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Over the course of Billboard Boxscore’s 40-year history, Latin music artists have made their mark on stage with sold-out tours across the Americas. Here, Billboard is running down the 10 highest-grossing concert tours by Latin acts – here, defined by artists eligible for Billboard’s Top Latin Albums and Hot Latin Songs charts – in the […]

The White House race between former President Donald Trump and current Vice President Kamala Harris continues to be incredibly tight. With less than two months to go before Americans cast their votes, both candidates are doing everything they can to lock in their core constituents, amidst a desperate scramble to rope in crucial undecided and uninspired voters who could tip the scales in their favor.
And while the GOP has long hewed to the old saw that celebrity endorsements don’t move the needle on election day, this year has already shown how the right A-list seal of approval could be one of the decisive factors in the battle between twice-impeached convicted felon Trump and 11th-hour Democratic candidate VP Harris.
The proof is in the immediate impact felt by Taylor Swift throwing her hat into the ring two weeks ago with a strongly worded endorsement of Harris and VP pick Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. After Swift encouraged young voters to register at Vote.gov following the Democratic National Convention, more than 405,000 people clicked through in strong example of Swift’s potential impact on the outcome in November, easily besting the site’s early September daily tally of 30,000 visitors.
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A week later, Trump lashed out at the megastar, who has been selling out stadiums around the world for the past year on her culture-dominating Eras Tour, while also getting weekly high-profile, multi-demo screen time during NFL season thanks to her romance with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,” the candidate raged on his Truth Social platform over the weekend.
According to a YouGov poll conducted last week, more than 53% of Americans — including 31% of Republicans — think Swift’s endorsement will help Harris; 4% thought it might hurt Harris. That poll came on the heels of a February survey by Change Research that found that 65% of Democrats had a favorable view of Swift, while 29% of independents and just 17% of Republicans felt the same. For now, though, it’s still unclear if Swift’s endorsement will actually help Harris — based on a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll, in which 81% of voters surveyed said Swift’s support for the VP will not influence how they vote. Only six percent said they are more likely to vote for Harris since Swift’s post, with 13 percent saying it makes them less likely to do so.
With the Nov. 5 election just 47 days away, Billboard spoke to a group of academics, political consultants, pollsters and music managers to see if they think Swift’s endorsement — and Trump’s lashing out — could help push Harris/Walz over the top, or turn the tide in Trump’s favor.
“People Will at Least Listen to Her”
“This election will be decided by a few thousand votes in three or four key states, so everything matters,” says veteran pollster and communications analyst Frank Luntz. “Will this be the deciding factor? Probably not. But will it have an impact? Most definitely.”
Luntz, who has done a series of stories asking the same group of young, undecided voters about the election for the New York Times since August, says before President Biden dropped out to make way for Harris, he polled voters about who would have the most influence on their vote. In first place was Trump at 38%, with Biden at 34% and Swift not far behind at 25%.
“I was really shocked by that,” he says. “At the time, Biden was so weak among younger women, and they are among the Democrats’ most reliable voting group — and [Swift] matters significantly, because she’s not seen as a politician and she’s not seen as a partisan. So people will at least listen to her.”
In addition, Luntz says, he thinks Swift handled the wording of her endorsement “quite well,” with language that explained “with some sophistication” why she did what she did. Among the reasons Swift cited for speaking out was her fear and anger over an incident last month in which Trump platformed fake AI-generated images of the singer falsely claiming she was supporting him.
Brilliant Corners Artist Managment (Death Cab For Cutie, Postal Service, Best Coast) co-founder Jordan Kurland knows a bit about speaking out during crucial elections, thanks to his time serving on the Entertainment Advisory Committee for both former two-term Democratic President Barack Obama and the unsuccessful 2016 Clinton presidential campaign against Trump. He also was impressed with the way Swift made it more about voting than herself.
“I appreciate that she talks about doing her research and encouraging people to not just vote for the candidate because your favorite pop star said so, but to really get to know the issues,” says Kurland.
“The icy peak of dumbf–k mountain”
While an older generation of artists, such as Bruce Springsteen, Oprah Winfrey and Barbra Streisand, have been reliable democratic party boosters and endorsers in the past, Luntz and Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson (author of Everything Trump Touches Dies) say that Swift is a new kind of political force — with a massive, multi-media reach that could rope in sometimes unreliable, unmotivated young voters.
