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In the five years that followed the release of SZA’s groundbreaking debut album, Ctrl, the acclaimed artist teased fans with the occasional one-off or collaboration — as the wait for the official follow-up continued to grow. So when she finally did return at the end of 2022 with her much-anticipated second album, SOS, the stakes were high. And throughout 2023, her record-breaking chart wins exceeded expectations.
With SOS, SZA ventured outside R&B’s boundaries by diving into gospel, grunge, pop-punk and rap; meanwhile, as her producer-engineer, Rob Bisel, previously told Billboard, “Her pen got sharper and more personal.” SOS debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and spent 10 nonconsecutive weeks there, the most of any R&B/hip-hop album by a woman since Mariah Carey’s self-titled debut spent 11 weeks at the top in 1991. Instead of its impact being limited to the final weeks of 2022, SOS became one of this year’s biggest releases.
It started with the groovy yet gruesome “Kill Bill,” which arrived as a single in January and eventually became SZA’s first No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100; it also made history with an unprecedented 21-week siege atop the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. The following month, she embarked on the SOS tour, telling Billboard at the time that she was “deeply excited to pop ass and cry and give theater” during her first-ever arena headlining stint, compared with her more intimate, stripped-down shows in the past. “When I finally saw the tour and how insane she was going with her choreography, range and stamina … it really hit me,” her producer Carter Lang previously told Billboard. “The transformation was super apparent.”
SZA found ways to keep SOS in rotation while on the road. In April, “Snooze” was released as the album’s sixth single and slowly grew into its next smash. It was serviced to (and succeeded at) rhythmic, R&B/hip-hop and pop radio, all of which culminated in a star-studded music video that arrived in August and featured Justin Bieber. Soon after its release, she recruited him for the song’s acoustic version. “Snooze” ultimately peaked at No. 2 on the Hot 100 and dethroned “Kill Bill” on Hot R&B Songs, where the former had ruled for 16 nonconsecutive weeks.
By September, SOS became the longest-running No. 1 title on Top R&B Albums, logging 50 weeks and counting at the summit. And to top it all off, SZA finished at No. 1 on four major Billboard year-end R&B/hip-hop rankings: Top R&B/Hip-Hop Artists, Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songwriters, Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums (SOS) and Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs (“Kill Bill”). SZA was also crowned the No. 2 Hot 100 artist of the year and No. 5 Hot 100 songwriter of the year, while SOS landed at No. 3 on the year-end Billboard 200 recap.
“We had a lot of really big moments in R&B this year, obviously SZA being one of those,” says Alaysia Sierra, head of R&B at Spotify. “She’s pop, alternative, R&B. She doesn’t want to be put in a box, but she can’t deny her foundation.”
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But SZA wasn’t the only R&B artist earning rave reviews following a prolonged album break. Janelle Monáe returned with The Age of Pleasure, which is Grammy-nominated for album of the year and blends more Afrobeats, reggae, funk and soul sounds compared with her 2017 left-of-center pop album, Dirty Computer. Jorja Smith released the kaleidoscopic Falling or Flying five years after her critically acclaimed debut, Lost & Found. And Kelela dropped the rapturous Raven, the follow-up to her first full-length album, Take Me Apart, from 2017. Taking their time to further develop their sound — regardless of expectations to make a specific type of music — wasn’t just better for their peace of mind but also for their artistry.
“It’s hard making music as a Black woman [because] we don’t get the luxury to try something and have it be something that’s genuinely part of us,” SZA previously told Billboard. “You have to allow people to get to know different parts of it.”
She’s following the trajectory laid out by artists like Beyoncé and Usher, who have R&B roots but later crossed over and found mainstream pop superstardom. Decades into their careers, they are dominating the world’s biggest stages: Beyoncé’s Renaissance world tour grossed $579.8 million, according to Billboard Boxscore — making it the highest-grossing tour by a woman, a Black artist and any American soloist — while Usher will headline the Apple Music Super Bowl LVIII Halftime Show next year in Las Vegas, the home of his two residencies that combined are expected to exceed $100 million in earnings by early December, according to Billboard’s estimate.
SZA is well on her way. She is the most nominated artist at the 2024 Grammys, with SOS up for album of the year and six different songs nominated in various genre categories. More Black women R&B artists are present in the Big Four categories: Victoria Monét is the second-most nominated, with seven nods, while Coco Jones has five.
Sierra believes that R&B artists like Monét and Jones, both of whom are up for best new artist, have the best shot at elevating to pop music’s upper echelon. “Our next superstars are R&B artists,” Sierra says. “When you think about a pop star, they’re going to be making R&B music.”
This story originally appeared in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
There’s no agreed upon birthdate of the term “rock’n’roll.” Ohio DJ Alan Freed is widely credited with popularizing it in the early 1950s to describe a new upbeat version of R&B music that was gaining traction with young audiences throughout America. Almost 70 years later, in 2017, it was R&B/hip-hop that surpassed rock as the country’s dominant music. And unlike rock, hip-hop does have an agreed upon birthdate, resulting in the current 50th-anniversary celebration.
Despite chatter to the contrary, a large segment of rap sounds very similar to what it was like at 30, 25 or even 15 years old. A clear line can be drawn between Big Daddy Kane or Rakim and the deliveries of Jay-Z, Nas, Drake, Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole. The aesthetics may have changed a bit, as well as the effectiveness of the techniques, but the artistic values shared by the first group of MCs are also shared by the latter.
And yet, until this September, hip-hop had gone an entire calendar year without a song topping the Billboard Hot 100, for the first time since 1993. The concern was understandable, but when it’s considered that the artist who broke the streak isn’t even a traditional rapper — Doja Cat, whose “Paint the Town Red,” the Dionne Warwick-sampling single from her most recent rap-flavored project, Scarlet, did the honors — the genre seems to be just fine. And to be fair, when the genre’s most consistent hit-makers did return — Drake and Cole’s collaboration “First Person Shooter” debuted at No. 1 in October — things more or less went back to normal.
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And that’s what has been so remarkable about this yearlong celebration of hip-hop’s anniversary. The palpable sense of doom and gloom between the innumerable star-studded events — the pop-up performances, special segments on airings of the BET Awards and the MTV Video Music Awards and a multigenerational gathering at Yankee Stadium that capped off the festivities — all just proved that the principles that catapulted the genre into the mainstream are alive and well. Some aspects of the music’s past have even miraculously returned to the forefront — like a strong contingent of women rappers.
For years, fans and critics alike have decried the fact that hip-hop didn’t make enough space for women artists to thrive. It may have taken a few years, but that’s what they’re getting today. As a matter of fact, outside of “The Big Three” (Drake, Cole and Lamar) it’s the women — rappers like GloRilla, Cardi B, Ice Spice, Nicki Minaj and Latto — who seem to be carrying on the tradition the most. They’re the artists rapping as if they’re standing 10 toes down in the middle of a cypher. And their fixation on bars has netted them great success.
Minaj is already one of the most successful artists of her generation and Cardi B can’t seem to make a song that doesn’t turn into a hit, while Latto and GloRilla, two relative newcomers, have both managed to land top 10 hits and sell out their own shows. Even Doja Cat, an already successful pop artist, has released a rap album to critical acclaim and commercial success. To top it off, she took arguably the hottest new female rapper in the game, Ice Spice, on tour with her.
Meanwhile, a new generation of rap stars like Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti have taken the music in a different direction that eschews its traditional form and most resembles a new brand of punk. They don’t focus on crafting 16-bar verses or making sure to stay within the pocket of the beat. Hell, fellow newcomer Yeat doesn’t even use real words at times. But it seems to be working. Uzi’s Jersey club-influenced “Just Wanna Rock” dominated radio, and their Pink Tape album went No. 1 earlier this year. Carti’s last full-length, 2020’s Whole Lotta Red, debuted at No. 1, and Yeat has notched two top 10 entries on the Billboard 200, while hitting No. 1 on the Hot 100 with his recent collaboration with Drake, “IDGAF.” Traditional rap fans may feel that, if this is the future, then hip-hop won’t last another 50 years.
But hip-hop has always been this way — a fearless cultural and artistic lab that works to push itself forward. If anything, it’s the world that has changed the most. “Rap has always come in waves,” says Maurice Slade, SoundCloud’s head of marketing, artist relations. “Similar to a garden, rap needs rain for things to grow. And whenever it gets real rainy — which I think is the time we’re in right now — shortly after that there’s fertile soil and sunshine, and then you see the fruit after.”
According to Slade, the state of the world is responsible for the type of music new hip-hop artists are creating. “The rain right now is post-pandemic — these kids went through some crazy shit with that. You got a recession, you got high interest rates, you got wars going on. The world is f–ked up. When the world is really f–ked up, right after that is when we get some of the best sh-t when it comes to rap and hip-hop.”
This story originally appeared in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
The sound that dominated popular Spanish-language music in 2023 wasn’t represented at all on the Billboard Hot 100 until two years ago, when Gera MX and Christian Nodal’s country-tinged “Botella Tras Botella” debuted at No. 60 and made history as the first regional Mexican song on the chart. Since then, the genre’s presence on the ranking has exploded as a new crop of stars has evolved the music’s sound and look, borrowing from hip-hop, trap and rap to build on its traditional instruments of guitar, accordion and more. As a result, these artists have nurtured a new generation of fans for a genre with foundations that date back over a century.
This year, more than 35 regional Mexican tracks have entered the Hot 100, highlighted by Eslabon Armado and Peso Pluma’s blockbuster smash, “Ella Baila Sola,” which also made history when it reached the chart’s top five. This record year for regional Mexican music, or música Mexicana, has been powered by not only superstar collaborations — like Grupo Frontera’s team-up with Bad Bunny and Fuerza Regida pairing with Marshmello — but also support from major labels eager to partner with the independents that have long dominated the genre. In the first half of 2023 alone, overall consumption of regional Mexican music jumped 42.1%, topping all other genres but K-pop, according to Luminate.
“For decades, Mexican music has played a significant role in Latin music, leaving a profound impact on the global musical landscape,” says Manny Prado, vp of marketing and A&R at Interscope Records. “Finally, it has gained the acknowledgment it deserves.” This year in particular, international collaborations have propelled the sound into uncharted territories, and no other Latin genre has gained the traction of regional Mexican.
Its newfound popularity is rooted in many things, but particularly in its indie support, followed by multinational distribution partnerships with major labels. In June, Fuerza Regida frontman Jesús Ortiz Paz signed a worldwide deal with Cinq Music to distribute his own label, Street Mob Records, which he launched in 2018. The move followed a deal that Fuerza Regida signed with Sony Music Latin last year through a partnership with its indie label, Rancho Humilde. The strategy also worked for Washington state-based sibling trio Yahritza y Su Esencia, which signed to Columbia Records in partnership with Sony Music Latin and its indie Lumbre Music (which had discovered and signed the act eight months prior).
While indies have historically dominated the genre — and continue to do so — such partnerships indicate that alliances will be key to the music’s continued growth in 2024.
“We saw Mexican music grow because artists started to collaborate, and it’s the same thing when companies start joining forces,” says Maria Inés Sánchez, Sony Music Latin’s new vp of West Coast operations. “Major labels like Sony can reach a broader spectrum of the business in general. We have eyes where indies perhaps don’t with offices internationally.”
At the center of the regional Mexican revolution is Peso Pluma, whose raw and raspy vocals and signature sound of punctuated trombones and charchetas — along with a quirky haircut — made him the unwitting face of the genre. After a few collaborations with fellow corrido artists at the beginning of the year, he struck gold when he teamed with Eslabon Armado for “Ella Baila Sola.” Arguably this year’s biggest Latin hit, with 617.3 million on-demand official streams in the United States, it proves how a powerful song can propel a local genre to global recognition, as well as the importance of catering to a broader audience. The two indie artists are stylistically opposites; Peso Pluma is known for his swaggy, attitude-heavy corridos and Eslabon Armado for its romantic sierreño ballads. “Ella Baila Sola” became the first regional Mexican song to dominate the Billboard Global 200 (holding the top slot for six weeks) and is No. 1 on the year-end Hot Latin Songs chart.
