Ansel Elgort says, “It’s just so easy to be a hater,” in his Billboard cover story. It’s true.

No, it wasn’t Mary J. Blige or the incomparable Lea Michele. It’s Halsey—an artist familiar to many as the featured voice on The Chainsmokers’ obnoxious earworm “Closer”—who’s the first and only female artist to have a No. 1 album in the country this year.

There comes a time in every pop diva’s career when it’s clear that she’s surpassed that finite window of time when everything she touches turns to gold. Sometimes this seems unfair—Janet Jackson cranked out six singles that charted on the Billboard Hot 100 from 1993's janet., while The Velvet Rope, which many a…

Six whole years ago, Adele released her second album, 21, and we’ve never stopped hearing about it since then. As of this week, she now owns the record for the longest-charting album by a woman.

Today in longreads comes Danielle Bacher’s “Chris Brown’s Downward Spiral: Insiders Open Up About His Struggles With Addiction and Anger,” an almost 5,000-word piece for Billboard. In it, its struggling R&B star subject comes across as a tortured man who can’t (and/or won’t) get a handle on his addiction and mental…

Once again, a cappella news has me nonplussed. Pentatonix, the subject of my waking nightmares (daymares?) and target of my ineffective spells, has once again topped the Billboard 200 chart with their joyless Christmas album, A Pentatonix Christmas. This, of course, means I am going to have to stock up on sage,…

Lurking within the 18-track, 69-minute album the Weeknd released in November, Starboy, is a tight collection of sweet, often housey R&B that’s as nostalgic as it is prescient. Drake’s Views could easily be pared down to a collection of pop containing non-obvious dance songs that eschew EDM brashness for pulsing…

Get it, Gaga. The superstar’s fourth album, Joanne, has reached the top spot on the Billboard 200, making it—that’s right—her fourth number one album.

After a seemingly contentious back-and-forth as to whether Kesha would be allowed by Dr. Luke and Kemosabe Records to perform at the Billboard Awards, she got there after all—doing the song she said she’d perform all along, a cover of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” with Ben Folds. And she got a standing ovation for…

The Go-Go’s, reunited for their final tour this summer 38 years after the band formed, hit the Billboard Music Awards red carpet before their farewell performance. Jane Wiedlin’s like YOU WILL NEVER FORGET ME!

If a photograph from their recent Billboard magazine profile is to be believed, one-fifth of Fifth Harmony has two right feet. I don’t mean that in an idiomatic sense, either, as we all know two- to three-fifths of what makes Fifth Harmony “Fifth Harmony” are their dancing skills. No, what I mean is that Ally Brooke…

In a new Billboard piece detailing Kesha’s lawsuit against Dr. Luke, Kesha’s mother Pebe Sebert has spoken, and the details are as gruesome as ever. Sebert describes her daughter as “a prisoner” of Dr. Luke, and says that in the current situation, even if Kesha works with another producer as her contract allows, “Luke…

Late Thursday evening, Billboard tweeted a picture of Kim Kardashian’s young child North West sucking on a lollipop, accompanied by the phrase, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” What exactly were they trying to suggest?

A confidential survey recently sent by Billboard to top music executives asks participants to weigh in on a variety of gossipy issues, like what artists are secretly the biggest assholes, what Justin Bieber’s career will be like in a few years, and—most questionably—whether or not they believe that Kesha was sexually…

The assless chaps, questionable kisses and Great Fall were worth it, guys; Madonna has racked up more number one songs than any other artist on Billboard’s Dance Club Songs chart. *throws glitter in the air and dances around like a “Ray of Light”*

By all accounts, 2014 was a very, very good year to be a woman in music.