“Taylor Swift represents a different category of celebrity than almost anyone under the sun,” says the former Republican and political strategist Wilson, who co-founded the Lincoln Project Super PAC in 2019 in an effort to prevent Trump from being re-elected. “She’s sui generis in terms of the reach she has and her impact on young women, not to mention their fathers and mothers.”
Swift not only rules the Billboard charts on an almost constant basis, as well as having a culture-dominating Eras Tour and accompanying movie, but also makes headlines every weekend from the sky box as she cheers on Kelce. NFL games averaged 17.9 million viewers each in 2023, a year when 45 NFL games were among the 100 most-watched prime-time telecasts, with the league hogging 14 of the top 15 slots.
Add in 4.35 million tickets sold for her 60 Eras Tour U.S. shows in 2023, and Wilson says you have an artist whose reach — and influence — is virtually unmatched in modern pop history.
“Some of those girls who first loved her are now young women whose mothers took them to see Swift 10-15 years ago,” says Wilson. “And she has a relationship to those women and girls that Republicans are trying to make fun of — [they say] ‘her music is about bad choices, that’s why this is a bad choice’ — but her candor about her life, and the way it plays through her art, makes her relatable and engages people and makes them feel connected to her beyond her music and entertainment.”
In addition to being major pop culture moments and serious financial boosters for every city Swift visits, Wilson wryly notes that “nobody leaves a Taylor Swift show early or cranky, which is exactly the opposite of a Trump rally. They stay until the last minute and come away feeling happy and empowered.” (Wilson says he joked on MSNBC last week that he’d devised a new spin on the traditional warning about the historically biggest mistakes a politician can make: invading Moscow in the winter, launching a land war in Asia… and screwing with Swifties.)
As for Trump’s “HATE” tweet, Wilson came up with a new description of what he said was an unfathomably stupid self-own targeting a potentially crucial group of voters. “It wasn’t just a stupid idea,” he says. “If there was an Olympian level of stupidity, a mountain in the far distance of stupid ideas, it’s the very pinnacle, the icy peak of dumbf–k mountain.”
“They got Kid Rock and you have Taylor Swift”
Renowned political consultant and pundit James Carville, the lead strategist for Bill Clinton’s winning 1992 campaign, maintains that the evidence that celebrity endorsements have a significant impact on voting behavior is “pretty thin.” But, he adds, at the very least Swift’s endorsement will “drive [Trump] crazy” — as evidenced by the billionaire real estate mogul’s all-caps tweet and running mate JD Vance’s (somewhat) tempered double-down on Fox News last week. “We admire Taylor Swift’s music — but I don’t think most Americans, whether they like her music, are fans of hers or not, are going to be influenced by a billionaire celebrity who I think is fundamentally disconnected from the interests and the problems of most Americans,” opined the former venture capitalist, multi-millionaire Ohio senator.
In addition to her endorsement potentially distracting Trump, and his hate in response turning off many 18-34 young female voters who could be crucial to a win in November, Carville says Swift’s urge to register to vote could definitely make a difference. “It’s impressive that people did an affirmative act [in registering to vote], and he knows that,” says Carville. “They got Kid Rock and you have Taylor Swift. How is that gonna work out?”
Despite political veteran Carville’s on-the-fence status about celebrity endorsements, Penn State University associate professor of political communications and gender Dr. E. Michele Ramsey says that there is “all kinds of research” showing that the “perceived authenticity” of a celebrity’s thumbs-up does move the needle for “either a product or a candidate.”
Ramsey, who teaches the “Taylor Swift, Gender and Communication” course, says Swift’s action could make a difference among low-information voters, a crucial demo this year. She says we’re a moment now where women’s stories are loudly taking center stage on playlists, in the movies and on social media thanks to massive exposure for projects from not only Swift, but also such pop culture juggernauts as Beyoncé, Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish, and even last year’s billion-dollar Barbie movie. And while Swifties are generally more likely to vote for Democrats according to a recent YouGov poll, she is so hugely popular that it’s likely she has fans across a broad political, and geographic spectrum.
