This story appears in Rolling Stone‘s 2021 Future of Music issue, a special project delving into the next era of the multibillion-dollar hitmaking business. Alongside our reporting, we invited four star artists to share their own predictions on the music industry’s wild next era. Read the other stories here. Mike …
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Big Hit’s name isn’t often uttered in the same breath as Universal, Sony, and Warner — not yet. “We still have a long way to go,” says Lenzo Yoon, the company’s new global CEO. But he hints that the K-pop powerhouse, which recently founded Big Hit America and debuted on …
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It didn’t take long for the Weeknd to decide to invest in animated concert-streaming company Wave. It happened almost right after the R&B superstar streamed his first animated show. Dubbed “The Weeknd Experience,” the show, which aired on TikTok on August 7th, was Wave’s highest-profile project to date, drawing in …
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When Anthony Hamilton, one of the last mainstream singers working in the Southern soul tradition, releases his eighth studio album in 2021, it will mark the first time that the 49-year-old R&B veteran owns the rights to his music. “We’ve thought about this day since 2005,” says Eli Davis, Hamilton’s …
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Triller is tired of being called a “TikTok rival.” But it’s a fair comparison: both Triller and TikTok are social networks reliant on the sharing of music combined with short-form videos. Both are also wildly popular amongst teenagers (TikTok, with over 2 billion global downloads, is more so; but Triller, …
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Puri’s “Coño” is a hard-nosed dance hit, the type of bass-heavy, reggaeton-leaning missile that could play in a drunken, sweaty club on four different continents. While the track initially came out in 2017, it has been an in-demand selection for TikTok videos recently — the most popular song on the …
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Jean-Michel Jarre thought livestreamed concerts were missing something. So he added virtual drugs. The French electronic music pioneer and former CISAC president has been one of the biggest champions of virtual-reality concerts — a concept that’s seeing a noticeable bump as coronavirus continues to stall the comeback of live music. …
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Had you invested $1,000 in Spotify on January 1st this year, you could pull out $1,800 right now. Had you invested $1,000 in Spotify in the midst of market-zapping pandemic uncertainty in March, you’d have more than doubled your money. Last Thursday, Spotify’s market cap soared to an all-time high …
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It’s been a whole week since the music business held a “blackout” to discuss measures against racism, in response to the killing of George Floyd and other black victims of police brutality. So where are those measures? “I thought it was a good symbolic gesture, a show of silence,” Chuck …
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For the first time since the pandemic sidelined live music in the U.S. in March, veteran DJ D-Nice finally had the chance to play an in-person live gig. D-Nice, who’s been a mainstay amid safer-at-home regulations with his popular Club Quarantine Instagram Live Sessions, flew out to Hallandale Beach, Florida …
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