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These days, Coldplay approaches touring “as a traveling R&D lab,” says longtime manager Phil Harvey — and the band’s ongoing Music of the Spheres tour does feel a bit like a stadium run as science experiment. There are compostable wristbands, biodegradable confetti and stationary bicycles that fans on the floor can ride mid-set to generate power to the production’s smaller C stage.
Five years ago, frontman Chris Martin declared that Coldplay would not tour until he could ensure the act’s stadium dates would “have a positive impact” on the environment. Now, thanks to the numerous green innovations put in place since Music of the Spheres began in 2022 — including not only the aforementioned measures but also renewable-resource batteries and routing that reduced air travel — the band achieved a 47% reduction in carbon emissions for the first year of touring, with a 50% reduction goal by the time it wraps in November.
Like an increasing number of artists, Coldplay relied on a team of scientific experts to devise a plan for a greener tour that would be both mammoth (7.7 million global tickets sold to date, according to Billboard Boxscore) and meaningful. “For the number of artists that we’ve been speaking to, the interest and appetite for understanding is pretty good and has exploded over the past three years,” says professor John E. Fernández, director of the Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI) at MIT, who helped certify Coldplay’s carbon emission results and has also worked extensively with major dance act Above & Beyond.
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The band also connected with Luke Howell — a former solar engineer who founded British sustainability consulting firm Hope Solutions and previously worked with the Glastonbury Festival. Howell and his Hope team studied the band’s previous tours “to identify key areas where we could reduce emissions,” he says, then created a range of targets, while recommending emerging green tech for the trek. “We don’t always get it right,” Harvey says of Coldplay’s ongoing efforts, “but we pass on everything we learn so that other people can do it better next time.”
Ahead of the inaugural Music Sustainability Summit, held in Los Angeles in February, the ESI announced a comprehensive study on touring’s carbon footprint, expected to be completed this summer. Recommendations will be made — although Fernández says there’s still a long way to go. “I would characterize the music industry as risk-averse,” he says. “It’s a business, and artists are trying to make a living, so we’ve seen an enormous amount of concern over the risk entailed with making a commitment to reduce emissions.”
Prof. John E. Fernández
MIT
It’s one thing for a stadium act like Coldplay to make sustainability a prerequisite for playing live, but the majority of artists don’t have that financial luxury — or even a standardized emissions benchmark to shoot for. Michael P. Totten, who has served as a climate science adviser for Pearl Jam for over two decades, says, “The biggest problem we face is that [no artist] has control over everything” — in short, even one big act can’t cut through all the live-industry bureaucracy. “You’d love to work with green arenas,” he says, “but they’re owned by somebody else, they do a ton of events, and might say, ‘You should talk to the ticket sellers.’ ”
Thus, so far, the artists who effectively make their touring practices greener tend to be those who have the means and drive to do so — and whose tours also often leave the biggest footprints. Totten points out that Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard helped drive the band’s pledge of donating $200 per ton of carbon on its tours — but did so based on scientific recommendations, not any law or industrywide objective.
Marcus Eriksen, a marine scientist who has worked with Jack Johnson to spread awareness of plastic pollution in the oceans, believes that change needs to start with more major artists demonstrating their awareness of various environmental issues. “You want to find influencers — people that can reach a much wider audience,” says Eriksen, who has led several ocean expeditions intended to help educate celebrities like Johnson about how much plastic exists in large bodies of water. Such in-person experiences can, he says, help attendees recognize an urgent issue and encourage them to spread the message back on land. “Getting folks out into the field for a direct experience — that can be transformative,” Eriksen says.
While standard green guidelines may not exist yet for the live industry, Howell says he would love to see more solar and renewable energy incorporated into touring, as well as “electric vehicles and fossil oil-free fuels for all trucking and freight.” Fernández also says the music industry must remain in close contact with the scientific community about the latest climate change projections to make any real progress. “Everyone in the music industry must accept the fact that we’re not going to stay [at] 1.5 degree C average surface warming,” he says, referencing the temperature threshold that was the original goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement. “So if you’re developing a climate plan to maintain that, you’re just going to have to rewrite that plan.”
With that in mind, Fernández stresses that artists must remain open to evolving information on climate change, even at the risk of reworking preexisting sustainability pledges. “This is not unique to the music industry — what we’re seeing is that some companies have made climate commitments, they don’t feel good about the inability to fulfill them, and then they go silent,” he says. “Artists can’t go in that direction. They have to be part of inspiring people to take action.”
This story will appear in the March 30, 2024, issue of Billboard.
In the early ’00s, Adam Gardner’s home and work lives didn’t align. “We would live an environmentally friendly lifestyle at home, and then he would go off on the tour bus powered by diesel, using Styrofoam and plastic utensils, and just feeling miserable about it all,” recounts the Guster frontman’s then-girlfriend, now-wife, Lauren Sullivan. “He realized other artists were feeling the same way.”
Gardner cared about sustainability. Many music business stakeholders that he met, in touring especially, didn’t. So he and Sullivan — a veteran of environmental organizations including Rainforest Action Network — set out to redefine how the industry approaches its footprint.
In 2004, they co-founded REVERB (they’re now co-executive directors), partnering in short order with prominent eco-friendly acts like Dave Matthews Band and Jack Johnson. Twenty years on, its guiding mission remains: working with artists (its partners now include Billie Eilish, ODESZA and The 1975) and the music business to implement sustainable touring measures and to leverage the fan-artist relationship to increase engagement with environmental and social issues.
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Inspired by Bonnie Raitt — “the godmother of all of it,” as Sullivan puts it, who launched her Green Highway initiative on her 2002 tour to promote alternative energy sources while greening her own touring — Sullivan reached out to the musician’s management to gauge how the model might be applied to other tours, and it offered mentorship and initial financial support. Gardner propositioned Barenaked Ladies to test the model; the band agreed, and REVERB debuted on the group’s 2004 co-headlining tour with Alanis Morissette.
REVERB spent its early years navigating a music business that was often ambivalent about environmental issues. But as the climate crisis worsened and stakeholders saw REVERB in action, its conversations about sustainability became easier and its actions more comprehensive. Where REVERB used to be “a thorn in the side” of promoters, venues and artist teams, Sullivan explains, “it has been a sea change, 2004 to today.”
A fan refilled at a water station.
Courtesy Reverb
The nonprofit’s work falls into two broad categories: improving a tour, venue or event’s sustainability and using concerts to connect with fans about important issues. While tour sustainability has improved since REVERB launched — thanks in part to the organization itself — the former remains central to its work because most music industry stakeholders still lack the expertise to conceive and carry out green initiatives. Lara Seaver, who as REVERB’s director of touring and projects implements its strategies, describes REVERB’s suite of tour greening measures as “a menu” that teams can choose from based on a tour’s established culture. There’s “low-hanging fruit,” like eliminating single-use plastic bottles backstage, and more involved actions, like collecting a touring party’s unused hotel toiletries (which hotels often discard because they’re not tamper-resistant) and donating them to local shelters.
“What REVERB does really well is they make it turnkey to implement everything,” says AG Artists COO/GM Jordan Wolosky, who has handled client Shawn Mendes’ REVERB work. “There’s so many different moving pieces, so when you have an organization that can help you tackle a few of those pieces from the start, it’s extremely helpful.”
There’s also “not a lot of weight or responsibility put on the artist unless they really want to dive in,” says Activist Artists Management partner and head of sustainability Kris “Red” Tanner, who oversees REVERB affiliations for clients like The Lumineers and Dead & Company. “They help execute and check everything. We as the artists can say, ‘We support this, we want it to happen,’ but funnel it through [REVERB] and make sure we’re actually living up to what we’re promising.”
Critically, REVERB’s programs are tailored. “I can’t imagine saying to an artist, ‘It’s cookie-cutter, and it’s our way or the highway,’ ” Sullivan says. Some artists want to go green but aren’t sure how; others have specific environment-related priorities (one year, Dave Matthews asked REVERB to dedicate its on-site messaging to protecting rhinos), while others still tap into the climate crisis’ intersectionality by asking REVERB to coordinate advocacy for social issues (like homelessness and addiction for The Lumineers and Indigenous land rights for boygenius).
“It’s a really great, low-impact way for us to allow the artists to make an impact without a lot of heavy lifting on their side,” Tanner says. “Just using their pulpit is a great way to help spread the word.”
REVERB researches and assembles local and national nonprofit partners, which are often numerous enough to create “action villages” at events for fans to interact with; for instance, during its 2023 tour, boygenius hosted 50 nonprofits. Since forming, REVERB has facilitated 7.7 million total fan actions, which range from voter registration to utilizing the #RockNRefill program, a decadelong partnership with Nalgene that rewards donors with collectible, tour-specific reusable water bottles — and offers all fans free, filtered refilling stations. “If you have 100 people on a tour, doing everything perfectly — you have the lightest footprint tour that ever was — and you compare that with the power of 20,000 fans at one show, it’s pretty clear where the most potential for impact is,” Seaver explains.
Adam Gardner, Jack Johnson and Lauren Sullivan in 2017.
Matt Cosby
Notably, since REVERB’s inception, sustainability has moved from afterthought to priority in the industry. “Folks are realizing if these sorts of impacts are considered from the very beginning, the efficiency of these solutions goes through the roof,” says Tanner Watt, a 12-year REVERB veteran who liaises with artists, nonprofits and brands as director of partnerships. “We can usually save time and money and also increase the potential positive outcome and positive impact of these programs when we’re involved in the entire conversation around a tour or event.”
These conversations extend to venues and promoters. Mike Luba, president of Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, began a partnership between the venue and REVERB in 2017. “We followed their blueprint,” he says, and the facility became climate-positive, meaning it offsets its carbon by more than it generates. “REVERB has changed the narrative, where people now go to concerts expecting that these things are in place,” Luba continues. Some artists do, too: Neil Young, who will play two dates at Forest Hills in May, isn’t an official REVERB partner, but he has a host of green requirements for any venue he plays. When booking his shows, “if we hadn’t already checked a whole bunch of boxes, it was a nonstarter,” Luba says.