“We’re in a unique moment in history where women’s stories are at the top of the food chain, where all these performers are speaking in a very vulnerable situation and expressing feelings that I think many women [and others] can relate to,” Ramsey says about an era when a woman’s right to choose has taken center stage. That state-by-state battle of course follows the overturning of Roe V. Wade two years ago, thanks to Trump’s elevation of three new conservative Supreme Court justices ,who helped overturn a woman’s federally protected right to abortion.
So far, in addition to Swift, a raft of other musicians and stars who appeal to the young female demo have endorsed Harris, including Beyoncé, Eilish, Roan, Rodrigo, Ariana Grande, Cardi B, Charli XCX, Katy Perry, Demi Lovato, Kesha, Megan Thee Stallion and P!nk. Trump has gotten endorsements from a less pop-culture-relevant group: one that includes Kid Rock, Billly Ray Cyrus, Kanye West, Lil Pump, Jason Aldean, Kodak Black and Azealia Banks.
“I’ve never seen a political party that just wants to poke the bear as much as they can,” Ramsey adds about the GOP’s decades-long drive to make abortion illegal, as well as attempts to limit the availability of IVF treatments and contraception, and Vance’s now-infamous put-down of Harris (and other Democrats) as “childless cat ladies.” (Swift sharply signed her endorsement as a member of the latter group, while posting a picture of her holding one of her cats.)
Ramsey notes that while young voters don’t tend to trust dusty institutions or traditional politicians, they do put faith in idols they want to emulate — as evidenced by the quickly formed Swifties for Kamala group that pulled together the day Biden dropped out. “If I was a campaign consultant to Republicans, I would tell them to stop saying anything about Taylor Swift,” he counsels.
At the end of the day, Luntz thinks “everything” makes a difference when you’re talking about an election measured in inches, not miles. He points out the Harris campaign’s potential to lean into Swift’s pop culture pull, as they already have with Taylor-themed campaign friendship bracelets and political ads. “You’re seeking any kind of momentum, any kind of edge,” he explains.
In Luntz’s mind, if the singer doubled-down against Trump’s childish “if you don’t like me, I don’t like you more” “HATE” post and turned his ire against him, it could be a key brick in Harris’ firewall: “She [Swift] could easily turn that into, ‘you don’t like me, WE don’t like you and we’re gonna have the last laugh!’”
At press time spokespeople for the Trump and Harris campaign had not returned Billboard‘s request for comment.
HARU NEMURI will launch the U.S. leg of her Flee from the Sanctuary Tour on Saturday, Sept. 28. Her U.S. tour will kick off from Seattle, following into San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Brooklyn, and finishing at Reggies in Chicago on Oct. 15. Tickets are now on sale for all shows here. “When I felt […]
Travis Scott celebrated the 10th anniversary of his 2014 Days Before Rodeo mixtape with a concert in Atlanta — and he joined forces with Spotify to commemorate the show with a 23-minute film. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news The concert film arrived on Wednesday (Sept. 18), […]
back number’s “to new lovers” returns to No. 1 on the Billboard Japan Hot 100, dated Sept. 18, scoring its second week atop the tally.
The theme song of the drama series Umi no Hajimari (“beginning of the sea”) was released digitally on July 15 and hit No. 1 on the chart dated July 24 after topping downloads (24,432 units) and radio airplay and coming in at No. 4 for streaming (7,532,578 weekly streams). The veteran three-man band’s latest hit gradually slipped 5-7-8-9-14-16 on the list, then returned to the top ten last week at No. 7. The CD single dropped Sept. 11 and powered the track back to the top spot with 25,170 copies sold in its first week. Other metrics for the poignant ballad have gone up as well, with streams at 102%, radio at 489%, video views at 154%, and karaoke at 112% week-over-week.
WEST.’s “Maaikka!” debuts at No. 2. The 23rd single by the seven-member boy band that celebrated its tenth anniversary on Apr. 23rd topped sales with 246,731 copies sold. The track also ranked No. 36 for radio and No. 73 for video.
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Mrs. GREEN APPLE’s “Lilac” slips to No. 3 after scoring its second week at No. 1 last week. While it drops a few rungs on the tally, overall points for the track have increased, with downloads at 102%, radio at 193%, and video at 101% compared to the week before.
