BMG has acquired Mötley Crüe‘s entire recorded music catalog in a deal that marks the company’s larg-est single-artist deal since its founding in 2008, the company announced Tuesday (Nov. 30).

The deal covers the heavy metal icons’ nine studio albums, starting with the 1981 debut Too Fast for Love to the latest release, 2008’s Saints of Los Ange-les. Billboard estimates the band has sold 22.5 million albums in the U.S., based on RIAA certifications pre-1991 and MRC Data figures from 1991 to present.

Terms were not disclosed, although one music industry source put the figure between two numbers that other outlets have reported, at higher than $90 million but not $150 million.

BMG’s global catalog team plans to work closely with the band and its management to re-promote the releases starting next year.

“It feels amazing to be collaborating with our new partners at BMG,” Mötley Crüe said in a statement. “Their extensive track record of success in Rock made them the perfect home to continue preserving and growing our musical legacy, ensuring we always stay at The Top.”

Mötley Crüe’s manager Allen Kovac added: “After

working side by side with BMG for well over a decade, the relationship we have developed and success we’ve accomplished over the years made this a very easy tran-sition to entrust with this treasured Rock catalog. Work-ing with BMG in any capacity, whether that’s publishing or records, has always been a great experience.”

Mötley Crüe’s most popular recordings, spanning from Too Fast for Love to 1997’s Generation Swine, and including the singles “Girls, Girls, Girls,” “Smokin’ in the Boys Room” and “Dr. Feelgood,” among others were all released on Elektra Records, which the band signed with in 1982. In the 1990s, Kovac helped the band acquire those masters from Elektra was part of a contract renegotiation.

“With expert management at the helm, Mötley Crüe have long owned their own recordings,” BMG’s presi-dent repertoire & marketing for New York and Los Angeles Thomas Scherer said in a statement. “It is an honor and a privilege for BMG to be entrusted with this catalog. They are the perfect fit for our global digital and physical expertise in rock.”

In June 2022, Mötley Crüe plans to kick off their headlining U.S. stadium tour, which was previously

BMG Acquires Mötley Crüe’s Recordings Catalog

B Y   C O L I N S T U T Z

(continued)

YOUR DAILY ENTERTAINMENT NEWS UPDATE

BulletinN OV E M B E R 3 0 , 2 0 2 1 Page 1 of 25

• Drake Sparks Hip-Hop’s Rebound: The

State of the Billboard Hot 100’s Top 10 Through Q3 2021

• Adele To Kick Off 2022 With Las Vegas

Residency

• What the Metaverse Means for Music Creators

(Guest Column)

• Concert Business Stocks Rebound Following Friday Omicron Selloff

• UK Watchdog Orders Meta/

Facebook to Sell GIF Platform Giphy

• Garth Brooks on Selling 400,000

Tickets in Ireland, Residency Rumors

and Greatly Expanding His Free

Dive Bar Tour

INSIDE

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Page 3 of 25

postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The more-than-30-date tour marks the band’s first major concert run since 2015.

“This is more than just a significant trans-action. It’s a new chapter for an extraor-dinary catalog,” said BMG CEO Hartwig Masuch in a statement. “Few bands under-stand the myth and the magic of Rock like Mötley Crüe do. In an increasingly competi-tive rights acquisition market, artists need to be convinced that a buyer will do the right thing with their work. I am delighted that Mötley Crüe have decided BMG will be the best custodians of their musical career.”

In March, BMG announced it was team-ing with private equity firm KKR to buy music assets in what was described as a $1 billion deal pipeline. This Mötley Crüe acquisition, however, is not part of that partnership.

Lately, BMG has been in the business of acquiring iconic catalogs, including a deal with Mick Fleetwood in January covering his share in Fleetwood Mac’s recordings, and a blockbuster deal in October with Tina Turner that covered her artist’s share of her recordings, her writer’s share of publishing and her neighboring rights from her solo career. The company is also home to the rights to several iconic hard rock acts, in-cluding Black Sabbath, Dio, Motörhead and the Scorpions, while it helped Iron Maiden achieve the highest-charting album of the band’s career in September.

Mötley Crüe, Kovac and Chris Nilsson of 10th Street Entertainment were ad-vised in the transaction by Tim Mandel-baum, Cynthia Katz, and the law firm of Fox Rothschild.

Drake Sparks Hip-Hop’s Rebound: The State of the Billboard Hot 100’s Top 10 Through Q3 2021BY GARY TRUST

What were some of the most notable trends on the Bill-board Hot 100 songs chart through the first three

quarters of 2021?Hit Songs Deconstructed, which pro-

vides compositional analytics for top 10 Hot 100 hits, has released its State of the Hot 100 Top 10: Q3 2021 report.

Here are five takeaways from Hit Songs Deconstructed’s latest in-depth research.

Hip-hop over pop: Through the first three quarters of 2021, hip-hop was the

most popular primary genre in the Hot 100’s top 10, with a 41% share of all top 10s. Pop ranked second, at 36%.

Hip-hop pulled ahead of pop after pop led 41% to 34% in the year’s first half. Helping ignite the turnaround? The Sept. 18-dated Hot 100, when Drake claimed a record nine concurrent top 10s, all from his album Certified Lover Boy, which launched that week at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Leading his haul, “Way 2 Sexy,” featuring Future and Young Thug, soared in atop the Hot 100 that frame.

Hip-hop won a tight battle in the Hot 100’s top 10 for all of 2020 (41% vs. 40%), after pop took 2019 (48% vs. 34%) and hip-hop led in 2018 (59% vs. 24%, a relative landslide thanks in part to, again, Drake’s dominance that year).

Guys’ gains: Songs with exclusively male lead vocals dominated the Hot 100’s top 10 in Q1-Q3 2021, accounting for a 73% claim of all top 10s. Titles with exclusively female lead vocals drew a 19% share.

The gap between the two widened slight-ly from a 69% vs. 23% split in all of 2020. Men also won by similar, though somewhat less decisive, margins in 2019 (62% vs. 22%), 2018 (63% vs. 23%) and 2017 (58% vs. 23%).

Meanwhile, songs mixing male and female lead vocals, such as The Weeknd and Ariana Grande’s remixed “Save Your Tears,” remained below 10% among all Hot 100 top 10s through the year’s first nine months, in

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line with an 8% share for such hits in 2020. That’s down noticeably from 16% in 2019 and 23% in both 2018 and 2017.

Time for a change: The most common song length for a Hot 100 top 10 in the first three quarters of 2021? Under 3 minutes, with a 37% share. The ranking reflects a worst-to-first nearly five-year turnaround, as in 2017 such a length placed last (9%). Notably, The Kid LAROI and Justin Bieber’s “Stay,” at just 2:21, reigned for seven weeks beginning in August.

Songs of 3-to-3:29 minutes in length fell to second in Q1-Q3 2021, after leading in all of 2020, down more than double from 53% to 24%.

Meanwhile, top 10s over 4 minutes again placed last over the year’s first three quarters, as in 2020 and 2019. Still, such songs made gains from 7% to 8% to 17% in that span (and with Q4 already including one record-breaking entrant).

Hold your applause: Synths remained the most prominent instrument in Hot 100 top 10s through the first three quarters of 2021. Not only has the sound led each year since 2017, it has risen in share from 75% to 81% to 91% to an even more dominant 95% since 2018.

Notably on the decline? Hand claps. After appearing in 80% of top 10s in 2017, and between 60 and 69% in 2018-20, they fell to 44% in the first three quarters of 2021. Still, a hand for top 10s this year featuring such,

well, handiwork, including Dua Lipa’s No. 2-peaking “Levitating.”

‘Good days on my mind …’: Perhaps unsurprisingly, given 2020-21, songs with an introspective lyrical theme have increased among Hot 100 top 10s in that span. Such hits, including SZA’s “Good Days,” Masked Wolf’s “Astronaut in the Ocean” and Ed Sheeran’s “Bad Habits,” logged a 29% share in Q1-Q3 this year, a high since 2017 and rising from 21% last year and more than tripling from 9% in 2017.

Meanwhile, love/relationships led all lyri-cal themes among top 10s in the first nine months of 2021, mirroring its top-ranking 49% share in 2020.

Adele To Kick Off 2022 With Las Vegas ResidencyBY GIL KAUFMAN

Adele announced her first-ever Las Vegas residency on Tuesday (Nov. 30), a 24-show run that will have her playing the

Colosseum of Las Vegas at Caesars Palace twice a weekend from Jan. 21 through April 16. The “Weekends With Adele” shows will feature Friday and Saturday night sets from

the singer, with presale tickets available through registration using Ticketmaster Verified Fan, which will be open from today through 2:59 a.m. ET on Thursday (Dec. 2).

The Verified Fan Presale will begin on Dec. 7 at 1 p.m. ET and only fans who’ve received a unique code getting the chance to purchase tickets on a first come, first served basis

The shows are the only announced live dates so far from the singer whose new 30 album launched all 12 tracks from the standard edition onto the the latest Bill-board Hot 100 (dated Dec. 4), with the set’s lead single “Easy on Me” pacing her haul as it returns to No. 1; the album track “Oh My God” opened at No. 5 on the Hot 100. 30 rocketed in at No. 1 on the Bill-board 200 albums chart with the biggest week of 2021 in terms of both equivalent album units (839,000) and album sales (692,000).

30 is Adele’s the third No. 1 album, fol-lowing 25 (10 weeks on top in 2015-16) and 21 (24 weeks in 2011-12). The gaudy first week numbers easily surpassed the debut of Drake’s Certified Lover, which moved 613,000 units in the week ending Sept. 9.

Check out the ‘Weekends With Adele” dates below:

Jan. 21-22Jan 28-29Feb. 4-5Feb. 11-12

Page 5 of 25

IN BRIEF

Sam Hunt’s second studio full-length, and first in over five years, Southside (MCA Nashville/Universal Music Group Nashville), debuts at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart dated April 18. In its first week (ending April 9), it earned 46,000 equivalent album units, including 16,000 in album sales, ac-cording to Nielsen Music/MRC Data.

Southside marks Hunt’s second No. 1 on the chart and fourth top 10. It follows freshman LP Montevallo, which arrived at the summit in No-vember 2014 and reigned for nine weeks. To date, Montevallo has earned 3.9 million units, with 1.4 million in album sales.

Montevallo has spent 267 weeks on the list, tying Luke Bryan’s Crash My Party as the sixth-longest-running titles in the chart’s 56-year history.

On the all-genre Billboard 200, Southside ar-rives at No. 5, awarding Hunt his second top 10 after the No. 3-peaking Montevallo.

Hunt first released the EP X2C, which debuted and peaked at No. 5 on Top Country Albums in August 2014. Following Montevallo, Between the Pines: Acoustic Mixtape started at its No. 7 high in November 2015.

Montevallo produced five singles, four of which hit the pinnacle of Country Airplay: “Leave the Night On,” “Take Your Time,” “House Party” and “Make You Miss Me.” “Break Up in a Small Town” peaked at No. 2.

Hunt co-penned all 12 songs on Southside, including “Body Like a Back Road,” which was released in 2017. The smash hit ruled Country Airplay for three weeks and the airplay-, streaming- and sales-based Hot Country Songs chart for a then-record 34 frames. It now ranks second only to Bebe Rexha and Florida Georgia Line’s “Meant to Be” (50 weeks atop the latter list in 2017-18).

