Month: October 2023

Ed Sheeran season is here.

The superstar English singer and songwriter is cruising to No. 1 on the U.K. chart with Autumn Variations (via Gingerbread Man), which dropped last Friday (Sept. 29) for Sheeran’s second long-play release of the year.

Based on sales and streaming data published by the Official Charts Company, Autumn Variations is outselling its nearest competitor by more than two-to-one, to lead the chart blast.

If it holds its course, Sheeran will extend his flawless streak of No. 1 studio albums to seven, a run that began with his 2011 debut LP + (plus).

Produced with Aaron Dessner, Autumn Variations should give Sheeran his second leader on the Official U.K. Albums Chart in 2023, after – (subtract) logged two weeks at the summit in June.

Coming in at No. 2 on the latest Official Chart Update is Porcupine Tree member Steven Wilson‘s solo effort The Harmony Codex (SW Records). If it stays on target, The Harmony Codex would be Wilson’s highest charting solo effort, improving on peak positions of 2017’s To The Bone (No. 3) and 2021’s The Future Bites (No. 4).

Completing the podium at the midweek stage is British R&B artist Jorja Smith’s sophomore album Falling Or Flying (FAMM). It’s new at No. 3 on the chart blast, and should give the BRITs Critics Choice award winner a third U.K. top 10 appearance.

Further down, Kentucky rock act Black Stone Cherry could nab a fourth U.K. top 10 with Screamin’ At The Sky (Mascot), set to bow at No. 5; U.K. retro synth-pop trio Gunship could ride to a first U.K. top 10 with concept album Unicorn (Horsie In The Hedge), poised for a No. 7 start; while British soul veteran Beverley Knight who could bag her fifth top 10 with The Fifth Chapter (Tag8), set to start at No. 10.

Keep an eye out for potential top 40 berths from Anna Lapwood (LUNA at No. 26 via Sony Classical), Wilco (Cousin at No. 29 via Sony Music CG), Orb & David Gilmour (Metallic Spheres In Colour at No. 31 via Sony Music CG), Hawkwind (Space Ritual at No. 32 via Atomhenge/Cherry Red), 2023 U.K. Eurovision rep Mae Muller (Sorry I’m Late at No. 33 via Capitol) and Andrew Cushin (Waiting For The Rain at No. 35 via Strap Originals).

All will be revealed when the Official U.K. Albums Chart is published late Friday, Oct. 6.

Selena Gomez is gearing up to host her first Rare Impact Fund Benefit, and the superstar already has a full list of incredible A-list experiences and items up for auction at the event.

Among the list of auction items for a good cause is a signed Lionel Messi jersey, a signed guitar from Jewel, a VIP Luke Combs concert. You can check out the full live auction list here.

The Only Murders in the Building star and Rare Beauty founder will host the first Rare Impact Fund Benefit on Oct. 4 in Los Angeles at Nya Studios, with all ticket proceeds supporting the Rare Impact Fund. The benefit, naturally, is hosted by Gomez’s own Rare Beauty cosmetics line, while the fund itself aims to maintain openness regarding mental health stigma and provide education to enquiring youth worldwide. One percent of Rare Beauty’s sales are also donated to the fund.

Gomez’s Only Murders in the Building co-star Martin Short and “Wolves” collaborator Marshmello are slated to join the event, with additional performers and entertainment to be announced at a later date. In addition to people speaking at the event, there will also be a live auction that will take place.

John Mayer is ready to share his musical taste with SiriusXM users.

The seven-time Grammy winning superstar is launching an exclusive, year-round channel called Life With John Mayer. The channel, which is set to become available in November, won’t be defined by genre, per a press release, by by time of day and day of the week. The show will be a “musical experience hand-selected by the guitarist and songwriter and an ever-evolving world of music built from Mayer’s classics, collaborations and never-before-heard material blended in with the music he loves,” according to a description.

“I’ve had a dream over the last several years to create a dynamic, real-time music channel that focuses less on genre and more on our changing emotional states throughout the days and weeks,” said Mayer in a press release. “It’s a highly ambitious project, and SiriusXM is the perfect partner to build this experience with. I look forward to creating and fostering a sense of community through this channel, and shining a light on what music does best – providing the soundtrack to our lives.”

