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Davido will celebrate his 32nd birthday in style this year. The Lagos-raised star is returning to his hometown of Atlanta for a Davido & Friends birthday bash concert on Nov. 21 at State Farm Arena. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news Tickets for the concert presented by […]
Olivia Rodrigo‘s first-ever concert in the Philippines was anything but sour on Saturday (Oct. 5), especially after the 21-year-old pop star donated all the net profits from her ticket sales to a charity supporting women’s health. Shortly after the Guts World Tour stop in Bocaue’s Philippine Arena concluded, Rodrigo — who is half Filipina — […]
As if the beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar wasn’t already historic, the saga’s most enduring track, Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” enters the record books with an unprecedented 21st week at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Rap Songs chart. The single, released on pgLang/Interscope/ICLG, surpasses Lil Nas X’s 2019 juggernaut, “Old Town Road,” featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, for the most weeks atop the chart since its launch in 1989.
“Not Like Us,” released May 4 amid the height of the rappers’ feud, reaches the record through continued strong performance in the three metrics that inform the chart: streaming, sales and radio airplay.
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It wins a 20th frame at No. 1 on the Rap Streaming Songs chart thanks to 17.1 million official U.S. streams in the latest tracking week (Sept. 27 – Oct. 3), according to Luminate. With its newest week on top, it matches “Old Town Road” for the third-longest command among all titles. Desiigner’s “Panda” and Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” share first place, at 23 weeks each.
For sales, “Not Like Us” registered 2,000 downloads in the tracking week. Despite a 10% decline from the prior week, it pushes 4-3 on Rap Digital Song Sales, a list it previously ruled for nine nonconsecutive weeks.
Lamar’s smash also repeats at No. 7 on the all-genre Radio Songs chart, with 45.4 million in total audience impressions, a 3% slide. (All radio airplay, regardless of genre, contributes to a song’s rank on Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs.) The single dominated its core format this summer, with 15 nonconsecutive weeks in charge of the R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay list.
As “Not Like Us” resets the leaderboard on Hot Rap Songs, here’s a review of the songs with the most weeks at No. 1 in the chart’s 35-year history:
Weeks at No. 1, Song Title, Artist, Date Reached No. 121, “Not Like Us,” Kendrick Lamar, May 18, 202420, “Old Town Road,” Lil Nas X featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, April 13, 201919, “Industry Baby,” Lil Nas X & Jack Harlow, Aug. 7, 202118, “Hot Boyz,” Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott featuring Nas, Eve & Q-Tip, Nov. 27, 199918, “Fancy,” Iggy Azalea featuring Charli XCX, May 3, 201418, “Hotline Bling,” Drake, Oct. 10, 201517, “Panda,” Desiigner, April 23, 201617, “Mood,” 24kGoldn featuring iann dior, Oct. 24, 2020
The colossal single extends Lamar’s recent near-monopoly on Hot Rap Songs, with the rapper in the No. 1 spot for 27 of the last 28 weeks. Before “Not Like Us” took the throne, the Pulitzer Prize winner, Future and Metro Boomin ruled with their collaboration “Like That,” a six-week champ. In the past six months, only Eminem’s “Houdini” interrupted the Lamar blockade, by sneaking out a one-week rule in June.
ONE N’ ONLY, the six-member dance and vocal group from Japan, released their third EP, Fiesta, on Oct. 2. In the past, they melded J-pop and K-pop to create a “JK-pop” style, and in 2023 they established a new style, “Jatin pop,” which fused J-pop and Latin music. Their new EP Fiesta has an even freer approach, spanning all kinds of genres, including a foray into amapiano.
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Billboard Japan interviewed the group, which is constantly breaking new ground as a Japanese dance and vocal group. (Note: Member NAOYA was unable to take part in the interview due to a scheduling conflict.)
You’ve made a really lively EP with Fiesta I feel like it has more aggressive songs than your past work. What have your impressions been like?
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HAYATO: Well, first off, when we were creating the EP, we talked about wanting to make songs to lead our autumn tour. We wanted to make something that would get the audience hyped, like “EVOL,” turning shows into real parties. That’s why we made “Fiesta” our lead song. I think it’s an incredibly fun EP.
