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18 Nov 2022

Nick Cannon Has ‘No Idea’ If He Has More Children on the Way: ‘I Don’t Know!’

Nick Cannon swears that he’s “good right now” with the amount of children he has — but he’s also unsure if he has any more on the way.

Speaking with Billboard News at the Billboard Live: R&B/Hip-Hop Power Players event, Cannon caught up with Tetris Kelly on the red carpet, who asked him about his musical endeavors and what he had in the works for the future. “I got a record with Chris Brown out now called ‘I Do,’” the multi-hyphenate explained. “It’s always working, more on the executive side, we got a lot of hot young artists coming up, so we’re excited about next year.”

And when asked about his brood — which currently consists of 11 kids and one on the way — the former talk show host said, “That’s my number one priority obviously. I wake up being a father thinking about my kids and everything else comes after that.”

Cannon also expressed his gratitude for his children being the driving force behind his many projects. “My kids are definitely the creative force in all that I do,” he gushed. “They’re the funniest, most innovative, best questions…every project I’m working on now is through their eyes.”

So are there more baby Cannons in the works? “I don’t know, man. I have no idea. I think I’m good right now!”

The Masked Singer host first became a father to twins with Mariah Carey in 2011, and most recently revealed in a November 2022 announcement that model Alyssa Scott was pregnant with his next baby. In the time since, Cannon has welcomed children with four other ladies: Brittany Bell, Abby De La Rosa, Bre Tiesi and LaNisha Cole. (Keep track of all of Cannon’s children here.)

Watch Billboard‘s interview with Nick Cannon in the video above.

18 Nov 2022

2022 Billboard Live R&B/Hip-Hop: Photos From the Evening

The biggest and brightest stars and executives in the R&B and hip-hop world showed out at Billboard Live: R&B/Hip-Hop on Thursday night (Nov. 17) at Academy LA.

Billboard‘s deputy director, R&B/hip-hop Carl Lamarre and executive director, R&B/hip-hop Gail Mitchell started the evening’s festivities by thanking the R&B and hip-hop team, including reporters Neena Rouhani and Heran Mamo, and devoting a moment of silence to Takeoff, PnB Rock, Young Dolph, Pop Smoke, Nipsey Hussle and more rappers who have died in recent years.

Future, who currently stars on Billboard‘s cover, presented the Rookie of the Year award to Blxst, who recently came off a sold-out world tour and earned two 2023 Grammy nominations for album of the year with Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers and best melodic rap performance with “Die Hard” by Lamar featuring himself and Amanda Reifer.

Fellow cover star SZA presented the Executive of the Year award to Tim Hinshaw, head of hip-hop & R&B at Amazon Music, who delivered a heartfelt speech that made sure there wasn’t a dry eye left in the room. And Vibe editor-in-chief Datwon Thomas presented the Rémy Martin x Vibe Impact and Excellence Award to SAINt JHN, which honors a musician who has made tremendous efforts in their community, as well as paving the way for the next generation of artists.

Opener Flo Milli performed songs from her 2020 debut mixtape Ho, Why Is You Here? and her 2022 album You Still Here, Ho? before City Girls took the stage and performed their hits such as “Jobs” and “P–sy Talk.”

18 Nov 2022

Tyler Childers, Bryan Adams & Melissa Etheridge Announced for 2023 Stagecoach Palomino Stage 

Stagecoach’s iconic Palomino Stage is getting the star treatment in 2023 with scheduled performances from Tyler Childers, Bryan Adams, Melissa Etheridge and more. The Palomino Stage, which offers an alternative sound to the main stage acts, will also feature sets from ZZ Top, Marty Stuart, Turnpike Troubadours and Nikki Lane, among others.

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Stagecoach festival will take place from April 28-30 at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, Calif., following two weekends of Coachella on the same grounds. Ian Munsick, Keb’ Mo’, Valerie June, Sierra Ferrell, Jaime Wyatt, Sammy Kershaw and more will also take the Palomino Stage in 2023.

