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BLACKPINK‘s Lisa brought some pink venom to the Miami International Autodrome on Sunday when the K-pop star served as the Formula 1 Grand Prix flag-bearer and met the Oracle Red Bull Racing team. On Tuesday (May 7), Lisa posted photos from the event on Instagram, writing that she felt “Honored to wave the flag at […]
BE:FIRST’s “Masterplan” blasts in at No. 1 on the Billboard Japan Hot 100, dated May 1, ending Creepy Nuts’ consecutive run atop the chart at 13 weeks.
The title track of the septet’s concept single released April 24 on CD, “Masterplan” debuts at No. 2 for CD sales with 115,963 copies sold in its first week, and comes in at No. 7 for streaming with 7,955,802 weekly streams. It also rules downloads (35,174 units), radio airplay and video views, dominating three metrics to take the top spot on the Japan Hot 100 like the group’s previous release, “Mainstream.” This is BE:FIRST’s sixth No. 1 hit, having previously ruled the tally with “Gifted,” “Bye-Good-Bye,” “Scream,” “Boom Boom Back,” and “Mainstream.”
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Creepy Nuts’ “Bling-Bang-Bang-Born” slips to No. 2 after 13 straight weeks atop the Japan Hot 100. While it yields the top spot this week, the number of downloads for the MASHLE Season 2 opener increased by 105% from the week before, and points for karaoke and radio also increased, resulting in only a slight decrease in overall points.
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Omoinotake’s “IKUOKU KONEN” rises 5-3 this week. The three-man band hit the stage for its first headlining show at the Osaka Jo Yaon outdoor concert hall on April 28, celebrating the day the band was formed, and downloads increased slightly probably due to this event. Omoinotake is set to digitally release a new single called “Tsubomi” (Bud) on May 5, to be featured as the ending theme of the anime series My Hero Academia Season 7.
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WEST.’s “Heart” bows at No. 6. “Heart” is the anniversary single commemorating the tenth anniversary of the seven-member boy band’s CD debut on April 23. The track ruled sales with 263,585 CDs sold in the first week, while also coming in at No. 19 for radio.
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The Billboard Japan Hot 100 combines physical and digital sales, audio streams, radio airplay, video views and karaoke data.
See the full Billboard Japan Hot 100 chart, tallying the week from April 22 to 28, here. For more on Japanese music and charts, visit Billboard Japan’s English Twitter account.
Even rockers are Swifties! Pearl Jam’s frontman Eddie Vedder and bassist Jeff Ament joined Bill Simmons on his self-titled podcast this week, where they praised Taylor Swift — especially since Vedder attended Swift’s Eras tour with his wife and two daughters. “She’s an artist who’s respectful of her audience and I know from my daughter […]
Hey now, this is what dreams are made of! Hilary Duff announced Tuesday (May 7) that she and husband Matthew Koma welcomed their new daughter last week, sharing photos from the singer-actress’ home water birth and revealing the little girl’s unique name on Instagram. In the pictures, an emotional Duff sits in a tub while […]
After a hellacious heavyweight feud between two of rap’s top superstars, Kendrick Lamar and Drake, the court of public opinion seems poised to announce the Compton MC as the victor. For now, Kendrick can rejoice and hold his head high after issuing the knockout blow of the battle on Saturday (May 4) with “Not Like Us,” topping streaming charts on Spotify and Apple and already making its way into the heart of pop culture. Meanwhile, his adversary Drake is left to ponder his next move, after seemingly dismissing the lyrical combat in what was likely his last song of the battle, Sunday’s “The Heart Pt. 6.”
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Though Drake can proudly hoist his laundry list of accolades, spanning from his 13 No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 to his all-time record number of Hot 100 entries, there’s no denying that this loss against hip-hop’s cerebral assassin will certainly muddy his standing in the rap world. Though he fought tooth-and-nail with Lamar throughout the weeks-long back-and-forth, you don’t get brownie points for coming in second place in hip-hop. Despite his glossy Hall of Fame resume, the question remains: Can Drake reclaim his glory and recover? Or did Kendrick deliver his fatality?
