In a move that highlights her selective engagement with social media, Ariana Grande, who deactivated her Twitter account years ago but remains the seventh-most-followed person on Instagram, is set to join HYBE’s superfan platform, Weverse.

Weverse Company tells Billboard that the chart-topping star will join the platform on Sunday (July 21), adding to a roster that includes BTS, BLACKPINK, JVKE, NCT 127, (G)I-DLE, Lauv, YOASOBI, Conan Gray, AKB48 and thuy. In joining the platform, Grande will have the ability to post messages and content to her own dedicated community, hold livestreams for members, read personalized fan letters, upload exclusive media content, share disappearing messages, and utilize the popular Weverse Shop, which sold more than 18 million pieces of merchandise last year to fans in more than 198 countries.

The announcement marks a significant moment for both Grande and Weverse, opening up a new way for the singer to deepen her connection with fans while showing a commitment to her continued business relationship with HYBE and HYBE America CEO (and Grande’s former manager) Scooter Braun.

Since opening in June 2019 with Billboard 200 chart-toppers TOMORROW X TOGETHER as its first artist, Weverse now hosts 146 artists from countries including South Korea, Japan and the U.S. Its biggest artist community, for BTS, boasts 26 million members, while the ENHYPEN community has 9.8 million. Today, HYBE reports over 155 million lifetime downloads and an average of 10 million monthly active users across 245 countries and regions, with 90% of its user base now coming from outside Korea. Despite Warner Music Group (WMG) announcing plans for its own superfan app — as well as WMG and Sony investing early in rival superfan platform Fave — Weverse says its start with K-pop artists delivered important insights to entice top Western stars like Grande to join.

“What’s lucky for us has been that K-pop idols are the types of artists that have a very strong core fanbase,” Joon Choi, president of Weverse Company, tells Billboard of the company’s half-decade of growth that now includes investment from Universal Music Group. “As a platform and a business, we had already enjoyed the competitive edge or advantage of being there first and being there early to observe what superfans actually want.”

While artists can use Weverse to access first-party data for content delivery, promotion and to stay connected to international fans, the platform has expanded opportunities in live music with not only event streaming but its Weverse Con Festival and a Weverse by Fans tool through which fans can develop their own merch.

“We were there earlier and we have a long experience of observing the demands of our fans,” Choi adds. “That’s why we were able to create this one-stop fan service that includes merch development, merch selling, communities, videos, live streaming and even magazines…I do see the growth of startups or services that are entering this particular [superfan] market and that’s good. The more competition in the market is actually better for us because being the only player in that particular market sector makes us nervous.”

New competitors or not, Weverse continues to expand; currently, the company boasts a total of 400 employees in South Korea, 60 in Tokyo, and 20 in Santa Monica, Calif. (with the target to grow to 30 this year). And with a major star like Grande, there’s a slew of Arianators that could soon be joining the platform. Still, the executive admits he doesn’t know what to expect from the Eternal Sunshine singer once she officially joins. As he puts it, “It is totally up to the artists.”

Read on for more insights from Joon about Grande’s big move and what lies in store for Weverse’s future.

Weverse is adding new artists all the time, but Ariana Grande is a huge name with a worldwide fanbase. What have the weeks been like leading up to this announcement?

I just traveled a lot; I’ve been a globetrotter. We have offices in Santa Monica and Tokyo, and in each office location our leaders are currently meeting and contacting many artists and labels, so I believe our platform and business are becoming truly international and crossing borders. As we do that, we have opportunities to engage with and work with big artists, but also rising stars, so these opportunities are being created.

In the past, Weverse or artists have held special events or activities to begin their time on the platform. Will Ariana have a welcome party?

My simple answer to that question is that it is totally up to the artists. So, although we do have sessions where we offer guidelines or guidance in terms of how to better utilize the platform to cultivate the superfan culture or fandom, we do not necessarily engage too much [in terms of] planning activities or what’s going on the Weverse platform. I know that this might not be the direct answer that you’re looking for, but we have artists onboarded onto Weverse with a very good understanding of the difference between Weverse and other social media platforms.

