Baltazar, an AI-powered analytical platform that can aid in royalty valuation thanks to the ingestion of $2 billion worth of music statements protected by anonymizing architecture, has added Shot Tower Capital, a boutique investment bank specializing in music industry assets, and its asset valuation unit, RedBrick Advisors, to its growing list of design partners. 

Built by Swedish company Chapter Two, Baltazar allows users to ingest their royalty information, but silos it so they can access it when needed (and so others can’t see it). Collectively, the ingested information enhances Baltazar’s overall data library in volume while also making the platform smarter, allowing users to gain financial analytical insight to assess valuation and provide revenue forecasting, according to Chapter Two and Shot Tower Capital executives. It is one of a few emerging analytical platforms — another is the Mogul catalog valuation dashboard — aimed at helping the financial sector and industry executives make economic sense of the growing trillions of annual micro-transactions and the resulting royalty payment flow. 

“Music has always been a data-rich industry, but the tools to interpret that data have lagged behind,” Shot Tower Capital managing director Rob Law said in a statement. “As music matures into an institutional asset class, the technology powering it must evolve just as quickly. This partnership reflects the next step in our commitment to leading that evolution — ensuring the market has the sophisticated, data-driven infrastructure it needs to scale with confidence.”

While the $2 billion worth of ingested royalty information is a good place to start, the platform will only get better as more financial data is ingested, according to the company. As it stands now, that $2 billion includes historical royalty information that comes from a CMO (collective management organization) and private acquisitions deals like the sale of a stake in producer Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins‘ catalog to HarbourView Equity Partners. 

In total, the ingested data comes from more than 100,000 catalogs, according to Chapter Two. The volume breaks out to 62% in revenue from master rights and 37% from publishing rights, but the company says that data comes more from publishing catalogs than master recording catalogs.

Going forward, Shot Tower will feed Baltazar financial information from whatever deals it’s working on, which helps the platform learn. In addition, Shot Tower will also play the role of stress testing the system and providing feedback, according to Chapter Two CEO Michel Dahlbert Traore. Shot Tower is “pushing us on correctness,” he says. “They are asking, ‘Can you trace all decisions the system has made?’ Also, Shot Tower wants to know what is assumed and what is fact — they will help make this institutional-grade.”

Chapter Two was founded in 2021 by Traore, COO Filip Stromsten, and chief music officer Ida Brink. It is backed by Swedish House Mafia’s Axwell, King.com video game creator and founder Sebastian Knutsson, and Stride.VC, a London-based seed-stage tech fund, according to company literature. Traore describes Baltazar as the “Bloomberg Terminal for music assets.”

Royalty statements from around the world can be radically different, but Baltazar allows users to upload messy, incomplete and incompatible data and organize it with proprietary AI, Traore elaborates. First, it identifies the data, he explains, which allows a second step to kick off — namely, cleaning up the data, which addresses things like double counting and spacing between numbers that a computer can’t understand. A third step fixes those things. It does this by ingesting, rationalizing and cleaning up data to provide standardization across revenue flows from around the world, and quickly putting it into a structure that allows users to tailor royalty information into understandable analytics. This can allow for apples-to-apples comparisons, according to Chapter Two’s literature on Baltazar.

As Sachin Sagger, co-founder of Shot Tower Capital’s valuation unit, RedBrick Advisors, said in a statement, “Reliable valuation starts with reliable data. Baltazar strengthens the analytical foundation required for high-quality valuation and transaction decision-making. This technology furthers our ability to provide additional transaction support and services to our clients.”

In normal times, artists say that understanding royalty statements can be difficult. In today’s music industry, “in order to make sense of [royalty payments], you need to put in a lot of work,” says Traore. “Over the years, institutional buyers solved that issue manually with a bunch of analysts.” That’s where Baltazar comes in. “We are building an infrastructure to get to the source of earnings,” he says. Or, as Chapter Two’s press release puts it, Baltazar is a new intelligence platform designed to standardize music royalty analytics and copyright valuation for institutional markets. In a few hours, “Baltazar gets you from raw statements to actionable data,” he adds.

As things stand now, Traore says there is no publicly available data source that shows what a catalog should be making, nor is there enough data publicly available that allows for accurate forecasting. These are things that Baltazar was built to address, he adds. 

