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Trending on Billboard D’Angelo had already proven a transformative R&B figure as a 21-year-old with his 1995 debut LP Brown Sugar, scoring hits and winning awards and growing the movement that would ultimately be known as neo-soul. And when his sophomore album Voodoo arrived in 2000, it topped the Billboard 200 — helped by the […]
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Esaú Ortiz had already penned important songs for Luis R Conriquez (“De Fresa y Coco”) and Grupo Firme (“Tronando Ligas” with Junior H) when he had a thought: “If I’ve written hits for other artists, how could I not write one for myself?” Then, it happened. The 27-year-old artist from Monterrey, Nuevo León released his biggest hit to date, titled “Triple Lavada” — which also includes a remix featuring Conriquez, Alemán, Óscar Maydon and Victor Mendivil.
The remix — released in May, two months after the original one — earned Ortiz his first top 10 on any Billboard chart when the song peaked at No. 9 on the Hot Latin Songs chart. It also peaked at No. 12 on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. chart and at No. 17 on the Billboard Global 200 chart. The plan was to only release the remix version, not two separate ones. But, he had to pivot quickly when, earlier this year, a part of the song was leaked on TikTok and gained momentum.
“It took time to get everyone on board, so I had to release it on my own, and besides, it had been leaked, so I had to release it right away,” Ortiz says over Zoom. “The leaked version was already at the top of the [TikTok] charts, so I had to request for it to get taken down and release my own version. I couldn’t wait for the remix.”
Still, the spunky retrobélico stands as Ortiz’s biggest milestone yet since launching his career over 10 years ago, mainly as a songwriter, and the song has now cemented his status as a Latin artist on the rise in a crowded field of new música mexicana acts.
Ortiz may have had his major breakthrough as a songwriter, but his dream was always to be a performing artist. He began performing in Kindergarten singing Pedro Fernández songs and later, in his teens, transitioned into rap. He was motivated by his mom, who also sings and performs at parties doing tributes to stars like Gloria Trevi.
“Then I started singing reggaetón, banda, grupero, corridos tumbados, I think I performed in every genre,” Ortiz says. He joined a few local bands and also started writing his own songs because, “the music I was listening to didn’t say what I experienced exactly, so I had to write it myself.” He began uploading videos of him performing his songs on Facebook and eventually promoters and even local bands began reaching out to him.
“I wanted to be an artist, but it’s really difficult, it takes time,” Oritz says. “I thought, I’m going to sneak in this way and make a name for myself as a composer, then I’ll make money for everyone and then, when I decide to be an artist, I’ll already have superstar friends I’ve written for that I can collaborate with. When you start as a songwriter, you’re already on the other side and there are people who like what you do and how you write. You’ve already proven yourself.”
This year, “Triple Lavada” marked the launch of his career as an artist, and earned him a distribution and marketing deal with Sony Music Latin. His first big deal in the industry after experiencing a few heartbreaks early on in his career when other companies “stole” from him, he explains. “I was just doing deals how I thought I should but no one was guiding me, I was on my own.” Today, he’s releasing music under his own self-titled label.
“‘Triple Lavada’ was that change from composer to artist, that watershed moment, where there is a before and after,” Ortiz says. It also served as an introduction to the subgenre he pioneered, retrobélico — which came to him when he was listening disco music at a party. It was also the perfect set up for his latest album Discontrol, released Oct. 10. The album cover, inspired by Michael Jackson’s Thriller, is enough indication that Ortiz is offering something different, a more nuanced approach to regional Mexican music.
As a self-declared fan of The Weeknd, Sabrina Carpenter and Post Malone, his music is a fusion of disco, rap, cumbia, pop and ballads powered by Mexican music instruments. “I wanted people to realize that I can do many genres,” he says. “I don’t want to limit myself to just one genre, that’s why I made the album super varied. I consider myself regional, but as a variation, as a branch of regional music.”
Below, learn more about this month’s Billboard Latin Artist on the Rise:
Name: Esaú Ortiz Anzuara
Age: 27
Recommended Song: “Triple Lavada” or “Discontrol”
Biggest Accomplishment:
“Launching my career as an artist and pioneering retrobélico.”
What’s Next:
“I’m working on my next album, which will drop next year. Discontrol didn’t really have collaborations because I wanted to showcase my essence what I represent as a retrobélico artist. But I have collaborations coming up with Lit Killah, Xavi and Alemán, and I want to save them for the next album.”