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Another head-turning team-up arrived in April, when Bad Bunny joined Tejano act Grupo Frontera for “un x100to,” a cumbia/norteña song that scored a top 10 debut on the Hot 100. It was perhaps a catalyst for other unorthodox collaborations that followed, including Peso Pluma and El Alfa, Grupo Frontera and Manuel Turizo, and Banda MS and Ice Cube.
“The [Mexican] movement is now taking advantage just as reggaetón did” in the early 2000s, says Sergio Lizárraga, founder of indie label Lizos Music and manager of Banda MS. “But in the end, the root is the same, the themes they address are the same — just sung differently.”
Uriel Waizel, the editorial lead for Mexico at Spotify, compares this wave of success to another genre entirely: Afrobeats. “The biggest lesson regional Mexican music has taught is that the ‘traditional’ format had to make concessions to impact the U.S. and global charts,” Waizel says. “Which is what we saw happen with Rema and Selena Gomez [with “Calm Down”]. It’s a great example of music that becomes more digestible for global audiences.”
He cites recent Latin hits like “Qlona” by Karol G and Peso Pluma and “Harley Quinn” by Fuerza Regida and Marshmello as further proof. “After several iterations that have been happening evolutionarily over the past five years,” he says, “música Mexicana has finally found its way into the global market.”
This story originally appeared in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Tega Oghenejobo could see it coming — but didn’t realize just how big it would be.
In March 2022, Nigerian record label Mavin Records and its subsidiary Jonzing World released Rave & Roses, the debut album by budding Nigerian star Rema, who had already achieved success in his home country and was steadily making inroads internationally. The album was well-received, but it was its second single, the bouncy earworm “Calm Down,” that was really making noise. “Its initial growth in Europe, particularly in France, where it dominated the radio charts for months, hinted at its potential,” says Oghenejobo, Mavin’s COO. “Then breaking records in regions like India and the Middle East, becoming the first No. 1 song on the MENA [Middle East and North Africa] charts showcased its global appeal even before it hit the U.S.”
The song began picking up traction on TikTok and across social media, followed by marketing support from Mavin and distributor Virgin Music, all while Rema toured Europe and Africa to help “Calm Down” gain steam. Then, in August 2022, Mavin and Interscope Records released a remix with Selena Gomez, and the song began to catch on stateside, both on streaming services and at radio. It would take another 10 months, but “Calm Down” would ultimately reach No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 1 on the all-genre Radio Songs chart, both history-making feats for a song by an African lead artist.
“The success of ‘Calm Down’ highlighted several crucial lessons: Solid partnerships, a competent team and an artist aligned with the vision are indispensable for global success, while the ability to adapt and capitalize on every opportunity, as well as maintaining momentum, emerged as key strategies,” Oghenejobo says. “And collaborations, exemplified by Rema and Selena Gomez, underscore the potential for unexpected pairings to achieve remarkable results.”
The coronation of “Calm Down” across the charts — it also reached No. 1 on the Global Excl. U.S., Pop Airplay and U.S. Afrobeats charts, ultimately spending 58 weeks atop the lattermost list — didn’t happen in a vacuum. For the past seven years — since Wizkid became the first Nigerian act to reach No. 1 on the Hot 100, as a featured artist on Drake’s 2016 smash “One Dance” — African artists and African music, for which “Afrobeats” serves as a sort of catchall term, have been steadily making headway on the U.S. charts, radio station playlists and arena headlining slots. Wizkid, Burna Boy and Davido have been at the forefront leading the charge, but the past two years have also heralded breakthroughs for a number of younger artists, such as Rema, Tems, Libianca, Asake and Tyla. The Grammys acknowledged that growth by introducing the best African music performance category; the award will be given out for the first time next year.
“For the past 30 to 40 years, American culture influenced the world,” says Tunde Balogun, president of LVRN, which co-manages Davido and Nigerian DJ-producer Spinall. “Now, through Africa and Latin in particular, we’re seeing the world influence American music. We’re seeing the industry’s institutions change, and we’re seeing it on the top 40 radio charts as well as the Hot 100. It’s a really exciting time.”
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Some of that is due to the success of collaborators like Rema and Gomez. For example, “Essence,” Wizkid’s breezy breakout hit with Tems, took off in 2021, then exploded after Justin Bieber hopped on the remix, while Tems herself won a Grammy for a guest feature on Future’s “Wait for U.” And this year, Becky G remixed Libianca’s “People” to reach a broader audience. But it’s also a reflection of a growing appetite for music from beyond the borders of the United States — and labels are following consumer tastes.
“Most labels right now are essentially looking at the world’s music population — they’re no longer just looking at what’s happening in Ohio or Portland or wherever, they’re looking at what is actually being consumed in the world,” says RCA COO John Fleckenstein, whose roster includes Wizkid, Davido, Tems and Libianca. “That, to me, shows that we’re starting to recognize that the whole world is full of fans and artists and those borders are coming down, the economic ones and the political ones. It’s just about fans and artists. Perhaps most excitingly, the stage is already set for a true global superstar to emerge in the genre.”
And that superstar might already be here. For all the excitement around the music itself, there is more groundwork to do for the artists and the business — work that is already well underway. “The numerous wins, valuable lessons learned and opportunities for growth have been incredibly rewarding, and the validation through successful tours, enthusiastic audiences, awards and accolades motivates us to aim higher and work harder,” Oghenejobo says. “With determination and respect for the craft, there’s limitless potential for what African music can accomplish. The future looks incredibly promising.”
This story originally appeared in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Ironically, this year in pop was defined by a pair of 2022 blockbusters: Taylor Swift’s Midnights and SZA’s SOS. Although the two Billboard 200-topping albums are starkly different in sound and tone, there is a lyrical through line of unflinching self-examination and sarcastic self-deprecation that courses through each. “Anti-Hero,” the lead single from Midnights that ruled the Billboard Hot 100, became one of Swift’s biggest chart hits thanks, in part, to its cheeky refrain: “It’s me, hi/I’m the problem, it’s me.” Likewise, SZA dominated the Hot 100 with her Grammy-nominated “Kill Bill,” in which she sings, “I’m so mature, I’m so mature/I’m so mature, I got me a therapist to tell me there’s other men.”
Olivia Rodrigo, a pop powerhouse who this year scored a Hot 100 No. 1 with “Vampire” and another top 10 with “Bad Idea, Right?,” built the entirety of her Grammy-nominated GUTS album around this concept. In “ballad of a homeschooled girl,” she croons, “Everything I do is tragic/Every guy I like is gay/The morning after, I panic/Oh, God, what did I say?!” Delivered with a tone that carefully swells from apathy to mania, Rodrigo’s lyrics are biting — but she’s the subject of her own takedown. Through revealing the social and romantic cues that still confuse her in spite of her superstar status, Rodrigo goes from inaccessible celebrity brand to virtual friend and confidante in just a few bars.
This sort of tongue-in-cheek accountability — which struck a particularly resonant chord in the context of the evolution of Swift’s public persona and perception — harks back to a pivotal album released a decade earlier. Lorde’s 2013 debut, Pure Heroine, was defined by its pointed pop songwriting, with couplets that bemoan the singer’s own shortcomings just as much as they deride and analyze the world around her. Ten years later, pop music in 2023 has proved that not only is this style of songwriting here to stay, but it has also become increasingly reflective of diversity and representation in popular media.
SZA’s brand of self-deprecation speaks more directly to Black women. When she sings, “I used to be special/But you made me hate me/Regret that I changed me/I hate that you made me/Just like you,” in “Special,” she’s speaking from a place that’s uncomfortable, embarrassing and valid — especially to Black women who must fight various compounding forms of misogynoir in their quest for love. She’s making emotional space that holds just as much weight as more positive anthems like Beyoncé’s “Brown Skin Girl.”
For as many pseudo-protest songs as summer 2020 produced, that period also intensified the already-brewing ramifications of a pandemic on the human psyche. “I think between people being on lockdown and dealing with all the hardships of the last few years, [they] have had much more time to turn inward and sometimes face their own demons,” says “Special” co-writer Rob Bisel. “I think having music that’s self-deprecating helps make that process of turning inward much less difficult and makes people feel less alone during these turbulent times.”
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Bisel also worked on Reneé Rapp’s standout debut, Snow Angel, which features several sarcasm-drenched pop tunes including “I Hate Boston” and “Poison Poison.” The former is a cheeky rebuttal of Beantown due to a no-good ex, while the latter is a fiery rumination on a friendship with a woman that went up in flames. As an out bisexual woman in pop, Rapp writes lyrics that capture the minds and attitudes of an audience rarely targeted — but often objectified — by top 40 radio. Troye Sivan’s Hot 100 hit “One of Your Girls” — which details the minefield that is being a gay man messing with romantic interests who have not previously been with other men — functions in a similar way for gay men. Even Barbie (by way of Ryan Gosling’s worldview-shattering viral hit, “I’m Just Ken”) and Paramore (with the sassy “Running Out of Time”) employed this trend of sardonic, intimately self-aware songwriting this year.
According to Alexander 23, who co-wrote “Poison Poison,” this style of songwriting is “here to stay because we just see too much of people now via social media to believe something too positive.” He adds, “I think people are hearing things that feel more conversational, more like the artist is someone [who] they actually know and [is] their friend.” Of course, this hasn’t completely pushed aside flashy, confidence-boosting pop jams — take Tate McRae’s “Greedy” and aliyahsinterlude’s “IT GIRL,” for example — but there’s no mistaking its dominance.
Both Bisel (Beck, Green Day) and Alexander (LCD Soundsystem) point to past generations of pop artists as evidence of this songwriting style’s legacy. “One of the most powerful things you can do as a songwriter is to share the feelings that everyone experiences but are too afraid to say out loud,” Bisel says. “A self-deprecating song in some ways is a vehicle for listeners to share their own burdens and to feel seen.”
With self-critical records from Lana Del Rey (“A&W”) and boygenius (“Not Strong Enough”) scoring key Grammy nods and tongue-in-cheek tracks from Swift and SZA dominating commercially, pop is staunchly in its sarcastic era. “I’m a big believer that trends in music are cyclical and constantly come back around,” Bisel says. “At the same time, honest music will never go out of style.”
This story originally appeared in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
On Aug. 10, the day before the 50th anniversary of DJ Kool Herc’s 1973 Bronx block party — considered the official birth of hip-hop — TIDAL hosted its first public event at its new high-rise offices near Manhattan’s Union Square. As part of the festivities, music consultant and writer ladidai conducted a panel featuring three artists at three different points in their careers: veteran Yonkers MC Styles P from The LOX, which headlined shows in Queens and The Bronx as part of the anniversary celebration; critically acclaimed Alabama rapper Flo Milli, who the following night would make a surprise appearance at the star-studded Hip-Hop 50 Live concert at Yankee Stadium; and rising Roc Nation signee Reuben Vincent, a North Carolina rapper. The panel focused on advice for developing artists about navigating the music industry and building career longevity.
“Artists have to look at themselves as entrepreneurs,” Styles told the crowd. Now in his third decade as a performer, he also owns a series of health-focused juice bars in New York. “If you think about the most successful people in hip-hop, they all have their hands in a few different pots. That’s just the way of the hustler.”
For TIDAL, events like these are a key component of a new strategy that, it hopes, will foster its own longevity. They are part of its revamped Rising program, which grew out of conversations with more than 100 artists and provides tools for creators that can streamline their business dealings so they can focus more on their art. This strategic focus on economic empowerment for artists derives from TIDAL’s new corporate owner, Block, the mobile payments company led by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey that was known as Square when it acquired the streaming platform in March 2021 for an initially announced $297 million — more than five times the $56 million that Jay-Z paid to acquire it in 2015.
Block changed the way small businesses operate through its Square credit card reader, Cash App, and financial service offerings that cater to small-business owners and entrepreneurs overlooked by major credit card companies. The services and solutions it offers have helped it achieve a market cap of $39.6 billion at press time.
Not surprisingly, TIDAL’s new owner sees independent artists in the same vein: self-funded, slim-margin businesses that lack the tools needed to succeed in their line of work.
The financial services that TIDAL intends to offer will begin rolling out in 2024, and when they do, TIDAL plans to introduce a pricing structure that, if it attracts enough artists, will create an income stream that is not dependent on streaming subscriptions. “If we help creators manage and grow their businesses, so will we,” a representative says.