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From a mainstream standpoint, Drake’s legacy won’t be affected. For 15 years, he has shattered records by putting up video game numbers. He’s second to Jay-Z regarding rappers with the most Billboard 200 No. 1 albums, while being fourth overall (also behind Taylor Swift and The Beatles). Even after his 2023 For All the Dogs left fans and critics mostly underwhelmed, he still topped the Billboard 200 during the set’s opening week with 402,000 equivalent album units moved, while also notching two Hot 100 chart-toppers with the SZA-assisted “Slime You Out” and “First Person Shooter” with J. Cole.
Drake’s ability to weave in and out of the pop world whenever he chooses has enabled him to have a fanbase outside of rap. But while this beef has crossed over into pop culture, the reality is the feud was strictly for hip-hop culture and not really anyone else. The people who adored Drake for making “Hotline Bling” or “One Dance” won’t care too much about his loss to Kendrick as opposed to The Culture and will continue to champion him.
When Drake sparred against Pusha T in 2018, he was in the midst of the best commercial run of his career. He had released back to back smashes in “God’s Plan” and “Nice for What,” ultimately topping the Hot 100 for a combined 19 weeks between them. But then, Pusha temporarily toppled Drake with “The Story of Adidon,” leaving the 6 God stunned and under duress. Though Drake didn’t respond to the scathing diss track, he pushed forward with his fifth studio album, Scorpion, and ultimately won the summer with his meme-ready, dance-challenge-inspiring single “In My Feelings,” which became his third No. 1 hit during that run. While The Culture buried Drake after his disappointing loss, the pop world never abandoned him.
In 2018, Drake survived Pusha’s avalanche onslaught by shifting attention away from the beef and towards the thing he still does best: making anthems. Though hip-hop listeners have long memories, mainstream America can be a little more prone to amnesia – and ultimately, who doesn’t love a comeback story?
In addition, now that the battle is nearing its end, by taking a well-deserved break, Drake will allow not only hip-hop but, ultimately, fans to miss what he brought to the table essentially nonstop over the last 15 years. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and the genre needs to see what life looks like without Drake for the next year or two, as he reimagines what he wants the next phase of his career to look like. The juggling act between attempting to be both the ultimate pop star and hip-hop’s most revered MC is a tall order for anyone to handle, including Drake. While his resume on the former half is unquestionable, he’s never fully accomplished the rap half of it – there have always been peers, including Kendrick, that demand more innate respect from the streets than Drake.
As he weighs his future, Drake may have to decide which route he wants to go when finishing his story. After receiving harsh criticism for For All the Dogs, he dashed into the studio because The Culture demanded more rap songs. That birthed the project’s Scary Hours Edition, featuring some of his best rapping to date. Though hip-hop purists applauded his efforts, not everyone clapped for him, as they awaited his demise and later rebuked him after Kendrick’s demolition derby.
Drake also needs to decide if chasing love and admiration in hip-hop, a genre where some of the biggest stars collided with him during his “20 V 1” showdown, is worth the pursuit. If so, he should focus his efforts on proving himself with a hard-nosed rap album, considering that’s the one thing he hasn’t really done since If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late. If he’s indifferent to that idea, then he could fully embrace the pop star image and whip up radio anthems that would continue to chart and dominate. But he should pick one of the two lanes, because trying to operate in both is virtually impossible for him at this juncture of his career. And either way, the goal for Drake should remain the same: to put out the best music of his life, the kind that instantly changes the conversation and leaves the biggest L of his career another distant memory.
Tommy Richman scores his first appearance on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (dated May 11), as his new single, “Million Dollar Baby,” soars in at No. 2.
Released April 26 on ISO Supremacy/PULSE Records, the song debuts with 38 million official U.S. streams, 302,000 in early radio airplay audience and 4,000 downloads sold in its first week of release (April 26-May 2), according to Luminate.
Since the Hot 100 began in 1958, only five other acts have debuted in the top two with no prior history on the chart. Lauryn Hill first achieved the feat on the Nov. 14, 1998 survey, when “Doo Wop (That Thing)” launched at No. 1; before that, though, Fugees charted three songs with her as a member. Fantasia was second, with a No. 1 start for “I Believe” after she won American Idol in 2004. In 2013, Baauer opened at No. 1 with his viral hit “Harlem Shake.” Zayn followed in 2016, when his debut solo single “Pillowtalk” arrived at No. 1; similar to Hill, One Direction had charted 29 songs with him as a member. Most recently prior to Richman, last August Oliver Anthony Music became the first act to premiere atop the Hot 100 with no prior chart history on any ranking when “Rich Men North of Richmond” debuted at No. 1.
