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P!nk’s new live album All I Know So Far: Setlist arrives at No. 3 on Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart (dated June 5), granting the singer-songwriter her ninth top 10, all consecutive, on the list. The set was released on May 21 via RCA and starts with 19,000 copies sold in the U.S. in the week ending May 27, according to MRC Data.
P!nk’s hot streak on Top Album Sales began nearly 20 years ago, when she got her first top 10 with her second album, M!ssundaztood. It debuted at No. 8 on the Dec. 8, 2001-dated chart, later peaking at No. 6.
All I Know So Far is one of seven debuts in the top 10 on the latest Top Album Sales chart, which is led by the No. 1 arrival of Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour (72,000). Plus, Nipsey Hussle’s Victory Lap re-enters at No. 8 with 2021’s largest sales week for an R&B/hip-hop album on vinyl.
Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart ranks the top-selling albums of the week based only on traditional album sales. The chart’s history dates back to May 25, 1991, the first week Billboard began tabulating charts with electronically monitored piece count information from SoundScan, now MRC Data. Pure album sales were the measurement solely utilized by the Billboard 200 albums chart through the list dated Dec. 6, 2014, after which that chart switched to a methodology that blends album sales with track equivalent album units and streaming equivalent album units. For all chart news, follow @billboard and @billboardcharts on both Twitter and Instagram.
At No. 1 on Top Album Sales, Rodrigo’s Sour clocks the third-largest sales week for an album released this year. Only the debut frames of Taylor Swift’s Fearless (Taylor’s Version) (179,000) and Morgan Wallen’s Dangerous: The Double Album (74,000) were larger.
Twenty One Pilots’ Scaled and Icy starts at No. 2 on Top Album Sales with 51,000 copies sold, while Lord Huron debuts at No. 4 with Long Lost (16,000). For Twenty One Pilots, it’s the duo’s third album to reach the top two on Top Album Sales, and for Lord Huron, it’s the act’s third top 10.
Blake Shelton nabs his 13th top 10 on Top Album Sales with the No. 5 start of his new studio effort Body Language (just under 15,000 sold). Shelton got his first top 10 with 2003’s The Dreamer, which debuted and peaked at No. 8 on the Feb. 22, 2003-dated chart.
Waterparks splash in with their second top 10 on Top Album Sales, as the group’s new studio set, Greatest Hits, enters at No. 6 (13,000). Alan Jackson’s Where Have You Gone falls 3-7 in its second week on the chart, selling 11,000 copies (down 59%).
Nipsey Hussle’s Victory Lap re-enters Top Album Sales at No. 8 with nearly 9,000 sold (up 3,332%). The set also hits No. 1 for the first time on the Vinyl Albums chart. Nearly all of its sales were on vinyl, securing it the largest sales week in 2021 for an R&B/hip-hop set on wax.
During the tracking week ending May 27, Victory Lap was issued on gold-colored vinyl exclusively via Walmart (which has sold out already) while the late artist’s official webstore also carried a reissued edition of the black vinyl album with expanded packaging (and promptly sold out of its stock). The black vinyl edition will become widely available to all retailers on June 25.
Rounding out the top 10 on latest Top Album Sales chart: The Devil Wears Prada’s ZII bows at No. 9 with 8,500 while The Black Keys’ Delta Kream falls 2-10 in its second week with 8,000 (down 74%).
After what have surely been the strangest 14 months in recent memory for Ibiza, there is some forward motion — and a few steps backwards — for clubs on the famed island dance music mecca.
In a June 1 interview with Spanish radio station La Cadena SER, Eivissa Leisure Association manager José Luis Benítez said that a 2,000-capacity outdoor pilot event will happen either this June 25 or July 2. This event will serve to test the safety of outdoor gatherings on the island going forward, with Benítez telling La Cadena that if this event goes well and the safety protocols prove viable, venues on the island could start hosting outdoor events roughly two weeks after the test run.
To gain entry into the pilot event, attendees will be required to have received at least one vaccination dose, or must provide evidence of a negative COVID-19 test result. The as-yet-unannounced host venue will also provide testing for attendees. Five hundred people will be allowed on the dance floor, while drinks will be confined to a designated seating area.
While this news presents a bit of hope for clubs on the island, when the island’s full slate of club events might return remains unclear, with Balearic Islands Health Minister Patricia Gómez on Thursday (June 3) saying that nightlife presents a “lot of risk.” While the island’s 2021 season is currently stalled, some venues including nightlight institutions Amnesia and Hï have announced closing events for September and October.
