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Rod Wave’s Last Lap debuts at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Streaming Albums chart (dated Oct. 26), launching with the third-biggest debut streaming week for a rap set in 2024.
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Also in the top 10 of the latest Top Streaming Albums, Charli XCX’s Brat flies 17-3 (a new peak) after its deluxe reissues were released in the week ending Oct. 17, GloRilla’s Glorious debuts at No. 4, BigXthaPlug’s Take Care enters at No. 5 and Jelly Roll’s Beautifully Broken bows at No. 7.
The 50-position Top Streaming Albums chart ranks the most-streamed albums of the week in the U.S., as compiled by Luminate. Titles are ranked by streaming equivalent album (SEA) units, where each SEA unit equals 3,750 ad-supported or 1,250 paid/subscription on-demand official audio and video streams generated by songs from an album. If an artist has multiple albums containing the same song, SEA units for that song are generally assigned to whichever album sells the most by traditional album sales in a given week.
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Last Lap debuts at No. 1 with 125,000 SEA units earned. That sum equates to 173.35 million on-demand official streams of the set’s songs, marking the third-biggest debut streaming week for a rap album in 2024. The two largest debut rap frames were logged by Future and Metro Boomin’s collaborative set We Don’t Trust You (324.31 million) and Eminem’s The Death of Slim Shade (Coup de Grâce) (220.08 million).
Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet falls a spot to No. 2 (70,000 SEA units; down 11%) after six nonconsecutive weeks atop the list.
Charli XCX’s Brat bounds 17-3, a new peak, with 57,000 SEA units (up 144%) after the album was reissued twice in during the week ending Oct. 17.
On Oct. 11, the original album’s tracklist was joined by 16 remixes of its songs in a deluxe edition (dubbed Brat and It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat), and those remixes included such guests as The 1975 and Ariana Grande. Then, on Oct. 14, the deluxe was plussed-up with one more remix, a redux of “Spring Breakers” featuring Kesha. All versions of Brat, new and old, are combined for tracking and charting purposes. Brat’s 57,000 SEA units equate to 73.63 million on-demand official streams of its songs – the album’s best week yet, and Charli XCX’s biggest streaming week for any album.
GloRilla’s new Glorious debuts at No. 4 on Top Streaming Albums with 56,000 SEA units (equaling 77.98 million on-demand official streams of its songs). Both figures represent career-highs for the artist, and the biggest weeks for any rap album by a female artist in 2024. Glorious is also the highest charting rap album by a woman on Top Streaming Albums this year.
BigXthaPlug’s Take Care starts at No. 5 on Top Streaming Albums with 47,000 SEA units (equaling 62.77 million on-demand official streams of the set’s songs). It’s the rapper’s biggest streaming week ever. Morgan Wallen’s chart-topping One Thing at a Time falls 2-6 with 46,000 SEA units (down 5%). Jelly Roll’s Beautifully Broken arrives at No. 7 with 44,000 SEA units (58.86 million on-demand official streams) – his biggest streaming week yet.
Rounding out the top 10 are Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft (3-8 with 42,000 SEA units; down 2%), Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (4-9 with 40,000; down 4%) and Taylor Swift’s former leader The Tortured Poets Department (5-10 with 39,000; down 3%).
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. You can see the stars who have made our list so far here, and now we remember the century in Justin Bieber — who has now been a megastar for half his 30 years, accounting for some of the best and biggest pop music (and one of the most impactful career paths) of the past 15 years in the process.
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Anyone who saw Justin Bieber’s 2007 cover of Ne-Yo’s “So Sick” could tell he was going to be famous.
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The blurry clip of a barely discernible 13-year-old Bieber seems like nothing special at first, just a video his mom Pattie Mallette uploaded to the platform for his extended family to check out. “I know the videos of him are dark but you can hear him and get a sense of his stage presence,” Mallette wrote in the caption of the video, in which the teen is dressed in an unusually formal white button-down shirt, trousers and a tie. His magic quickly became apparent, as soon as Bieber began to belt the R&B track with a shocking sense of vocal ease for someone so young. He confidently makes his way around the stage, making eye contact with different audience members and never once seeming nervous, as if even he knew he was destined to be a superstar.
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Even “superstar” feels like an understatement. With 23 Grammy nominations (and two wins), eight No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200, eight Billboard Hot 100 chart-topping songs, 33 Guinness World Records, 26 Billboard Music Awards, four RIAA-certified diamond records and an estimated 150 million records sold over the course of his career, 30-year-old Bieber has been a crucial part of the pop landscape for more than a decade, setting a new standard for pop artists to come by being a trailblazer in using social media to his advantage, without the need for radio or MTV backing to cross over to mainstream success.