More than ever, artists in the music business are piecing together a living through streams, merchandising, live shows, social media ads and synch placements — supplemented with side gigs and temp jobs — as the old world of big advances and steady album sales becomes a distant memory and the odds of standing out in a torrent of new music grow slimmer.
Every day, over 120,000 audio tracks are uploaded to streaming services, according to Luminate — a figure that has nearly tripled in the past five years — making it harder for artists to break through and build a fan base, much less earn and manage their money. It’s a disparate, complicated and often confusing business, especially for up-and-coming artists trying to get by without the support of a traditional label or the institutional know-how of an experienced management team.
“The vast majority of artists on a streaming platform cannot afford to live off their music, even though that’s the No. 1 goal for them,” TIDAL global head of product Agustina Sacerdote says. “It’s not to be famous, it’s not to have an entourage of 20 people. It’s just to be able to quit their side jobs.”
Global head of product Agustina Sacerdote
Those artists who have established a foothold “are cobbling together ways of handling payroll and invoices, paying their quarterly taxes and understanding what’s a write-off and what isn’t. That’s part of being a small-business owner,” says Matt Graham, managing partner for talent management company Range Media Partners. He adds that when a young artist does break through, “a lot of money comes fast, and without the appropriate mechanisms to allocate things properly and pay people on time, you can run into tax issues with the government; you can run into lawsuits with collaborators — it’s a really tricky business to navigate.”
That’s exacerbated by a lack of financial management resources for emerging artists, in part because there isn’t much money in it for those with the know-how to help. Many business managers, for example, won’t take on clients who bring in less than $500,000 a year.
TIDAL’s Rising program operates with these hurdles in mind and is “anchored around three pillars: educate, amplify and connect,” says Alex Mas, the platform’s marketing director and one of the first five employees hired after the company’s 2015 U.S. relaunch. That includes offering artists resources, webinars and workshops on, for instance, balancing release and tour budgets, the mechanics of synch licensing and marketing, and understanding how paid media such as Facebook directly relates to streaming numbers and ticket sales.
TIDAL’s artist relations team also works to connect emerging acts with label executives, potential managers, lawyers and booking agents, among other industry facilitators. “It’s helping artists become more self-sufficient so they can go off and succeed regardless of the platform,” Mas says.
Given TIDAL’s modest subscriber numbers — some 2.1 million subscribers globally as of mid-2020, according to a lawsuit filed the following year, compared with Spotify’s approximately 138 million, a number that has since grown to 220 million — the company’s CEO, Jesse Dorogusker, who has spent over a decade at Block and was instrumental in the development of the Square card reader, says the platform’s support of artists must extend beyond monetizing the streams that artists generate on its platform. The representative says TIDAL does not disclose subscriber numbers, but adds that “streaming will continue to have value” for its new owner. “We’re a music platform and remain excited by the opportunity to evolve our streaming services.”
“Even if we were one of the bigger services, just making [an artist’s] experience better on TIDAL is not enough,” says Dorogusker, a Liz Phair superfan and Silicon Valley veteran who, before joining Block, spent eight years developing iOS accessories for Apple. “You have to know all of your revenue, your data, your collaborators, your access to capital, all of your taxes — it can’t be platform-captive,” he explains. “How could you hope for artists to be fortunate enough to work solely on their art if they have no access to this information?”
This is decidedly new territory for TIDAL, which is still, in the minds of most consumers, associated with Jay-Z, a claim to superior audio quality and a creator-first ethos. (It was notably the first streaming service to introduce full writer credits for tracks and the ability to search by producer.) And though sources tell Billboard that the Roc Nation owner has been just as, if not more, involved in TIDAL’s business since the sale — “I would say his spirit is felt,” senior vp of artist and label relations Jason Kpana says — the company’s messaging must pivot as it changes course. Dozens of industry figures, managers and artists Billboard contacted for their thoughts on TIDAL 2.0 all said they were unaware of its new business strategy. Now, as the company attempts to transform itself from a consumer-centric to artist-focused platform, will anyone be listening?
TIDAL debuted in May 2015 at a star-studded and controversial press conference at the James A. Farley Post Office in Midtown Manhattan. Jay-Z had purchased Scandinavian streaming service Aspiro and brought together 15 of his celebrity-artist friends — including his wife, Beyoncé; Kanye West; Madonna; Jason Aldean; Alicia Keys; Arcade Fire; Coldplay’s Chris Martin; Rihanna; and deadmau5 (replete with his bulbous rodent helmet) — to announce what Keys called “the first-ever artist-owned global music and entertainment platform.” Each of the artist-owners were given a 3% share in the company, and TIDAL began implementing a plan that leaned on exclusive album releases, video premieres and high-quality audio to draw in subscribers who were, by then, used to getting music for free.
Artist investors Usher, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Madonna, deadmau5, Kanye West, Jay-Z and J. Cole (from left) at the TIDAL launch in New York in 2015.
Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images
Thus began a strategy aimed at disrupting what was quickly becoming the status quo for the music business. TIDAL’s 16 artist-owners were protesting the low royalty rates of ad-supported streaming services like then-burgeoning Spotify that paid fractions of a penny per stream and vowed to use their collective power to boost royalties for all. Their stated mission was interpreted by some as noble and others as a scheme by some of music’s 1 percenters to line their already brimming pockets.
Ultimately, giant conglomerates Apple, Google and Amazon entered the streaming space and, alongside Spotify, swallowed up market share, edging TIDAL increasingly toward the margins. Yet the staffers who worked in editorial, marketing and industry relations there carved out a niche that focused on rising artists and independent creators, highlighting their stories and creating video content, playlists and podcasts around their work. “It has absolutely always been a part of the fabric of the company to allow emerging artists to find a way to grow in their journey,” says Kpana, who has worked there since 2015.
It was a business philosophy that aligned with Block’s vision, and executives there say it was a reason they acquired the streaming platform. But the purchase wasn’t without friction. Block closed the deal on April 30, 2021, acquiring 86.8% of TIDAL for $223.1 million in cash and $10.1 million in stock. Shortly thereafter, the City of Coral Springs Police Officers’ Pension Plan (a Block shareholder) filed a lawsuit that challenged the acquisition. The complaint alleged that Block CEO Dorsey and the company’s board of directors had breached their fiduciary duties by acquiring a company that they alleged was failing financially.
The lawsuit laid bare some of TIDAL’s financial issues, including multimillion-dollar losses for 10 straight quarters; some $127 million in liabilities, largely in the form of unpaid streaming fees to record labels; and a $50 million loan that Jay-Z extended the company in 2020. Several of TIDAL’s licensing deals with labels and relationships with artists had expired or were not legally enforceable. Sources also told Billboard that the streaming service had been chronically late on royalty payments to labels, a situation Dorogusker says has been remedied. The complaint also contained a morsel of insider business gossip, alleging that the deal was first hatched while Dorsey was vacationing with Jay-Z in the Hamptons and later in Hawaii.
The lawsuit was dismissed in May, albeit with Delaware Court of Chancery Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick writing in her memorandum opinion that Block buying TIDAL was, “by all accounts, a terrible business decision.”
With that hurdle cleared, Jay-Z joined Block’s board of directors, and along with several of the original artist-owners, retained a small stake in TIDAL. (Each of those artist-owners either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment, and a representative for Jay-Z did not comment.)
Inside TIDAL’s new Manhattan office.
Julian Walter
McCormick’s assessment of the Block-TIDAL deal had merit. According to Goldman Sachs’ June 2023 Music in the Air report, the top six streaming services globally — Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Tencent Music and NetEase — accounted for 92.2% of the global streaming market, and by 2030, that number is predicted to climb to around 94%. And yet, the music streaming business model has yet to produce many profits for anyone, even a company as big and as synonymous with the space as Spotify, which reported a 2022 annual operating loss of 659 million euros (around $720 million) and recently slashed 17% of its work force, or some 1,500 jobs, in the pursuit of profits. (This week, Block also forced austerity measures on TIDAL, laying off some 40 people in an attempt to “right-size our team,” a spokesperson said.) Apple Music and Amazon Music are loss leaders for corporate behemoths with other profit-generators, Deezer is unprofitable, and SoundCloud shifted to distribution and other artist services in an attempt to capitalize on the troves of data it has collected through its streaming service, while also imposing layoffs in May.
Block’s plans for TIDAL, then, could not rely on a pure streaming play, and in a March 4, 2021, Twitter thread, Dorsey revealed his strategy. He wrote that the TIDAL deal was about making the economy “work for artists, similar to what Square has done for sellers.” He added, “We’ll work on entirely new listening experiences to bring fans closer together, simple integrations for merch sales, modern collaboration tools and new complementary revenue streams.”
The deal perplexed industry observers. “If Square wants to create new ways to help musicians sell real goods and digital goods, it could just do that,” Vox tech writer Peter Kafka wrote at the time. “Instead, Square is paying [what was then reported] $300 million for a failed music service that doesn’t help it accomplish any of those goals.”
Nearly three years later, several music industry insiders echo Kafka’s point. Dorogusker’s response: “There are very few companies on the planet that have the rights to offer 100 million songs to music subscribers” and produces a valuable trove of data. Under his leadership, TIDAL plans to use that data, and the access it provides to artists and their teams, to create tools of economic empowerment that don’t readily exist in the music business.
In June, TIDAL unveiled its Artist Home portal, which lets users add their social media accounts to their artist pages, connect with TIDAL employees for support, allow members of their teams to access their profiles and generally manage their look on the platform. It’s essentially a stripped-down version of Spotify for Artists or any of the back-end profile portals that digital service providers currently offer creators. It was a modest move compared with its streaming rivals, but leadership contends an important step forward.
“It is the first concrete milestone toward our vision of establishing a direct relationship with artists and building products and services for them,” Sacerdote says. “We have been in the music business for a very long time, but we have never built specifically for an artist or even dealt directly with an artist.”
TIDAL has always had relationships with the artist community through its artist-owners, exclusives that were intended to build market momentum — interviews, artist-curated playlists, podcasts, and album rollouts for superstars like West, Prince, Rihanna, Beyoncé and Jay-Z — and live events like its annual TIDAL X concert series in Brooklyn and activations at Roc Nation’s Made in America Festival in Philadelphia. But those initiatives were largely designed to pull in fans. Artist Home is the first time TIDAL has worked with artists to build a toolkit on its platform for artists.
TIDAL Rising, which has run in various iterations since the service’s birth, was initially similar to programs like Apple’s Up Next, YouTube’s Foundry and Spotify’s RADAR. But last May, it was overhauled to dovetail with the platform’s artist-empowerment focus. Initially, some two dozen creators were chosen to enroll in the program, which provides resources like webinars and workshops on budgeting money for tours and rollouts, platforms like artist showcases and traditional marketing, instructionals on effective digital marketing and industry connections that would otherwise be out of reach. But crucially, artists in the program are also eligible to receive anywhere between $500 and $50,000 in direct funding, no strings attached.
“We are sitting down with these artists and figuring out where they are in their career, but we’re not defining what funding they get based on what they have coming up,” says Kpana, the artist relations lead. “Mostly, we’re looking at them to see where we think we can be of most assistance, and that’s how we’re deciding what we give them. We’re not deciding what they do with the money.”
Artist relations lead Jason Kpana
Travis Shinn
Billboard spoke to nearly all of the initial two dozen artists and their teams in the Rising program, and though TIDAL executives declined to get into the specifics of who qualifies for inclusion and funding, a number said they were invited after previously building relationships with the TIDAL team through playlisting or editorial. All said the money they received gave them more control over their careers.
This past summer, for example, Nashville-based singer-songwriter Gabe Lee got the chance to open for more seasoned folk artist Pony Bradshaw on four sold-out dates in Texas during a mid-August weekend; at the end of the trek, his take was $1,200, minus hotel stays (when he wasn’t able to crash with friends) and fuel costs. “In the end, Gabe probably lost money on that trip; it’s expensive to be on the road,” says Torrez Music Group’s Alex Torrez, who manages Lee and signed him to his record label. The grant from TIDAL narrowed those losses while expanding his audience by having him perform for more than 2,000 people across the four shows.
