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There have been many famous brother acts in the history of rock n’ roll, from the Everly Brothers to the Bee Gees to the Jacksons. Sweden is sending a brother act to the Eurovision Song Contest this year, but Marcus & Martinus aren’t simply brothers — they are identical twins. They will open the grand final on Saturday (May 11) with an energetic performance of their hit single, “Unforgettable.”
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Billboard sat down with the 22-year-old siblings from Norway at their hotel in Malmö, Sweden, host city to this year’s pan-European competition.
As young as you are, you are seasoned veterans, with a career that dates back a decade. How did you get started in the music business?
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Martinus: We wanted always to be football players. That was our dream, and then we started singing together when we were 10 years old. By the age of 12 we had to choose. Should we be serious about music? Should we go all in as football players? Our dad said to us, “Music is fun but football is also very fun.” But music has worked out very well.
Marcus: When we were six, we started in a children’s choir and had a music teacher who made us fall in love with the music. She did an amazing job and three years later, when we were done in the children’s choir, we wanted to do more but we didn’t know how. Then an opportunity came in 2012 when we joined the competition for the Junior Eurovision Song Contest, and we won.
You’ve been in a lot of musical competitions. What are your thoughts about competing with other singers?
Marcus: When we did [Junior Eurovision] we didn’t have any pressure because we were kids and it was for fun and everyone loved everyone there. When we did The Masked Singer no one knew who was under the masks, so we didn’t have any pressure. But then Eurovision is something else. Here you are representing a country and people will have opinions, because they really want their country to win. We try not to read the comments but it’s difficult not to because they are everywhere.
Martinus: We are very competitive people. We play a lot of football, so it’s in our blood that we want to win all the time and we’re brothers as well, so we compete against each other in everything. So I think this year we are the most competitive people in the whole competition, but it’s nice because you’re very focused when you’re on the stage and are very ready. I think that’s just a good thing.
As devoted Eurovision fans know, many artists have represented countries that are not their homelands. Celine Dion from Canada sang for Switzerland; Gina G is from Australia but sang for the U.K.; and you are from Norway singing for Sweden.
Marcus: For us, it was a natural choice because we’ve been working a lot in Sweden the last few years and when the coronavirus came, we were thinking what our next step would be. We had been teen stars for awhile and we needed to get away from that. We’re 22 years old now. We don’t want to be locked in as teen stars forever, and that was very difficult for us in Norway, because they’ve known us since we were 10 years old. We felt like Norway never accepted that we wanted to go further than that. So we thought we should go to Sweden, where they found us later. We signed with Universal Music Sweden. They accepted that we wanted to go past [our teen years] and it feels very natural to represent Sweden because they have helped us through that journey.
When ABBA entered Eurovision, their goal was to break out beyond Sweden and become a global act. Is that one of your goals in the competition?
Martinus: That has been our goals for a very long time and when we joined Melodifestivalen [the Swedish heat to pick the artist and song that will go to Eurovision], that was also one of our goals. If we went to Eurovision, it would be a free ticket to Europe where you can visit a lot of countries. You get a lot of first impressions because people haven’t seen you before. It was a very nice opportunity for us when Eurovision came. We’ve been waiting for this moment and it’s very nice to get back out in Europe.
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What is the genesis of your Eurovision entry, “Unforgettable”?
Marcus: We wrote it from scratch, just like “Air” [the brothers’ entry in Melodifestivalen 2023]. We were inspired by “Air” because a lot of Eurovision fans really liked that song and said if it weren’t for Loreen [and her song “Tattoo”], it would have gone straight through [to Eurovision]. People said they really wanted us to try again. “Air” went well [placing second to Loreen] so we thought we should do something similar, but even more Eurovision. We wanted to make something rougher and tougher, but an upgrade from “Air.” As you know, we’ve been on a stage for 12 years. We want to show that experience on stage.
What is the dynamic of being a brother act?
