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For several years, the consensus has been clear: Hit singles are getting shorter. Blame for this has fallen on shrinking attention spans, an environment of endless musical abundance in which songs must impress themselves on listeners quickly or risk being discarded, and the rise of short-form video platforms, which cause users to fall in love with 15-second sound snippets, rendering a full track irrelevant.
In 2024, however, the average length of songs that cracked the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 actually rose by more than 20 seconds, to 3:40, according to Hit Songs Deconstructed. At the same time, the portion of top 10 hits that let over a minute pass before hammering home a chorus rose to its highest level in a decade, nearly 23%.
While a single year of data doesn’t reverse a trend, it’s clear that longer hits have not been banished permanently from the upper reaches of the Hot 100. Five top 10s last year exceeded five minutes, including two apiece from Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar. These are the musical equivalents of doorstops, more than twice as long as the shortest top 10, Tate McRae‘s “Greedy.” And those hits seem downright laconic next to Drake‘s “Family Matters,” released in the middle of his venomous, no-holds-barred showdown with Lamar, which ran past 7:30.
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Top songwriters and producers were cautiously optimistic about having more room to roam last year — and more freedom from the old adage, “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus.”
“The whole short-form thing has been pushed so hard,” says GENT!, who co-produced Doja Cat‘s “Agora Hills,” a hit that clocks in at 4:25. “The majority of the time, with short-form content, you need a gimmick, and I think music lovers are kind of tired of the gimmicks.”
“[An increase of] 20 seconds is significant,” adds the writer and producer Cirkut (Lady Gaga‘s “Abracadabra,” ROSÉ and Bruno Mars‘ “APT.”). “People may be tiring of the quick little TikTok thing.”
On a spectrum between succinct and long-winded, Cirkut leans toward the former. “I do like to get to the hook,” he says. But he acknowledges that “sometimes, a longer verse keeps you waiting, and if it’s well-written, then it makes the chorus that much more satisfying.”
TikTok can certainly reward brevity as users fall hard for sonic morsels, even a verse or a hook from an as-yet-unwritten song. But perhaps counterintuitively, when “any catchy part of a song could be what grabs people’s attention,” this may end up loosening the constraints binding commercial songwriters, according to Matt MacFarlane, senior vp of publishing at Artist Partner Group. “Song length becomes less relevant,” adds Olly Sheppard, also a senior vp at APG. “Listeners already like the part they found on TikTok,” so they’re locked in regardless of how peculiar or meandering the rest of the track turns out to be.
This theory also got a vote of support from Evan Blair, who produced and co-wrote Benson Boone’s theatrical, heaving ballad “Beautiful Things,” which peaked at No. 2 on the Hot 100. (At three minutes on the dot, “Beautiful Things” was shorter than the average top 10 hit last year, but it did make listeners wait more than a minute before drenching them with a chorus.) “Now that teasing tracks [on TikTok and other social media platforms] is a thing, we often don’t introduce songs to the world chronologically,” Blair says. “If we draw people into the middle of the song, the journey to get there matters much less.”
While TikTok plays a prime role in music discovery, it is not the only factor influencing what songs become popular. Vincent “Tuff” Morgan, vp of A&R at the indie publisher peermusic, points out that many of the star artists and songwriters who released albums last year are now in the second half of their 30s. They have devoted fan bases, so they don’t live or die by viral trends: Instead, they can be confident that even if they take their time, legions of listeners will linger with them.
“If you look at the chart, a lot of these are seasoned songwriters,” Morgan says. “The commonality is that the songwriters are a little more mature than the Gen-Z, TikTok generation.” Superstars like Swift, Lamar, Bruno Mars and Beyoncé, who combined for two dozen top 10 hits between them in 2024, are all 35 and up.
Data from last year offers some support for Morgan’s theory. The average length of a top 10 hit was 3:40, and the average age of the lead artists on songs that exceeded 3:40 was around 35. That’s roughly five years more than the average age of the lead artists whose hits clocked in under 3:40.
Not only that: 12 out of 18 of the top 10s that sprinted to the finish line in less than 3 minutes came from musicians under the age of 30. On the other end of the spectrum, Swift, who is 35, had seven top 10 hits longer than 3:40, and Lamar, age 37, had six.
This is all exciting for Dan Petel, who runs This Is Noise, a management company with a roster of songwriters and producers. For years, he’s been admonishing his clients, “stop sending songs that are just two verses and a chorus!” And now he believes, “happily, we’re evolving away from 15-second clip-based music.”
“If you’re gonna have a great song,” Petel adds, “why would you want it to end so soon?”
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Mufasa: The Lion King was one of the biggest movie of 2024. But, if you missed it in theaters, the prequel film is now available to stream at home.
Read on for the best way to stream Mufasa: The Lion King online.
How to Watch Mufasa: The Lion King Online
Mufasa: The Lion King is streaming for $24.99 to rent and $29.99 to buy digitally on Prime Video, Apple TV and other premium video on-demand marketplaces.