What opportunities do you see for Weverse in welcoming Ariana Grade, and what opportunities are now open to Ariana?

Weverse is definitely a distinct platform, different from other social media platforms, so I’m also very curious how it will be utilized by artists like Ariana Grande. It really depends on each artist or label whether they discuss details about how they want to or plan to utilize Weverse. But in this particular case, we don’t know yet — that’s something that I’m closely watching.

But I would like to add that when I look at Weverse from my perspective as the leader of this business, it’s important to have enough resources and big enough clusters of a particular genre, specific country or culture. So, that’s why we’ve been working hard to onboard many artists. During the first half of this year alone, we have onboarded Nightly, thuy, Lauv, Umi, Conan Gray and JVKE. And then we have Ariana Grande. But Gracie Abrams has been very active as well; she’s good. So, when you see Weverse as a platform and in terms of the growth of our platform, it is very important that we have thriving clusters of certain music genres, countries or cultures to generate a network effect as well.

Weverse does a lot of business selling music, albums and merchandise via Weverse Shop, but Ariana isn’t only involved in music: she has R.E.M Beauty and perfumes; she’s in movies and television. Does she give you opportunities to expand into new commerce markets?

I can’t comment on an artist’s existing merchandise lines or albums since there must be agreements or contracts in terms of production and distribution in place. How merchandise is developed and sold through Weverse really varies by each artist. But a feature that we have on Weverse, Weverse by Fans, has been very effective and is gaining a lot of attention from artists because it is based on fan demand. Also, Weverse by Fans doesn’t require a minimum quantity of manufacturing goods for production. So, as soon as there’s enough demand for a certain type of merch, we can immediately produce and sell those.

On one hand, Ariana Grande is one of the most followed people on Instagram, but she also deactivated her Twitter years ago and takes social media breaks. How were discussions with an artist who might have complex feelings about social media?

That’s a very good question. Actually, when we meet a lot of artists, we tell the artists to actively use other social media because Weverse is a little different. It’s a place where people who love the artist gather. This isn’t our claim — artists have been saying this particular characteristic makes Weverse a very friendly and safer platform for artists to engage with their fans and the public compared to [other] social media…and that’s not just specific to big-name artists. We have been having opportunities to work with rising rookies as well. We don’t really care whether it’s a big-brand artist or not; what’s more important for us is to seek and discover artists interested in cultivating superfan culture, regardless of how famous or how popular they are, to work with us and use Weverse.

Ariana is the seventh-most-followed person in the world on Instagram. Do you worry that adding an artist with such a wide audience could open Weverse up to trolls or those with bad intentions?

Our product features are already equipped and have the advantage of features like filtering, reporting and in-house moderators to prevent and manage ill-intended activities on Weverse’s platform. I do understand the concern that you raised regarding such potential, and I agree with you. However, such circumstances or ill-intended activities occurred for artists already onboarded on Weverse. So, it would not just be for Ariana Grande that such a thing could happen. But I believe we have about four years’ know-how in operating and managing trolls or activities like that. So, we are not too worried, although we are still being very, very cautious about how to manage that.

I’d add that we always tell artists when onboarded to Weverse that the best use case has been using live broadcasts to communicate with fans directly. K-pop artists have been doing so well in terms of using Weverse as a platform for that, and also through the membership, they can have closer, more direct interactions with their fans as well. So, we’ve been telling artists from the inception, from the moment that they are onboarded to Weverse, that these are some of the ways that are historically proven to be very effective to have a very long-term and sustainable fandom relationship.

What is the onboarding process like? Are you personally meeting top artists?