The country festival celebrates its 15th anniversary with a Palomino Stage that rivals previous years. The Palomino Stage has welcomed Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, George Jones, John Prine, Jerry Lee Lewis, Smokey Robinson, Emmylou Harris, Glen Campbell, Kenny Rogers, Charley Pride, Tom Jones and Dwight Yoakam as well as today’s hottest, award-winning talent including Sturgill Simpson, Cody Jinks, Zach Bryan, Cody Johnson, Colter Wall, Charley Crockett, Margo Price and more over the years.

The 2023 edition of Stagecoach will also see headlining performances from superstars Luke Bryan, Kane Brown and Chris Stapleton. Additional artists on the Mane Stage include Brooks & Dunn, Jon Pardi, Old Dominion, Riley Green, Lainey Wilson, Gabby Barrett, Parker McCollum, BRELAND, Elle King, Morgan Wade, Niko Moon and Kameron Marlowe.

Three-day passes for the country festival begin at $389 with VIP, camping and parking passes also available. New to this year’s festival is the Saloon pass, which offers fans access to standing room only areas on both sides of the Corral and access to the Rhinestone & Cowboy Saloons featuring specialty food and drink vendors, air-conditioned restrooms, shaded seating areas, and full bars. For more information on tickets and lineup, head here.

18 Nov 2022

The Ledger: A Million Angry Taylor Swift Fans Can’t Be Wrong — But Will Anything Change?

The Ledger is a weekly newsletter about the economics of the music business sent to Billboard Pro subscribers. An abbreviated version of the newsletter is published online.

Is Ticketmaster a monopoly that treats customers unfairly? Problems with Taylor Swift’s record-breaking The Eras Tour onsale this week has created choruses of complaints around the ticketing giant that have now led to a reported Justice Department investigation.  

On Thursday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar sent an open letter to Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino detailing her “concerns about the state of competition in the ticketing industry and its harmful impact on consumers.” The problem, wrote Klobuchar, is a lack of competition “that typically push[es] companies to innovate and improve their services. That can result in dramatic service failures, where consumers are the ones that pay the price.”  

Breaking up Live Nation and Ticketmaster wouldn’t necessarily have prevented this problem. It’s likely that any ticketing platform would have struggled with such a high level of demand. StubHub crashed in 2018 after University of Georgia fans flooded the site to purchase tickets to see their team play in the NCAA football national championship game — and that was just one game.

Ticketmaster blamed the outage on a surge of unregistered fans and billions of bots. According to the company, over 3.5 million people pre-registered for Swift’s Verified Fan credentials, the largest registration in its history. Typically, only a fraction of registered fans show up to buy a ticket. This time, “a staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes” resulted in 3.5 billion total system requests — four times the previous record number.  

One could argue Ticketmaster could have been better prepared for such a high level of demand. Perhaps the company should Swift-proof the platform in anticipation of a flood of speculators and unregistered fans — Swift said Friday (Nov. 18) that her team “asked them, multiple times, if they could handle this kind of demand and we were assured they could.” Overall, problems on the platform are relatively rare given Ticketmaster’s volume of business, but we talk about them because they happen with high-profile concerts that attract large numbers of customers. Those attract the most attention and complaints online, which in turn attracts politicians. Ticketmaster is one of the few non-partisan issues in America in 2022. 

Some observers have conflated the issues surrounding Ticketmaster’s market power, though. Rep. David Cicilline, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee, wrote about the Swift on-sale that “excessive wait times and fees are completely unacceptable … and are a symptom of a larger problem.” It’s fair for Cicilline to suggest that Ticketmaster does not invest enough in its platform to avoid the technical issues and wait times Swift fans recently experienced. That’s debatable, but it’s a defensible argument.  

Fees are, however, an entirely different issue. Ticketmaster is a pioneer in the area of ticket fees but does not have a monopoly on the ability to charge them. More competition in ticketing would not prevent venues and promoters from adding to the face value of tickets. The ticket purchase is an opportunity for all parties involved to capitalize on fans’ demand for live music. As Bruce Springsteen’s controversial leap into dynamic pricing showed, leaving money on the table is an increasingly uncommon strategy in the modern music business. 

