2025 has marked a pivotal year for Japan’s music culture, with signs of transformation echoing both at home and abroad. But what does the future look like from a global vantage point? To find out, Billboard JAPAN sat down with Joe Hadley – Spotify’s Global Head of Music Partnerships & Audience – during his visit to Japan in May for the inaugural MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN 2025, the country’s first-ever global music awards.

In recent years, a growing number of Japanese artists, like Kenshi Yonezu, Fujii Kaze, YOASOBI, and Ado, have gone on successful world tours. People are saying that J-pop is starting to make sweeping advances overseas. How do you see the current situation?

It’s amazing to see these artists touring globally and resonating with fans around the world. And it’s not just about live shows – the streaming numbers tell a compelling story of growing global interest as well. In 2024, about 50% of the royalties paid out to Japanese artists were from outside of Japan, and nearly three-quarters of that was for tracks in Japanese. In other words, the music doesn’t have to be in English to travel. It does really well in Japanese, which is a very telling sign about the world’s reception and readiness for Japanese music.

Here’s another really fun stat: in 2024 alone, Japanese artists saw about 2.6 billion first-time streams from listeners outside of Japan. This is a pretty incredible number. Japanese music is really expanding its global reach.

So does this mean that Japanese music is drawing a lot of attention, or that the widespread use of music streaming services like Spotify is transforming the structure of the global music business, or both?

It’s a bit of both. We have a really strong product and we also have an incredible editorial team. When you talk about the globalization of music, you also have to talk about global curation groups within Spotify. These are teams of editors specializing in each genre and region who come together from around the world to share music and support one another in getting music playlisted in the right places. Creating playlists like Gacha Pop, which is popular outside of Japan, is really important, and our role is to use curated playlists like this to stream music to global audiences. Personalization features like AI DJ also help share the world discover this music on Spotify.

Could you talk to us a bit about the current state of music culture? What trends and movements are you keeping an eye on?

Music is really travelling around the world. All kinds of artists are being listened to in countries and regions outside the ones they’re from. This is tremendously exciting. Spotify has almost 700 million monthly listeners, and its ability to export music globally just keeps growing and growing.

One recent trend I’m keeping my eye on is the global growth of country music. We’re starting to see it spreading outside of the U.S. to places like the U.K. and Europe, but really in Australia and New Zealand. You’d also be hard-pressed to miss the growth of African music outside Africa.

Of course, Japanese music is important, too. For example, I saw in the news the other day that ONE OR EIGHT’s “DSTM” had become the first song by a Japanese boy band in America’s Media Base Top 40 radio chart. That’s a great starting point. Even beyond the collaboration between Megan Thee Stallion and Yuki Chiba, we’re seeing the potential for a lot of growth around the world. This ties back to what we were talking about earlier, regarding global artists that are touring.

Until now, some have been saying that Japan’s music industry is lagging behind the rest of the world. What do you see as Japan’s current position within the global music scene? 

Japan is in the middle of that same movement. That’s why we’re all here in Japan, and I’m really looking forward to going to the MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN (MAJ) award ceremony in Kyoto.

What do you think about the launch of the MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN?

I think it’s an incredible opportunity and a super exciting one. Spotify is really proud to partner with CEIPA (the Japan Culture and Entertainment Industry Promotion Society, which is made up of five major music industry groups) on MAJ. It’s CEIPA’s role to empower artists and creators, and we want to be side-by-side with them on their journey of developing Japan’s music industry both at home and abroad. That’s why we’re here taking part in this inaugural event.

The five nominees for Top Global Hit From Japan were selected using Spotify’s voting feature, and they were voted on by general overseas Spotify listeners. How do you see this award?

There are a lot of award shows out there, but I think having one that involves ordinary music fans is very meaningful. I can’t divulge any specific voting numbers, but the number of voters was far more than I’d expected, which really impressed on me how interested people are in the award.

I was a part of the voting process, and that was very much a learning experience for me. It made me feel even more involved with Japan and created a stronger sense of responsibility. The selection of nominees was quite diverse, which I think is representative of Japanese music as a whole. I think it’s easy if you’re not familiar with Japanese music to pigeonhole or stereotype it, but there are many different genres. That definitely came across in the nomination process.