Plenty of touring frontiers remain to be conquered. Last year, REVERB launched a major initiative, the Music Decarbonization Project, to eventually eliminate the carbon emissions created by the music industry, and Sullivan cites fan travel and inefficient tour routings as areas with room for improvement. But more broadly, REVERB has already accomplished some of the most challenging work.
“We’re continuing to show venues, promoters and other stakeholders that this is feasible — fans want it, artists clearly want it,” Sullivan says. “And if the will is there, it can happen.”
This story will appear in the March 30, 2024, issue of Billboard.
When Co-op Live, the latest arena from developer Oak View Group (OVG), opens in Manchester, England, in April, it will look a bit different from most similarly sized British venues.
Inside, it will serve up an eminently modern offering: the United Kingdom’s largest arena concert capacity, an acoustically efficient infrastructure and a star-studded concert lineup including Stevie Nicks, Olivia Rodrigo and Nicki Minaj. But outside, the venue’s innovations will be most visible. Situated on the Manchester Ship Canal, Co-op Live is surrounded by a “biodiversity ring” — over 29,000 square feet of lush greenery offering a natural habitat for local wildlife and a surrounding green wall to attract bees. A mile-long pedestrian path partially along the water will encourage more environmentally friendly travel to and from the 23,500-capacity venue.
Since OVG broke ground on Co-op Live in 2021, chairman/CEO Tim Leiweke has frequently walked that route to the arena, which was built by local suppliers to reduce the transportation of materials, is entirely powered by electricity to eliminate the use of gas on site and even collects rain to water its plants and flush its toilets. “Co-op Live is going to be the most sustainable arena in the U.K. and one of the most in the world,” he tells Billboard. “It is our intent, our ambition and our commitment to be carbon neutral, but it takes a year to be certified” with an “excellent” rating from the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method, run by U.K. accreditation service BRE Global.
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A veteran of the live sector — and of innovation in arena construction, specifically — who once served as president of AEG, Leiweke is known for his enthusiasm for ambitious new projects like Co-op Live and Green Operations & Advanced Leadership (GOAL), a sustainability program developed by founding members OVG; State Farm Arena and its NBA sports tenant the Atlanta Hawks; Fenway Sports Group; and green building expert Jason F. McLennan for arenas, stadiums, convention centers and other venues. “I love GOAL. It’s the most important thing we’ve done toward sustainability,” Leiweke says. “It’s hugely important that we get other people in the industry committed to GOAL. That’s one of [OVG’s] highest priorities.”
Building Co-op Live is only the latest milestone in OVG’s commitment to creating more sustainable concert spaces that began with its billion-dollar, four-year renovation of Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena (formerly Key Arena), which reopened in late 2021. Now OVG is working to bring sustainability to each of the more than 400 buildings it owns, operates or partners with.
“As an industry, we are a lightning rod of attention,” Leiweke says. “Can we use that platform that has such a big profile to be an example of tackling this issue and doing the right thing?”
A rendering of U.K. venue Co-op Live, where a pedestrian path encourages foot travel to the arena.
Courtesy of Oak View Group
During Climate Pledge Arena’s renovation, OVG floated its iconic roof in the air for conservation — Seattle designated Key Arena’s exterior a municipal landmark in 2017 — and overhauled the 60-year-old building to consume zero fossil fuel, use solar panels for 100% renewable energy power and employ a “Rain to Rink” system harvesting water off the roof to help create the ice for NHL tenant the Seattle Kraken. Naming-rights partner Amazon chose the new arena’s moniker, basing it on its Climate Pledge with environmental advocacy group Global Optimism. Today, it’s a zero-waste venue without single-use plastics — and was the first arena to achieve International Living Future Institute Zero Carbon Certification, meaning it’s energy-efficient, combustion-free and powered entirely by renewable sources.
After working with OVG on Climate Pledge, Amazon provided its web services software to track venue performance for sustainability measures such as energy and water use, greenhouse gas emissions and waste management. In October 2021, OVG and fellow founding members launched GOAL to provide resources to venues exploring how to operate more sustainably.
“You don’t have to be Climate Pledge Arena and chances are you won’t be, at least not at first,” says Kristen Fulmer, OVG head of sustainability and director of GOAL. “It’s important that we meet operators where they are and make incremental improvements over time.”
Take OVG’s newly built Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert, Calif., as an example. It’s surrounded by drought-resistant plants, uses electric Zambonis to maintain the ice used by AHL team the Coachella Valley Firebirds, runs on solar panels covering its parking lot and is sunk 25 feet below grade to limit exposure of its exterior facade and thus reduce its HVAC dependence. Parking lot lights are on dusk-to-dawn sensors, the venue composts, and prepaid parking reduces the time cars spend idling.
“When you open a venue that has all these elements already designed into it, [sustainability] becomes part of your daily procedure,” Acrisure senior vp John Page says. And GOAL provides a “tracking system that allows us to evaluate on an ongoing basis how we can lower our carbon footprint” and reach a target of carbon neutrality by 2025.
As with Acrisure, GOAL’s approach to sustainability often utilizes creative solutions to regional issues, a practice made easier by the data it collects from its now 50 members. (Leiweke intends to double that number by the end of 2024.) “No one does a better job than State Farm Arena on recycling,” Leiweke says. “We brought them in and said, ‘Great, write the playbook.’ And then we bring in all of the other people in our industry that we see as best in class on green and sustainability and say, ‘Great, write that playbook.’ ”
Even with its collected best practices, Leiweke says, “Amazingly, many people turn down [GOAL] because they say it will cost too much money, which is ridiculous. How much do you think it’s going to cost to replace the Earth?” It’s true that upfront costs are higher at OVG’s tricked-out-for-sustainability venues — but, Leiweke insists, GOAL’s energy tracking and operational data will prove they’re saving money in the long term. “It’s usually about how long you’re looking at the budget,” Fulmer says, “and usually it will pay for itself.”
In the meantime, there are ways to defray costs. Corporate partners, Fulmer explains, are often eager to contribute funding for environmental causes, promote their own sustainability agendas or both. GOAL helps those that want to back specific measures — say, funding a venue’s switch from plastic to compostable cups — to team up with venues in exchange for on-site branding or activations.
As artists calculate their carbon footprint for upcoming tours, GOAL venues and partners can provide numbers, as well as initiatives and proposals, to lessen a tour’s impact.
“Do I think it makes a difference that Billie Eilish is going to play my venue when she has a choice because she knows how committed we are to sustainability? 100%,” Leiweke says. “But that’s not the only reason we did it. We did it because we should all be doing this.”
This story will appear in the March 30, 2024, issue of Billboard.
On its surface, Cali Vibes seems like a normal music festival. In February, the three-day Long Beach, Calif., event held its third annual edition, welcoming 20,000 fans per day with a bill topped by Gwen Stefani, Stick Figure, Slightly Stoopid and Rebelution. But a closer look reveals quiet innovation. Attendees drink from reusable plastic cups instead of single-use ones. Solar panels power the artists lounge. Staff members posted at each garbage station advise guests on whether waste should be thrown away, recycled or composted. Excess food is donated to local shelters.
The festival is a fun time — and a testing ground for sustainability initiatives that may eventually be used throughout the live sector. In 2023, Goldenvoice parent company AEG Presents designated Cali Vibes as an incubator to pilot green measures with the hope of expanding them across AEG’s festival portfolio. Cali Vibes designed its program in partnership with Three Squares, a Los Angeles-based environmental consulting firm.
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“Environment is part of the DNA of the festival,” says Goldenvoice vp of festivals Nic Adler, who in his position oversees California festivals including Cali Vibes, Cruel World, Just Like Heaven, Portola, Camp Flog Gnaw and Goldenvoice’s other “non-desert” (i.e., not Coachella or Stagecoach) events, which all typically draw between 20,000 and 30,000 fans per day.
“Cali Vibes is definitely the greenest one,” says Adler, who also helps book the shows, which focus on reggae, roots rock and hip-hop. “It’s harder to do something on the scale of 125,000 people a day [like Coachella or Stagecoach] versus 30,000, so the festivals we oversee are testing grounds for our larger events.
“We’re all aware that bringing 50 truckloads of stuff and 50,000 people to a site is not sustainable,” he continues. “But there’s a way to go at it where everybody does better.”
Goldenvoice doesn’t promote Cali Vibes as a green festival — but it certainly could. That starts with how fans reach the festival grounds at Long Beach’s Marina Green Park. Cali Vibes promotes public transit use by offering attendees free or discounted rides through a partnership with L.A. Metro and electric scooter company Bird. (Scientists cite the emissions from fan travel as the single biggest challenge in greening concerts.) This year, most Cali Vibes transport vehicles were electric. While the festival can’t control how artists arrive at the site or how the event’s equipment is delivered, its “no idling” rule reduces emissions by requiring cars and gas-powered golf carts to be turned off when not in motion. Adler says the rule will likely be implemented at Coachella 2024.
Reusable cups from r.Cup were the rule.
Nicolita Bradley
Elsewhere, festival signage is made from wood so it can be reused, while thousands of square feet of plastic banners at stages are taken by upcycling company Rewilder after the event wraps and sewn into tote bags and backpacks sold at the following year’s merchandise stand. Unsold merch is refashioned into staff uniforms. This year, the festival’s reusable cup program, r.Cup, had an 81% return rate, which translated to the elimination of 300,000 single-use plastic cups. Water is served in aluminum cans, and refill stations are located throughout the event. Each ticket includes a $5 sustainability charge — Adler says it helps fans “feel like they’re participating” — which is split between greening festival operations and nonprofits including Surfrider Foundation and Plastic Pollution Coalition; Cali Vibes has donated $130,000 since the program’s inception.
Such forward-facing initiatives are crucial, Adler explains, because “festivals are inherently discovery-based in terms of new music, new people, new food” and can instill new habits that might stick with attendees. “We are an example,” he says, that could inspire fans to get their own reusable cup, learn to compost or go vegetarian.
