Near Truths

MINT MONEY CLUB: AWGE/Interscope’s Playboi Carti is off to an astounding start with his long-awaited set MUSIC. The over/under on the 30-track hip-hop release’s chart bow is 250k (without any physical).

That would be a #1 debut, in case you were wondering, after an opening weekend that saw Carti absolutely dominating the Spotify and Apple Music charts, with the Top 3 (and 24 of the Top 30) on the Spot U.S., 12 of the Top 20 on Spotify global and the Top 4 (and 18 of the Top 20) on Apple. Spotify flacks are saying MUSIC is 2025’s most-streamed album in a single day on the platform.

Like some other projects under the capacious John Janick banner, Playboi seems to represent a vibrant new chapter for rap. With Q1 2025 nearing its close, several big new-artist stories are well underway. At the very top of the list—and inarguably the breakout of 2025 so far—is TDE/Capitol’s Doechii.

After a sensational Grammy night, the rapper-singer began to slice through the noise on DSPs with cuts from her Rap Album winner, Alligator Bites Never Heal. She's now going nuclear with a new version of an older cut, “Anxiety,” that had gone viral. Her new rendition reached #2 on both Spotify’s U.S. and global charts and the Top 10 on Apple Music. And the Alligator track “Denial Is a River” has been hanging tough.

Doechii’s streaming momentum confirms the widespread perception—which was palpable just before the Grammys—that she was on a path to superstardom. With her ability to shift gears from edgy, formidable bars to playful pop to confessional intimacy, Doechii is helping to revitalize hip-hop, a genre that had begun to feel depleted in the preceding years. And as her Grammy performance proved, she is a riveting live act.

Capitol boss Tom March makes his bones with a giant assist from Top Dawg’s shop, which is emerging as one of the great artist-development incubators in the biz.

RCA’s Tate McRae has blown the doors wide open with her #1-debuting album and has several songs sizzling at the DSPs. The Canadian singer, who was signed at 16 and has been nurtured by Team Edge’s characteristic patience, is yet another diva triumph in Nipper Land.

Interscope’s Gracie Abrams is also continuing to build major momentum, with single “That’s So True” showing real stamina. Her 2024 was terrific, but her 2025 looks even better. Island titans Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan keep blowing up the charts as the standard-bearers of a dazzling crop of female pop stars. Island now has two more contenders to add to this impressive list of distaff breakouts: Lola Young and Gigi Perez, both of whom have found berths in the upper tier at Spotify and aren’t going anywhere.

Women are, in fact, thoroughly dominating pop. It’s lately a rare thing for male artists to make a mark there. Roan has upped the ante once again with the hotly anticipated track “The Giver,” a queer country-rock romp she performed on SNL. Could it take her to an even higher plateau?

Kendrick Lamar (pgLang/Interscope) and SZA (TDE/RCA) are still hitting new heights together, and separately, with one ginormous track after another. The upcoming tour by the two Wasserman-repped stars (both of whom, we hasten to add, were forged in the TDE crucible) will be one of the top headlines of the year for the live sector.

Theo Sedlmayr-repped Drake, whose litigation against his label persists, made a fairly modest showing—by the standard of his typical releases—but collaborator PARTYNEXTDOOR has gotten a big boost, and the market share of Todd Moscowitz’s Alamo is pinging the radar with a 3.0 in current.

THE WATER’S FINE: Six months into their tenure, with the dark cloud of the previous Atlantic regime now in the rearview, Elliot Grainge and his young team (cultivated during his 10K era) have rejuvenated the company, and the senior execs who made the cut are savoring the new energy and enjoying winning again.

Grainge ticked all the appropriate leadership boxes and quickly put points on the board, ushering Coldplay to a #1 chart bow and breaking Charli xcx wide open. But perhaps the most important achievement of this early chapter has been his cultivation of a relationship with Atlantic’s most crucial creative asset, Bruno Mars.

It’s almost impossible to overstate the versatile artist-songwriter-producer’s importance on the landscape at present—the marketplace simply can’t get enough of him, and whether his collaborators are newcomers or established stars, he always seems to raise their game.

Grainge’s alliance with him immediately yielded a massive hit, a duet with BLACKPINK member ROSÉ, followed by a splashy collab with Sexyy Red and the cherry on top, the Bruno-Gaga record, one of the biggest singles of the past 12 months. Grammy night brought a big pop trophy for Gaga/Bruno and two wins for Charli, not to mention powerhouse performances by those stars. Mars is said to be in the studio working on a new album, and there’s reason to think it could be his biggest yet. Also on the superstar front: A new record from hitmaker Ed Sheeran.

Team Atlantic has several promising irons in the artist-development fire, as evidenced by the strong-streaming cut by The Marías, the buzz around country artist Sam Barber (who has one of country’s Top 10 streaming songs YTD), a Spotify Top 20 entry by singer-songwriter Alex Warren (“Ordinary”) and a promising single by Ravyn Lenae, to name a few. Rapper Don Toliver maintains an impressive stream count and may be on the cusp of bigger things as well.

Clearly, Grainge the younger and his team have developed effective systems for this moment, pushing the right buttons and pulling the right levers to move the market.