Sly & The Family Stone's Streams Up 563% Following Sly Stone's Death
This week: Sly & the Family Stone's streams are way up following the passing of the group's iconic bandleader, Coldplay sees a heartbroken deep cut go viral for its frontman's rumored real-life heartbreak, Beyoncé gets a bump for a song she's not even playing on tour and more.
More from Billboard
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Head to Florida for Stanley Cup Final
Twenty One Pilots Drop New Single, 'The Contract,' Detail North American Tour Dates
j-hope Heads to Memphis to Recruit GloRilla for 'Killin' It Girl' Single: Listen
The legendary Sly Stone died earlier this week (June 9) at age 82, leaving behind a seismic impact on the worlds of funk, rock and soul. Though sadly brief in his run as a prominent recording artist – the original lineup of Stone's signature outfit Sly & the Family Stone fell apart within a decade, and Stone became reclusive not long thereafter – his imprint on future generations of artists remains indelible, with a pair of undisputed classic albums (1969's Stand! and 1971's There's a Riot Goin' On) and countless classic singles.
Unsurprisingly, following his death, fans flocked to streaming services to revisit Sly & the Family Stone's most beloved works. His catalog combined for 2.5 million U.S. on-demand audio streams over Tuesday and Wednesday, the two days following his death – up 563% from 385,000 streams over the same period the previous week, according to Luminate. Among the most-streamed classics across those two days: 'Everyday People' (up 168% to 326,000 streams, following a Cher-and-Future-assisted bump two weeks ago), 'Dance to the Music' (up 408% to 174,000) and 'Thank You Falettin Me Be Mice Elf Agin' (up 378% to 169,000). – ANDREW UNTERBERGER
Last week, news broke that Coldplay's Chris Martin and actress Dakota Johnson had reportedly called it quits after eight years of on-and-off dating. Although the couple has not publicly commented on the reports, Coldplay has spent the past few weeks playing stadiums as part of their years-long Music of the Spheres tour — and Martin's performance of the heart-wrenched song 'Sparks' during the shows has inspired some post-breakup gawking, and a significant streaming boost.
'And I know I was wrong/ But I won't let you down/ Oh yeah I will, yeah I will, yes I will,' Martin sings on the track from Coldplay's 2000 debut Parachutes, which he performs in a stripped-down version on acoustic guitar during the stadium tour. After the band performed for two nights at Las Vegas' Allegiant Stadium last week and at Denver's Empower Field at Mile High on Tuesday night (June 10), TikTok clips began to surface focused on Martin's pained facial expression during the song's chorus, with one popular clip captioned, 'Homie is heartbroken.'
Whether it's capturing true feelings or just a projection, the viral boost has translated to streaming services, where 'Sparks' earned 1.5 million U.S. on-demand audio streams on June 9-10 — a 64% increase from its streaming total during the previous Monday and Tuesday, according to Luminate. We'll see if the 25-year-old track can keep surging, although Coldplay will play a pair of stadium shows in El Paso this weekend — and many phones will once again be trained on Martin during one of the show's more emotional moments. – JASON LIPSHUTZ
With their fast-rising new Hollywood single, Cali rap stars YG and Shoreline Mafia (currently comprised of OhGeesy and Fenix Flexin) are looking to keep the West Coast's Kendrick Lamar-fueled momentum going for the rest of the year.
The new single, which dropped on May 23, appears to be another (more upbeat and danceable) taste of the forthcoming project YG teased with March's '2004.' Featuring an assist from Shoreline Mafia and bars directed at Joey Bada$$ ('All the pretty hoes gon' play this/ Joey Bada$$ gon' hate this'), 'Hollywood' is an easy song of the summer contender that's quickly taken over socials. On TikTok, the official 'Hollywood' sound has garnered over 10,000 posts, thanks to the music video's viral Storm DeBarge-crafted choreography.
According to Luminate, 'Hollywood' earned 3.28 million official on-demand U.S. streams in its first full week of release (May 23-29). The following week (May 30-June 5), that figure jumped by 53.5% to just over five million official streams. On the Jun. 14-dated Bubbling Under Hot 100, 'Hollywood' debuted at No. 3, a promising sign for the rest of its chart run. Should its growth continue, 'Hollywood' could land YG his first Hot 100 entry as a lead artist in nearly three years. – KYLE DENIS
'All Night,' the sweeping ballad that wraps up Beyoncé's forgiveness narrative on her blockbuster 2016 Lemonade LP, has been a fan-favorite for nearly ten years. Now, thanks to a viral Cowboy Carter mash-up, it's become something of a streaming hit.