Roughly 20% to 30% of food vendors at Goldenvoice festivals are vegan, with all vendors required to offer at least one vegetarian option. When Morrissey and Siouxsie Sioux headlined Cruel World in 2022 and 2023, respectively, both artists required that meat not be sold, resulting in roughly 80% vegan options — and demonstrating the power artists have to demand sustainability initiatives. Meanwhile, festival staff collect and compost food waste from vendors and divert excess food to local nonprofits and homeless shelters.
Beyond the solar-powered artists lounge — which Adler says has become a point of pride even if it isn’t “that great-looking” — the fest has shifted to clean energy in several areas, including solar-powered light towers in parking lots, merch stations and bathroom zones, and battery-powered LED lights in some locations. In 2023, the use of renewable diesel in generators and heavy equipment eliminated 43 tons of carbon emissions.
And since festival greening often means entering unknown territory, Adler says his team “spends a lot of the year going to random parking lots to meet someone to test a solar battery. We’ve seen more things we don’t like than things that will work, but that’s the process to find the right products.”
Staffers served as garbage station guides.
Juliana Bernstein
When it comes to green initiatives, Adler thinks the live sector is “crossing the threshold.” As sustainable technologies become more widely available and adopted, “the more prices are going to come down, so more festivals will want to use solar batteries or electric vans. The minute [the costs] start affecting the bottom line in a positive way, there’s going to be a full push for all of this.”
That hasn’t happened just yet, but even so, Adler can’t “recall a time in this business where it has been easier to use these alternatives.” He predicts that in five to 10 years, green energy tech will be established and affordable enough for producers to feel confident using it for large-scale stages and other major energy use points.
But for Adler, the goal is not necessarily to create a zero-emissions festival — “If you restrict it too much, people might not come back” — but instead an enjoyable, inspiring environment that implements and showcases ever-improving sustainability components and which vendors, artists and fans are happy to return to.
“You must create the opportunity for people to do the right thing,” he says. “That’s what our team is focused on the most: Have we created enough opportunities for people to participate in doing better?”
This story will appear in the March 30, 2024, issue of Billboard.
For decades, festivals have created weekendlong oases for music fans — and left a mind-boggling amount of waste in their wakes. But as artists and fans increasingly learn about their impact on the environment, eco-minded — and creative — organizers have started pushing to make festivals greener.
Whether headliner- (solar power) or supporting act-size (“Pee into tea,” anyone?), their ideas are making the live space more sustainable. Just imagine if they could all happen in one place. Below, Billboard digs into a look at the eco-friendly festival of the future.
Catch Some Rays
Illustration by Sinelab
Most festival stages are powered by generators burning diesel fuel, but advances in solar technology now make it possible to store and generate enough power to meet a major festival’s heavy energy needs. Late last year, Massive Attack announced Act 1.5, the first 100% solar-powered festival in the United Kingdom, with the help of solar panels and battery packs that store sufficient energy on site without needing diesel generators.
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It Takes a Village
Illustration by Sinelab
Tennessee’s Bonnaroo offers fans interested in sustainability a dedicated place at the festival to organize and learn about new green efforts proposed by its nonprofit division, Bonnaroo Works Fund. That includes the Roo Works cafe, where green entrepreneurs can pitch their ideas in a group setting; a nonprofit village where patrons can interact with green groups; a “learning garden” highlighting sustainable farming practices; and a volunteer program called Rooduce, Roouse and Roocycle.
Keeper Cups
Illustration by Sinelab
Single-use beverage cups are a major source of festival landfill waste. Companies like r.Cup have begun working with major promoters like Goldenvoice to switch to washable, reusable cups, which are collected each night and washed at a local cleaning center. In 2023, r.Cup’s program diverted 1.1 tons (roughly 30,000 cups per day) of waste from local landfills.
Plant Seeds of Change
Illustration by Sinelab
To offset the carbon dioxide emissions of large events, promoters are increasingly planting trees and creating forest reserves. Groups like the European Festival Forest focus their offset efforts in certain regions of the globe, like Iceland, while other organizers plant and restore forests at festival sites for future concertgoers’ benefit.
Making (Vegan) Concessions
Illustration by Sinelab
In 2022, Goldenvoice’s Cruel World Festival in Pasadena, Calif., launched the largest vegan and vegetarian dining pavilion for any festival west of the Mississippi, with 10 vegan and 20 vegetarian vendors offering items like maneatingplant’s vegan bao buns, dairy-free milkshakes from Monty’s Good Burger and plant-based sushi burritos from Oona Sushi.
Water Works
Illustration by Sinelab
Last year, Amsterdam’s DGTL festival launched an initiative to protect the site’s limited groundwater supply — it’s located within an industrial port in the city — by partnering with local sanitation companies to, well, “make tea out of pee.” By harnessing the same water purification technology that’s used to convert wastewater in space, DGTL created water reuse applications that will likely be expanded in the future.
Wipe Deforestation Out
Illustration by Sinelab
Festivals like Lollapalooza and Outside Lands have switched to bamboo-based toilet paper this year, not because of the material’s post-flush qualities but to help curb deforestation. Bamboo grows much faster than trees cultivated for paper products, and activists see it as a possible long-term solution to the developing world’s need for lumber, which is increasing in price as deforestation continues.
Start a Movement
Illustration by Sinelab
For its Music of the Spheres tour, Coldplay deployed a kinetic dancefloor, harnessing the crowd’s movement to activate LED lights and other visuals — and to generate electricity that was then routed to power elements of the production. On the tour, custom-made Energy Centers were also assembled in a circle for fans to generate energy by riding stationary bikes.
Wrist Watch
Illustration by Sinelab
Light-up wristbands are now common audience accessories on major tours (and at some festivals), though some activists worry about the waste they create. For its Music of the Spheres tour, Coldplay partnered with Canadian company Pixmob to make biodegradable light-up wristbands — the first of their kind — from compostable plant-based plastics. Now Pixmob only makes biodegradable wristbands, having done so for events like the Super Bowl and the Olympic Games and tours by Taylor Swift and Imagine Dragons.
This story will appear in the March 30, 2024, issue of Billboard.
On February’s Top Tours list, U2 is in the winner’s circle with monthly earnings of $56.5 million from 166,000 tickets sold.
February is U2’s first month at No. 1, after sitting at No. 2 in December of 2019 and 2023, both behind Trans-Siberian Orchestra. This marks the first Irish act to claim monthly honors.
Since launching in 2019, the monthly Boxscore recap has detailed touring breakthroughs, particularly in country and Latin music — highlighted by Morgan Wallen and Bad Bunny, respectively — as well as reporting quirks along the way, including Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s dual coastal ensembles during the holiday season. The latest oddity: U2’s recent domination makes the band the first act to lead Top Tours without actually going on tour.
The group’s haul north of $50 million comes from 10 shows, all at Las Vegas’ Sphere. The rock quartet christened the Sin City arena with the first show from its U2:UV Achtung Baby Live residency in September, and to date, is still the only act to play at the venue. Concert series by Dead & Company and Phish are scheduled for later on Sphere’s 2024 calendar.
Residencies at this scale – 40 arena shows in six months – are unprecedented. Prior to U2’s kickoff, Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars were the only residency acts to crack the top 10 of Top Tours. The traditional Vegas model is for acts such as them to play sold-out theaters to roughly 5,000 fans each night, with the flexibility to charge extravagant prices for the opportunity to see an A-list artist in a more intimate setting.
U2 is playing by similar rules, with its $340 average ticket within 5% of Mars (No. 19), but expanded to an arena audience. Demonstrating the same intensity of demand as theater residencies but broadened to an audience three times as big, U2’s monthly victory, ahead of stadium tours at Nos. 2-3, is groundbreaking.
With all that activity from one arena, U2 also crown Top Boxscores, with Sphere reigning as the month’s top-grossing venue. Both victories were decisive, by a margin of more than 3:1.
U2’s recent run began on Jan. 26 and stretched through March 2, earning $84.7 million during that period. Dating back to opening night (Sept. 29, 2023, and through its close on March 2), the U2: UV Achtung Baby Live residency brought in $244.5 million and sold 663,000 tickets over 40 shows.
That is the lowest show count – by far – for any residency with a gross of $100 million or more. Mars and Billy Joel (Madison Square Garden) are the only others with a nine-digit gross and fewer than 100 shows.
Former chart-topper P!nk is No. 2 on Top Tours with a $48.3 million gross. Shows from the Australian leg of the Summer Carnival Tour sold 437,000 tickets in February, marking the highest attendance total of the month. This is P!nk’s third time at No. 2, following stints in April 2019 and August 2023, adding to her three months at No. 1 (March 2019, July 2019, October 2023).
Oceania brought in more revenue than North America or Europe on P!nk’s I’m Not Dead Tour (2006-07), the Funhouse Tour (2009) and The Truth About Love Tour (2013-14). Her recent leg, stretching through March 23, marks her first time in stadiums in Australia and New Zealand, having made the outdoor transition elsewhere on the Beautiful Trauma World Tour (2018-19).
Including her March dates, P!nk’s 20 continental shows grossed $104.3 million and sold 980,000 tickets, bringing the tour’s total to $361.8 million and 2.8 million tickets. With more dates scheduled in the U.S. and Canada, and Europe through November, the Summer Carnival will easily become P!nk’s first to cross $400 million. The Beautiful Trauma World Tour came agonizingly close when it wrapped in 2019 with $397.3 million.
Karol G follows at No. 3, leading a trifecta of Latin stars in the top 10. Luis Miguel sits just beneath at No. 4, and Bad Bunny rounds out the group at No. 10. Across shows in the U.S. (Bad Bunny), Mexico (Karol G) and South America (Luis Miguel).
Stars of the 21st century fill out most of the rest of the top 10, with Madonna, Depeche Mode, Blink-182 and the Eagles filling out Nos. 5 and 7-9, respectively. Ed Sheeran rounds out the top 10 at No. 6 as the last of six $30 million tours from February. Emerging from the slow winter months, the last time more acts crossed the $30 million threshold was August, when Beyoncé led P!nk, Metallica, Morgan Wallen, The Weeknd, Drake and the Jonas Brothers.
