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Billboard is returning to SXSW in Austin this year for three nights of star-studded concerts, an interactive content house and a plethora of panel discussions featuring musicians, music industry leaders and Billboard staff members.
Panels kick off Monday (March 13), while three Billboard Presents The Stage at SXSW concerts are slated to follow later in the week. On Thursday (March 16), rapper and singer Lil Yachty will usher in the trio of shows with opening acts Lola Brooke and Armani White (presented by Doritos), followed by Feid and Eladio Carrión on Friday (presented by Samsung Galaxy) and Kx5 (Kaskade and deadmau5) on Sunday (presented by Carnival).
Warner Chappell’s Guy Moot Leads SXSW 2023 First Round Speakers
03/13/2023
All Billboard Presents The Stage at SXSW concerts are set to take place at Austin’s Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park at 7 p.m CT.
Below is a list of where to find Billboard staffers and events at SXSW this week.
Monday, March 13
The Influence of Latin Music on Global Touring11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. CT | Austin Convention Center, Room 18ABBillboard‘s senior Latin writer Griselda Flores will moderate a panel examining the impact that emerging and heritage Latin artists will have on the future of global touring. More info.
The Power of Connection with Emerging Technologies4 – 5 p.m. CT | Empire, 607 East 7th Street, AustinBillboard‘s senior director of touring/live entertainment Dave Brooks will moderate a panel with Dentity CEO Jefferey Schwartz, Rebecca Thorne of See Tickets, Stephen Chilton of Psyko Steve Presents and Dani Slocki of vSpace to discuss innovations in technology and how that relates to Web3, ticketing, access, Identity verification, fan appreciation, fan clubs, consumer engagement and more.
Tuesday, March 14
The Neighbors Have Money For You: Neighboring Rights Now1 – 2:30 p.m. CT | Parkside, 301 E. 6th St, AustinBillboard‘s deputy editorial director Rob Levine will host a panel of presenters to discuss neighboring rights and explain the different revenue sources and options rightsholders have to collect royalties. More info.
What to know: Royalties, Rights and Recording Artists2 – 3:30 p.m. CT | Courtyard Marriott, Rio Grande Ballroom, 300 E. 4th St, AustinBillboard‘s chief brand officer Dana Droppo will moderate a panel with SAG-AFTRA and top recording artists to discuss how the union can help artists protect themselves and what tools are available to help ensure a long-term career. This event will also be available online. More info.
Audible is Bringing a Dynamic Music Storytelling Experience to SXSW
03/13/2023
Wednesday, March 15
Rebuilding the Touring Industry from Scratch2:30 – 3:30 p.m. CT | Austin Convention Center, Room 17ABBillboard‘s special features/power lists editor Taylor Mims will moderate a panel examining how the key players in the touring industry have rebounded from the ruins of COVID over the past two years. More info.
Featured Session: How Music, Entrepreneurship, & Independence Intersect2:30 – 3:30 p.m. CT | Austin Convention Center, Room 16ABBillboard‘s R&B/hip-hop reporter Heran Mamo will moderate a panel on the steps needed to build a successful entertainment company that transcends cultural boundaries. This event will also be available online. More info.
Thursday, March 16
Featured Speaker: Music Publishing in the New Songwriter Economy11:30am – 12:30 p.m. CT | Austin Convention Center, Room 16ABBillboard‘s editorial director Hannah Karp will discuss the future of music publishing and the new songwriter economy. This event will also be available online. More info.
How Global Collecting Societies Change Publishing2:30 – 3:30 p.m. CT | Austin Convention Center, Room 17ABBillboard‘s deputy editorial director Rob Levine will discuss how the rise of globalized collecting societies will affect the publishing business and the songwriters who depend on it. More info.
The Creator Boom: How the Industry Can Transform2:30 – 3:30 p.m. CT | Austin Convention Center, Room 18CDBillboard‘s music publishing reporter Kristin Robinson will moderate a panel discussing the rise of AI music companies and music creation tools, as well as DIY distribution services that are enabling bedroom creators — and how both creators and the industry are transforming to keep pace with this new creator paradigm. More info.
Billboard x Doritos® partner to take flavor to ANOTHER LEVEL® in Austin, TX
03/13/2023
Welcome to the Machine: Art in the Age of A.I.4 – 5 p.m. CT | Austin Convention Center, Room 12ABBillboard‘s deputy editorial director Rob Levine will also discuss the future of artificial intelligence in the music business and how “functional music” can be used to help listeners study or sleep. More info.
Billboard Presents The Stage at SXSW: Lil Yachty7 p.m. CT | Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park, 1401 Trinity St., AustinPresented by Doritos, rapper and singer Lil Yachty will perform with opening performances by Lola Brooke and Armani White. Buy tickets here.
Doritos After Dark at Billboard House10:30 p.m. – 1:30 a.m. CT | 800 Congress, AustinDoritos will be taking over the Billboard House for a late-night, one-night-only dining experience featuring an all-vinyl set by DJ Pee .Wee (Anderson .Paak). The experience will be available to SXSW badge holders on a first-come-first-served basis. More info.
Friday, March 17
Billboard Presents The Stage at SXSW: Feid and Eladio Carrión7 p.m. CT | Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park, 1401 Trinity St., Austin, TX Presented by Samsung Galaxy, Latin superstars Feid and Eladio Carrión will perform. Buy tickets here.
Saturday, March 18
Billboard Presents The Stage at SXSW: Kx5 (KasKade and deadmau5)7 p.m. CT | Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park, 1401 Trinity St., Austin, TXPresented by Carnival, electronic dance titans Kx5 (Kaskade and deadmau5) will perform. Buy tickets here.
Billboard’s parent company PMC is the largest shareholder of SXSW and its brands are official media partners of SXSW.
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Since aespa‘s debut in 2020, the K-pop girl group has stood out from other global-pop stars with an innovative dedication to blending real and virtual worlds. Now, the quartet is expanding its reach by connecting with fans through a virtual-reality experience at SXSW 2023, and Billboard has your first look.
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K-pop super label SM Entertainment and virtual-reality concert platform AmazeVR have come together for the world premiere of the aespa VR Concert at KWANGYA later this month at SXSW. The showing joins a slate of extended-reality activations for the Austin, Texas, festival’s XR Experience program, including J Balvin‘s “Futurum” VR concert.
Members KARINA, WINTER, GISELLE and NINGNING will share their stories and perform “Black Mamba” and “Illusion,” both of which are included on the group’s Girls: The 2nd Mini Album, which hit No. 1 on Billboard‘s Top Album Sales chart when it arrived in July 2022. to Aespa will take the stage in KWANGYA, the virtual world envisioned and developed by SM Entertainment that pops into song lyrics for aespa as well as other SM artists such as TVXQ!, EXO, NCT and more.
Ahead of the SXSW premiere, watch an exclusive message from the girls plus a behind-the-scenes peek at the experience below. And according to a press release, if you can’t make it to Austin, the concert will soon be released across all major VR headset platforms.
The aespa virtual-reality concert at KWANGYA at the SXSW XR Experience program runs from March 12 to 14, 2023, at the Austin Fairmont Hotel Congressional Ballroom from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. each day.
Kx5, presented by Carnival, will perform at Billboard Presents The Stage at SXSW, on March 18.
The show was going so well. An hour into the set from Kx5 — the electronic music supergroup of genre leaders Kaskade and deadmau5 — it was, as intended, a dazzling feat of light, sound, video and the emotional punch of those elements combined. Then the power went out, and Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum — and the 46,000 fans assembled there on that drizzly night in December — were thrust into silent darkness.