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(Also notably, Artists for Haiti debuted at No. 2 in 2010 with its charity single “We Are the World 25: For Haiti.” The supergroup featured dozens of A-list artists and chart veterans, including Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, Celine Dion, P!nk and Usher.)
Before this week, Richman had notched one chart appearance: Brent Faiyaz’s “Upset,” featuring Richman and Felix!, reached No. 12 on Hot R&B Songs and No. 33 on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs last November.
“Million Dollar Baby” has benefitted from attention on TikTok, where it has soundtracked over 150,000 clips on the platform to date.
Richman hails from Woodbridge, Va., and was the first artist signed to Faiyaz’s ISO Supremacy imprint, in partnership with PULSE Records. Richman also opened for Faiyaz on his F*ck the World, It’s a Wasteland Tour. “I’m grateful and amazed at the support from Brent, ISO Supremacy and the team at PULSE Records, which motivates me,” Richman said at the time. “To have the opportunity to open for Brent on his sold-out tour is an absolute honor and to sign to PULSE Records, a creative community that really understands music and supports artists, I couldn’t ask for more.”
In a 2023 interview with the Miami New Times, Richman discussed the difficulties of breaking into the music industry as a Virginia-based artist. “There’s a lot of passion through the scene back home, and I feel like it’s because a lot of people don’t get a fair shake,” he said. “It’s really hard to have your voice heard there. That’s probably why a lot of people from Virginia left, like Pharrell and Timbaland. It’s kind of key for an artist to leave their nest. That way, you can appreciate where you come from.”
Richman released his debut album, Alligator, in 2022 on Boom.Records. In September, he dropped the five-track The Rush, via ISO Supremacy.
Richman Rules Streaming Songs
Richman lands his first No. 1 on Billboard’s Streaming Songs chart via the chart-topping entrance for “Million Dollar Baby.” He’s the second act to land a first Streaming Songs ruler with an initial entry in 2024, following Benson Boone, whose “Beautiful Things” led for a week in February.
Unlike “Million Dollar Baby,” “Beautiful Things” rose to No. 1 in its third week on the chart. The last act before Richman to debut atop the list with a first charting song? Kim Petras, whose “Unholy,” with Sam Smith, started at the summit in October 2022. Splitting the accomplishment one level further: Since Petras was a co-lead on “Unholy,” the last act, like Richman, to launch a first entry atop Streaming Songs with no billed collaborators before this week was Olivia Rodrigo, with “Drivers License” in January 2021.
Notably, “Million Dollar Baby” represents the sixth No. 1 debut on Streaming Songs in 2024. Comparatively, nine songs debuted atop the ranking in all of 2023.
Richman Banks First R&B/Hip-Hop No. 1
Richman also storms onto the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs and Hot R&B Songs charts at No. 1 with “Million Dollar Baby.”
Meanwhile, Faiyaz’s “Upset,” featuring Richman and Felix!, returns to Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs at No. 40, spurred by 4.2 million streams, up 94% from the prior week.
Similarly, after “Upset” originally hit No. 12 in Richman’s sole prior visit to Hot R&B Songs in November, he simultaneously ups his top 10 count to two as, concurrent with “Million Dollar Baby” bowing at No. 1, “Upset” reenters at No. 7.
—Kevin Rutherford and Trevor Anderson contributed to this report
Billie Eilish has something special planned for fans counting down the seconds until her third studio album Hit Me Hard and Soft arrives May 17. To couple with her recently announced listening parties scheduled for May 15 and 16 in New York City and Los Angeles, the singer revealed Tuesday (May 7) that fans who […]
Charli XCX confirmed longtime rumors that she worked on new music for Britney Spears. During a recent appearance on Watch What Happens Live, the “Von Dutch” singer clarified that she did write music for the pop princess, but Spears never recorded the tracks. “It leaked to the press. Britney then did this post where she was like, […]
With many people opting to enjoy a Western aesthetic in 2024, from fringed jackets to cowboy hats to shimmering boots — and a plethora of artists offering up country-influenced music — it’s no surprise that all things equestrian have re-entered the spotlight as of late. Plus, there is the longtail, massive influence of the hit […]
35 years ago, the trajectory of electronic music history shifted when Ed Simons met Tom Rowlands at the University of Manchester. Then students, the pair would go on to comprise one of the most celebrated electronic acts in the history of the then-nascent genre, after they united as The Chemical Brothers.
