condition: you gotta put my people on.’” he recalls. “It’s not a one-time thing that helps sell tickets for the Junos and then call it a day. Punjabi music will be there forever.”
Musicians are seeing the shift, and not just in the places you might expect.
This summer, Ikky was booked at the Calgary Stampede, an annual festival best known for rodeo exhibitions and cowboy boots. Ikky, who is Sikh, heeded warnings that people in Alberta tend to experience racism more acutely than in Ontario. Knowing he would be the first Punjabi artist to perform there, he arrived ready to DJ country songs. But his plans quickly changed.
“I intended to go there and play Morgan Wallen. That is what I really thought I was gonna go do,” he laughs. “As soon as I saw the mixture of people there, I was like, no, we gotta go completely Punjabi. We gotta give what defines Punjabi music.”
By the end of the set, people had come from rides and from queues to hear the music that was coming from that street stage, and by the end the crowd grew to about a thousand people. “That’s that moment where I thought, okay, what you’re doing is right. Keep your foot on the gas.”
That’s still the case, even as artists like Shubh (who Ikky collaborated with on last year’s “Baller”) face obstacles to free expression and risk misinterpretation for things they do or don’t say. In a way, it shows how much their music is resonating.
“It scares us a little, but at the same time it shows our power,” Ikky says. “As artists, we have a big enough voice to shake a country.”
There have been teases of this kind of mainstream crossover in the past, from “Beware of the Boys,” the Bhangra/hip-hop collaboration of Panjabi MC and Jay-Z in the early 2000s, to the “international” version of Shania Twain’s 2002 mega-seller Up!, but while those fusions have been taken as short-term novelties, the new wave of Punjabi artists are building a foundation to make it endure.
Brampton-based rapper Sidhu Moose Wala was a major figure in opening the door to the mainstream for Punjabi musicians. Tragically murdered in India in 2022, the same year his album Moosetape became the then-highest charting Punjabi album in Canada, he is unable to see the success of this new wave, many of whom collaborated or took inspiration from him. That’s why these artists stress the importance of banding together to uplift each other, paving the path for the next generation.
AP Dhillon says he’s seeing the industry change rapidly. When he started to blow up, the labels weren’t seeing what he and his peers were doing. Today, like billions of people on YouTube and at concerts, they have their eyes on what’s happening here.
“A few years ago, nobody was paying attention,” he says. “Now, they’re paying attention.”
This story originally appeared on Billboard Canada.
Ishmil Waterman, Lane Dorsey, Sasha Jairam/Billboard Canada
The Japanese entertainment company that has acknowledged its founder sexually assaulted hundreds of boys over the span of half a century, took a new name on Monday: Smile-Up. It also vowed to focus on compensation for victims of the abuse.
Tokyo-based Johnny & Associates, founded in 1975, will eventually fold, but its performers can join an independent company that is being set up, said Noriyuki Higashiyama, the company’s new leader and a former star at Johnny’s, as the company is known.
Higashiyama, tapped last month to head the old Johnny’s, will now be president of both Smile-Up and the new company. The new company’s name will be put to public vote by Johnny’s fans.
“All things with the Johnny’s name will have to go,” Higashiyama told reporters at a Tokyo hotel. “A wounded heart isn’t easy to heal. Compensation on its own will never be enough.”
In recent months, dozens of men who were performers and backup dancers as teens and children at Johnny’s have come forward, saying they were sexually assaulted by Johnny Kitagawa.
Kitagawa, who died in 2019, was never charged.
So far, 325 people have applied to the company’s compensation program, and that number may grow. Payments will begin next month, Higashiyama said. How the monetary amount will be decided was not yet clear.
Last month, Kitagawa’s niece Julie Keiko Fujishima resigned as chief executive at Johnny’s and apologized for his past. She still owns 100% of the unlisted company but will not be part of the new unnamed company, whose capital structure is still being worked out.
Fujishima did not appear at Monday’s news conference and had a letter read aloud. The letter said she was “brainwashed” by her mother Mary, who insisted Kitagawa was innocent, even after the Japanese Supreme Court ruled two decades ago that the sexual allegations against him were accurate.
“I want to erase all that remains of Johnny from this world,” she wrote. “I do not forgive what Johnny has done.”
Some victims say they have suffered for decades in silence, unable to confide in family or friends, while experiencing flashbacks.
Most of the attacks took place at Kitagawa’s luxury apartment, where several youngsters were handpicked to spend the night. The following morning, he would thrust 10,000 yen ($100) bills into their hands, according to various testimony.
Rumors about Kitagawa were rampant over the years, with several tell-it-all books published. A recent U.N. investigation has said that the number of victims is at least several hundred, and called on the Japanese government to act. When BBC did a special on Kitagawa earlier this year, the scandal jumped into the spotlight.
Mainstream Japanese media have come under serious scrutiny for having remained mum about Kitagawa, apparently afraid of his influence and ability to deny access to his stars.
Now, some TV broadcasters and programming have done an about-face to shun Johnny’s stars. Major companies have also recently announced they will stop using them in advertising.
In a related development, several victims met with lawyers, feminists and Johnny’s fans to work together in pushing for legal changes so civil damages can be pursued after the current limit of 20 years. The criminal statute of limitations is now 15 years.
Attorney Yoshihito Kawakami said children often don’t understand what happened, and the changes will allow victims to seek damages from Johnny & Associates.
Japan raised the age of sexual consent from 13 to 16 only this year. Japanese media reports say Kitagawa often purposely picked on 13-year-olds, although his victims have been as young as 8.
The company has promised it will compensate victims “beyond the scope of the law. ”
“Some perpetrators are living their lives as though nothing happened. That causes great pain to the victims,” said Junya Hiramoto, who heads a group of Johnny’s victims.
The Associated Press does not usually identify victims of alleged sexual assault, but Hiramoto and others in the case have chosen to identify themselves in the media.
“By coming together, we can grow into a bigger force and move toward hope,” he said.