“Downtown’s Dead,” which is also on the new set, reached Nos. 14 and 15 on Hot Country Songs and Country Airplay, respectively, in June 2018. “Kin-folks” led Country Airplay on Feb. 29, becoming Hunt’s seventh No. 1. It hit No. 3 on Hot Country Songs.

Latest single “Hard to Forget” jumps 17-9 on Hot Country Songs. It’s his eighth top 10, having corralled 8.2 million U.S. streams (up 96%) and 5,000 in

sales (up 21%) in the tracking week. On Country Airplay, it hops 18-15 (11.9 mil-lion audience impressions, up 16%).

TRY TO ‘CATCH’ UP WITH YOUNG Brett Young achieves his fifth consecutive and total Country Airplay No. 1 as “Catch” (Big Machine Label Group) ascends

2-1, increasing 13% to 36.6 million impressions.Young’s first of six chart entries, “Sleep With-

out You,” reached No. 2 in December 2016. He followed with the multiweek No. 1s “In Case You Didn’t Know” (two weeks, June 2017), “Like I Loved You” (three, January 2018), “Mercy” (two, August 2018) and “Here Tonight” (two, April 2019).

“Catch” completes his longest journey to No. 1, having taken 46 weeks to reach the apex. It out-paces the 30-week climb of “Here Tonight.”

On Hot Country Songs, “Catch” pushes 7-5 for a new high.

COMBS ‘DOES’ IT AGAIN Luke Combs’ “Does to Me” (River House/Columbia Nashville), featuring Eric Church, ascends 11-8 on Country Airplay, up 10% to 24.7 million in audience. The song is Combs’ eighth straight career-opening top 10, following a record run of seven consecutive out-of-the-gate, properly promoted No. 1 singles.

Church adds his 15th Country Airplay top 10.

THAT TOOK QUITE ‘A FEW’ MONTHS Travis Denning shatters the record for the most weeks it has taken to penetrate the Country Airplay top 10 as “After a Few” (Mercury Nashville) climbs 12-10 in its 57th week, up 4% to 21.4 mil-lion in radio reach.

The song surpasses two tracks that took 50 weeks each to enter the top 10: Easton Corbin’s “A Girl Like You,” which reached No. 10 in January 2018 be-fore peaking at No. 6 that February, and Aaron Watson’s “Outta Style,” which achieved its No. 10 high in December 2017.

“After” is Denning’s second Country Airplay entry. “David Ashley Parker From Powder Springs” traveled to No. 32 in September 2018.

SamHunt’s Southside Rules Top Country Albums; Brett Young ‘Catch’-es Fifth Airplay

Leader; Travis Denning Makes History

ON THE CHARTS JIM ASKER jim.asker@billboard.com

BILLBOARD COUNTRY UPDATE APRIL 13, 2020 | PAGE 4 OF 19

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Feb. 25-26March 4-5March 11-12March 18-19March 25-26April 1-2April 8-9April 15-16

What the Metaverse Means for Music Creators (Guest Column)BY DAVID ISRAELITE

There is a lot of buzz around the concept of a “Metaverse.” The company formerly known as Facebook recently announced its

ambition to create a futuristic, immersive social experience, and to achieve this, it will become a new hub for listening to, discovering and interacting with music and music creators. Undoubtedly, music will be as important to the metaverse as it is to the real world.

As Mark Zuckerberg recently told The Vergecast, “You might be able to jump into an experience, like a 3D concert or some-thing, from your phone, so you can get ele-ments that are 2D or elements that are 3D. … I think that this is going to be a really big part of the next chapter for the technology industry, and it’s something that we’re very excited about.”

Merging social media, gaming, consumer-ism and other forms of entertainment into one innovative digital universe holds great promise for the music industry. And while the terms and technology will change, the rules have not. Music must be licensed and paid for regardless of how it is consumed, which bodes well for songwriters in this new frontier.

For example, Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite – which recently pre-

sented Ariana Grande’s Rift Tour – gives a glimpse into the metaverse’s potential. These events can attract viewership far beyond what a stadium tour could hold for an experience far beyond listening to the radio. This virtual platform also gives artists the ability to ‘perform’ more frequently and for millions of fans, allowing the generation of much more revenue.

Accelerated by the abrupt transition to in-home entertainment forced by the pan-demic, Big Tech is exploring and investing in virtual experiences involving music like never before. Behemoths like Microsoft have already begun building out a music component to their massively popular Teams platform. Disney, which is beloved as much for its animation as the music which accompanies it, recently entered the metaverse market. The bottom line is that the investment in the metaverse points to people spending much more time and money consuming music in new and innova-tive ways.

Why is this good for songwriters? Because music will be a crucial component of the metaverse and the rules governing its use will be much more favorable.

Playing music in a public forum requires a performance license with royalties doled out by the PROs: ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and GMR. While the performance right is tech-nically in a free market, ASCAP and BMI are governed by WWII-era consent decrees which considerably devalue this space.

However, say a platform wants to host a concert in the metaverse. Since this will take place in a curated reality, synched with all forms of visual programming, a syn-chronization license would be necessary. Such a license is unregulated by outdated compulsory licenses and consent decrees, and therefore results in much more parity between what record labels and artists are paid compared to songwriters and music publishers. Everybody wins, because in this space songwriters can say no, therefore they have the ability to negotiate much fairer rates. Rates that companies like Meta, Apple, Google and others can clearly afford.

The idea that consumers may spend a great deal of time in a music-filled meta-verse points to growth in the value of song

copyrights. This, among other factors, has no doubt contributed to the rampant investment in music catalogs. This is due in part to the pressure put on platforms to license rights relating to new forms of con-sumption – even when they have initially denied the value and necessity of that music to their offerings.

In a little over a decade, we’ve seen myriad platforms emerge. So many in fact, that almost 30% of publishing revenue today comes from sources solidified through deals done in the last 15 years at the NMPA – all with players who originally claimed they did not have to pay publishers and songwrit-ers. Today songwriters receive new income streams from lyrics, ringtones, music vid-eos, interactive streaming, social media platforms, the fitness industry and gam-ing.

Many, if not all companies using mu-sic to attract users to the metaverse, will need to engage in new licensing deals. For instance, Facebook licensed its social media platforms after pressure from publishers and songwriters, and this agreement was beneficial to itself and its users. However, its expanded offerings in the metaverse, hinted at by its CEO, would dramatically expand on terms previously agreed upon.

To forecast some value on the use of music in the metaverse, we can look to other platforms in or entering that sphere. Rob-lox came to an agreement with NMPA ear-lier this year that paves the way for music to fill its virtual worlds. Other companies like Twitch and TikTok have also come to the table to compensate songwriters.

Much has been written about how songs as an asset class are on the rise. This will only fully come to fruition if songwriters are valued appropriately by new platforms. We are still fighting for music creators to be paid fairly by streaming services – now val-ued in the billions – who originally claimed they couldn’t afford to pay proportionally. We should be bullish about songwriters’ contributions to the metaverse at the outset, and not accept that emerging technologies are either oblivious to the licenses neces-sary or don’t have the ability to properly compensate creators.

Ultimately, while the concept of the

Page 7 of 25

IN BRIEF

Year in Music, the No. 1’s, will wrap up 2021 with an extraordinary editorial package.

Included will be year-end charts, interviews, and analysis on the year’s top artists, titles and labels as well as the year’s top producers, songwriters and publishers.

The year-end Boxscore rankings will shine a light on the most successful tours as well as the top venues and promoters.

This highly-anticipated year in music—the No.1s, serves as a compilation of must-have information. It is referenced year-round by everyone in the music and touring industry as their de facto resource for billboard

billboard’s

historical data and information.

Advertise in this signature collector’s edition and position your company, artist or breakthrough achievement to the power players in the industry. This issue provides the ideal showcase to run a brand or congratulatory message to acknowledge success over the past year.

YEAR IN MUSIC

THE NO. 1s ISSUE

IS S U E DATE 12/18 | AD CLOSE 12/7MATERIALS DU E 12/8

CONTACT East Coast: Joe Maimone | joe.maimone@billboard.com.Southeast: Lee Ann Photoglo | laphotoglo@gmail.comLatin: Marcia Olival | marciaolival29@gmail.comTouring & West Coast: Cynthia Mellow | cmellow.billboard@gmail.comInternational: Ryan O’Donnell | rodonnell@pmc.com

Year in Music, the No. 1’s, will wrap up 2021 with an extraordinary editorial package.

Included will be year-end charts, interviews, and analysis on the year’s top artists, titles and labels as well as the year’s top producers, songwriters and publishers.

The year-end Boxscore rankings will shine a light on the most successful tours as well as the top venues and promoters.

This highly-anticipated year in music—the No.1s, serves as a compilation of must-have information. It is referenced year-round by everyone in the music and touring industry as their de facto resource for billboard

billboard’s

historical data and information.

Advertise in this signature collector’s edition and position your company, artist or breakthrough achievement to the power players in the industry. This issue provides the ideal showcase to run a brand or congratulatory message to acknowledge success over the past year.

YEAR IN MUSIC

THE NO. 1s ISSUE

IS S U E DATE 12/18 | AD CLOSE 12/7MATERIALS DU E 12/8

CONTACT East Coast: Joe Maimone | joe.maimone@billboard.com.Southeast: Lee Ann Photoglo | laphotoglo@gmail.comLatin: Marcia Olival | marciaolival29@gmail.comTouring & West Coast: Cynthia Mellow | cmellow.billboard@gmail.comInternational: Ryan O’Donnell | rodonnell@pmc.com

metaverse is abstract and will develop and change over time, the fundamental rules surrounding this space are not. If you create a platform that allows users to access and enjoy music, you must ensure creators are paid before the platform is launched. Too often we see tech companies acquiesce only after damages have been incurred, only to feign ignorance at the clear rules of the game.

The laws are clear and the metaverse is an opportunity to bring music creators into the fold as foundational partners. If this happens, the future truly could be virtually unrecognizable and transformative.

David Israelite is the President & CEO of the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA). NMPA is the trade association representing American music publishers and their songwriting partners.

Concert Business Stocks Rebound Following Friday Omicron SelloffBY GLENN PEOPLES

Shares of Live Nation and MSG Entertainment rose 4.2% and 9%, respectively, on Monday (Nov. 29) as investors considered how the

coronavirus omicron variant will affect the touring business’ recovery.

The day’s gains halved Live Nation’s 8.8% fall on Friday when news of the omicron variant was first widely publicized, and a 2% gain in after-hours trading suggests inves-tors’ concerns could ease in the following days. MSGE’s spike on Monday more than made up for Friday’s 8.4% drop. Both com-panies outperformed the market, with the S&P 500 Index rising 1.32% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising 0.68%.

Reports Friday that the new variant, first discovered in South Africa, had been detected in Europe sent global markets tum-bling and gave the Dow Jones Industrial average its worst drop in 2021. Shares of

Live Nation reached an all-time high of $123.80 on Nov. 5 following encouraging third-quarter earnings results and opti-mism for a strong 2022 concert sched-ule, but fell 9.3% to $112.32 the following week after 10 fans and hundreds more were injured at the Astroworld festival the company produced in Houston on Nov. 5. Then, on Friday, shares fell from $112.61 to $103.53 at close, based on the omicron news.