From the front of the house, deadmau5’s longtime manager, Dean Wilson, sprinted backstage — where, he says, he found “everybody running around like headless chickens, screaming, ‘Generator’s on fire!’ ”
The generator was not supposed to be on fire. However, it had turned itself off due to overheating and was emanating smoke. Its programming had then instructed three backup generators to also shut down to avoid igniting the 17,000 gallons of diesel fuel inside. Frantic staffers worked to salvage what had been billed as a landmark live performance — one that cost “almost seven figures to design and over seven figures to execute,” says Kaskade’s manager, Ryan Henderson.
Success seemed unlikely. “When you have a major failure like that, normally something then doesn’t work,” Wilson says. “Something’s not rebooted properly. Some configuration can’t restart because it has crashed so badly.” But when deadmau5 hit the button that would, in theory, restart the show, restart it did. The performance, co-produced by Live Nation affiliate and powerhouse electronic music promoter Insomniac Events alongside both artists’ teams, set a record for the biggest ticketed global headliner dance event of 2022.
“I’ve been working in the electronic/dance space since the early ’90s,” says UTA’s Kevin Gimble, who represents deadmau5, Kaskade and Kx5. “I have been fortunate to have a lot of incredible moments throughout my career. However, nothing — and I mean nothing — can compare to the emotions that were stirred within me seeing [nearly] 50,000 people inside that building singing ‘I Remember’ in unison. Pure f–king magic.”
As Kx5, deadmau5 and Kaskade have formalized a collaborative relationship that began with the aforementioned moody 2008 classic — one of EDM’s first defining tracks, the penultimate song played during the L.A. Coliseum performance and, in dance parlance, an all-time banger. In 2009, they released a follow-up single, “Move for Me.” Now, 14 years later, they are leveling up the partnership with the March 17 arrival of Kx5’s eponymous debut album, which is being released on deadmau5’s independent label, mau5trap Recordings.
The show wasn’t just a full-circle moment for Kx5: It was one for dance music itself. In June 2010, deadmau5 and Kaskade, playing separately, were among the last electronic artists to perform at the L.A. Coliseum during what would be the final Los Angeles iteration of Electric Daisy Carnival. Produced by Insomniac and featuring then-rising acts like Avicii and Swedish House Mafia, the festival created a maelstrom of headlines (and lawsuits) when a 15-year-old girl who had snuck into the event died after overdosing on MDMA. In the aftermath, Los Angeles sent EDC packing to Las Vegas, and the venue became a no-fly zone for electronic music — and, aside from a handful of shows throughout the 2010s, most other genres, too — even as EDM was becoming a major commercial force in the United States.
“We’d heard rumors they were going to start doing more shows at the Coliseum, and I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if we were the first electronic act to do a show back in that venue?’ ” Wilson recalls. “We were absolutely the test case.”
“Kaskade kind of straddles the line between electronic and pop music,” says Henderson of why promoters book the producer in venues where dance music might be otherwise verboten. “People don’t associate him with rave culture as much as you’d think.”
On Kaskade (left): Dior jacket and sneakers, Mouty pants, Oscar & Frank eyewear. On deadmau5: Amiri jacket, pants, and sneakers.
Austin Hargrave
With the December show filed as a win, deadmau5 and Kaskade symbolically marked a decade-plus run during which they became two of the genre’s most successful artists. Alongside peers like Swedish House Mafia, Avicii, Calvin Harris and Skrillex, they helped create the superstar DJ template of Vegas residencies, arena shows, festival headlining and massive paychecks. To date, Kaskade’s catalog has aggregated 736 million U.S. streams, according to Luminate, and deadmau5’s has clocked 1.5 billion.
They remain two of the scene’s most elite acts, having influenced a generation of fans and artists alike. John Summit, the 28-year-old dance phenom who opened the Coliseum show, told Wilson that deadmau5’s “Ghosts ‘n’ Stuff” was the reason he started making music. (Later in 2023, Summit will release the first official remix of “I Remember.”)
But while Kx5’s out-of-the-gate success was made possible by each artist’s individual popularity and the near mythological status of their previous collaborative output, the project is more about their own enjoyment than the new creative directions some of their peers have followed as their careers have progressed.
“It was literally a product of us saying, ‘F–k it,’ ” says deadmau5, born Joel Zimmerman, in his pronounced Canadian accent. “I’m not saying we don’t love it, but we don’t need it, financially speaking. It’s just something we want.”
On this Monday afternoon in Los Angeles, deadmau5, who’s based in Toronto, sits alongside Chicago native Kaskade (real name: Ryan Raddon), who is now based in L.A. Deadmau5 makes infrequent eye contact and uses a variation of “f–k” upwards of 40 times during the 45-minute conversation. “Dude” is the interjection of choice for Kaskade, who wears reflective-lensed sunglasses.
As they tell it, Kx5 (pronounced “kay five”; the “x” is silent) is essentially the result of friendship meeting market demand and pandemic downtime. Crowds would still “freak out” when Kaskade dropped “I Remember” in his sets and, he says, “every time I’d see Joel at a festival, I’d be like, ‘Man, we should probably do something together.’ He’d be like, ‘Yeah, we probably should.’ ”
When live events paused, Kaskade called him to make it official, saying, “OK, seriously, I don’t have anything to do. Let’s do something.” They started emailing productions back and forth, with tracks taking shape as the pandemic wore on.
Kaskade photographed on February 6, 2023 in Los Angeles. Givenchy sweater.
Austin Hargrave
Kx5 soft-launched in July 2021 during Kaskade’s headlining set at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif. Produced by Insomniac and marking the first public concert at the new venue, the show sold 27,000 tickets and grossed $2.6 million, according to Billboard Boxscore. It also featured a surprise opening set from deadmau5, who returned later to play “I Remember” alongside Kaskade. (They didn’t play any Kx5 music, nor did deadmau5 don the plastic mouse helmet he has long worn during solo performances.)
Shortly after the SoFi show, UTA’s Gimble began conversations with Insomniac and Live Nation about a Kx5 play at the Coliseum. Nearly six months later, on Jan. 3, 2022, deadmau5, Kaskade and their managers met in L.A. to strategize Kx5. Discussions around the artists doing something official together had started ahead of the pandemic, when they were offered a back-to-back set at HARD Summer 2020. When that show was canceled amid lockdowns, HARD promoter Insomniac shifted the offer to EDC 2022, where Kaskade and deadmau5 decided to debut the Kx5 live show. But they still needed a lead single.
Wilson, who has managed deadmau5 since the artist launched that persona in 2006, had been sitting on a top-line demo of a song called “Escape” from U.K. songwriters Camden Cox, Will Clarke and Eddie Jenkins. Deadmau5 had been tinkering with the demo’s production but was concerned, Wilson says, that it didn’t sound “new enough” compared with his more recent output.
Nonetheless, at the January 2022 meeting in L.A., Wilson told Kaskade they had a track that might work as Kx5’s first release. “Joel looks at me like, ‘What?’ ” Wilson says. “And I play ‘Escape,’ and Ryan goes, ‘We’ve got to do that.’ ”
Deadmau5 sent parts of the song to Kaskade, who soon completed it. (“Let’s make it radio-ey,” says deadmau5 of their goal for it. “Let’s make it ‘I Remember’-ey. Strip it back, keep some of that early-2000s vibe to it.”) Released in March 2022 — three months before the debut Kx5 performance at EDC — critics and fans hailed “Escape” as a triumphant return to form, a fresh take on the dreamy, sexy yet melancholy slowburn style the duo had forged with “I Remember.”