“EVOL” generates a lot of excitement, so it’s beloved by fans.
TETTA: Right. I think “Fiesta,” like “EVOL,” will turn up the energy levels in our shows.
HAYATO: The chorus is one you never get tired of, the song has a fast tempo, and both the lyrics and the choreography are incredibly upbeat. There’s also a part that we want all our fans to sing along with, so want to build up this song together.
TETTA: KAITA did the choreography for “Fiesta.” A lot of trial-and-error went into the chorus, too, and I think it turned out catchy and memorable. We stripped the choreography down a lot, making it easy to copy, and the dance is a lot of fun.
How many times have you worked with KAITA so far?
HAYATO: This is our fourth song, after “Hook Up,” “OPEN,” and “Last Forever.” The choreography is really catchy and easy to understand, and KAITA’s the same age as us, so he’s easy to talk to. That’s why the end result turned out so well.
REI: Ever since we established the “Jatin Pop” genre by fusing J-pop and Latin music in “EVOL” and “DOMINO,” we’ve written a lot of songs with Latin elements. “Fiesta” is especially catchy, and it has a great call-and-response section, so the audience will get amped up with us. KAITA, the choreographer, is part of RIEHATATOKYO, which has a strong hip-hop focus, so the choreography he created was really groovy. There’s a lot of depth to the rhythm, and that was combined with this Latin feel. They’re a great match. I don’t think there have been any other groups that combined Latin and Japanese elements like we have with Jatin Pop, so, just like our name, I think we’ve created a “one and only” song.
EIKU: And what’s more, it’s a blast to sing. You can really get into it, and I can just imagine everyone going crazy, carried by that Latin sound, so I’m looking forward to performing it live. Also, through our tour of all of Japan’s 47 prefectures, I’ve felt a change in how much more vocal our fans have gotten.
TETTA: Right! There’s this stronger feeling of unity, and in the audience participation parts, the crowd has gotten so much louder that it feels like they’ve all been practicing together in advance.
HAYATO: It’s so much fun sharing that feeling of excitement and energy with everyone.
KENSHIN: I think that by releasing a song like this, we’re helping create an even stronger sense of unity. I love the start of the second verse. It has this speed and this addictive quality that makes you want to listen to it over and over again. The song gets you fired up. The lyrics are also interesting, combining Japanese, English, and Portuguese.
HAYATO: The lyrics are all really easy to understand, too, so they’re easy to absorb.
KENSHIN: Yeah. Through our 47-prefecture tour from October 2023 to April 2024, we improved our live performance abilities. We were able to experience truly hands-on live shows, and we’ve grown so much.
TETTA: But we never had any down time! There were cameras filming us even while we were travelling between shows, so the only time we were truly alone was when we were asleep in our hotels. Partway through, I was like, “Where am I?” “Who am I?” (laughs) But thanks to that, I was able to focus exclusively on our shows, so I refined my vocals, and I grew more confident with each show. It was a great experience.
REI: It really was educational. Playing at small concert venues, close to the audience, I’d look at people further away and think that I needed to make it a fun show for everyone. I think the tour made me much better at performing live.
TETTA: We played several live shows in Brazil, and sometimes there would be a change of venue on the actual day of a show. Coming from experiences like that, the little problems that came up when touring in Japan were a breeze to deal with. (laughs)
KENSHIN: I became a lot more adaptable! (laughs)
That’s great to hear. Going back to the EP, “Burn it out” is a hard rock number, which is unusual for ONE ‘N ONLY. Listening to it, I could just picture you running around the stage.
HAYATO: We wrote that song precisely because we wanted to run around! We have an older song called “OPEN,” which has a strong rock feel. ONE N’ ONLY and rock go together really well. We wanted a song in our set list where we could go wild, so we picked “Burn it out.”
TETTA: I like rock in general, so singing that song is a blast. I feel like with a rock song, the way you perform live is different, so I’m looking forward to doing it live.
REI: The music for “R.U.S.H.” was written by JUNE (ONE N’ ONLY’s music producer) and HAYATO was involved in writing the lyrics. I hope listeners pick up on those creative aspects, as well.