Friday’s decline was greater than the short-lived deficit due to COVID-19 delta variant concerns on July 19 when the Live Nation’s shares fell 4.8% and fully recov-ered in just two days. Going into slow months of winter, the timing of the omicron breakout is less concerning for out-of-home entertainment companies such as concert promoter and theme parks than for recovering industries such as movie theaters and cruise liners that do brisk business in cold months.

Concerns about omicron hampered the recovery of stocks throughout the travel and leisure industries. Delta Air Lines and American Airlines shares fell 8.8% and 8.3%, respectively, on Friday while each fell less than 1% again on Monday. Some hotel companies rebounded slightly on Monday: Hilton Worldwide Holdings recovered a fifth of its 6.2% drop, and Marriot Interna-tional made back a third of its 6.5% decline. Markets in general have surged in the latter half of 2021 as countries re-opened to travel and governments eased restrictions. Stocks have fared well even as hospitalization rates throughout Europe grew to record levels in November.

Many countries — including the United States, United Kingdom and European Union member nations — quickly restricted travel from South Africa and seven other countries on the continent on Friday. Is-rael closed its borders to non-citizens at midnight Sunday to stop the omicron variant from spreading beyond two cases detected last week. Japan, which opened to some business travelers and students this month, followed suit and closed its borders to all international travel on Monday. No cases had been reported in the United States through Friday, although the variant has been detected in Canada, Spain, Portugal,

Hong Kong and Belgium. The World Health Organization said on

Monday that the omicron variant carries a high likelihood of global spread and its mutations “may be associated with immune escape potential and higher transmissibil-ity,” although it stressed there are uncertain-ties about whether the new variant is more transmissible or leads to more severe CO-VID-19 symptoms than the delta and other coronavirus variants. In addition, some experts are concerned that existing vaccines will be less effective against the omicron variant. Existing PCR tests continue to de-tect infection of variants including omicron, and researchers are trying to find out if the types of rapid testing used at concerts and other live events are also effective, accord-ing to the World Health Organization.

UK Watchdog Orders Meta/Facebook to Sell GIF Platform GiphyBY ASSOCIATED PRESS

The United Kingdom’s antitrust watchdog has blocked Facebook’s acquisition of Giphy and ordered the social network to sell off the

GIF-sharing platform, saying the deal hurts social media users and advertisers by stifling competition for animated images.

The Competition and Markets Author-ity said Tuesday that the deal would let Facebook “increase its already significant market power” by denying or limiting other platforms’ access to Giphy GIFs and driving traffic to Facebook-owned sites. It has noted previously that there’s only one other big provider of GIFs, Google’s Tenor.

The regulator also was concerned that the deal removed potential competition from the U.K.’s 7 billion pound ($9.3 billion) dis-play advertising market, of which Facebook controls half.

Page 9 of 25

IN BRIEF

ISSUE DATE 12/18 | AD CLOSE 12/7 | MATERIALS DUE 12/8

UBS ARENA OPENING2 0 2 1

On December 18, Billboard will spotlight the opening of UBS Arena at Belmont Park, the arena that’s made for music and built for hockey. New York's newest premier entertainment and sports venue and home of the New York Islanders is developed in partnership with Oak View Group, the New York Islanders, and Jeff Wilpon. The $1.1 billion multi-purpose, state of the art arena will host more than 150 major events annually while delivering an unmatched live entertainment experience including clear sightlines and premier acoustics.

UBS Arena at Belmont Park kicks off its music programming with Harry Styles for his last 2021 Love on Tour show on November 28. Additional programming includes Eric Church, Genesis, Trans-Siberian Orchestra, a sold out Sebastian Maniscalco show, Imagine Dragons, TOOL, John Mayer, New Kids on the Block and Roger Waters.

Please join Billboard in congratulating UBS Arena on their grand opening!

CONTACTEast Coast: Joe Maimone | joe.maimone@billboard.com.Southeast: Lee Ann Photoglo | laphotoglo@gmail.comLatin: Marcia Olival | marciaolival29@gmail.comTouring & West Coast: Cynthia Mellow | cmellow.billboard@gmail.comInternational: Ryan O’Donnell | rodonnell@pmc.com

It’s the first time the watchdog has sought to unwind a tech deal, marking an escalation by regulators seeking to tame digital giants.

Facebook, which has been renamed Meta, said it disagreed with the decision and is considering all its options, including an appeal.

“Both consumers and Giphy are better off with the support of our infrastructure, talent, and resources,” the company said. “Together, Meta and Giphy would enhance Giphy’s product for the millions of people, businesses, developers and API partners in the UK and around the world who use Giphy every day, providing more choices for everyone.”

After consulting with other businesses and groups and assessing alternative solu-tions proposed by Facebook, the watchdog said it “concluded that its competition concerns can only be addressed by Facebook selling Giphy in its entirety to an approved buyer.”

Stuart McIntosh, chair of the watchdog’s independent group that carried out the investigation, said the deal “has already re-moved a potential challenger in the display advertising market.”

“Without action, it will also allow Facebook to increase its significant market power in social media even further, through controlling competitors’ access to Giphy GIFs,” he said. “By requiring Facebook to sell Giphy, we are protecting millions of so-cial media users and promoting competition and innovation in digital advertising.”

New York-based Giphy’s library of short looping videos, or GIFs, are a popular tool for internet users sending messages or post-ing on social media.

The two sides have waged a bitter battle over the deal, reportedly worth $400 mil-lion.

The Competition and Markets Authority said in a provisional decision in August that Facebook should be forced to sell Giphy. The social giant responded with a strongly worded letter, saying the provisional deci-sion contained “fundamental errors.”

Last month, the watchdog fined Facebook 50.5 million pounds ($67.4 million) for fail-ing to provide information needed for the investigation, saying the company’s failure

to comply was deliberate.The watchdog has said that prior to the

deal, Giphy had been considering expanding its advertising services to other countries, including the U.K. That would have added a new player to the market and encouraged more innovation from social media sites and advertisers, but Facebook terminated Giphy’s ad partnerships after announcing the deal, it said.

Garth Brooks on Selling 400,000 Tickets in Ireland, Residency Rumors and Greatly Expanding His Free Dive Bar TourBY MELINDA NEWMAN

Garth Brooks had extra reasons to be thankful Thanksgiving morn-ing — five of them to be exact. When he went to sleep Wednes-

day night, he knew two dates for his Croke Park shows in Dublin in September 2022 were going on sale early Thursday. He woke up Nov. 25 to news that five shows — more than 400,000 tickets — had sold out at the Irish stadium.

The news was especially gratifying be-cause in 2014 Brooks cancelled five shows after the Dublin city council agreed to only allow three concerts, per the city’s annual agreement with the local residents. Instead of canceling two shows and disappointing those fans, Brooks pulled the plug on all five, a move he later said felt like “a death in the family.”

Though promoter Aiken Promotions was holding five dates for 2022, similar to in 2014, Brooks had expressed doubt that he could sell that many seats eight years later, given that the concerts would be coming at the end of his current North American

stadium outing rather than at the beginning of his 2014 comeback tour, after a 13-year hiatus from the road.

“You’re thinking you’ll be very lucky to do two shows, so I slept in,” Brooks tells Bill-board. “I didn’t want to know what was going on. And we got the call at 7:30 in the morning. [Tickets] had been on sale since 3:00 our time. [Promoter] Peter [Aiken] starts talking, but Peter has this really thick Irish brogue, and I couldn’t understand. He just kept saying, “Brilliant,” everything was great. I ask him, “Do we put on shows three and four next week?” He goes,“No, no, no. We through all five already.” And man, I just hate to say this because it’s a f–king broken record — I started crying. I couldn’t believe it. And so it just really caught me by surprise. But it made me feel very good.” (If there was potential for more than five dates, Brooks says he wasn’t aware of that.)

Brooks will return to Ireland, playing his first dates there since he played two shows at Croke Park in 1997, on Sept. 9-11, and 16-17.

“What I love most about what just hap-pened in Ireland is that it has put an upbeat ending to the stadium tour, right? We’ve got our last year here and now it is the yellow brick road heading toward Emerald city,” says Brooks, mixing references to one of his favorite movies, The Wizard of Oz, and Ireland, known as the Emerald Isle.

Brooks will resume his North American stadium tour in February or March, he says, with April 24’s date at Fayetteville, Arkansas’s Razorback Stadium going on sale Dec. 3. He expects more concerts to be announced before year’s end with a goal of around 17 dates in 2022, including the five shows postponed this year because of the pandemic. Below, he talks with Bill-board about his emotional reaction to his Ireland dates selling out, and his plans for what might come after.

You’ve said cancelling the 2014 shows felt like “a death in the family.” When did the discussions begin again about bring-ing them back?

For the last seven years, the discussion has been going on, and for the last seven years it was simple: [My saying,] “Guys, if there’s any chance we put on anything for

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J A N U A R Y 2 9 , 2 0 2 2

I S S U E D A T E 1 / 2 9 A D C L O S E 1 / 1 8 M A T E R I A L S D U E 1 / 1 9

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sale that can’t happen, I’m sorry, I’m just not going to do it to the people. I’m not going to do it to myself. I just can’t do it again.” And so it was probably March, because people started hearing me say, “Hey, this tour now has a chance to end on an unbelievably high note.”

But still, the confirmation wasn’t there — so you couldn’t say anything. The confirma-tion for the five shows wasn’t until probably 10 days before the [Nov. 22 Dublin] press conference. I couldn’t come over here unless all five were available again, just in case it might happen again — which I never dreamed it would.

Your mom’s roots are in Ireland, but what else explains the connection between you and the Irish audience? It’s been there since you first played Ireland in 1997.

I don’t know why it means so much to the Irish people. I don’t have a clue. My mom bragged about being Irish her whole life, and I stick out like a sore thumb over there. But for some reason, something has con-nected between the Irish people and Garth Brooks’ music, and I feel very fortunate for that. The reason why it means so much to me is: I’ve played there, and I wish I could put it in words, but they can name you the top selling solo artist of all time and you haven’t had a career if you haven’t played Ireland. They can call you the biggest loser on the planet and you never did anything in music, but if you played Ireland, you got to experience something amazing.

[When we played] Denver’s Mile High Stadium, it was an out-of-body experience. Every night is like that in Ireland. They know who wrote the songs, they know everything about who played on them, who sang background on them. It’s an artist’s dream to play there.

Dublin’s deputy lord mayor is asking you to call out the price gouging that’s already happening at hotels in Dublin for your dates — some hotel prices are al-ready up 200%. Do you feel like you need to call out the price gouging?

I can just say that I hate it as much as I do ticket scalping, parking, everything. I understand supply and demand, but it’s one of those things that you try and figure out a

way [to curtail it] — but I know in my time of touring, I’ve never found a way around it.

Are you filming the shows with an eye towards a TV or streaming special or a live album or DVD, like you did in 1997 Yeah. It provides for a lot of great, great, great opportunities to put a cap on — knock on wood — what’s been a very successful stadium tour.

How is the show going to look different than the US stadium dates? You’re using the same stage, so that will be similar.

Here in the States, you try not to put too many ballads in your show. Here in the States, we run. Over there, you won’t lose them if you do a ballad or two more than you’re used to doing. For example, you don’t play Ireland without playing “If Tomorrow Never Comes” — even though here it’s 30 years old, and you’re probably not going to drop “The River” or drop “The Dance” for it. Over there, you don’t have to make that choice.