We’re not a service that allows anyone to sign up, [like] on a website like YouTube or other social media. We don’t know when that’s going to happen, maybe in the far future we will switch to such a model. But so far, we have been doing internal research to discover and identify artists who would have a potential benefit or whose fanbase overlaps with the user base of Weverse. These days we are getting a lot of inbound inquiries from artists or other labels themselves. In the past, we used to do a lot of outreach to discover or find more artists, but since last year, as words such as “superfan” and “Weverse” have become more buzzy in the industry and the market, we have been gaining a lot of attention.

It’s not just me but other teams; we call it a B2B team in Korea, but maybe in the United States, it’s called a customer success management team. We have internal resources that frequently discuss and follow up with labels and artists.

I’m personally curious as someone in media, do you ever imagine a day you might expand the type of people beyond musicians?

Definitely. We already have some actors and actresses onboarded, but this question is really good. We’ve thought about it, but the timeline is very important. The ultimate goal of Weverse is to create a superfan not only for human artists. While I believe Weverse is currently working the best for superfans of a person with a thriving fandom, we’ve already seen an interesting case of the virtual idol group in Korea called PLAVE with a significantly high engagement level within their community on Weverse, which is very, very noteworthy. That’s where we saw the potential of expanding this platform not just for human artists but also for virtual artists. However, we also see the possibility of extending this IP to include other types of artists; this is a fun future that we can imagine at the moment. We still have a lot of room for further growth within the music industry so that’s where we have greater focus.

Since you said this was your personal curiosity, I’m giving you my personal opinion and projection on that potential. [Laughs] My biggest question working at Weverse is, “How many people out of the entire human population would have the ‘superfan’ DNA?” That’s kind of the ultimate thing we are looking for. Someone might be a superfan of a certain sport or sports team — there’s always a superfan of something or someone.

There’s the Weverse Con Festival, Weverse Magazine, there’s exclusive shows to stream. Why is Weverse developing IP beyond the platform? I imagine a HYBE Festival would be well received.

Weverse is a platform, so neutrality is the greatest value that we really emphasize and prioritize, which has been the case since Chairman Bang [Si-Hyuk] originated this platform. From day one, we really valued neutrality as an important value for us, but also in using such a new business model, we believe that we can lead innovation in the music industry. When you look back on the music industry’s history for the last two or three decades, it started by simply selling albums, then the touring business rose, and since 2000, technology has been disrupting the music industry. Now, it’s time for us to seek the answer to what’s next, right? I think Weverse is a platform and a business that has been most actively conducting experiments in order to answer what’s next for the music industry. If our experiments succeed, we can definitely offer benefits to artists all around the world, and that has been the basic philosophical foundation for our business and platform. We’re very, very, very, very serious about it.

Some people here might not like what I’m just about to say, but considering all the other [types of] content — it can be TV shows, movies, video games, everything — we think music itself, just as a piece of content, is the least compensated compared to all the others. So, we really have to think about that from a business perspective. …There is way more around music, right? There is no doubt that music is the core — and that’s why the mission statement of HYBE is, “We believe in music” — and that’s where we started from. [But] to make it a sustainable business, that’s where we can evolve from.

It was fun to see JYP Entertainment founder J.Y. Park perform with Chairman Bang at Weverse Con Festival last month. JYP is one of the last big K-pop agencies not on Weverse. Was this a hint?

We’ve always wanted all the artists from JYP, no doubt! [Laughs] But this time, it was just about the music. But of course, we’ve always wanted JYP — simple!

Removing yourself from work for a second, who or what are you a superfan of?

I’ve been a very big [music] fan since the ’80s: I listened to Casey Kasem with America’s Top 10, I was a Billboard kid. I think about all the famous songs and artists from the ’80s and ’90s — I’m that old guy [Laughs] — and then I had the recent memorable experience with PLAVE. The DJ JoJo [Wright] from KIIS FM actually visited Weverse Con Festival, held a lot of interviews with artists performing, and mentioned that one of the most impressive interviews he had was with PLAVE. From my perspective, from the ’80s and ’90s to virtual artists on the radio, that’s a very interesting journey to see and experience.