On April 14, TikTok user @cowboydanny posted a mashup of 'All Night' and Cowboy Carter's 'Tyrant,' laying the latter's lead vocals over the former's instrumental and drawing a connection between the songs' shared theme of redemption. The moving mash-up quickly went viral on TikTok amongst the Beyhive, eventually spreading to the platform at-large once the Cowboy Carter Tour kicked off two weeks later on April 28. On TikTok, @cowboydanny's original post has collected over one million views, while the accompanying sound plays in around 35,000 posts. On YouTube, the creator's official upload of the mashup boasts nearly 640,000 hits. For the past eight weeks, 'All Night' has seen a steady, gradual resurgence on streaming as a new generation of consumers discover the Lemonade visual album for the first time.
During the week of April 11-17, 'All Night' earned just under 940,000 official on-demand U.S. streams, according to Luminate. Six weeks later (May 30-June 5), that number ballooned by 76% to over 1.65 million official streams. Even though Beyoncé does not perform 'All Night' on the Cowboy Carter Tour (she does, however, perform 'Tyrant'), the song is still connecting with listeners and gaining new fans nine years later. – KD
Best of Billboard
Chart Rewind: In 1989, New Kids on the Block Were 'Hangin' Tough' at No. 1
Four Decades of 'Madonna': A Look Back at the Queen of Pop's Debut Album on the Charts
Chart Rewind: In 1990, Madonna Was in 'Vogue' Atop the Hot 100
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Associated Press
32 minutes ago
- Associated Press
Aubrey Plaza describes grief over husband Jeff Baena's death, likens it to an 'ocean of awfulness'
Aubrey Plaza has described her grief over husband Jeff Baena's death, likening it to 'a giant ocean of awfulness.' The actor spoke on the podcast ''Good Hang with Amy Poehler,' telling her former 'Parks and Recreation' costar in her most detailed public remarks to date that it's been a daily struggle to overcome her grief. Writer-director Baena's January death at age 47 was ruled a suicide. 'Overall, I'm here and I'm functioning,' Plaza tells Poehler at the outset of their interview after being asked how she is coping. 'I feel really grateful to be moving through the world. I think I'm OK. But it's like a daily struggle, obviously.' ___ EDITOR'S NOTE — This story includes discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, the national suicide and crisis lifeline in the U.S. is available by calling or texting 988. There is also an online chat at ___ She likens her grief to an image from an Apple TV+ horror movie starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy. 'Did you see that movie 'The Gorge?'' Plaza asks Poehler. 'In the movie, there's a cliff on one side and then there's a cliff on the other side, and there's a gorge in between, and its filled with all these monster people trying to get them,' Plaza says. 'And I swear when I watched it I was like, 'That feels like what my grief is like,' or what grief could be like … where it's like at all times, there's a giant ocean of awfulness that's right there and I can see it.' Plaza adds: 'And sometimes I just want to dive into it, and just be in it, and sometimes I just look at it. And then sometimes I try to get away from it. But it's just always there, and the monster people are trying to get me, like Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy.' Baena was a writer and director who frequently collaborated with Plaza. He cowrote David O. Russell's 2004 film 'I Heart Huckabees' and wrote and directed five of his own films. Plaza starred in his 2014 directorial debut, the zombie comedy 'Life After Beth.' After largely remaining silent since Baena's death, Plaza is now promoting her new film, 'Honey Don't!' The dark comedy from director Ethan Coen has Margaret Qualley as a private investigator looking into nefarious goings-on in Bakersfield, California.