However, rentals are accessible for 30 days after purchase, and for 48 hours once you begin watching the movie.
Directed by Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk), Mufasa: The Lion King is a prequel to the 2019 live-action version of The Lion King. It follows an orphaned cub named Mufasa (Aaron Pierre), who gets adopted into the royal family and becomes the brother of Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a young lion prince who later becomes Scar. The film then follows Mufasa’s journey to becoming the next king of the Pride Lands.
The movie also features a voice cast with Seth Rogen, Billy Eichner, Tiffany Boone, Donald Glover, Mads Mikkelsen, Thandiwe Newton, Lennie James, Anika Noni Rose, Blue Ivy Carter, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and others.
Meanwhile, the soundtrack for Mufasa: The Lion King also features original songs by Lin-Manuel Miranda and a film score by Dave Metzger.
Mufasa: The Lion King is to rent for $24.99, or buy digitally for $29.99 on Prime Video. In the meantime, you can watch a trailer for the movie below, or watch The Lion King at the Hollywood Bowl featuring Jennifer Hudson, North West and other on Disney+.
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Not long after Lil Tecca released his fifth album Plan A last September, he visited a boisterous livestreamer named Tylil, who has more than 300,000 followers on Twitch. “We wanted to portray Tecca’s personality, which is sometimes a little too shielded,” says Giuseppe Zappala, who manages the rapper. “And streamers have been recognized at the top of the hierarchy in the digital landscape.”
Livestreaming was once dominated by gamers, which limited the ways that artists could engage with the Twitch ecosystem. But the landscape has diversified over time. When Tecca met up with Tylil, the two played paintball together; later, the streamer gave the 22-year-old rapper a driving lesson, even though Tecca didn’t have a driver’s license. (“Do not press on the gas hard… I know you play a lot of car games; this is a real car.”) Everything was captured on camera in real time, and the resulting “relatable” videos, Zappala says, remind viewers “that Tecca is a down-to-earth, funny person.”
A lot of people watch streamers like Tylil, Kai Cenat, PlaqueBoyMax, Duke and IShowSpeed when they’re live. Still, relying only on a live audience limits their reach. “Core fans will watch hours of streams,” says Rafael Rocha, CEO of the marketing agency NuWave Digital. “Everybody else will consume that content mainly in short-form video.”
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Music marketers are increasingly focused on facilitating that second wave of engagement, which they do by snipping out the highlights of livestreams — either relying on their own teams of editors; “clippers” who congregate on Discord; or AI programs — and then promoting those bite-sized videos across TikTok, Instagram, X and more.
“Twitch is, in many ways, the new live TV,” says Alec Henderson, head of digital at APG. “And the clips from the livestreams are just like TV reruns. Those highly engaged, entertaining moments can live online forever.”
Henderson saw the value of livestreams when he brought the rapper Lil Baby on to Cenat’s stream back in the fall of 2022: “It ended up one of the most fruitful parts of our rollout,” he says. Last year, livestreamers led to boosts for APG acts like BabyChiefDoit and Flawed Mangoes. A recent press release promoting DDG‘s new single “The Method” credits the rapper’s appearance on PlaqueBoyMax’s livestream with jump-starting the track: “Immediately, clips of the recording went viral across socials and garnered over 1 million views on TikTok alone.”
The clipping practice has been popular in the Twitch streaming community for some time, according to Parker Ulry, who runs the digital marketing agency Perfect Circle. “The podcast community is super on it now, and music is falling in line.”
“Ideally, someone discovers your Twitch stream or podcast interview through a 30-second clip and then goes back and consumes the whole piece,” Ulry continues. “Then they become a fan of you and start streaming your music.”
Artists have several options when they want to reach the livestreaming audience, according to Alex Falck, head of commercial at the digital marketing company Creed Media. They can get streamers to play their music and react to it on camera; let them use their music for highlight compilations; actually go on the livestream to hang out; and even produce music with the streamer. (This is how PlaqueBoyMax has built his following; Henderson predicts that “it’s just a matter of time before a hit record comes out of one of those streams.”)
Once the stream is underway, the captivating moments need to be isolated and extracted. “If you’re on a three-hour stream, that’s a content goldmine — 20, 30, 50 posts,” Ulry says.
Some digital marketers do the clipping in-house. But many find armies of capable clippers on the messaging platform Discord. “A lot of these niche underground communities are naturally congregating on Discord already,” says Vanessa Sheldon, a digital marketer at Forever Music Group who works on a lot of clipping campaigns. “Discord allows developers to build things into these servers and communities, so we created our own server, got a lot of those kids in there, and then built the tool kit for them to participate in these campaigns and get paid out.”
Clippers she works with are compensated based on the performance of their videos. Usually, the rate is between 30 cents and 50 cents per thousand views, though it can go as high as 70 cents in some cases. This means that the roughly 2,000 members of the Discord community she assembled are incentivized to make their clips as eye-catching as possible. “The more viral your video is,” Sheldon says, “the more you get paid.”