Behind Sphere as the month’s top venue, London’s O2 Arena and Sydney’s Qudos Bank Arena bring the U.K. and Australia to the top of the heap at Nos. 2-3, respectively, peppered by Melbourne’s Rod Laver Arena at No. 6 and Manchester’s AO Arena at No. 7.
A version of this story will appear in the March 30, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Long before Billie Eilish became a global superstar, she says she was “notorious” among her friends for something else entirely. “When I would get a present, I would carefully undo the tape and carefully unwrap it and not let it rip and I would fold it up so that it could be reused — I didn’t want to destroy it,” she says with a sincere chuckle.
In the eco-conscious house where Eilish grew up, everything — wrapping paper included — was treated as reusable. In 2012, with the help of a government rebate program, the family transitioned its Los Angeles home to run on solar power. And, in 2014, Eilish’s parents, Patrick O’Connell and Maggie Baird, removed the grass from their front yard to save water. “Those were big moments for us,” Baird recalls. “We were excited.”
When Eilish, then in her early teens, started taking label meetings in 2016, her mother came along for the ride — for myriad business reasons, including keeping sustainability at the forefront of her daughter’s career. Baird recalls “begging” labels to provide more information about their environmental initiatives and policies, and often wondered why she and her teenage daughter were the ones who had to raise the issue in the first place. (Eilish signed with The Darkroom in 2016, an imprint of Universal Music Group subsidiary Interscope Records.)
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Today, Eilish and Baird are still talking about the environment — to much larger audiences than they were nearly a decade ago — while also leading the charge for the future of sustainability in music. In 2020, Baird founded Support + Feed, which aims to mitigate climate change and increase food security by encouraging the acceptance and accessibility of plant-based food, including at large-scale events like concerts. Eilish partnered with the organization on her 2022 Happier Than Ever tour, which, according to REVERB, a nonprofit dedicated to addressing environmental concerns in the music business, saved 8.8 million gallons of water by serving plant-based meals for the artists and crew.
And last year, Eilish helped launch and fund REVERB’s Music Decarbonization Project, which aims to ultimately eliminate carbon emissions created by the music industry. As part of the initiative, she partially powered her headlining set at Chicago’s Lollapalooza last summer with zero-emissions battery systems that were charged on a temporary “solar farm” set up on site. (In 2024, Willie Nelson’s Luck Reunion festival partnered with REVERB for a second consecutive year to power its main stage with 100% solar energy all day.)
Eilish’s sustainability efforts go far beyond her touring. In 2022, she worked with Nike to redesign the brand’s iconic Air Force 1 shoes to be vegan using vegan nubuck leather made with 80% recycled materials and 100% recycled polyester. More recently, in October she starred in a Gucci campaign that featured its classic 1955 Horsebit bag in Demetra, a vegan alternative to leather made from 75% plant-derived raw materials — a first for the brand.
“Yeah, we’re all going to die soon,” Eilish says matter-of-factly. “But we can try our best.”
Billie Eilish (left) and Maggie Baird at Overheated in 2023.
Jessie Morgan
Growing up, why was sustainability such a priority for the family?
Billie Eilish: It wasn’t even something I really thought about; it was such a normal thing. My mom started making these bags in these different types of beautiful fabrics and ribbons, and that’s how all of our presents were wrapped for Christmas and my birthday. When I would have parties, friends would come over and bring me presents in wrapping paper and I would be like, “Ew, this is so ugly.” We always used dish towels instead of paper napkins — everything was reusable, truly. And I didn’t even know it was weird. When I started dating, the people I was dating would be like, “Do you have any paper towels?”
Maggie Baird: You’re four-and-a-half years [younger than your brother], Finneas… [he] remembers [the] transition more. We always joke that my kids grew up in the house where you got the stink eye if you came in with a plastic bag or if you wasted anything.
Eilish: I even think to a fault sometimes, I’m so unable to just throw things away in the trash. If I get food out with a friend I literally have to separate everything. Like, it’s genuinely annoying. I wish I just didn’t care and could throw it all in the garbage and that could be the end of it.
When Billie was starting out, were there any blueprints for making a music career sustainable or were you making your own?
Eilish: There’s always somebody that paved the way for you, but I got to be real: It was bleak out here. We would be in meetings for things and my mom would [ask], “What are you guys doing to be more resourceful and conscious?” And they’d be like, “Oh, uh, well, you know…” They’d be tripping and stumbling over their words because they’re not doing anything. And it was kind of alarming to find that no one’s really doing anything to better the world. And the problem is, us people living in the world with no power — “us” in terms of anybody — we’re all like, “Oh, don’t use plastic straws. We’re going to use horrible, soggy paper straws to save all the turtles. And we’re going to get electric cars. And we’re going to not use blow dryers,” or whatever it is to save the planet. And then these giant companies are not even doing anything when they have so much more power. We’ve had a lot of conversations and people are trying, but even when they’re trying, they’re like, “Oh, yeah. We’re going to have that in 2026.” And you’re like, “Well, that’s not fast enough.”
Baird: It did feel bleak and very lonely in the beginning. When you’re a smaller artist and you don’t have any power and you don’t have any money, you just find yourself going, “Wait, why do we have all this plastic backstage?” Or, “Why are we driving this way?” Or, “Why are we doing this?” And the answer was, “Well, that’s just the way it’s done.” What really helped me was somebody said, “You need to talk to [Coldplay’s] Chris Martin.” They connected me on a call with Chris, which was amazing. Then Chris connected me to REVERB, and REVERB was a real game-changer for us. They had the ability to help us know what to change and how to communicate.
Do you recommend REVERB to new artists looking for sustainability solutions?
Baird: They do have resources for newer artists because in the beginning, you can’t really afford things and you may not be playing in venues that have a lot of flexibility. There’s a lot of organizations working in this space: Music Sustainability Alliance, Music Declares Emergency. If artists are interested, it does really start with them telling their teams that they care and that it’s foremost in their thoughts. From the beginning, it was about constantly asking questions until people [got] you the answers.
We, as a plant-based family, had all these catering conversations and it was not until Lesley [Olenik, vp of touring at] Live Nation was like, “Well, it sounds like you’d like all plant-based food.” We were like, “Can we do that?” And she was like, “Erykah Badu did.” It’s kind of just knowing what other people are doing. We do have green riders [for] dressing rooms, video shoots and photoshoots. I think those are really, really helpful and highly shareable.
Which of your strides in sustainability are you most proud of?
Eilish: The one that was seen by the most people was getting Oscar de la Renta to stop using fur when they made me a dress for the Met [Gala]. That was really important to me. It’s tough as a person who loves fashion. I’ve tried to be a big advocate of no animal products in clothing and it’s hard. People really like classic things. I get it, I’m one of them. But what’s more important: things being original or our kids being able to live on the planet and them having kids?
Baird: Also, the solar set at Lollapalooza was a huge moment. And Billie also made it possible for us to create two climate summits in London for her fans, Overheated, [which was held in 2022 and 2023]. Getting [London’s] O2 Arena to go fully plant-based for six shows [in 2022] was a monumental feat, and getting plant-based food in every arena on her [Happier Than Ever] tour was amazing. There’s so many amazing wins that Billie herself probably doesn’t even know. I think that the artist’s role is to champion [something] and say that’s what they want, what they believe in and [that they] want to make it happen. It’s the power that they have to say, “This is important to me, and it has to be a priority.”
Billie Eilish (left) and Maggie Baird onstage with panelists at their Overheated climate activism event in London in 2023.
Jessie Morgan
Have you seen labels make sustainability a priority?
Baird: I will say happily that Universal has really come a long way. We had three Universal Music Group Sustainability Summits last year, one in London, one in L.A., one in New York with just UMG employees talking about all the various issues. I used to be like, “Why are we the ones doing this?” Like, why is a 15-year-old girl and her mom talking about this? Why aren’t you telling us, why don’t you have all the advice on this? But gradually they have started to, which I think is really encouraging.
When it comes to pushing for impact over profit, have you experienced any friction?
Baird: Merch becomes a real issue. We look at sustainability in every single aspect: vinyl, packaging, transportation, food. But with merch, Billie is very particular about what her merch looks like.
Eilish: It’s about how it feels and how it looks and how it’s made. And so the problem is to make sure that my clothing is being made well and ethically and with good materials and it’s very sustainable and that it feels good and is durable. It’s going to be more expensive and that’s the thing: People can be upset by that. But I’m trying to pick one of two evils.
Baird: And Billie reduced the number of drops she does. Like, she just literally doesn’t sell as much merch.
Eilish: Sometimes people have the idea of when things are more ethical, they’re more expensive, and so it’s harder to be plant-based or environmentally conscious if you don’t have as much money. That’s the whole system we live in, of like, if you have less money then you have less resources [for] healthier food… And so what we’re trying to do is make it more universally accessible.
You’re working to make vinyl more sustainable. Happier Than Ever came in eight vinyl variants, but you use 100% recycled black vinyl — plus recycled scraps for colored variants — and shrink-wrap made from sugar cane.
Eilish: We live in this day and age where, for some reason, it’s very important to some artists to make all sorts of different vinyl and packaging … which ups the sales and ups the numbers and gets them more money and gets them more…
Baird: Well, it counts toward No. 1 albums.
Eilish: I can’t even express to you how wasteful it is. It is right in front of our faces and people are just getting away with it left and right, and I find it really frustrating as somebody who really goes out of my way to be sustainable and do the best that I can and try to involve everybody in my team in being sustainable — and then it’s some of the biggest artists in the world making f–king 40 different vinyl packages that have a different unique thing just to get you to keep buying more. It’s so wasteful, and it’s irritating to me that we’re still at a point where you care that much about your numbers and you care that much about making money — and it’s all your favorite artists doing that sh-t.
Baird: But to be fair, the problem is systemic, right? Because if Billboard, to be honest, is going to not have limits… I would love to see limits, like no more than four colors. Or some kind of rules, because you can’t fault an artist for playing the No. 1 game.
