Billboard staff picked the 50 greatest producers of this century: the most innovative, impactful and important knob-twiddlers since 2000. The top 5 are:

5. Mike Will Made-It because he loves twisting the familiar into something far weirder and more rewarding

4. The-Dream & Tricky Stewart thanks to their zooming keys, gentle-but-insistent percussion, expansive soundscapes and the era's most lethal toplines.

3. Timbaland - fourth-dimension funk, with rattling drums, squelching bass, unrecognizable and disembodied vocal hooks

2. Pharrell Williams / The Neptunes - Liquid guitars, clanging percussion, and the most intoxicating synth tones you've ever heard

1. Max Martin -  the hooks we crave, the choruses we want to belt out, from the stars that have defined the mainstream over the past two decades

The woman from the Dirty Dancing song teams up with a mobster and a kid from a pizza parlor to - by a combination of timing, luck, forethought, and stolen lyrics - start a revolution - Complex says about Sylvia Robinson, their choice of the best hip-hop producer od 1979. The best in 2019 - Madlib, for creating soulful, era-spanning beats. In-between the two - Kanye West, Dr. Dre, The Neptunes...

“I hate LA" - Kelis says in a Guardian interview, because - "There’s nowhere to go after 10 at night. So I thought, if I’m going to be in California, I should be where I can appreciate how beautiful it really is, not stuck in LA and pretending it’s a city that’s fun”. So, she moved with her two sons and husband to a 10-hectare farm deep in wine-country California, next to rocky hills. This spring she is going on a world tour to mark 'Kaleidoscope', her debut album she is very proud of - “the femaleness of the album, of the freaking outspokenness of it, the blackness of it, the alternativeness of it”.

Mariah Carey, Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics, members of The Isley Brothers, Steve Miller, Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams of The Neptunes, Rick Nowels and William “Mickey” Stevenson have been announced as the class of 2020 of the Songwriters Hall Of Fame.

Artists and songwriters that have been nominated for induction to the annual Songwriters Hall of Fame 2020 include Outkast, the Neptunes, Eurythmics, R.E.M., Patti Smith, the Isley Brothers, Vince Gill, Journey, Beach Boys’ Mike Love, Mariah Carey, Gloria Estefan, Steve Miller, Motown legend William "Mickey" Stevenson, songwriting duo L. Russell Brown and Irwin Levine, and […]