Marketers can also use AI-powered tools to create the clips for them. “OpusClip will spit out a bunch of content for you automatically with edited subtitles,” Falck explains. The results may be haphazard, but they are delivered quickly. “AI is still somewhat new, so it doesn’t necessarily get the same level of attention or amazing editing as if you use your in-house team,” Falck continues. “It’s more of a volume game, pushing out 100 assets per stream, just seeing what takes off.”
Once the clips are in hand, “Start pumping them onto TikTok, Instagram, even YouTube Shorts, these algorithmically powered platforms,” Ulry says. One natural ally in this effort is fan pages, which are dedicated to posting nonstop about a particular artist or group of artists. (These accounts can be created by the artist or their team, or run by enthusiastic civilians with lots of time on their hands.) Another is what Falck calls “community pages” — accounts dedicated to a specific genre of music, for example. They all help create what Zappala describes as “an explosion of content that’s circulating the internet” in the wake of the livestream, raising awareness and hopefully hooking potential fans.
One manager recently asked Mayor Cohen, a digital marketer, if he could organize a “tour” of five to 10 livestreamers for an artist. “That’s kind of the business: Get artists on the stream, then repurpose content,” Cohen says. “Not that many people will watch a four-hour stream. But they will go on TikTok or Instagram and watch the best clips.”
“If the clip is reactive,” Ulry adds, “it’ll find an audience.”
Drake and PartyNextDoor’s new album has already setting records on Apple Music following its Valentine’s Day release.
After dropping on Friday (Feb. 14), the duo’s years-in-the-making project, $ome $exy $ongs 4 U, has broken the record for the biggest R&B/soul album in Apple Music’s history by first-day streams worldwide.
Billboard has reached out to Apple Music for more details.
$ome $exy $ongs 4 U marks Drake’s first full album since 2023’s For All the Dogs, which spent two weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. It’s also his first major project since his explosive rap feud with Kendrick Lamar, which recently saw K. Dot take aim at the Toronto superstar during the Super Bowl Halftime Show on Feb. 9, performing his Billboard Hot 100-topping diss track “Not Like Us” in front of more than 100 million viewers.’
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The 21-track album, with a 74-minute runtime, follows PartyNextDoor’s P4, released in 2024.
Earlier in the week, Drake brought out PND during a concert in Melbourne, where the OVO signee surprised the Australian crowd on Drake’s Anita Max Wynn Tour.
“I got an album coming out on Feb. 14 with my brother PartyNextDoor,” Drake told the crowd. “It’s called $ome $exy $ongs 4 U, but it’s some turned-up songs for you on there, too, and there’s some personal feelings on there for you. Hopefully, whoever you’re with on Valentine’s Day, hopefully y’all can share that experience together.”
Drake also revealed the cover art for $$$4U, which features both artists rocking fur coats in front of the Marilyn Monroe Towers in Canada.
The duo has long demonstrated their strong chemistry on tracks like “Come and See Me,” “Recognize,” “Members Only,” “Loyal,” “Preach, “Since Way Back,” and others.
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UFC goes back home to “The Entertainment Capital of the World.” Two premiere middleweight fighters are set to go head-to-head in the octagon as the main event for UFC Fight Night. American Jared “The Killa Gorilla” Cannonier (17-8-0) faces off against Brazilian fighter Gregory “Robocop” Rodrigues (16-5-0) on Saturday, Feb. 15.
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UFC Fight Night: Cannonier vs. Rodrigues takes place at UFC Apex in Las Vegas, Nevada, with a start time of 4 p.m. ET/1 p.m. PT. The main card is expected to begin at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT.
If you want to watch UFC Fight Night: Cannonier vs. Rodrigues online, the MMA event livestreams on ESPN+ for subscribers only.
Not a subscriber? A monthly subscription to ESPN+ goes for $11.99 per month. However, you can go with an ESPN+ annual subscription for $119.99. This saves you 15% compared to the month-to-month subscription price.
Check out the complete UFC Fight Night: Cannonier vs. Rodrigues fight card below:
Main Card, 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT — ESPN+
Jared Cannonier vs. Gregory Rodrigues (Middleweight) — Main Event
Calvin Kattar vs. Youssef Zalal (Featherweight)
Edmen Shahbazyan vs. Dylan Budka (Middleweight)
Ismael Bonfim vs. Nazim Sadykhov (Lightweight)
Rodolfo Vieira vs. Andre Petroski (Middleweight)
Connor Matthews vs. Jose Delgado (Featherweight)
Prelims Card, 4 p.m. ET/1 p.m. PT — ESPN+
Angela Hill vs. Ketlen Souza (Women’s Strawweight)
Jared Gordon vs. Mashrabjon Ruziboev (Lightweight)
Rafael Estevam vs. Jesús Santos Aguilar (Flyweight)
Gabriel Bonfim vs. Khaos Williams (Welterweight)
Vince Morales vs. Elijah Smith (Bantamweight)
Valter Walker vs. Don’Tale Mayes (Heavyweight)
Julia Avila vs. Jacqueline Cavalcanti (Women’s Bantamweight)
In addition, you can get the Disney Trio — which comes with ESPN+, Hulu and Disney+ — starting at just $16.99 per month for both services in one package.