Martinus: There’s a special bond between us. It’s something else when random people get together and start a band rather than being brothers, because we have this special connection and we know each other. I’m the person in the world that knows him best and the same with him with me, so we have that special connection when we are on the stage. We can feel each other’s energy and we can give each other energy and I think that’s the reason why we have gone so far in our career. We work very well together, even though we’re brothers and fight, but I think that is healthy. We’re brutally honest with each other, which also helps us to get better, because you can say, “You were awful today. What happened?” That helps us a lot and our very special connection helps us as artists as well.
Marcus and Martinus performed “Unforgettable” in semi-final 1 on Tuesday (May 7) but were not competing. As representatives of the host country, they are automatically qualified for the grand final, which will be live on Saturday (May 11). The four-hour show will be live on Peacock in the U.S., airing at 3 p.m. ET.
The brothers have toured Europe with Jason Derulo and will be back on the road starting May 30 with their We Are Not The Same Tour, with 26 dates extending until March 25, including a stop at London’s O2 Arena on March 5, 2025.
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Welcome to Billboard Pro‘s Trending Up newsletter, where we take a closer look at the songs, artists, curiosities and trends that have caught the music industry’s attention. Some have come out of nowhere, others have taken months to catch on, and all of them could become ubiquitous in the blink of a TikTok clip.
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This week: Drake and Kendrick Lamar see the catalog side effects of their recent beefing, a couple new hit movies impact streaming with their very different soundtracks, the calendar turns to *NSYNC season and more.
Kendrick Lamar’s Diss-Track Parade is Lifting His Entire Catalog – Drake’s, Not So Much
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“At least your fans are getting some raps out of you / I’m happy I could motivate you,” Drake declares near the end of “The Heart Part 6,” the most recent volley in his genre-consuming feud with Kendrick Lamar. Indeed, one of the by-products of this ongoing back-and-forth has been a new spate of material from a superstar who’s notoriously been stingy with his releases in between album cycles, as Lamar has already more than doubled his 2023 output with 2024 diss tracks alone. And while those shots at Drake have been doing boffo business on streaming services, Lamar’s entire catalog — even outside of his recent diss tracks — is up as well, as rap fans return to K. Dot’s discography for general appreciation (or to parse through subtle attacks against Aubrey Graham).
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“Euphoria,” the first of Lamar’s recent diss tracks, debuted at No. 11 on this week’s Hot 100 chart and could move up next week, as the song earned a whopping 27.6 million official U.S. on-demand streams from May 3-6, according to Luminate. “Not Like Us,” the most club-friendly diss track which dropped late on May 4, could debut even higher, with 21.1 million streams in its first three days of release, while the vicious “Meet the Grahams” earned 8.8 million streams from May 3-6. (“6:16 in LA,” another Lamar diss track, has yet to arrive on streaming services.)
Plus, listeners have been interested in perusing the classic songs that have served as samples in Lamar’s diss tracks. Teddy Pendergrass’ “You’re My Latest, My Greatest Inspiration” was up 76% in streams from Apr. 26-29 (76,000) to May 3-6 (134,000) after being sampled at the beginning of “Euphoria,” while Al Green’s “What a Wonderful Thing Love Is” shot up 283% over the same time period once it was used on “6:16 in LA.” And “BBL Drizzy,” the King Willonius song that Metro Boomin sampled for his anti-Drake beat challenge, is naturally way up in streams, from a negligible amount at the end of April to 185,000 from May 5-6.
Even if you remove all of the diss tracks from Lamar’s overall catalog, however, the rapper’s streams have still significantly increased since the simmering feud reached its recent boiling point. From May 3-6, Lamar’s discography earned 50.62 million streams — up 49% from the previous Friday-to-Monday tracking period (33.98 million from Apr. 26-29). Meanwhile, Drake’s overall catalog is actually down when you similarly compare his streams from that weekend (105.86 million from Apr. 26-29) to last weekend (100.69 million from May 3-6) and remove his two streaming-available response tracks, “Push Ups” and “Family Matters.” Of course, even with that 4.9% dip in catalog plays, Drake’s streaming numbers remain roughly twice as many as Lamar’s, which can be a minor source of comfort as his adversary’s diss tracks make the bigger splash on the charts. – JASON LIPSHUTZ
New Anne Hathaway Rom-Com Has the Right ‘Idea’ With Maggie Rogers, St. Vincent & More on Soundtrack
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The much-anticipated film adaptation of Robinne Lee’s hit novel The Idea of You made its Amazon Prime debut over the weekend – starring Anne Hathaway as a divorcee who takes her daughter to Coachella and ends up in an unlikely romance with the younger Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine), singer from the One Direction-ish fictional boy band August Moon. Unsurprisingly for a movie where music plays such a big part, the well-received film has a number of prominent synchs – more from the alternative end of the dial than the top 40 one – which have led to big streaming gains for those songs.
Singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers (who did play Coachella in 2019 and 2022) gets the movie’s opening credits song – also repeated in a flash-forward towards the end of the film – with her Heard It in a Past Life single “Light On.” The rousing song collected 354,000 official on-demand U.S. streams for the first four days of the film’s release (May 3-6), up 71% from the equivalent period the prior week, according to Luminate. Veteran art-rock star St. Vincent (a Coachella four-timer, most recently in 2018) also has three different songs appear in the movie, the most prominent being her Daddy’s Home highlight “Pay Your Way in Pain,” which plays on the radio (and is sung along to by Hathaway and her daughter, played by Ella Rubin) during a car ride. “Pain” racked up 32,000 streams from May 3-6, a 124% gain over the same period the week before.
And of course, you can’t have a movie about a fictional band without some fictional songs – and August Moon has a half-dozen of ‘em, appropriately co-penned/produced by go-to One Direction collaborator Savan Kotecha, most of which were released before the film. Those songs racked up a combined 1.3 million streams over May 3-6, led by “Dance Before We Walk,” which Campbell writes and records over the course of the movie. (And perhaps at least a couple viewers were also inspired to revisit the real thing over the weekend, as 1D’s U.S. on-demand audio streams were also up 5% over May 3-5 from the same three-day period the week before.) – ANDREW UNTERBERGER
Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross’ Challengers Score Is An Ace on Streaming
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Two weekends ago (April 26), Challengers, Luca Guadagnino’s acclaimed romantic tennis drama, hit theaters, bringing the electric throuple of Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist to the silver screen. To soundtrack the stylish, sexy film, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross provided a hypnotic techno-rooted score to track the intertwined fates of the film’s three characters.
According to Luminate, the Challengers score soundtrack collected 1.09 million official on-demand U.S. streams during the film’s opening weekend (April 26-28). In the following three-day period (April 29-May 1), streaming activity jumped 66% to 1.83 million streams. In its first week of release, (April 26-May 2), Challengers (Original Score) pulled 3.44 million streams.
While original songs remain big draws for tentpole movies – who can forget the multi-format dominance of last year’s Barbie soundtrack – score soundtracks tend to cater to markedly smaller audiences. With the danceable score and the star power of the film’s cast, younger artists have been particularly drawn to the Challengers score, which they’ve continuously expressed on TikTok. (The score also appeared in a Challengers-inspired SNL skit over the weekend.)
And who knows? Maybe the success of Challengers – in addition to her Labrinth-assisted Euphoria singles – could jumpstart Zendaya’s return to music. After all, she notched a Billboard Hot 100 top 40 hit with “Replay” (No. 40) 10 years ago! – KYLE DENIS
Online Edit Community Lifts Yëat to Another Viral Hit
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Whether you call them edits or fancams, you can always count on one of those video montages to catapult a song from obscurity to virality. While Yëat is no stranger to the Billboard charts — he’s already earned ten Hot 100 entries — “If We Bëing Real” could become his biggest solo hit yet.
Taken from 2093, his fourth studio album (which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 in March), “If We Bëing Real” pulled over six million official on-demand U.S. streams during the period of April 26-May 2. That marks a whopping 214% increase in streaming activity from four weeks ago (March 29-April 4) when it earned 1.92 million streams.
Over the past month, streams for “If We Being Real” have increased at least 13% each week – thanks, in no small part, to its TikTok virality. An ominous, slowed-down version of “If We Bëing Real” has gained traction on the app as a soundtrack to edits of various fictional characters and real-life people, including Outer Banks’ Rafe Cameron (played by Drew Starkey), Kingdom of Heaven’s King Baldwin IV (played by Edward Norton) and Minnesota Timberwolves shooting guard Anthony Edwards. There are several unofficial “If We Bëing Real” TikTok sounds with upwards of 20,000 posts, including one with nearly 100,000 clips.