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We all know Batman, but now it’s time to meet his Bat-Fam.
Billboard Family is exclusively premiering the superheroic title sequence from the new Bat-Fam animated series, scored by Fall Out Boy rocker Patrick Stump. The theme song is a shredding, electric-guitar-led number, and you can hear Stump’s foreboding “la-la-la”s throughout. Watch below:
In the new series, which arrives Nov. 10 on Prime Video, Luke Wilson voices the Caped Crusader, reprising his role from 2023’s Merry Little Batman animated film — for which Stump also composed the score. Also returning: Batman/Bruce Wayne’s son Damian Wayne, aka “Little Batman,” voiced by Yonas Kibreab, and butler Alfred Pennyworth, voiced by veteran actor James Cromwell.
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New characters filling out the cast include former supervillain Claire Selton (Haley Tju), Alfred’s niece Alicia Pennyworth (London Hughes), Damian’s grandfather Ra’s Al Ghul (Michael Benyaer), and a scientist-turned-humanoid-bat-creature called Man-Bat (Saturday Night Live alum Bobby Moynihan).
As the trailer (unveiled earlier this month at New York Comic Con) promises: “Justice will be served, family style.” It might be an unconventional family, but Alicia warns in the trailer, “You mess with one of us, you mess with all of us.”
This is Stump’s latest musical contribution to an animated series, as he previously scored Disney Jr.’s Spidey and His Amazing Friends starting in 2021, followed by Dead End: Paranormal Park (2022) and Hot Wheels Let’s Race (2024) for Netflix. With his band Fall Out Boy, Stump has four top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 and seven top 10 albums on the Billboard 200, including four No. 1s.
Bat-Fam arrives Nov. 10 on Prime Video in more than 240 countries and territories and will also stream on Amazon Kids+, Amazon’s digital subscription for kids.
Prime Video
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When Baz Halpin first spoke with Justin Timberlake to plan the star’s Forget Tomorrow World Tour, the concert production designer suggested: “Let’s talk broadly about concepts and what you want to say on the tour.” Timberlake cut him off. “No,” he said. “I want to understand lighting, special effects, pyro, video. I want you to tell me everything that’s new.”
Halpin compiled a 100-page deck, including links to the latest video technology, for the pop superstar to study. Together, they concocted the centerpiece of the 14-month tour, which concluded in July — a massive, five-sided monolith, 17 feet by 30 feet by 7 feet, festooned with tiny LEDs for elaborate videos. At the end of every show, Timberlake surfed atop the giant rectangle, floating above the audience as it displayed gravity-defying bubbles on every side. “Screens have gotten infinitely lighter. They’ve gotten infinitely cheaper,” says Halpin, founder and CEO of Silent House, a Los Angeles design and production company that has worked with Tyler, The Creator, P!nk, Doja Cat and others. “A lot of things came together to make the process easier and more achievable.”
Billboard‘s Live Music Summit will be held Nov. 3 in Los Angeles. For tickets and more information, click here.
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No longer are video screens confined to the giant postage stamps bookending every live stage. Because LED technology has rapidly advanced over the last 30 years, artists can display more detailed scenes bounded only by their imaginations, spread across screens of all shapes and sizes, for audiences. SZA sits on a ledge, silhouetted beneath a moon, clouds and stars that seem like a real night. Phish jam at Las Vegas’ Sphere amid psychedelic canvases ranging from the ocean floor to the cosmos to abstract patterns. And some concerts employ the fast-growing technology to simply magnify the fans in attendance, like that infamously canoodling couple caught on a circular stadium kiss cam in July at a Coldplay show.
“The quality of LED in terms of image projection is insane these days,” says Adrian Martinez, co-founder and creative director of STURDY, which has designed visuals for such stars as Bad Bunny, Kendrick Lamar and Drake. “We’re getting to the point of watching HDTV.”
Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres tour, which broke worldwide attendance records in January with two concerts in India, anchors its stage with huge screens — circular ones on either side of the performance as well as a half-circle constantly running behind the band. It’s no wonder that amid the nonstop larger-than-life video stream of frontman Chris Martin, neon rainbows and explosions of light that the unwitting couple found themselves on the kiss cam.