However, perhaps none of that would have been possible without a serendipitous discovery from Scooter Braun, the now-titan of the music industry who, at the time, was a marketing executive of So So Def Recordings. After accidentally stumbling upon the “So Sick” clip on YouTube, Bieber’s smooth voice and the “stage presence” his mother pointed out caught his attention. With the blessing of his mother, Bieber was flown down to Atlanta, Georgia – nearly 900 miles away from his hometown of Stratford, Ontario – to record some demos with Braun, who quickly introduced him to now-grown teen-pop royalty Usher. At just 13 years old, Bieber signed with Braun and Usher’s joint venture, Raymond Braun Media Group, and a year later, also signed with Island Records.
The good fortune kept pouring in for Bieber, who made achieving fame seem so easy. His debut single, “One Time,” was released in July 2009 and his first EP, My World, dropped just a few months later in November. “One Time,” “One Less Lonely Girl,” “Love Me” and “Favorite Girl” from the project entered the top 40 of the Hot 100. My World eventually became certified platinum in the United States.
But what was it about Bieber that made him so immediately popular? Sure, his honeyed vocals and his catchy love songs were enough to get fans to swoon, but there was a significant lack of male pop stars in the music market at the time. Another Justin – Timberlake – was still taking over radio with songs like “What Goes Around… Comes Around” and “Summer Love,” but he was 26 years old at the time, and many of his fans also skewed older. Bieber was the perfect age for young, hormonal teenage fans who soon coined the term “Bieber Fever,” a Beatlemania-type craze over Bieber’s bright smile, charming personality and swooping hairstyle that inspired similar ‘dos for boys across the globe for years to come.
Bieber Fever spread strongly into the start of 2010, when JB dropped the Ludacris-assisted “Baby,” the first single off his debut full-length project, My World 2.0. The track skyrocketed Bieber into a success for a global audience beyond the tweens that loved his 2009 EP, hitting top 5 on the Billboard Hot 100. The album, which was released in March 2010, featured a slew of other longstanding hit singles, including “Somebody to Love,” “U Smile,” “That Should Be Me” and “Eenie Meenie” featuring Sean Kingston. The project debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and earned him his first two Grammy nominations, for best new artist and best pop vocal album.
Bieber was now 16 years old, and wasn’t planning on slowing down yet. 2011 was just as busy as his previous two years. His Jon M. Chu-directed concert film Justin Bieber: Never Say Never hit theaters in February – grossing $30 million on its opening weekend and $99 million total worldwide. The film arrived alongside a remix album, Never Say Never: The Remixes, which featured appearances from fellow stars including Usher, Miley Cyrus and Chris Brown. In his personal life, he also confirmed his relationship with another young star, Wizards of Waverly Place actress and pop singer Selena Gomez, when the couple made their red carpet debut at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party that year. He rounded out 2011 with his holiday album, Under the Mistletoe, which became the first Christmas album by a male artist to top the Billboard 200.
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By the time his third studio album Believe arrived in June 2012, Bieber’s fame reached unprecedented levels of chaos and success. Still a teenager, he couldn’t leave the house without being hounded by paparazzi and fans, and he survived his first public controversy when a pregnant fan claimed Bieber was her baby daddy. While the paternity test came back negative, the experience inspired the Believe track “Maria,” a modern “Billie Jean” denying that he fathered the child.
Clearly, Bieber was growing up, and Believe reflected that. The singer had gone through puberty and his voice was noticeably lower, and the track list strayed away from his past teen-pop sound, as Bieber played with elements of dance, R&B and hip-hop reflect a newer, more mature chapter in his career. Believe debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and featured Hot 100 top 10 hits including “Boyfriend,” “Beauty and a Beat” featuring Nicki Minaj and the Big Sean-assisted “As Long As You Love Me.” With four chart-topping albums under his belt, Bieber’s Believe Tour launched in September 2012, and grossed $212.2 million across 155 shows.