What Is Cannonier vs. Rodrigues’ Walkout Music for UFC Fight Night?
While UFC has yet to announce each fighter’s walkout music for the main event of UFC Fight Night, the fighters usually go out to the octagon to the same songs during their matches. Jared Cannonier typically walks out to “TA.TA.RI.GAMI (The Demon God)” by Japanese composer Joe Hisaishi from the film Princess Mononoke, while Gregory Rodrigues prefers to walk out to “This Means War” by Avenged Sevenfold. So these songs will likely make an appearance during the MMA event.
UFC Fight Night: Cannonier vs. Rodrigues is streaming on ESPN+ on Saturday, Feb. 15, starting at 4 p.m. ET/1 p.m. PT. The main card begins around at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT on ESPN+.
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All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes.
It’s time to take another trip to the White Lotus.
The Emmy-winning HBO original series The White Lotus is back, bringing a whole new cast of seemingly picture-perfect travelers and enthusiastic hotel employees to an idyllic locale for its third season. Taking place at an exclusive Thai resort, this new group of guests and employees will party, fight and undoubtedly cause mischief within the span of a week. Who will come out unscathed? Tune in to the White Lotus season 3 premiere airing this Sunday (Feb. 16) at 9 p.m. ET/PT, airing on HBO and streaming on Max.
As much as we loved the season 2 cast, we can’t wait to uncover all the dark, twisted mysteries that a new batch of characters are hiding. This season of the anthology series stars Leslie Bibb, Carrie Coon, Michelle Monaghan, Walton Goggins, Aimee Lou Wood, Jason Isaacs, Parker Posey, Sarah Catherine Hook, Sam Nivola and Patrick Schwarzenegger. Also, making her acting debut in the upcoming season is BLACKPINK’s LISA.
“I don’t know what to feel right now. I’m just so excited. I can’t wait for all of you guys to watch this show,” LISA told Variety in a recent interview. “It is my first acting [experience] so I don’t know what to expect on set, but everybody just being so supportive helped me a lot. So thank you, everyone.”
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To learn more about how you can watch The White Lotus season 3, check out our guide below.
Here’s How to Watch & Stream ‘The White Lotus’ Season 3
The eight-episode season makes it the longest of the series so far. The season 3 premiere will air this Sunday (Feb. 16) at 9 p.m. ET/PT, with following episodes airing weekly on HBO and streaming on Max. Not subscribed to Max? There’s plenty of bundle streaming deals to help you save big and offer an even bigger library of shows, movies and live TV.
Max’s bundle deal with Hulu and Disney+ allows subscribers to stream from all three platforms for one base price. On their own, each streamer costs $10/month, but the Max bundle gets you all three for just $16.99. That’s a 43% savings and one of the best Max deals online.
For Amazon Prime members, get a 7-day free trial to Max here. Max doesn’t currently offer a free trial on its site, so this Prime Video promotion is the only way to stream Max online for free right now.
The above free trials are reserved for Amazon Prime members exclusively. Not a Prime member? Get a 30-day free trial to test out the service here. Besides Prime Video, the subscription includes free shipping on millions of items, a subscription to Amazon Prime Music and other member benefits.
Want to experience your own (hopefully more peaceful) White Lotus vacation? The Mike White-created series teamed up with Away for a limited-edition luxury travel collection. The collab features a trio of getaway bags, including the popular hardside carry-on luggage, luxe beach bags, and custom accessories. Each item features raffia-inspired exterior and leather details. Shop the collection below.
Luggage
Away x ‘The White Lotus’ Carry-On Luggage
Tote Bag
Away x ‘The White Lotus’ Poolside Tote
Luggage
Away x ‘The White Lotus’ Bigger Carry-On Luggage
Duffle Bag
Away x ‘The White Lotus’ Weekender Bag
Luggage
Away x ‘The White Lotus’ Medium Luggage
Crossbody bag
Away x ‘The White Lotus’ Mini Everywhere Bag
Packing Organizers
Away x ‘The White Lotus’ Insider Packing Cubes
Watch the trailer for the upcoming season 3 of The White Lotus below.
The rap feud between Kendrick Lamar and Drake has broken out beyond the hip-hop world so that now even the mainstream media is all over it and keeping score, thanks to Lamar winning record and song of the year at the Grammys for his Drake diss track “Not Like Us” and his performance a week later at the Super Bowl Halftime Show.
While it’s unclear how this is all going to play out, music industry label executives know that rap feuds, in general, are good for business — as long as they don’t go too far.
As it is, Lamar’s high-profile performance is landing him the most ink, which in turn is driving plenty of business his way. It’s only five weeks into the year as tracked by Luminate, and already his recorded music catalog is closing in on 1 billion on-demand streams in the U.S., which it will probably reach next week; while his global streams are heading toward 2 billion. As of the week ending Feb. 6, those counts stand at 862.8 million (U.S.) and 1.69 billion (globally), according to Luminate. Overall, Lamar’s catalog has accumulated nearly 664,000 album consumption units in the U.S. in 2025 so far.