Eilish: I was watching The Hunger Games and it made me think about it, because it’s like, we’re all going to do it because [it’s] the only way to play the game. It’s just accentuating this already kind of messed up way of this industry working.
How have the industry and fan responses to your efforts shifted over the years?
Baird: You have this amazing power when you’ve got 10,000 to 20,000 people in a venue to see you, who get to hear from you, what you believe in and how you’re trying to change. That fan interaction is incredibly important. If you can educate them to know you can bring your reusable water bottle in and there will be water-filling stations, and there will be plant-based food and it will not be more expensive, and [to think about] how you get to the show and back — which, as we know, the biggest carbon cost is fan transportation. Then we’ve got to get the arena to understand people want these things.
We know from research that fans are more likely to take action if they believe the artist is authentic. Which I think unfortunately scares off a lot of artists because they’re like, “Well, I don’t want to say I’m trying to do X because I’m not perfect on Y.” That’s a barrier that is really challenging to break, especially with social media and the culture of cancel and hate. The truth is, you just have to do it anyway. Artists can cast a giant shadow of influence. If you’re not perfect, but you are influencing many, many, many people to do better, it’s multiplied hundreds of times.
Is there any other part of your career, Billie, that isn’t yet where you would like it to be in terms of sustainability?
Baird: You experienced major touring weather events in 2022 and 2023. We were in an extreme weather event in Mexico City that canceled the show and was quite dangerous. We’ve been in horrific heat. We’ve been in horrific smoke from fires. It’s just a reality of the business, and people have to start to take seriously that this is the biggest threat to touring.
Eilish: It’s a never-ending f–king fight. As we all know, it’s pretty impossible to force someone to care. All you can do is express and explain your beliefs, but a lot of people don’t really understand the severity of the climate [crisis]. And if they do, they’re like, “Well, what’s the point? We’re all going to die anyway.” Believe me, I feel that way too. But “what’s the point” goes both ways: “What’s the point? I can do whatever I want. We’re all going to die anyway.” Or, “What’s the point? I might as well do the right thing while I’m here.” That’s my view.
This story will appear in the March 30, 2024, issue of Billboard.
When South African singer-songwriter Tyla turned 22 years old in late January, she was on top of the world — literally.
Her label, Epic Records, invited a few hundred music executives, artists and fans to Harriet’s Rooftop in West Hollywood, Calif., for her birthday bash. The party was a dual celebration: Tyla had also recently scored her first Grammy Award nomination, for best African music performance — one of three new categories the Recording Academy introduced this year — with her 2023 breakthrough hit, “Water.”
Waiters surprised Tyla — who had transformed a corner of the rooftop bar into her own private VIP section, complete with glam shots of herself decorating the walls — with a glittery sheet cake. Epic chairwoman/CEO Sylvia Rhone and president Ezekiel Lewis presented her with three plaques commemorating the success of “Water”: gold and platinum certifications in over 18 countries (including the United States and South Africa); surpassing 1 billion views on TikTok; and reaching No. 1 on Billboard’s U.S. Afrobeats Songs, Rhythmic Airplay and Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay charts.
Then, five nights later, Tyla got the best belated birthday present of all: her first Grammy, the inaugural win in its category, which Jimmy Jam presented to her during the awards show’s premiere ceremony. “I was in such shock,” Tyla recalls on an early March afternoon. “It’s something that a lot of people strive toward and want to win at least once in their lifetime. And I’m so blessed to have received one so early in my career.”
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But for an artist reflecting on such a joyous moment, Tyla sounds a bit blue speaking to me about her Grammy win today — and understandably so. Just six hours before our chat, she had posted a letter on Instagram announcing the kind of news no young artist wants to reveal: Due to “an injury that’s tragically worsened,” she would be delaying her first headlining North American and European tour and dropping out of a handful of festivals, including Coachella. “It’s difficult because I want to go. It’s the moment that I’ve been waiting for,” she tells me. “It’s not an easy decision, but it’s the right decision.”
Four days later at her Billboard cover shoot, Tyla maintains a level of poise that suggests nothing’s wrong. She gamely plays the part of the glamorous burgeoning pop star, in a fur-print puffer jacket, bra top and mismatched gold hoops that complement the edginess of her eyebrow slit.
This is, after all, a role Tyla has prepared for her whole life. Her co-manager, Colin Gayle, clearly remembers his first meeting with her: “I was like, ‘What do you want to do?’ She said, ‘I want to be Africa’s first pop star.’ ” Gayle, who is also co-founder and CEO of Africa Creative Agency, had recently moved to South Africa when Brandon Hixon — the New York-based co-founder of FAX Records who started managing Tyla in 2018 after discovering her on Instagram — reached out to see if he would meet with Tyla and consider becoming her on-the-ground support. By 2020, Gayle had joined her management team.
AREA jacket and boots, Rui top, Cori! Burns skirt, Hugo Kreit earrings and Jacquie Aiche necklaces.
Ramona Rosales
As a new generation of young African women has broken into mainstream pop music over the past few years (including Beninese Nigerian singer Ayra Starr, whom Tyla collaborated with on “Girl Next Door,” and fellow South African DJ Uncle Waffles, whom she performed with in September in New York), Tyla has emerged with a unique blend of sounds dubbed “popiano” — a hybrid of pop, R&B and Afrobeats with the shakers, rattling log drums and soulful piano melodies of amapiano. It really popped when she released “Water,” a summer anthem with a sweltering pop/R&B hook (and a subtle sensuality recalling Aaliyah’s “Rock the Boat”) that floats over bubbling log drums.
“Water” opened the floodgates to the global recognition of Tyla’s dreams. The song debuted at No. 67 on the Billboard Hot 100 in October and by January had reached a No. 7 peak. Its viral TikTok dance helped catapult the track onto radio, and Travis Scott and Marshmello eagerly hopped on its remixes. “Water” hit No. 1 on U.S. Afrobeats Songs in October, ending the record 58-week reign of Rema and Selena Gomez’s “Calm Down,” and it has now spent 24 weeks (and counting) atop the chart. Tyla’s catalog has earned 283.7 million official on-demand U.S. streams, according to Luminate — and “Water” is responsible for 236.7 million of them.
On the morning of Nov. 10, 2023, Tyla’s Epic team told her to tune in to the Grammy nominations livestream from her hotel room in New York. “I didn’t even know the label submitted some songs,” she recalls. “When I saw my name, I was like, ‘There’s no way.’ My best friend was jumping in the room with me. I still have the video, and I’m wearing this bodysuit that’s half open. It’s a hectic video, but it showcases the excitement in that moment.”
This year’s best African music performance nominees were predominantly Nigerian artists — Burna Boy (“City Boys”), Davido (“Unavailable”), Asake and Olamide (“Amapiano”) and Starr (“Rush”). Tyla and Musa Keys (who’s featured on Davido’s “Unavailable”) were the only South African acts. Considering the significant inroads Afrobeats has made in the American music market over the last decade, Tyla’s win with an amapiano song wasn’t necessarily likely.
“That category is something that was introduced in my lifetime, and I was the first person to win it. And I’m able to bring it home back to South Africa,” Tyla marvels now, adding that her father has already claimed the trophy to be displayed in his study, along with the rest of her award hardware. “The South African genre of amapiano just started bubbling, and I’m so proud that South Africa has a genre that people are enjoying and paying attention to. I’m super proud of my country and where our sound has gone.”
Diesel dress, Dsquared2 shoes, Jenny Lauren Jewelry bracelet, Letra ring and UNOde50 bracelet and ring.
Ramona Rosales
That sound is just one element of how Tyla represents her home country in her craft, sometimes in ways that the average non-South African consumer might miss. For a late-2023 performance on The Voice, she transformed the stage into a shebeen, an “unlicensed, underground space for drinking and music” where Black South Africans could gather and “speak freely in protest” during apartheid, according to Lior Phillips, author of South African Popular Music (Genre: A 33 1/3 Series). And at the very end of the repeated prechorus of “Water,” Tyla softly exhales “haibo,” a Zulu expression of shock or disbelief. “It’s similar to ‘Yo!’ where you can use it multiple ways,” she explains. “In that [song], I kind of use it in a sassy way.”
But when she performed “Water” during her debut U.S. TV performance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in late October, Tyla replaced it with another South African expression: “Asambe!”
“ ‘Asambe’ in South Africa means ‘Let’s go!’ And she screamed it on the mic. That was pivotal,” recalls her choreographer, Lee-ché Janecke. “It felt awkward at first when we were rehearsing it because we were like, ‘Are we really going to do this on national television in America? Um, yeah, we are!’ As much as it’s one word, it meant the most to South Africa.”
Growing up in the “very lively” city of Johannesburg, Tyla Laura Seethal was always the center of attention. “Even before I could remember, my mother would tell me stories about how when I was small, I would always want to sing for people,” Tyla recalls. “I would pose for people just so they [could] take pictures of me. And I danced for everyone.”
Her parents exposed her to American R&B icons like Stevie Wonder, Brian McKnight, Aaliyah and Whitney Houston; South African pop and house acts like Freshlyground, Mi Casa and Liquideep; and Nigerian Afrobeats superstars like Wizkid, Burna Boy and Davido. When Tyla was 11, she started uploading videos of herself singing covers to YouTube and Instagram, from Billie Eilish’s “Ocean Eyes” to Boyz II Men’s version of “Let It Snow,” and DM’ing them to superstars like Drake and DJ Khaled.
Brielle catsuit, Nissa Jewelry earrings, UNOde50 necklace, Alejandra de Coss bracelet, Letra rings.
Ramona Rosales
While her countless reachouts went unanswered, her Instagram covers caught the attention of Garth von Glehn, a Zimbabwean director and photographer based between Cape Town and New York. When he first emailed her, Tyla worried it was a scam — but after a few weeks, she agreed to meet von Glehn with her parents.