For folk-punk artist Sunny War, who used to tour solo but required a full band to perform her latest record live, the money she received enabled her to pay for extra musicians, which allowed her to play bigger shows, and to buy proper road cases for her gear when she travels. Latin pop/hip-hop artist Angie Rose used her funds to buy new studio equipment (a laptop, microphones and software) she can use to record music on her own. For Nigerian American rapper-producer Akinyemi, the money went toward mixing and mastering costs, as well as marketing materials for his next release. Vincent — who participated in the panel at TIDAL’s Hip-Hop 50 event — was able to pay a video crew to shoot his performance at J. Cole’s Dreamville festival; he used the content to promote an upcoming release. For a handful of other artists, the money went straight to recording costs; for half a dozen more, it covered rent and daily expenses.
The music business has traditionally worked through advances, which must ultimately be recouped. TIDAL’s monetary distributions are more like grants. “This feels more like a social-good project,” says Alex Rosen, head of U.S. streaming at Partisan Records, whose group Geese is in the program. “I think it’s an empowering program. It’s really refreshing to not see any true expectations on funding, and it gives a band that is starting to break out a lot of freedom to help make their art.”
TIDAL sees it as a research opportunity. “At a basic level, it’s just a better use of marketing dollars,” Dorogusker explains. “We could talk about how great TIDAL is, or we could invest in artists and let them talk about how great being a Rising artist is. It’s marketing and communications, and the learning we get out of it is incredibly valuable.”
CEO Jesse Dorogusker
It also aligns with the emerging view of the business from the perspective of young artists, who in many cases are loath to sign away ownership of their masters in a label deal when there are other potential pathways to success. “We really value equity and ownership, so the core mission for the [TIDAL Rising] program really aligns with how we want to move forward with our artists on both the label and management side,” says Celena Fields, vp of marketing at indie music company LVRN, whose artist, singer-songwriter-producer Alex Vaughn, is in the program. “They’re holding our hand every step of the way, and instilling these resources that are super critical in an artist’s career, especially early on. It’s not just giving you the money, but really providing that educational aspect as well.” Up-and-coming managers, who are beginning to learn the ropes, benefit from the educational aspects, too.
TIDAL says it has hundreds of artists signed up for Artist Home, has grown its Rising program to 106 artists and has distributed grants totaling $830,000. It recently rolled out its Collabs feature — making it easier for creators to work with others through the platform — and held an artist summit in October with musicians from the United States and Poland that focused on career planning, financial well-being and the basics of music law and touring. The services are free for now, and the representative says that a timetable has not been set for when TIDAL will begin charging for its services.
While TIDAL’s financial support for new artists may be the sexiest part of its new business strategy, helping demystify the business is just as crucial. “The education component is humongous,” says Nicholas Judd, co-founder and CEO of music-focused business management and financial services firm LeftBrain, about the biggest obstacles young artists face. He explains that “having a more informed client start with us, where they’ve been very active in learning about and managing their own finances, means that we can have higher-level conversations and provide even more value because we’re not getting them from zero to one; we’re getting them from one to 10.”
To that point, in October, Block purchased Hi-Fi, a financial services startup that tracks artist royalty income from a variety of different sources — publishing, streaming, performance rights, distribution — in one place. Hi-Fi came the closest, Dorogusker says, to the business model the new owners are in the process of creating. He adds the acquisition is still in the “early days” of being incorporated into TIDAL’s structure, but that it will go a long way toward helping “to build products that help artists manage their money.”
If TIDAL becomes a destination for independent artists looking to optimize and grow their businesses, the expectation is that the company’s future will no longer depend on the financially difficult business of running a streaming service. Businesses that employ Cash App pay processing fees of just under 3% per transaction, and TIDAL will eventually create a pricing structure for the services it will offer. The company says that pricing will vary, with some services being monetized and others incorporated into Artist Home for free. “There’s no one size fits all,” a spokesman says. “How we set pricing is informed by many variables.”
Whether TIDAL’s turn toward artists will resonate remains to be determined, but insiders say there is a new sense of purpose at the company.
“Two years ago, when we bought a music streaming service, we told a story about building scalable self-serve tools for software and financial services to make emerging artists successful, but we didn’t have it yet. It was philosophical,” Dorogusker says. “Now we’re into the tangible. One of the fundamental flaws of the music business is that you mortgage your whole future for that first opportunity. And not everything has to be that way. You can have access to your data. You can have a way to project how many T-shirts you should print for a tour. We thought we could pull a lot of that knowledge in and turn that into tools for artists. But it’s going to be in the act of showing it, not just telling it. This is the start of that.”
This story will appear in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
It’s a crisp November night outside Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, and inside, Rod Wave has a sold-out audience of 12,000 hanging on his every word. As the 25-year-old rapper-singer nears the end of performing “Come See Me,” one of several hits off his 2023 blockbuster, Nostalgia, he pauses and walks toward a ladder that’s part of his stage design. Screams of “Don’t do it, Rod!” commence. “You have so much to live for!” yells a teenage girl near me.
Undeterred by the cautionary cries, the burly locomotive of a man begins his ascent. As he climbs, a thunderous roar erupts and buries the shrieking voice next to me whose pleas go unanswered. Standing on the edge of the stage balcony 15 feet up, Rod surveys the crowd before plummeting onto a landing pad. The lights go out and the song comes to a screeching halt. Fans in the crowd play a quick round of “Where’s Rod?” to locate the Florida megastar — who soon reemerges, Superman-like, without a scratch on his teddy bear face.
Like everything Rod does, this wasn’t a stunt for clicks or social media fodder. It was much more profound than that: He has struggled in the past with depression and anxiety and has always been open about having had suicidal thoughts, especially in the song’s music video. “That was from a dream I had,” Rod explains of the stage fall days after the show. “When I come out, walk onstage and look at [the ladder], it’s really to show people, ‘Don’t get up and do that when you can do this. You don’t know where life can take you.’ I’m walking out to a whole arena full of people looking back up at me. Imagine [if] I would’ve [gone through with committing suicide]. I would’ve never made it to this part. There’s a whole meaning behind it — a bigger picture.”
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Since Rod entered the hip-hop scene with his debut album, Ghetto Gospel, in 2019, his penchant for soul-grabbing lyrics and entrancing hooks has made him a beloved figure. His breakthrough single, the album’s “Heart on Ice,” was as chilling as its title suggests. Rod’s gruff takes about backstabbers and broken friendships earned widespread praise, including from his heroes-turned-peers Lil Baby, 21 Savage and Lil Durk, who appeared on the song’s remix. “Heart on Ice” became Rod’s Billboard Hot 100 debut, peaking at No. 25 — the first of 70 entries on the chart he has accrued since.
While many of today’s biggest hip-hop acts like Travis Scott and Playboi Carti thrive on mosh-pit anthems, Rod has stuck to his roots as an unabashed lover, using music to express his heartbreak and inner turmoil. His ability to hopscotch among genres has become his hallmark and the secret to his success, and he hit a new artistic apex on Nostalgia, which debuted with 137,000 equivalent album units in September, according to Luminate — a career best. Whether he’s contemplating his road to fame on “Long Journey” or reimagining himself as a tragic literary hero on the love-drunk “Great Gatsby,” Rod’s versatility is always evident.
“Rod pioneered this lane of struggle rap, which, given his age, is pretty incredible,” says Todd Moscowitz, CEO of Rod’s label, Alamo Records. “He’s one of the great songwriters of his generation and channels emotion and vulnerability in a unique way that people relate to. He has half of the NFL in tears on Instagram when he drops a single.”
Since Ghetto Gospel, Rod’s subsequent three albums — 2021’s SoulFly, 2022’s Beautiful Mind and Nostalgia — have topped the Billboard 200, making him the third artist to nab at least three No. 1s on the chart since the start of 2021. The only others are Taylor Swift and Drake.
“Being compared to Taylor Swift, you can’t even wrap your head around that kind of sh-t,” Rod says. “I remember ninth grade, being on my school bus listening to ‘Blank Space.’ Being in these conversations, it don’t really hit you. I was just on the sidelines. Now I’m really in the game. I went from the nosebleeds to the franchise player of the team with three rings.”
Eric Ryan Anderson
Rod Wave’s first-ever performance was at a high school football teammate’s birthday party in 2015. At the time, the artist born Rodarius Green was a budding rapper from St. Petersburg, Fla., working at Krispy Kreme. He enjoyed listening to 2Pac, Kodak Black and Kanye West but also appreciated the soulful pop sensibilities of Adele and Ed Sheeran. That eclectic musical taste helped him find his voice — one that spoke to the harsh street realities he and his family survived.
Both his father and uncle served time in prison. Rod, too, had problems on the streets and was charged with armed robbery at 15. After spending several months in jail, his father looked to instill discipline in him. “I started playing football because I got in trouble, and my dad wanted me to do something better with my free time,” Rod explains. “So when I got out of jail, he put me in football. It was just a new thing for me. It’s a lot of discipline I learned then that I carry with me now.”
While Rod enjoyed the camaraderie that came from working in the trenches with teammates, his true passion was music. A singer without any vocal training, he would showcase his talents between classes at Lakeview High School, the hallways becoming his stage. Yet the confidence Rod exuded when he belted for his peers disappeared when it came to actually recording his music and uploading it online — until his classmate and former producer, Elijah Simmons, took matters into his own hands, recording a video of him singing in the hallway one day and posting it on Facebook.
Though Rod feared rejection, to his surprise, the video caught the attention of one of his football teammates, who later asked him at practice to perform at his birthday party. At the time, Rod didn’t have a car and wasn’t getting paid to perform — but the thought of doing so for the first time in front of his classmates, especially the girls, was motivation enough. “I walked to that motherf–ker. I was 17,” Rod remembers, chuckling. “You don’t really know if your stuff is good enough at the time. I didn’t want to think that I was one of them people who think they raw. I was [wondering] like, ‘Am I really good?’ ”
Eric Ryan Anderson
Rod soon went from booking birthday parties to hole-in-the-wall Florida clubs, and his stock began to rise — so much so that fans would recognize him when pulling up to the Krispy Kreme drive-thru. Shyness usually got the best of him; he shrugged off questions about his rapping alter ego when he was on the clock. Balancing high school, a growing rap career and a part-time job was a lot for a teenager, and after his father, Rodney “Fatz” Green, saw the focused hunger in his son, he wanted to lend his support. Green and Rod’s uncle Derek Lane forged Hit House Entertainment — Rod’s own label — to help him realize his rap dreams. With Lane designated as management, they leaned on Rod as their franchise player.
From December 2017 to December 2018, Rod released his acclaimed mixtape trilogy, Hunger Games, which featured songs like “Pain,” “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Heart 4 Sale” that portrayed the daily pain Rod endured. The music garnered millions of listens and eventually caught the attention of Alamo Records’ Moscowitz.
Founded in 2016, Alamo wasn’t initially a first-class destination for rap powerhouses. That changed when it signed Lil Durk and Rod two years later. (As part of its deal with Rod, Alamo established a partnership with Hit House.) Before signing with Alamo, Durk had spent five years at Def Jam and was looking for a change of scenery to help elevate his career. Rod and Durk soon became the twin giants of Alamo, evolving into Billboard chart-toppers and streaming goliaths who quickly came to define hip-hop in a new decade.
“The other day, I had to text Durk, ‘I’ve been listening to you since middle school.’ I was able to DM him and [watch it] land. He was just like, ‘You hard, too!’ I was just like, ‘I been listening to you. I f–k with you. I rock with you,’ ” Rod says with a child-like smile. “When you in the moment and you meet people face-to-face, it slips my mind because I have to be Rod Wave. F–k all that. I’m a fan. I’ve been listening to your sh-t.”
Durk isn’t the only star who has left Rod awestruck. Drake and Sheeran have praised his accomplishments, especially the latter. On Beautiful Mind, Rod interpolated Sheeran’s “U.N.I.” from his debut album for his song “Alone.” The track caught the attention of Sheeran, who first met Rod after WPWR (Power 105.1) New York radio host Charlamagne Tha God learned of the rapper’s adoration for the pop giant.
“Ed’s a phenomenal guy. That’s one of my favorite artists. He’s just real people,” Rod says. “When you looking at it from a fan point of view, they don’t even feel like real people. It’s like you know them, but they’re like figures in your mind. They don’t even feel reachable.”