Currently, Chapter Two is targeting sophisticated institutional investors and financial advisors that are buying or looking at music assets. But eventually, as the system’s infrastructure is built out, the company claims it will serve every stakeholder across the music industry. For instance, later this year, “we want to roll something out for rights holders, starting with business managers,” Traore says. “You would need a good driver who understands the system to get the most out of the tool.” 

Beyond that, the next phase would target labels and distributors that pay advances and need models to forecast. Eventually, the hope is that it can also evolve to be used for auditing royalty statements. “For now, we are not focused on the auditing aspect, but that may come,” says Traore. “With every ingestion, the system gets smarter.”

What’s more, Chapter Two expects that other providers, like valuation and auditing services, will build out capabilities on top of the Baltazar platform — or that perhaps a management firm will create a nice user interface to let its clients navigate their financials. With chat and query capabilities, a songwriter wouldn’t need a forensic guru to find out how much their song catalog made in Japan in 2021, for example.

In order to access Baltazar, users will have to become subscribers, says Traore, which will be based on the size of the company and usage. One of the advantages of becoming a subscriber is that it would allow financial firms not to invest so heavily in analyst and technology staffing, since Chapter Two maintains a staff of about eight tech people who are continually tweaking the system to improve it, says Shot Tower’s Law.

Baltazar “provides the raw horsepower that experts need to see the ‘why’ behind a valuation, not just the ‘what,’” said Traore in a statement. “For those who live in these numbers, data quality is the entire game.”

Dermot Kennedy has made history on the U.K.’s Official Albums Chart dated April 10 with his new album, The Weight of the Woods.

By landing the top spot, Kennedy is the first Irish solo artist to have each of his first three studio albums score the No. 1 placement. This week’s achievement follows the 2019 debut Without Fear and 2023’s Sonder to rule the U.K. charts.

In its second week, RAYE’s This Music May Contain Hope slips just one place to No. 2. The epic 17-track LP gave the British star her first U.K. No. 1 album. The set landed at No. 11 on the Billboard 200 in its opening week.

Olivia Dean’s The Art of Loving is at No. 3, while her song “Rein Me In” with Sam Fender is at No. 1 on the U.K.’s Official Singles Chart. 

Harry Styles’ Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally rises two places to No. 4. On Friday (April 10), the LP was named the U.K.’s biggest album of 2026 so far, amassing 226,000 combined chart units since its release in March.

Fresh from the opening night of its global tour, BTS’ recent chart-topper ARIRANG is at No. 5. The group kicked off its upcoming 85-date tour in Goyang, South Korea, on Thursday (April 9) before hitting North America on April 25.

Arlo Parks has earned her third top 40 record with Ambiguous Desire at No. 11. The Londoner won the Mercury Prize in 2021 with Collapsed in Sunbeams (No. 3) and released its follow-up My Soft Machine in 2023 (No. 9).

Kehlani and Missy Elliott aren’t afraid to indulge in a little “Back and Forth” on the “Folded” singer’s sensual new single. The track from Kehlani’s upcoming self-titled album due out on April 24 is the latest preview of the two-time Grammy winner’s fifth album, the follow-up to 2024’s Crash.

It finds Kehlani in their signature lights-low R&B groove, with Elliott kicking thing off with some bold bars, boasting, “You know it’s some hot s–t/ Let me say what I’m gon’ say, let me stay on the topic/ Girl, woman, I do what I wanna do/ Why you trippin’ when I come right home to you?” over the song’s languorous beat before Kehlani steps in on the whispery first verse.

“Why you so quiet?/ The silence hit like sirens/ If looks could kill, well then, tonight might get violent/ When the fit too fire, you always get too firin’,” Kehlani sings as Elliott interjects some of her signature excitable “woo”‘s to punctuate the affair.

The pre-chorus amps up the heat, with Kehlani singing, “And by-y-y-y-y/ By doing this later, I do us a favor / And by-y-y-y-y/ Don’t ruin my makeup, be there when you wake up,” before dipping into the singsongy chorus that pays homage to Elliott’s legendary late friend and collaborator Aaliyah’s 1994 debut hit single “Back & Forth.”