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The three and a half decades of shows, albums and block-rockin’ beats that have ensued since are under the microscope in the latest Chemical Brothers offering, Paused in Cosmic Reflection. Out today (May 7) via Mobius publishing, the retrospective book unpacks, in often granular detail, the Brothers’ mythology from the earliest days as students to rising U.K. stars to genre trendsetters and worldwide heroes.
Along with extensive interviews with the duo themselves, the book feature new interviews with friends and collaborators, including Noel Gallagher, Wayne Coyne, Beth Orton, Michel Gondry and Beck. The 300-plus-page Paused In Cosmic Reflection also includes many rare and and never-before-seen photographs. Assembled by Robin Turner, the book is dedicated to Stuart “Jammer” James, the group’s longtime tour manager, who died in 2015.
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Speaking to Billboard about the book last September, Simons offered, “I guess there’s no end date, but we are nearer to the end of The Chemical Brothers than we are the beginning… It has been good to reflect and remember some history. I guess you’ve got to do it before you start forgetting everything, and I’ve got a really good memory.”
“He remembers, like, every small gig above a barber shop we ever did,” added Rowlands. “Then someone would produce a photograph of it and I’d be like, ‘Oh, gotcha. Maybe we did do that…’ But one of the things about our band is, we don’t like stopping and reflecting. I always want to move on to the next thing. This book really felt like stopping and reflecting.”
See exclusive images from the book below.
Paused in Cosmic Reflection
live show visual Show directors Adam Smith & Marcus Lyall
“Early on, Oasis was accepted as part of that culture,” Noel Gallagher says in the book. “Mixmag gave Definitely Maybe full marks and an incredible review when it came out. When I picked up the guitar and started to write again, the inclusiveness of the lyrics in house music showed up in my songs and became a big part of it. A song like ‘Live Forever’ would never have existed and wouldn’t have been called that before acid house. It would have been melancholy. The euphoria of acid house was so engrained in me, I was so into it and what I loved about it was the inclusivity. Songs were about us, they weren’t personal, they were about the collective. I adopted that and put it into my music.”
Paused in Cosmic Reflection
Jake Chessum
Paused in Cosmic Reflection
Adam Smith
“There were a few electronic bands playing live in the early nineties,” Simons says of the group’s early days. “We’d gone to see Kraftwerk when we were at university in 1991 and Tom had been in [prior dance act] Ariel, so we knew it was something that could happen, but initially we just DJed. We got offered to do [the club night] Sabresonic very early on; we’d only done a handful of remixes and [Chemical Brothers EP] Fourteenth Century Sky was just out. From the very start, we knew we didn’t want to be in the spotlight on stage. We decided that we wanted to have visuals projected right on top of us. And lots of strobes. That ethos has been the same for every gig we’ve played in the 30-odd years since.”
Paused in Cosmic Reflection
Peter J. Walsh
Paused in Cosmic Reflection
Mark Benney
“Ultimately, I think The Chemical Brothers have a great predilection for exploration,” says Beck, who worked with the duo on 2015’s “Wide Open” and 2023’s “Skipping Like a Stone.” “Their records always seem to take you to different places. They kind of sit in an unusual place between different eras of electronic music and DJ culture. It’s like they have one foot in multiple decades at the same time in a way that is utterly unique among their peers.”
Paused in Cosmic Reflection
Mark Benney
“[1997 sophomore album] Dig Your Own Hole was us giving free rein to all of the different influences that were feeding into us from all around the world,” says Simons. “It was the most extreme expression of that, one where you could have a track like ‘It Doesn’t Matter’ sitting alongside ‘The Private Psychedelic Reel’. They’re completely different forms of music but they each evolved from everything that was channelled in, that fed into the making of Dig Your Own Hole. For us, our sound was entirely natural. It wasn’t something we sat down and pondered, tried to perfect. We had no intention of making a pure electronic dance record; we always wanted all of those external forces to be reflected.”
Paused in Cosmic Reflection
Mark Benney