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TOMORROW X TOGETHER recorded the anthem for Samsung’s latest Galaxy series. “Open Always Wins,” released on Wednesday (July 17), features lyrics penned by TXT members SOOBIN, YEONJUN, TAEHYUN and HUENINGKAI.

“We’re excited to collaborate on this meaningful project with Samsung. We’ve infused our single with a sincere message of encouragement, rooting for everyone to bravely face challenges without being disheartened by failure,” the K-pop group said in a statement. “We believe those who overcome and progress through obstacles are the true champions.”

The song was first teased during Galaxy Unpacked in Paris on July 10. Samsung announced its all-new Galaxy Z Fold6 and Galaxy Z Flip6, the Galaxy Buds3 and Galaxy Buds3 Pro at Galaxy Unpacked.

The Fold 6 and Flip 6 feature Samsung’s Galaxy AI capabilities. The phones will be released July 24 and are available for pre-order now.

“Open Always Wins” is also part of Samsung’s partnership with the Olympics. The music video follows the group as they prepare for a live concert and includes clips from Team Samsung Galaxy athletes. The track is available to stream on YouTube Music, Spotify, Melon, Genie, Bugs, Flo and Vibe.

“We are proud to have collaborated with our Galaxy Ambassadors, TOMORROW X TOGETHER, to create a brand anthem that encapsulates the spirit of openness authentically,” said Jamie Park, VP & head of the Experience Marketing Group, Mobile eXperience Business at Samsung Electronics. “We hope it inspires listeners to embrace openness in their own lives, and the experiences and opportunities that come with it.”

Watch the music video for “Open Always Wins” below.

aespa achieves its fifth top 10-charting effort on Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart as the female K-pop quartet’s new Armageddon – The 1st Album debuts at No. 2 on the chart dated July 20. All five of the act’s entries on the chart have debuted in the top 10.

Also in the top 10 of the latest Top Album Sales chart, Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department nets a sixth week at No. 1 (and with a 154% sales increase), the 30th anniversary reissue and first vinyl pressing of Selena’s Amor Prohibido pushes it back onto the chart at No. 4 and Agust D (aka BTS’ SUGA) sees his D-Day album re-enter at No. 8 after its release 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 Luminate. Pure album sales were the sole measurement 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.

Armageddon arrives with 18,000 copies sold in the U.S. in the week ending July 11, according to Luminate. The album was released widely on CD on July 5 after previously being available as a digital download and via streaming services. CD sales power nearly all of the 18,000 sales in the week ending July 11, and the set was issued in eight collectible CD variants, all containing paper merchandise.

Meanwhile, Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department holds at No. 1 on Top Album Sales with 90,000 copies sold – up 154% for the week. CD sales comprise 67,000 (up 127%), digital album download sales comprise 19,000 (up 1,266%) and vinyl sales comprise 4,000 (down 10%).

The Tortured Poets Department’s overall weekly increase was bolstered in part by sales generated from Swift’s official webstore, which restocked seven earlier-released CD variants of the album (including a signed edition). The restocked items were available to purchase for a few hours on Sunday, June 7 and shipped shortly afterwards. In addition, Swift released three new digital album download variants of the album on Thursday, July 11, sold exclusively in her webstore for $4.99 each, and were only available to purchase that day. Each contained the original standard 16-song album tracklist, along with one bonus live acoustic track, recorded during her The Eras Tour stop in Stockholm (“Guilty as Sin?,” “How Did It End?” or “Peter”).

ATEEZ’s former No. 1 Golden Hour: Part.1 rises 7-3 with nearly 13,000 copies sold (up 3%).

Following its 30th anniversary reissue, Selena’s Amor Prohibido re-enters Top Album Sales at No. 4 with 11,000 sold – its best sales week since 1995. The set, which was initially released in 1994 and spent 20 weeks at No. 1 on Top Latin Albums in 1994-95, was reissued on July 4 across digital and physical configurations, including its first pressing on vinyl.