HAYATO: I worked on the rap part. I wanted to use Japanese, too, so I picked words carefully. In JUNE’s songs, it’s pretty common for the Japanese parts to be broken down and given a more Western feel, with English mixed in, but if I was going to be taking part in the writing process, I wanted to have some clearly Japanese parts. I placed a lot of importance on the overall vibe, focusing on creating an atmosphere in which the words were clearly audible.
EIKU: I love “Too Much.” There’s some amapiano in there, so I hope people keep a close eye on our footwork. TETTA and I did the final switch-up, and I love the interplay in that part. It felt like we were jamming together, so I had a lot of fun.
HAYATO: The choreography also had some African dancing, and we’re developing and using some new steps, so I want fans to check out these latest moves, fresh from the floor.
EIKU: These new steps are like nothing I’ve ever seen when practicing the fundamentals. They’re really hard, so I’ve been watching tutorial videos and practicing.
KENSHIN: I like “ALL OUT.” We debuted this song in the final show of the 47 prefecture tour, but we wanted to make it clear in the lyrics that this was just one more step in our journey. NAOYA, HAYATO, and I wrote the lyrics to the song, and I didn’t have much previous experience with writing lyrics, so it was an incredibly fun time.
HAYATO: We wrote lyrics to accompany music from JUNE, and all of us really focused on the details. We’d show each other the lyrics we were working on while on the bus between shows, and we truly put our heart into the lyrics. Because of that, we were able to create a song with a strong message.
—This interview by Kana Yoshida first appeared on Billboard Japan
Cissy Houston, the mother of the late Whitney Houston and a two-time Grammy winner who performed alongside superstar musicians like Elvis Presley, and Aretha Franklin, has died. She was 91.
Houston died Monday morning in her New Jersey home while under hospice care for Alzheimer’s disease, her daughter-in-law Pat Houston told The Associated Press. The acclaimed gospel singer was surrounded by her family.
“Our hearts are filled with pain and sadness. We loss the matriarch of our family,” Pat Houston said in a statement. She said her mother-in-law’s contributions to popular music and culture are “unparalleled.”
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“Mother Cissy has been a strong and towering figure in our lives. A woman of deep faith and conviction, who cared greatly about family, ministry, and community. Her more than seven-decade career in music and entertainment will remain at the forefront of our hearts.”
Houston was in the well-known vocal group, the Sweet Inspirations, with Doris Troy and her niece Dee Dee Warrick. The group sang backup for a variety of soul singers including Otis Redding, Lou Rawls, The Drifters and Dionne Warwick.
The Sweet Inspirations appeared on Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” and sang background vocals for The Jimi Hendrix Experience on the song “Burning of the Midnight Lamp” in 1967. In the same year, Houston worked on Franklin’s classic “Ain’t No Way.”
Houston’s last performance with the Sweet Inspirations came after the group hit the stage with Presley in a Las Vegas show in 1969. Her final recording session with the group turned into their biggest R&B hit “(Gotta Find) A Brand New Lover” a composition by the production team of Gamble & Huff, who appeared on the group’s fifth album, “Sweet Sweet Soul.”
During that time, the group occasionally performed live concert dates with Franklin. After the group’s success and four albums together, Houston left The Sweet Inspirations to pursue a solo career where she flourished.
Houston became an in-demand session singer and recorded more than 600 songs in multiple genres throughout her career. Her vocals can heard on tracks alongside a wide range of artists including Chaka Khan, Donny Hathaway, Jimi Hendrix, Luther Vandross, Beyoncé, Paul Simon, Roberta Flack and her daughter.
In 1971, Houston’s signature vocals were featured on Burt Bacharach’s solo album, which includes “Mexican Divorce,” “All Kinds of People” and “One Less Bell to Answer.” She performed various standards including Barbra Streisand’s hit song, “Evergreen.”
Houston won Grammys for her albums “Face to Face” in 1997 and “He Leadeth Me” the following year in the best traditional soul gospel album category.
Houston authored three books: “He Leadeth Me,” “How Sweet The Sound: My Life with God and Gospel” and “Remembering Whitney: A Mother’s Story of Life, Loss and The Night The Music Stopped.”