What kind of future do you think the MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN will help create for Japan’s music culture?

In my opinion, the biggest contribution right away is the very fact that the event is　happening. It’s like a wedding, where you gather together people who’ve probably never all been in the same room – in this case, artists, executives, writers, and the like. So this will be the first time, but it’s going to continue and grow to have a massive impact. It won’t just be Japanese artists, but it will get artists from other countries to come to Japan, which is going to have ripple effects. But for me, the most exciting part and the biggest impact will be having those people in the room, feeling the energy and the connections that come from it.

What do you see for the future of Japan’s music scene?

It’s already been going in a pretty incredible direction these last five or ten years. I think if Spotify continues to grow, we continue to work with more local partners like CEIPA, and we continue to think globally, Japanese music will keep growing at the same rate. I do think it’s on the artists, the labels, and their teams to make sure that they’re hitting the markets, going out and continuing to tour, and being intentional about collaborations, but the sky’s the limit. I’m very, very optimistic and excited about the future of Japanese music and music as a whole.

—This interview by Tomonori Shiba first appeared on Billboard Japan

In 2023, the producer Kevin Saunderson wandered into the home studio he shares with his son Dantiez in Detroit. What he heard blasting from the speakers seemed familiar. “I said, ‘Man, that sounds like me!’” Saunderson recalls with a laugh. “[Dantiez] used some of my bass sounds.”

As one of three men widely credited with inventing Detroit techno, Saunderson is used to encountering artists who have borrowed scraps of his style. But this time, he got a chance to put his own twist on another producer’s unwitting homage.

“We’re always around each other,” Saunderson says of Dantiez. “We’ve already been doing Inner City [another group] together, and he sounds like me in some ways. So I thought, why don’t we just do an album together?” That release, e-Dancer, which takes its name from one of Saunderson’s projects in the 1990s, is due out June 13. 

The two men spoke to Billboard over Zoom from their Detroit home: Dantiez, laid back, lounged on a couch in one part of the house, while the elder Saunderson spoke passionately in another room about the genre he helped create. He has embraced the role of elder statesman and techno historian in recent years, doing frequent interviews about the style’s origins and even guest editing a series for Mixmag. “I’ve been in it since the beginning — I’m the beginning of this movement in many ways,” he explains. “I’ve seen a lot, and I want to be a driving force trying to educate people to our music.” 

Over more than three decades, Saunderson’s discography has ranged from vocal dance-pop classics — Inner City’s “Good Life” and “Big Fun” — to the scrappy, scraping techno on e-Dancer’s canonical album, 1998’s Heavenly. “If you opened the techno songbook, Kevin Saunderson may have the most diverse — and in some ways, most prescient — discography of all,” Sam Valenti, founder of the label Ghostly International, wrote in January. “In any other country,” Valenti added, “he’d be given every tribute and lifetime achievement award imaginable.” 

The producer DJ Spinna put it more simply in a recent Instagram comment: “Just Want Another Chance” — the song in which Saunderson invented the “Reese Bass” sound that he heard Dantiez using in the studio — “changed my damn life!!”

e-Dancer started as a retort to a dance world that often polices its borders, wary of the potential for dilution that accompanies mainstream success. Inner City’s first two singles traveled far beyond Detroit and even the wider, if still insular, world of dance-heads, becoming top 10 hits in the U.K. (“Good Life” also cracked the Hot 100 in the U.S.) “I had all that success with Inner City, and all the Detroit guys were joking with me — ‘You’re commercial, now we can’t play “Big Fun” in the club,’” Saunderson explains. “It ain’t underground enough.” e-Dancer was meant to demonstrate that Saunderson still “had that other sound” in his arsenal.

He put out the first e-Dancer single in 1991; the title was “Speaker Punishing,” suggesting this wasn’t easygoing ear-candy. The follow-up, “Pump the Move,” put harsh chattering electronics front and center — softening them slightly with a cushy synthesizer line — while the B-side was squirrely and agitated, with the strafing energy of acid house. Heavenly collected tracks from these singles along with more songs from the mid-1990s.