The MGM National Harbor Hotel in Washington, D.C., holds special significance to Rod. It’s where he’s staying after performing at the city’s Capital One Arena the night before. It’s also where he first learned about the coronavirus. Rod was just seven dates into his first headlining tour when he played D.C. on March 9, 2020, and news about a national lockdown derailed his planned nationwide trek. “My dream got shut down just like that,” he remembers, still sounding dejected. “I always wanted to go on tour, travel America, see the cities and get paid to do it. When I first was able to do it, it got took away from me.”
The pandemic tested Rod’s patience. He landed a coveted performance slot on NPR’s Tiny Desk (Home) Concerts, but that paled in comparison with the venues he had been filling. Still, the thought of hitting the road and being with his fans again fueled him. Rod’s mission was clear: Get back on tour. But before he could do that, he had to fulfill a different calling: becoming a first-time father to his newborn twin girls.
“I [won’t] lie: [Fatherhood] made me softer. Back then, I could just move and feel nothing. Now I feel like they made me a little weaker,” he says while his kids hang out in the next room. “I can’t do that. I have to get home. I’ll be gone with my homeboys for three days or on the road for a week, and I’m just like, ‘We have to get a jet and fly the kids.’ ”
Eric Ryan Anderson
Instead of fatherhood being a hurdle, it motivated Rod, especially when touring resumed. In 2021, he came back stronger than ever, notching his first Billboard 200 No. 1 album with SoulFly and two top 20 Hot 100 hits in “Tombstone” and “Street Runner.” He realized his wish of returning to the road, but this time — with the help of powerhouse hip-hop festival promoter Rolling Loud, which in 2021 launched a national touring branch of its business with Rod as its first tour — he was playing amphitheaters, a step up from the clubs and theaters of his previous tour.
“We’ve witnessed his evolution from the start, and what sets him apart is his unwavering consistency,” Rolling Loud co-founder Matt Ziegler says. “His music consistently reaches a high standard, accompanied by impassioned performances that have become his trademark. As we observed his skyrocketing music consumption and the widespread acclaim for his shows, it inspired us to acquire his SoulFly tour, leading to the launch of our Rolling Loud Presents division.”
Ziegler’s Rolling Loud partner, Tariq Cherif, calls Rod’s success “truly unique; he diligently tours during key moments, aligning with new releases, and he remains authentically himself. His vulnerability, artistic authenticity and genuine connection with people set him apart. When we organized his tour, many doubted he could fill amphitheaters, but he defied expectations by selling out most dates.”
And Rod was already thinking bigger: He wanted arenas. Notching his second and third Billboard 200 No. 1s — Beautiful Mind in August 2022 and Nostalgia in September 2023 — helped him fulfill that dream. Seeing thousands of people of different ages and races singing his songs in a bonfire-like experience at his concerts excited Rod and his team. “His shows are like going to karaoke with 15,000 people,” Moscowitz says. “Everyone sings along and there’s a real sense of community.”
“What we figured out is where his core fans are and where they are going to support [him]. Then we’d mix the routing in to get to these places that make sense,” adds Beau Williams, Rod’s touring manager. “Even going through this, we found some diamonds in the rough in a lot of these cities that a lot of artists can’t go to the way he’s doing great numbers.” And with his zealous fans behind him, Rod’s goals continue to widen: His eyes are now set on stadium touring and Grammy Awards.
“This is the new chapter. People catching on slowly but surely,” Rod says. “That’s why I say in four or five years, we’ll probably be in stadiums selling 250,000 [tickets] the first week. That’s what I’m here for — Grammys and sh-t.”
This story will appear in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
“I forgot to wear the knee pads,” Karol G says ruefully. “I’m going to have scrapes.”
She beams. For a soaking wet pop star who has just been dragged through a shallow pool, Karol looks remarkably happy.
Moments before, a group of writhing, shirtless male dancers had lifted Karol, dressed in a white bikini and transparent baggy pants, high above the water as she performed a medley of songs from her unprecedented past year in music, including material from her chart-topping February album, Mañana Será Bonito; the edgier August follow-up, Mañana Será Bonito (Bichota Season); and a small teaser of her new single with Kali Uchis, “Labios Mordidos.” Her arms knifed back-and-forth through the pool in fierce synchronicity with her platoon of dancers — all water-drenched sexiness, but a punishing physical routine nonetheless. After Karol dries off, wrings out her pants and gets her glam touched up, she’ll do it all over again.
“I want it to be spectacular,” she says matter-of-factly of the roughly four-minute Billboard Latin Music Awards performance. To that end, she enlisted renowned choreographer Parris Goebel, whose work includes Rihanna’s Super Bowl halftime show performance, to continue pushing her as a dancer. “Dance doesn’t come so easy to me,” Karol admits. “To do the things I do, I have to rehearse a lot.” Earlier this year, Goebel choreographed Karol’s MTV Video Music Awards performance.
“She understands what I want to express in my movements, and also, she gets something out of me that I’m still in the process of understanding,” Karol says. “I’ve learned a lot about myself this year. Even though it would seem I’ve arrived at a point where I could relax and let things run, life keeps showing me that I’ve still got a lot of things to do, a lot of things to give.”
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Twenty-four hours later, Karol is calm (and dry) in a quiet Los Angeles studio, talking with her usual expressiveness and candor in sentences punctuated by crescendos, accents and exclamations and augmented by enthusiastic gesticulations. In her many music videos, Karol usually presents one of two ways. There’s the bichota, or badass, sexy and powerful and not afraid to show it. And then there’s the smiling (or occasionally melancholy) girl next door who enjoys celebrating love and doesn’t shy from displays of vulnerability. In person, the young woman born Carolina García in Medellín, Colombia, is all those things, but she’s also warm, exuberant and disarmingly earnest, a demeanor that has remained intact through my many encounters with her over the years, even as her popularity has soared.
Her hair is pulled back in a tousled ponytail, its platinum color matching the short, clingy silk dress that shows off her sculpted physique. At 32 years old, Karol has worked hard to look like this. Earlier this year, her doctor prescribed an eating plan to alleviate a long-standing colon disorder; at the same time, after a lifetime of exercising, she upped her training regime to be able to perform for three hours in a stadium. “I wanted to be healthy, and I needed to do a ton of cardio for the shows. And my body began to change,” she says. “It was beautiful because I’d always been told certain changes took time, and it was true.”
You could say the same of Karol’s upward career trajectory. She just wrapped an extraordinary year in which she became the first Latina woman (and second artist ever) to top the Billboard 200 with an all-Spanish-language album (Mañana Será Bonito); the top female Latin artist on Billboard’s year-end charts (behind only Bad Bunny and Peso Pluma); and the winner of album of the year at November’s Latin Grammys, as well as urban album of the year — the first woman to win the latter.
Karol is also the first Latina (and still one of only a few women) to headline a global stadium tour and the highest-grossing Latin touring artist of the year by far. According to Billboard Boxscore, in 2023, she grossed $146.9 million from just 19 shows and sold 843,000 tickets through Nov. 19, almost doubling the $86.7 million the Latin runner-up, RBD, grossed from 18 shows in the same period.
Karol G photographed November 11, 2023 at The Powder Room Studio in Los Angeles. Balenciaga jacket, Intimissimi underwear, Replika Vintage shoes.
Vijat Mohindra
Beyond her accolades — or perhaps, more accurately, behind them — is Karol’s shrewd business sense. Her long-standing recording agreement with Universal Music Latino, which signed her to her first major deal in 2016, ended after Mañana Será Bonito came out in February. Instead of re-upping or accepting any of the “incredible” deals she says other labels offered, she launched her own Bichota Records, invested in its staff and infrastructure — much of it based in her native Colombia — and inked a distribution deal with Interscope that provides her with that company’s full, multinational support and staff but lets her keep her masters moving forward, including Bichota Season’s.
“We wanted to stay in the Universal family,” says Noah Assad, who has managed Karol since 2020, now through his Habibi Management. “They’re the ones who bet on her in the beginning, and we believe in longevity. No one knows an artist more than the infrastructure who had you in the beginning.”
Even so, he adds, “She was ready to build her own label, her own structure, her own team. She was already betting on herself without getting the gain. Independence is not just being independent; she had to build this whole infrastructure. Not every artist is made for independence, but knowing that she could [be] made it the right decision.”
Landing Karol, says Interscope executive vp Nir Seroussi, came from “a very practical conversation that I had with [manager and friend] Noah, asking, ‘What do you want?’ And he said, ‘She’s a boss. She wants to feel empowered, and she’s ambitious. She wants to have a seat at the table with the Billie Eilishes and the Olivia [Rodrigos] of the world.’ ”
Karol’s message to the label, Seroussi recalls, was clear: “I’ve come this far. I want more. I want to sit next to general-market artists because that’s how I feel: Latina but with an A-league fan base.”
But as she eyes mainstream global stardom, Karol is, as usual, prepared to be patient.
“It’s a fine line,” she notes. “In that rush to go global, music can lose its essence. So we’re going step by step. Yes, they’ve brought proposals [to the table], but I’m not in a rush. It would be amazing to fill stadiums in Asia, for example, but I truly feel happy and thankful with what I’m doing today. We’ll find the way.”
In an era of ever more rapid rises to stardom for Latin artists — witness Peso Pluma and, before him, Bad Bunny — Karol G’s ascent has been steady but slow, even laborious, and compounded by being a woman in a Latin world where female-led hits historically are scant. She started as a child pop act, competing on Colombia’s X Factor at 14, and didn’t hail from the barrio but from a solid middle-class family. When reggaetón descended on her native Medellín, she got hooked, but pursuing a career in the genre presented additional hurdles: She started recording and performing it at a time when men completely dominated the genre — as they still do — and she was considered an oddity, facing a highly skeptical industry: Aside from Ivy Queen a generation before, there weren’t any other women to measure her against.
But alongside her producer/co-writer Ovy on the Drums, Karol developed a sound — melodic, lyrically conversational, sparsely arranged and open to experimentation — that was very much geared toward women, touching on themes of empowerment and vulnerability with a genuinely personal point of view and embracing sexuality without being too overtly sexual. Stars like Nicky Jam and J Balvin endorsed her and recorded with her, and in 2016, Universal signed her.
“People got ‘married’ to Karol G,” says Raymond Acosta, head of talent management for Habibi, which also represents Bad Bunny, Eladio Carrión and Mora. “Her fans, even when they disagree with her, see her as a sister. For many of them, she’s not simply an artist. She’s family.”
A prolific, and by all accounts tireless recording artist, Karol built her fan base by being sincere on social media, by constantly releasing music and by maintaining a clear, consistent vision of who she was and what she wanted. Her debut album, 2017’s Unstoppable, released when she was 26, debuted at No. 2 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart, back when she had 3.5 million Instagram followers; today, she has 70 million.
Her first big hits were collaborations with men, beginning with “Ahora Me Llama” with Bad Bunny in 2017, which peaked at No. 10 on Hot Latin Songs. Her first No. 1 was 2018’s “Dame Tu Cosita,” alongside El Chombo and Pitbull. By then, Karol had been at Universal for three years without a massive hit of her own. All around her, reggaetoneros were scoring quick Hot Latin Songs No. 1s, even as she relentlessly released music; to date, she has logged 60 entries on the multimetric chart, the most for a Latin female artist.
“I started in 2006, and now it’s 2023,” says Karol bluntly. “My first songs were 15, 16 years ago. You spend all that time working and thinking, ‘When is my time?’ People on social media always show the goal: the cars, the money, the luxury goods, and everyone at home is thinking, ‘Why doesn’t that happen to me?’ But it’s not that easy. Everything has a process. Yes, I sometimes had doubts, but if I didn’t do this, what was I going to do? I am music. Every time anything happens to me, I want to write a song. Everything for me is a song.”
Tiffany Brown catsuit and jacket, Retrofête x Keren Wolf earrings.
Vijat Mohindra
Finally, in fall 2019, she released the song: “Tusa,” a track about getting over heartbreak, which she wrote with Ovy on the Drums and Keityn and recorded with Nicki Minaj. It spent four weeks at No. 1 on Hot Latin Songs, underscoring Karol’s status as a Latin artist to contend with, who could collaborate with a top American rapper, while cementing her place as a woman who could relate to other women, tell their stories, voice their concerns, vent for them. (It also established the potent trifecta of Karol, Ovy and Keityn, which has since churned out a succession of chart-topping hits including the No. 1s “Provenza” and “TQG” with Shakira.)