“Escape” has garnered 47.7 million official U.S. on-demand streams. And by the time the song (featuring British singer Hayla) hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Dance Mix Show/Airplay chart in April 2022, Kaskade and deadmau5’s idea for a Kx5 EP had expanded into plans for an album. “Don’t threaten us with a good time,” the latter jokes about the project’s growth. Kaskade laughs.
In July 2022, Kaskade joined deadmau5 at his home studio in Toronto. “It ended up being a lot of hanging out, wake-surfing, chilling and talking about music,” recalls Kaskade. “We had a songwriting session that went until, like, four in the morning. I couldn’t stay up anymore.”
While they keep different hours, they agree that working together is a more streamlined process than when they record individually. “The benefit of doing it together is you get to bounce ideas off somebody else,” Kaskade says. “Usually when you’re in your own space, it’s like, ‘I think this is the end?’ With somebody else in the mix, I send it over to Joel. Like, ‘I think it’s done. What do you think?’ ” Working together, they agree, also eliminates expectations among their fans. “They don’t know what to think,” says Kaskade. “They’re like, ‘Let’s see what this is about.’ ” The resulting 10-track album is simultaneously sophisticated and tough, featuring complex and inventive progressive house productions that pulse and glow. Lyrics — largely about love and the loss of it — ride achingly pretty, often haunting melodies.
“Ryan excels as a songwriter and in arrangement and structure, where I suppose I excel in mastering, engineering and the more technical components of sound versus the idea,” deadmau5 says. “He’s got his wheelhouse, I’ve got mine, and we don’t overlap a lot. Like, I would sooner shoot myself in the leg before I’m like, ‘Here, Ryan, master this.’ ”
deadmau5 photographed on February 6, 2023 in Los Angeles. Amiri jacket.
Austin Hargrave
Their differences run deeper than their production strengths. While deadmau5 has been known to stay awake for three days straight making music, Kaskade appears to sleep regularly. Deadmau5 smokes cigarettes; Kaskade does not. Deadmau5 drinks Corona. Kaskade, a practicing Mormon, is sober. He remarks that it’s surreal to be doing an interview for the cover of Billboard. Deadmau5 announces he would rather be at home playing video games.
“I call them the odd couple,” says Wilson. “They’re yin and yang, chalk and cheese, completely different ends of the spectrum, but they ultimately have a respect for each other as producers.” And respect from deadmau5 is rare: In EDM’s heyday, he used Twitter to insult everyone from Justin Bieber (“little f–king d-ckhead”) to Disney, which in 2014 sued him over the similarities between his “mau5head” and its Mickey Mouse logo. (“Disney thinks you might confuse an established electronic musician/ performer with a cartoon mouse. That’s how stupid they think you are.”) In 2015, he published a Tumblr post about dealing with depression exacerbated by social media; his team now runs his accounts.
Deadmau5’s prickly (if, by now, predictable) nature makes his creative, and personal, alchemy with Kaskade all the more remarkable. “Joel doesn’t … he has very, very few relationships like that,” Wilson continues. “Joel’s a self-contained machine. His studio is in the middle of the house. He works predominantly on his own. He doesn’t do massive collaborations on a regular basis. But I think he likes Kx5 because it’s so different than it being all about the mouse head. There’s pressure in that, but with the two of them, you can see Joel go, ‘This is a bit of fun.’ It’s much more of the relaxed, funny Joel because he’s got a sparring partner, a foil, someone he can joke with. You can’t do that if you’re doing it on your own.”
The fact remains that Kx5 has an expiration date. The pair is scheduled to play just five more shows beyond South by Southwest, all U.S. festival sets, starting at Miami’s Ultra Music Festival in late March and ending in September at a currently unannounced East Coast event. (Although “nobody’s closing the door on what this could be in the future,” Henderson says. “There’s something special here.”)
“We can show up and crush a big event, but I’m not going to f–king hammer it until we’re both over it,” says deadmau5. “I don’t want to be f–king Siegfried & Roy over here doing 20 shows a night in f–king Vegas. We’ll just do some nice, big, iconic-looking plays, then f–king Ryan’s off Kaskade-ing and deadmau5 is out deadmau5-ing.”
Indeed, as EDM elder statesmen (relatively: Kaskade is 51, and deadmau5 is 42), they can do a one-off super pairing without relying on it for relevancy or income. (That said, the impact of Kx5 “feeds residual revenue streams” like streaming numbers and solo plays for each individual artist, Henderson says, adding that Kaskade just signed a three-year, eight-figure Vegas residency deal. “I’m not saying the Kx5 brand contributed to that,” Henderson adds, “but it definitely didn’t hurt it.”)
Kaskade (left) and deadmau5 of Kx5 photographed on February 6, 2023 in Los Angeles. On Kaskade: Louis Vuitton jacket. On deadmau5: Amiri jacket.
Austin Hargrave
But having come up, says deadmau5, “right at the turning point” when EDM was the world’s most lucrative genre, his and Kaskade’s brands are now foundational to the music’s culture, and their businesses extend well beyond streaming. “The money is in ancillary goods,” deadmau5 says. “Tangible items [like merchandise], appearances, shows, production.” He adds, “I don’t think I’m going to be f–king donning a mau5head in my 50s,” noting he may shift into managing mau5trap acts as he gets older and tours less.
But since they broke through in the EDM golden age, paths to success in the wider industry have become more difficult, making it harder for both emerging and established artists to score crossover hits. By the time Kx5 drops, eight of its singles will already be out because, says Wilson, digital service providers would only support two tracks if they were all released at once — and thus no one would hear most of the music. While deadmau5 has over 10 million fans across Instagram and Facebook, Wilson says the algorithms won’t allow communication with most of them. He also says that despite the success of “Escape” on dance radio and the $300,000 put behind its campaign — “We spent hundreds of thousands working that record. Who else has got that kind of money?” he asks — they couldn’t get the song on Spotify’s Today’s Top Hits playlist. “You break down those playlists, and they’re all predominantly major-owned acts,” says Wilson, who co-founded mau5trap with deadmau5 in 2007. “It’s a closed shop.”
Still, the strength of deadmau5 and Kaskade’s respective brands reduces the need for Kx5 to generate revenue. “They’re definitely investing more than they’re making,” Henderson says. “This whole project is for the fans. This isn’t getting these guys together, throwing them on a stage, exploiting their legacy and bringing in a bunch of money. It’s about making something special for their fans. They 100% sacrifice income to play together.”
Kaskade concedes that since corporate interests entered the mix during the EDM boom, the scene has become “more predictable” — or, as deadmau5 puts it, now “it’s all a bunch of little douche nozzles that know the trends, and how this is going to work, and you have to do it like this, and it homogenizes it all to sh-t.” The optimist of the duo, Kaskade believes there will always be an underground and the unpredictable music it fosters, but “just not like it was 20 years ago or 10 years ago, when the majors got involved.”
But while Wilson says EDM is often treated as the “poor relative” among other more visible genres in the wider industry, it remains “a great multibillion-dollar business with very successful festivals and a fan base that is very deep and that buys our tickets.”
“Is it commercially viable in terms of pop album sales? F–k no,” says deadmau5. “Is it commercially viable? Hell yeah. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be doing this. I’d be your stock boy at Bed Bath & Beyond.”
In the end, the L.A. Coliseum show earned $3.7 million. Kx5 didn’t have to cover the cost of a new generator.
Penske Media Corp. is the largest shareholder of SXSW; its brands are official media partners of SXSW.
