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. Miss Universe heads to the Big Easy! The 71st annual Miss Universe pageant kicks off in New Orleans this weekend with new hosts and a new network. “The City of New Orleans and the Miss Universe Organization share common values of celebrating inclusion, culture and the empowerment of women,” New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell said in a statement announcing NOLA as the location for this year’s pageant. Keep reading for details on how to watch and stream Miss Universe 2023 from anywhere. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, chart...
Taylor Swift was the queen of vinyl albums in 2022, as the superstar sold more vinyl LPs in the U.S. than any other act by far last year: 1.695 million across her entire catalog of releases, according to the U.S. 2022 Luminate Year-End Music Report. In fact, she sold more vinyl LPs last year than the next two biggest-sellers on vinyl combined: Styles with 719,000 and The Beatles with 553,000. Swift loomed so large on vinyl in 2022, nearly one of every 25 vinyl LPs sold last year in the U.S. was a Swift album (1.695 million of 43.46 million total vinyl albums sold by all artists). Swift’s latest release, Midnights, was the top-selling vinyl album of 2022 in the U.S., with 945,000 copies sold across all of its vinyl variants and editions. The album has the largest yearly sales total for a vi...
In 2022, sales of albums on cassette tape in the U.S. increased by 28% to 440,000 (up from 343,000 in 2021), according to the U.S. 2022 Luminate Year-End Music Report. While 440,000 a mere fraction of the total album sales market (0.44% to be more precise), it’s a robust figure for a format that was mostly non-existent a few years ago. In 2015, for example, cassettes sold just 74,000. In 2022, total album sales across all formats — digital and physical — numbered 100.09 million. Physical album sales totaled 79.89 million — thus giving cassettes a 0.55% share of the physical album market last year. (Physical albums include CDs, vinyl LPs, cassettes and other niche physical formats.) While cassettes are now a niche offering marketed to superfans, they were once the leading format for album p...
HipHopWired Featured Video Source: Radio One / Radio One Digital DJ Drama is talking his talk. He recently said he brought mixtapes back, and the culture agreed wholeheartedly. As per Complex, the record executive took to social media to give himself some flowers. On Monday (Jan. 9), DJ Drama posted a photo while at the studio that read “I Brought The Mixtape Game Back 2 Life.” Drama wrote in the IG caption, adding in a “Thanks Tyler” with a winking face emoji. “If You Can Think It, You Can Achieve It.” The post also mentions he is in “album mode” which points to his I’m Really Like That project. Naturally, his claim quickly picked up traction throughout Hip-Hop circles and he was met with validation from only from rap fans but also some of his peers. Funkmaster Flex commented “10X” under ...
HipHopWired Featured Video Source: LaVergne PD / LaVergne PD In today’s episode of So, A Bunch of Cops Chose To Cop-ulate, a police station in Tennessee recently became the center of a blue-on-blue sex scandal after a married female officer was accused of engaging in sex-cop-ades with six male officers, some of which she allegedly had sex with while on duty. From the New York Post: Officer Maegan Hall and her fellow law officers allegedly engaged in wild sexcapades that included sending dirty pictures, taking her top off at a “Girls Gone Wild” hot tub party, and even having oral sex with two officers at the La Vergne, Tenn., police station, WTVF TV reported. Related Stories The steamy shenanigans — in which Hall allegedly bragged about the size of one partner’s genitals and claimed to...
HipHopWired Featured Video Source: Michael Tullberg / Getty Soulja Boy called out the rap community after seeing Megan Thee Stallion receive little to no support in her case against Tory Lanez – but others have called him out over his own alleged history of abuse. The “Crank That” rapper spoke out about the Grammy Award-winner and how silent many were in relation to Lanez’s treatment of her and the ensuing trial on social media. “Yall ni**as out here shooting bi**hes and ain’t nobody gone say nothing? I’m the only ni**a in the whole rap game that’s gonna say something? Ok, cool,” he said in an Instagram Live session. [embedded content] Related Stories He continued his tirade, directly addressing the Brampton, Canada artist. “You want to shoot bi**hes in the feet ni**a? Yous a pu**y ni**a a...