However, by the start of 2013, the negative effects of childhood fame on mental health began to appear. Bieber and Gomez split for the first time in November 2012, and in March 2013, Bieber was getting aggressive with paparazzi in London. He soon began to display increasingly erratic behavior – including wearing a gas mask to dinner, urinating in a nightclub’s cleaning bucket (as well as on a photo of Bill Clinton), spitting on fans, sneaking out of a Brazilian brothel while wearing a sheet, vandalism and, of course, writing that he hoped Anne Frank would have been a “Belieber” in the Anne Frank House guestbook – and Bieber announced in December 2013 via Twitter that he was “officially retiring.” The announcement came just a day after he released his singles collection Journals, which continued to display his artistic maturity by experimenting with downtempo R&B on songs like “All That Matters” and “Confident.” However, the sound was a bit too jarring for his pop-loving fans, and the album flopped commercially compared to his previous works.
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His retirement proved to be equally turbulent. In January 2014, he was arrested in Miami Beach, after getting pulled over in a bright yellow Lamborghini. He was charged with driving under the influence, resisting arrest and driving with a suspended license. He later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of reckless driving. Bieber later revealed that from the ages of 19 to 21, he was heavily addicted to drugs – including prescription pills, lean, psychedelic mushrooms, MDMA and marijuana, which he used as a coping mechanism for extreme amounts of anxiety and pressure he was understandably feeling at the time.
Things began looking up again for Bieber in 2015, when he found his sense of Purpose with his sixth Billboard 200 leader and his most successful commercial project to date, led by his comeback hit “Where Are Ü Now” with Skrillex and Diplo, an unexpected and successful pivot by the star into the EDM landscape. He followed it up with “What Do You Mean?,” which became his first leader on the Billboard Hot 100, clearly indicating that the music scene was missing Bieber’s presence. The project produced two more No. 1 hits, “Sorry” and “Love Yourself,” which remain inescapable on the radio and streaming playlists to this day. While the Purpose tour kicked off in March 2016 to build on the success of the groundbreaking album, Bieber’s mental health issues persisted. The run was canceled in July 2017 as the singer shifted focus on his well being.
Over the next two years, Bieber lent his vocals to a handful of successful collaborations, including DJ Khaled’s “I’m the One,” BloodPop’s “Friends” and the inescapable hit of 2017, a remix of Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito.” The historic track marked a major step in Latin music breaking into the global mainstream, and spent a whopping 16 weeks atop the Hot 100, then tied for the longest run in the chart’s history. However, at 23 years old and nearly a decade into his career, Bieber seemed to be taking a much-needed break from his recording career. In late 2017, he began opening up about the effects of childhood stardom in interviews and in his music in order to put his past actions into perspective and highlight his immense growth.
By 2018, he rekindled his romance with model Hailey Baldwin, and the two were married in September of that year. A year later, he announced that his fifth studio album, Changes, was on the way, and released a vulnerable, in-depth YouTube Originals docuseries. The 10-part series focused on the ups and downs of Bieber’s life throughout his musical hiatus, including his marriage, sobriety journey, battle against Lyme disease and mental health. In the grand scheme of his career, the docuseries marked a major pivot for good, with Bieber shedding the pop star persona and showing fans the human at the core.
Bieber dropped Changes in 2020, and subsequently gained three Grammy nominations and one win for best country duo/group performance for his Dan + Shay collaboration, “10,000 Hours.” Justice arrived a year later and was nominated for album of the year and best pop vocal album at the 2022 Grammy Awards. The album’s standout hit, “Peaches,” became his first Hot 100 No. 1 of the 2020s and gained four nominations including record of the year and song of the year. Justice also featured the Benny Blanco collaboration, “Lonely,” a devastatingly raw look at how fame sent Bieber into a downward and isolated spiral, capturing his past 15 years in one single. “Everybody saw me sick/ And it felt like no one gave a s—/ They criticized the things I did as an idiot kid,” he sings on the diaristic track.
Now, in 2024, Bieber hasn’t released a new single or album in a few years, but it seems like the 30-year-old star is experiencing a healthy, loving life for the first time, much to fans’ happiness. He’s been married to Baldwin for six years, and the duo welcomed their first child, a son named Jack Blues Bieber, over the summer. With his whole life to that point being spent on overdrive, it’s relieving to see Bieber cruising and enjoying his newest adventure, fatherhood. Hopefully, the ride will inspire yet another chart-topping album – and one more example of his one-of-kind presence, which has persistently shined through the darkness for over 15 years now.
Read more about the Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century here — and be sure to check back Thursday as we reveal our No. 7 artist!