“Privacy is a big issue, but we’ve always looked into, ‘How can we get the audience to actually be part of the show?’ ” says Joris Corthout, CEO of Prismax, a visual production company that recently worked with promoters Insomniac and Tomorrowland to create the EDM show UNITY at Sphere. Prismax is developing an on-site concert photo booth that transfers fans’ snapshots (with their permission, of course) to a huge stage combining lights and Polaroids. According to Silent House Studios president Alex Reardon, camera technology has improved to “pick up people in lower-light scenarios than [it] used to,” which helps artists integrate fans into the video aspect of the show. Silent House client Maroon 5 plans to do the same for its upcoming tour, “capturing the audience and trying to use those images as something emotional, something musical,” Halpin adds. “Think of it as another paint in the paint box.”
Nine Inch Nails perform during the Lights in the Sky Tour at the Mohegan Sun Arena on August 7, 2008 in Uncasville, Connecticut.
Courtesy of Moment Factory
Video technology for today’s concerts is basically limitless, thanks in part to groundbreaking tours like Nine Inch Nails’ 2008 outing Lights in the Sky, which spread tapestries of striking LEDs throughout all sides of the stage and ceiling, sometimes in the form of brightly colored grids or swirling mist. “LED in 2008 was very rare,” says Daniel Jean, producer/director of the music department for Moment Factory, which designed that tour. “It was more expensive and it was low resolution.” Ten years later, Childish Gambino’s Pharos concerts in New Zealand were among the first to present an elaborate animated world, toggling between fish, burning trees, colorful coral shapes and industrial sculptures. “I likened it to a planetarium,” says Christian Coffey, tour director for those shows and others by Lamar, A$AP Rocky and more. “The band is performing, but you’re watching the screen for so much of it.” In 2024, multiple suspended screens displayed flickering lights and images of Billie Eilish singing throughout her video-heavy Hit Me Hard and Soft tour.
It was in 1997, while watching colorful LEDs flash behind U2 during Las Vegas dress rehearsals for the band’s seminal PopMart stadium tour, that special-effects whiz Frederic Opsomer turned to his wife and said, “You are now looking at the future for the rest of my career.” According to Opsomer, CEO of the 30-year-old production company PRG, PopMart was when concerts first took advantage of the blue LED, invented by Japanese engineers in 1993. Enabling use of every color rather than just red and green, the development kicked off the LED era in lighting and video, replacing Jumbotrons using heavy and expensive cathode-ray technology.
By the time PopMart rolled around, Opsomer adds, video equipment that historically required 14 touring trucks needed two. And installation time took two hours rather than two days. “Suddenly, all the possibilities are open,” he says. “We’ve been playing with it ever since.”
The U2 PopMart Tour stage set at Sam Boyd Stadium on April 25, 1997 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Rob Verhorst/Redferns
In addition to unlocking limitless shapes, sizes and images at concerts and festivals, state-of-the-art camera and LED technology has let production experts be more nimble and improvise along with the artists. For its four-night 2024 run at Sphere, Phish hired producers at Moment Factory, which also works with stars like Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo, to “play the visuals in real time,” as Jean puts it; in one widely shared moment, an intricate, rainbow-colored forest transformed into fireworks exploding above the stage. “We’re playing miniature video games,” adds Manuel Galarneau, the company’s multimedia director. “Depending where we were at in the music, we could have trees grow, turn into fireworks.”
As video technology has expanded, production companies have boomed alongside it. High Scream, which puts on large events starring David Guetta and DJ Snake, among others, has increased its employees from two in 2012 to 240 today. “We went very, very big for the last five, six years,” says Romain Pissenem, the company’s founder and show producer. “It’s a lot of work, not a lot of sleep.” Moment Factory launched with six workers in 2001 and employs 480 today.
A crucial period for some concert video specialists was the coronavirus pandemic, when they could stop focusing on the day-to-day grind of setting up shows and contemplate innovation. Corthout pivoted to virtual festivals, including a digital iteration of Tomorrowland, and when traditional live events returned, “We just decided to work on that methodology we created for the virtual festivals,” he says. “We used to be and mix video files, but now we build a whole world.” Artificial intelligence, Corthout adds, has been a “fantastic tool” that reduces production costs.