HipHopWired Featured Video Source: WWD / Getty A$AP Rocky and Rihanna are back outside. The couple made a surprise appearance at the 2023 Golden Globe Awards. As per Buzz Feed News, the star duo walked in unexpectedly to the ceremony. They walked in as Jennifer Coolidge presented the award for Best Supporting Actor in a TV series, so their entrance left everyone in attendance in awe. As expected, A$AP and Rihanna were dressed to the nines. RiRi wore a dramatic black gown by Schiaparelli Couture and complimented the dress with a white gold and diamond necklace and matching earrings. Pretty Flaco kept it formal with a double breasted black suit and his signature braids were freshly done. While Rihanna didn’t take home the award for “Lift Me Up” from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, she s...
James Holden has announced his first album in six years. Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities is due out March 31 via Border Community. He’s previewing it with the single “Contains Multitudes,” which you can listen to below. Of the influences behind “Contains Multitudes,” Holden said in a press statement, “I’d been looking at John Stezaker’s collages, where things collide and it feels like it opens a window into them, thinking a lot about musical approaches to that idea, then the end part of this just appeared in my head as I listened to the loops of the beginning part. The two songs are opposite musics but also completely contained inside one another.” Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities follows Holden’s 2017 full-length, The Animal Spiri...
Shana Cleveland of La Luz has announced a new solo album: Manzanita is out March 10 via Hardly Art. The lead single is called “Faces in the Firelight,” and, according to a press release, it’s addressed to Cleveland’s son and also her life partner, Will Sprott of Shannon and the Clams. Find it below. “The song is about watching Will tend to a huge burn pile that was still going long after dark and realizing that out there in the dark field he looked like the ultrasound image we had on our fridge,” Cleveland explained of “Faces in the Firelight” in a press release. “I was thinking that the greatest act of love might be to wait for someone. To say, ‘I’ll be here whenever you’re done, whenever you’re ready.’” Manzanita follows Shana Cleveland’s 2019 solo album, Night of the Worm Moon, and La L...
Yaeji has announced her debut album. With a Hammer arrives this April. The electronic artist wrote about the the record in a newsletter to fans, also sharing the album art, photographed by Dasom Han. “I want to begin this album with intent,” she wrote, in part, “So I started writing a story about me and my hammer.” Check out the artwork below. Yaeji released her first full-length mixtape, What We Drew 우리가 그려왔던, in 2020. The following year, she teamed up with South Korean musician Oh Hyuk for two new tracks, “Year to Year” and “29.” She also reworked samples from the Pac-Man video game into a track titled “Pac-Tive.” Read the Cover Story “Pitchfork’s 25 Next Roundtable: Yaeji, Bartees Strange, Amaarae, Angel Bat Dawid, and KeiyaA on the Future of Music.”
The Grammy-winning rock guitarist Jeff Beck has died, his family announced. “After suddenly contracting bacterial meningitis, he peacefully passed away yesterday,” the family shared in a statement. “His family ask for privacy while they process this tremendous loss.” Beck was 78 years old. Geoffrey Beck was born in Wallington, South London in 1944. He sang in a church choir as a child, and picked up the electric guitar as a teenager; he even fashioned a homemade model imitating the famous Gibson Les Paul. Like many British teens at the time, he idolized American blues and rock’n’roll artists—particularly Buddy Guy and Gene Vincent. Beck played in a handful of local bands in the early ’60s, such as the Rumbles, the Tridents, the Night Shift, and Screaming Lord Sutch, but he got an even bigg...
Go behind the decks of one of the biggest performances of the year. Last weekend, Skrillex, Four Tet and Fred again.. took to social media in search of a venue that would host a last-minute pop-up performance from the trio. They were ultimately successful in their search, which led to a string of three shows in the U.K. for a very limited number of fans. Seeing as tickets to each show sold out in a matter of minutes, many fans experienced a terminal case of FOMO. If this applies to you, you’re in luck because a YouTuber managed to capture almost four hours of the DJ set from behind the decks. Skrillex performing at Electric Brixton. Anthony Larpin You can hear favorites from all three artists in the mix, like “Butterflies,” “Turn On The Lights again.....