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Bowing at No. 4 is OCHA NORMA’s “Chihayaburu.” The Hello! Project girl group’s fourth single sold 108,690 copies to hit No. 4 for sales, while coming in at No. 19 for downloads and No. 100 for radio.
HKT48’s 18th single “Boku wa yatto kimi wo shinpai dekiru” (“I can finally worry about you”) launches at No. 5, selling 152,017 copies to hit No. 2 for sales, but didn’t enter the top 100 in any of the other metrics of the chart’s methodology.
Elsewhere on the chart, Southern All Stars’ “Jeanne d’Arc ni yoroshiku” debuts at No. 11. The theme song for TBS Sports 2024 topped downloads and radio this week.
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 Sept. 9 to 15, here. For more on Japanese music and charts, visit Billboard Japan’s English X account.
Just in time for spooky season, Michael Jackson’s iconic 1983 music video for “Thriller” has surpassed one billion YouTube views. The milestone marks the King of Pop’s fourth visual to join the Billion Views Club after “Beat It,” “Billie Jean,” and “They Don’t Care About Us.” Directed by John Landis and boasting a voiceover from Vincent Price, the 13-minute clip […]
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Source: Bernard Smalls / @PhotosByBeanz
2024 has been a busy year for the toxic king, Future, as he not only helped kick off the battle between Kendrick Lamar and Drake, but also dropped two entire albums just weeks apart in the process.
Looking to keep his 2024 rolling, last week, Future announced that he’d be releasing a new mixtape dubbed Pluto near the end of September. Now, he’s dropped the track list for said project on social media. On Wednesday (Sept. 18), Future Hendrix took to Instagram and revealed the titles of his 17-deep project, and though it didn’t reveal any featured guest, you can bet you’ll be hearing from a few of his Hip-Hop peers joining come Sept. 20 when Pluto drops.
While we don’t expect anyone else suddenly starting off a classic rap battle based off of a guest appearance on Future’s mixtape, we’re sure whoever pops up will be bringing their “A” game on the upcoming project, which has some pretty interesting titles such as “Ready To Cook Up,” “Oath,” and “MJ.”
01. Teflon Don
02. Lil Demon
03. Ski
04. Ready To Cook Up
05. Plutoski
06. Too Fast
07. Ocean
08. Press The Button
09. MJ
10. Brazzier
11. South of France
12. Surfing A Tsunami
13. Made My Hoe Faint
14. Told My
15. Oath
16. Lost My Dog
17. Aye Say Gang
Should be interesting to see what kind of waves Future makes with his latest piece of work. Will he continue to take subliminal jabs at his rap rivals to get social media speculating? Will he play it cool and go about his business? Guess we’ll find out soon enough.
What will you be expecting from Future’s latest mixtape? Let us know in the comments section below.

Forget espresso — Sabrina Carpenter is ready to start sipping on eggnog. This holiday season, the 25-year-old pop star is helping fans get festive with a Netflix special titled A Nonsense Christmas, as announced Thursday (Sept. 19). In a teaser clip posted to her Instagram, a camera pans up Carpenter’s body to show fur-trimmed boots, […]
With the first quarter of the 21st century coming to a close, Billboard is spending the next few months counting down our staff picks for the 25 greatest pop stars of the last 25 years. We’ve already named our Honorable Mentions and our No. 25, No. 24, No. 23, No. 22, No. 21, No. 20, No. 19, No. 18 and No. 17 stars, and now we remember the century in Jay-Z — who redesigned crossover hip-hop stardom in his image and became one of the biggest pop culture icons of the entire century.
The best is not always the best-selling. Take the Porsche 911: Considered by many experts and fans alike to be pound-for-pound the best sports car money can buy, the rear-engined coupe sells only a fraction of what America’s number one pony car, the Ford Mustang, sells. Despite its motor being in the wrong place, the 911 is thought to be the platonic ideal of a sports car. It can do it all: deliver a transcendent driving experience, win prestigious motor races, do the weekly chore run, ferry a (small) family around, and look cool when parked on the block. Instead of introducing radical new ideas every model year, Porsche has worked to intensely refine and perfect the 911 over the course of its 75-year run.