THE LIST SO FAR:
Honorable Mentions
25. Katy Perry24. Ed Sheeran23. Bad Bunny22. One Direction21. Lil Wayne20. Bruno Mars19. BTS18. The Weeknd17. Shakira16. Jay-Z15. Miley Cyrus14. Justin Timberlake13. Nicki Minaj12. Eminem11. Usher10. Adele9. Ariana Grande
Joey Fatone is heading back to the Broadway stage, this time for the Shakespeare-inspired & Juliet. & Juliet opened at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre in New York City in 2022 and features songs by the legendary and Grammy-winning songwriter and producer Max Martin. The show reimagines the classic Shakespeare play Romeo & Juliet, picturing what life would have […]
“The setlist is how you communicate your story to your audience,” says Bruce Springsteen near the start of Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, the new Thom Zimny-directed documentary on the Boss’s life as touring musician that debuts on Hulu on Friday (Oct. 25).
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The movie had its Los Angeles premiere Monday night (Oct. 21) before a star-filled audience at the Academy of Motion Pictures Museum’s David Geffen Theater, which included Catherine O’Hara, Danny DeVito, Judd Apatow, John Densmore, Jackson Browne, Richie Sambora and Brandi Carlile.
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As anyone who has seen Springsteen’s current tour knows, this outing’s setlist is relatively static for a Springsteen show, with the themes of mortality and loss interspersed with the joy of being alive running throughout. What it lacks in the spontaneity of past Springsteen tours, it more than makes up for in the emotional resonance Springsteen and the expanded E Street Band bring to the often transcendent material.
The documentary, which is a must-see for any Springsteen fan, pulls back the curtain on how the tour came together. By the time the first show was played in Tampa in February 2023, Springsteen had released three new albums and it had been six years since the E Street Band had toured due, in part, to the pandemic. The film takes fans behind the scenes from the first day of rehearsals in a small, black box theater in New Jersey to stages across the world and, in the process, tells the story of the band’s 50 year friendship.
In one of the film’s more poignant passages, musician and Springsteen’s wife Patti Scialfa reveals she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 2018 and how that has affected her ability to tour with the band. The deaths of longtime band members Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons are also discussed in loving detail.
As to why now was the right time to reveal the behind-the-scenes machinations, at a Q&A following the screening, Springsteen, 75, kept with the mortality theme and half quipped, “Well, if we didn’t make it now, I’d be dead pretty soon so we got to make these while we can. That’s all there is to it.”
The tour, which picks up again in Europe next Spring, has as its tentpoles four songs from Letter to You, Springsteen’s 2020 album inspired by the death of George Theiss. His passing left Springsteen the only living member of his first band, The Castiles, which he joined as teenagers.
“I was with him the last few days before he passed away,” Springsteen said during the Q&A, moderated by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation chairman and iHeart president of entertainment enterprises John Sykes. “I came back from George’s, and I think he filled me with something where I think all of Letter to You was written in about two weeks and recorded in four days. It’s just, hey, you get up around our age and those are the things you’re thinking about, and Patti and I have had to deal with her illness and you’re worried about…it’s just part of your life now, questions and mortality. Like I say in the film, there’s a lot more yesterdays and goodbyes once you get up around where we are then there was 30 or 40 years ago.”
Zimny, who has worked with Springsteen on projects for 24 years, said during the Q&A that the project unfolded as shooting progressed. “I think it evolves every day that I was experiencing the band, filming and seeing what was going on. I think it’s a conversation that happens with Jon [Landau, Springsteen’s manager] and Bruce from day one and I just stay really open to what I’m experiencing. The first day of rehearsals. I was just so blown away by that sense of everyone’s happiness and I knew that I wanted that to come across, that sense of gratitude that they can perform again. But by time I reached the American concerts and Europe, the film evolved. I think a big thing is to be open, not have a set POV. I go for the adventure.”
The movie, which is narrated by Springsteen, ends with his citing a quote from The Doors’ Jim Morrison. In the Q&A, which also featured Landau and Springsteen’s longtime right-hand man Steven Van Zandt, Springsteen revealed the origin of its usage. He and Scalfia were at the same Doors show at the Asbury Park (N.J.) Convention Center in 1968, though they hadn’t met yet. Then, he told an endearing story that showed that, ultimately, the pair are music nerds just like his fans. Decades later, he and Scalfia were talking about the Doors show and found the setlist online. “We got in bed and we said, ‘OK, we’re going to recreate the entire show,’” he recalled. “I found live Doors cuts and we recreated the entire show from 1968 and listened to it before we went to sleep…Suddenly, I sort of went on a bit of a Doors binge and I started reading several book and I came across the quote and it just seemed like the perfect way to sum up what the band is about, what our relationship to our fans means, what our mission statement has been for the past 50 years. It just seemed to sum it up in those four very brief lines.”