Ultimately, Tyla spent every weekend of her final year of high school at his studio loft, writing and recording music, shooting music videos and conducting photo shoots with her best friend Thato Nzimande. Von Glehn’s loft was “a creative artist hub,” says Janecke, who worked on music video sets with von Glehn and was tapped by him to help train some of the in-house artists during their early development period. One of those artists was Tyla.
“She just had this thing in her eyes that she wants this!” Janecke exclaims. “And wanting it makes me feel like, ‘OK, I’m going to push more with this person.’ If you’re hungry, and that hunger never stops, that’s my girl. And she has been that girl since that point.”
Tyla’s parents, however, remained skeptical that the path of an artist was the right one for her — so, to appease them, she applied to university to study mining engineering, a field she picked only because “it was the job that was going to give me the most money.” But after “a lot of convincing and a lot of crying,” her parents allowed her a trial gap year after she graduated from high school in 2019 so she could prove that a full-time music career would pan out.
Working with Kooldrink, a producer living in von Glehn’s house, Tyla started “to experiment and find out the sound that I wanted to have.” At the time, amapiano was taking over South African dancefloors and radio stations alike. Meaning “the pianos” in Zulu, amapiano originated in the South African townships in the mid-2010s as a hybrid of deep house, jazz and kwaito music and was popularized by Kabza De Small and DJ Maphorisa, among others.
Ramona Rosales
After first hearing amapiano in high school, when a classmate played her Kwiish SA’s “Iskhathi (Gong Gong),” Tyla wanted to put her own spin on the genre. “Amapiano songs were like eight minutes, 10 minutes at that time,” Tyla told Billboard in October, when she was honored as R&B/Hip-Hop Rookie of the Month. “And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s a bit too long! Let me make an amapiano song that has the normal format of a pop song or an R&B song.” She experimented with that formula on her scintillating debut single, “Getting Late,” featuring Kooldrink. But after shooting one scene for the video at the beginning of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic broke out and production shut down. With just one year to prove herself to her parents, Tyla feared she had run out of time.
“Even if it only gets 270 views on YouTube and my career fails, I’ll just watch this video on repeat for the rest of my life and I’m pretty sure I’ll be happy,” Tyla posted on Instagram days before the “Getting Late” video eventually premiered in January 2021. The outcome quashed all of her previous concerns: The clip, which has since garnered more than 9 million YouTube views, earned a music video of the year nomination at the 2022 South African Music Awards, and FAX Records’ Hixon sent it to Epic’s Rhone and Lewis.
“This could be the vehicle to take Africa to the world in a way that it has never been exported before,” Lewis recalls thinking. The “Getting Late” video started a label bidding war, but thanks to Hixon’s established business relationship with Lewis and Rhone — and with a little help from multiple “Love, Sylvia Rhone from Epic” billboards with Tyla’s face on them placed around Johannesburg — Tyla chose Epic.
“It was a very competitive signing. We wanted something authentic, sincere and personal — especially since we’re 10,000-plus miles away,” Rhone says of her tactic. “That’s what sealed the deal.”
Tyla can still picture the first time she left South Africa, in 2021. “I remember looking outside of the plane and crying,” she says, “and being like, ‘What the heck is this?!’”
She was en route to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where Epic had assembled various American, European and African songwriters and producers, including three-time Grammy winner (and former Epic president of A&R) Tricky Stewart, and put them in a writing camp just for her. “At the time, we couldn’t get the resources and the people [to South Africa] to make it happen,” Lewis explains. “So I figured out randomly by looking at the map that Dubai would be a place that would host us all. That’s a very expensive proposition, a very ambitious sort of undertaking, but she was worth it.”
Ramona Rosales
For the next two-and-a-half years, Epic’s development of Tyla became a truly global endeavor, taking her and a rotating group of hit-makers to Ghana, Nigeria, Tanzania, South Africa, Jamaica, the United Kingdom, the United States and beyond to write and record her self-titled debut album. The sessions helped Tyla gain more formal studio recording experience, while also establishing her “Fantastic Four” team of creative collaborators: Ari PenSmith, Mocha Bands, Believve and Sammy SoSo, who all contributed to “Water,” the “summer banger” that Tyla felt had been missing from her album. In keeping with the project’s international genesis, the song was “produced in London, then finished in LA, written and vocal demo done in ATL then recorded in Cape Town,” as SoSo wrote on Instagram.
“I was actually driving in Portland [Ore.] with my family and I started listening to [“Water”] on my phone. I literally stopped the car and pulled over,” Hixon recalls of his initial reaction. “My wife and my kids were like, ‘What’s going on?’ And I was like, ‘Yo, this sh-t is crazy!’ ”
Tyla and her team instantly knew “Water” was going to be big, and she wanted to find a way to make it even bigger. One night at around 10:30 p.m., a few days before the song dropped, Tyla called Janecke and Nzimande to brainstorm choreography ideas. She had always loved the Pretoria-based Bacardi style of dancing — which synchronizes booty shaking and intricate footwork with a song’s fast-paced rhythm — and had incorporated it into a different song from her live sets that always generated a crazy crowd reaction. Tyla asked Janecke if he could create a Bacardi-inspired dance for “Water,” and within an hour, he drafted a TikTok video of his original routine and sent it to her. “She goes, ‘Post! Post this right now!’ ” he recalls excitedly. “She was going crazy over this pocket of hands up, hands down, throw it to the side, boom. Booty on log drum! Throw it to the other side. Booty on log drum!”
When she performed the dance for the first time at the self-proclaimed world’s biggest Afrobeats festival, Afro Nation Portugal, in July, Janecke had Tyla’s backup dancers pour water bottles on her. A month later, while rehearsing for her Giants of Africa festival set in Rwanda, she suggested simply pouring the water bottle on herself — a choreography tweak that proved to be social media gold. One festival attendee posted a video of the revised “Water” routine on her Instagram Story and Tyla asked for the footage, reposting to her own account shortly before jetting back to South Africa. When she landed almost four hours later, the video had amassed more than 5 million views. (It now has over 21 million.)
Tyla’s natural dance ability — and her instincts for the kind of performance that would most resonate on the internet — continued to draw in fans as she began performing on TV, appearances that, co-manager Gayle says, “cemented her as an artist.” But keeping her audience engaged and growing required more than one hit single. The Tyla EP arrived in early December, with “Water,” its Scott remix and three new songs — intended, Lewis explains, to give fans “a taste of other layers of the artist so that it becomes bigger than a track proposition and turns into an artist proposition.”
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The mini project also introduced a playful new focus track, “Truth or Dare,” which came with its own viral TikTok choreography. “Truth or Dare” and another EP track, the 1990s R&B-inspired “On and On,” became two more top 10 hits on the U.S. Afrobeats Songs chart for Tyla, peaking at Nos. 3 and 10, respectively, and “Truth or Dare” has been steadily climbing at radio, reaching No. 22 on Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay and No. 24 on Rhythmic Airplay.
The momentum of her other songs perfectly set the stage for the March 22 release of Tyla’s self-titled debut. It’s bittersweet that she can’t promote it live — yet — in the way she has proved to be so skilled, and for the moment, neither Tyla nor her label will reveal anything more about her injury. So for now, the music will have to speak for itself.
Over 14 tracks, Tyla polishes her popiano sound, finding the sweet spot between African and American music with R&B melodies, amapiano production and exquisite pop writing. “We traveled the world to make this record, and that’s why the world is reflected in this record,” Lewis says. Mexican American star Becky G joins her for the smooth, Afrobeats-meets-Latin dancefloor number “On My Body”; rapper Gunna and Jamaican dancehall artist Skillibeng help coax out her more braggadocious side on “Jump”; and Tyla brings other stars from her home continent along for the ride, blending beautifully with Nigerian singer-songwriter-producer Tems on “No. 1” and cooing over South African DJ-producer Kelvin Momo’s slow-burning amapiano production on “Intro.” “I had this voice note on my phone of the song playing and people talking in the back. I remember loving the slang that we were using and just the sound of a South African studio session,” Tyla says. “I knew I wanted that for my intro.”
And while her fans will have to wait to see her live (in her Instagram note, Tyla said she hoped to be “ready to return safely onstage this summer”), they can still see the kind of performer Tyla is in her Gap Spring 2024 Linen Moves campaign, which reimagines Jungle’s viral “Back on 74” music video. She wants to keep branching out into fashion, too, or perhaps dabble in makeup and acting. “People are going to see me everywhere,” she promises. “So if you don’t like me, I’m sorry.”
Tyla dreamed for years of becoming Africa’s first pop star — and she isn’t about to let one setback stop her. “I’m really confident in what I’ve created. Now’s a time where I can showcase a performance style where I’m not really dancing as much. Maybe I strip back a little bit more and I’m just serving vocals,” she muses. “But there’s no way to stop me. I’m always going to find a way.”
This story will appear in the March 30, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Initially, BossMan Dlow didn’t think he crafted a breakout hit in “Get In With Me” — after recording the track last year, he quickly discarded it into his dossier of files and got back to working on his next hopeful street anthem. But he’s happy to be wrong: the song become his debut entry on the Billboard Hot 100 in mid-February and has since reached a No. 49 high in five weeks on the chart. In the March 1-7 tracking week, “Get In With Me” earned 9.6 million official U.S. streams, according to Luminate.
The 25-year-old credits the slick rhymes on the trunk-rattling single to the alcohol flowing through him during a November studio session in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “Patrón was talking to me,” he tells Billboard. “That beat came on and I think I had just spent $1250 on some shoes — so that was in my brain, ‘Pair of shoes $1250.’ It just came to me on some drunk s–t to be real.”
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Dlow motivates listeners with his work hard, play hard mentality stacking paper and getting fly to floss on the competition. (“You wanna be a boss, you gotta pay the price,” he raps on “Get In With Me.”) And he isn’t apologizing for his making recent waves in the industry, either, breaking through after pounding on rap’s door seeking entry since 2019 (“I’m trying to step on they throat — ya hear me”).