In 1938, Cissy Houston started her career when she joined her sister Anne and brothers Larry and Nicky to form the gospel group, The Drinkard Four, who recorded one album. She attended New Hope Baptist Church, where she later become Minister of Sacred Music.
Houston was the youngest of eight children.
“We are touched by your generous support, and your outpouring of love during our profound time of grief,” Houston said on behalf of the family. “We respectfully request our privacy during this difficult time.”
Tee Grizzley’s relentless work ethic has led him to releasing at least one project every year of his career since first exploding onto the scene with his classic “First Day Out” single in late 2016.
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The Detroit resident checked off 2024’s box on Friday (Oct. 4) when Post Traumatic arrived 11 months after his last album, Tee’s Coney Island.
When Tee and his team were in the process of whittling down the 40 to 50 tracks he recorded for this LP, he noticed something consistently peering through from his lyrics — his pain. That’s what led Grizzley to titling his fifth studio album Post Traumatic.
“I feel like this is my best work,” he confidently declares over a Zoom call to Billboard. “After they hear this, they not gonna want to hear nothing else from nobody.”
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It’s fitting that Tee is cathartically letting go of the decades of pain and trauma endured throughout his life, as he recently had surgery on his middle finger to remove part of a bullet fragment lodged into his hand since he was 14 years old.
Grizzley followed up his “Swear to God” collaboration with Future by grabbing another rap A-lister to spar with in J. Cole. What started out as a friendship where Tee wanted to have the Dreamville boss join him to play in his GrizzleyWorld RP on Grand Theft Auto, ended up in the thumping back-and-forth of “Blow for Blow.”
Earlier this year, Cole essentially executive-produced the track, when finding the eerie Pi’erre Bourne beat and ripping it before sending the track over to Tee. “When I heard it, I was blown away by his verse. Like, ‘I can’t half-step on here,’” Grizzley describes his reaction of listening to “Blow for Blow” for the first time.
Give the rest of our interview with Tee Grizzley a read as he details the oral history of teaming up with J. Cole, working with Kanye West in Mexico and what’s on tap for GTA 6.
What happened to your middle finger?
I was playing with a gun a long time ago when I was 14. It had went off and I had a piece of fragment in my finger. It been there this whole time and I finally got it removed.
Post Traumatic — what led to this project coming about?
You know I’m always working in the studio. Just trying to perfect my craft. A lot of the songs I realized I heard a lot of my pain in it when I was coming up with the album title. I come up with the album title after I make the songs. I was listening back like, “I been through some s–t.” I was in Detroit most of the time. I recorded a couple songs in L.A. I just want my core to be super happy with this work and I want to gain some new fans.
Have you noticed a difference creatively since trying ayahuasca?
Nah, I don’t really feel like ayahuasca helped me with my creative. I feel like ayahuasca helped me with life in general. It was deeper than being more creative. It was a life help.
I feel like that could go hand-in-hand.
For some people — but for me, it showed me what life was and how life works. It ain’t gonna write the music for me.
“Blow for Blow,” how was linking up with J. Cole? Tell that story for us.
I was trying to come up with the perfect song to do with Cole. I don’t want to just put Cole on any song. He helped me with that process like, “I already know what we should do. I got the perfect one for us.” When I heard it, I was blown away by his verse. Like I can’t half-step on here. Usually I go to the studio and go with the flow a little bit. This one I had to sit with it and really figure out what I want to say on here. Ain’t no matching Cole. He gave his sharp pen and I had to get my sharp pen for my world.
Did you talk to Pi’erre Bourne? He was surprised when the track dropped [as the producer].
I never kicked it with Pi’erre before. That was all Cole’s doing. [The track] was sent back-and-forth. [Cole and I] talked a lot so it was like we was in the studio together.
What was the origin of your friendship with Cole?
Probably like a year. The way we connected it wasn’t even about music. I’m really trying to get bro on GTA. I’m trying to get J. Cole on GTA and we’re kicking it about the game and chopping it up about real life. I told him about my experience with ayahuasca and stuff like that. To have a friendship like that, I just decided to take advantage of that. I let him know I needed him. Even if he would’ve said no, nothing would’ve changed about our friendship. I still would’ve f–ked with him. I know he in the middle of working on The Fall Off. I would’ve understood. But bro made it happen for me. I wanna say this was March or April.