“Life with John Mayer will be a showcase for John’s exceptionally deep love of music. He is very engaged in every aspect of this channel and has an exciting vision for what our listeners will experience when they listen. To have a musician as brilliant as John creating and curating a daily soundtrack for all of us is very special, and we’re honored and proud that John has chosen SiriusXM as the place where his fans can share this musical experience with him,” added Scott Greenstein, SiriusXM’s President and Chief Content Officer.

See the teaser for Life With John Mayer below.

Get ready for Life With @JohnMayer…the channel that changes with you! John is the music director for your life, curating an exclusive year-round SiriusXM channel that recognizes that different moods require different music and every day requires careful curation. pic.twitter.com/uAspMYN4FA

— SiriusXM (@SIRIUSXM) October 2, 2023

Sia isn’t hiding procedures she’s gotten done.

The “Chandelier” singer attended the fifth annual Daytime Beauty Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday (Oct. 1), where she presented plastic surgeon Dr. Ben Talei with the award for outstanding achievement in medicine. During her speech, she revealed that she has personal experience with Dr. Talei’s work, as he has given her a face lift.

“I’m a pop star that normally hides my face and doesn’t lie about s—. I got an amazing face lift from Dr. Talei,” Sia said, according to People. “He is incredible. And he is doing so much good work — and not just for the pop stars of the world.”

She continued, “I was showing someone in the back my before-and-afters right before I came on. People go, ‘You look nice.’ I’m like, ‘Dr. Ben Talei facelift’ for anything you could ever want. I love him, I can’t say enough good about him.”

Over in the music world, Sia has a lot coming up. The star released her new single “Gimme Love” in September, marking the initial taste of her’s first new solo pop album in eight years, Reasonable Woman, which she said in a post is due out in the spring of next year.

Sia’s last studio album was 2016’s This Is Acting, which was mostly comprised of songs she wrote for other artists that were not released on their albums and featured the singles “Alive,” “Cheap Thrills,” “The Greatest” and “Unstoppable.” She followed up with the holiday album Everyday Is Christmas in 2017 and the 2021 soundtrack album Music — Songs From and Inspired by the Motion Picture, the companion to her directorial debut of the same name.

Since entering the dance scene nearly a decade back, Spencer Brown has made his name on progressive house music that’s lush, emotive and pristinely produced.

That last part is not a coincidence. Brown, 29, has always been a hyper-perfectionist, and in the last few years he’s gotten a better understanding about why.

“There’s been symptoms and signs since I was a kid,” Brown tells Billboard over Zoom. “It got really intense five or six years ago, but I didn’t know what was going on.”

What was going on was obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), which Brown was formally diagnosed with during the pandemic but had always been a part of his life. The American Psychiatry Association defines OCD as “a disorder in which people have recurring, unwanted thoughts, ideas or sensations (obsessions). To get rid of the thoughts, they feel driven to do something repetitively (compulsions).”

For Brown, OCD manifests as an extreme discomfort with uncertainty, with his obsessive thought loops being the compulsion attempting to mitigate it. Since childhood, Brown would find six different ways to ask his parents the same question. As an adult, he’d barrage his team with texts about how tickets to his shows were selling and ask 40 different people which of two mixes they thought sounded better.

“The thing is with with OCD, a lot of people think it means you have to like clean everything,” Brown says. “But in reality, it can come out in so many different ways and for me, it’s almost purely a mental thing. The ritual, so to speak, of milling over things that are uncertain.”

Certainty can be hard to come by for most people, and can be especially elusive for someone in a profession that relies on ticket sales, streams and consistent artistic inspiration. But after starting work with a therapist, Brown says he’s “learned how to sit with being uncertain about something better than I used to.”

It thus follows that his latest album is called Equanimity, a word Merriam-Webster defines as “evenness of mind especially under stress.” Out this past Friday (Sept. 29) via diviine, the album — Brown’s third studio LP — took him four years to make and found him spending 12-18 hours in the study every day during the last three months of production. He says that when he listens to it, he’s certain it’s his best work to date.