Second Gentleman Dough Emhoff has established a reputation as a music nerd and, like his wife, Vice President Kamala Harris, an inveterate crate digger. So it made perfect sense that as he’s been grinding it out on the road like a rock band touring in a panel van to support Harris’ presidential campaign, Emhoff took time out to chop it up with Pearl Jam‘s Eddie Vedder and Jeff Ament to describe how he’s been connecting with voters at record shops around the country.
“I’m trying to highlight small business and talk about all the great things that Kamala Harris is gonna do for the country and merge it with my love of music,” Emhoff told the PJ singer and bassist during a visit to their SiriusXM Pearl Jam Radio channel. “And so it’s gotten me to local record stores across the country. I’ve gotten to, you know, meet you guys, but also [former R.E.M. singer] Michael Stipe kind of came out of semi-retirement, and Michael’s now done two events for us.”
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The most recent event featuring Stipe took place at an Oct. 4 Get Out the Vote concert in Pittsburgh that also featured Jason Isbell. Emhoff said indie rock legend Stipe took him to one of his favorite hometown indie rock shops [Wuxtry Records] in Athens, GA, which, he noted, is still standing. “I kind of did a whole, you know, go through shelf by shelf with him. I got to visit a record store with [California] Governor Gavin Newsom, who also loves music. So he and I were with a local business owner going through the stacks, picking out some records,” Emhoff said.
And that’s not all. Emhoff also noted that he’s gotten to hang and talk music with Jon Bon Jovi, another Harris/Walz campaign supporter, as well as Isbell. Though Bruce Springsteen has also given his thumbs-up to Harris, Emhoff lamented that he has yet to meet the Boss in person, while noting that Taylor Swift has also, famously, endorsed his wife’s 11th hour White House bid.
“So the music industry has come out in a way that you guys have always done this. It’s what you did from day one, using your voice, not only to make this music we all love, but to talk about the truth and being engaged,” Emhoff told the PJ members, who have long worn their activism on their sleeves. “And so to see that coming back and get to talk to some of the people I’ve listened to my whole life, and then see how active they are. But to do that in a record store with Michael Stipe in Athens and pick out some records was pretty, pretty damn cool, man.”
Vedder said he got the chills hearing the R.E.M. origin story, then reciting the details of it as chapter-and-verse, down to the album that Stipe and guitarist Peter Buck bonded over: Patti Smith’s Horses. To rub it in a bit more, Emhoff added that Stipe also took him to a compound of buildings he owns in Athens, where he got a personal tour, which included pointing out the very spot where the singer wrote the lyrics to the band’s 1985 album Fables of the Reconstruction.
Ament wondered what albums are still on Emhoff’s need-to-get list, which inspired the Second Gent to reel off a list of some more of his favorite bands, including the Pixies, Nirvana and, of course, PJ, as well as Radiohead and The Stone Roses’ legendary self-titled 1989 debut LP.
It also stood to reason that politically plugged-in Vedder would tell Emhoff what his biggest fears are about a potential second Donald Trump administration. “People’s safety is the most important thing. So you know, when I read about this event that happened, perhaps over the weekend. A large group gathered for Trump in the thousands, and there were 20 buses that brought them in. Intense heat in the Desert Valley there, gets up to 102 during the day,” Vedder said of a recent Trump rally in California’s Coachella Valley that reportedly left hundreds of followers stranded in desert heat with no way to get back to their cars.
Vedder said that chaotic scene of unpreparedness felt like a parallel to the whole vibe of the third White House campaign by the twice impeached former President. “Not to mention the confusion, again, chaos and some of the quotes are, are chilling. But I have to say, it seems analogous to the election,” Vedder said. “Unlike any other candidate in the history of our country, [Trump’s] got more at stake on a personal level, his personal freedoms, his future, all riding on this vote. And he’s, I think he needs people. And I think he uses people. And I think this Coachella’s situation is very analogous to what would happen if and when he would potentially win. He gets what he wants, uses the people as padding, and then they’re left in utter chaos to fend for themselves. That’s what we worry about.”