You reconnected with Mariah the Scientist for “Situationship.” You guys seem to have a good chemistry coming off “IDGAF” with Chris Brown, which hit the Billboard Hot 100 for her first entry.
I feel like the chemistry is there. I think I work well with female R&B artists. They bring a different type of soul to music. They melodies and voices and my verses — it just pairs very well.
Anything you wanted to do with the album that didn’t make the cut?
I did so much recording, and when we narrowed everything down, the best music was chosen. The way I usually do it — I make songs with a purpose. By the time I get to 15 or 16 songs, I’m confident in all of them. But this time, I recorded a bunch of music. Me and my time listened to all of it and chose the best 24. It was like 40 or 50 songs.
What else you got coming up the rest of the year?
I feel like this album gonna be in rotation for the rest of the year, and next year we got a tour coming. I feel like this is my best work. After they hear this, they not gonna want to hear nothing else from nobody.
There’s this leaked song with Kanye I think was supposed to be on either Yandhi or Jesus Is King called “Survive.” What’s the history of that? How was working with Ye? It’s a dope record. I wish people heard it.
When YNW Melly was out — free Melly — he had pulled up on Kanye. Melly had called me up when he was working on a mixtape at the time. He didn’t even ask Kanye if it was cool, he was just like, “Pull up.” I pull up, and Kanye was like, “I rock with you too. I want to do some work with you.” That turned into me going out to Mexico, and Kanye was out there and we started working and vibing. It was a super dope experience.
Touch on the gaming space, as far as what’s ahead and how lucrative it’s been for you.
It’s so much deeper than the money. I enjoy doing it. Before I was a rapper, I was a gamer. I grew up on it. It’s definitely lucrative if done right. In a sense that you gotta stream and repurpose your content.
What do you think about GTA 6 potentially coming out next year? Has Rockstar tapped in with you?
Yeah, I definitely developed a relationship with Rockstar throughout this GTA thing. I think GTA 6 is coming next year for sure. I’m super excited to play. I would like to see servers based off of GTA 6. I definitely hope that role play is incorporated into it somehow.
Have GTA and Rockstar embraced RPs?
They have. FiveM is the host for all the role play servers and Rockstar bought FiveM. Rockstar has a FiveM team that’s heavily involved with the role play community. [I’m taking off] three weeks.
What’s your favorite GTA of all-time?
I like Grand Theft Auto III. That’s the one I played the most. That was a game you actually rode around shooting people. San Andreas is a classic for sure. What made me fall in love with it was Grand Theft Auto III.
Do you have any community service coming up?
I’m going to the jails and the juveniles. Not only giving back, but talking to the people and younger generation. Trying to give them some game, and shine some light on the fact that it ain’t over for you.
Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’ “Die With a Smile” tops both the Billboard Global 200 and Billboard Global Excl. U.S. charts for a sixth total and consecutive week.
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Plus, The Weeknd and Playboi Carti’s “Timeless” debuts at No. 3 on the Global 200 and No. 4 on Global Excl. U.S.
The Global 200 and Global Excl. U.S. charts, which began in September 2020, rank songs based on streaming and sales activity culled from more than 200 territories around the world, as compiled by Luminate. The Global 200 is inclusive of worldwide data and the Global Excl. U.S. chart comprises data from territories excluding the United States.
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Chart ranks are based on a weighted formula incorporating official-only streams on both subscription and ad-supported tiers of audio and video music services, as well as download sales, the latter of which reflect purchases from full-service digital music retailers from around the world, with sales from direct-to-consumer (D2C) sites excluded from the charts’ calculations.
“Die With a Smile” leads the Global 200 with 117.3 million streams (down less than 1% week-over-week) and 9,000 sold (up 3%) worldwide Sept. 27-Oct. 3. The song is Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’ first No. 1 each since the chart began.
Notably, the duet has drawn over 100 million streams globally in each of the last five weeks – the most such frames for a song this year; it surpassed Sabrina Carpenter’s “Please Please Please” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” each with three.