While promoters are trying to be optimistic, the U.K. government dealt a blow to Ibiza tourism today by announcing that it’s keeping the Balearic Islands (of which Ibiza is a part of along with Formentera, Mallorca and Menorca) on its “amber” list of its traffic light system for international travel. This means that a 10-day quarantine is required for those flying from Spain to the U.K. The news is another setback to Ibiza’s return to normalcy, with UK tourists making up a sizable amount of overall visitors to the island each year.
According to Johns Hopkins University, just 20% of the Spanish population is currently vaccinated.
Investor and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman has made and lost billions making bold risk. He famously lost a billion-dollar bet shorting shares of Herbalife, was called an a–hole by now-President Joe Biden following a joke gone awry at a high-end Las Vegas dinner in 2017 and commands a cult-like reverence from some retail investors who call their unflinching belief in his investment strategy “hopium” because of his basic-to-the basics approach to growth investment.
After months of signaling his plans to make a large investment through his special purpose acquisition company Pershing Square Tontine Holdings, on Thursday (June 3) the Wall Street Journal reported Ackman, 55, now plans to help take Universal Music Group public at a $40 billion valuation — a potential record for the hyped-up SPAC market.
PSTH is sponsored by three investment funds managed by Pershing Square Capital Management, the storied New York-based hedge fund. PSTH has $5 billion available to invest in UMG through a $4 billion IPO on Sept. 11, 2020, on the New York Stock Exchange, at $20 a share and an additional $1 billion investment by Pershing Square. In addition, Pershing Square purchased $1 billion of units, each worth one share of Class A common stock and one-third of a redeemable warrant, at $20 per unit. It can buy an addition $2 billion of units in private placements.
The PSTH-UMG deal would be unusual because SPACs typically target companies that want to go public. The SPAC, nothing more than shell company, acquires the target in what’s called a reverse merger, thereby allowing the target to trade on a public market without going through the usual expensive, time-consuming process. In this case, Vivendi will spin off UMG on the Amsterdam Euronext exchange by Sept. 27, 2021, Vivendi revealed in May. For the spin off, Vivendi shareholders will get a fixed number of shares in UMG. PSTH would presumably get its equity in UMG through a private placement through Vivendi. Tencent Corp. owns 20% of UMG’s equity. Vivendi investors will get 60% of UMG shares in the spin off. Vivendi has the remaining 20% of equity and revealed in May it may sell 10% to a U.S. investor ahead of the spin off.
Ackman and Pershing Square should get a healthy payday, if the deal goes through. With PSTH, Pershing Square has warrants for 6.21% of the company, for which it paid $67.8 million, with a $24 strike price, meaning they would not be redeemable until the investors received a 20% return on their investment.
PSTH peaked at $34.10 per share on Feb. 16. It closed at $25.05 on Thursday and dropped 5.3% to $23.71 in after-hours trading. UMG accounting firms each estimated UMG’s valuation at €33 billion ($40 billion).
What’s more, Pershing Square will not exercise its warrants until three years after the deal closes, ensuring it will be a long-term shareholder in UMG or another target company if the deal falls through.
Four Pershing Square directors own a total of about 314,000 shares. Michael Ovitz, CAA co-founder and former president of The Walt Disney Company, owns 250,000 shares. Jacqueline Reses, former executive chairman of Square Financial Services, owns 50,000 shares. Michael Gonnella, Pershing Square Capital’s chief financial officer and Joseph Steinberg, chairman of Jeffries Financial Group, own 14,000 shares between them. PSTH’s largest institutional investors include Guggenheim Capital, The Baupost Group and Ontario Teacher’s Pension Plan Board. PSTH’s board of directors also includes Lisa Gersh, co-founder of Oxygen Media and former CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia.
While most SPAC investors have focused on finding the rare “unicorn” investment that can disrupt an industry and skyrocket in value, Ackman has promised to find what he calls a “mature unicorn,” meaning an undervalued legacy company with room for growth. In April he sold his 1% state in Starbucks to fund his SPAC ambitions and has been dropping hints about his intended target on earnings calls and during investor summits. After a rough year produced disappointing yields for SPACs, meanwhile, investors have been closely monitoring Ackman’s Tontine fund for signs of which company he would take public.
A Harvard MBA grad, Ackerman hails from Chappaqua, New York, and has spent much of his life in finance, turning his $54 million investment in his fund Pershing Square Capital into a personal fortune worth $3.3 billion thanks to early bets in companies like Chipotle and Wendy’s, as well as some more controversial bets. In 2013 he accused Herbalife of being a Ponzi scheme and announced a short position on the company’s share that initially drove the price down 20%, only to regain its value thanks to involvement from Ackman’s longtime nemesis Carl Icahn. Icahn’s investment in Herbalife, essentially the counter bet to Ackman’s short position, launched a battle that the Wall Street Journal called the “Hedge-Fund Equivalent of Stalingrad.”