After hitting No. 2 on the Hot 100 by way of Drake’s “IDGAF” last year, Yeat could soon be revisiting the chart’s upper regions if “If We Being Real” continues to grow at this rate. – KD
Q&A: Josh Norek and Ernesto Lechner, Co-Hosts of The Latin Alternative Radio Show & Podcast, on What’s Trending Up in Their World
The Latin Alternative recently celebrated its 15th anniversary. What has it been like witnessing the evolving size and makeup of Latin music during that time?
Norek: In some ways, the evolving popularity and demographics of Latin music consumption has mirrored the growth of our show The Latin Alternative over the years. When we launched the program in 2009, we were airing in one single market (our parent station WEXT in Albany, NY). Today we are in 55 markets, including obvious ones like Los Angeles, Dallas and Orlando but also places you wouldn’t expect like Tulsa and Duluth where public radio stations reached out and asked for the show because they had real listener interest for Latin rock, hip-hop and left of center sounds. Latin music’s various subgenres have far more mainstream acceptance in all markets than when our program started, and that’s largely due to the ease in accessing the music via streaming. When I was a teenager growing up in Upstate NY back in the day, it was not exactly easy to find a Los Fabulosos Cadillacs import CD at the local record store, but a kid living in the boonies today would have no such problem finding the musical equivalent.
What has been the most surprising aspect of Latin music’s expansion over the past few years to you?
Norek: What I find surprising and couldn’t have anticipated when we began the show 15 years ago is how digital music distribution has leveled geographic barriers. For example, Uruguay is a tiny middle class country with just three million people, and its music seldom traveled very far in the CD era. But today we play more Uruguayan music on the show than the country’s size would indicate because we have lots of Uruguayan artists submitting music to us.
Another surprise is how regional Mexican music is finally “cool” and accepted in places like Miami and Spain where there was a lot of hostility – and not-so-subtle racism – directed at the genre. That’s really great to see, especially when over seventy percent of the U.S. Latino population is of Mexican origin.
Which trend in current Latin music fascinates you the most?
Lechner: I’m particularly obsessed with the way in which young artists in the reggaetón and Latin trap genres are questioning the very essence of what a pop song is supposed to be – and sound like. Their constant desire to experiment with form and content reminds me of impressionism in 19th century Paris, when Monet, Sisley and Pissarro reinvented the rules of painting. Some of the neo-reggaetón songs ignore the basics of song structure, and instead create vivid impressions, cinematic moods in the shape of song. I’m fascinated by the collaboration between Colombian producer Ovy on the Drums and KAROL G, as well as the latest works by Ozuna, Bizarrap, Rosalía, Arcángel, Rafa Pabön and Young Miko.
Fill in the blank: the Latin artist that not enough people are talking about yet is _______.
Lechner: I believe the prodigiously talented Chilean singer/songwriter Francisca Valenzuela should be an international superstar. – JL
Season’s Gainings: It’s Gonna Be *NSYNC Season
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Justin Timberlake might not have made quite the lasting impact on 2024 that he’d hoped to with his new Everything I Thought It Was album – and hey, it’s been a crowded year in pop, plenty hitmakers much younger and hipper than JT are struggling too – but at least one day out of the year is still guaranteed to be his. May 1 came and went a week ago, and with it, the biggest day for his old *NSYNC group’s lone Hot 100 No. 1 hit, “It’s Gonna Be Me” (with Timberlake of course delivering the last word of the title more like “May.”) The song first spiked 107% to 277,000 official on-demand U.S. streams on April 30, according to Luminate, and then another 60% the following day to 444,000 – before dropping 45% to 247,000 on May 2, as the song goes back into semi-hibernation for the next 363 days. – AU
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Olivia Rodrigo is continuing to expand her Guts World Tour, announcing Wednesday (May 8) that she’s adding nine new dates in Asia and Australia to the trek for this fall. The new dates will mark the pop star’s first time touring in either country, bringing her up to a total of 82 shows globally by […]
Seth Rogen concedes that Drake has lost the battle to Kendrick Lamar, Canadian pride be damned. During his Seth Smokes the Bowl charity show at the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday (May 7), the comedian tried to explain the ongoing beef that has taken over the rap world over the past month or so. “There are […]
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Everyone has to put their foot in their mouth sometimes, even notoriously outspoken artists like English singer-songwriter Lily Allen. On Monday (May 6), the “Smile” singer formally apologized to Elton John for her years-long resentment of him — and she also revealed how it all stemmed from a grave misunderstanding on her part.