“I ain’t goin’ back and forth tonight, I’m goin’ out/ I ain’t goin’ back and forth tonight, I’m goin’ out/ It’s last call, you the last thing on my mind,” Kehlani croons on the refrain. By the time Elliott gets to her verse, she’s heated when a man tries to tell her how to present herself in a sassy back-and-forth that ends with an explicit shoutout to Aaliyah.

“Ayo, where you goin’?/ I’m going out, what you mean?/ Oh, yeah, with who?/ I’m going out, I’m ’bout to leave/ And you wearing that?/ Yeah, I’m grown, not a teen/ Who you riding with?/ I’m ’bout to drop my Lamborghini,” Elliott raps. “N–ga, I ain’t doing this tonight/ I’m ’bout to drive off, oh, you mad? Yeah, aight/ You know I be home, I’ma see ya when I see ya/ All that back, back and forth got me feeling like Aaliyah.”

The new song comes after an epic run for Kehlani in 2025, which included the crossover anthem “Folded,” which landed the singer several chart milestones, with the track peaking at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, marking her first top 10 on that singles chart. The song also hit No. 1 on three other Billboard charts: Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay and Rhythmic Airplay. Another single released last year, “Out the Window,” reached the top 10 of the Rhythmic Airplay and Hot R&B/ Hip-Hop Songs charts.

Kehlani will be receive the Impact Award at Billboard Women in Music 2026, which will take place on April 29 at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles. They will also do a special performance at the event hosted by Keke Palmer.

Listen to “Back and Forth” below.

British singer-songwriter-producer Raye has walked a winding road through the music industry over the past decade. Signed to a major label a decade ago as an artist, she subsequently had a string of successes as a songwriter for artists like Beyoncé and John Legend and as a collaborator with the likes of David Guetta and Charli xcx before going independent, signing with distribution company Human Re Sources and releasing her debut indie project My 21st Century Blues in 2023. 

Since then, her trajectory has been on a big upswing: the success of Blues led to a Grammy nomination for best new artist in 2025, where she stole the show at the ceremony with a rendition of “Oscar Winning Tears,” and the subsequent release of her second album, THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE, and its breakout single “Where Is My Husband?” This week, HOPE debuted at No. 11 on the Billboard 200 and “Husband” reached No. 11 on the Hot 100, both career-high marks for Raye — feats which earn Human Re Sources founder/CEO J Erving the title of Billboard’s Executive of the Week.

Here, Erving talks about Raye’s success as an independent artist, how he’s built Human Re Sources over the past seven years and how he navigates the indie music world. “My goal isn’t to compete, my goal is to move culture,” he says. “And I feel like if we continue to move culture in a space that’s becoming more crowded by the day, we can continue to have success.”

This week, Raye’s new album THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE debuted in the top 10 on four different Billboard charts, and hit No. 11 on the Billboard 200, a career high for her. What key decision did you make to help make that happen?

Raye is the decision maker. Our role and responsibility is to support her decisions and help bring them to life. She knew exactly what she wanted when making “Where Is My Husband” and delivered a classic album.

At the same time, this week her single “Where Is My Husband?” reached No. 11 on the Hot 100, her first top 20 single and the highest mark of her career to date. How have you guys helped push that single ahead of the album, and after the album’s release?

Raye had the vision for “Where Is My Husband.” She introduced the record on her socials, explained what it meant to her and showed fans how to connect with it. We followed her lead and helped amplify what she set in motion.

With this album, as well as her best new artist nomination at the Grammy Awards last year, Raye has truly made the transition from hit songwriter to hit artist — a crossover that many have tried, but that is notoriously difficult to achieve. How did you help her make that shift and really succeed?

Raye’s first big record from “My 21st Century Blues” came almost three years ago, and that really set the foundation for this next chapter. The hard work, the live performances, the authenticity, everything she brings, it’s always been bigger than one song. Again, Raye is an independent artist, and she’s driving this.

You’ve had Human Re Sources for seven years now. How has the company grown and evolved over that time period?

We try to stay close to the artist. As we’ve grown, the team has grown with it. We’re learning every day, figuring out how to move within the new music business model and staying connected to artists that mean something to us, from Brent [Faiyaz] to Pink Sweat$ to Raye to Jill Scott and more to come. 

What does the future hold for both Raye and Human Re Sources?

There’s no ceiling to what Raye is capable of as she continues to grow and evolve, we grow alongside her at Human Re-Sources.