“I’ve always had the view that how successful you are is really a function of how you deal with failure,” Ackman told Shane Parrish on his popular Knowledge podcast in April 2020. “If you deal with failure well and you persist, you have a high probability of being successful.”
On Thursday night’s (June 3) new episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, Kim Kardashian opens up to her sisters about feeling “like a f—ing failure” amid her marriage issues with Kanye West.
Much of the 20th and final season of the E! reality series was filmed ahead of the February announcement that Kardashian had filed for divorce from West after six-plus years of marriage. In the new episode, we see the Kardashian-Jenner family on a December vacation to Lake Tahoe, and Khloe Kardashian reveals that Kim and Kanye had a big fight before the trip.
In a flashback scene to Kardashian crying, surrounded by sisters Kylie and Kendall Jenner and Kourtney Kardashian, Kim says through tears, “I think he deserves someone who can go support his every move and go follow him all over the place and move to Wyoming. I can’t do that! He should have a wife who supports his every move and travels with him and does everything, and I can’t.”
Since 2019, West has spent the bulk of his time on a 1,400-acre ranch in Cody, Wyoming, while Kardashian is based at their home in suburban Los Angeles.
Before her 2014 marriage to West, Kardashian was previously married to songwriter Damon Thomas and NBA player Kris Humphries. “I feel like a f—ing failure that it’s, like, a third f—ing marriage,” Kardashian tells her sisters. “I feel like a f—ing loser, but I can’t even think about that. Like, I want to be happy.”
Kardashian and West share custody of their four children together: 7-year-old daughter North, 5-year-old son Saint, 3-year-old daughter Chicago, and 1-year-old son Psalm.
Watch the scenes from Thursday’s episode about Kim and Kanye’s marriage starting at the 1:45 mark in the video below:
Cameo, the app and tech company that allows users to pay celebrities for personalized videos, has struck a charitable partnership with ACM Lifting Lives, the philanthropic arm of the Academy of Country Music. The resulting campaign, “Cameo Goes Country,” will benefit ACM Lifting Lives’ COVID-19 Response Fund and music therapy programs for both physical and mental health-related issues.
Going live today and running through June 30, “Cameo Goes Country” allows fans to book personalized messages and purchase virtual meet-and-greet tickets in support of the charitable campaign. Participating country artists, who will donate 100% of their proceeds to the cause, include Carrie Underwood, Chrissy Metz, Deana Carter, Jon Pardi, Lauren Alaina, Mickey Guyton, Trace Adkins and Tyler Hubbard, among many others.
The first-come, first-served limited-time offers can be accessed by visiting www.cameo.com/tags/acm-lifting-lives. Additional exclusive offers from new artists will be added over the course of the month.
Created in April 2020, ACM Lifting Lives’ COVID-19 Response Fund has distributed over $3.5 million to assist workers in the country music industry who have suffered financial hardship due to the pandemic.
Interscope Geffen A&M (IGA) and rapper Yo Gotti’s Collective Music Group (CMG) have partnered to further develop and support CMG’s roster of artists including Moneybagg Yo, 42 Dugg and EST Gee, it was announced today.
The collaboration has already produced successes for Moneybagg Yo, who recently earned his first-ever Billboard 200 No. 1 album with A Gangsta’s Pain, which sat atop the chart for two weeks last month. 42 Dugg also scored a win with his mixtape Free Dem Boyz, which debuted at No. 8 on the Billboard 200 this week.
“With 25 years under his belt as a successful artist, label head, manager and entrepreneur, Yo Gotti has built an impressive legacy in hip hop and remains one of the most exciting voices in music,” said IGA chairman John Janick in a statement. “We look forward to working closely with Gotti’s team to continue to build upon CMG’s incredible run in our business.”
“I have a tremendous amount of respect for John Janick, Steve Berman, Nicole Wyskoarko and the entire Interscope team and their track record of success,” added Gotti. “We share the same vision about winning – we want to break barriers, disrupt the industry and develop the next generation of superstars. I’m thrilled to partner with them as I continue focusing on CMG’s expansion.”
Founded in 2012, CMG has also worked to develop the careers of Blac Youngsta and BlocBoy JB.
“Gotti’s decades long ability to consistently identify the next important wave of talent is very rare in our business,” said IGA co-head of A&R Nicole Wyskoarko. “We’re excited about all of the new artists he and his team are currently developing and can’t wait to get started.”