Ticket prices occasionally get dragged into the argument, too. Politicians and consumers seem to want a form of price competition that doesn’t exist. Prices for an in-demand concert ticket won’t necessarily become more affordable if they’re sold at, say, StubHub rather than Ticketmaster. The laws of supply and demand say that prices for in-demand, scarce objects like a Swift concert ticket are going to be high no matter who’s selling them.  

So, what tangible results might come from the calamitous The Eras Tour on-sale? Sen. Klobuchar’s letter points to customers’ desire for fair access to concert tickets. She asked Rapino, “Generally, what percentage of high-profile tour tickets are made available to the general public compared to those allocated to pre-sales, radio stations, VIPs, and other restricted opportunities?”  

Klobuchar wants to know what percentage of tickets the average person has a realistic shot at getting without being the customer of a particular credit card, without buying high-priced VIP packages, without winning a radio station contest or without being a member of an artist’s fan club. In this case, Capital One is a sponsor of the Eras tour and offered a pre-sale to its customers.  

But how do lawmakers regulate access? Do they establish rules that dictate what kind of marketing partnerships artists can and cannot establish? Would they tell American Express to stop giving such long-standing perks as pre-sale access and dedicated tickets to its credit card holders? If Congress really wanted to create a more level playing field for fans, they could do what the lawmakers in Victoria, Australia, did in 2021: pass a law that limits the resale value of a ticket to 110% of its face value. That could lower the number of resellers and bots clogging up Ticketmaster’s system for high-traffic on-sales like the Eras Tour. At the very least, price limits would bring a much-desired sense of fairness to the secondary market. Whether the U.S. Congress has the stomach to establish price controls on private companies remains to be seen.

A more likely outcome of the Eras Tour debacle is increased transparency. New York State legislators passed a law in June that improves transparency by requiring all-in pricing and prohibits revealing the ticket’s total cost — face value plus fees — after multiple clicks in a check-out process. The bill could have gone further: a requirement to disclose the percentage of tickets made available to pre-sales and VIPs was in an early form of the bill but not the final version.

But, again, are lawmakers willing to mandate such disclosures from private businesses? This would more likely be a voluntary disclosure done at the behest of the artist – Swift is exactly the kind of powerful artist who could persuade ticket sellers to reveal this information. Transparency wouldn’t immediately translate into greater access for the average fan, but it could fuel a larger conversation about how fans get access to concert tickets. That wouldn’t ease the pain of many Swift fans, but it would be a step forward.  

18 Nov 2022

For the Record: Bye Bye Blockchain – Why it Won’t Change the Music Business 

Almost five years ago, I wrote a column about how Bitcoin and Blockchain might change the music business. At the time, the question seemed more about how than if: An online merchandise store had just started accepting cryptocurrency, several entrepreneurs had founded startups to use blockchain technology to pay rights holders, and entrepreneur and then-Dot Blockchain CEO Benji Rogers predicted that “Blockchain technology is coming like a tsunami.” 

I was skeptical. I called Blockchain “a solution looking for a problem” and pointed out that the only person I knew who had bought anything with Bitcoin was a former neighbor in Berlin who had purchased LSD online. At that time, Bitcoin was worth $11,631 and the Dow Jones average was 25,803. 

As Bitcoin shot up — to a November 2021 high of more than $56,000 — more artists and music executives became certain that cryptocurrency and Blockchain technology would change everything. Artists sold NFTs — as did Billboard — and in February Coachella sold $1.4 million of NFTs, including 10 lifetime passes to the annual festival.

Now the cryptocurrency exchange FTX is in bankruptcy, Bitcoin is down to $16,099, and the U.S. will almost certainly regulate cryptocurrency “banks” and exchanges. In economic terms, that means cryptocurrency companies might have to compete on an even playing field with traditional finance entities, which would reduce risk for consumers but eliminate some of the advantage that startups get from making their own rules. In non-economic terms, Mom and Dad are home, they’re pissed, and they’re not going to let you run your business unless you can wear your big-boy pants! 