Emhoff replied by echoing one of Harris’ frequent refrains, that she believes convicted felon Trump is “only in it for [himself and] doesn’t care about others. And we already saw that the first time that he was president, and he was like that then. And he is worse now. You know, he’s a degraded version of what he was, and he was a pretty horrible President that time around,” Emhoff said. “And he has just gotten worse. He’ll be surrounded by people who are like him, incompetent, who don’t really care about us extremists. And that’s what’s at stake right now.”
Elsewhere, Emhoff talked about being blown away by the sense of family and community backstage at a recent PJ show he attended in Philadelphia. The full interview is in available now on SiriusXM’s Pearl Jam Radio (ch. 22) and on the SiriusXM app, with re-broadcasts scheduled to air during the rest of the week.
Check out highlights from their chat below.
Gunna was always going to get his flowers coming to Brooklyn, but this time, he brought his own, too. Clad in a studded vest and a black Korn tank top, the 31-year-old strode across the Paramount stage with royal blue blossoms in the foreground. The arrangement mirrored the fluorescent melodies that entranced the crowd in a night of faint weed smoke and some of the most indelible anthems of the late 2010s and early 2020s.
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It was just the latest stop in Gunna’s Wun of Dem Nights Tour on Monday night (Oct. 21), a trek promoting his One of Wun album, which he dropped this past May. For this one, Wunna oscillated between all areas of his catalog. One moment he’s performing “WhatsApp (Wassam).” The next he’s performing his portion of Travis Scott’s “Yosemite.” Then “Drip Too Hard” and “Pushin P.” All that and pretty much everything in between — basically, last night was a good time to be a Gunna fan.
Billboard breaks down the top five moments from the show. Check it out below.
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Gunna Gives the Crowd Their Flowers — Literally
Just before performing his underrated 2022 single “Banking on Me,” Wunna tapped into his inner loverboy and had his team bring out white roses for the crowd. It was a fitting prelude to the tender serenade that engrossed everyone in the crowd. It didn’t sound like he needed any effects either, so shouts to Gunna on flaunting those vocals.
Gunna Performs His New Age Classic “FukUMean”
Toward the very end of the show, Gunna had more fun with the fans, asking them to guess which track was next. He let them put forth their best guess, but they didn’t seem to get it right. Channeling the momentum from the speculation, he immediately dove into “Fukumean” for a seamless feat of curation and expert transitioning.
The Stage Arrangement Looks Otherworldly
Powered by mellifluous melodies and surrealistic soundscapes fit for video games, Gunna is all about immersion, and his stage set here only accentuated the effect. Featuring mini boulders, the aforementioned blue flowers, and a staff with metallic skulls, the scene had all the whimsy of a fantastical milieu. With flashes of gleaming red lights beaming down, it all felt like an opening scene from an interstellar pirate movie. Call it Gunna’s Escape From Trapper’s Island.
Gunna’s fit, along with his deliberate movements across the stage, all swirled together for a legitimate aesthetic joy ride. It would’ve been easy to opt for something more straightforward, but he’s clearly committed to ambiance — from his music all the way to the stage.
Crowd Raps “Drip Too Hard” With Gunna
Given the state of things, it doesn’t feel all that likely we’ll see Gunna and Lil Baby perform “Drip Too Hard” any time soon. It’s too bad, because it’s the best song they’ve ever done, solo or otherwise.
The crowd seemed to realize that, too, as they spit the track word-for-word when Wunna jumped into the song, which is now pretty much considered a classic. Pretty crazy how time passes: Six years ago, Gunna and Lil Baby were relative newcomers looking to cement their status as Atlanta’s next up. Turns out, they were both on deck.
Moments like this one transport you back to a time before Young Thug and Gunna were put in jail while also making you reflect on what was, what is and what might never be again. It’s sad, yet kind of beautiful when you think about it in those terms. But for the night, it was just a bop everyone felt called to rap to.
Gunna Pays Homage to Young Thug With Vintage Performance of “Hot”
In one of the most electrifying moments of the night, Gunna turned back to 2019 to perform “Hot,” a Young Thug track where he handles hook duties. At the moment he jumped onto the track, the stage was engulfed by red lights, and the crowd started chanting pretty much every word. Next, he performed “Ski.” All the while, “Free Jeffery” flashed on the screen behind Gunna, solidifying a moment that was as genuine as it was electric.
