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With honorees from the across the globe, the 2024 Billboard Women in Music Awards are a true international affair. Repping Seoul, South Korea, is NewJeans, a chart-topping K-pop girl group comprised of Minji, Hanni, Danielle, Haerin and Hyein.
Earning this year’s Group of the Year award, NewJeans spent 2023 lighting up the Billboard charts and proving that they were the correct choice for the honor. The quintet debuted back in 2022, and their Jersey club-inflected sound has helped them become one of the hottest new acts across radio and streaming around the world.

In 2023, the group scored five entries on the Billboard Hot 100, led by “Super Shy” at No. 48. Their other entries include “OMG” (No. 74), “ETA” (No. 81), “Ditto” (No. 82) and “Cool With You” (No. 93). Over on the Billboard Global 200, “Super Shy” (No. 2), “Ditto” (No. 8) and “OMG” (No. 10) all reached the top 10. “Super Shy,” one of the group’s biggest singles, also made appearances on Pop Airplay (No. 37), Streaming Songs (No. 32) and Digital Song Sales (No. 45). On World Digital Song Sales, NewJeans boasts six consecutive top five hits.

NewJeans’ success is not limited to the singles chart. In 2023, Get Up — the group’s sophomore EP — debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 (chart dated Aug. 5, 2023), edging out the star-studded Barbie soundtrack by just 500 units. Get Up also hit No. 1 on Top Album Sales, Tastemaker Albums and World Albums (10 weeks).

Proving their dominance across both albums and singles, NewJeans’ fast rise up the Billboard charts made them a clear choice for the Group of the Year honor at the 2024 Billboard Women in Music Awards.

After the video, catch up on more Billboard Explains videos and learn about how Beyoncé arrived at Renaissance, the evolution of girl groups, BBMAs, NFTs, SXSW, the magic of boy bands, American Music Awards, the Billboard Latin Music Awards, the Hot 100 chart, how R&B/hip-hop became the biggest genre in the U.S., how festivals book their lineups, Billie Eilish’s formula for success, the history of rap battles, nonbinary awareness in music, the Billboard Music Awards, the Free Britney movement, rise of K-pop in the U.S., why Taylor Swift is re-recording her first six albums, the boom of hit all-female collaborations, how Grammy nominees and winners are chosen, why songwriters are selling their publishing catalogs, how the Super Bowl halftime show is booked and why Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drivers License” was able to shoot to No. 1 on the Hot 100.

The wait is (almost) over: Normani announced she’ll be releasing her debut album, Dopamine, this year. She posted the album artwork on Instagram Wednesday (Feb. 21), which features the black-leather bikini-clad singer riding on top of a black rocket. “cryingg typing this rn. DOPAMINE THE ALBUM,” she captioned the post. The announcement of her long-awaited […]

It’s another good week to be Noah Kahan: on this week’s Hot 100, the alt-folk singer-songwriter’s long-rising breakthrough “Stick Season” becomes his first career top 10 hit, rising to No. 10 in its 20th week on the chart. Kahan’s now-signature hit is the title track of his third studio album, Stick Season — which rebounds to its previous peak of No. 3 on the Billboard 200 this week thanks to a new deluxe edition dubbed Stick Season (Forever), 16 months after the album’s October 2022 release. Meanwhile, Kahan launches two new songs from the deluxe edition, “Forever” and “You’re Gonna Go Far,” onto the Hot 100 at Nos. 28 and 86, respectively.

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Kahan’s dual chart triumph is a story of singular success: after grinding out multiple albums and hundreds of tour dates, the Strafford, Vt. native began an ascent towards crossover stardom in earnest last year as Stick Season’s listenership continued to swell. He is now, without a doubt, an A-list artist in popular music – yet the first few weeks of the new year have also suggested that, if 2023 was Kahan’s breakout year, 2024 may be the moment the greater sound of modern pop bends around him. 

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As “Stick Season” hits the top 10, a slew of folk-adjacent, guitar-led, vaguely rustic sing-alongs have concurrently infiltrated the Hot 100 — from Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things” to Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” to Michael Marcagi’s “Scared to Start” to Good Neighbours’ “Home” — making clear that Kahan’s influence is extending beyond his own wins. “This lane is now open,” Kwame Dankwa, program director of WXXX (95.5 FM) in South Burlington, Vt., tells Billboard of the burgeoning folk-pop boom.