So, what about that tsunami? It has been a busy five years for the music industry: recorded music boomed, major financial players invested in publishing catalogs, two of the three major labels went public, Latin music gained a bigger global audience, and TikTok emerged as a transformative source of promotion. Blockchain and Bitcoin barely changed the industry at all, though. A few artists made an insane amount of money on NFTs and a bunch of companies announced plans to fundamentally disrupt disruption itself. But Bitcoin is still an inefficient means of exchange and a poor store of value — at best it’s a high-yield, high-risk investment — and Blockchain is still a solution in search of a problem.  

A little more than a year after my column, Benji Rogers, he of the tsunami prediction, left Dot Blockchain, which in September 2019 rebranded as Verifi Media. The company still helps rights holders track ownership and use data, but it doesn’t emphasize Blockchain technology on its website. (Emails to the Verifi publicity contact came back as undeliverable.) That makes sense: The big problem with rights data has always been that it’s incorrect or incomplete. Blockchain is a distributed database that allows users to track changes, but it can’t fix incorrect or missing information. 

Five years ago, the startup Choon had a plan to track music use with Blockchain and pay rights holders immediately with a digital currency called Notes. It went out of business in 2019, as Notes fell in value along with Bitcoin. The following year, Choon co-founder Bjorn Niclas launched Rocki amid the pandemic and exchanged outstanding Notes for Rocki tokens at a 50:1 ratio. (The company also lets independent musicians sell NFTs.) Since then, “Rocks” tokens have gone from being worth about 5 cents each, up to an April 2021 high of $5.45 — it peaked when Bitcoin did — and down to about a penny. That sounds exciting, and potentially profitable, but I suspect most artists prefer to get paid in currency that holds its value.  

Bitcoin and NFTs aren’t going anywhere — some investors see the “crypto winter” as a buying opportunity, while others just want to HODL. (Art NFTs are performing better than most.) But the collapse of FTX will inspire investors, and hopefully government agencies, to ask more questions about whether celebrities who buy and sell NFTs are being transparent enough about their transactions — especially since the fans they influence may buy into investments in a way that help those who already own them. 

Like many online technologies, Blockchain and Bitcoin offered a utopian dream of decentralization, free from government regulation and control. When it comes to finance, however, government regulation isn’t a bug, to use the technology phrase — it’s a feature. Just ask anyone who had money with FTX, which wasn’t insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) the way U.S. banks are. Among the assets stuck in the exchange are the Coachella Keys that offer holders access to the festival.

Coachella told Billboard that it’s confident it will handle this issue. But it’s hard not to wonder if there wasn’t an easier way to do this — say, passes with QR codes, or maybe even just spots in a database that could be sold with the cooperation of the event promoter. Blockchain is essentially a distributed database that can operate at internet scale, and it’s easy to see how exciting that is. It’s just still hard to see what use the music business might have for it. 

18 Nov 2022

Aaron Carter’s Manager Says He ‘Didn’t Seem Okay Physically’ Prior to His Death

Aaron Carter‘s manager spoke out on Thursday (Nov. 17) about the singer’s final days before his tragic death earlier this month.

“He looked thin. He was extremely tired,” Taylor Helgeson said in an interview with Page Six. “He just looked like he needed to be doing anything but working. He looked like he needed to be taking care of him.”

The manager explained that Carter had been working on a new album — which would’ve served as a follow-up to 2018’s Love — at the time of his Nov. 5 death at the age of 34.

“He didn’t seem okay,” Helgeson continued. “Now, when I say that, I think it’s really important to kind of context that…He didn’t seem okay physically…[but] mentally, he was the most excited I’ve seen him in months. He was very intelligent and he was very conscious of what people wanted to see from him. We had so much stuff going on and, you know, Aaron was a really prideful guy in his own right, too”

In the wake of the “That’s How I Beat Shaq” singer’s passing, his older brother Nick Carter has launched a donation fund for On Our Sleeves, a children’s mental health charity, in his memory. Meanwhile, the publication of Aaron’s unfinished memoir — Aaron Carter: An Incomplete Story of an Incomplete Life — has been postponed after backlash from the singer’s management team, ex-girlfriend Hilary Duff and others. (Carter’s team also publicly slammed the planned release of an album titled Blacklisted, which he purportedly recorded with producers Morgan Matthews and John Wyatt Johnson before his death.)