This story will appear in the March 11, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Feid, presented by Samsung Galaxy, will perform at Billboard Presents The Stage at SXSW on March 17.
A leaked album was the best thing that ever happened to Feid.
In September 2022, the Colombian singer-songwriter was headlining three consecutive sold-out hometown dates at Plaza de Toros La Macarena — Medellín’s famed bullfighting ring and concert venue — where he performed for more than 30,000 people over the course of the three shows. He was due for some much-needed rest the following Monday. But that never happened.
Instead, the artist born Salomón Villada Hoyos, 30, who also goes by the nickname Ferxxo, received an agitated call from his manager, Luis Villamizar, with the news that his album, Feliz Cumpleaños Ferxxo — scheduled for a December release — had, without their knowledge, arrived much earlier, in the form of a 39-minute voice note first leaked as a link on the internet.
“All my spirits dropped,” he recalls today, still sounding disappointed. “It was incomplete. It was a mess, and I felt rage — but that feeling lasted about half an hour. After that, I talked to my mom to see how we could take advantage of the situation and thankfully, we reacted quickly.”
With help from his team, producers and record label, Universal Music Latino (UML), he took matters into his own hands, working relentlessly for 24 hours to release an album that wasn’t even mixed or mastered yet. Because all 15 tracks had been leaked, Feid changed the title to Feliz Cumpleaños Ferxxo Te Pirateamos El Álbum (Happy Birthday Feid We Leaked the Album) and had his sister, who’s also his longtime graphic designer, create new cover art that acknowledged how the songs had ultimately spread: Though Universal quickly took down the initial leaked link, the audio had already been shared to DropBox and then sent wide through a chain of WhatsApp conversations. (Six of the 15 tracks had already been released as singles at the time of the leak.)
On Sept. 14, just two days after it leaked, the album — powered by syncopated perreos, reggaetón swagger and chill house beats — officially came out. Feid remains unsure of who leaked the set and why. But that’s now beside the point: Feliz Cumpleaños Ferxxo earned him his first top 10 entry on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart, surging from No. 25 to No. 8 in its second week, on the chart dated Oct. 1, 2022. It concurrently became his first entry on the Billboard 200 and peaked at No. 5 on Latin Rhythm Albums. “Normal,” the set’s fourth single, also became Feid’s first Hot Latin Songs entry as a soloist, following five alongside stars like J Balvin, Nicky Jam and Karol G. The track peaked at No. 1 on the Latin Rhythm Airplay chart on Jan. 21.
To maintain momentum, Feid and his team made another swift change of plans, deciding to rebook a previously in-the-works club tour — his first headlining U.S. run — to theaters to reflect his rapidly growing popularity, and to execute the task, from booking to opening night, in less than a month. Hans Schafer, senior vp of global touring at Live Nation, the tour’s promoter, told Billboard at the time that, like the album’s assembly, “everyone worked really quickly to turn this around.” Tickets to the 14-date stint, which began Oct. 13 in Atlanta and wrapped Nov. 25 in Los Angeles, sold out in 24 hours.
Feid photographed on January 12, 2023 at Proper Studio in Miami.
Devin Christopher
Feid has always had a clear creative vision concerning his music, which laces innovative urban beats with the essence of early-2000s reggaetón and lyrics about love. But his biggest barrier to achieving solo mainstream success for himself was trusting that intuition, rather than worrying about others’ opinions. It took years, but Feid finally realized the importance of being faithful to his core identity. And while the album leak was jarring and unplanned, the foundation he laid over more than a decade of making music allowed him to seize the opportunity and explode in popularity. With the tour, his ability to pivot quickly kept yielding successes.
“It was very special to go to the shows and see people dressed as me with green clothes, white glasses and even a gold tooth,” Feid gushes. “After the first show, I told my team, ‘Look carefully at this stage because, God willing, we will never have people as close as we do now. We will have them further and further away.” In other words, Feid expects to be playing U.S. arenas and stadiums before long.
For a teenage Feid, even playing the theaters of his fall tour would have been unimaginable.
As a seventh grader at Colegio San José de La Salle in Medellín, he discovered his passion for performing during a school talent show. Singing Daddy Yankee’s “Rompe (Remix)” with a group of friends as The Three Fathers, “I liked seeing how people were enjoying something I was doing,” he recalls. “I was shaking with nerves, but when I started to sing it all went away.”
That performance and others like it, known as colegios (school tours), are common for aspiring teen artists in Colombia, and they eventually allowed Feid to connect with Alejandro Ramírez Suárez, who would become Latin Grammy-winning producer Sky Rompiendo — and Feid’s longtime collaborator alongside Mosty, Wain, and Jowan and Rolo of production duo Icon Music.
By their early 20s, both Feid (whose moniker sounds like “faith” when spoken in Spanish) and Sky were making names for themselves in their hometown. Feid had already independently released singles such as “Bailame” and “Morena,” both of which gained traction in Latin America; Sky was the mastermind behind J Balvin’s first No. 1 chart hit, “Ay Vamos,” which peaked in March 2015.
Around then, Feid “unintentionally” fell into songwriting after Colombian artist Shako asked if he could record a song Feid had written for himself, called “Robarte Hoy.” “I was still new in the industry and didn’t even know writing for other artists was a thing,” he recalls (a year later, Shako invited him on the remix). One of the first popular tracks Feid wrote was Reykon’s “Secretos,” which ultimately led him to work with Balvin as a writer on the 2016 hit “Ginza,” nabbing Feid an ASCAP Latin award along the way.
“I started taking him to the studio when we had camps for Balvin because he has always had great chemistry,” Sky remembers. “Yes, he helped us write ‘Ginza,’ but the song where he proved himself as a songwriter was ‘Sigo Extrañándote,’ ” another track for Balvin that showcased Feid’s heartfelt, relatable lyricism. As Balvin tells Billboard, “He always brought something fresh to the table, and I always let him know of his potential.”
Suddenly, Feid’s “reggaetón music with pop lyrics” had made him the hip, on-demand songwriter that artists from Thalía to Ximena Sariñana to CNCO wanted to work with. In 2016, he signed an exclusive worldwide publishing administration deal with Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) through management and publishing company Dynasty Music Group, helmed by his then-manager, Daniel Giraldo, and Juan Pablo Piedrahita. Soon after, he signed his first record deal with In-Tu Linea, a label then under the Universal Music Latin Entertainment (UMLE) umbrella that was launched by industry veteran Jorge Pino and his longtime colleague Fidel Hernández as COO. Although “many labels showed their interest,” Feid says, Pino and Hernández were the only ones to make the “very special” gesture of meeting him in person.
Feid made his major-label debut with the Balvin-featuring “Que Raro,” which became his first Billboard chart entry, debuting and peaking at No. 26 on Latin Digital Song Sales and peaking at No. 16 on Latin Rhythm Airplay in 2016.
“Today, I highly value that moment that Balvin gave me — the spotlight in which he put me, the type of song it was,” he says. “It was super cool for my career, for my life, for everything I have been building. There are still people who tell me that they followed me or discovered me with ‘Que Raro.’ ”
Soon after, Feid collaborated with artists such as Maluma and Nacho; released his debut album, Así Como Suena, in 2017; received a Latin Grammy nomination for his next one (2019’s 19); and joined “The Avengers,” a collective of urbano artists that included Dalex, Dímelo Flow, Justin Quiles, Lenny Tavárez and Sech and released club bangers such as “Cuaderno” and “Quizas.” Around then, he also stopped writing music for others.