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That’s nearly three times larger than during the same period in 2024 when Lamar posted 233,000 album consumption units and almost 301 million on-demand streams in the U.S. and global streams of 650 million. Of course, besides his high-profile TV appearances this year, Lamar’s streaming and sales activity is still enjoying an added boost from riding in the afterglow of his recently released GNX album on Nov. 22.
But is all this attention also helping Drake? It’s unclear. Drake is slightly trailing Lamar in terms of U.S. album consumption units and streaming in 2025 so far. Album consumption units came in at 620,000 units, or 7.1% short of the Compton rapper; while his total of nearly 834 million on-demand streams is 3.5% below Lamar’s U.S. total and his global total of 1.529 billion is 10.3% short of his musical rival’s.
Besides that, Drake’s 2025 performance is also down from how his catalog performed in the first five weeks of 2024, when he accumulated 930,000 album consumption units; and, within that, 1.281 billion streams in the U.S. Those 2024 numbers are 50% and 53.6% greater, respectively, than his U.S. activity in 2025 during the same period; while his 2024 global on-demand stream total was 2.246 billion, or nearly 47% greater than this year.
Drake, of course, does not have the added momentum of having released a new album at the end of 2024. (He is releasing his PartyNextDoor collaborative EP, Some Sexy Songs 4 U, this Friday.) Not only that, his current year’s numbers are competing against his prior year’s numbers which did have that benefit thanks to the afterglow of his eighth studio album, For All the Dogs, which was released on Oct. 6, 2023.
Still, the above numbers do not reflect the impact that Lamar’s Super Bowl performance is having on the activity of his and Drake’s catalogs. Those numbers, for the week ending Feb. 13, won’t be available from Luminate until Monday (Feb. 17).
This is all short-term, of course. Looking at the two artists’ career numbers, Drake swamps Lamar, even though the “Just Like Us rapper” has pretty impressive counts in his own right. Over the past 10 years, Drake has gone toe-to-toe with only Taylor Swift in claiming the title of the biggest artist in the U.S., if not the world, at least as far as recorded music activity goes.
Drake and Lamar’s first commercial releases came out within about a year of each other. Drake’s debut album, Thank Me Later, hit the streets in June 2010, while Lamar’s Section 8.0 album came out in July 2011. Since then, Drake has issued eight albums and Lamar six, and each has also released mixtapes, EPs, collaborations and/or compilations and soundtracks.
By the end of 2024, Drake’s catalog has accumulated nearly 80.7 million album consumption units in the U.S., versus Lamar’s 29.1 million album consumption units, according to Luminate. In fact, the combined activity of just three of Drake’s studio albums alone is higher than Lamar’s total, as each of those albums — Take Care, Scorpion and Views — have garnered slightly over 10 million album consumption units a piece. Meanwhile, Lamar’s best album showings come from his major-label debut good kid, m.A.A.d city, with 9.3 million album consumption units, and DAMN, at nearly 9 million units.
(These career numbers exclude collaborations where most of the collaborators are each considered a primary artist but do include songs where artists are “featured” on a Drake or Lamar song because Luminate credits those songs’ activity to just the primary artist. Album consumption units count each album sale as one album consumption unit; while track equivalent albums, whereby 10 tracks sold equal one album consumption unit; and stream equivalent albums, whereby 1,250 paid subscriber streams equal one album consumption unit, or 3,750 ad-supported streams equal one album consumption unit. Also, Luminate only tracks album consumption units in North America; globally, it only tracks streams and downloads, not album consumption units.)
Within the album consumption unit numbers, Drake’s streaming total in the U.S. is 84 billion and 127 billion globally, as of the Luminate year ended Jan. 2, 2025. Meanwhile, Lamar’s U.S. career streaming total is nearly 29 billion and more than 47 billion globally.
Those numbers are extremely impressive given that 2015 was the first year in which streaming’s impact was widely felt. While huge rock stars, not counting pop artists, are lucky to break the 1 billion on-demand streams milestone in the U.S. each year — and none of them yet appear to have broken the 2 billion mark in the U.S. in a single year — these days, R&B and hip-hop artists regularly hit the multi-billion on-demand stream mark each year — usually led by Drake.
Over the past five years — from 2020 to 2024 — Drake’s U.S. streams have totaled 46 billion, for an annual average of 9.2 billion streams, while globally he’s averaged 15.9 billion streams per year. In contrast, Lamar’s U.S. stream count during that same period averages 3.29 billion, while his annual global count averages nearly 6.4 billion streams. Any way you cut it — by album consumption units or by stream count — Drake’s activity over the course of his career, or even just within the 2020 to 2024 period, is more than twice that of Lamar’s.
So even though Lamar is the top dog this year when measured against Drake’s activity, it remains to be seen if this rap feud changes the dynamics of whose swagger — Drake’s, the reigning champ, or Lamar’s — can be backed up long-term. Only time will tell.