The newly-minted EGOT winner and Allen have a storied history together, with John having been her manager years ago. “He would call me like once every couple of weeks to check in and say hi and make sure I was okay,” she reminisced on the “Miss Me?” BBC podcast that she co-hosts with Miquita Oliver. “And there was some times in that period where I wasn’t okay.”
Allen was signed to John’s Rocket Music Entertainment Group when she was recording and promoting 2009’s It’s Not Me, It’s You, which peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard 200, marking her highest-charting LP in the U.S. The two officially parted ways some years later following the release of Sheezus, Allen’s third studio album, in 2014.
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“We parted ways, and I wrote this long letter to say how sad I was about the situation and that there was a big Elton-shaped hole in my life,” she said on the podcast. “Over the next few years as my life began to sort of spiral out of control, I held much resentment for the fact that I’d made myself very vulnerable in this letter and told him all about my sobriety, and I was quite cross with him for a few years.”
After Oliver probed for specifics regarding the source of Allen’s animosity toward John, she explained, “When I moved here to America, I was unpacking and I found the letter. I never sent it! Elton, if you’re listening — which you’re probably not — I love you and I no longer harbor that resentment towards you.”
While John has not publicly acknowledged Allen’s admission, the revelation does mark a relatively lighter news cycle for the controversial “5 O’Clock” singer. Earlier this year, Allen criticized the “quite calculated” campaign behind Beyoncé‘s critically lauded Cowboy Carter album, to which “212” rapper Azealia Banks replied, “You’re going to stop right there and sit this one out.”
Both Banks and Allen have been vocal critics of Queen Bey’s country pivot, which hasn’t deterred the “Texas Hold ‘Em” singer from topping both the country and Americana/folk charts with her star-studded new album.
Creepy Nuts’ “Bling-Bang-Bang-Born” returns to No. 1 on the Billboard Japan Hot 100, dated May 8, extending its record to 14 weeks atop the tally.
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The hip-hop hit dominated the chart for most of this year after it first hit No. 1 on the chart released Jan. 31 and stayed there for 13 straight weeks. The MASHLE Season 2 opener slipped to No. 2 last week (May 1) but returned to score its 14th week atop the list. The track has increased in all metrics of the chart’s methodology except streaming compared to the previous week. Downloads for the long-running hit are up by 117%, radio airplay and video views by 105%, and karaoke by 120%. And it’s far from doing poorly in streaming as well; weekly streams remain almost the same as the week before and the total has surpassed 300 million at the second fastest pace in Japan chart history.
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Moving 4-2 this week is Mrs. GREEN APPLE’s “Lilac.” The song gained 130% in downloads, 127% in karaoke, and notably, 425% in radio from the week before, hitting its highest position yet.
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Debuting at No. 3 is SixTONES’ 12th single “Neiro.” The theme song for the drama series Omukae Shibuya-kun starring member Taiga Kyomoto launched with 540,564 CDs sold, outselling the group’s previous single “CREAK” (471,285 first-week sales). The track tops sales and comes in at No. 9 for radio and No. 18 for video.
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In other chart moves, the theme song of a project by TOBE’s artists, called “Be on Your side,” re-enters the chart at No. 12 after selling 75,157 copies in its first week, and the first single “MORNING SUN” by EXILE B HAPPY — the new EXILE TRIBE music group led by EXILE TETSUYA — bows at No. 15.
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 Apr. 29 to May 5, here. For more on Japanese music and charts, visit Billboard Japan’s English Twitter account.