Almost every video designer refers to some aspect of world-building. For this year’s Grand National stadium tour co-starring Lamar and SZA, the rapper’s world was “street and concrete and very raw,” according to tour director Coffey, while the R&B star’s landscape was “very lush.” The challenge, he says, was to use screens and high-resolution video content to “transport one world to another and make it seem seamless so it’s not jarring.” Corthout adds: “That’s the future of live entertainment — you can transport people to a completely different world.”
Phish perform during night three of their four-night run at Sphere on April 20, 2024 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Courtesy of Moment Factory
With all the fantastical potential, for many in the touring business, one risk is overstimulating the audience. “The resolution and the processing have gotten better,” says LeRoy Bennett, the longtime concert production designer currently working on Paul McCartney’s tour, in which the singer duets seamlessly with his late Beatles partner John Lennon on “I’ve Got a Feeling,” with assistance from documentary director Peter Jackson. “But we’ve got 30 songs in the show, so there’s not all content all the time. We try to give it a break. It becomes redundant if every single song has video on it.” Shows at Sphere, Bennett adds, are perfect for EDM artists who don’t necessarily need the audience to look at them, whereas pop and rock stars want to avoid “the whole audience looking up at the ceiling and not looking at you.”
Still, Sphere lets designers innovate in ways they can’t on traditional tours. “Sphere allows us to immerse people 100% as far as the eye can see,” Corthout says. “An old stage would give you physical boundaries. Sphere takes those boundaries away.”
Sphere productions like UNITY use innovative ideas that point the way for others to follow. “I haven’t personally worked with an artist who has said, ‘Look what Sphere is doing, I want to do that,’ ” Coffey says. “But Sphere is pushing the envelope forward.” In this way, according to Martinez, Sphere productions offer “proof of concept” for experimenting with video ideas. “The bar has been set so high,” he says, “it has opened the door for those of us on the creative side to say, ‘We know this works. How about we try this?’ ”
This story appears in the Oct. 25, 2025, issue of Billboard.
Trending on Billboard Ariana Grande is celebrating the release of her Positions (Vevo Official Live Performances) in honor of the fifth anniversary of the singer’s sixth studio album, 2020’s Positions. Tracks on the six-song EP use audio from Grande’s 2021 Vevo Official Live performance taping of the songs “POV,” “Positions,” “Safety Net” (feat. Ty Dolla […]
Source: Prince Williams / Getty
YFN Lucci hops on Big Bank’s Podcast and shares an interesting story about Young Thug.
650 Lu made it clear from the beginning of his career that he would stay ten toes down and never tell. Regardless of whether it’s family or even a foe. On his new album, “ALREADY LEGEND”, he talks about staying solid on his song, “PIECES ON MY NECK”, saying, “While n*ggas painting they nails, and living fairytales, I was sitting up in my cell, I chose not to tell.”
Very on brand for the Summerhill rapper. During his sitdown with Big Bank, he reveals that the Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis allegedly tried to twist his arm to cooperate against Young Thug. Dangling less time behind bars, and an early release if he sang. Lucci claimed that this happened “plenty of times,” that Fani Willis asked him to provide information against his former op.
Since both Lucci & Thuggers’ release, they have squashed their longtime beef. Which was huge for not only Atlanta, but Hip-Hop altogether. Even make guest appearances on each other’s albums. The two leaned into the drama and used it to their advantage during the album rollouts. Seemingly playfully dissing each other on Instagram, to turn around 24 hours later and have each other on their albums.
YFN posted a picture of Thug saying, “ALBUM AIN’T NUN FOR A MILLION UGLY AHH MAN @thuggerthugger1 #ALREADYLEGEND FRIDAY F*CK BUDDY”
After the two Atlanta rappers released their projects, they both bumped into each other in the club and dapped it up for the first time in public. Cementing that, the beef was over, and both superstars made amends.
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When Chappell Roan began contemplating her return to the stage after the biggest year of her professional career — one that included a series of record-breaking festival performances and culminated in a Grammy for best new artist — she had a clear vision for how she wanted to do it.
“She loves the feeling of a festival-style show, where people can dance and be free of fixed systems,” says Kiely Mosiman, one of Roan’s agents at Wasserman Music. “So we came up with the initial idea of, essentially, building festival sites — but just for Chappell’s show.”
Members of Roan’s live team will speak at Billboard‘s Live Music Summit, which will be held Nov. 3 in Los Angeles. For tickets and more information, click here.