The pitch will be general admission. As you well know, the industry is rethinking general admission after Astroworld. Are you in talks with them about how do you make a GA field as safe as possible? Every place we’ve gone, Europe has done it so right with the crushers — the big bars that keep people from pushing forward, the barricades, all that stuff. They do it really, really right over there. What you try to do [as an artist] is you try to get to as many people as you can, so no one’s sitting in one general direction where the pressure keeps [building]. So that really works good for us because we kind of spread out anyway — but we have had nothing but great memories over there, and great respect for how they handle the size crowds that they have.

We don’t know where the world’s go-ing to be COVID-wise in September. You can’t really discuss or plan for that yet, can you?

No, not yet. You don’t know. So hopefully you’re just making the best decisions you can on when the opportunities come up to make the choices.

Is there going to be new music between now and then?

I think there has to be something new that’s done in those five nights. Last time we

were in Ireland, we weren’t even through with “Tearing It Up (and Burnin’ It Down)” — and by the time the second chorus comes around, they’re already singing it with you and you see it on the film. It was crazy. So I think they enjoy new stuff as long as you play the old stuff.

Now let’s dissect each night. You have to as an entertainer believe, whether it’s true or not, someone’s going to come all five nights. We owe it to those people to make each show their own. So, yeah, we’ll be trying some some new stuff, maybe covers, maybe new material. We’ll see.

Are you going to stay in Dublin be-tween the two weekends?

Yeah, Miss Yearwood and I have decided we’re just going to kind of wear the coun-try out. We’re going to go see all the things we want to do in between those two week-ends. Do yourself a favor and do the love of your life a favor: Hold hands and go see one of the most beautiful countries on the planet.

Is Trisha going to come out during the middle of the show like she does in the U.S.?

We’ll see. We did the Ryman shows here and she didn’t do makeup because we play it by ear. So when she did come out, they wor-shipped her for it and it was cool — but you never knew if she was coming out or not.

Speaking of the Ryman and your recent shows there and at the Grand Ole Opry House: You’ve talked about after the stadium tour is over doing another resi-dency. What’s the latest with that?

Well, I had an amazing time here. I got to tell you, though, that the thing that’s really eating my gut — we’re doing the dive bar tour, and five of the seven of us [band mem-bers] are on those stages again. I would not be opposed to putting together a 45-to-60 city dive bar tour after the stadium tour. I just wouldn’t. I think it would be a blast, and I think it’d be a hell of a lot of fun. Business-wise, I think you lose money on it.

Especially the way you’re doing the dive bar dates now where tickets are all free. I think the tickets will be given away because I like the randomness of it. Like in Oklahoma City, there were 2.4 million

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entries for 700 seats. Then you get in there and you realize, holy crap — because they just drew them randomly, 80 percent of the people in it were guys, right? That was re-ally odd to me. It was like hanging out in the locker room. I like the fact of never know-ing who you’re playing for, except people that really want to get in there… Having a sponsor helps you when you’re saying that tickets have to be given away.

So the dive bars may happen before any new residency?

I think [they] have to, because the thing I learned about a residency with Steve Wynn [during Brooks’ 2009-2014 Las Vegas solo residency] was the reasons why residencies work is because you’re not doing anything else. There’s only one place this guy is going to be on this planet this night, and it should be special. [With] the residencies, they’re pouring out the money pretty pretty good, so you want your partner to at least break even on the entertainment side.

The Psychedelic Renaissance Is Ushering In a New Genre Of Electronic Music — And With It, New Revenue StreamsBY MARY CARREON

I pulled a black eye mask over my eyes and placed a pair of sound-canceling headphones over my ears. The sound of rain falling over piano notes and a

sporadic symbol rang in my ears as a nurse practitioner at Field Trip Health, a legal ketamine clinic in Los Angeles, injected 35 milligrams of FDA-approved ketamine into my left arm.

The sensation of moving backward on a

slow roller coaster consumed my body, as I descended to the bottom floor of a black abyss. I entered the upside-down. Low-tone chimes and soft swirling guitar twangs guided me down a corridor of nothingness until I morphed into the surging water that carved out the Grand Canyon. Effervescent xylophones over a soft synthesizer accom-panied a visual of my hair becoming moss growing on the sides of stone. My bones formed the edges of jagged cliff sides hang-ing over the ocean. My body disintegrated into the Earth. An hour later, soft wind chimes layered over rolling waves guided me back into my body.

Psychedelics-assisted therapy is trending. The media regularly hails it as a revolution-ary psychiatric treatment, and it’s becoming a health craze similar to CBD and cannabis in terms of the myriad benefits it’s purport-ed to offer. But this coverage consistently neglects that there’s a new genre of largely beat-less electronic music forming around experimental psychedelic therapies — and a new industry developing around sounds intended to help heal the array of mental health conditions that psychedelic therapies show efficacy with.

“The psychedelic space needs a lot of new music that is designed for it,” says Grammy nominated producer Jon Hopkins, who on November 12 released Music For Psychedelic Therapy, a nine-track album dedicated to the psychedelic liminal space. “Otherwise, you have a playlist made of a hundred differ-ent energies. It’s like someone new coming into the room every 10 minutes and bringing their stuff into your space.”

Music becomes a dwelling people inhabit during a psychedelic experience. Making music for psychedelic states is the equiva-lent of building a house with multiple rooms a journeyer can roam between. It creates a cohesive environment, one with a consis-tent design, energy and message, which can boost the positive effects of a trip. Cohesive music prevents a journeyer from being yanked out of a vision or other hallucina-tory experience and transported somewhere entirely different when a song changes on a playlist.

“It’s longform music,” says Hopkins, who’s globally renowned for making

electronic music with high-vibe beats, bass and sparkling textures. “The best way to describe it is like several different places that you imperceptibly move between over the course of [an hour-long] period.”

Indigenous people have utilized this sin-gular format of music for thousands of years in plant medicine traditions. The emergence of longform, Ableton-generated music for psychedelic therapy, then, is the Western adaptation of an ancient formula. Combined with the advent of genres like binaural beats — which claim to make the brain emit beta and alpha waves — electronic music has as-sumed scientific value. Rave culture’s roots in transcendence via dance music also plays a factor in why electronic sounds are regu-larly employed in this new treatment, and probably why electronic artists are among the first in the 21st century to design sound for hallucinatory realms.

But longform music for the psychedelic landscape is a relatively new development. In fact, most people who receive Western psychedelic therapy don’t currently hear unified soundscapes. They instead listen to an amalgamation of music on playlists curated by therapists or professional guides. This is partly due to the convenience of or-ganizing songs on platforms like Spotify. It’s also because, until recently, there’s hardly been any music designed specifically for the nuances and duration of various psychedelic terrains. (Hopkins’ new album is an hour long, approximately the same length as a ketamine trip.)

Johns Hopkins’ Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research curated a six-hour Spotify playlist for its clinical trial looking at the effect of psilocybin on major depressive disorder. It features Viv-aldi, Brahms, Bach, and Gregorian chants, a sound bowl track, one song by Alice Coltrane, and Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” and The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” as the closing tracks. The playlist is objectively all over the place, but listening to shuffled songs is standard in most psychedelic clinical trial settings.

The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which spon-sors and organizers psychedelic clinical trials throughout the United States and be-

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yond, uses less classically oriented playlists in their ongoing Phase III MDMA clinical trials. “Our music is generally without lyrics because lyrics prompt a story,” says Bruce Poulter, a clinical supervisor for MAPS’ MD-MA-assisted therapy research in Boulder, Colorado. “As an organization, we’re using music to support a process, not to drive it.”

Most of these playlists are a mashup of classical, meditation, tribal drums and mel-low ambient music. All can effectively guide someone through a psychedelic experience. The clinical trials are evidence of that, considering shuffled playlists, rather than dedicated music for psychedelic therapy, are are often used in these settings.

“Certainly some of the best music be-ing used for psychedelic therapy wasn’t intended for psychedelic therapy at all — in fact, most of it wasn’t,” says Justin Boreta of The Glitch Mob, who’s now making mu-sic for psychedelic therapy with his project Superposition, a collaboration with Mat-thew Davis of the LA Philharmonic — whose EP Form Less was nominated for best new age album at the 2020 Grammys.

“I think the difference between music for psychedelic therapy and other music used in that setting is intention,” Boreta continues. “This new music invites the care needed to go inward and what an artist would want to be present with someone on that journey. When an artist puts it all together, you start to hear something else emerge.”

Producer East Forest is on this same wavelength. In 2019, he released Music For Mushrooms: A Soundtrack For the Psyche-delic Practitioner, a five-hour record created for leading a group or individual through an entire psilocybin experience. (The album hit No. 7 on Billboard‘s New Age Albums chart, where it spent two weeks.) He, Boreta and Hopkins share the same goal: to create a sin-gular voice for individuals to follow through the psychedelic realm.

“Not having music specifically for [this new type of treatment] has been an over-sight in the psychedelic therapy space,” says East, who released another psychedelic soundscape entitled IN: A Soundtrack for the Psychedelic Practitioner Vol. II on October 22. “These playlists are fine, but they’re a bit inadequate in my mind. With ketamine

clinics and psilocybin therapists and more places starting to come online, people are beginning to realize that the music part in all of this is actually really important.”

Science backs the significance of mu-sic in psychedelic therapy. According to a 2021 study by the European College of Neuropharmacology in Denmark, psilocybin increases participants’ emotional response to music by an average of 60 percent. Other studies show that music plays the role of a “hidden therapist” in guided sessions. Within the context of legally sanctioned trips, this suggests that music facilitates the efficacy of these treatments.

To help fill the sound void, neuroscientist Dr. Mendel Kaelen developed Wavepaths, a music app for psychedelic therapists and practitioners. Through adaptive AI music-generation technology, the program builds supportive sound environments for tripping patients based on different factors, including emotions and the type of medicine a person consumes. It’s essentially a tool that allows therapists to build a sound experience for journeyers while the app’s technology strings together an original instrumental.

“What is it that conveys the process of letting go or breaking out in tears due to sadness, love or beauty?” says Kaelen, who spent nine years as a researcher at Impe-rial College London. In 2015 he authored one of the first studies looking at music’s role in psychedelic therapy, and it found that LSD significantly increases people’s emotional response to music. “You’re deal-ing with the building blocks of music at that point, which is what I’m interested in. There’s a philosophical component to what we [at Wavepaths] do that is essentially re-inventing the way music may happen. A consequence of that may be that there is a new genre in the making.”

Kaelen has worked with 22 professional musicians — including Hopkins, East and Boreta — thus far to build Wavepaths. Musicians are paid a fee determined by how much music a they provide to the system, plus royalties. Every sound package recorded becomes exclusive property of the Wavepaths platform to ensure freshness and novelty for all listeners.

Wavepaths is the only app of its kind

that delivers music for psychedelic therapy based on data from decades of research. Ac-cording to Kaelen, the program is licensed out to 300 legal clinics in over 30 different countries. Therapists and clinics subscribe to the app and pay a monthly fee based on the number of sessions a clinician leads or how big a facility is. Field Trip Health ketamine clinic is one of Wavepaths’ biggest clients, with clinics in over a dozen cities around the US and Canada.

According to Ronan Levy, co-founder and executive-chairman at Field Trip, Wave-paths is the standard for psychedelic ther-apy music. “Field Trip uses Wavepaths be-cause they are the clear market leader with the most sophisticated technology and the most history around developing music for psychedelic experiences,” he says. “Work-ing with organizations like Wavepaths that are data-focused, doing the research and are evidence-based is very consistent with who we are at Field Trip.”