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The closest thing Hip-Hop has to the Porsche 911 is Brooklyn’s own Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter. Throughout his storied three-decade career, Jay-Z never reached the commercial heights of some of his contemporaries but, much like the 911, he represented the platonic ideal of what a rapper should and could be – including as a crossover star, who was able to have major hits and top 40-level success without ever really changing who he was or sounding like he was actively chasing any of it.
Jay-Z
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Hitting the scene in earnest in 1996 with his debut album Reasonable Doubt, Jay shared underworld tales and street knowledge in a cool unaffected manner that made it seem as if he was letting you in on a secret. With Death Row and Bad Boy dominating the charts in the mid-’90s, Jay worked to carve out a lane for himself as the guy who had one foot on the block and one foot in the boardroom. After not finding high-level commercial success with his debut, Jay recruited the team behind his friend The Notorious B.I.G.’s classic albums to create In My Lifetime, Vol. 1. Debuting at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, Vol. 1. boasted minor hits in “The City Is Mine” and “(Always Be My) Sunshine” but proved that Jay had the propensity to make music that appealed to both radio program directors and true hip-hop heads.
But the real breakthrough came with 1998’s Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life. This time around there was no big-name executive producer, just Jay-Z and his Roc-A-Fella partners Dame Dash and Kareem “Biggs” Burke. The star of the show was the 45 King-produced, Annie-sampling “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” that peaked at No. 15 on the Hot 100, becoming Jay-Z’s biggest hit up until that point and pushing Vol 2. to be Jay’s first No. 1 debut on the Hot 200. Suddenly the hustler from Marcy Projects was no longer toiling away in the shadow of NYC’s towering MCs — he was now one of its brightest stars. Over the next four years Jay-Z proved success does indeed beget success. He launched the careers of a few successful rap stars under his Roc-A-Fella imprint and stretched his earning potential with new clothing and liquor endeavors. But despite all that — as well as a bevy of rap hits and back-to-back Billboard 200 No. 1 albums — Jay’s best days were still far ahead of him.
The new millennium got off to a crazy start for Jay, as he connected with the Neptunes for the first time for the lead single of what was supposed to be a label compilation album. The fun and uproarious “I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me)” became Jay’s first single to top the Hip-Hop/R&B chart and peaked at No. 11 on the Hot 100. The song was so big it reportedly inspired Britney Spears to tap the Virginia Beach-based production duo to work on her Britney album. The Dynasty: Roc-La-Familia also served a greater purpose still for the young rap mogul: It set the groundwork for what would become the best album of his career. Featured on Dynasty were three then-unknown producers – Ye (then Kanye West), Bink! and Just Blaze — who gave Jay a bunch of sample-based beats that were shimmering, soulful and gritty all at once. That sound would go on to anchor Jay’s sixth album, The Blueprint.
In 2001, Jay was fighting battles on multiple fronts. He was taking verbal fire from NYC artists — Nas, Prodigy, and Jadakiss — who were none too happy with Jay’s claim to be the King of New York. And he was fighting two criminal cases: one for illegal gun possession and one for assault. During all that, Jay absconded to Miami to record what would become his magnum opus. Legend goes that Jay heard the beats and was so inspired he recorded the album in less than a week. The result would be a project that completely reordered the pantheon of rap greats: Sure, Reasonable Doubt is considered a classic, but the wider world didn’t take notice of it until years later. With The Blueprint, everyone knew immediately that Jay-Z had made the best rap album anyone had heard in years. From the scathing diss track “Takeover” to the tender “Song Cry” — and a pair of irresistible ‘00s pop-rap staples in the triumphant “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” and the hilariously rude “Girls, Girls, Girls” — The Blueprint, as Noah Callahan-Bever wrote, became just that: “Everything a great rap album should be, and, perhaps as importantly, nothing that it should not be.”