In the last decade, Saunderson has decided to revisit some of his early successes. Nearly 20 years after Heavenly, he gently retouched the songs on Heavenly Revisited (2017), and followed that with Re:Generate (2021), which gave producers like Adam Beyer, Robert Hood and Special Request a chance to rework tracks from the original album. In 2019, Saunderson also relaunched Inner City, enlisting Dantiez — now a dance music producer in his own right — to join the new version of the group with Steffanie Christi’an handling vocals in place of original singer Paris Grey.

Father and son have established a working routine that Saunderson summarizes as “he starts it, and usually I finish it.” “Even though we live together,” adds Dantiez, who also puts out music on his own and with his brother, “it’s hard to actually get us both in the studio at the same time.” 

Between start and finish, though, tracks undergo endless tweaks. “I usually go through six, seven, eight versions of a song before it even makes it to [Saunderson],” Dantiez says. 

And even with the album due out shortly, they continue to iterate. The early advance copy sent to Billboard had a hard-driving, string-soaked vocal cut titled “Symbolical,” but Saunderson said he would likely pull out the drums before e-Dancer came out, making the song “real ambient, just the violin and her voice.” A previous version of the album-closer “Escape” — which pairs revving synths with a mean, ankle-level bass line — featured a male vocal, but it was later removed.

The Dantiez track that reminded Saunderson of his own work is “Emotions,” the second song on e-Dancer, which lays out the album’s throughline: A bass, frayed around the edges, that skulks and snarls under many of the tracks, seemingly spoiling for a fight. That buzzsaw sound reappears on “Dancer,” with wordless vocals wafting above it, “Frequency,” where the synths stutter and screech like rusted car brakes, and “Reece Punch,” which pairs it with pounding four-note piano runs. Dantiez once said that the key to a killer club track is “a big kick and a great bassline,” and he stayed true to that principle on e-Dancer.

Since Saunderson’s output has been so “prescient,” as Valenti put it, he remains at ease even as techno continues to evolve around him. The style has gone through “so many different phases,” Saunderson says. “Tech house became very popular. I was always in between [genres] — I could do something very techno or really house. I never said I was doing tech house at the time, but it’s really an in-between version of house and techno [like what I was doing].”

Lately Saunderson has noticed that in the U.S., “the trend seems like everything has gotten faster.” It can be “a little complicated” following up a set from a DJ who is racing along at 150 beats per minute, but he’s seen that before too — as Saunderson posted on Instagram recently, he’s been “playing hard ‘n fast long before TikTok techno was a thing.” When playing out new tracks in his sets, he has found that “Melodica,” “Emotions,” “Dancer,” and “Frequency” have elicited the strongest response from club goers. 

Following the release of e-Dancer, Saunderson and Dantiez will take their act on the road, performing at Loveland and MUTEK Montreal. They also have a party in Detroit, The Hood Needs House, that they are hoping to bring to other cities. On top of that, Saunderson maintains a busy solo DJ schedule, including a recent party at Detroit’s Movement Festival. At the event, he described recently as “techno Christmas,” he celebrated his KMS Records label and also featured his two sons — Damarii along with Dantiez — in the lineup.

“I find a way to play a few classics each set so people get a good education,” Saunderson says. “Some people may not know who the hell I am. But they hear me, and they get kind of blown away.”

A Los Angeles judge says hip-hop powerhouse Top Dawg Entertainment must face allegations that the company “doxxed” two women after they sued the record label for sexual harassment and assault.

In a ruling Wednesday, Judge Michael E. Whitaker refused to dismiss allegations that the company broke California state law by revealing the identities of the two accusers in a response statement to the media that called the lawsuit a “shakedown.”

Top Dawg had argued that the statement was fair game because lawyers for the two women spoke the media first, but the judge was unpersuaded.

“Defendants argue that it was plaintiffs who initiated the inflammatory press release and it was necessary for them to publicly respond and correct the record,” the judge writes. “Plaintiff’s correctly point out, however, that publicly revealing their true identities was not a necessary part of correcting the narrative in the public record.”

In a statement to Billboard on Thursday, Top Dawg’s attorney Allison Hart vowed to challenge the ruling further: “We have the utmost respect for the court, but believe that yesterday’s decision that our clients were not allowed to disclose the plaintiffs’ names was in error, and we intend to immediately appeal and continue vigorously defending against plaintiffs’ bogus claims.”