“I needed to find myself as an artist,” he says. Though Feid was gaining popularity writing for big acts, he hadn’t yet discovered his own strong artistic identity, and admits he was following the standards he observed in the industry by being “an average singer releasing average music.” As other Colombian artists of his generation such as Maluma, Karol G and Balvin skyrocketed to stardom, he wondered, “When will it be my turn?”
Then one day, after more than a decade of work, it clicked.
“I decided to take an arepa with cheese in my hand and say that I was paisa,” he proudly states, referring to the local word for someone from Medellín. “I began to be more faithful to who I am and my Colombian roots. At that moment, I opened the coolest door that I’ve ever opened, which was finding my identity and introducing El Ferxxo. It took me a long time to realize that this was what I had to do to really, really connect with people.”
Feid photographed on January 12, 2023 at Proper Studio in Miami.
Devin Christopher
Putting his new alter ego to the test, Ferxxo (pronounced Fercho) began incorporating local Medallo slang into his lyrics, like mor (love), que chimba (how cool) and parchar (hanging out) and replacing letters in his titles with X’s to pique curiosity.
It worked. The Latin Grammys nominated 2020’s Ferxxo (Vol. 1: M.O.R.) and its Justin Quiles-featuring single “Porfa” for best urban music album and best reggaetón performance, respectively. On the strength of an all-star remix featuring Balvin, Maluma, Nicky Jam and Sech, “Porfa” earned Feid his first No. 1 hit on both the Latin Airplay and Latin Rhythm Airplay charts.
As he established his musical identity, Feid recognized that creating a visual one was similarly important. He adopted the color green (most often, a lime shade) as his trademark, starting in early 2022 with the release of the single “Castigo”: Its cover art features a green monster truck and in the music video, Feid is clad in all green.
“It reminded me of the time when I was a huge fan of artists and wanted all the merch that had to do with them. I try to put myself in the shoes of a fan so that the people who follow me have a better chance of feeling closer to me,” he says. Now, he always finds a way to wear it — the color of growth and new beginnings.
As 2021 progressed, it seemed like everything was falling into place for Feid. He inked a worldwide publishing agreement with UMPG, fully transitioned from In-Tu Linea to UML under president Angel Kaminsky’s team and opened Karol G’s Bichota U.S. arena tour.
Still, it wasn’t all smooth sailing — and in fact, his month on the road with Karol was a tough wake-up call. “I feel that 90% of people saw my show for the first time,” he says. “Coming from being a big deal in Colombia and being at the top of the charts to doing a show in Sacramento [Calif.] and having only five people yell ‘Wooo!’ was challenging for me.”
Feid photographed on January 12, 2023 at Proper Studio in Miami.
Devin Christopher
Then, shortly after returning home, a motorcycle accident left Feid with a severely injured left knee that required a two-month recovery. But instead of wallowing in his pain (or just kicking back to watch Netflix), Feid got to work on his next album.
“There were moments of doubt and complications,” says Jesús López, chairman/CEO of Universal Music Latin America & Iberian Peninsula. “It was bad luck for his leg but good luck for his head because he was able to be calmer for a while and work more on the creativity of his album Feliz Cumpleaños Ferxxo.”
Hunkered down with his leg in a cast, Feid organically started engaging more with fans on TikTok. He would flirtatiously react to viral videos in his suave Medallo, create simple dance challenges for his music, tell jokes and, most importantly, preview tracks he was working on, like “Normal.” On TikTok, he realized, it was easier to promote himself (and go viral) than through an interview with a major news platform, and it became one of his biggest marketing tools, attracting new fans outside Colombia in places such as the United States, Mexico and Spain. (Feid now has more than 7.5 million TikTok followers.)
But it wasn’t until two trips to Mexico in 2022 that Feid truly noticed the effects of his social media presence. When he arrived in May for a festival in Monterrey, thousands of fans greeted him at the InterContinental Presidente hotel in Mexico City, prompting Feid and his team to schedule shows of his own in the country. In August, the three resulting headlining gigs — at Auditorio Nacional (Mexico City), Auditorio Citibanamex (Monterrey) and Auditorio Telmex (Guadalajara) — sold almost 20,000 tickets and grossed nearly $1 million, according to Billboard Boxscore. Previously, Feid had only performed in Mexico as a surprise guest for other artists.
“I feel that everything has been gradual in my career, but this was definitely an alert to us that something was happening,” he says with a laugh. “I still don’t want to realize what’s happening. I just want to keep making my music, be with my family, eat frijolitos (beans) and relax, but I can say that Mexico was that moment when we all wondered, ‘What’s going on?’ ”
Today, speaking with me in Miami’s hip Wynwood neighborhood, fame doesn’t seem to have changed Feid — and he’s embracing his paisa identity more than ever. He’s wearing his laid-back, go-to uniform of shorts, sneakers, baseball cap and graphic T-shirt and proudly rocking the first-ever backpack from his collaboration with Bogotá-based brand Totto. He’s polite and warm, arriving early for his Billboard photo shoot (“People’s time is valuable”) and greeting everyone in the room with a chiseled smile and a tight hug. “Que más mi reina? Todo bien?” he asks me — “All good, my queen?”
While it may have taken some extra time to get here, Feid’s down-to-earth appeal is central to why, finally, he’s prospering. Feid attributes his success to “the perfect timing of God,” but those around him know there’s a bit more to it.
“He is real and authentic,” says his manager, Villamizar. “In his music, what he writes, what he says. The DNA of all this success is him and people notice and feel it.”
“He has a lot of perseverance and a lot of persistence that few have,” says Balvin. “Many [artists] would have gotten out of the way by now, but he was always there. Now he is living his best moment, and I’m sure many more blessings will come his way.”
Feid photographed on January 12, 2023 at Proper Studio in Miami.
Devin Christopher
Late last year, Feid released his second collaboration of 2022 with Yandel, and he’s carried that momentum into 2023, earning his first Hot 100 entry with the Ozuna-assisted “Hey Mor” and embarking on his first proper Latin American trek, the sold-out Ferxxo: Nitro Jam Tour promoted by CMN. He’ll headline Chicago’s Sueños Music Festival in May and tour Europe this summer, all while working on his next album. Its “whole concept has to do with how I went from being in the shadows as a composer to everything I am achieving now [as an artist],” he explains.
Feid is covered in tattoos, but one on the right side of his neck is particularly noticeable. In cursive, it reads: Nunca olvides porque empezaste (never forget why you started) — a reminder to stay grounded. “Fe,” or faith, is at the core of what got him here, and what will keep him going forward.
“From the beginning, it was [my dream] to have a vision that only I could have and could spread to people and also surround myself with a team that understood what I wanted to do,” he says. “I have always had a lot of faith in myself and my career — and that is why Ferxxo is called ‘Feid.’ ”
Penske Media Corp. is the largest shareholder of SXSW; its brands are official media partners of SXSW.
This story will appear in the March 11, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Doritos and DJ Pee .Wee are the fun-loving combo we never knew we needed.
Doritos revealed on Thursday (Mar. 9) that it’s teaming up with Billboard to bring Doritos After Dark, its recently piloted ghost kitchen menu, to SXSW for one night only at an exclusive experience.
Set in a triangle-inspired space, Doritos After Dark at Billboard House will allow attendees to sample the brand’s previous menu, like Doritos Sweet Chili Chicken Bites, as well as two exclusive dishes inspired by the food scene in Austin, Texas, including Doritos BBQ Pulled Pork Nachos and Doritos Flamin’ Hot Limon Margarita Cheesecake.