Throughout his career, Jay always looked at himself as more than a rapper. Yes, he also claimed to be a hustler, but he more so saw himself as an enterprise. The famous bar wouldn’t come until 2005 when he hopped on a remix to Ye’s “Diamonds” record—in Jay’s eyes he’s not simply a businessman, he’s a business, man. And that sentiment really began to show in the early 2000s: So much so he felt he’d outgrown his role as a rapper to the point that he decided to retire, dropping a farewell project in The Black Album. And why not? By then he felt he had it all: He had five consecutive No. 1 albums, Roc-A-Fella was chugging along just nicely — and, in his immortal words, he had “the hottest chick in the game” wearing his chain in Beyoncé. He’d just scored two of his biggest pop hits to date alongside the then-burgeoning pop/R&B diva: His No. 3-peaking “Bonnie & Clyde ‘03” from the overstuffed sequel album Blueprint 2: The Gift and Curse, and her “Crazy in Love,” the Hot 100-topping breakout hit from Bey’s Dangerously in Love that set her on the path to all-time solo greatness. Things couldn’t be going better.
But what other rapper could have made the entire world care about their retirement? He made culture stop. Fans actually mourned his career! We’d never seen someone go out on top; on their own terms. Especially after making what appeared to be all the right moves. It was no wonder the documentary he made about the making of his “last” album – 2004’s Fade to Black, which also captured his “retirement party” concert at New York’s Madison Square Garden, bringing hip-hop to the World’s Most Famous Arena at a time when it rarely got to command such stages — was itself a hit.
Jay-Z
Kevin Mazur/WireImage
Of course, he couldn’t leave the game alone, and wound up returning three years and a Def Jam Presidential stint later with the forgettable Kingdom Come. Tapping his usual list of producers to craft his comeback special, Jay suffered his first great misstep: He underestimated just how much the rap game had moved on in the time he was away. The South, and Atlanta in particular, was now the dominant force in rap– a reality helped bring forth by signing Young Jeezy to Def Jam. And with younger guys like T.I. able to seamlessly flow between grimy street records and wide aperture radio hits, Jay’s attempt felt, well, old. It didn’t help that he himself was struggling with how to be a rapper touching 40 years old.
But Jay-Z’s true gift remained his ability to make people believe Jay-Z is the coolest person in the world. His ability to sell that idea has helped him sell everything else. When, on Blueprint 3, he declared Auto-Tune dead at the late height of its use within hip-hop in 2009, most people said “hm,” but went with it. (He had less success with getting people to stop wearing Timbs, but you can’t win ‘em all.) Nonetheless, his coolness is what made his BP3 collaboration with Alicia Keys, “Empire State of Mind” — a song that could have fallen flat and tumbled into cringe in the hands of a lesser artist — his first song to hit No. 1 on the Hot 100, and an enduring Big Apple anthem that even folks who couldn’t name a second Jay-Z song still know most of the words to.
Another gift has been his ability to align himself with the right people at the right time. When he retired from rap and released The Black Album, Jay released a cappella versions of the album and let DJs and producers make new mash-up versions of the album. Danger Mouse’s career was birthed on the back of that release when he mixed it with beats sampling the Beatles’ White Album to create The Grey Album. That album also inspired Linkin Park and Jay to combine some of their songs together to create a six-song EP called Collision Course that wound up selling 368,000 copies first week and winning a Grammy for “Numb/Encore.”
But Jay’s greatest collaborations would come years later. In 2011, he and his mentee Ye traversed the globe to record what would become Watch the Throne. A fully immersive experience, WTT spawned a roving art exhibit, a listening at NYC’s Hayden Planetarium, and a global tour that had them performing their smash hit “N—as In Paris” multiple times at every stop and 11 times in Paris. Lush, lavish, and luxurious, Watch the Throne had was the cultural high point of the past 24 years for both Jay-Z and Ye, positioning them both as not just rap stars but pop culture titans.
Jay-Z
Jason Merritt/Getty Images
A few years later, in 2014, Jay’s legend (and pop star bonafides) only grew greater when he and his now-wife Beyoncé decided to team up for what would become one of the best tours of the past 25 years, with the On the Run Tour. Boasting 21 shows across three countries, the all-stadium tour became one of the most successful in history, with $109 MM in ticket sales, according to Billboard Boxscore. It was so successful, the duo re-upped and did it again four years later. Could Jay have headlined a solo stadium tour 18 years into his career? Maybe, maybe not. But the important thing to remember is that he did embark on global stadium tours at a time in his career when most rappers from his generation wouldn’t be able book midsize venues in their home cities.