“As a woman, she has always had a very clear notion of her identity and what she wants to tell fans, and she has taken that female power to the next level, making women feel like bichotas,” says Ovy, referring to the title of the global Karol hit that has become synonymous with female power. “She has always been very clear about what she wants to musically show the world, and as her producer from day one, I’ve always understood every move she makes. Anything she has in her mind, I turn into music.”
There is a definite line between stardom and superstardom, and for several years, Karol G inched ever closer to the latter, yet didn’t quite reach it. She played clubs, festivals, shows throughout Latin America, anything to be seen, but never had a proper routed headlining tour. Still, her second album, 2019’s Ocean, debuted at No. 2 on Top Latin Albums, and she became the top Latin female artist on Billboard’s year-end charts, a spot she has maintained ever since. She also toured the United States for the first time as a guest on Gloria Trevi’s 21-date Diosa de la Noche trek.
In 2021, she got her first Top Latin Albums No. 1 with her intensely personal KG0516 and launched her first headlining tour, playing theaters. The Bichota Tour — named after the single but by now synonymous with Karol herself — grossed $15.4 million, sold 214,000 tickets and opened Karol’s eyes to possibilities she hadn’t seriously considered. A major catalyst was the icy blue wigs — matching Karol’s hair color on the album cover and her cold, vulnerable state of mind — that fans took to wearing to the shows, an unprecedented display of fandom for a Latin artist.
“I think it was the way each person connected more closely with me,” Karol reflects. “It wasn’t just the blue wigs. I noticed [later] so many people changing their hair color in step with me. I thought it was extraordinary how a hair color can define a moment in your life.”
More importantly, “I realized that, thank God, this Karol G thing was a family and not a moment. I felt these people were there with me and would always be there, no matter what,” she says earnestly. Reading social media comments guided her. Fans who had seen her years before in a club now wanted to see her in a theater. “I began to understand there was a connection. When someone came and said, ‘I think you’re ready to do arenas,’ I thought, ‘Why not? If 3,000 people saw me in a theater, it means there are 12,000 more people who didn’t see me. Let’s go sell arenas.’ ”
Paumé Los Angeles bodysuit, Jimmy Choo shoes.
Vijat Mohindra
The ensuing $trip Love arena tour in 2022 grossed $72.2 million and sold 424,000 tickets. Which again made Karol and her team consider bigger venues — in this case, stadiums.
“It’s sort of mind-boggling to sit here in early November 2023 and think that in November 2021 she was starting her first headline tour of North America ever,” says UTA partner Jbeau Lewis, booking agent for Karol and Bad Bunny, among others. “The fact that she headlined predominantly theaters in 2021, then arenas in 2022, then jumped to stadiums in 2023 is unprecedented for any genre. I think it’s easy to talk about Karol as a leader in Latin music, but based on the success she has had, especially in this year, she should be spoken about in the same breath as Taylor or Beyoncé.”
A year ago, Karol and her team weren’t even contemplating a stadium tour. The plan was to finish the arena tour in 2022, release Mañana Será Bonito in February 2023 and take a break — as much for herself as for her fans, who had seen her tour two years in a row — save for three Puerto Rico stadium shows in early March.
Then, Mañana Será Bonito exploded. When Karol played the first of the three Puerto Rico dates, she included a handful of the album’s songs, accompanied by her guitarist. Fans clamored for more, and by the third date, she was performing the entire album — and fans were singing along to every word.
“At that point, I realized I had to be very, very aware of what was happening with this music,” she says. After playing three stadium dates where fans knew all her brand-new material, she felt the moment was ripe for her to hit the road again.
A Karol G concert is a bit of a spiritual experience, one that unites multiple generations of Latin women under a single roof. Grandmothers and children cry in unison; professional women let their hair down and wear different-colored wigs. And in a twist, men know the songs, too.
“The most beautiful thing about my shows is people arrive with the intention to heal,” Karol says. “Their intentions are so beautiful that when I go onstage and all that energy is directed toward me, I feel like a battery that’s recharging and filling up, and sometimes I cry a lot in my shows. I try not to, but my heart feels like it’s going to burst.”
Replika Vintage bra, BIG HORN eyewear, Paumé Los Angeles bracelets and earrings.
Vijat Mohindra
After her arena tour, Karol had been able to summon the same energy for her Puerto Rico stadium shows. Now the challenge was to extend that into a full stadium tour.
“The first step was sitting down and making the decision to do stadiums. This was the subject of a lot of discussion with my team. Someone said, ‘You’re going to play stadiums? Beyoncé plays stadiums. Taylor Swift plays stadiums. Are you ready for that?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not ready. But I will be.’ ”
Her team crunched numbers and came up with six safe markets. Those six dates quickly became nine when New York, Los Angeles and Miami sold out and second dates had to be added. From there, the tour mushroomed to 16 dates in 13 cities.
Less than the team being resistant to the tour, Lewis says, “It just wasn’t the plan. Generally speaking, when you go out and tour in stadiums, you need 18 months to a year to execute. We made the decision in March to go out on tour in August, with a very short runway. But all of the signals were there. There was such demand. Rolling immediately into second nights in Los Angeles, Miami and New York was incredible, and that gave the team confidence to say, ‘Let’s add more cities to this tour.’ Then doing things like her headlining Lollapalooza and coming back six weeks later in Chicago and selling 52,000 tickets in Soldier Field, that’s really unprecedented.”
For Karol, the crash course of preparing to play stadiums came with intense pressure: Not only would she be performing for crowds of 50,000 or more, she would be doing it during the same summer as the Renaissance and Eras tours. “Karol G couldn’t be the one who looked like she had no business doing it,” she says.
“It was an enormous personal challenge, from how I looked, to how I thought, to how I put it together,” she continues. “I didn’t feel I was ready until I saw the videos from the first two dates. I always judge myself horribly, and nothing is exactly how I want it. But in this tour, as a woman, I played the videos and said, ‘Wow, I love what I see.’ ”
Incorporating new music presented its own challenge. Soon after announcing the tour, Karol released Mañana Será Bonito: Bichota Season, a companion set that highlighted a completely different side of her: tougher, sexier, more experimental. To explain it, she wrote a book about the two versions of herself represented in the two albums and handed it to her tour designer. “I said, ‘This is my story. This is Carolina’s book, and I want her to be a siren.’ And they found the way to put it all into the show.”
While top Latin touring acts have long played stadium dates in Latin America, the notion of a conceptual tour is still relatively rare, and in the United States, only a few Latin artists have done multicity stadium tours. Karol benefited from the expertise of her team, including Assad and Lewis, which had already put together Bad Bunny’s two stadium tours, as well as the rock-solid family foundation that’s an intrinsic part of her business structure. In addition to Acosta, who handles her day-to-day at Habibi, since at least 2019, her sister, Jessica Giraldo, has also functioned as a “360,” overseeing all aspects of Karol’s career, including the growing Bichota Records and its staff; her Medellín office, Girl Power, which runs her merchandise business, among other projects; and her philanthropic Con Cora (“With Heart”) Foundation.
“Strategically, we have a great structure, and there are many, many people focused on massifying Karol’s vision,” says Giraldo, an attorney. “The big change Noah brought when he came on was globalizing the project. He opened the door to big mainstream festivals and big deals, for example. Raymond is his right hand in this project. And I’m the connection between the artist and everything else. I know Karol perfectly well; she’s my sister. But on the professional side, I’ve learned to understand her vision and execute it.”
Balenciaga jacket, Intimissimi underwear, Replika Vintage shoes.
Vijat Mohindra
While families and musical careers don’t always mesh, Karol’s has been an organic part of her structure from the very outset of her journey. Her father, a musician, fostered Karol’s ambitions, managed her until she signed with Universal and was the only person to join her onstage when she won the Latin Grammy for best new artist in 2018. Today, he isn’t part of her actual business, but he is part of her personal support network and, along with her mother, a constant presence at her shows and milestone moments, including this year’s Latin Grammys and Billboard Latin Music Awards, where he sat by her side.
“My family is everything to me,” Karol says. “[Fame] conditions real friendships and real relationships. Having my family — the most real and pure thing — around me makes me feel I’m not living in an ephemeral world where everything is transitory. Having them around me is also my way of thanking them for everything they did for me.”
That backbone will be essential come February, when Karol kicks off her 20-date Latin American stadium tour before an expected European run — all told, a seven-month trek, her longest time on the road yet. As ever, while on tour, she’ll link up with Ovy on the Drums and other writers for sessions to maintain a constant output of singles.
But at this point in her life, she’s ready to handle it all.
“If you ask me what I’m most proud of in the past year, it’s the independence we accomplished,” Assad says. “But I’m very proud of how hard she worked during the pandemic, going from the pandemic to theaters to arenas to stadiums. That all happened from 2020 to 2023, and that’s just amazing.”
Beyond music, Karol will make her acting debut on the Netflix scripted drama series Griselda alongside Sofía Vergara in January. And her Con Cora Foundation for women, launched this year, already has ongoing projects in sports, education and rehabilitation, including a program with the Houston Space Center to send Colombian teens to visit NASA.
“I’m bummed this era will end because definitely it’s the time I reaped what I sowed,” Karol says. “All these years working for something, and finally, that something is working for me. All these things I thought could happen, I trusted they would, and they did.”
When asked what comes next, Karol hesitates for a moment, as if wanting even more would seem too greedy for someone who already has so much.
“I’d love for my music to be heard everywhere, and, truthfully, I’d like my name to be heard all over the world,” she finally says. “Last year, we went to Santorini [Greece], to Kenya, to Dubai [United Arab Emirates], on holiday. And when people asked us where we were from and I said, ‘Colombia,’ the reaction always was, “Oh, Shakira, Shakira.’ ”
And then, in typical, demonstrative Karol G fashion, she holds up her arm to me. “See? I get goose bumps just thinking about it because that must be the ultimate. To have everyone in the world know your name.”
This story will appear in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
After Morgan Wallen wraps his sold-out Nov. 10 concert at Atlanta’s Truist Park with a crowd singalong to his 2019 No. 1 “Whiskey Glasses,” he enthusiastically roams the edge of the stage, crouching down, eager to get close to his ardent fans. As they thrust albums, cowboy boots and cardboard signs into his hands, the 40,000-seat stadium suddenly starts to feel more like a 200-capacity club.
Wallen has come prepared. He pulls out the appropriate black or silver Sharpie from his jeans pocket and yanks off the cap with his teeth, then autographs each item and poses for selfies. Even once the stadium lights have switched on and people have started to head toward the exits, Wallen is still hanging out. Finally, he starts to jog off, but then stops, turns around and runs back to autograph one more sign — the one that reads “You’re our entertainer of the year” — before leaving the stage for good.
The sign is a nod to Wallen’s prowess as an energetic, engaging performer — his Atlanta audience had no clue he was on antibiotics and was so concerned about a possible return of his spring vocal cord issues that he didn’t talk to anyone for hours before the 90-minute show, including postponing this interview. But it was also a reminder that, although he had lost entertainer of the year 48 hours earlier at the Country Music Association (CMA) Awards — and weathered a potentially career-ending scandal in 2021 — he remains tops with his millions of fans.
When time allows, the post-show autograph session is a nightly ritual. “I like looking them in the eyes,” a recovered Wallen says 10 days later over Zoom in his first major interview in two years. He’s dressed head to toe in gray camo, on his “lunch break” from hunting deer on the 1,700-acre farm outside Nashville he bought earlier this year with his booking agent and good friend, Austin Neal. He has scrubbed off his camo face paint: “I didn’t want to look like an idiot in front of you,” he says with a good-natured grin.
“There’s usually a few people every night where I’m just like, ‘God, that is like the happiest person in the world right now,’ and I always pick those,” he says. “I’m almost tearing up thinking about it. It’s just like, man, I mean a lot to this person, I can tell. I try to tell them, ‘Hey, I saw you up there. I saw you tonight.’ ”
Those fans helped make Wallen, 30, the biggest winner at this year’s Billboard Music Awards, which are based on year-end performance metrics on the Billboard charts. The Big Loud/Republic artist won 11 trophies, including top male artist, top Hot 100 artist and top country artist, as well as top Hot 100 song for “Last Night” and top Billboard 200 album for One Thing at a Time — the first time a male artist has captured the latter two in the same year since Usher in 2004. He dominates the country year-end charts, claiming the No. 1 spot on 12 of the genre’s 28 lists, including Hot Country Songs, where “Last Night” succeeds 2022’s year-end chart-topper, Wallen’s “Wasted on You.”