Additionally DJ Pee .Wee (a.k.a Anderson .Paak) will spin one of his popular vinyl-only sets for attendees.
“Inspired by those exhilarating hours between sunset and sunrise, Doritos After Dark encourages fans to try another angle and embrace unexpected late-night eats,” said Stacy Taffet, senior vice president of brand marketing of Frito-Lay North America, in a press statement. “As a brand that has its finger on the pulse of pop culture, this collaboration was designed to showcase the food, music and technology that SXSW and Doritos are all about.”
Doritos will take over the Billboard House on Thursday (March 16) at 800 Congress starting at 10:30 p.m. The experience will be available to SXSW badge holders on a first-come-first-served basis.
However, there are also two ways to score tickets and skip the line. Starting on Friday (March 10) head to www.billboard.com/doritos-after-dark to enter for a chance to win two tickets to the experience. Fans can also head over to 604 Driskill Street in Austin from March 13 to 14 to experience Doritos Taste the Night Tunnel, a kaleidoscopic journey complete with visuals, scents and sounds. There, participants can enter the sweepstakes by using the exclusive Doritos Triangle Tracker AR Lens developed by Snapchat and scanning the installation.
Doritos will also sponsor Billboard Presents The Stage at SXSW, where fans can enjoy the Doritos Dip Snack Bar. See more information about Doritos at SXSW at www.DoritosAfterDark.com.
See the poster for the event below.
Courtesy Photo
Lil Yachty, presented by Doritos, will perform at Billboard Presents The Stage at SXSW on March 16.
Someone has sparked a blunt in the planetarium.
It may be a school night, but no one has come to the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, N.J., to learn. Instead, the hundreds of fans packed into the domed theater on Jan. 26 have come to hear Lil Yachty’s latest album as he intended: straight through — and with an open mind. Or, as Yachty says with a mischievous smile: “I hope y’all took some sh-t.”
For the next 57 minutes and 16 seconds, graphics of exploding spaceships, green giraffes and a quiet road through Joshua Tree National Park accompany Yachty’s sonically divergent — and at this point, unreleased — fifth album, Let’s Start Here. For a psychedelic rock project that plays like one long song, the visual aids not only help attendees embrace the bizarre, but also function as a road map for Yachty’s far-out trip, signaling that there is, in fact, a tracklist.
It’s a night the artist has arguably been waiting for his whole career — to finally release an album he feels proud of. An album that was, he says, made “from scratch” with all live instrumentation. An album that opens with a nearly seven-minute opus, “the BLACK seminole.,” that he claims he had to fight most of his collaborative team to keep as one, not two songs. An album that, unlike his others, has few features and is instead rich with co-writers like Mac DeMarco, Nick Hakim, Alex G and members of MGMT, Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Chairlift. An album he believes will finally earn him the respect and recognition he has always sought.
“I did what I really wanted to do, which was create a body of work that reflected me,” says a soft-spoken Yachty the day before his listening event. “My idea was for this album to be a journey: Press play and fall into a void.”
Sitting in a Brooklyn studio in East Williamsburg not far from where he made most of Let’s Start Here in neighboring Greenpoint, it’s clear he has been waiting to talk about this project in depth for some time. Yachty is an open book, willing to answer anything — and share any opinion. (Especially on the slice of pizza he has been brought, which he declares “tastes like ass.”) Perhaps his most controversial take at the moment? “F-ck any of the albums I dropped before this one.”
Lil Yachty photographed on January 25, 2023 at Shio Studio in Brooklyn.
Peter Ash Lee
His desire to move on from his past is understandable. When Yachty entered the industry in his mid-teens with his 2016 major-label debut, the Lil Boat mixtape, featuring the breakout hit “One Night,” he found that along with fame came sailing the internet’s choppy waters. Skeptics often took him to task for not knowing — or caring, maybe — about rap’s roots, and he never shied away from sharing hot takes on Twitter. With his willingness and ability to straddle pop and hip-hop, Yachty produced music he once called “bubble-gum trap” (he has since denounced that phrase) that polarized audiences and critics. Meanwhile, his nonchalant delivery got him labeled as a mumble rapper — another identifier he was never fond of because it felt dismissive of his talent.
“I came into music in a time where rap was real hardcore, it was real street,” he says. “And a bunch of us kids came in with colorful hair and dressing different and basically said, ‘Move out the way, old f-cks. We on some other sh-t.’ I was young and I didn’t really give a f-ck, so I did do things that may have led people to the assumptions that I was a mumble rapper or a SoundCloud kid or I don’t appreciate the history of hip-hop. But to be honest, I’ve always been so much more than just hip-hop.
“There’s a lot of kids who haven’t heard any of my references,” he continues. “They don’t know anything about Bon Iver or Pink Floyd or Black Sabbath or James Brown. I wanted to show people a different side of me — and that I can do anything, most importantly.”
Let’s Start Here is proof. Growing up in Atlanta, the artist born Miles McCollum was heavily influenced by his father, a photographer who introduced him to all kinds of sounds. Yachty, once easily identifiable by his bright red braids, found early success by posting songs like “One Night” to SoundCloud, catching the attention of Kevin “Coach K” Lee, co-founder/COO of Quality Control Music, now home to Migos, Lil Baby and City Girls. In 2015, Coach K began managing Yachty, who in summer 2016 signed a joint-venture deal with Motown, Capitol Records and Quality Control.
“Yachty was me when I was 18 years old, when I signed him. He was actually me,” says Coach K today. (In 2021, Adam Kluger, whose clients include Bhad Bhabie, began co-managing Yachty.) “All the eclectic, different things, we shared that with each other. He had been wanting to make this album from the first day we signed him. But you know — coming as a hip-hop artist, you have to play the game.”
Yachty played it well. To date, he has charted 17 songs on the Billboard Hot 100, including two top 10 hits for his features on DRAM’s melodic 2016 smash “Broccoli” and Kyle’s 2017 pop-rap track “iSpy.” His third-highest-charting entry arrived unexpectedly last year: the 93-second “Poland,” a track Yachty recorded in about 10 minutes where his warbly vocals more closely resemble singing than rapping. (Let’s Start Here collaborator SADPONY saw “Poland” as a temperature check that proved “people are going to like this Yachty.”)
Beginning with 2016’s Lil Boat mixtape, all eight of Yachty’s major-label-released albums and mixtapes have charted on the Billboard 200. Three have entered the top 10, including Let’s Start Here, which debuted and peaked at No. 9. And while Yachty has only scored one No. 1 album before (Teenage Emotions topped Rap Album Sales), Let’s Start Here debuted atop three genre charts: Top Rock & Alternative Albums, Top Rock Albums and Top Alternative Albums.
“It feels good to know that people in that world received this so well,” says Motown Records vp of A&R Gelareh Rouzbehani. “I think it’s a testament to Yachty going in and saying, ‘F-ck what everyone thinks. I’m going to create something that I’ve always wanted to make — and let us hope the world f-cking loves it.’ ”
Yachty says he was already confident about the album, but after playing it for several of his peers and heroes — including Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, Post Malone, Drake, Cardi B, Kid Cudi, A$AP Rocky and Tyler, The Creator — “their reactions boosted me.”
Yet despite Let’s Start Here’s many high-profile supporters, some longtime detractors and fans alike were quick to criticize certain aspects of it, from its art — Yachty quote-tweeted one remark, succinctly replying, “shut up” — to the music itself. Once again, he found himself facing another tidal wave of discourse. But this time, he was ready to ride it. “This release,” Kluger says, “gave him a lot of confidence.”