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Together with Mosiman and Roan’s team at Foundations Management, Roan devised a series of fall pop-up performances in New York, Los Angeles and Kansas City, Mo. — the biggest city in her home state — directly catering to her biggest fans. But Roan’s camp was concerned that, rather than reaching the hands of those fans, the bots and scalpers that troll high-demand concert on-sales would scoop up tickets for the shows, looking to flood the secondary market with up-charged tickets and make a healthy profit on resales.
Roan outlined that focus in a July Instagram post announcing the eight dates that would begin Sept. 20 in New York and run through Oct. 11 in L.A. “Because we’re only coming to three cities,” she wrote, “I wanted to make sure 1. we’re keeping ticket prices as affordable as possible and 2. we’re trying to keep them away from scalpers.”
That’s easier said than done. In an era of soaring concert ticket prices and a bot issue that has become so pervasive that Congress has gotten involved, star artists — particularly those who exploded in popularity as quickly as Roan did over the past 12 months — are often frustrated by the difficulties in reaching their biggest fans and catering to those who supported them from the beginning.
To do so, Roan and her team turned to Fair AXS, a program by ticketing partner AXS that aimed to deliver on her vision. As opposed to typical tour rollouts, which usually employ a presale and a general on-sale and are often inundated by bots that buy out inventory instantaneously and astronomically inflate prices on the secondary market, Fair AXS took a slower, more methodical approach. Fans signed up over a three-day period, after which AXS used a proprietary system to verify that each registrant was a real person who maybe even had purchased Roan tickets in the past. AXS then delivered a list of such registrants to her agents at Wasserman. The AXS team released a tranche of ticket-purchasing invitations to fans across a 24-hour period and then, based on the ratio of those fans who actually purchased the tickets, released a second tranche the following day and a third the day after. The result takes much longer than a traditional on-sale — and naturally eschews the “instant sellout” publicity rush — but the demand for Roan was such that there never needed to be a fully open public on-sale, and the process delivered on her goals.
“When you have an artist that wants to do something like this and then you have really strong agents and managers in their corner who will take the time to agree on a plan, it’s incredibly effective,” says Dean DeWulf, head of venues, North America at AXS. “She chose to focus on fairness for her fans, even when she could have priced tickets higher.”
Still, for Roan, the result paid off handsomely: The first six shows of the run — four at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens and two at Liberty Memorial Park in Kansas City — grossed $15.4 million and sold 123,000 tickets, according to Billboard Boxscore, with the two L.A. dates yet to be reported. The process took around two weeks, between the three-day registration window, the seven days during which AXS vetted millions of registrations and the three days of offering the approved fans tickets. But just as important to her team at Foundations, Wasserman and AXS was the response to the shows, where almost every attendee was outfitted in cowboy hats, glitter and hand-made costumes.
“It really did feel like everyone was a part of a community in a way that I haven’t felt at a show in a really long time,” Mosiman says. “I think sometimes it gets lost how much Kayleigh [Amstutz, Roan’s real name] really does care about fans and their experience. And she absolutely was part of this process, putting in the work from day one to do it at this scale.”
Scale, now, is the big test for this program. It has been around for several years but has been used most often for one-off specialty shows, such as big-name underplays at small venues (Paul McCartney used it, for example, when he played California’s 4,500-capacity Santa Barbara Bowl in September) or at special venues like Red Rocks in Colorado. Acts such as ODESZA, Vampire Weekend, Billy Strings and Sturgill Simpson have used it, while perhaps the biggest proof of concept came from Zach Bryan’s tour in 2023, which utilized the program across its entire 32-date run, with face-value resale exchange. In late October, the Iowa festival Hinterland announced that it will use Fair AXS for its 2026 edition, becoming the first festival to deploy it.
And while artists may be leaving money on the table — the general admission price for Roan’s shows was $99 when they could have easily been priced much higher — there are other benefits the program provides artists, in addition to fostering community and rewarding the loyalty of devoted fans. “Artists are so disintermediated from their fans today,” DeWulf says. With this program, “they can actually know who the fans are. Being able to give that information to not only the artist camp but also to the promoter is very helpful for them to understand where the fans are, to route the tour to bigger venues next time and add more shows.”
Roan’s next move, as she put it in her announcement, will be “going away to write the next album.” And when she tours behind that release, it will be on the arena — or, perhaps, even the stadium — level. But her connection with her fans in the live environment has now been cemented — and AXS may have a solution to the increasingly impersonal process involved in establishing that connection.