Wallen’s groundbreaking accomplishments transcend country, too. When “Last Night” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March, it became the first song by a solo male country artist to top the chart since Eddie Rabbitt’s “I Love a Rainy Night” in 1981. Once it reached the summit, “Last Night” spent 16 nonconsecutive weeks there, the most ever for a noncollaboration. (Wallen nixed the idea of releasing remixes to potentially propel the song past the 19-week record held by Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, says Big Loud partner/CEO Seth England, who heads Wallen’s label and co-manages him with K21’s Kathleen Flaherty. “Morgan loves the original version, and he had made it that far on his own music and accord,” he says.)
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When One Thing at a Time debuted at No. 1 in March, its predecessor, 2021’s Dangerous: The Double Album, logged its 110th nonconsecutive week in the Billboard 200’s top 10, second only to the Sound of Music soundtrack and the most by a solo artist since the chart began publishing weekly in 1956. One Thing at a Time has spent 16 nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, the most for any album since Adele’s 21 in 2011-12. And, after debuting at No. 1, the album logged the next 31 weeks in the top five.
As country music experiences its biggest surge in popularity since the Garth Brooks era three decades ago, Wallen (alongside Luke Combs) is the tip of the spear for the genre’s new generation, which includes Zach Bryan, Lainey Wilson, Jelly Roll, Bailey Zimmerman and Wallen’s frequent writing partner and close friend, HARDY. He has shifted country’s streaming calculus by releasing albums that contain more than 30 tracks and racking up tremendous consumption tallies: One Thing at a Time’s songs earned 498.3 million on-demand streams in its first week, the most ever for a country album, according to Luminate. Through the third quarter of 2023, country music’s on-demand audio and video streaming grew by 24% year over year — and Wallen accounted for 31% of that growth. Of all country music on-demand streams through the same period, 10% belonged to Wallen. For the first time since the 2013 launch of the year-end Streaming Songs Artists chart, a country act (Wallen) leads the list, and a country song (“Last Night”) is No. 1 on the year-end Streaming Songs chart.
He’s catching the eye of legendary country artists, who now study his methods. “This is a new generation that is streaming, which is something new to Dolly,” says Dolly Parton’s manager, Danny Nozell. “What Morgan is doing, I want to take and see how I can apply that to Dolly.” (To wit: Parton released the longest album of her career, the 30-track Rockstar, in November.)
Similarly, Luke Bryan, who calls his good friend Wallen a “world-class songwriter, singer and performer,” was also impressed by Wallen’s new-school methods. “His ability to relate to fans by way of introducing new songs by performing them on socials was truly a brilliant way to build his career,” he says.
“When I started doing this, I had no intentions or expectations of becoming that guy,” Wallen says of being the de facto leader of this new country movement. “But yeah, I’m definitely proud of it. Especially when people say to me that they never liked country music before and now it’s [their] favorite.”
Rye 51 shirt, PAIGE jeans, Tecovas boots.
Daniel Chaney
As massive as Wallen’s following is, in early 2021 and for quite some time afterward, it looked like he could lose it all after a neighbor gave TMZ video footage of him using a racial slur. But Wallen’s fans never abandoned him — in fact, they rallied around him.
Their fervor was, in some ways, a testament to how, in a sea of male country artists who often seem interchangeable, Wallen has always stood out — not only for his instantly recognizable raspy twang, but for the intimate tone of his songs, many of which he co-writes.
“There’s a level of conversation Morgan brings to a song that makes him such a strong writer; you immediately feel invested in the story,” says Miranda Lambert, who co-wrote One Thing at a Time’s “Thought You Should Know” with Wallen and Nicolle Galyon. In February, the song became his eighth No. 1 on the Country Airplay chart; he has already scored two more.
While he leans toward tried-and-true tropes — the cry-in-my-beer midtempo ballad, the playfully cocky you’re-going-to-wish-you-never-left-me tune — he often injects them with a vulnerability that’s the antithesis of last decade’s bro-country movement. And by infusing many of his traditional country melodies with rap cadences and beats and alt-rock guitars, Wallen has expanded his audience far beyond country’s typical listenership.
“I obviously have brought some of my own flavor into the space and everybody doesn’t necessarily like that, and I don’t care because I love it,” says Wallen, whose favorites range from indie-rockers The War on Drugs to country rebel Eric Church to rappers like Moneybagg Yo and the late Young Dolph. “I love being able to incorporate all the types of music that I like. If I had to sing one kind of song for two hours, I’d lose my mind.”
The first stadium show Wallen played was on May 31, 2018, as one of three supporting acts for Bryan at Toronto’s Rogers Centre. It was also the first stadium show he had ever attended. Bryan had heard Wallen’s 2017 hit “Up Down” and felt “it spoke to just the right audience, and I knew then I wanted Morgan on tour with me.”
“I remember going out there and it was like, ‘Gawwwwd!’ It just felt so massive,” Wallen says. Five years later, stadium stages feel like home. “We played in Austin [five days ago] in an arena. There were 12-13,000 people there, and it felt tiny,” he says. “Then we played the stadium in Houston [two days later], and it was like back to normal again.” He laughs as he catches himself, knowing there’s nothing normal about his life these days: “What? That’s not normal.”
Growing up in Sneedville in East Tennessee (2021 population: 1,315) and then outside of Knoxville, Tenn., where his family moved when he was in middle school, Wallen, the son of a public school teacher and a minister (his father is now a semitruck driver), had no money for luxuries like concerts. Any extra cash went to support his baseball career: He was a star pitcher and shortstop in high school before an arm injury his senior year took him off the diamond for good.
“When baseball ended, that was really tough because that’s all he was thinking about,” England says. “I think he probably transformed that into a new drive and [thought], ‘I’m going to have to really work hard at something else.’ ”
Now he’s filling the ballparks he dreamed of playing in as a kid. This year, the One Night at a Time tour played three nights at the Boston Red Sox’s Fenway Park and had double plays at venues including San Diego’s Petco Park and Atlanta’s Truist Park, the respective homes of baseball’s Padres and Braves. Through Nov. 18, the tour had grossed $300.4 million and sold 1.5 million tickets, making it the highest-grossing country tour ever reported to Billboard Boxscore.
“The charisma has always been there, but now [the show] is so tight,” says Neal, head of The Neal Agency and Wallen’s booking agent since 2017. (Neal launched his company in early 2022 following his departure from WME, several months after Wallen left the agency.) Wallen used to talk and fidget much more onstage. “We used to say he’d go on a soliloquy, but now he’s so dialed in. Plus, he can’t talk that much because he’s got so many songs that he’s got to play.”
LTIFONE sweater, Mister Freedom jacket, Nudie jeans.
Daniel Chaney
Still, in April, Wallen’s vocal load caught up with him. Minutes before he was to go onstage for a second sold-out night at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium in Oxford, Miss., 45,000 fans learned he had lost his voice and couldn’t perform. After powering through a few more shows several days later, a visibly upset Wallen told his more than 6 million Instagram followers that doctors had ordered him to go on vocal rest for six weeks, resulting in the postponement of multiple shows.
Though Wallen says he isn’t “the type of person that really worries a lot,” the experience scared him, especially after some doctors told him his voice might be permanently altered. He was spooked “100%” by what happened in Oxford, England says. “During that stretch, he was having real trouble with his voice. It was rough.” But unlike in Oxford, when Wallen started having vocal issues the week of his Atlanta shows, he had doctors at Vanderbilt and his vocal coach — who taught him methods to make singing more sustainable and joined him in Atlanta — at his disposal.
The support system that has sprung up around him is a far cry from 2014, when Wallen was working as a landscaper in Knoxville and competed on The Voice. Back then, he could certainly move more freely, without the bodyguards he requires now.
“Everything has gotten so, so huge,” he says. “I don’t really go to the grocery store. I have to go through back doors to go to the doctor and all that kind of stuff. I still try to hold on to as much [normalcy] as possible. I like driving, so I try to drive as much as I can by myself.” Adjusting to fame has been tough at times for Wallen, and he’s not sure that he has. When old friends don’t invite him to events, it sometimes bothers him, even though he knows the disturbance his presence can cause. And he has found a second use for the camo gear. After hunting, he sometimes leaves on his cap, camo top and a little face paint, just enough so that he can “sneak around, just wherever I can go, maybe a Mexican restaurant.” Otherwise, he says, “I play my shows, I hang out with my son, [Indie, 3], and I hide pretty much. And I’m OK with that. I’m happy as hell with that.”
HARDY, who has toured with Wallen off and on since 2018, speaks more bluntly about the limitations fame has placed on his friend. “In the last couple of years, he handles himself so much differently out on the road. He protects himself from situations that might get him in hot water,” he says. “He doesn’t go out to bars. If there’s a good time to be had, we have it backstage where we’re safe and where f–king people aren’t videoing and trying to get a rise out of somebody. We will still have the same amount of fun, but we do it in an environment [without] the public eye on us anymore. It sucks that you can’t really do it that other way, but you just can’t when you get Morgan Wallen famous.”
If Morgan Wallen wasn’t already aware of how famous he was, he found out Feb. 2, 2021, when TMZ published that video of a drunk Wallen (on “hour 72 of a 72-hour bender,” he later said) casually using a racial slur as he told a friend to get another friend home safely. TMZ’s post included an apology from Wallen, but the reaction was swift and severe. Radio playlists pulled his music, his booking agency dropped him, awards shows deemed him ineligible, and his own label suspended him.
It wasn’t the first time Wallen’s behavior had raised flags. He was arrested for public intoxication and disorderly conduct in May 2020 after a disruption at Kid Rock’s Nashville bar, and five months later, Saturday Night Live revoked its invitation to perform after he violated the show’s COVID-19 safety protocols. (The show had him on two months later.) But Wallen says that the experience in 2021 truly showed him “just how much that people listen to me. I don’t think I realized that, at least not at that grand of a scale at the time,” he says, carefully weighing his words. “I [learned] how much my words matter.”
Now, nearly three years later, Wallen says, “That person is definitely not the same person I am now.” He doesn’t diminish the hurt his words caused or question the actions the industry took, but he admits to feeling anger that so few gave him the benefit of the doubt and rushed to brand him a full-blown racist.
“There’s no excuse. I’ve never made an excuse. I never will make an excuse,” Wallen says of using the slur. “I’ve talked to a lot of people, heard stories [about] things that I would have never thought about because I wasn’t the one going through it. And I think, for me, in my heart I was never that guy that people were portraying me to be, so there was a little bit of like, ‘Damn, I’m kind of actually mad about this a little bit because I know I shouldn’t have said this, but I’m really not that guy.’ I put myself in just such a sh-t spot, you know? Like, ‘You really messed up here, guy.’ If I was that guy, then I wouldn’t have cared. I wouldn’t have apologized. I wouldn’t have done any of that if I really was that guy that people were saying about me.”
“Any of that” included meeting with several Black leaders, including 300 Elektra Entertainment chairman/CEO Kevin Liles, Universal Music Group executive vp/chief people and inclusion officer Eric Hutcherson and Grammy-winning gospel artist Bebe Winans, as well as with the Black Music Action Coalition (BMAC) and other groups in an effort to educate himself; his process “to learn and try to be better” continues, he says.
“I think that moment was a cloud with a silver lining because I think it showed him he has a platform that can do good,” HARDY says. “He realized, ‘I’ve got to get my sh-t together.’ ”
One such platform is the Morgan Wallen Foundation (formerly the More Than My Hometown Foundation). By February 2022, Wallen and Big Loud (on behalf of Wallen from his royalties) had donated $500,000 to organizations including The National Museum of African American Music, Rock Against Racism and the BMAC. Three dollars from every concert ticket Wallen sells goes to the foundation, which primarily helps underserved communities through supporting music and sports youth programs, and has donated over $1 million in 2023, including $100,000 to the Atlanta Braves Foundation and $500,000 to Habitat for Humanity of Greater Nashville to help revitalize a baseball and softball complex.