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A little over a decade ago, folk music experienced a pop revival thanks to what has been summarized as the “stomp clap hey” movement, with bands like Mumford & Sons, the Lumineers and Of Monsters & Men scoring banjo-heavy crossover hits and playing to sprawling festival crowds. While some of Kahan’s tunes modernize the stomp-clap sound, the core tenets of his heart-on-sleeve aesthetic — detailed storytelling, vulnerable vocals, scruffy guitar strums that could lead a song anywhere from folk to rock to country to pop — are being refracted through a variety of different styles and voices.

“There’s a confluence of influences — not just in the folk and singer-songwriter space, but also in indie, alt-country, soul,” says Cecilia Winter, Spotify’s Global Hits editorial lead. That’s why, even though a song like Teddy Swims’ soul-pop waltz “Lose Control” doesn’t resemble Kahan’s sound, the emotional songwriting and unfussy vocal take can be grouped together with “Stick Season” in a playlist or radio block. “We’re definitely seeing a heightened demand for these more raw, less-polished songs,” Winter adds.

Part of the explanation for this shift can be chalked up to timing: the advent of TikTok at the beginning of the decade, along with the global pandemic, produced a new wave of young artists stuck at home and sharing clips of themselves performing stripped-down songs from their bedrooms. Kahan experienced that circumstantial effect on his music firsthand: after his 2019 debut Busyhead failed to earn a sizable audience, the singer-songwriter kept writing throughout the pandemic (and about it, too — see the COVID name-check in the “Stick Season” lyrics) and posting song clips on TikTok. Weeks of teasers for “Dial Drunk” last year, for instance, stoked enough excitement that the song earned Kahan his first Hot 100 debut, and kicked off his crossover bid in earnest.

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Also a key factor in the return of folk-pop: a superstar releasing back-to-back projects in that mode. Taylor Swift’s pair of 2020 albums, Folklore and Evermore, not only produced more eye-popping commercial returns and critical acclaim, but undoubtedly influenced a new generation of listeners a decade after folk’s last pop crossover. 

“The biggest artist in the world [was] writing very grounded folk music that tells stories,” Kahan told Billboard last month, in reference to Swift’s sonic pivot. “And it allowed a huge new audience to find interest in that and to tap into that world.” The rise of alt-country troubadour Zach Bryan over the past two years was another major precedent for Kahan’s success; another rootsier storyteller whose songs were scooped up by the TikTok set, Bryan has become a stadium headliner, while also championing and collaborating with Kahan.

Perhaps the biggest recent change to this movement is happening at pop radio: while Swift’s Folklore/Evermore offerings and Bryan’s early hits never translated from streaming platforms to the top 40 airwaves, songs like “Stick Season,” “Lose Control” and “Beautiful Things” all reside in the top 25 of the current Pop Airplay chart. Dankwa says that, while WXXX has been keeping “Stick Season” and “Dial Drunk” from Vermont’s hometown hero in heavy rotation, he’s noticed that demand of similar-sounding artists on pop airplay is rising. 

“With Noah Kahan’s success, so many [listeners] got their tastebuds wet, and they got hooked,” he notes. “They are saying, ‘We want more of this.’”

Along with factors like TikTok, the pandemic lockdowns and radio adoption, Winter suspects that the success of an artist like Kahan also speaks to a greater cultural push against technological superficiality. That includes combating the use of AI in music, of course, but also practices like image-smoothing via Photoshop and carefully curated social media feeds, in order to be more direct and genuine.

“There’s something distinctly human about folk,” says Winter. “With an ongoing shift towards greater authenticity, I think that shift bleeds into pop music, which is really a sponge for whatever is happening in culture.”

And Kahan — a gifted songwriter whose introspective folk songs contain a pop sensibility, so that his top 40-ready anthems still contain a sense of time and place — has served as the perfect emblem of that place. When Stick Season started taking off in 2023, Kahan had already been playing small and midsize venues around the U.S. for over a half-decade, developing a grassroots following that supported his small-town sing-alongs as pop fans began to take notice of his singles.