As fans get ready to catch Lady Gaga‘s “Disease,” the pop superstar shared a haunting new video trailer for the fast-approaching single Tuesday (Oct. 22). In the clip, Gaga — wearing a short white dress — frantically sprints away as a car drives after her in a suburban neighborhood. The camera is positioned from inside […]
This article was created in partnership with McDonald’s Just as Latin music fuses deep-rooted traditions and modern beats, the iconic McDonald’s Big Mac is getting a fresh remix with the launch of the highly anticipated Chicken Big Mac — and fans saw it come to life at Billboard Latin Music Week. In celebration, McDonald’s hosted […]
Mike Will Made-It is gearing up to deliver his first album since 2017 with R3set, which doubles as the third installment of his Ransom series.
The Ear Drummers CEO chats with Billboard about his upcoming LP, losing his hard drives of music, and reflects on some of his biggest hits over the years, such as collaborations with Beyoncé, Rihanna, Miley Cyrus and more.
“It’s been a journey for real. It’s Ransom 3. Each Ransom is different phases. Ransom stands for Releasing All New Songs Orchestrated by Mike Will,” he says.
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Around the time Ransom 2 arrived (the project reached No. 24 on the Billboard 200 in 2017), the Atlanta producer had his hard drive and backup stolen, which led to him taking a step back from music and exploring other endeavors such as real estate.
“Around that time right there I had lost my hard drives. My hard drives had got stolen,” he shares. “I really eased back from the music. I started buying real estate. I bought my studio that I work at right now in Atlanta. When I first got there, there would be a couple TVs on the all and we’d just be gambling on 2K. I wasn’t even really tripping on the music.
Mike Will continues: “To lose your hard drives and your backup in one, that was like a wake-up call. I was just trying to figure out what that meant for me. I won a Grammy, I put multiple people on so it’s like maybe I needed to start doing other stuff. Like I need to start investing in other fields, but nothing was really working out. What works for me is music.”
Although R3set is currently without a release date, Mike’s recruited a star-studded cast of collaborators that includes SZA, Don Toliver, Young Thug, Moneybagg Yo, GloRilla, Yo Gotti, Muni Long and more.
The 35-year-old avid golfer tee’d up the rollout for the project with “High3r” featuring Lil Yachty and Lil Wayne over the summer.
Mike Will Made-It already carries a decorated resume that has seen him connect with some of the best music has to offer, including Ye (formerly known as Kanye West), Beyoncé, Rihanna, Miley Cyrus and more. He served “Pour It Up” for RiRi as a single from her 2012 Unapologetic album; the intoxicating club banger cracked the Billboard Hot 100’s top 20.
“My home girl Karen Clark was working at Def Jam. She really put that together. Shout-out to Chris Brown,” Mike Will recalls. “He had came through the writing camp just checking out the different songs. He had heard ‘Pour It Up’ like, ‘This one gotta get to Ri.’ She had called the next day like, ‘What’s the song Chris talking about?’ She loved it, she laid it down.”
Watch the full interview with Mike Will Made-It above.
Scott Stapp acknowledges that the 99-year-old Grand Ole Opry, whose storied membership includes Johnny Cash, George Strait and Tanya Tucker, is not the natural setting for “outliers like me.” But as the singer known for bombastic hard-rock Creed hits like “One Last Breath” and “Higher” prepares for his Opry debut Wednesday night (Oct. 23), he suggests he may be more country than people expect. “When I was young and poor, my grandparents were huge fans of country music and bluegrass. They would watch The Opry on TV in Florida. I can remember laying down on the floor with my hands under my chin with my grandparents behind me,” Stapp tells Billboard. “That’s why it’s a tremendous honor, and I want to do my best to bring my A-game.”
In the past six years, the Opry, which began in 1925 with Uncle Jimmy Thompson playing his fiddle at Nashville radio station WSM, has been more aggressive about opening its stage to non-traditional country performers. Post Malone, the pop and hip-hop star who this year released a chart-topping country album, performed in August; retired Cardinals pitcher Adam Wainwright, a singer-songwriter who put out an album this year titled Hey Y’All, made his debut in March; jam band Leftover Salmon and Andrew Farriss of INXS are scheduled for dates later this year. In 2018, 53 artists made their Opry debuts; last year, that number increased to 131, plus another 101 so far in 2024. For its 100th anniversary in 2025, the Opry is planning 100 debuts, beginning Jan. 18 with Shaboozey, whose “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” this year became the first song in history to reach the Top 10 of the Country, Pop, Adult Pop and Rhythmic Airplay charts.