Field Trip Health also commissions musi-cians to contribute to their app called Trip, which assists people with creating their set and setting, intention, journaling and integration after a consciousness-expanding experience. Each artist’s contract is negoti-ated on a case-by-case basis, according to Levy, while the music is licensed by Field Trip Digital LLC, the subsidiary that owns Trip.

East Forest’s latest album IN debuted on Wavepaths three months before it was re-leased to the public. Superposition also has music licensed to the app. “I certainly think there’s going to be a vast genre of music designed to support psychedelic therapies. There are artists already doing this, so you can see the genre already forming,” says Levy. “We have a whole bunch of musicians, including East Forest, Superposition and Laraaji, producing music for our app. It’s a cool way for people to start experimenting with the music that speaks to them in non-ordinary states of consciousness.”

While this new therapy music isn’t go-ing to start a party on the dancefloor, it’s still tourable, and it’s already flipping the conventional concert format on its head. East Forest performs his music live for audi-ences who take in the sound while laying on

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yoga mats. Earlier this year, Hopkins played his new album to a meditative crowd in an immersive listening environment in Austin, Texas. The vibe of these shows is BYOM- (bring your own medicine)-and-journey-to-the-music. Boreta is also working on plans to play live for group psychedelic therapy sessions. “I think as legalization continues to happen and there are more opportuni-ties to do this,” he says, “there will be more group therapy sessions with sitters and live music.”

It’s impossible not to acknowledge the role of Indigenous traditions in the forma-tion of this new genre, particularly when considering group therapy sessions. Music designed for ceremony is a tradition as old as time: Ayahuasceros in the Amazon sing Icaros, Tarahumara shamans from Mexico’s Chihuahua desert chant rhythmic peyote prayers and West-Central Africa’s Bwiti people play drums pounding at 170 beats per minute. Each style of music serves a different purpose. The Mazatec people from Huautla de Jimenez, a mountainous region on the outskirts of Oaxaca, Mexico, chant and sing poetic songs in mushroom language.

“The curandera, the healer, is singing and talking from the mushroom’s perspective. The voice of the healer is the voice of the mushroom being transcribed for the pa-tients or ceremony participants,” says Eliza-beth (not her real name), a woman involved in the lineage of the Mazatec tradition. (The Mazatec people were put on the map by author and ethnomycologist R. Gordon Was-son after he wrote a non-consensual feature in 1957 for Life magazine about Mazatec curandera, Maria Sabina.) “The songs are geared to go into the healing process of the journeyer. That’s why [the songs] are impro-vised in the moment: the healer is a conduit speaking for the patient or the group.”

While psychedelic music is a well-estab-lished sound, this new genre of therapy mu-sic is the West’s first intentional foray into making music for the psychedelic realm. It’s also the first time western culture has put aside its moral qualms with drugs to partici-pate in a healing tradition that fundamen-tally recognizes the accuracy of Indigenous wisdom. “Perhaps this is becoming more

of a genre in modern music for Western therapy,” says East, “but obviously, music is the essential guide and vehicle for the cer-emony, and in many ways it is the ceremony. It’s been this way for millennia.”

If psychedelics are the medicine, then music is part of the healing agent. It’s something humans have always known and science is just starting to prove, and it’s cata-lyzing the emergence of a new music culture in the West.

“Music will guide you into certain places, and we haven’t mapped that terrain in the West at all,” Hopkins says. “I feel like there’s a new synergy between modern electronic music and the forms of consciousness we can finally start to explore.”

Rosalie Trombley, Canadian Broadcast Legend and Bob Seger Muse, Dies at 82BY KAREN BLISS

Canadian broadcast legend Rosalie Trombley, a trailblazer for wom-en in the music industry who was immortalized by Bob Seger in

his 1973 single “Rosalie” as “everybody’s favorite little record girl,” died on Nov. 23. She was 82.

Seger sang, “she knows music…she’s got the power” in his 1973 song about Trom-bley, who for nearly two decades served as music director of the influential top 40 station CKLW-AM/The Big 8, situated in the Canadian border city of Windsor across from Detroit.

“Rosalie was an icon, a trailblazer, and our friend,” Seger posted on Facebook upon learning of her passing. “Through her hard work and incredible instincts, she achieved a rare level of influence and power in music. When she got behind your record other sta-tions would follow suit. She was literally a gatekeeper to national success and we were

so fortunate to have her support, especially on many of our early records. She was an integral part of our journey and we are eter-nally grateful. We will miss her.”

Trombley started as a receptionist at The Big 8 before ultimately being named as the station’s music director, a role she held from 1967 to 1984. She was known as “the girl with the golden ear,” pushing songs such as Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets,” Alice Cooper’s “Eighteen,” The Guess Who’s “These Eyes,” Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind,” Paul Anka’s “(You’re) Having My Baby,” Bachman Turn-er Overdrive’s “Takin’ Care of Business” and Burton Cummings’ “Stand Tall.”

Other artists Trombley has been credited with helping break at top 40 are Kiss, Andy Kim, The O’Jays, Chicago, Earth, Wind & Fire, Parliament–Funkadel-ic, Queen and Aerosmith.

Her impact south of the border was acknowledged when she became one of the first inductees at the Motor City Music Awards, where she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1992. At home, Cana-dian Music Week honored her by introduc-ing The Rosalie Award, which is presented annually at the Canadian Music and Broad-cast Industry Awards to “Canadian women who have blazed new trails in radio.” She received the first of those, of course, in 2005. In 2016, she was given the Canadian music industry’s highest honor for an industry member, the Juno Awards’ Walt Grealis Spe-cial Achievement Award, but couldn’t attend due to health issues.

CARAS/Juno Awards president and CEO Allan Reid told Billboard that he didn’t know Trombley well, but that he did service her music occasionally when he worked in radio promotion for A&M and she was at CKEY in Toronto. “We were honored to recognize Rosalie Trombley with the Walt Grealis Special Achievement Award,” says Reid. “She was the first woman to be awarded this honour by CARAS [since the award was created in 1984] and was a very deserving trailblazer from radio that made a huge difference in the lives of many artists.”

“I was a RCA record rep in early 70s so I made the weekly trek to CKLW then after that for my own label, Solid Gold,” Canadian

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Music Week president Neill Dixon tells Bill-board. “The Rosalie Award was started as the Trail Blazers Award to inspire young women to enter the broadcast industry, which eventually got shortened to the Rosa-lie Award in her honour.”

In a 2016 interview with Billboard, Trom-bley’s son Timothy said that despite her failing health, his mother did understand the magnitude of the award. “She’s thrilled. She feels very honored, very grateful for the recognition,” he said at the time. “She loved what she did, but she never looked at it in any kind of grand way. It was just what she had to do to raise her three kids and it just happened to be something that she really enjoyed doing.”

Trombley is survived by her son Timothy Trombley and his wife, Renée Trombley; son Todd Trombley; daughter Diane Lauzon and her husband, David Lauzon; and grandson Robert Lauzon. A private service will be held for family and close friends.

Canadians Are Now Hitting 2 Billion Weekly Audio StreamsBY KAREN BLISS

Canadian consumers are now streaming more than two bil-lion on-demand audio streams per week — a new benchmark for the

country’s music industry.For the third consecutive week, Canada

hit the two billion-streams mark in the week ending Nov. 25, according to MRC Data. The total 2.047 billion streams were up 15.9% from the same period last year.

Canada’s music industry has been get-ting close to two billion weekly streams for the last several months and finally hit the mark in the week ending Nov. 11 when with 2.013 billion streams. The following week, ending Nov. 18, when it earned 2.002 billion streams.

Overall, as is the worldwide trend,

streaming in Canada has been climbing. This year to date, streaming in Canada is outpacing 2020 by 12.6%. That’s compared to a 16.6% increase between 2019 and 2020. It’s been five years since MRC Data recorded a half-billion weekly on-de-mand audio streams in the country, three years since one billion weekly on-demand audio streams and two years since 1.5 bil-lion on-demand audio streams.

“The rate of growth is not going to be as strong as it used to be because as you get to a higher level, the rate of growth tends to decrease,” says an MRC Data spokesperson. “But there’s a very good chance we might hit the 100 billion streams at the end of the year for the full year, which we’ve never hit before. It’s close so it might be possible.”

Spanish Broadcasting System Launches New Salsa Radio Station in Miami: ‘It Fills a Need’BY JESSICA ROIZ

Salsa lovers, rejoice: Spanish Broad-casting System launched a new ra-dio station in Miami that will play salsa music at all times, Bill-

board has learned.Salsa 106.3FM, which began its broadcast-

ing transmissions on Nov. 25, targets South Florida’s Hispanic adults from 18 to 34 years of age and the 25 to 64 demographic, rotat-ing salsa gems from icons like Marc Anthony and Oscar D’ Leon to the newer generation of tropical artists such as Luis Vazquez.

“Listeners were asking for more salsa,” Jesus Salas, SBS’ EVP of programming, tells Billboard. “Most of the audio radio sta-tions have gone the Latin urban route.”

The brand-new station, with the slogan “Donde la Salsa Vive” (where salsa lives), becomes the second SBS Radio station

broadcasting a market-specific genre, following Puerto Rico’s salsa station Zeta 93FM.

“It’s a different station than all the others in the market and fills a need,” Salas elabo-rated. “Salsa music spans many decades and hundreds upon hundreds of proven super salsa hits. It already is a salsa success.”

Salsa 106.3FM now complements SBS’ other three radio stationsL Z-92.3 FM (Spanish Adult Contemporary and News), El Zol 106.7 (Tropical Latin Urban and Top 40), and Ritmo 95.7 (Cubaton y mas).

Marilyn Manson’s Home Raided Amid Abuse InvestigationBY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Authorities searched the home of rocker Marilyn Manson on Monday after allegations of physical and sexual abuse by

several women.Los Angeles County sheriff’s Deputy Eva

Jimenez said a search warrant was served on the home of Manson, whose legal name is Brian Hugh Warner. She would give no further details.

The Sheriff’s Department said in Febru-ary that its detectives had begun investi-gating Manson over reports of domestic violence between 2009 and 2011 in West Hollywood, where he lived at the time.

The women involved were not identified, but several women have publicly alleged this year that they were physically, sexually and emotionally abused by Manson around the time of the incidents under investigation, and some have filed lawsuits.

Manson’s attorney Howard E. King declined immediate comment. Manson has denied the allegations, and King has called them “provably false.”

The search of Manson’s home was first reported by TMZ.

The 52-year-old shock rocker’s former fi-

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ancee, Westworld actor Evan Rachel Wood, named him as her abuser for the first time in an Instagram post in February.

Manson called Wood’s statements “hor-rible distortions of reality.”

In May, Game of Thrones actor Esmé Bi-anco sued Marilyn Manson in federal court, alleging sexual, physical and emotional abuse. Bianco says that Manson violated human trafficking law by bringing her to California from England for non-existent roles in music videos and movies.

Manson deprived Bianco of food and sleep, locked her in a bedroom, whipped her, gave her electric shocks and threatened to enter her room and rape her during the night, the lawsuit alleges.

Bianco’s attorney said she also was inter-viewed by law enforcement.