New York Times
32 minutes ago
- New York Times
If You Have Time for Just One Romance Novel, Make It This One
August Lane AUGUST LANE (Grand Central, 325 pp., $29) is a second-chance romance and a powerhouse of the genre — a sullen, smoldering ember that's one breath away from blazing into an inferno. To be honest, I'm a little mad you're reading my column and not this book right now. August was abandoned by her superstar mother, Jojo, raised by her grandmother and betrayed by the boy she loved. That boy, Luke Randall, stole a song they'd co-written and became a country music star himself. And now Jojo's being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and has asked Luke to sing his signature hit as a duet onstage in Arcadia, their hometown. Everything that was taken from August is on that concert stage, and it will all go up in smoke if she tells anyone that Luke had a co-writer. Contracts, royalties, sponsorships — poof. Revenge is right there for the taking. Except August doesn't know the real reason Luke's kept singing their song. She doesn't know he's been sober for five years, and that he's tired of watching his career wither while he hides his real voice behind radio-friendly production polish. She doesn't know he sees his return to Arcadia as a chance to finally make things right. If she doesn't burn down his career, he'll do it for her. The angst is glorious. Everyone in this book is ruined in some way that will never be fixed. People do monstrous things to the ones they love. This is not the aw-shucks kind of country: It's the murder ballads, the rolling thunder, the long black road — and the best romance I've read all year. The Entanglement of Rival Wizards Next up is an enemies-to-lovers, THE ENTANGLEMENT OF RIVAL WIZARDS (Bramble, 326 pp., paperback, $19.99), in which a magical graduate student has to work with his nemesis from another department in order to keep his funding and complete his degree. Sebastian Walsh, a human wizard studying evocation, keeps his trauma close at hand like a switchblade. Elethior Tourael — he says to call him Thio; Sebastian would rather die — is a snobby half-elf from the rival conjuration department whose relatives have made piles of money off magical weapons. Thio and Sebastian separately pitched projects on how to prevent magical spells from draining a wizard's power — so to save money, the university pairs them up and tells them they're sharing the grant. It's a disaster until the two realize that irritation is one step away from attraction. But just as they're starting to work as a team, both in and out of the lab, family secrets start coming home to roost. This is the complex world building SFF readers live for, paired with the epic swooning of modern romantasy. Raasch gives us a detailed magical military-industrial complex that has its claws in every aspect of Sebastian and Thio's lives. The philosophy of spells, orc religions, parental betrayals — it's a lot, but Raasch always pulls back before it becomes too much. By Marsh and by Moor Finally, indie author Trent has treated us to a new working-class queer Regency, BY MARSH AND BY MOOR (Self-published, ebook, $3.99). Jedediah Trevithick loved his life as a carrier, just him and his cart and his horse. But then he was kidnapped by the press gang, a roving band that snatched up laborers for a Royal Navy desperately in need of sailors. Jed has spent the past five years at sea, dodging cannonballs, hating the officers and planning his escape. Now he's washed ashore at the feet of a London ostler traveling to a place not far from Jed's hometown. Solomon has his own reasons for keeping to the back roads and byways — but he doesn't know them nearly as well as Jed does, even after five years' absence. Solomon and Jed come to depend on each other — and then, slowly, to want more than simple trust and friendship. But Solomon's secrets are the kind you can't run away from — and Jed will have to decide just how much of his life he's willing to risk for love. Regencies with war veteran heroes often paint the Napoleonic period as an orgy of prize money and roguish scars; Trent presents the bleak reality most soldiers and sailors faced instead — being stolen from loved ones and sent to die by cannon or cutlass. But we also see people stand up to the press gangs, protect friends and strangers, and find ways to keep one another safe from kidnappers and abuses of the law. In a subgenre where money is so often the fantasy, it's worth cheering characters who escape via their wits and not their wealth.