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Saturday Night Live premiered on Oct. 11, 1975, with host George Carlin, and ever since, the variety show has become a comedy and cultural TV institution over the past 50 years. In fact, the very first episode will re-air on Saturday (Feb. 15) at 11:30 p.m. ET/PT on NBC and Peacock.
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To celebrate its 50th anniversary, NBC has two events for SNL this weekend. The first is SNL50: The Homecoming Concert, a concert special that features the show’s legacy of musical performances on Friday (Feb. 14). It’s hosted by Jimmy Fallon. The second is SNL50: The Anniversary Special, a TV special that pays tribute to the show and its creator Lorne Michaels on Sunday (Feb. 16).
Old and new cast members, along with a number of celebrities, athletes, politicians, comedians and recording artists, come to Studio 8H in NBC Studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City for SNL50: The Anniversary Special.
When Does ‘SNL50: The Homecoming Concert’ Start?
SNL50: The Homecoming Concert airs Friday, Feb. 14, at 8 p.m. ET/5 p.m. PT. It’s available on NBC and Peacock live.
When Does ‘SNL50: The Anniversary Special’ Start?
SNL50: The Anniversary Special broadcasts live on Sunday, Feb. 16, at 8 p.m. ET/PT. The TV special airs on NBC, while it’s also available to stream on Peacock at the same time.
Who Is Performing During ‘SNL50: The Homecoming Concert’?
The concert special SNL50: The Homecoming Concert features a number of recording artists performing throughout the evening. Here’s a complete of performers, below:
Arcade Fire
Backstreet Boys
Bad Bunny
Bonnie Raitt
Brandi Carlile
Brittany Howard
Cher
Chris Martin
Dave Grohl
David Byrne
DEVO
Eddie Vedder
Jack White
Jelly Roll
Lady Gaga
Lauryn Hill
Miley Cyrus
Mumford & Sons
Post Malone
Preservation Hall Jazz Band
Robyn
Snoop Dogg
St. Vincent
The B-52s
The Roots
Wyclef Jean
Who Appears on ‘SNL50: The Anniversary Special’?
Since SNL has been a pop-culture touchpoint over the last 50 years, and SNL50: The Anniversary Special will be a star-studded event with the biggest stars in attendance. Below, you’ll find a list of just a few of the celebrities who will be in appearance.
Adam Driver
Ayo Edebiri
Bad Bunny
Dave Chappelle
John Mulaney
Kim Kardashian
Martin Short
Miley Cyrus
Paul McCartney
Paul Simon
Pedro Pascal
Peyton Manning
Quinta Brunson
Robert De Niro
Sabrina Carpenter
Scarlett Johansson
Steve Martin
Tom Hanks
Woody Harrelson
Where to Watch ‘SNL50: The Homecoming Concert’ & ‘SNL50: The Anniversary Special’ for Free
If you’re a cord-cutter, you have a few ways to watch both SNL50: The Homecoming Concert and SNL50: The Anniversary Special online — especially if you want to watch for free. DirecTV Stream has a five-day free trial, while other streaming services — such as Hulu + Live TV — also offer a free trial so you can watch NBC for free.
Keep reading for more details on how to watch the TV special with Peacock, DirecTV Stream and Hulu + Live TV.
How to Watch ‘SNL50: The Homecoming Concert’ & ‘SNL50: The Anniversary Special’ With Peacock
Both TV specials broadcast on NBC and livestream on Peacock for Premium or Premium Plus subscribers only. If you don’t subscribe to the streaming service, you can get access with a Peacock monthly subscription, which starts at $7.99 per month for the ad-supported plan, or $13.99 per month for the ad-free plan.
And right now, every episode from every season of Saturday Night Live from that past 50 years is streaming on Peacock.
Along with SNL50: The Homecoming Concert and SNL50: The Anniversary Special, you can also watch the backlog of SNL starting with season 1 and going all the way through season 50 — that’s a whopping 50 seasons of TV with a subscription to Peacock. In addition, you’ll get access to original programming, such as Love Island USA, Laid, Bel-Air, The Traitors, Poker Face and others; hit movies, including The Wild Robot, Monkey Man, Abigail, The Holdovers, Oppenheimer and others; live sports from NBC Sports; live news from NBC News; and more than 50 streaming channels.
How to Watch ‘SNL50: The Homecoming Concert’ & ‘SNL50: The Anniversary Special’ With DirecTV Stream
A subscription to DirecTV Stream — which comes with NBC for SNL50: The Homecoming Concert and SNL50: The Anniversary Special — gets you access to live TV, local and cable channels, starting at $74.99 per month. The service even offers a five-day free trial to watch for free if you sign up now.
You can watch local networks such as CBS, ABC, Fox, and PBS, while you can also watch many cable networks, including FS1, Lifetime, FX, AMC, A&E, Bravo, BET, MTV, Paramount Network, Cartoon Network, VH1, Fuse, CNN, Food Network, CNBC and many others.