“Ticketing, over the last 20 years, has become so monolithic, so opaque, so confusing, and it’s made it easy for bad actors to completely arbitrage the tickets, create scarcity and inflate prices,” DeWulf says. “But at the end of the day, ticketing is deeply personal. We’re in the fan connection business, and people care so deeply about these artists. That connection that we’re powering is so human and personal. And this is a very personal approach.”
This story appears in the Oct. 25, 2025, issue of Billboard.
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SoundCloud, a leading platform for independent artists and their fans, is debuting new features to make streaming more financially rewarding for its customers. On Thursday (Oct. 30), the company announced new components to its all-in-one offerings that will put more money into artists’ pockets.
“We’ve got an opportunity to solve the problem that streaming is not enough for artists or fans, because this is going to be new dollars on the table for artists and new ways for fans to express their fandom,” CEO Eliah Seton tells Billboard.
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For music distributed through SoundCloud, artists signed up to the Artist and Artist Pro plans will now keep 100% of royalties from streams on other platforms such as Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music and TikTok. Previously, SoundCloud took a 20% cut of those royalties as a distribution fee. This change mirrors the existing 100% payouts on royalties generated from streams on the SoundCloud platform.
In addition, SoundCloud is launching a new patronage feature. Artists will also keep 100% of the money received from a new feature on artist profiles, Fan Support. Fans can donate from $1 to $1,000 at a time in exchange for their names being acknowledged on the artists’ pages. At launch, Fan Support is available only to Artist Pro subscribers in the U.S.
Early results of Fan Support have been promising. According to Seton, artists who have tested Fan Support have earned more than they’ve received from streaming in their entire careers. “This can really unlock a major new opportunity for a middle class of artists that a lot of people have been talking about for a long time,” he says.
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The Artist plan is billed annually for $39 and allows distribution of up to two tracks per month. The $99-per-year Artist Pro plan offers distribution of an unlimited number of tracks. The new distribution terms and Fan Support feature are not available on the free Basic tier, which does not include distribution to other streaming providers.
SoundCloud’s latest moves are an attempt to address the financial problems faced by independent artists on its platform. Music streaming has revitalized the larger music industry, attracting major investors to artist and songwriter catalogs and driving the global industry’s decade-long winning streak. For many independent artists, however, streaming itself isn’t financially sustainable.
More than 40,000 new creators upload music to SoundCloud each week, according to Seton, and new music accounted for 50% of streams on the platform in 2024, according to the company’s Music Intelligence Report from March. But the volume of new music is itself seen as a hindrance: 67% of independent labels believe the glut of new tracks uploaded to streaming services — including AI-generated music — makes it harder to develop new artists, according to MIDiA Research.
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In a prior attempt to make streaming more equitable, in 2021, SoundCloud changed how it pays royalties to help emerging, less popular artists. Called “fan-powered” royalties, the scheme gives artists a share of the fees from users who stream their music. That’s different from the traditional “pro-rata” method, which pools subscription fees and pays royalties based on aggregate streams. In a pro-rata model, independent artists share a revenue pool with superstars. SoundCloud’s approach, which attracted Warner Music Group and independent rights organization Merlin, is more favorable to independent artists, according to a 2024 report.
Artist and Artist Pro have additional components, such as on-demand vinyl manufacturing through a partnership with Elastic Stage that was announced in July. Both tiers also allow artists to create merch storefronts on their pages. The goal, Seton explains, is to provide a menu of options for artists to build a career in different ways. “We want to be able to unlock all those possibilities,” he says.
Thursday’s announcement is a bet that giving artists a larger share of royalties will be good for business. Unlike most streaming platforms, SoundCloud is a two-sided marketplace that generates income from both artists and listeners — a symbiotic relationship that creates a “virtuous circle,” Seton explains. Luring and retaining artists with career-building tools and attractive terms not only generates more income, it makes SoundCloud a more attractive destination for fans.
“We feel like we’ve really begun to crack the code on being a two-sided marketplace and what really distinguishes us,” says Seton.
Trending on Billboard
Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” was the earworm of 2024, an inescapable pop smash that miraculously retained its charm even after hundreds of listens. But did you ever think a scholarly look at the song would win a Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award?