WIRED
32 minutes ago
- WIRED
I Went to an AI Film Festival Screening and Left With More Questions Than Answers
Aug 20, 2025 6:30 AM Runway AI paired up with Imax to screen 10 AI-generated winning selections. The festival has been derided by some cinephiles, while others insist it's part of a natural technological evolution. The AI Film Festival. Photograph: Mark Sommerfeld Last year, filmmaker Paul Schrader—the director of Blue Collar, American Gigolo , and First Reformed , and writer of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver —issued what seemed like the last word on artificial intelligence in Hollywood filmmaking. A few days after the release of Denis Villeneuve's sci-fi blockbuster Dune: Part Two , Schrader asked his Facebook followers: 'Will Dune 3 be made by AI? And, if it is, how will we know?' Schrader is well regarded not only as a director, but one of cinema's top-shelf curmudgeons, quick with a wry burn or baiting shit-post. But his Dune tweet seemed like more than another provocation. It spoke to a mounting feeling among many filmgoers, myself included: that Hollywood had stooped to producing sleek, antiseptic images so devoid of personality that they might as well have been made not by a living, breathing, thinking, feeling artist, but by a computer. Most generative AIs 'train' on existing troves of man-made images. With Dune , the opposite seemed true. It appeared as if Villeneuve was training on AI conjurations, screensavers, and glossy desktop wallpapers. (In fact, the film used 'machine learning' models to relatively modest ends.) Still, it got me thinking: Is there an actual AI aesthetic? Do video generators powered by AI share a set of artistic ideas, or values, common among their output? Or, even more basically, can AI video generators have ideas, or values, at all? My initial hunches here were … a) no; b) no; and c); no, of course an AI could not have 'ideas' or 'values,' which are the exclusive province of human artists, and human beings more generally. A toaster does not get a notion to warm up your bread or bagel, and then follow through with it. Nor does it care about how it does so. It merely executes a set of routinized, mechanized functions related to the warming (and eventual jettisoning) of breads, bagels, and other toastables. Why should generative AI be any different? To test these premises (and my own rather dismissive conclusions) I trekked to a theater in New York to take in a program of 10 short films from the 2025 AI Film Festival. The AI Film Festival is backed by Runway, a New York–based AI company offering 'tools for human imagination.' Among those tools are image and video generators allowing users to create characters, sets, lighting schemes, and whole immersive scenes. With its Gen-4 software, users can theoretically create a whole movie—or something vaguely approximating one, anyway. 'We were all frustrated filmmakers,' says Runway's cofounder, Alejandro Matamala Ortiz, of he and his partners, who met as grad students enrolled in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU's Tisch School for the Arts. 'We wanted to build the tools that we wanted to use.' The film festival was born of a further desire to help legitimize those same AI tools. A gala screening held earlier this summer at New York's prestigious Alice Tully Hall at the Lincoln Center (home to the New York Film Festival and year-round programming) saw filmmakers and technologists gather to watch the crème de la crème of a technology typically written off for producing mere 'slop.' The festival format, Ortiz says, serves to 'bring people together.' Now, that same gala program is touring Imax cinemas around the country, for a limited engagement. As with any billing of 10 shorts made by 10 different filmmakers, the quality is a bit scattershot. The program begins promisingly enough with Maddie Hong's Emergence, an immersive nature documentary 'shot' (and narrated) from the POV of a butterfly larvae hatching from a chrysalis. With its bold pastel color palette, the rotoscope animated More Tears Than Harm , by Herinarivo Rakotomanana, superficially evoked the work of American primitivist painter Horace Pippin (who is one of my favorite artists). Simon Reith's 6000 Lies is a rapid collage of gestating human fetuses, followed by a photo of a fetus burial site. In an abridged form, it might make an effective advertisement for a pro-life group. Indeed, if there was anything like an aesthetic sensibility shared by the films it was a sense of commercialized gloss: rapid-fire edits, satiny, photorealistic images. A few, like Riccardo Fusetti's Editorial and Vallée Duhamel's Fragments of Nowhere , played like perfume ads for a fragrance an android might wear. The lousiest of the bunch was an anime short called RŌHKI - A Million Trillion Pathways , credited to a filmmaker named Hachi and IO. Beyond being wholly derivative, it highlighted the rather obvious shortcomings of the technology, like characters' earlobes and shirt collars seemingly mutating in shape between scenes. One filmmaker in the audience, Robert Pietri, came away mostly impressed by what he saw. 