Billie Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather” holds at No. 2 on the Global 200, following three weeks at No. 1 beginning in August. It soared by 18% to 90.3 million streams and 45% to 10,000 sold worldwide following the Sept. 27 premiere of its official video.
The Weeknd and Playboi Carti’s “Timeless” enters the Global 200 at No. 3. Released Sept. 27, it starts with 66.2 million streams and 7,000 sold worldwide in its first week. The Weekend earns his 13th top 10 since the survey began and Playboi Carti, his fourth.
Carpenter claims three songs in the Global 200’s top 10 for a sixth week: “Taste,” which holds at No. 4, after reaching No. 2; “Espresso” (3-5, following three nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1 beginning in June); and “Please Please Please” (6-7, after two weeks at No. 1 also starting in June). She’s the first artist to triple up in the top 10 over six weeks in 2024; next up, Eilish and Taylor Swift each have posted two such weeks this year.
“Die With a Smile” leads Global Excl. U.S. with 94.2 million streams (up less than 1%) and 5,000 sold (down 2%) outside the U.S. Sept. 27-Oct. 3. As on the Global 200, the ballad became Gaga and Mars’ first No. 1 each since the list launched.
Eilish’s “Birds of a Feather” keeps at No. 2 on Global Excl. U.S., following three weeks at No. 1 beginning in August, and Carpenter’s “Espresso” maintains the No. 3 spot, following eight nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1 beginning in May.
The Weeknd and Playboi Carti’s “Timeless” debuts at No. 4 on Global Excl. U.S. with 37.8 million streams and 1,000 sold in its first week. The Weekend adds his 11th top 10 and Playboi Carti, his third.
Karol G’s “Si Antes Te Hubiera Conocido” is steady at No. 5 on Global Excl. U.S., after hitting No. 2.
Plus, Carpenter’s “Taste” holds at No. 6 on Global Excl. U.S. (after reaching No. 4) and “Please Please Please” dips 7-10 (following a week at No. 1 in June); already the only artist with multiple weeks with three songs in the top 10 simultaneously this year, she logs a sixth week achieving such a triple.
The Billboard Global 200 and Billboard Global Excl. U.S. charts (dated Oct. 12, 2024) will update on Billboard.com tomorrow, Oct. 8. For both charts, the top 100 titles are available to all readers on Billboard.com, while the complete 200-title rankings are visible on Billboard Pro, Billboard’s subscription-based service. For all chart news, you can follow @billboard and @billboardcharts on both X, formerly known as Twitter, and Instagram.
Luminate, the independent data provider to the Billboard charts, completes a thorough review of all data submissions used in compiling the weekly chart rankings. Luminate reviews and authenticates data. In partnership with Billboard, data deemed suspicious or unverifiable is removed, using established criteria, before final chart calculations are made and published.
It’s a constant refrain in the modern music business: “A hit can come from anywhere.”
The increasingly varied nature of hits, which now erupt from South Korea and South Africa and Mexico and carom from country to country in the nearly frictionless streaming landscape, has been reflected on Billboard’s two global charts. Halfway through 2022, 85% of top 10 hits on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. ranking were releases from artists outside of the mainland U.S. That number rose to 92% in 2023.
But unexpectedly, the big global hits in the first six months of 2024 came primarily from one place: America.
Halfway through this year, U.S. acts accounted for 60% of the top 10 hits on the Global Excl. U.S. chart. And American artists were also responsible for the top eight songs on the Billboard Global 200 this summer. “American artists are crushing this year,” says Scott Cutler, co-CEO of Pulse Records. Pulse has contributed to the surge — the company signed Tommy Richman, whose bouncy, high-gloss “Million Dollar Baby” was No. 8 on the Global Songs of the Summer ranking.
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Executives attribute America’s show of musical might this year to three factors: The strength of the release calendar for U.S. stars, at a time when many prominent acts from outside the U.S. have been off cycle; the boom in country music, which is finding an increasingly global audience; and American labels’ increased emphasis on international marketing.
U.S. global dominance in music used to be a given. But that changed as listeners around the world adopted streaming services, and the cost of making and marketing music plummeted thanks to new technology and social media platforms. “When the cost structure changes, local [music] bounces back,” Will Page, former chief economist at Spotify, told Billboard last year.