How to Watch ‘SNL50: The Homecoming Concert’ & ‘SNL50: The Anniversary Special’ with Fubo
To watch SNL50: The Homecoming Concert and SNL50: The Anniversary Special on NBC, Fubo starts at $59.99 for the first month, $84.99 per month afterwards (the streamer’s current deal) with more than 210 channels — including local and cable — that are streamable on smart TVs, smartphones, tablets and on web browsers.
The service even gets you live access to local broadcast networks including Fox, CBS and ABC, while it also has dozens of cable networks, such as ESPN, Bravo, CMT, ID, TV Land, VH1, TLC, E!, FS1, MTV, FX, Ion, OWN, Paramount Network and much more.
How to Watch ‘SNL50: The Homecoming Concert’ & ‘SNL50: The Anniversary Special’ With Hulu + Live TV
SNL50: The Homecoming Concert and SNL50: The Anniversary Special on NBC are available to watch with Hulu + Live TV too. Prices for the cable alternative start at $82.99 per month, while each plan comes with Hulu, Disney+ and ESPN+ at no additional cost.
Hulu + Live TV might be best for those who want all of these streaming services together in one bundle. It also features many other networks, including ABC, Hallmark Channel, BET, CMT, Disney Channel, NBC, Fox Sports and more.
Where to Buy SNL50 Funko Pop! Figures Online
For SNL’s 50th anniversary, Funko has dropped limited-edition SNL Pop! figures of some of the most popular characters from the variety show’s 50 years, including Matt Foley (Chris Farley), Gilly (Kristen Wiig), Direct from Domingo (Marcello Hernandez), Debbie Downer (Rachel Dratch) and much more. Figures start at $12 and can be found at Funko.com.
Funko
SNL Pop! Matt Foley
Funko
SNL Pop! Gilly
Funko
SNL Pop! Direct from Domingo
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SNL Pop! GuapLord
SNL50: The Homecoming Concert and SNL50: The Anniversary Special are both available to watch on NBC via DirecTV Stream or Hulu + Live TV, to stream on Peacock on Friday, Feb. 14 and Sunday, Feb. 16, respectively.
Want more? For more product recommendations, check out our roundups of the best Xbox deals, studio headphones and Nintendo Switch accessories.
Music streaming company LiveOne saw its revenue drop 6% to $29.4 million in its fiscal third quarter ended Dec. 31, the company announced Thursday (Feb. 13). Revenue in the audio division fell 1% to $27.1 million. The drop led LiveOne’s operating loss to widen to $5.1 million from $800,000 in the prior-year period.
In the nine-month period, LiveOne’s revenue of $95.1 million was up 8.7% from the prior-year period. Operating loss in the period more than doubled, however, to $7.3 million from $3.5 million.
LiveOne, which has both a Slacker-branded music streaming service and numerous business-to-business relationships, ended the quarter with 800,000 Tesla “subscribers” — 475,000 of which are ad-supported. The company used to have preferred status with Tesla, powering the in-auto music streaming app that was free to Tesla owners, but that relationship changed in 2024. Now, LiveOne is no longer free to Tesla owners, although the electric vehicle manufacturer will continue to pay grandfathered LiveOne accounts in perpetuity.
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Now, LiveOne sells discounted packages to Tesla owners. “The conversion opportunity has enormous upside by offering Tesla owners an opportunity to upgrade and have access on all devices at discounted priority pricing,” LiveOne CEO Robert Ellin said in a statement in October. “We’ll drive growth, unlock new revenue streams, own our data, and increase ARPU [average revenue per user].”
But the third-quarter decline caused LiveOne to lower its expectations for the full year. While announcing earnings, the company updated its guidance for full-year revenue and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. LiveOne now expects revenue for the full fiscal year ending March 31 to be $112 million to $120 million, down from $120 million to $135 million. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be $6 million to $10 million compared to previous guidance of $8 million to $15 million.
The revised guidance caused LiveOne shares to fall 18.6% to $0.96 on Thursday. That put LiveOne’s share price 55% below its 52-week high of $2.15.
On Wednesday (Feb. 12), PodcastOne –which LiveOne spun off in 2023 while retaining approximately 72% of its outstanding shares — announced that quarterly revenue increased 22% to $12.7 million and net loss narrowed to $1.6 million from $2.6 million.
This analysis is part of Billboard’s music technology newsletter Machine Learnings. Sign up for Machine Learnings, and other Billboard newsletters for free here.
Have you heard about our lord and savior, Shrimp Jesus?
Last year, a viral photo of Jesus made out of shrimp went viral on Facebook — and while it might seem obvious to you and me that generative AI was behind this bizarre combination, plenty of boomers still thought it was real.
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Bizarre AI images like these have become part of an exponentially growing problem on social media sites, where they are rarely labeled as AI and are so eye grabbing that they draw the attention of users, and the algorithm along with them. That means less time and space for the posts from friends, family and human creators that you want to see on your feed. Of course, AI makes some valuable creations, too, but let’s be honest, how many images of crustacean-encrusted Jesus are really necessary?