And Manson’s former assistant accused him of sexual assault, battery and harass-ment in her own lawsuit, saying he used “his position of power, celebrity and connections to exploit and victimize during her employ-ment.”

Manson emerged as a musical star in the mid-1990s, known as much for courting public controversy as for hit songs like “The Beautiful People” and hit album’s like 1996’s “Antichrist Superstar” and 1998’s “Mechani-cal Animals.”

How Taylor Swift & Lil Nas X Landed Big Grammy Nominations Without Nods in the Pop FieldBY PAUL GREIN

Taylor Swift achieved something very unusual in the nominations for the 64th annual Grammy Awards: She received an album

of the year nod for evermore, an album that received no other nominations.

Swift has one other Grammy nod this year, as one of the songwriters on Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour, a credit she was granted because two songs on the album contain interpolations of old Swift songs.

Swift isn’t alone in being nominated in a marquee category after being passed over in a subordinate category. Lil Nas X received an album of the year nod for Montero, which was passed over for a nod for best pop vocal album. He also received a record of the year nod for “Montero (Call Me by Your Name),” which was passed over for a nod for best pop solo performance. In Lil Nas X’s case, there’s a plausible explanation for why he may have failed to register in those pop categories.

Lil Nas X’s only nomination in a genre-specific category was best melodic rap performance for “Industry Baby,” featuring Jack Harlow.

Grammy voters were allowed to vote in up to three musical fields, in addition to the General Field, the Academy’s name for the Big Four categories: album, record and song of the year, plus best new artist. It’s possible that some of Lil Nas X’s supporters in the Academy simply didn’t vote in the pop field, focusing instead on rap and R&B.

Two other record of the year nominees were passed over for nominations in perfor-mance categories this year. They are AB-BA’s “I Still Have Faith in You” (which was passed over for a nod for best pop duo/group performance) and Jon Batiste’s “Freedom” (which was passed over for a nod for best R&B performance).

ABBA’s record of the year nod is the group’s first Grammy nomination in any category, so its failure to land a nod for best pop duo/group performance is not a sur-prise. But Batiste’s failure to land a nod for best R&B performance is a surprise. He was this year’s leading Grammy nominee, with 11 total nominations, the most by any artist since Kendrick Lamar amassed 11 nods six years ago.

Justin Bieber’s soul/pop jam “Peaches,” featuring Daniel Caesar and Giveon, is nominated for song of the year, but was passed over for a nod for best R&B song. That could be in part because his support-ers in the Academy are more apt to vote in

the pop field than in R&B, but “Peaches” was nominated for best R&B performance – Bieber’s first nomination ever in an R&B category.

Kacey Musgraves and Brandi Car-lile both made headlines in the run-up to the announcement of the Grammy nomina-tions when they or their representatives expressed displeasure that their recordings had been moved.

Musgraves’ star-crossed was moved from best country album to best pop vocal album. It wound up not being nominated in that category, though a track from the album, “Camera Roll,” was nominated for best country solo performance and best country song. Those were Musgraves’ only nomina-tions this year. It’s possible that her voters would have been more inclined to find her and vote for her in the country album category.

Carlile’s “Right on Time” was moved from the American roots music field to pop. That didn’t deter her voters. She is nominated for three awards for “Right on Time” – record of the year, song of the year and best pop solo performance. Carlile is also nominated for song of the year for co-writing “A Beauti-ful Noise,” her collab with Alicia Keys, and as a guest artist on Brandy Clark’s “Same Devil,” which is vying for best American roots performance.

When the Recording Academy announced the 64th annual Grammy nominations on Tuesday, they simultaneously announced that they were bumping the number of nominees in each of the Big Four categories from eight to 10. They acknowledged then that this was a last-minute decision but framed that as a positive.

“Perhaps in the past, the leadership would have waited for the next awards cycle to make a change,” Harvey Mason jr., Academy CEO, and Tammy Hurt, chair of the board of trustees, said in a joint statement. “But one thing that we’ve heard loud and clear from you is that you are tired of waiting for big changes. You asked for – and you deserve — an organization that is as nimble and brave as you. In that spirit, we went to the board of trustees and made the case for this direc-tion, and just minutes ago, they adopted it.”

In an interview with Billboard last week,

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Mason denied that the decision was made based on knowing what finished No. 9 and No. 10 in the Big Four categories.

The New York Times published a report on Wednesday, authored by Ben Sisario and Joe Coscarelli, in which those reporters said they had gotten hold of a copy of the initial nominations list, when there just eight nominees in each of the Big Four categories, and thus could see what was added.

According to The Times’ story, the entries that moved up were: for record of the year, “I Still Have Faith in You” and “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)”; for album of the year, evermore and DONDA; for song of the year, “Kiss Me More” (co-written by Doja Cat and SZA, who performed it, and five more writers) and “Right on Time” (co-written by Carlile, who performed it, and three more writers); and for best new artist, Arooj Aftab and Baby Keem.

On Thursday, Mason issued the following statement. “Realizing that today is a time to celebrate Thanksgiving with family and friends, we reluctantly felt compelled to respond to the suggestive and sometimes erroneous reports we have seen in the media regarding the Academy’s decision to expand our general fields from eight to 10 nomi-nees…

“I applaud our board of trustees, for hav-ing the agility and foresight to approve this expansion as a way to honor more music, more artists and more genres. And yes, they did it quickly and decisively, and they did it without knowing who the additional nomi-nees would be. For those who would suggest any counter-narratives to stir drama and drive clicks, I would ask that you please take a fresh look at the new Recording Academy.”

Turning back to this year’s nominees, three of the 10 nominees for best new artist are nominated for the best album award in their respective genres. Rodrigo’s Sour is nominated for best pop vocal album (as well as album of the year), Arlo Parks’ Collapsed in Sunbeams and Japanese Breakfast’s Ju-bilee are both nominated for best alternative music album.

Four other nominees in that category received other nominations on this year’s ballot. Finneas has four other nomina-tions — three for work with his sister, Billie

Eilish, and one for his work as a producer on Bieber’s album Justice (Triple Chucks De-luxe). Baby Keem has two other nominations – one as a featured artist on West’s DON-DA and one for best rap performance for “Family Ties” (featuring Lamar). Aftab and The Kid LAROI each have one other nomi-nation. Aftab’s other nod is for best global music performance for “Mohabbat.” The Kid LAROI’s other nod is as a featured artist on Bieber’s album.

The three other best new artist nominees — Jimmie Allen, Glass Animals and Saweetie — received no other nominations.

Bill Cosby Prosecutors Urge Supreme Court to Restore ConvictionBY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Prosecutors urged the U.S. Su-preme Court to reinstate Bill Cosby’s sexual assault conviction, complaining in a petition released

Monday the verdict was thrown out over a questionable agreement that the comic claimed gave him lifetime immunity.

They said the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision in June to overturn Cosby’s conviction created a dangerous precedent by giving a press release the legal weight of an immunity agreement.

Montgomery County District Attorney Kevin Steele called the court’s decision “an indefensible rule,” predicting an onslaught of criminal appeals if it remains law.

“This decision as it stands will have far-reaching negative consequences beyond Montgomery County and Pennsylvania. The U.S. Supreme Court can right what we believe is a grievous wrong,” Steele wrote in the filing, which seeks review under the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Cosby’s lawyers have long argued that he relied on a promise that he would never be

charged when he gave damaging testimony in an accuser’s civil suit in 2006. The admis-sions were later used against him in two criminal trials.

The only written evidence of such a promise is a 2005 press release from then-prosecutor Bruce Castor, who said he did not have enough evidence to arrest Cosby.

The release included an ambiguous “cau-tion” that Castor “will reconsider this deci-sion should the need arise.” The parties have since spent years debating what that meant.

Steele’s bid to revive the case is a long shot. The U.S. Supreme Court accepts fewer than 1% of the petitions it receives. At least four justices on the nine-member court would have to agree to hear the case. A deci-sion on the petition, filed Wednesday but only made public Monday, is not expected for several months.

Castor’s successors, who gathered new evidence and arrested Cosby in 2015, doubt Castor ever made such a deal. Instead, they say Cosby had strategic reasons to give the deposition rather than invoke his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent, even if it backfired when “he slipped up” in his rambling testimony.

Cosby’s spokesperson called Steele “obsessed” with the actor and said he only hoped to please “the #MeToo mob.” Defense lawyers have long said the case should never have gone to trial because of what they call a “non-prosecution agreement.”

“This is a pathetic last-ditch effort that will not prevail. The Montgomery’s County’s DA’s fixation with Mr. Cosby is troubling to say the least,” spokesperson Andrew Wyatt said in a statement.

Cosby, 84, became the first celebrity convicted of sexual assault in the #MeToo era when the jury at his 2018 retrial found him guilty of drugging and molesting college sports administrator Andrea Constand in 2004.

He spent nearly three years in prison before Pennsylvania’s high court ordered his release.

Legal scholars and victim advocates will be watching closely to see if the Supreme Court takes an interest in the #MeToo case.

Two justices on the court, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, were accused

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of sexual misconduct during their bitterly fought confirmation hearings.

Appellate judges have voiced sharply dif-ferent views of the Cosby case. An inter-mediate state court upheld the conviction. Then the seven justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court wrote three separate opin-ions on it.

The majority found that Cosby relied on the decision not to prosecute him when he admitted giving a string of young women drugs and alcohol before sexual encounters. The court stopped short of finding that there was such an agreement, but said Cosby thought there was — and that reliance, they said, marred his conviction.

But prosecutors call that conclusion flawed. They note that Cosby’s lawyers objected strenuously to the deposition ques-tions rather than let him speak freely.

Cosby himself has never testified about any agreement or promise. The only alleged participant to come forward is Castor, a po-litical rival of Steele’s who went on to repre-sent President Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial. Castor said he made the promise to a now-dead defense lawyer for Cosby, and got nothing in return.

He never mentioned it to his top assistant, who reopened the case in 2015 after a fed-eral judge unsealed Cosby’s deposition.

At a remarkable pretrial hearing in Febru-ary 2016, Castor spent hours testifying for the defense. The judge found him not cred-ible and sent the case to trial.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, in its ruling, called Cosby’s arrest “an affront to fundamental fairness.”

Weeks later, the ruling prompted the state attorney general to dismiss charges against a jail guard accused of sexually abusing female inmates, because of an earlier agree-ment with county prosecutors that let him resign rather than face charges.

Cosby, a groundbreaking Black actor and comedian, created the top-ranked “Cosby Show” in the 1980s. A barrage of sexual assault allegations later destroyed his image as “America’s Dad” and led to multimillion-dollar court settlements with at least eight women. But Constand’s case was the only one to lead to criminal charges.

Five of Cosby’s accuser’s testified for the

prosecution to support Constand’s claims, testimony that Cosby’s lawyers also chal-lenged on appeal. However, the state’s high court declined to address the thorny issue of how many other accusers should be allowed to take the stand in a criminal case before the testimony becomes overkill.

In a recent memoir, Constand called the verdict less important than the growing sup-port for sexual assault survivors inspired by the #MeToo movement.

“The outcome of the trial seemed strange-ly unimportant. It was as if the world had again shifted in some much more significant way,” Constand wrote in the book, “The Moment.”

The Associated Press generally does not name alleged victims of sexual assault un-less they speak publicly, as Constand has done.

Cheryl Carmel, who served as jury foreperson at Cosby’s retrial, said she was glad to see Steele ask for the review.