He signed a record deal with Alamo Records last summer, and he’s the latest integral piece to an already-loaded R&B/hip-hop roster that boasts stars Rod Wave and Lil Durk. And with a label team in tow, life is moving faster than ever for the burgeoning Florida native. He’ll look to stay hot with the release of his gritty Mr. Beat the Road mixtape on Friday (March 15). The 17-track project boasts features from Sexyy Red, Rob49 and more.
Below, Dlow tells Billboard about the success of “Get In With Me,” manifesting a Future collab and his entrepreneurial plans outside of music.
Did you know “Get In With Me” was a hit when you first recorded it?
Hell nah. I had just ran through it. I heard the beat and that probably took me 45 minutes to an hour and then I was like, “You know what? F–k it, next song.” Type of s–t. That’s just another song. [I’m] punching in freestyling. I used to write. Now I don’t be having no time like that. I just go in that b—h and speak my mind, which is a little better.
Where were you eating hibachi on the 50th floor?
That’s boss activity. Get you a bad b—h and take her to the 50th floor and order the most expensive s–t you can. You know, just living life. Doing s–t to talk about doing s–t.
When did you know it was a hit outside your fanbase?
When I first did the freestyle, the s–t went up to like 200,000 likes. I ain’t never had that many likes. Then it was people reposting it. Rod Wave, Moneybagg Yo, even Ciara posted it, DaBaby wanted to get on it. He posted it. A lot of reaction from big rappers too so it’s really crazy.
I saw Quavo using your lyrics in an Instagram caption. What do you think about seeing that?
That s–t crazy. From playing these dudes’ [songs] to now they playing my music. I never talked to him, he just did that.
What was your reaction to making the Hot 100?
The s–t just keep getting crazier and crazier. That’s hard as f–k to do, bro. Especially rap music. It’s unbelievable.
Do you ever have the mentality of “I’m trying to make the Hot 100” when making music?
Nah, I was really in the streets. This is new to me. So my manager telling me, “You at No. 52 on Billboard [Hot 100].” Like damn, Billboard?! I don’t really know what it mean but you know that s–t is hard.
What do you think about “Get In With Me” taking off on TikTok and helping promote it?
Yeah, I seen Lil Baby posted it. It’s crazy. I really didn’t know that song was gonna do all that. That’s what I learned. It be the songs you don’t like. That’s just how it goes. I’m not saying like I thought it was trash, I’m saying more I put it to the [side] like this ain’t one of ‘em. This ain’t my main focus.
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How’d you link up with the producer Dxntemadeit?
Yeah, I f–k with bro. Bro was in the studio with us and we got a couple beats off him. I f–k with his selection and how he make his beats. We started working and we gonna keep it going. We got us some [more] s–t coming for sure.
How did you end up signing with Alamo last year? The label is loaded with you, Lil Durk and Rod Wave to name a few.
Real street. My music started off in Tallahassee and started swinging its way up north and down south in Florida. Couple rappers were reposting my music from the start, and it ended up having me to keep going. [I signed with Alamo during] Last year around August or September. Yeah, we finna crush. We got no time to play.
What was your childhood like growing up? I know you were a hoops fan.
Yeah, Port Salerno. Small hood running around doing kid s–t. Riding dirt bikes and s–t. Couple of streets to ride on, couple of dirt path roads to ride on. Play a little basketball and it’s really just the streets after that. You’ll catch the streets young where I’m from. It’s all around. You end up doing street s–t and then you end up in trouble and then you end up all in now. Just some small city.
Who were some of your early music inspirations?
My people used to play old-school music. I used to play Lil Wayne, Wiz Khalifa. That was my s–t.
What did you find so appealing about Future’s music?
He’s been going for a long time and he can drop a hit whenever he wants to. It speaks for itself. I want to be long-lasting like that. He’s probably looking at 20 years right now.
We’re gonna get that Dlow and Future collab?
We definitely gon’ get it.
I read you wanted to change your name from BossMan Dlow. What was it gonna be?
Yeah, in 2019 I was BossMan Dlow and I got locked up and had some s–t to deal with. I didn’t want to get back out and rap with the same name I got locked up in. I was gonna just be Big Za. I had a little music, and I had my listeners knowing me as BossMan Dlow. I didn’t wanna throw them off so I just kept it.
What about “Slide” by H.E.R. helped you get through being locked up?
When I heard it, I just had to go by myself and zone out. I picture me just seat laid back, foreign car, I’m on [Interstate] 95 talking to this b—h and good za. I’m just sliding and handling business. That song put me in that mode for real. I used to play a lot of Roddy Ricch too.
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What are some of your 2024 goals? [Is there] Another project on the way?
We’re trying to go on tour, bro. We trying to get this tour right. We trying to get to the arenas and sell out arenas and make better music. We gon’ stay consistent. We gon’ keep it rolling. Another tape and we gon’ have an album this year too.
Bossing up, what other ventures do you have lined up to create avenues for income outside of music?
I want a trucking business. We gon’ rent and sell cars. We gon’ buy property houses. We gon’ build houses. We gon’ own car washes and restaurants. We gonna do it all. I want every store you pass to be Dlow’s establishment. You could come work for Too Slippery Entertainment.
A version of this story originally appeared in the March 9, 2024, issue of Billboard.
On June 29, 2012, Nick Miller regained consciousness in a Boulder, Colo., hospital room. The day before, he’d overdosed on heroin, the final act of a 10-day drug binge. Coming to, he saw his mother and the sadness in her eyes. He was 21 years old and had been sober for 15 months after time in rehab and years of opiate addiction. He’d been doing so well.
But his mom had known something was off after her son had gone quiet over text and phone. She called a friend of his, insisting they go check on him while she packed a bag and booked the next flight to Denver. The friend found Miller unresponsive, thrust naloxone — the opioid overdose reversal medication — up his nose and dialed 911. If not for his mom’s sense that something was wrong, it’s unlikely that I’d be here in Miller’s house on this chilly February afternoon in Los Angeles to talk with him about his incredible success as electronic producer Illenium. It’s unlikely he’d be here at all.
Sitting in the cave-like home studio within his large and otherwise light-filled house, Miller, 33, dotes on his dogs — the regal Belgian Malinois Grace and a small but fierce blonde dachshund whose dedicated Instagram account has 23,000 followers and for whom the house’s Wi-Fi network, “Palace du Peanut,” is named — holding them in arms covered in sacred geometry and Eye of Sauron tattoos. He makes jokes and direct eye contact, speaks in ski-bum parlance (“fire,” “sick,” “chillin’ ”), endearingly giggles and generally comes off as a person worth rooting for.
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I ask Miller what he’d say to that hospital room version of himself, given everything that has happened since. His answer is immediate: “There’s no way I would have even believed the possibilities.”
Illenium plays Billboard Presents THE STAGE at SXSW on March 16. Get your tickets here.
As Illenium, Miller is one of the most successful electronic acts of the last half-decade, a dance music star in the fireworks and confetti tradition, but with a harder and more rock-oriented sound and sensibility than straightforward main-stage EDM. In a genre known more for talent-heavy festival bills than solo-show hard ticket sales, he’s one of only a handful of artists, like ODESZA and Kaskade, playing venues as massive as stadiums and arenas.
Still, it’s possible you’ve never heard of him. Illenium hasn’t yet had a solo crossover hit (“Takeaway,” his 2019 collaboration with The Chainsmokers and Lennon Stella, hit No. 69 on the Billboard Hot 100 and remains his highest-ranking single on the chart), and unlike some world-famous DJs, he doesn’t frequent fashion shows, post shirtless selfies or chase fame.
He calls himself “very much a homebody,” one who most enjoys staying in and working on music, playing video games and hanging out with his dogs and his wife, Lara. The two met at a festival and married last September in Aspen, Colo., not too far from their primary residence, a 23,000-square-foot estate in the Denver suburb of Cherry Hills. Miller says he only bought the L.A. house in 2021 because “I was spending so much money on hotels and studio spaces here that it made more financial sense.” He has left twice in the last six days, once for a meeting and the other time to play the second of his back-to-back headlining shows at SoFi Stadium.
Louis Vuitton shirt and Askyurself sweater.
Daniel Prakopcyk
These Trilogy performances — so named because they feature three separate Illenium sets over five hours — are the current crown jewel of the Illenium empire. Prior to the Feb. 2 and 3 shows in L.A. (where his team says fans bought $2 million in merchandise alone), last June’s Trilogy concert at Denver’s Mile High stadium grossed $3.9 million and sold 47,000 tickets. It happened amid a 26-date North American tour that sold 191,000 tickets and grossed $15.7 million, according to Billboard Boxscore. His fourth studio album, 2021’s Fallen Embers, earned a Grammy Award nomination for best dance/electronic album, an accomplishment that came months after the debut Trilogy show at Las Vegas’ Allegiant Stadium helped break the pandemic’s pause on live music.
With nearly 33,000 attendees, the July 3, 2021, performance, according to Boxscore, broke the record for the biggest dance music event for a single headliner in U.S. history. At the end of it, Miller told the roaring crowd that for him Trilogy represents “my transition from a f–king sh–ty life. That was my past. So it’s just f–king crazy, this. What the f–k? This is a f–king football stadium.”
Performing from a cryo-spitting tower of LEDs on the 50-yard line was not on Miller’s radar when he started releasing music in 2014. His work helped form the then-emerging future bass subgenre, which, like the bass music that influenced it, is huge and often heavy but also simultaneously soft — like getting hit in the head with a two-by-four wrapped in velvet. Future bass also incorporates more traditional verse/chorus song structures than much of the wilder bass made by Illenium’s influences and peers — Zeds Dead, Excision, SLANDER, Dabin, Said the Sky, Space Laces — and his work also heavily integrates rock, metal, indie and pop sounds. The Illenium oeuvre, developed over his five studio albums, is cinematic, anthemic, often heavy and typically lyrically personal music that mulls deeper themes — love, heartbreak, rage — than standard dance refrains about putting your f–king hands up.
“I’m sensitive,” Miller says, and “for sure” an emotional person. For him, writing music is a form of escape, release and healing, and he thinks listeners can feel the depths he’s pulling from: “A fan who’s going through something — when they listen to something personal, it just bonds in a different way.”