An attorney for the plaintiffs, meanwhile, praised the court’s decision: “Our clients believe the Court’s ruling speaks for itself, and are gratified the case has been set for trial,” said Shounak S. Dharap. “They look forward to presenting all the evidence to a jury of their peers.”

Using the pseudonyms Jane Doe and Jane Roe, the two women filed a lawsuit in December against Top Dawg, a top hip-hop label best known for helping to launch the careers of Kendrick Lamar, SZA and Doechii. Doe, a public relations staffer, says she faced “inappropriate workplace behavior,” including harassment and assault, as well as unpaid wages; Roe, a friend of a Top Dawg artist, says she was “sexually harassed twice by TDE employees.”

In addition to the company itself, the lawsuit names execs Anthony “Moosa” Tiffith Jr. and Brandon Tiffith, the sons of TDE founder Anthony “Top” Tiffith, Sr., as defendants.

“TDE’s leadership knew about these instances of sexual abuse, as well as the failure to properly compensate Ms. Doe, yet took no action to prevent further violations, discipline the individuals involved, or offer supportive services to plaintiffs,” their lawyers wrote.

Two months after the case was filed, lawyers for the women issued a press release publicizing their allegations. During the resulting media coverage, Top Dawg issued a strongly-worded denial, claiming the allegations were “fabricated” and filed by women seeking “ten minutes of fame.” Along with those denunciations, it also included the women’s real names, which had been unknown at the time.

A week later, attorneys for the accusers added a new claim to their lawsuit, alleging that the press statement had illegally released the womens’ names. They claimed the move violated a recently-enacted California statute that allows people to sue when they’ve been doxxed – a modern term for maliciously releasing someone’s identity on the internet.

Seeking to dismiss that new accusation, Top Dawg argued that the two women never had a legal right to sue under the “Jane” pseudonyms in the first place. But Judge Whitaker suggests that call had not been Top Dawg’s to make on its own.

“The court need not decide whether plaintiffs’ would ultimately have been able to proceed under pseudonyms or would have been ordered to proceed under their real names,” the judge says. “The court and parties were deprived of that answer when defendants revealed Plaintis’ true names in a public news article, mooting the issue. Thus, at the time the statement was made, it revealed plaintiffs’ true identities, which were not previously publicly known.”

Following the ruling, the entire case against Top Dawg remains pending. The defendants might now ask the judge to dismiss the original allegations of sexual harassment and assault; if such a motion were denied, the case would move forward into discovery and toward an eventual trial.

Jeezy has said he’s finally at a peaceful place in his life following his tumultuous divorce from Jeannie Mai last year. Sitting down with The Breakfast Club on Wednesday (June 11), Jeezy said despite the bitter divorce he was embroiled in for most of 2024, his 2025 has been filled with nothing but peace.

“Peace, yeah, peace man,” Jeezy said when asked where things currently stand with Mai. “I’m all about understanding. I’m all about what’s best for everybody, the greater good. I’m just telling you, I tell myself this every day: ‘Man, this is amazing.’ I don’t got no enemies, I don’t go no issues. I don’t want no enemies, I don’t want no issues. I just want peace, I just want joy, I just want freedom. I love my freedom, I love it.”

He went on to say that he can move “independently” now, including coming to The Breakfast Club whenever he wants.

“I ain’t gotta check in, I ain’t gotta talk to no label, I don’t gotta do nothing,” Jeezy continued. “Shout out to Def Jam, love y’all. But it’s just like, freedom and ownership is everything, especially when you’re talking art, you’re talking culture, you’re talking your mind. I work hard my whole life, this is the season of me. I’m putting myself first at all costs. My peace is everything.”

The former couple’s divorce was finalized last summer and was anything but amicable. Allegations of domestic abuse were hurled around last April, which Jeezy denied.

“It’s disheartening to witness the manipulation and deceit at play and at this time my main concern is being an active father to our daughter as I continue to fight for court mandated joint custody,” Jeezy wrote on social media at the time about the child the pair share, three-year-old Monaco Mai Jenkins. “Rest assured, the truth will prevail through the proper legal channels.”