“I firmly believe that what we decided was correct, or else I wouldn’t have made that decision … with the group. Having it overturned because of something that was outside of the facts of what we were given is disappointing,” Carmel told The AP on Monday.

Adele Charts All 12 Tracks From ’30’ on Billboard Hot 100BY XANDER ZELLNER

Adele sends all 12 tracks from the standard edition of her new LP 30 onto the latest Billboard Hot 100 (dated Dec. 4), with the

set’s lead single “Easy on Me” pacing her haul as it returns to No. 1. Plus, the album’s “Oh My God” opens at No. 5 on the Hot 100.

“Easy on Me” leads with 93.2 million radio airplay audience impressions (up 11%), 37.5 million U.S. streams (up 55%) and 27,600 downloads sold (up 11%) in the Nov.

19-25 tracking week (following 30‘s Nov. 19 release), according to MRC Data. “Oh My God” bows with 24.2 million streams, 6.8 million in radio reach and 3,300 sold.

As previously reported, 30 blasts in at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart with the biggest week of 2021 in terms of both equivalent album units (839,000) and album sales (692,000).

Here’s a recap of Adele’s 12 placements on the Dec. 4-dated Hot 100 (with all debuts except for “Easy on Me”):

Rank, Title No. 1, “Easy on Me” (up from No. 2; fifth week at No. 1) No. 5, “Oh My God” No. 18, “I Drink Wine” No. 23, “My Little Love” No, 26, “Can I Get It” No. 32, “To Be Loved” No. 41, “Strangers by Nature” No. 44, “Cry Your Heart Out” No. 49, “Hold On” No. 53, “All Night Parking (Interlude),” with Erroll Garner No. 55, “Woman Like Me” No. 56, “Love Is a Game”

The 11 debuts lift Adele’s career total to 25 Hot 100 entries, dating to her first, “Chasing Pavements,” in November 2008. Of those, 16 have reached the top 40.

As “Oh My God” debuts at No. 5, Adele has now notched six career top five Hot 100 hits, among nine top 10s. “Easy on Me” became her fifth No. 1.

Plus, thanks to his billing on “All Night Parking,” late jazz pianist Erroll Garner scores his first Hot 100 appearance, posthu-mously. Garner was born just over 100 years ago, in June 1921, and died in January 1977. The song (which interpolates Joey Pec-oraro’s 2017 track “Finding Parking,” which samples Garner’s 1964 song “No More Shadows”) also marks Adele’s first Hot 100 hit billed with another artist.

Further, with 12 Hot 100 entries in 2021, Adele ties Billie Eilish for the third-most this year among women, after Taylor Swift (40) and Summer Walker (18). Lil Durk leads all acts with 41 entries in 2021.

All charts dated Dec. 4 will update tomor-row (Nov. 30) on Billboard.com.

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Universal Music Canada CEO Jeffrey Remedios Appointed TIFF Board ChairBY EJ PANALIGAN

The Toronto International Film Festival announced on Tues-day the appointment of Jeffrey Remedios, chairman and CEO of

Universal Music Canada, as chair of TIFF’s board of directors, succeeding Jennifer Tory.

Remedios has been a member of the TIFF Board for five years; Tory held the chair role since 2016.

“I’d first like to congratulate and thank Jennifer Tory for her impeccable leadership and years of commitment and contribution to TIFF, particularly in recent years as the organization navigated these unprecedented times,” Remedios said of assuming Tory’s role. “I’d also like to thank our departing Board colleagues – Ellis, Wade, Shabin, Francis, Frank and Geoff – for their dedica-tion and countless contributions. I’m hum-bled and honored to serve TIFF’s mission in the role of Chair alongside my esteemed existing and new Board colleagues.”

Remedios also sits on the boards of the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts & Sci-ences, Music Canada and the board of Arts & Crafts, the independent music label he co-founded in 2003 and where he served as President until 2015. He founded Field Trip, downtown Toronto’s boutique community music and arts festival held at Historic Fort York and is former Chairman of FACTOR, a foundation that assists Canadian talent on recordings. He also served on the boards of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Canadian Opera Company, the Canadian Independent Music Association and the Minister’s Advi-sory Council for Arts & Culture.

TIFF also announced the departures of long-time members Ellis Jacob, Wade Oos-

terman and Shabin Mohamed. Other mem-bers stepping down are Francis Shen, Frank Kollmar and Geoff Beattie. Joining the board are Mary DePaoli, Danis Goulet, Allen Lau, Devorah Lithwick, and Laurie May.

Following the board news, TIFF an-nounced Cameron Bailey as its new CEO.

Ari Lennox Arrested in Amsterdam, Says She Was Racially ProfiledBY HERAN MAMO

Ari Lennox has been arrested in Amsterdam after she claims on social media to have been ra-cially profiled in the airport

Monday morning (Nov. 29).Early Monday, Lennox sent out a flurry of

tweets about her negative experience with airport security in Amsterdam, writing, “F— Amsterdam security. They hate black peo-ple.” In her final tweet, Lennox wrote, “I’m being arrested in Amsterdam for reacting to a woman racially profiling me.”

Dutch military police, who are in charge of security at Amsterdam Schipol airport, told Reuters that the singer (real name Courtney Shanade Salter) was arrested for disturbing public order after accusing airline personnel of racial discrimination. The police said Lennox was held for acting aggressively toward an airline official and for being drunk in public.

“Our unit found a woman full of emotions, that wouldn’t calm down,” spokesman Rob-ert van Kapel told the publication. “That’s why she had to be taken into custody.” It remains unclear how long the “Shea Butter Baby” star will remain in custody since po-lice are still investigating claims of possible threats Lennox made during the incident.

Billboard has reached out to Lennox’s reps for comment but did not hear back at press time.

The R&B singer performed her latest single “Pressure” and “Unloyal” with Sum-mer Walker from the latter’s Billboard 200-topping album Still Over It at the 2021 Soul Train Awards, which was taped at New York’s Apollo Theater on Nov. 20 and was broadcast Sunday night on BET.

See Lennox’s tweets about her arrest below.

Adele Returns to No. 1 on Billboard Artist 100 as ’30,’ ‘Easy on Me’ ReignBY XANDER ZELLNER

Adele revisits the top of the Bill-board Artist 100 chart (dated Dec. 4), reigning as the top musi-cal act in the U.S. for a 13th total

week, thanks to the explosive debut of her new LP, 30.

The set launches at No. 1 on the Bill-board 200 with 839,000 equivalent album units, according to MRC Data, earning the largest week of the year, surpassing Drake’s Certified Lover Boy (613,000 in its opening week in September). Of 30‘s starting sum, 692,000 are from album sales, already making it the top-selling album of all of 2021.

All 12 songs from 30 concurrently rank on the latest Billboard Hot 100, with lead single “Easy on Me” returning to No. 1for a fifth week on top and “Oh My God” debuting at No. 5.

With her 13th week at No. 1 (and first since the Nov. 6 chart), Adele ties Ed Sheeran for the eighth-most weeks spent at the Artist 100’s summit since the list began in 2014. Taylor Swift leads all acts with 50 weeks at No. 1, followed by Drake (36), The Weeknd (22), BTS (20), Ariana Grande (15), Justin Bieber and Post Malone (14 each).

Swift dips to No. 2 on the Artist 100, as Red (Taylor’s Version) likewise descends to No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and the set’s “All Too Well (Taylor’s Version)” places at

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No. 4 on the Hot 100, after debuting at No. 1 a week ago.

Sheeran holds at No. 3 on the Artist 100, powered by a pair of hits in the Hot 100’s top 10: “Shivers” at No. 6 and “Bad Habits” at No. 8. The Weeknd rises 8-4 as his LP The Highlights re-enters the Billboard 200 at No. 10 (37,000 units, up 724%), sparked in the latest tracking week by its release on vinyl, and Doja Cat lifts 6-5, as her single “Need to Know” holds at No. 9 on the Hot 100.

Plus, late rapper Young Dolph re-enters the Artist 100 at No. 36 after he was fatally shot in his hometown of Memphis on Nov. 17. He places four albums on the Billboard 200: Rich Slave at No. 50 (up from No. 126; 16,000 units, up 64%), followed by re-entries for Paper Route iLLUMINATi (No. 130), Dum and Dummer 2, with Key Glock (No. 142), and Bulletproof (No. 179). Young Dolph reached a No. 6 high on the Artist 100 in August 2020.

The Artist 100 measures artist activity across key metrics of music consumption, blending album and track sales, radio air-play, streaming and social media fan interac-tion to provide a weekly multi-dimensional ranking of artist popularity.

For all chart news, you can follow @bill-board and @billboardcharts on both Twitter and Instagram.

Zac Brown Band’s ‘Same Boat’ Floats to No. 1 on Country Airplay ChartBY JIM ASKER

Zac Brown Band notches its 14th No. 1, and first in over five years, on Billboard‘s Country Air-play chart as “Same Boat” sails

from No. 4 to the top of the tally dated Dec. 4. In the week ending Nov. 28, the song increased by 9% to 28.2 million audience impressions, according to MRC Data.

Frontman Zac Brown penned the track with Ben Simonetti and Jonathan Singleton.

“We wrote ‘Same Boat’ to help remind us of what we have in common and what makes us human,” Brown tells Billboard. “I’m really grateful that our fans are listen-ing and connecting with that feeling of togetherness and unity. It’s what makes our country great, and gives us all a little hope this holiday season.”

The song is the first single from Zac Brown Band’s seventh studio album, The Comeback. The set arrived at No. 3 on Top Country Albums in October (with 19,000 equivalent album units), marking the outfit’s 12th top 10.

“Same Boat” is the group’s first Coun-try Airplay No. 1 since April 2016, when “Beautiful Drug” led for a week. The band followed with two No. 14-peaking singles, “Castaway” (August 2016) and “My Old Man” (July 2017), before returning to the summit.

Zac Brown Band ties Rascal Flatts for the most Country Airplay No. 1s among groups of three or more members, dating to the sur-vey’s January 1990 launch. Lady A follows with 11 leaders. (Kenny Chesney leads all acts with 31 No. 1s.)

“Same Boat” is also Zac Brown Band’s first Country Airplay leader since the act signed with Warner Music Nashville in a partnership with the group’s label, Home Grown Music, in April. The band launched its major label career in 2008 on Atlantic Records and scored its first No. 1 that De-cember with its first entry, “Chicken Fried.”

“Same Boat” concurrently returns to the top 10 on the airplay-, sales- and streaming-based Hot Country Songs chart, up 12-9, af-ter hitting No. 8 on the Nov. 20 ranking. The song drew 4.9 million U.S. streams and sold 800 downloads in the week ending Nov. 25.

TWO FOR ‘TOO’ Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (Taylor’s Version)” dominates Hot Country Songs for a second week, after it soared in atop the chart dated Nov. 27 as her ninth No. 1.

The song, from Swift’s re-recorded LP Red (Taylor’s Version), maintains its reign driven most heavily by 25.8 million streams.

Meanwhile, Swift’s current country radio single, “I Bet You Think About Me (Taylor’s

Version) (From the Vault),” featuring Chris Stapleton, pushes 42-38 on Country Airplay (1.9 million impressions, up 19%).

Stapleton is also featured on a Country Airplay entry by another superstar, Adele, as “Easy on Me” ranks at No. 51 (915,000 in audience). Simultaneously, his latest solo single, “You Should Probably Leave,” holds at its No. 10 high (17.2 million, up 12%).

Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ Tops Holiday 100, As Chart Returns for the SeasonBY GARY TRUST

The Holiday 100 returns to Bill-board‘s charts menu, ranking the top seasonal songs of all eras via the same formula used for

the Billboard Hot 100, blending streaming, airplay and sales data.

The more the merrier: Mariah Carey‘s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” rules the Holiday 100 for a 46th week of the chart’s 51 total weeks since the list launched in 2011; it has topped the tally for 31 consecu-tive weeks, dating to the start of the 2015-16 holiday season.

The only other Holiday 100 No. 1s to date are Justin Bieber’s “Mistletoe,” for a week in the 2011-12 holiday season; Pentatonix’s “Little Drummer Boy” (one, 2013-14) and “Mary, Did You Know?” (two, 2014-15); and Ariana Grande’s “Santa Tell Me” (one, 2014-15).

Carey’s 1994 carol crowns all three Holiday 100 component charts (with all surveys dated Dec. 4): Holiday Streaming Songs (17.5 million U.S. streams, up 57%, in the Nov. 19-25 tracking week, according to MRC Data), Holiday Airplay (15.2 million audience impressions, up 87%) and Holiday Digital Song Sales (3,800 sold, up 42%).

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As announced Nov. 18, the song also boasts top honors on Billboard‘s Greatest of All Time Holiday 100 Songs chart.

Rounding out the Holiday 100’s top five is a quartet of classics released in the 1950s-60s: Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” (No. 2), Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock” (No. 3), Burl Ives’ “A Holly Jolly Christmas” (No. 4) and Andy Williams’ “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” (No. 5).

Meanwhile, three songs newly released this holiday season debut on the Holiday 100: Dan + Shay’s “Pick Out a Christmas Tree” (No. 48, led by 4.5 million streams, up 105%); Kelly Clarkson’s “Christmas Isn’t Canceled (Just You)” (No. 64; 2.9 million, up 31%); and Taylor Swift’s “Christmas Tree Farm (Old Timey Version)” (No. 73; 2.5 million, following its Nov. 22 release). Dan + Shay and Swift’s songs are Amazon Music exclusives, while Clarkson’s is from her LP When Christmas Comes Around…, which jingled in at No. 1 on Billboard‘s Top Holiday Albums chart dated Oct. 30.

The entire latest Holiday 100, along with all seasonal and other charts, will update on Billboard.com tomorrow (Nov. 30).

Olivia Rodrigo, H.E.R. and The Weeknd Win Top Apple Music AwardsBY THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Olivia Rodrigo, H.E.R. and The Weeknd all won honors at a revamped Apple Music Awards, which has grown larger to

encompass global music patterns. Rodrigo was named breakthrough artist of the year, her Sour was named album of the year and her single “drivers license” was song of the year.

The streaming service crowned H.E.R. as songwriter of the year and The Weeknd

was named global artist of the year, a step up from the category last year which was mere artist of the year. “I am very honored and blessed to receive this recognition,” H.E.R. said in a statement. “As a young Black and Filipino artist, and a woman who is on the stage giving my all, there’s no doubt that representation is important.”

The Weeknd thanked Apple for the honor and being supportive “not only for my work but also for great music by newer artists where it matters so much for creators to be found and supported.” The Apple Music Awards, now in its third year, also intro-duced a new category of awards recognizing artists from five countries and regions — Af-rica, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia — who made the greatest impact culturally and on the charts in their respective countries and regions.

The winners are Aya Nakamura for the French region, OFFICIAL HIGE DANDism for Japan, RIN for Germany, Scriptonite for Russia and Wizkid for Africa.

“We’re thrilled to honor the artists that are shaping culture and connecting with fans around the world on Apple Music,” said Oliver Schusser, Apple’s vice president of Apple Music and Beats. “This year we’re also recognizing more regional artists, showing the world the impact of extraor-dinary talented musicians who are making waves globally.”

The service said winners are chosen through a process that reflects both Apple Music’s editorial perspective and what customers around the world are listening to the most. Last year, rapper Lil Baby was named artist of the year by Apple, Taylor Swift was named songwriter of the year and Megan Thee Stallion was honored with breakthrough artist of the year.

BTS Claims Top Two Spots on Hot Trending Songs Chart, MONSTA X Debuts In Top 10BY XANDER ZELLNER

BTS commands the top two posi-tions on Billboard‘s weekly Hot Trending Songs chart (dated Dec. 4), powered by Twitter,

thanks to its former Billboard Hot 100 lead-ers “Butter,” at No. 1, and “My Universe,” with Coldplay, at No. 2.

“Butter” reigns for a fifth week with 4.5 million Twitter mentions in the track-ing week, which ran from Friday Nov. 19 through Thursday, Nov. 25. The song took home the trophy for favorite pop song at the American Music Awards, which aired Nov. 21 on ABC, while BTS also won for artist of the year and favorite pop duo or group. Plus, as announced Nov. 23, “But-ter” is nominated for best pop duo/group performance at the 64th annual Grammy Awards.

“My Universe” follows on Hot Trending Songs with 1.5 million mentions (up 114%) in the period, after the groups performed the collaboration on the AMAs.

BTS has now ruled the weekly iteration of Hot Trending Songs for all six weeks of the chart’s existence; the South Korean stars’ “Permission to Dance,” also a former Hot 100 No. 1, led the inaugural list (dated Oct. 30).

Billboard‘s Hot Trending Songs charts, powered by Twitter and sponsored Capital One, track global music-related trends and conversations in real-time across Twitter, viewable over either the last 24 hours or past seven days. A weekly, 20-position ver-sion of the chart, covering activity from Fri-day through Thursday of each week, posts alongside Billboard‘s other weekly charts on Billboard.com each Tuesday. The charts highlight buzz around new releases, award

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shows, festival moments, music nostalgia and more. Hot Trending Songs is unique in that it tracks what songs people are talking about, not necessarily what they’re listen-ing to.

Elsewhere in the Hot Trending Songs top 10, MONSTA X’s “Rush Hour” debuts at No. 9. The track is from the group’s new EP, No Limit, released Nov. 19.

Among other Hot Trending Songs debuts, Stray Kids’ “Christmas EveL” enters at No. 15, with its parent EP of the same name hav-ing arrived Nov. 29, and Mark Tuan’s “Last Breath” bows at No. 16 following its Nov. 12 release.

Plus, Stylers and the BTS Army teamed up to help Jungkook debut at No. 20 with his cover of Harry Styles’ “Falling.” The BTS member surprised fans with his version of the track in October.

Keep visiting Billboard.com to check out the constantly evolving rankings, and check back Tuesdays for each weekly chart.

Adele’s ‘30’ Aiming for Second Week at No. 1 In U.K.BY LARS BRANDLE

Adele is heading for a second-straight chart double in the U.K., as her record-busting album 30 (Columbia) takes pole-

position in the race to No. 1.The London singer’s fourth album leads

the midweek chart, the OCC reports, ahead of Westlife’s new effort Wild Dreams (East West/Rhino), which is on track for a No. 2 debut for it would be the veteran Irish boy band’s 14th U.K. Top 10 appearance.

Last week, 30 blasted to the summit of the Official U.K. Albums chart, punching through with the fastest sales for any album this year, and the highest first-week tally for a female album in that territory since Adele’s 25 in 2015.

There’s Christmas joy in this week’s

chart update. Further down the midweek tally, Take That’s Gary Barlow is chas-ing his fifth Top 10 effort with The Dream of Christmas (Polydor), ringing in at No. 4; while Michael Buble’s holidays clas-sic Christmas (Reprise) lifts 17-7.

Outside the Top 10, David Bowie’s post-humous boxed set Brilliant Adventure (Par-lophone) is tracking for a No. 12 start, while another legendary British act, Deep Purple, is set to enter the survey with Turning To Crime (Ear Music), new at No. 15.

It’s been a long and winding road for The Beatles, whose final album Let It Be (Apple Corps) is set to reenter the Top 40 off the back of Peter Jackson’s three-part Disney+ documentary, Get Back. Originally released in 1970, Let Is Be flies 63-30 on the Official U.K. Albums Chart Update.

Over on the U.K.’s singles chart blast, Adele maintains a 1-2 with “Easy On Me” and “I Drink Wine,” respectively, while Mariah Carey’s Christmas favorite “All I Want For Christmas Is You” (Colum-bia) powers up the chart-blast, 25-3.

The Official U.K. Singles and Albums Charts are published late Friday, local time.

Ciara, Billy Porter & Liza Koshy to Co-Host Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan SeacrestBY HERAN MAMO

Ciara, Billy Porter and Liza Koshy will all return to co-host Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest 2022, ABC

and MRC Live & Alternative announced Tuesday (Nov. 30).

Seacrest, the show’s 17-time host and executive producer, will headline the New Year’s festivities from Times Square in New York City for its 50th anniversary.

Veteran hostess and Grammy-winning superstar Ciara will celebrate her fifth year taking over the Los Angeles party, where award-winning DJ D-Nice will spin. Emmy-, Grammy- and Tony-winning actor Porter will co-host the Central Time Zone count-down from New Orleans, which he also did in 2019. Meanwhile, Koshy, who previously served as one of the show’s correspon-dents in 2019, will make her grand return alongside Seacrest in New York. And Jessie James Decker will return as the Powerball correspondent for the third year in a row.

For its golden anniversary, the show will continue its tradition of broadcasting five-and-a-half hours worth of performances along with glimpses of New Year’s celebra-tions around the world until 2 a.m. ET. But there’s a twist this year: There will be an additional fourth location, in Puerto Rico, for the show’s first-ever Spanish-language countdown.

Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest 2022 will air live on Friday, Dec. 31, starting at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.

Miley Cyrus to Co-Host ‘Miley’s New Year’s Eve Party’ With Pete DavidsonBY GLENN ROWLEY

It’s official: New Year’s Eve 2021 will be a “Party in the U.S.A.” On Monday (Nov. 29), NBC announced that Miley Cyrus is set to host the network’s

special to ring in 2022.Titled Miley’s New Year’s Eve Party, the

telecast will be executive produced by Lorne Michaels and co-hosted by Pete Davidson. Additional celebrity guests and musical performances for the evening are expected to be announced in coming weeks.

“In what is sure to be an exciting and fun evening, we are looking forward to partner-ing with Lorne Michaels and ringing in 2022

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with a night of incredible entertainment, led by Miley and Pete,” said NBCUniversal ex-ecutive vice president of live events, specials and E! News Jen Neal said in a statement.

Miley’s New Year’s Eve Party will be broadcast live from Miami on the night of Dec. 31 from 10 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. ET on NBC. Viewers will also be able to livestream the festivities on Peacock, the network’s streaming service.

Meanwhile, in the coming year, the pop singer will resume touring in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on all things live music. In fact, she’s already slated to perform at the 2022 Super Bowl Music Fest as well as headline Lollapaloo-za’s Argentinian and Brazilian itera-tions alongside Foo Fighters, The Strokes, Doja Cat, A$AP Rocky and Martin Garrix.

While Cyrus’ excellent rock-tinged 2020 studio set Plastic Hearts was skipped in this year’s Grammy nominations, the star took the snub in stride, tweeting out a list of 30 other iconic artists who never won a Grammy and writing, “In good company” with an unbothered “rock on” emoji.

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