Des Pierrot vest, Jack John Jr. pants, Louis Vuitton shoes.
Daniel Prakopcyk
This bond is a key reason why fans not only love Illenium’s music, but often have devotional relationships with it. The audiences at his shows party and headbang — but there’s also a lot more crying at an Illenium concert than at most electronic sets.
His fusion of bass with traditional song structures has also fueled his broad appeal. UTA’s Guy Oldaker, his longtime agent, came up in the bass scene of Colorado — the genre’s spiritual U.S. home and a huge dance hub, with Denver effectively tied with Miami as the United States’ highest-indexing major market for electronic music streaming, according to Luminate. But Oldaker hadn’t figured out how to cross these artists over into major festivals and Las Vegas residencies, where he says crowds usually want “easily accessible pop music.”
When a promoter sent Oldaker demos by a local producer named Illenium in 2014, “I went, ‘Holy crap, this is exactly what I think will work with this audience in Vegas,’ ” Oldaker recalls. “I know very well how to build an artist in the scene where I’ve built everything else. I knew if I could connect the dots, we’d have a winner.”
Now, after the pandemic deflated his team’s plans for international expansion, Illenium is poised for the kind of global ubiquity Oldaker has long believed he could achieve — that is, if that’s even what he wants. “I go back-and-forth on if I’d rather be a famous world star DJ,” Miller says bluntly, “or just like, kind of be chillin’.”
When Oldaker first met him, Miller was sober — and also deep in the bass scene. He handed out show flyers as an intern for local promoter Global Dance, wrote for electronic music blogs, frequented Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison and Aspen’s Belly Up Tavern and fell in love with the music and community he had found. He’d returned to rehab following his overdose and, afterward, started teaching himself music: playing piano, watching YouTube tutorials on music theory and making “like, ‘Wonderwall’ remixes and random crap, just to figure it out.”
Soon, the music blog dubstep.net voted one of his tracks the No. 1 song of the moment. “I was like, ‘Let’s f–king go,’ ” he recalls. He’d also started performing around Denver and in 2015 signed with Oldaker (then at Madison House Presents), who sent Illenium (his name references Star Wars’ Millenium Falcon) on the road as a support act for artists like Big Gigantic and Minnesota. After a show at the 500-capacity George’s Majestic Lounge in Fayetteville, Ark., attendees bought out the venue for a second night so Illenium could play again. “And that sold out,” Oldaker says. “These were small-market shows by someone no one had ever heard of who was getting 250 bucks to open for another artist, and all of a sudden he’s blowing out some room in Arkansas.”
Miller and his team — which by this time included manager Ha Hau (also the founder of Global Dance) and touring manager Sean Flynn, whom he’d met in recovery — started putting up headline shows at smaller clubs. They decided he needed a signature “thing” and that it would be, Oldaker says, “putting so much production into these rooms that people walked out like, ‘I don’t know what I just saw.’ ”
For a 2015 set at Denver’s 650-capacity Bluebird Theater, Miller spent $10,000 on a custom metal phoenix, a symbol of his rise from addiction that has also appeared on his album covers and on the Illenium jerseys that are the de facto fan uniform at his shows. “On most of my tours, I’ve gone as far as I could with production by breaking even, or just slightly above,” he says. Flynn declines to give an exact price tag for Trilogy’s production, but says the shows are “really expensive.” They weren’t sure if they’d even turn a profit with the SoFi sets, but then “the second show crushed,” Miller says. “So we were chillin’.”
Daniel Prakopcyk
Streams, ticket sales and festival billings grew steadily as his profile rose, and his second album, 2017’s Awake, reached No. 106 on the Billboard 200. But Miller felt a disconnect. Fans didn’t know about the personal experiences making his songs so emotionally intense, a chasm that felt especially wide when they told him his music had helped them through hard times, like dealing with addiction.
“I’ve been wanting to share something super personal with you for a while,” Miller wrote in a letter posted to X (then Twitter) in August 2018, revealing his struggles with opiates and his overdose. “I was trapped in it, had no passion, no direction and truly hated myself… I’m just sharing my story and relating because music saved my life too.” The news came in tandem with the release of “Take You Down,” a huge, hypnotic song he wrote about his mother. “I couldn’t see that when I went to hell,” vocalist Tim James sings, “I was taking you with me.”
“Watching that relationship get torn by the sh-t you keep doing — at first, it’s like, ‘Why are you on me so much, I’m not even that bad,’ ” Miller reflects now. “Then it goes into ‘OK, I can’t stop’ and then it goes into, like, “F–k everyone. I can’t live without it.’ And then you’re just breaking down.”
Making this information public initially made him nervous “because I didn’t want to come off preachy. I love rave culture and people enjoying themselves and don’t want to be the person that’s like” — he shifts to a nerdy tone — “ ‘You guys are really f–king your lives up.’ ” But six years later, he thinks his fans appreciate knowing, “given all the music that has come out of it and that I did all of this sober.”
LEMAIRE jacket and Louis Vuitton shirt, pants and shoes.
Daniel Prakopcyk
In a realm not known for temperance, Miller says that Kaskade — one of the few sober dance artists — has been a role model who has shown him “you can do this and not be a party animal, because it’s hard. You see how insane people go and wonder if you’ll be accepted if you’re not partaking.”
But Miller is also uniquely suited to talk to fans about drugs. Last year, he partnered with L.A.-based nonprofit End Overdose, which distributes free naloxone and fentanyl test strips, provides training on how to respond to overdoses and is a partner of major dance music promoter Insomniac Events. He raised $50,000 for the organization through a fan donation matching campaign, became a certified End Overdose trainer, gave tutorials on administering naloxone on Instagram Live, provided trainings at stops on his last tour and gave contest winners an in-person demonstration at the Denver Trilogy show. Over 2,000 doses of naloxone have been distributed across these events; last September, one was used to resuscitate someone at a concert (not Illenium’s) in Kansas City, Mo. “We’ve literally saved lives together,” End Overdose communications officer Mike Giegerich says. “It’s beyond meaningful.”
Meanwhile, Miller has rather cleverly figured out a healthy (and productive) way to satisfy his own addictive impulses. “To have five hours to shape the night and do it all?” he says of the Trilogy shows. “That’s like, my psycho drug addictness. That sounds very fulfilling and, like, a sweet high for me.”
The five-hour Trilogy shows have also given Miller time to explore the direction he’ll pursue next. After his rock- and metal-focused 2023-self-titled album, which featured artists like Travis Barker and Avril Lavigne, the Trilogy sets inspired him to return to his electronic roots, and he’s working on “a lot” of new music. Collaborations with Tiësto (a Colorado neighbor Miller calls “the f–king man”), REZZ, Seven Lions, Mike Shinoda and others he’s not yet ready to name are forthcoming — not as an album, but as singles to be released throughout 2024.
Outside of scattered festival dates, he’s not touring this year, but Oldaker says, “World domination is where I think we go from here.” Flynn says the team “had a lot of steam” in Europe and Asia before the pandemic, and it’s now positioned to rebuild that momentum. American-style bass music has historically “had a hard time getting good traction” in Europe, Oldaker says, but he fervently believes Illenium could be the one to break it.
Miller’s own feelings are more mixed. He points out that his seven-date European tour last summer hit 2,000- to 3,000-capacity rooms and turned out “fire” crowds in cities like Brussels and Barcelona. He also acknowledges that the more minimal, less headbang-y European scene is “just so different,” Miller continues, “and I never bought into it. I’m not a partier. I like being home, and I don’t play that game of ‘meet this promoter so you can play their festival or club.’ I’m so not that person, and I think that has hurt me a bit in Europe.”
Still, he’d love to bring the full show abroad. He has growing fan bases in Asia (he did his first headlining show in India in February) and Australia, and his team is also eyeing expansion into Africa and Central and South America.
Meanwhile, North American demand hasn’t abated for the artist Oldaker calls “the underground monster you’ve never heard of who all of a sudden blows your mind.” Several stadiums have reached out about hosting a Trilogy show, and fans can see Illenium through September at his residency at the 2,100-capacity Zouk in Las Vegas, a club the team chose for its production capabilities. Having played Vegas since his days as an opener, Miller has learned “the game” of these shows: “taking yourself less seriously, just having fun and not trying to have a musical therapy session in a f–king Vegas club.”
Daniel Prakopcyk
While there are many goals still to reach — a crossover hit (his official remix of Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” toed the line), major mainstream festival headlining slots, movie scores and, Oldaker says, “expanding what he’s doing so people understand he isn’t just a bass producer and can do all these other things” — the imminent strategy is simple: keep building “core events,” Oldaker says, like Trilogy and Illenium’s Ember Shores destination festival in Mexico, which held its second edition in December. “Yes, we want to headline all the major festivals, but we have a great thing going with Trilogy where we can create these incredible experiences for fans to come be a part of,” Oldaker explains. “We’ll continue building it and hope these bigger festivals see the value we’re creating.”
“There is no ceiling to cap the success that he is capable of,” adds Tom Corson, co-chairman/COO of Warner Records, which released Illenium. “Nick is a career artist who can be as big as he wants to be both within dance music and outside of the genre.”
While now in a period of relative downtime, the guy whose lexicon heavily favors “chillin’ ” doesn’t, actually, want to be entirely chill. His Colorado rhythm is to drink coffee, run the dogs, tend to Illenium business — a straightforward model of “merch and music and shows,” he says — then hit his home studio. He’s also remodeling a Denver warehouse into a recording space for himself and other artists, some of whom will likely appear on the label he’s putting together. When he’s really not working, he golfs, snowmobiles or hangs with his parents, sisters, nieces and nephews who, Oldaker says, “are always around him.”
“They’re so happy, full of joy,” Miller says of his family’s take on his achievements. “We have a beautiful life now.”
That family isn’t just his direct relations anymore, but the tens of thousands of screaming fans who love him — not only as an artist, but as a survivor: the kid in the hospital bed who was about to get up and make it all happen.
This story originally appeared in the March 9, 2024, issue of Billboard.