One just did. The 2025 Virgil Thomson Award for outstanding music criticism in the pop music field is presented to Dan Charnas for his Slate article “The Musical History Lesson Buried Beneath the Song of the Summer.” ASCAP says the article looks at “the popular but ‘nameless’ musical genre that is the foundation” for Carpenter’s smash. (For the record, the song, which Carpenter co-wrote with Amy Allen, Steph Jones and Julian Bunetta, ranked fourth on Billboard’s 2024 Song of the Summer chart.)
The winners of the 56th annual ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Awards were announced Thursday (Oct. 30). Awards are presented for outstanding books, articles, liner notes and broadcast programs on the subject of music. Established in 1967 to honor the memory of composer, critic and former ASCAP president Deems Taylor, the awards are made possible by the support of the Virgil Thomson Foundation.
Here are this year’s other winners:
Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award recipients for articles published in 2024:
The award for an article in the pop music field goes to Robert Michael Marovich for his article on the prolific Black songwriter Ted Jarrett, “The Black Songwriter Who Took Nashville by Storm,” published by Zocalo Public Square.
The award for an article in the concert music field goes to Jonathan Kregor for his article “Remembering Clara Wieck in Vienna: Gender, Genius, and Genre in the Post-Beethoven Biedermeier,” published in Women’s Agency in Schubert’s Vienna.
The award for outstanding music criticism in the concert music field is presented to Kevin Bartig for his article, “Olin Downes and the Soviets,” published by the Journal of the American Musicological Society.
A runner-up award in the above category goes to Andy Zax for “Extinctophonics: The Game of Jim,” published in Third Man Records & Books’ Maggot Brain.
Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Broadcast/Media Award in pop music:
Director Alex Stapleton, writer Stephen Witt and producer Philip Byron for their documentary, How Music Got Free. The Paramount+ film tells the story of how technology-driven disruption changed music in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Additional producers included Marshall “Eminem” Mathers, LeBron James, Paul Rosenberg, Maverick Carter, Jamal Henderson, Steve Berman, James Chapman, Bruce Gillmer, John Janick, Dan Sacks, Bridgette Theriault, James Thayer, Naomi Wright, Steve Stoute, Anthony Seyler, Stevenson Waite, Michael Maniaci and Malik Johnson.
Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Broadcast/Media Award in concert music:
Producer David Osenberg for the weekly program “Sounds Choral,” a production of WWFM, The Classical Network. The program explores the choral art form and is hosted by a rotating roster of choral conductors, composers and scholars including Ryan Brandau, Gabriel Crouch, Jason Max Ferdinand, Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek, Christopher Jackson, James Jordan, Amanda Quist, Steven Sametz, Deborah Simpkin-King and Ethan Sperry.
ASCAP Foundation Paul Williams “Loved the Liner Notes” Award:
Lauren Du Graf for “Alice Coltrane: The Artist in Ascension” from The Carnegie Hall Concert on Impulse Records.
Runner-up awards in the above category are also given to Elizabeth Nelson for “Hours in the Colosseum: Notes on the 1974 Tour” from The 1974 Live Recordings by Bob Dylan & The Band on Sony Legacy and Shana L. Redmond for Paul Robeson – Voice of Freedom: His Complete Columbia, RCA, HMV and Victor Recordings on Sony Classical.
The “Loved the Liner Notes” Award was established in 2016 and is funded by ASCAP Foundation President Paul Williams.
Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Book Awards in pop music:
Joe Boyd for And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, a history of music from all over the world that influenced jazz, rhythm & blues and rock ‘n’ roll, published by Faber & Faber
Brian Wright for The Bastard Instrument: A Cultural History of the Electric Bass, published by University of Michigan Press.
A runner-up award in this category goes to Sheila Curran Bernard for Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly’s Truths from Jim Crow’s Lies, published by Cambridge University Press.
Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Book Award in concert music:
David Suisman for Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers, published by University of Chicago Press.
A runner-up award in this category goes to Mikel Rouse for The World Got Away: A Memoir, published by University of Illinois Press.
More information about The ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Awards is available at their site.
Trending on Billboard Carrie Underwood has hit a new career milestone: She’s been named the highest Recording Industry Association of America-certified female country artist of all time, with over 95 million units (22.5 million in albums and 72.5 million in singles) in the United States alone, inclusive of solo titles and collaborations. Among Underwood’s RIAA […]
