Taylor Swift Still Tops the Charts

Taylor Swift
Jason Tate

Variety:

One month after its release, Taylor Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl” logs a major milestone as it hits a fn uninterrupted four weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200.

The set is just the second album of 2025 to spend its first four weeks at the summit, following Morgan Wallen’s “I’m the Problem,” which led for its first eight weeks (and 12 weeks overall). Not surprisingly, Swift’s fourth week numbers are significant; she has earned a total of 146,000 album units in the United States in the week ending Oct. 30, according to Luminate.

New York Times Profiles Setlist.fm

The New York Times
Jason Tate

Marc Hogan, writing for the New York Times:

Setlist.fm can seem at once ubiquitous and inconspicuous. Few reports about its origins are readily available online. According to Live Nation Entertainment, Setlist.fm’s parent company, the site was founded in 2008 by Molindo, a media agency based in Austria that also developed Songtexte, a German-language site that compiles song lyrics. “They’re giant music fans and big data nerds,” said Joe Fleischer, the publisher of Setlist.fm and head of a Live Nation studio that produces marketing content for major brands.

Live Nation acquired Setlist.fm in 2010, although the entertainment giant did not announce the deal until two years later. Fleischer, a former music journalist, joined in 2011, when Live Nation bought BigChampagne, a music data company he helped found.

The entire point of the site, he said, is being useful: “That’s all it’s ever been, is about increasing utility, increasing our usefulness for fans.”

AI Artist Getting Spins on US Radio Stations

AI
Jason Tate

Ashley King, writing for Digital Music News:

If you thought only streaming platforms were feeling the onslaught of artificial intelligence-created (AI) artists and generated music, think again. Even radio stations aren’t safe from the budding industry of AI-generated content. According to Billboard, an AI singer called Xania Monet has become the first known AI artist to earn enough radio airplay to debut on a Billboard radio chart.

You know, we don’t have to do this…