Billboard Magazine March 26, 2022

GHOST’S IMPERA debuts at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart (dated March 26) with 2022’s biggest sales week for an album: 62,500 copies sold in the United States during its opening week (ending March 17), according to Luminate, formerly MRC Data. The album surges past the 37,000 copies that The Weeknd’s Dawn FM sold following its release on CD, sparking its reentry atop the Feb. 12 chart. The new album from the dynamic Swedish rock band — synonymous with its members’ striking, masked costumes (above) — earns the group its first Top Album Sales leader and its fourth top 10 entry. Of Impera’s opening total, physical sales comprise 51,000 copies, with 28,000 on vinyl, 21,000 on CD and 2,000 on cassette. The album was released on Loma Vista/Concord in…

AFTER RECORD-LOW GRO SSES IN JANUARY, a wave of new arena tours steered the live-music industry back on course in February. Bad Bunny led the way, earning both the month’s No. 1 tour and Boxscore: According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, the Latin star’s El Último Tour del Mundo trek — named after his November 2020 studio album — earned $39.8 million and sold 183,000 tickets. With an average of $3.3 million and 15,240 tickets per show, Bad Bunny sets a blistering pace for the year ahead, led by two shows in February at The Forum in Inglewood, Calif. The two-night stint rules the Top Boxscores chart with $9.6 million, or $4.8 million each night, setting a new high as the venue’s top per-show earnings, surpassing the Eagles’ previous record…

AT THE BEGINNING of the year, Luminate, formerly MRC Data, issued its 2021 annual report, which revealed that catalog music — traditionally considered a track that’s over 18 months old, although the term has different meanings in different situations — increased its share of U.S. music consumption from 65.1% in 2020 to 69.8% last year. The initial interpretation of that data was that, a year and counting into the pandemic, listeners were self-soothing with nostalgic songs — Fleetwood Mac, not Doja Cat. But a closer examination by Billboard reveals a much different picture. Listeners are increasingly gravitating to catalog tracks, but in the first six weeks of 2022, the average age of the 100 most streamed songs was just 20 months old (compared with eight months in 2020), according to Luminate.…

CHLOE ADAMS HAD RACKED UP 1 million followers on TikTok through her bedroom-pop covers of Lil Nas X, Shania Twain and Justin Bieber, as well as her own music, when someone from the platform contacted her late last year with a question: Would she want to be among the first artists to use its new in-app marketing and distribution tool, SoundOn, to release her next original song, “Dirty Thoughts”? Adams was already using one of the few dozen digital distributors that, for a small fee, will ensure that an artist’s music is uploaded and available across all streaming services and digital sellers — joining the deluge of the 60,000 songs uploaded to Spotify daily. But TikTok’s proposition was appealing: SoundOn, still in beta at the time, could not only offer that…

JOHN DUFILHO hadn’t had a routine physical in 10 years when the email from Universal Music Publishing Group arrived last fall. The film/TV composer and frontman of indie rock band The Deathray Davies worked as an independent contractor and could not afford health insurance. That changed when Dufilho, 52, learned that UMPG, which handles his publishing, and parent company Universal Music Group (UMG) had partnered with Music Health Alliance (MHA), a Nashville-based nonprofit that since 2013 has saved 18,000 musicians and industry workers an estimated $85 million in health care costs by helping them find insurance and navigate other healthcare issues, including counseling for survivors of the 2017 Route 91 Harvest festival mass shooting. Its services are free. Dufilho finally got that physical, and as the doctor listened to his heart, she…

FROM DETROIT TO BERLIN to the metaverse, electronic dance music has always had a symbiotic relationship with technology’s cutting edge. Now history is repeating itself as a mega-festival lineup’s worth of electronic artists — including stars like deadmau5, Steve Aoki and Claude VonStroke — have emerged as early adopters and innovators of non-fungible tokens. And some are pushing it a step further, unlocking the potential of NFTs to engage their audience though gamification. Vivie-Ann Bakos — the DJ, producer and label owner who performs as Blond:ish — initially got into NFTs as a way of offering value to hardcore fans who were spending upwards of 12 hours a day on her Twitch channel, Abracadabra TV, during the pandemic. Bakos emphasizes that the value of many NFTs is not just the piece…