Amor debuts at No. 1 on the Vinyl Albums chart with 10,000 sold on wax – Selena’s best sales week ever on vinyl. It’s her second leader on the 13-year-old Vinyl Albums ranking. The album was available in four vinyl variants – a standard clear color edition, a Target-exclusive pink color (containing a poster), a Spotify-exclusive coke bottle clear edition and a picture-disc variant sold via Selena’s webstore.

Amor was also reissued on CD and as a cassette tape, with the latter exclusively sold in Selena’s webstore.

Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft rises 9-5 on Top Album Sales with 10,000 (down 12%), Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess steps 8-6 with 9,000 (down 26%) and Zach Bryan’s The Great American Bar Scene shoots 21-7 after its first full tracking week, with 8,500 sold (up 66%). The set was released on July 4, the final day of the tracking week for the July 13-dated chart, and sold 5,000 copies that day (enabling it debut at No. 21). The album is only available to purchase as a digital download; its CD and vinyl are due out on Oct. 11.

Agust D’s chart-topping D-Day re-enters Top Album Sales at No. 8 with nearly 8,000 sold following the set’s vinyl release on July 5. Rounding out the top 10 are a pair of former No. 1s from Swift, as Lover jumps 19-9 with just over 5,000 sold (though down 3%) and 1989 (Taylor’s Version) vaults 20-10 with nearly 5,000 (down 5%).

All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes.

Are you traveling or looking to refresh your makeup bag collection this summer? When it comes to makeup pouches, finding the perfect one that fits all your items can be tricky. However, once you find it, you’ll be able to keep everything organized and quickly spot your eyeliner. With this short list of travel-friendly makeup bags, you’ll be able stay organized and stylish on your summer getaways, ensuring you’re ready to look your best while on the move.

From sleek travel bags to spacious organizers, this list of versatile accessories are sure to keep your makeup collection tidy. This can also help reduce the risk of forgetting any of your essential items while keeping you organized.

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This Lazyher travel makeup bag provides lots of space for all your cosmetics, from makeup brushes to toiletries. In fact, this makeup travel bag is designed to keep you fully organized. So if you’re seeking ways to declutter, your bag is an easy solve. According to Amazon, it also includes a detachable brush board to maintain a separate spot for your brushes.

Whether you’re traveling or just need a makeup bag that suits your on-the-go needs, consider buying yourself this Relavel makeup case. This high-quality leather makeup bag is perfect for all occasions. It includes adjustable dividers that allow you to move it around and organize your items based on your preferences. You can DIY it and make it your own. It also has plenty of space to fit all you want. With its waterproof and wear-resistant features, cleaning it will be easy. It also comes with an attachable shoulder strap. If you’re looking for a versatile option, add this one to your cart. 

Consider one of TikTok’s favorite trendy makeup bags: the Étoile Duo Vanity Case that’s all over my FYP. This limited edition comes in gray, black, beige, lavender pink, and so many other colors. Hurry, though: There are only three left in stock in lavender pink! This makeup bag has you covered with a top and bottom compartment. This bag also includes a fold-out mirror, making it easier for you to apply your makeup or skincare routine when on the go. Its vegan leather material and makeup-stain-proof lining make it truly one of a kind.

If you’re looking to spice up your style, this checkered two-piece makeup bag is the one for you. Its vintage and elegant brown plaid pattern design is perfect for any outfit and any occasion. According to Walmart, it is super lightweight with waterproof anti-wear and water-resistant interior. This multi-purpose bag can be used not only for makeup, but also as a personal travel bag for both men and women.

Can’t keep track of what’s in your makeup bag? Don’t fret: Consider this Ulta Beauty clear sage-trimmed alternative with see-through pockets and multiple compartments. Its spacious and sage-green tassel zipper pulls offer a clean look. You’ll get easy access to your items with just one glance.

For more product recommendations, check out other must-have makeup products to add to your makeup bag and discover the best Ulta Beauty deals now.