“The theme of this album is personal growth, not letting things out of your control affect your mental state,” he says. “That was a lesson I learned that I tried to capture into this music.”

Here, Brown talks about his diagnosis.

Tell me about how your OCD manifests.

With music, OCD for me comes out in perfectionism. I think that’s the blessing of this thing, because I’m so dialed in on what I’m doing. If it’s not a perfect mix, I’m gonna just keep on working on it and testing it out. I have an issue that I’ll finish it and turn it into mastering, then they’ll send the master back, I’ll sit with it and be like, “is this messed up?” I’ll sit with those thoughts, then maybe a couple of weeks later I’ll have to go back and redo the whole thing.

It sometimes drives people who work with me nuts, but we’ve learned to work in a productive way, where my team is fully aware of how my brain works, and I’m fully aware of how my brain works. They understand that sometimes I have this thing, and they totally accept that.

Are there are other aspects?

I’ve had to make a conscious effort to not bother my team too much. I used to really worry all the time about ticket sales. For a big show, let’s say a couple days before we only have 200 tickets sold, and we need to sell 1,500 tickets. I would be freaking out like, “Is this going to be bad? Are people going to show up?”

I’d be blowing up my team like, “Do you think there’s gonna be walk ups?” But I get to the show and maybe 1,000 people buy a ticket the day of the show, and it’s a packed show. And I’m like, “Why did I spend days having so much anxiety about how this is going to be, when really all I can do is just promote the show?” So now we have a thing on my team. I don’t get ticket sales number counts. No one gives me any of that stuff anymore. It’s really, really helpful for me.

When did that boundary get put in place?

I would say post-COVID. I really started to understand how OCD affects my life about a year into COVID, which is a funny thing, because there’s so much uncertainty with COVID. That was a true test of not letting [OCD] run my life. Basically I learned practicing equanimity, which is which is what my album is called. That means all these things can be happening around you, but you have to ground yourself and understand it’s okay that you don’t know… You have to be okay with uncertainty.

What was the response within your peer group, when you shared the diagnosis?

I do have friends who deal with similar things. But obviously everyone’s very supportive. It’s like, this is my personality. This is how I have been my whole life. All that’s changed is putting a label on how my brain works and realizing it’s slightly different than how other people’s brains work.

Everyone is totally understanding, especially my team, my peers, my collaborators. Everyone knows that this is how I am.

What other adjustments have you made?

Pre-COVID, before I learned how OCD manifests in my life, all I would do is cause myself anxiety. It was this anxiety cycle of uncertainty causing anxiety, then I would do things to try to get certainty, like texting 40 different people sending them two mixes saying “which mix is better?”

Half the people would like mix B, and half the people would like mix A, so then I would go into this loop of like, “oh my gosh, which one is right?” Then I would go to my car and test it. I would go to the club and test it. I would test it in my studio and on my headphones and on my air pod, over and over and over and over. At some point, you just need to decide like, “This is what it is. I’m done.” The past is the past, and I need to move on instead of dwelling.

And both versions are probably good.

They’re different. That’s it’s art is something I had to also had to learn. Some of these creative decisions, there is no right or wrong.

What other tools have you used to work with your OCD?

I was going into this therapist who’s incredible. And I was talking through all these things that were going in my head that I couldn’t explain. I would say things like “I don’t know if this, or I don’t know if that and it’s giving me anxiety.”

He’d say, “You’re looking for certainty on this, and I can’t give it to you.” All the sessions turned into me basically speaking to a wall. I love the guy, but that was the whole point of the therapy. I learned the same feeling I’m having with my therapist, where he won’t give me certainty on what I have uncertainty for, I need to apply this to my life and music and everything. The lesson is that that there’s no certainty in a lot of things in life, and you just need to be okay with sitting with that.

Have you developed any particular methods of sitting with that, so to speak?

I had a really powerful experience at Burning Man [this year.] I boiled down my career to four principles that, if I do them, it’s all I need to focus on. One is to be a good person to everyone around me — team, venues, promoters, anyone around me. First and foremost, just be kind to everybody.