This has led to a term called the “Dead Internet Theory” — the idea that AI-generated material will eventually flood the internet so thoroughly that nothing human can be found. And guess what? The same so-called “AI Slop” phenomenon is growing fast in the music business, too, as quickly-generated AI songs flood DSPs. (Dead Streamer Theory? Ha. Ha.) According to CISAC and PMP, this could put 24% of music creators’ revenues at risk by 2028 — so it seems like the right time for streaming services to create policies around AI material. But exactly how they should take action remains unclear.
In January, French streaming service Deezer took its first step toward a solution by launching an AI detection tool that will flag whatever it deems fully AI generated, tag it as such and remove it from algorithmic recommendations. Surprisingly, the company claims the tool found that about 10% of the tracks uploaded to its service every day are fully AI generated.
I thought Deezer’s announcement sounded like a great solution: AI music can remain for those who want to listen to it, can still earn royalties, but won’t be pushed in users’ faces, giving human-made content a little head start. I wondered why other companies hadn’t also followed suit. After speaking to multiple AI experts, however, it seems many of today’s AI detection tools generally still leave something to be desired. “There’s a lot of false positives,” one AI expert, who has tested out a variety of detectors on the market, says.
The fear for some streamers is that a bad AI detection tool could open up the possibility of human-made songs getting accidentally caught up in a whirlwind of AI issues, and become a huge headache for the staff who would have to review the inevitable complaints from users. And really, when you get down to it, how can the naked ear definitively tell the difference between human-generated and AI-generated music?
This is not to say that Deezer’s proprietary AI music detector isn’t great — it sounds like a step in the right direction — but the newness and skepticism that surrounds this AI detection technology is clearly a reason why other streaming services have been reluctant to try it themselves.
Still, protecting against the negative use-cases of AI music, like spamming, streaming fraud and deepfaking, are a focus for many streaming services today, even though almost all of the policies in place to date are not specific to AI.
It’s also too soon to tell what the appetite is for AI music. As long as the song is good, will it really matter where it came from? It’s possible this is a moment that we’ll look back on with a laugh. Maybe future generations won’t discriminate between fully AI, partially AI or fully human works. A good song is a good song.
But we aren’t there yet. The US Copyright Office just issued a new directive affirming that fully AI generated works are ineligible for copyright protection. For streaming services, this technically means, like all other public domain works, that the service doesn’t need to pay royalties on it. But so far, most platforms have continued to just pay out on anything that’s up on the site — copyright protected or not.
Except for SoundCloud, a platform that’s always marched to the beat of its own drum. It has a policy which “prohibit[s] the monetization of songs and content that are exclusively generated through AI, encouraging creators to use AI as a tool rather than a replacement of human creation,” a company spokesperson says.
In general, most streaming services do not have specific policies, but Spotify, YouTube Music and others have implemented procedures for users to report impersonations of likenesses and voices, a major risk posed by (but not unique to) AI. This closely resembles the method for requesting a takedown on the grounds of copyright infringement — but it has limits.
Takedowns for copyright infringement are required by law, but some streamers voluntarily offer rights holders takedowns for the impersonation of one’s voice or likeness. To date, there is still no federal protection for these so-called “publicity rights,” so platforms are largely doing these takedowns as a show of goodwill.
YouTube Music has focused more than perhaps any other streaming service on curbing deepfake impersonations. According to a company blog post, YouTube has developed “new synthetic-singing identification technology within Content ID that will allow partners to automatically detect and manage AI-generated content on YouTube that simulates their singing voices,” adding another layer of defense for rights holders who are already kept busy policing their own copyrights across the internet.
Another concern with the proliferation of AI music on streaming services is that it can enable streaming fraud. In September, federal prosecutors indicted a North Carolina musician for allegedly using AI to create “hundreds of thousands” of songs and then using the AI tracks to earn more than $10 million in fraudulent streaming royalties. By spreading out fake streams over a large number of tracks, quickly made by AI, fraudsters can more easily evade detection.
Spotify is working on that. Whether the songs are AI or human-made, the streamer now has gates to prevent spamming the platform with massive amounts of uploads. It’s not AI-specific, but it’s a policy that impacts the bad actors who use AI for this purpose.
SoundCloud also has a solution: The service believes its fan-powered royalties system also reduces fraud. “Fan-powered royalties tie royalties directly to the contributions made by real listeners,” a company blog post reads. “Fan-powered royalties are attributable only to listeners’ subscription revenue and ads consumed, then distributed among only the artists listeners streamed that month. No pooled royalties means bots have little influence, which leads to more money being paid out on legitimate fan activity.” Again, not AI-specific, but it will have an impact on AI uploaders with bad motives.
So, what’s next? Continuing to develop better AI detection and attribution tools, anticipating future issues with AI — like AI agents employed for streaming fraud operations — and fighting for better publicity rights protections. It’s a thorny situation, and we haven’t even gotten into the philosophical debate of defining the line between fully AI generated and partially AI generated songs. But one thing is certain — this will continue to pose challenges to the streaming status quo for years to come.