“I was always kind of nervous to put out music, but now I’m on some other sh-t,” Yachty says. “It was a lot of self-assessing and being very real about not being happy with where I was musically, knowing I’m better than where I am. Because the sh-t I was making did not add up to the sh-t I listened to.
“I just wanted more,” he continues. “I want to be remembered. I want to be respected.”
Last spring, Lil Yachty gathered his family, collaborators and team at famed Texas studio complex Sonic Ranch.
“I remember I got there at night and drove down because this place is like 30 miles outside El Paso,” Coach K says. “I walked in the room and just saw all these instruments and sh-t, and the vibe was just so ill. And I just started smiling. All the producers were in the room, his assistant, his dad. Yachty comes in, puts the album on. We got to the second song, and I told everybody, ‘Stop the music.’ I walked over to him and just said, ‘Man, give me a hug.’ I was like, ‘Yachty, I am so proud of you.’ He came into the game bold, but [to make] this album, you have to be very bold. And to know that he finally did it, it was overwhelming.”
SADPONY (aka Jeremiah Raisen) — who executive-produced Let’s Start Here and, in doing so, spent nearly eight straight months with Yachty — says the time at Sonic Ranch was the perfect way to cap off the months of tunnel vision required while making the album in Brooklyn. “That was new alone,” says Yachty. “I’ve recorded every album in Atlanta at [Quality Control]. That was the first time I recorded away from home. First time I recorded with a new engineer,” Miles B.A. Robinson, a Saddle Creek artist.
And while they did put the finishing touches on the album in Texas, they also let loose. “We had a f-cking grand old time,” SADPONY says. “We had about 50 people all throughout these houses and were driving in these unregistered trucks, like cartel trucks, around this crazy pecan farm. Obviously, we were all having some fun making this psychedelic record.”
Lil Yachty photographed on January 25, 2023 at Shio Studio in Brooklyn.
Peter Ash Lee
Yachty couldn’t wait to put it out, and says he turned it in “a long time ago. I think it was just label sh-t and trying to figure out the right time to release it.” For Coach K, it was imperative to have the physical product ready on release date, given that Yachty had made “an experience” of an album. And lately, most pressing plants have an average turnaround time of six to eight months.
Fans, however, were impatient. On Christmas, one month before Let’s Start Here would arrive, the album leaked online. It was dubbed Sonic Ranch. “Everyone was home with their families, so no one could pull it off the internet,” recalls Yachty. “That was really depressing and frustrating.”
Then, weeks later, the album art, tracklist and release date also leaked. “My label made a mistake and sent preorders to Amazon too early, and [the site] posted it,” Yachty says. “So I wasn’t able to do the actual rollout for my album that I wanted to. Nothing was a secret anymore. It was all out. I had a whole plan that I had to cancel.” He says the biggest loss was various videos he made to introduce and contextualize the project, all of which “were really weird … [But] I wasn’t introducing it anymore. People already knew.” Only one, called “Department of Mental Tranquility,” made it out, just days before the album.
Yachty says he wasn’t necessarily seeking a mental escape before making Let’s Start Here, but confesses that acid gave him one anyway. “I guess maybe the music went along with it,” he says. The album title changed four or five times, he says, from Momentary Bliss (“It was meant to take you away from reality … where you’re truly listening”) to 180 Degrees (“Because it’s the complete opposite of anything I’ve ever done, but people were like, ‘It’s too on the nose’ ”) to, ultimately, Let’s Start Here — the best way, he decided, to succinctly summarize where he was as an artist: a seven-year veteran, but at 25 years old, still eager to begin a new chapter.
He dug into his less obvious influences: In 2017, he listened to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon for the first time. “I think that was the last time I was like, ‘Whoa.’ You know?” He believes Frank Ocean’s Blonde is “one of the best albums of all time” and cites Tame Impala’s Currents as another project that stopped him in his tracks. All were fuel to his fire.
Taking inspiration from Dark Side, Yachty relied on three women’s voices throughout the album, enlisting Fousheé, Justine Skye and Diana Gordon. Otherwise, guest vocals are spare. Daniel Caesar features on album closer “Reach the Sunshine.,” while the late Bob Ross (of The Joy of Painting fame) has a historic posthumous feature on “We Saw the Sun!”
Rouzbehani tells Billboard that Ross’ estate declined Yachty’s request at first: “I think a big concern of theirs was that Yachty is known as a rapper, and Bob Ross and his brand are very clean. They didn’t want to associate with anything explicit.” But Yachty was adamant, and Rouzbehani played the track for Ross’ team and also sent the entire album’s lyrics to set the group at ease. “With a lot of back-and-forth, we got the call,” she says. “Yachty is the first artist that has gotten a Bob Ross clearance in history.”
Lil Yachty photographed on January 25, 2023 at Shio Studio in Brooklyn.
Peter Ash Lee
From the start, Coach K believed Let’s Start Here would open lots of doors for Yachty — and ultimately, other artists, too. Questlove may have said it best, posting the album art on Instagram with a lengthy caption that read in part: “this lp might be the most surprising transition of any music career I’ve witnessed in a min, especially under the umbrella of hip hop … Sh-t like this (envelope pushing) got me hyped about music’s future.”
“People don’t know where Yachty’s going to go now, and I think that’s the coolest sh-t, artistrywise,” says SADPONY. “That’s some Iggy Pop-, David Bowie-type sh-t. Where the mysteriousness of being an artist is back.”
Recently, Lil Yachty held auditions for an all-women touring band. “It was an experience for like Simon Cowell or Randy [Jackson],” he says, offering a simple explanation for the choice: “In my life, women are superheroes.”
And according to Yachty, pulling off his show will take superhuman strength: “Because the show has to match the album. It has to be big.” As eager as he was to release Let’s Start Here, he’s even more antsy to perform it live — but planning a tour, he says, required gauging the reaction to it. “This is so new for me, and to be quite honest with you, the label [didn’t] know how [the album] would do,” he says. “Also, I haven’t dropped an album in like three years. So we don’t even know how to plan a tour right now because it has been so long and my music is so different.”
While Yachty’s last full-length studio album, Lil Boat 3, arrived in 2020, he released the Michigan Boy Boat mixtape in 2021, a project as reverential of the state’s flourishing hip-hop scenes in Detroit and Flint as Let’s Start Here is of its psych-rock touchstones. And though he claims he doesn’t do much with his days, his recent accomplishments, both musical and beyond, suggest otherwise. He launched his own cryptocurrency, YachtyCoin, at the end of 2020; signed his first artist, Draft Day, to his Concrete Boyz label at the start of 2021; invested in the Jewish dating app Lox Club; and launched his own line of frozen pizza, Yachty’s Pizzeria, last September. (He has famously declared he has never eaten a vegetable; at his Jersey City listening event, there was an abundance of candy, doughnut holes and Frosted Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts.)
But there are only two things that seem to remotely excite him, first and foremost of which is being a father. As proud as he is of Let’s Start Here, he says it comes in second to having his now 1-year-old daughter — though he says with a laugh that she “doesn’t really give a f-ck” about his music yet. “I haven’t played [this album] for her, but her mom plays her my old stuff,” he continues. “The mother of my child is Dominican and Puerto Rican, so she loves Selena — she plays her a lot. [We watch] the Selena movie with Jennifer Lopez a sh-t ton and a lot of Disney movie sh-t, like Frozen, Lion King and that type of vibe.”