Despite this philanthropic push, don’t expect Wallen to use his sizable platform to speak out on social or political issues. When asked if he plans to endorse a presidential candidate in 2024, he swiftly answers, “No,” before continuing: “That’s not where my head’s at. I’m not an expert. I just don’t know enough to try to guide people. I know what I know, and that’s music.”
Stitched custom shirt, jacket and pants; Tecovas boots.
Daniel Chaney
Following the incident, Wallen says he did a 30-day stint in rehab in San Diego, and he has since drastically changed his drinking habits on the road. “That used to be my warmup — to get half lit: ‘I’m going out there, and we’re going to go have fun.’ Now, that is not the way I approach it,” he says.
Part of the change is just plain logical: playing massive stadium stages, “there’s a lot more ways you can fall than there is on a little one,” he says with a laugh. But his lifestyle changes (and the boost in his confidence level that has resulted) have also completely altered how he approaches performing. “I used to be scared to even think about what it would be like to play a show without drinking: ‘That sounds terrible. Why would I ever do that?’ And now I’m almost scared to wonder what it’d be like if I was drunk.” As far as drinking off tour, “I’m still figuring out my personal life,” he says. “I probably always will be.”
Despite the work he has done to make amends, there are still inroads to be made. While his fans fervently stood by him — sales of Dangerous soared 102% the week after the incident, and he headlined a 55-date arena and amphitheater tour in 2022 — not everyone was ready to move on.
Since the scandal, Wallen’s name is seldom heard when nominations or winners are announced at peer-voted awards shows. In November, he didn’t receive any Grammy nominations (though “Last Night,” which he didn’t write, is up for best country song), and Wallen, who won best new artist at the 2020 CMA Awards, went 0-3 at the CMAs this year. (Dangerous did win album of the year at the 2022 Academy of Country Music Awards.)
England acknowledges that “some people have no intention of forgiveness, but that’s also OK. Morgan realized that he has just got to control what he can control. He’s certainly not getting shut out in these awards because he’s a bad musician.”
Wallen shrugs off the snubs. The CMA losses “bothered me for like five minutes,” he admits. “And then I’m like, ‘Why am I mad? I’m about to go play for 80,000 people in Atlanta.’ ”
Daniel Chaney
And there are other recent victories to celebrate, like sharing the BMI Country Awards’ songwriter of the year honors with Combs on Nov. 7 — meaningful recognition for Wallen, who says he has heard criticism that he doesn’t write enough songs on his albums or relies too much on his co-writers. He has nothing but praise for the writers who contribute to his records but admits with a wry chuckle that the BMI Award was “validating … It’s kind of like maybe I do know a little bit about what I’m doing.”
Wallen has released collaborations with top country names including Eric Church, Chris Stapleton and Florida Georgia Line, as well as with Diplo and rapper Lil Durk. (Their “Broadway Girls” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart in 2022.) But he’s well aware that he hasn’t yet released a game-changing co-ed duet like Jason Aldean and Carrie Underwood’s “If I Didn’t Love You” or HARDY’s murder ballad “wait in the truck” with Lainey Wilson. However, he quickly adds, it’s not for lack of trying.
“I’ve reached out to a couple of people, and they’ve turned me down,” he says, declining to name names. “I just really want certain people, and I haven’t gotten the chance to do it yet. I’m going to keep trying to write songs for it or write with them.”
England says the timing hasn’t worked out, adding that Wallen sent a song for his next album to a noncountry artist as a possibility. “The answer was bittersweet,” he says. “It was, ‘Holy sh-t, this sounds like a global No. 1 record, but I just can’t do it right now.’ ”
Wallen says he “would love” to write with more women, but admits he frequently returns to his very successful “little squad” of collaborators “because I’ve just been slammed, and when I’m not on the road, I’m spending time with my son or hunting. I haven’t really wanted to branch out much just because I needed to keep myself sane.”
One new collaborator eager to work with Wallen: Post Malone. The artist, who is recording a country album, wrote with Wallen, ERNEST and Charlie Handsome, among others, when he was in town to perform with Wallen and HARDY at the CMA Awards. But Wallen confesses that Post Malone’s studio hours were hard for him. “[He] likes to write really, really late at night — and I can’t do that three nights in a row. I can do that one night,” he says with a laugh. “I can start about 5 p.m., but starting at 10 p.m. — that’s rough.”
A little while ago, when HARDY was at Wallen’s house, they headed out to his workshop. “Indie was in the bed. Morgan’s out here looking for an outlet to plug in a baby monitor. I was just like, ‘Man, that’s something I didn’t think I would see five years ago,’ ” HARDY says.
In Atlanta, the tow-headed Indie giggled in delight as he ran through the empty stadium concourse before showtime, pushing a toy dump truck and exuberantly honking the horn on a full-size forklift. “Anything about a vehicle or any part of it, that’s all he cares about,” Wallen later says, grinning broadly.
Wallen and Indie’s mother split before he was born and share joint custody. But Wallen says fatherhood happened for him at the right time. “It gives me something to focus on that’s not just all about myself because for a while, I had to be super selfish. I had to mostly focus on myself or [my career] wouldn’t work,” he says. But now, “it’s nice to really think about someone other than yourself and about what you’re passing down. He’s my favorite thing about life.”
And Wallen’s friends say fatherhood changed him. “Having a son really grew him up fast,” Neal says.
Becoming a dad made him look at life differently, Wallen says, including sparking an interest in expanding into businesses outside of music. In addition to buying real estate, he’s working with Plus Capital to find the right investments, including his recent affiliation as investor and brand ambassador with upstart Ryl Tea, which aligned with his desire to partner with health and wellness brands. “I like having a bunch of different things for me to focus on. [Otherwise], I’ll get bored,” he says. “I have a lot of opportunities, so I’ve been trying to take them.” Will one of those opportunities be, as is a rite of passage of sorts for so many country stars, opening a bar in Nashville? England says only: “It has been discussed. Stay tuned.”
But first, Wallen will spend much of 2024 carrying on with the One Night at a Time tour. In addition to continuing to make up this spring’s postponed dates and a headlining show at the Stagecoach festival, Wallen has added 10 more markets, many with multiple nights at stadiums, including three at Nashville’s Nissan Stadium.
Also potentially ahead: a full-blown international tour, perhaps in 2025. After starting 2023’s tour in Australia, Wallen ended the year with a Dec. 3 show at London’s O2 Arena that sold out in one hour. It was his first time in Europe, and Neal is exploring the best way to proceed globally. Wallen is up for the challenge: “I think it would be fun to go try to win people over again,” he says.
Next year, he’ll also return to the studio. Though more singles are coming from One Thing at a Time, Wallen is already writing and reviewing outside songs for his fourth album. Handsome, who co-produces Wallen’s music with Joey Moi, predicts the next one will be his biggest yet. “I’m expecting to see more songs that can go No. 1 at pop radio because I think people have seen that a country singer with a very Southern voice by himself without a feature can still have a No. 1 Billboard hit,” Handsome says. “Morgan’s leading the way for what country music is now and what it’s becoming.”
When England compares Wallen to another artist, it’s not a fellow young country superstar or a legend of the past, but another especially prolific and versatile performer affiliated with Republic: Drake. “Drake can do a hardcore R&B song, a trap rap song or a Caribbean-tinged beat global pop song,” England says. “I think Morgan is that in our genre. His voice is always going to be country even if he’s singing pop melodies, and the verses are likely to have some country imagery. But when it’s time to sing the big runs and melodies, the guy can do it. Even though he’s got a lot of older fans, he’s certainly got the young kids just wrapped around the sound right now. I don’t think that’s just a short-term thing. I think the guy’s got the ability to do that for decades to come.”
This story will appear in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
In 1978, Kate Bush became the first solo woman to reach No. 1 in the U.K. with a song she wrote, produced and performed entirely by herself with “Wuthering Heights.” Forty-five years later, in October, dance–pop artist Kenya Grace joined her as the second to pull off the feat with the quietly devastating “Strangers,” her major-label debut single.
“There wasn’t too much pressure on that song, to be honest,” Grace says. “I didn’t really have some mad goal in mind — I just wrote it one random night.”
For Grace, 25, that kind of writing experience is the result of skills she’s been honing her entire life: she began creating and performing songs for friends and family at age four, inspired by Norah Jones tracks that her mother would play around the house. By 16, the South Africa-born, Southampton-raised singer was frequenting drum’n’bass parties, baptizing herself in the energy of the U.K. dance music scene that would soon characterize the sound of her own music. “When I start writing something at 120 BPM, I’m like, ‘No, it’s way too slow,’” she quips.
She graduated from London’s Academy of Contemporary Music in 2019 — an institution she likens to a massive networking event — and spent the next few years building an audience on TikTok. Even from her initial videos, Grace displayed a deft understanding of how to present her music, including one clip in which she crafted a beat by using her music production controller to source sound waves from oranges.
The post caught the attention of Day One Music’s Nick Huggett and Nick Shymansky, who have signed and developed British music icons including Amy Winehouse and Adele. By November 2022, two months after she self-released the aptly titled “Oranges,” the two were managing Grace. “We’re seeing someone with a craft [who] knows how to sing and command an audience,” Shymansky says. “We’ve got someone that has earned their stripes and is ready to take on the world.”
They prioritized growing her fan base on an international level, and by July, the two helped her sign a deal with Major Recordings, an electronic dance music label launched by Warner Records. “We knew early on that more than half of her audience was in America; it’s not a coincidence the deal was signed there,” Shymansky says. “We had offers for shows in Los Angeles prior to ‘Strangers’ — that’s not typical for a British artist at such an early stage.”
Kenya Grace photographed on November 20, 2023 at SOUTH56 studio in London.
Bex Day
The partnership quickly paid huge dividends in “Strangers” — though a different song nearly took its spot. “I signed my deal about two weeks before I posted [a snippet of] ‘Strangers’ online,” Grace recalls. “The month before that, we were lining up a different song,” which ultimately became its follow-up single, “Only In My Mind.”
Nonetheless, when a teaser of “Strangers” connected with listeners on a musical and lyrical level, the label pivoted, with Grace still meticulously poring over the song’s final mix. “I was rewriting the lyrics to make it rhyme,” she says. “I’m always really funny and picky about vocal production. I spend the longest on the vocals.”
Sonically, the song is steeped in drum’n’bass and aligns with the current U.K. dance music revival in the U.S. led by artists like Fred Again.. and PinkPantheress. The song’s vulnerable lyrical bent (“And then one random night when everything changes/You won’t reply and we’ll go back to strangers”) plays to Gen Z’s penchant for unflinchingly honest pop songwriting.
Though Grace admits feeling pressure ahead of its release, “Strangers” officially arrived through Warner Records/Major Recordings on Sept. 1. By the end of the month, it became her first entry on the Hot 100 (since reaching a No. 52 high). The track has also climbed to No. 1 in the U.K.; reached the top 5 on the Billboard Global 200; and spent five weeks atop Hot Dance/Electronic Songs, marking the first time in the ranking’s decade-long history that a track solely written, produced and sung by a woman has reached the summit.
Says Huggett: “We had no expectations other than, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if this did better than the last release, which was really nowhere near there?’ That was the benchmark. Every time we put out some music, we want to improve on it incrementally.”
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While social media helped buoy “Strangers,” the resources of a traditional label drove the song at radio and helped place it on editorial playlists on digital service providers. The song has earned 773.7 million on-demand streams through Nov. 23, according to Luminate. “The label used this explosive moment to make sure there’s a proper campaign globally,” says Huggett. “We’ve been blown away with how brilliantly the label has worked the record with their understanding of the complexity of radio and traditional media.”
In October, Grace released the trance-driven “Only In My Mind,” and three weeks later, followed it with a “sad acoustic version” of “Strangers” as the song continues to chart. At the top of December, she detailed a biting take on modern love with “Paris” and, come 2024, she expects to release her “dark, moody [and] dance-inspired” debut album.
In the meantime, she’s on her first tour, with stops in London, New York and Los Angeles — though Shymansky has his sights set on even brighter lights: a Las Vegas residency 10 years from now. “There’s a long road to get there, but we think she has the goods to do that,” he says. “That’s gotta be the ambition.”
From left: Nick Huggett, Kenya Grace and Nicholas Shymansky photographed on November 20, 2023 at SOUTH56 studio in London.
Bex Day
A version of this story will appear in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