In a 2023 paper, Page and Chris Dalla Riva, a senior product manager at the streaming platform Audiomack, documented this shift. They found that less than 20% of the top 10 songs in Poland, France, Netherlands and Germany were by local artists in 2012. A decade later, however, homegrown acts accounted for 70% of top 10s in Poland, 60% in France, 30% in the Netherlands, and 20% in Germany. The authors called this shift “glocalisation.”
That said, these country-by-country gains are probably partially obscured on Billboard‘s global charts, because they aggregate streaming and sales data from more than 200 territories, according to Glenn McDonald, the author of You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music.
Imagine that Polish listeners are playing more Polish rap, but also some Sabrina Carpenter. Similarly, French listeners are enjoying more French rap, but dabbling in Carpenter’s discography as well. If you pool the two listening populations together, Carpenter will still be popular, but French listeners are unlikely to appreciate Polish rap, and vice versa.
Still, it’s notable that the upper reaches of Billboard‘s global charts show such a pronounced uptick for American artists so far this year — defying the last two years of data as well as conventional wisdom about the increasingly competitive nature of the music industry around the world.
Executives believe the surge is partly due to random chance. While superstars set their own schedules, either due to coincidence or competitive spirit, seemingly every American heavy-hitter has dropped an album this year. That group includes Ariana Grande, Ye, Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Future, Taylor Swift and Post Malone.
At the same time, international powerhouses like Harry Styles have been quiet. The members of BTS are serving in the military, so they haven’t released much music or scored a major hit. (Jung Kook‘s “Seven” was Billboard‘s global song of the summer last year.) And recent albums from Dua Lipa and Ed Sheeran haven’t been as successful as past projects.
On top of that, “it feels like a new generation of stars are here” in the U.S., says Peter Kadin, senior vp of marketing at EMPIRE. “There was a void for a time after the pandemic. Now artists that have been developing for a few years have really come into their own.” EMPIRE has its own budding star in Shaboozey. Carpenter, Chappell Roan, Richman, Benson Boone and Teddy Swims have also scored breakout singles this year, giving the U.S. an unusually strong slate of hits from newcomers who can be promoted abroad.
And it’s notable that some of these big singles are emerging from Nashville: Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is one of two country songs that finished in the top 10 in the song of the summer race on the Billboard Global 200. Luminate has surveyed a 12-week summer listening period for the past four years and found that streaming of country music outside America keeps rising. If international demand for the genre continues to increase, this gives U.S. labels another potential source of hits to export, one they couldn’t draw from the same way a decade ago.
Their approach to exporting has changed, too. U.S. labels once focused first on American consumers before looking abroad. Now they are often running global campaigns — or even starting promotion abroad, in territories where marketing is cheaper and fandom can be more of a social activity, before they begin a push Stateside. “It’s much easier to tap into all of these other markets because so much of promotion is digital now,” says Mike Weiss, head of A&R at United Masters.
Stellar, a Copenhagen-based marketing company, was founded in 2019 with the express purpose of helping artists find and nurture audiences in Southeast Asia and Latin America, which they might have neglected before streaming. The timing was right: “We have experienced a growing international focus from U.S. labels realizing the essential need for working artist campaigns with a global perspective,” says Felipe Martinez, Stellar’s head of Latin America. “Arguably U.S. labels have shown to be ahead of the curve in this understanding, while other markets seem to be more conservative in their international marketing efforts.”
At least this year, these efforts appear to be paying off for American artists. “If we see energy coming out of the Philippines or India,” Kadin says, “we’re going to run with it.”
Big Glo season has arrived. GloRilla looks to cap off her banner year with the release of her Glorious debut album on Friday (Oct. 11). Ahead of the project hitting streaming services, Glo revealed some of the superstar guests that will be joining her on the LP on Monday (Oct. 7). Explore See latest videos, […]
Bunnie XO is always supporting her man. The Dumb Blonde podcast host took to TikTok this week to share a sweet video in which her husband, Jelly Roll, is seen doing vocal warm-ups before a show. In the clip, Bunnie is rubbing the country superstar’s chest and giving him a hug while he does lip […]