Aside from being a dad, he most cares about working with other artists. Recently, he flew eight of his biggest fans — most of whom he has kept in touch with for years — to Atlanta. He had them over, played Let’s Start Here, took them to dinner and bowling, introduced them to his mom and dad, and then showed them a documentary he made for the album. (He’s not sure if he’ll release it.) One of the fans is an aspiring rapper; naturally, the two made a song together.
“I want to be Quincy Jones,” Yachty near whispers. Last year, he co-produced a handful of tracks on the Drake and 21 Savage collaborative album Her Loss. And recently, he features on two Zack Bia tracks, one of which he produced, for Bia’s upcoming album. Six months ago, he started living by himself for the first time. “I wish I did it sooner. I wake up, play video games and then I go to the studio all night until the morning,” he says. “That’s all I want to do.” Since finishing Let’s Start Here, Yachty claims he has made hundreds of songs, some experimenting with “electronic pop sh-t” that he can only describe as “tight.”
Lil Yachty photographed on January 25, 2023 at Shio Studio in Brooklyn.
Peter Ash Lee
Yachty wants to keep working with artists and producers outside of hip-hop, mentioning the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and even sharing his dream of writing a ballad for Elton John. (“I know I could write him a beautiful song.”) With South Korean music company HYBE’s recent purchase of Quality Control — a $300 million deal — Yachty’s realm of possibility is bigger than ever.
But he’s not ruling out his genre roots. Arguably, Let’s Start Here was made for the peers and heroes he played it for first — and was inspired by hip-hop’s chameleons. “I would love to do a project with Tyler [The Creator],” says Yachty. “He’s the reason I made this album. He’s the one who told me to do it, just go for it. He’s so confident and I have so much respect for him because he takes me seriously, and he always has.”
Yachty is now hoping everyone else does, too. “I just want people to understand I love this. This is not a joke to me. And I can stand with my chest out because I’m proud of something I created.”
Penske Media Corp. is the largest shareholder of SXSW; its brands are official media partners of SXSW.
This story will appear in the March 11, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Billboard is returning to SXSW in Austin, Texas, this year for three nights of star-studded concerts, plus an interactive content house featuring conversations with musicians and industry leaders.
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To kick off Billboard Presents The Stage at SXSW, rapper-singer Lil Yachty, presented by Doritos, will perform on March 16, with opening acts Lola Brooke and Armani White; Latin stars Feid and Eladio Carrión, presented by Samsung Galaxy, will perform on March 17; and electronic giants Kx5 (Kaskade x deadmau5), presented by Carnival, will perform on March 18.
Billboard Presents The Stage at SXSW will take place at Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park in Austin. Tickets go on sale at 11 a.m. CT/noon ET here on Friday (Feb. 17).
Several artists will also take part in conversations during a variety of events hosted at The Billboard House (800 Congress) on March 17. The one-day-only interactive content house will feature brand activations, photo moments, bites, cocktails and more. Entry is on a first come first serve basis, with a reserved amount of spaces available exclusively to SXSW Music and Platinum Badge holders and SXSW Music Festival wristband holders.
Billboard will also be donating a portion of ticket proceeds to Waterloo Greenway Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that aims to create an urban park system in partnership with the city of Austin. The organization’s first phase, Waterloo Park, opened in 2021 to provide downtown green space, community programming and performing arts and entertainment at the Moody Amphitheater.
In addition to the presenting sponsors, Billboard will be sharing Reels on its official Facebook page across the three-day experience, and fans will have the opportunity to create custom Facebook Reels with unique experiential activations throughout SXSW.
Billboard’s parent company PMC is the largest shareholder of SXSW and its brands are official media partners of SXSW.
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A group of musicians who have gathered together under the banner of the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW) has published a petition calling for better pay for artists selected to perform at the annual SXSW conference and festival each March. The petition — which at press time bore the names of more than 400 artists, and which is being continually updated with more names — has been signed by artists such as Eve 6, Mountain Goats, Jeremy Messersmith, Speedy Ortiz, Zola Jesus, Pedro the Lion, YACHT and Emperor X, as well as the Songwriters of North America (SoNA). Of the signees listed on the site, a half-dozen are scheduled to play SXSW this year.
In the petition, the UMAW is taking aim at the compensation that artists receive for being officially invited to perform at the festival, which launched in Austin in 1987. The petition claims that artists who are selected to perform must first pay an application fee, which has risen from $40 in 2012 to $55 this year, while they are offered a choice of either a festival wristband or $250 ($100 for a solo artist) as compensation. International artists, the petition says, are only offered a wristband, with no possibility of financial compensation.
In light of those claims, the UMAW is requesting that compensation for artists be raised from $250 to $750 per act; that a festival wristband be included as part of that compensation, not as an either/or choice; that international artists be offered the same compensation as domestic U.S. artists; and that the application fee be eliminated. The petition is addressed to SXSW and Penske Media, which owns Billboard as well as publications like Rolling Stone, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter. (In April 2021, Penske Media Corporation became an investor in SXSW by taking a 50% stake in the conference and festival. A rep for PMC did not respond to a request for comment.)
“SXSW is honored to host over 1,400 showcasing acts every March,” a SXSW spokesperson said in a statement to Billboard. “We are committed to creating professional opportunities by bringing emerging artists together with media, the global music industry, and influential audiences. We appreciate the feedback from the UMAW and will be doing our policy review after next month’s event.”
The UMAW, which has 18 members on its steering committee, including Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz and Zachary Cole Smith of DIIV, has been active with petitions in the past. The most impactful has been the Justice At Spotify campaign, launched in 2020 to protest the low streaming royalty payouts from the music streamer, which was signed by more than 6,000 individuals and demanded both higher royalty rates and a switch to user-centric royalties. That initiative was followed up with a series of protests by musicians outside Spotify offices around the globe in March 2021; days later, Spotify launched a website called Loud & Clear intended to increase transparency around how it pays rights holders.
New Order is among the starry guest list invited to perform at South By Southwest (SXSW), the annual showcase event and conference taking place March 10-19 in Austin, Texas.
The Manchester legends are part of the third wave of SXSW performers, a mix of legends, newcomers and everything in between, set for this year’s 37th edition.
A dive into the latest round reveals a number of standouts, including U.S. rapper Killer Mike, German electronic music pioneers Tangerine Dream, “Messy in Heaven” singer Venbee and hotly-tipped Adelaide, Australia indie two-piece Teenage Joans.
Other highlights from the fresh batch of artists, announced Wednesday (Jan. 25), include Anwan “Big G” Glover (Washington, D.C.), Coco & Clair Clair (Atlanta, GA), Diana Burco (Bogotá, Colombia), DJ_Dave (New York, NY), Ekkstacy (Vancouver, Canada), Isabella Lovestory (Tegucigalpa, Honduras), and many others.
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The live-music showcase is a buzzing part of a much larger festival, which was founded in 1987 and is dedicated to celebrating entertainment and culture.
Among SXSW’s partners for the 2023 show are Anniversary Group, Atomic Music Group, Athens in Austin, British Music Embassy, Don Giovanni Records, Fire Records, FOCUS Wales, Gorilla vs Bear, Jazz re:freshed Outernational, Pop Montreal, M for Montreal, Music From Ireland, New West Records, Space Agency and Wide Days Scotland.
As previously reported, SXSW will expand to Sydney for seven days and nights from Oct. 15-22, marking the event’s first foray outside the United States.
SXSW signed a “lifeline” deal with P-MRC, a joint venture between Penske Media Corporation and MRC, the companies announced in April 2021, making P-MRC a stakeholder and long-term partner with the Austin festival. P-MRC is the parent company of Billboard.
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