“Once an artist gets to a third album, sometimes they start to drift away from where normal people are, but I don’t see that happening with Noah,” says Dankwa. Kahan has naturally been heralded by Vermont and the greater New England area as he plotted arena headlining dates and earned a best new artist Grammy nod, but Dankwa believes Kahan is still “willing to tell everybody’s story. … People in Vermont know and understand him, but you could apply his songs to rural life anywhere in America.”

As a result, new hits that range from Boone’s full-throated folk-rocker “Beautiful People” (which spends a second week in the top 5 of the Hot 100) to Marcagi’s wistful strum-along “Scared to Start” (which debuted at No. 98 on last week’s chart) are further placing Kahan’s fingerprints across the pop charts as Kahan himself collects more hits. Juniper, Spotify’s new flagship folk playlist, has collected over 93,000 likes since launching last October — and Winter hopes that, as the sound’s place in pop music snowballs in 2024, more women and artists of color can gain traction in a space that’s been thus far dominated by white men, citing artists like Kara Jackson and Tiny Habits as just as worthy of mainstream moments.

Regardless of where this new boom leads, however, Winter views Kahan as the de facto leader of this movement, and predicts his influence to continue growing. “Noah reminds me of where Billie Eilish was in 2019,” she notes. “She’d been putting out music for a long time and building this core fan base, and then crossed over into the hit space in such a major way that all of a sudden there were a hundred mini-Billie Eilishes. That’s kind of what is happening with Noah Kahan.”

As Taylor Swift once said, this is why we can’t have nice things. Weeks after Emma Stone went viral for lovingly joking that the pop star was an “a–hole” for giving her a standing ovation at the 2024 Golden Globes, the actress has now said that she’s done teasing her longtime friend in public.
“I definitely won’t make a joke like that again,” she told Variety for her Wednesday (Feb. 21) cover story with Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos. “I saw headlines that really pulled it out of context.”

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Pointing at herself, Stone added, “What a dope.”

The interview follows the La La Land star’s best actress win at this year’s Globes for her portrayal of Bella Baxter in Poor Things. At the Jan. 7 ceremony, Swift stood up and excitedly cheered for Stone as she accepted the honors.

While speaking to press later that night, Stone was asked about the “Anti-Hero” singer’s applause. “What an a–hole, am I right?” she responded, earning laughs from Lanthimos and her costars, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe and Ramy Youssef.

“I’ve known her for almost 20 years, so I was very happy she was there,” Stone added at the time. “She was also nominated tonight, which was wonderful, and, um, yes, what an a–hole!”

The “Karma” musician was in the running for best cinematic and box office achievement that night, thanks to her blockbuster Eras Tour concert film; however, Swift lost out to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. The pop superstar’s three-hour production is one that Stone saw live three times last year, a favor the 14-time Grammy winner returned by attending the New York City premiere of Poor Things in December.

Over the summer, Stone became a central figure in Swiftian lore after the singer-songwriter released a “From the Vault” track titled “When Emma Falls in Love” as part of her July LP Speak Now (Taylor’s Version). Fans were quick to speculate that the “Emma” in question was the Amazing Spider-Man actress, something Stone neither confirmed nor denied when asked about the rumors at the Poor Things premiere.

At the time, she simply said, “You would have to ask her.”

PinkPantheress is only one night in to her Capable of Love Tour, but the trek is already a memorable one thanks to a fan with a prosthetic leg and a dream at the star’s kickoff show in Ireland Tuesday (Feb. 20).  While the “Boy’s a Liar” singer was onstage at Dublin’s 3Olympia Theatre, one of […]

The Spicy Pisces is officially 21. And after celebrating her milestone birthday Tuesday (Feb. 20) with a huge birthday cake and a party with friends, Olivia Rodrigo shared her gratitude on Instagram.  ‘21!!!” the pop star wrote, sharing a photo in which she poses next to a five-tier “spill ur guts” cake frosted with her signature […]

If imitation if the greatest form of flattery, Kylie Minogue should feel mighty chuffed indeed following the release of Boy George’s new single, “Religion.”

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The former Culture Club frontman this week shared the standalone single “Religion,” one of two songs included in the audiobook of his 2023 memoir Karma: My Autobiography (the other, “Suddenly I’m Wiser,” is not widely available on streaming platforms).

When “Religion” dropped on DSPs, X (formerly known as Twitter) had words. Eagle-eyed social media users spotted the cover art’s close resemblance to that of Minogue’s Tension album, which led the U.K. and Australian albums charts following its release in 2023.