Just like the venerable 911, Jay’s game was constant improvement. He didn’t sell like 50 Cent or Nelly or Eminem at their respective peaks. The only time he was able to sell a million in a week – sort of — was when he made a deal with Samsung to pre-load his Magna Carter…Holy Grail album on their phones, giving him a platinum plaque before it even hit stores. But his stranglehold on pop culture and his influence on cultural trends was unmatched (remember when he told everyone not to drive a BMW X5 and everyone, even people who couldn’t afford one in the first place, listened?). No one, besides Rihanna, Taylor Swift and Ye back when his name was still Kanye, has been able to affect the commercial decisions of young music fans as much as Jay had.
Jay-Z
Jon Super/Redferns
Don’t take our word for it, though. Listen to Jay at the end of “What More Can I Say”:
The soul of a hustler, I really ran the streets/A CEO’s mind, that marketing plan was me/ And no I ain’t get shot up a whole bunch of times/ Or make up s—t in a whole bunch of lines / And I ain’t animated, like say, a Busta Rhymes/ But the real s—t you get when you bust down my lines/ Add that to the fact I went plat’ a bunch of times/ Times that by my influence on pop culture/ I supposed to be number one on everybody’s list.
Read more about the Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century here — and be sure to check back on Tuesdsay when our No. 15 artist is revealed!

Linkin Park‘s recent reunion has sparked a lot of complicated feelings and opinions, the latest of which comes from late vocalist Chester Bennington’s mom.
In interviews with Rolling Stone published Thursday (Sept. 19), Susan Eubanks shared that she feels “betrayed” by the entire ordeal, alleging that no one in the band told her that they had plans to reunite, much less that they were adding Dead Sara’s Emily Armstrong as its new lead singer. “They told me that if they were ever going to do something, they would let me know,” she told the publication. “They didn’t let me know, and they probably knew that I wouldn’t going to be very happy. I’m very upset about it.”
Instead, Eubanks says she learned of the news — which Linkin Park announced via livestream Sept. 5 with plans to release a new album, From Zero, and embark on a tour — on Google, after which she tuned in to the stream to find Armstrong singing Bennington’s part in one of the band’s songs. “I’m just going to say it, [Armstrong was] screeching her way through a very high note,” she said, adding that she immediately clicked off and started crying.
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“I feel like they’re trying very hard to erase the past,” Eubanks continued. “They’re performing songs that Chester sang. And I don’t know how the fans are taking it, but I know how I take it. And having [Armstrong] singing my son’s songs is hurtful.”
Eubanks also alleged that guitarist Mike Shinoda used to threaten to replace Bennington with a female vocalist — whose range might be more naturally suited for Linkin Park’s songs — when her son was still alive. “He often put Chester down,” she claimed of Shinoda. “He said Mike told him at rehearsal that, ‘If you decide you’re leaving, we’re going to replace you with a girl.’ And Chester was dumbfounded and hurt.”
Billboard has reached out to Linkin Park’s reps for comment.
Linkin Park’s reunion follows a seven-year hiatus that came after Bennington’s death in 2017. While some fans are happy to see the group back at it again, others took issue with the addition of Armstrong, be it her perceived inability to fill Bennington’s shoes or her past affiliations with Scientologist and convicted rapist Danny Masterson. The latter issue lead Armstrong to release a statement Sept. 6 distancing herself from the That ’70s Show actor, emphasizing that she hasn’t spoken to him since supporting him at a single court date in 2020.
Another person who’s spoken out against Linkin Park’s reunion is Bennington’s son Jaime, who also claims the band didn’t consult him ahead of its reunion and slammed Armstrong’s involvement as “quietly erasing [his] father’s life and legacy in real time.” Later, Jaime said that he’d received abuse online from Linkin Park fans in response to his comments.
For Eubanks, a better way forward would’ve been leaving Linkin Park’s previous work in the past. “Don’t put [Armstrong] out there to sing Chester’s songs and then act like this was always the way it should have been,” she told Rolling Stone. “Now you can just put out new songs. But don’t bother to put out Chester’s songs with Emily singing them.”