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“It’s a great thing. It’s important, because it expands what country music is,” says Jared Cotter, Shaboozey’s co-manager, adding that the singer accepted the Opry invitation “in about two seconds.” “It needs to evolve. We’re really excited to be what I think is at the forefront of it.”
Shaboozey
Eric Ryan Anderson
Dan Rogers, the show’s senior vp and executive producer, says his artist-relations team has emphasized “artists you might not normally expect to see at the Opry” — whether that’s African-American stars, like Shaboozey, who have historically been largely absent from the Opry stage, or performers who’ve built their music careers outside country, like Stapp. This is part of the broadcast’s tradition, Rogers adds — James Brown and Stevie Wonder, not known for their country inclinations, performed in 1979, as did rocker Peter Frampton in 2013. Similarly, in a throwback to Hee Haw, Jerry Clower, David “Stringbean” Akeman and others, the Opry inducted comedians Gary Mule Deer and Henry Cho as members last year. Until that point, the Opry had not inducted a comedian since 1973.
“It’s no secret we have opened our doors more broadly since the pandemic,” Rogers adds. “We’re always working to be steadfast in our programming philosophy, which is [to] present the past, present and future of country music every time that big red curtain goes up.” The strategy has worked so far — although he declines to provide attendance numbers, Rogers says “visitation” and “demand for Opry performances” has increased yearly since 2020 in terms of increased numbers of the 4,400-capacity shows.
The Opry’s inclusive definition of “country” in recent years reflects pop music in general, according to Brian Mansfield, a Nashville writer, historian and managing editor of radio-industry trade publication Country Insider. “You don’t really think of Post Malone as a country artist, but if you talk to him, he grew up knowing that stuff,” he says, then cites Beyoncé‘s Cowboy Carter album, even though the pop superstar has never performed at the Opry. “She wanted to show how the country music she grew up with in Houston, which has this unique blend of country and R&B and everything in its DNA, was part of what she was.”
Stapp, by contrast, did not set out to make a country song when he and his Nashville songwriting collaborators came up with “If These Walls Could Talk,” even though he spent his childhood watching Hee Haw on TV when it was recorded on the Opry stage throughout the ’80s. “The song was just born and created as-is,” says Stapp, who has lived in Nashville since 2016. “I don’t have any intent to try to change it into some kind of more country-leaning song just because I’m playing it at the Opry.” For his debut, Stapp plans to perform the song for the first time with Dorothy, the hard-rock singer who duets with him on the recording.
In emphasizing new and unexpected performers, the Opry is being savvy about expanding its audience. “Our research shows that 50% of the audience in the seats love country music, and that’s why they came to the Grand Ole Opry. And the other 50% are in Nashville, and they know they’re supposed to see the Grand Ole Opry,” Rogers says. “Both of those halves will appreciate when someone they wouldn’t expect shows up at the Opry.”
Post Malone at his Grand Ole Opry debut on Aug. 14, 2024.
Chris Hollo
NBCUniversal and a private-equity firm, Atairos Group, invested $296 million for a 30% stake in the Opry’s parent company, Opry Entertainment Group, in 2022. (The group also owns the Ryman Auditorium, which hosts numerous Opry shows, and Blake Shelton‘s Ole Red brand of country bars.) It makes sense that investors are happy to see the lineup expand as widely as possible — in the first half of this year, Creed’s catalog streamed 263 million times, and its 2024 reunion tour is headlining arenas, including Madison Square Garden next month. Of Stapp, Rogers says, “I’ve read two or three times now, people saying to him, ‘This sounds country, were you influenced by country artists?’ So that made sense. And the fact that he is so passionate about songwriting feels really authentic. It turns out, as it often does, he fits really interestingly with the show.”
Another recent unexpected Opry debut was Katharine McPhee, the former American Idol runner-up who is best known as a pop singer, although she starred on 2021’s Netflix series Country Comfort. In her Oct. 12 debut, McPhee performed two songs, “She Used to Be Mine” and Gretchen Wilson‘s “Redneck Woman,” and dueted with fellow performer Riley Green on “Don’t Mind If I Do.” Unlike Stapp, McPhee didn’t grow up watching country music on TV, although she was a fan of Martina McBride, Shania Twain and Faith Hill.
“I didn’t know [Opry attendees] would be so attentive and friendly. They’re just music lovers. They just want to be there and root for whoever’s up on that stage,” McPhee tells Billboard. “I walked out to an audience full of smiling, warm faces, and that was really delightful.”