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George batted away the critics left and right.

“I’m recycling everything. It’s all the rage. Even fashion is catching on?,” he wrote in one post. In response to one particularly agitated comment, he assured the copycat image was “utter genius.” He returned serve on one poster who described the artwork as “pathetic,” and quipped that he “broke wind,” a retort to a Daily Mail headline which reads, “Boy George breaks silence after ‘copying’ Kylie’s album cover.

Both artists launched their careers in the 1980s. George (real name George O’Dowd), the flamboyant singer with Culture Club, was, for a time in the early-to-mid ‘80s, one of the most recognizable artists on the planet.

Culture Club captured six top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, including a No. 1 with 1983’s “Karma Chameleon.” Its parent album Colour By Numbers peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200.

When the band was dissolved in 1986, George embarked on a solo career, which was briefly derailed by substance abuse, controversy and legal problems, before the singer reinvented himself as a club DJ, returned to the stage and studio, and found regular work on reality TV. In 2015, he snagged the Ivor Novello Award for outstanding contribution to British Music, one of the U.K. industry’s highest honors.

Kylie is in a purple patch. The Aussie “princess of pop” recently signed with UTA for live representation in the U.S. and Canada, as well as “acting endeavors” worldwide. Her Vegas residency has been extended, she recently won her second Grammy, for best pop dance recording with “Padam Padam,” the U.K. top 10 hit from Tension; she’s nominated for international artist of the year at the 2024 Brit Awards, where she’ll receive its Global Icon Award; and next month, she’ll scoop Billboard’s Women in Music Icon Award.⁠

Tension is the ninth No. 1 album for Kylie in the U.K., where she is the first ever female artist — and second artist overall — to bag a No. 1 album in five consecutive decades.

Just weeks after making an unlikely U.S. chart debut, Sophie Ellis-Bextor is taking her show on the road for a first-ever headline tour of North America.
The British pop star sets a seven-date stretch, starting March 30 at San Francisco’s August Hall, followed by dates in San Diego, CA; Washington, DC, Boston, MA; Philadelphia, PA; New York, NY; and wrapping June 8 at Danforth Music Hall in Toronto, ON.

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The New York show at Webster Hall “sold out in a day,” she writes on social media. “My band and I are coming for you! Super excited. Come and dance with me.”

Ellis-Bextor is, of course, flying high with her 2001 hit “Murder on the Dancefloor,” which is synced to the final sequence in the hit dark drama Saltburn.

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The scene, in which the film’s lead Barry Keoghan dances nude to the song, kicked off a dance trend on TikTok – and saw the song power into charts around the world.

Last month, “Murder” cracked the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time, at No. 98, then lifted to No. 51, its new peak.

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In her homeland, “Murder” recently returned to its all-time peak position of No. 2 on the Official U.K. Singles Chart, and is one of her six top 10 hits there. She also boasts a No. 1 hit as the uncredited singer on Spiller’s 2000’s release “Groovejet (If This Ain’t Love)”. The track has also reentered the top 10 on Australia’s ARIA Chart.

“It actually feels really magical, and if I’m honest, I don’t think I’ve completely processed it really,” Ellis-Bextor told the BBC following the revival for “Murder”. “It’s a song I’ve been singing for over 20 years. I still love singing it. I love the way people react when I do it live. But for new people to be discovering it, for it to be making new memories with people, is kind of beautiful.”

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Ahead of her North America jaunt, Ellis-Bextor has strutted her stuff on national TV, performing the song on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and for the BBC’s coverage of the BAFTAs.

The English artist kicks off a tour of Continental Europe next month, starting in Groningen, Netherlands on March 1. More concerts are locked in across the U.K. and Europe later in the year.

With her dreamy pop songs and sky-high whistle tones, Ariana Grande has drawn comparisons to Mariah Carey since her music debut back in 2013. Of course, in the decade-plus since, Grande has made a massive, marquee name for herself — so it’s a bit of a full-circle moment that the two chart-topping divas have joined […]

It’s been five years since Lady Gaga made her viral “What’s fortnight” tweet, but now she’s figured it out. In fact, it was revealed on Tuesday (Feb. 20) that the superstar is joining Fortnite Festival. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news Gaga took to X (formerly known […]