Data is notably scarce at present, but depending which way the winds blow we may witness a chart battle between Warner Bros. crooner Josh Groban and RCA's new-school lad band Brockhampton. 

Carrie Underwood has scored a #1 Top 50 Chart bow for Cry Pretty with 260k, a smashing first foray for Capitol Nashville.

Just as there are certain things we can count on, like summer turning to fall as the plane of the equator passes through the center of the sun (look it up), there are certain people we can count on to take care of business. Like...

Streaming is the dominant driver in the RIAA’s just-released mid-year report on the U.S. music business, accounting for a stunning 75% of the revenue pie for the first half of 2018, while paid subscriptions in particular have grown 33% y-o-y. 

Our own Michelle S. on the posthumous new collaboration “Falling Down” (Columbia) from Lil Peep and XXXTentacion, which is heartbreaking in light of their untimely passing but also as a reminder of the creative power that's been lost.

Carrie Underwood will debut at #1 on this week’s HITS Top 50 with Cry Pretty, her first album for Capitol Nashville. 6lack (LVRN/Interscope) will bow in the Top 5.

Warner/Chappell chieftain Jon Platt will replace Marty Bandier when he steps down as head of Sony/ATV at the end of March.

Marty Bandier, who has just confirmed that he’ll be leaving the top post at Sony/ATV next March, didn’t enter the music business until he was 34, but he made up for lost time, as this excerpt from History of the Music Biz Vol. 3: The Rainmakers recounts.

With word that Warner/Chappell chief Jon Platt will be taking the reins at Sony/ATV, we offer this excerpt from a profile on the acclaimed publishing exec—which will appear in our forthcoming History of the Music Biz Vol. 3: Rainmakers—tracing an early portion of his extraordinary career.

These days, if you wanna be big, it helps to be lil. Lil Pump has the week’s most-streamed track on our Streaming Songs Chart, the debuting “I Love It,” with an assist from Kanye West; Lil Baby is #4 and #12, with Gunna and Drake, respectively, riding shotgun. And the Lil Peep-XXXTentacion collab has racked up north of 9m streams in its first two days of release to finish at #24, with nowhere to go but up.

After experiencing a collective Eminem high the previous week, as the rap legend raked in $1.8m, Streaming Nation has come back down to earth. The big exception to the trend is the Kanye-Pump collab “I Love It,” which has zipped past the competition like a long bomb from Patrick Mahomes to Tyreek Hill...