'A couple of them were really pushing, and going where I think you should be going with this,' he says, 'which is creating a cinema that you can't create otherwise. I was excited by it.' He sees the weaker films as not being limited as much by the emerging AI toolkit but by the 'limitations of the creators.' An AI it seems, cannot render away bad ideas inputted by the human beings plugging in the prompts. Well, not yet, anyway. As something of a generative-AI skeptic, watching the program raised all kinds of questions. Some of these were pretty pedantic and boring. Like: Does standard movie theater etiquette (re: looking at one's cell phone) apply during an AI film fest? You could imagine a computer filmmaker might actually like to see another little computer, lighting up in the dark theater, as if approvingly. Other questions were a bit more existential—or, perhaps, ontological—relating to the very nature of so-called 'AI art.' Even when these films were entertaining or nice to look at, I couldn't help but feel a little tricked. Aren't those qualities mere impersonations of real films, painstakingly made by real people? And so, aren't even the 'good films' still fundamentally bad? There are other, less chin-stroking, considerations. Generative AI has drawn criticism for its massive draw on natural resources, with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitting that the proliferation of data centers is pretty much unsustainable without considerable developments in nuclear fusion. And AI's encroachment on certain creative fields has led to concerns about mass layoffs in the film and video game industries. Runway's Ortiz says he thinks of AI as similar to previous technological innovations rollicking creative fields. 'Technology has brought some disruption in the job market,' he says. 'But it also opens up new, new stuff.' The technologists and 'creatives' using and promoting these tools tend to frame the arrival of all this 'new, new stuff' as something of an inevitability. Phoenix-based filmmaker Jacob Adler, whose Total Pixel Space took top honors at the AI Film Festival, seems to follow a similar philosophical track. 'I am fascinated by the long arc of technological evolution that requires the flow of time, beginning with biological technologies such as self-replicating molecules, cell membranes, photosynthesis, nervous systems, eyes, brains, etc.,' Adler wrote in an email to WIRED. 'AI is not a departure from nature, but a continuation of the fundamental evolutionary trend of biology learning to build more complex information-processing systems, now outside its own flesh.' But flesh still has its defenders. The AI battle lines increasingly seem drawn in terms that are unreconcilable. So it comes as little surprise that skeptics, critics, and champions of the old ways have been decrying the AI Film Festival from day one. When Imax announced its partnership with Runway AI, responses among cinephiles were spiky. One X user replied,'Not watching anything made by clankers,' referencing the slur used to disparage robots in the Star Wars films. Actor Jared Gillman reposted Imax's announcement on X with an image of Ethan Hawke in a suicide vest from First Reformed with the caption, 'One ticket for the ai imax film festival please' (doubly appropriate, perhaps, considering Schrader's stated views on the technology). The commingling of Imax and AI seemed a particularly egregious offence. Imax, after all, is a corporation ostensibly dedicated to showcasing the theatrical cinematic experience at the grandest and most imposing scale. And AI is regarded as, well, something else entirely. As one especially withering Redditor put it, 'Imax and Runway AI Sign a Film Festival Deal to Show Dogshit.' AI's defenders (many of whom have a vested financial interest in the technology's success) love claiming that many great leaps forward in human artistry have been met with similar resistance. And they have a point—to a point. Digital filmmaking challenged analog, celluloid filmmaking. The introduction of sound and color technology in cinema was regarded, at first, as a mere gimmick. Even very early critics and academics fretted that photographic media like cinema could never be art, precisely because they merely represented reality, instead of interpreting it. With time, and plenty of counterargument, pretty much all these takes have been proven wrong. Adler's own prize-winning short (which earned him a $15,000 cash prize and 1 million Runway AI 'credits') is a thesis film on this very idea. Total Pixel Space explores the notion of a hypothetical universe of colored pixels, exploring what its narrator calls 'a process of discovery in which all of reality is already mapped.' OK. But is all of reality 'already mapped'? Is this technology merely being 'discovered,' as one might discover, say, a river or a cool restaurant? Or is it being invented, and managed, by actual people making actual decisions, which have actual consequences? Perhaps AI is just the latest disruptive innovation riling up the haters and fuddy-duddies. Or perhaps machine-generated art constitutes not just another step in cinematic-technologic evolution, but a fundamental break from the basic, taken-for-granted idea of what it is to make art: that it involves skill, tremendous patience, considerable talent and, at very least, a human being positioned as its prime mover. AI is a difference (or 'disruption') not of degree, but kind—not the next step in a process, but a totally different thing. Apples and computer-generated oranges. For Troy Petermann, a 15-year-old attending the New York screening of the Imax AI Film Festival with his family, AI is not a tool. It's a threat. 'AI is definitely an innovation,' says the aspiring filmmaker. 'But innovation is the drug of humanity. We never know how to stop when it goes too far.' Petermann's reflections are refreshing, in large part because generative AI technologies are so typically pushed to people in his exact demographic: wannabe filmmakers with big ideas but little in the way of tools, money, or institutional support. He admits that AI technology may have tremendous upside in terms of its 'analytical' capacities, like processing and synthesizing information. 'When it comes to creative aspects,' he says, 'we should just draw the line.' Increasingly, those lines are getting blurrier. The AI Film Festival earned such pointed cinephile scorn in part because it was easy to single out as a conscious enemy of the seventh art. Runway's Ortiz speculates that, for the festival's next installment, the company may change the branding altogether. 'I don't think it will remain the 'AI Film Festival,'' he says. 'We do think AI is just going to be part of any process. Similar to other companies. Everyone is an AI company, and will be using AI in some way. AI will become just another tool within filmmaking.'