18 Nov 2022

NCT Dream Announce Comeback With Holiday Mini Album ‘Candy’

Get ready for a very NCT Christmas! On Thursday, NCT Dream announced they will spread cheer to their fans during the most wonderful time of year with the release of a special holiday album titled Candy.

“NCT DREAM Winter Special Mini Album Candy 2022.12.19 (KST),” the group tweeted, along with a festive illustrated visual of an NCT Dream house decked out in Christmas-themed regalia with bows, mini Christmas trees, candy canes, peppermints, bows, twinkling lights and more. Candy will mark the group’s first-ever holiday album.

The holiday album will also serve as a comeback for the group — which consists of members Mark, Renjun, Jeno, Haechan, Chenle, Jaemin and Jisung — since the release of Beatbox, the repackaged deluxe version of their second studio album Glitch Mode that contained four additional tracks on the album.

Glitch Mode served as the K-pop group’s last official album release. The project debuted at No. 50 on the Billboard 200 but spent a total of five weeks on the Top Current Album Sales chart following its April release, and reached a peak of No. 5 on the chart.

Up next for NCT Dream is bringing THE DREAM SHOW 2 : In a Dream world tour to Japan. The trek kicks off in Aichi at the Nippon Gaishi Hall on Nov. 23 and will play three nights in Kanagawa at the Nov. 26-28. The Japanese leg of the tour will conclude in Fukuoka for a show at the Marine Messe Fukuoka Hall A on Dec. 1.

See NCT Dream’s Candy announcement below.

18 Nov 2022

Jack Antonoff Blasts Touring Industry & Music Venue Practices: ‘Include Artists in More Areas of Revenue’

In light of fans — and Taylor Swift herself — taking issue with Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s highly publicized Verified Fan Presale failure, Jack Antonoff has a few choice words to share about the touring industry’s treatment of artists.

The Bleachers frontman and producer hit Twitter on Friday (Nov. 18) to blast music venues for taking away the revenue that newer artists have the potential to make from merchandise sales during concerts.

“While we are having the discussion can venues simply stop taxing merch of artists? This is literally the only way you make money when you start out touring,” he started. “The more we make it tenable for young and small artists to make a living on the road the more great music we will get. Touring is one of the most honest ways to make a living. Some of the hardest and most heartfelt work you can do. So why must [they] f— artist[s] so hard?”

The Grammy winning producer continued, “[Simple] solutions, stop taxing merch, stop lying to artists about costs of putting on shows, include artists in more areas of revenue. The stories I could tell from my years of touring are bananas. Young artists on tour are the last to see any money.”

Antonoff’s thread comes at what feels like a watershed moment for the music industry. Ticketmaster and Live Nation have come under fire from Antonoff’s frequent collaborator Taylor Swift, her fans and lawmakers after the disastrous sale of tickets for her 2023 The Eras tour.

The failure has led to the U.S. Department of Justice launching an investigation to see if the companies have abused its market shares in the music industry after 14 million fans attempted to access the presale, experienced major technical difficulties and failed to secure tickets, despite gaining entry into Ticketmaster’s Verified Fan Presale for the event. “It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them,” Swift said in a note to fans.

Another one of Antonoff’s collaborators, Lorde, spoke about the harsh realities of touring in a newsletter post to fans, stating, “for pretty much every artist selling less tickets than I am, touring has become a demented struggle to break even or face debt.” According to the “Solar Power” singer, an increase in ticket prices could cover the heightened cost of touring, but “no one wants to charge their harried and extremely-compassionate-and-flexible audience any more f—ing money.”

Antonoff, with the rest of Bleachers, will complete the final dates of the band’s How Dare You Want Tour on Dec. 3-4 at the Zona Festival in Phoenix. The band are confirmed for two festival dates in 2023; the High Water Fest in North Charleston, S.C., on April 15 and the Adjacent Music Fest in Atlantic City, N.J. on May 27.

See Antonoff’s tweets below.