Number two is to love the music that I’m making. If I’m in the studio feeling like I’m making music for somebody else, or for some other reason other than the love of what I’m making, that’s not the right reason to make it.

Number three, when I’m playing shows, play the music I love, don’t cater to anyone; don’t pander to anyone. If it comes out of the speakers, it must come from the heart for me.

Number four is creating authentic content that is aligned with my values. It doesn’t matter what’s trending or what people think I should do. It must be authentic. These four things are what I’m focusing on in my career. The rest of the stuff like the ticket sales, the numbers, that’s all stuff I need to not focus on. Or comparing myself to others. There’s a lot of uncertainty in that of “Why did they get that?” None of that stuff is relevant.

As Latin music continues to gain prominence worldwide, Latin music festivals have also been boosted globally in recent years. This was the topic of conversation at Monday’s (Oct. 2) The Art of the Festival panel at Billboard Latin Music Week — presented by Viña del Mar, the oldest and largest music festival in Latin America.

Featuring Chris Den Uijl (co-founder of La Familia Presenta), John Frias (CEO, Frias Entertainment Group, Bésame Mucho Music Festival), Alfonso Lanza García (CCO of Primavera Sound, CEO, Vampire Studio), and Daniel Merino (producer of Festival Viña del Mar), the panelists discussed what makes a successful fest today, from the best festival producers in the world.

Moderated by Bruno Del Granado, head of global Latin music touring group of CAA (Creative Artists Agency), the panel went behind the scenes of crafting and sustaining a successful Latin music festival in this era.

“Viña has its own identity,” says Merino, who helps run the iconic Chilean event, which started in 1960. He explains that it’s the only festival that doubles as a television show and lasts one full week.

Rosarito, Mexico’s own Baja Beach Fest began five years ago as the only exclusively reggaetón festival in the world. Den Uijl explained how the West Coast had no essential event in the Latin music space at the time. “The West Coast has 40 million people living in California, and 17 million are Mexicans,” he says. He also mentions how he expanded with Sueños in Chicago, while also programming more música Mexicana talent as the genre has had a massive spike internationally.

Conversely, with L.A.’s Bésame Mucho festival, Frias dives into how they found their niche by not going with the current mainstream; instead finding an audience in underserved markets by booking nostalgic acts.

As Bad Bunny became the first Latin music act to headline Coachella this year, Del Granado asked the U.S.-based festival runners if their job had become more difficult. The answer is not so simple, but they all agreed that the genre’s popularity has attracted audiences beyond the Latino demographic. “Where we’re competing is in the hard tickets,” says Den Uijl

“After so long, artists want to perform at Primavera Sound. It’s something that artists are looking for, it gives them cache, it gives them prestige, and we love it,” says Garza Garcia. Primavera Sound, which was founded in 2001 and is now based in different major cities of Spain, has drawn some of the biggest acts from both the American mainstream and Latin realm.

Celebrated for more than 30 years, the 2023 edition of Latin Music Week will include a Superstar Q&A with Shakira; the Legends on Legends chat with Chencho Corleone and Vico C; Making the Hit Live! with Carin León and Pedro Capó; a panel with RBD’s Christian Chávez, Christopher von Uckermann, and Maite Perroni; Superstar Songwriter discussion with Edgar Barrera and Keityn, among many other panels, Q&As and workshops. See the ultimate Latin Music Week guide here. This year’s Latin Music Week, taking place Oct. 2-6, also includes showcases by Peso Pluma, Mike Bahía and Greeicy, DannyLux and Fonseca, to name a few. Check out the dates and times for the showcases throughout the week here.

Official partners of the 2023 Billboard Latin Music Week include AT&T, Cheetos, CN Bank, Delta Air Lines, Lexus, Netflix, Michelob ULTRA and Smirnoff.

Latin Music Week coincides with the 2023 Billboard Latin Music Awards ceremony, which will broadcast live from the Watsco Center in Coral Gables, Fla., on Thursday (Oct. 5) and will air on Telemundo. It will also broadcast simultaneously on Universo, Peacock, the Telemundo App, and throughout Latin America and the Caribbean on Telemundo Internacional.