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Beyoncé suffered a wardrobe malfunction during her Cowboy Carter Tour on Thursday night (June 5), but not even having her pants fall down on stage can ruffle Queen Bey’s feathers. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news According to footage posted by attendees on social media, the mishap […]
Pase a la Fama, Telemundo’s new television series, is set to premiere on Sunday, June 8 featuring a star-studded panel of judges — Ana Bárbara, Adriel Favela and Horacio Palencia — and original music produced by Latin Grammy-winning hitmaker Edgar Barrera.
During the show, participants will compete in a bootcamp-like setting where they will “train, perform and face challenges,” according to a press statement, vying for a $100,000 prize, a record deal with HYBE Latin America and crowned the next regional Mexican band, which will comprised of five participants.
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“The truth is that it’s a project we put our hearts into,” Ana Bárbara tells Billboard during a conversation over Zoom, just days before competition kick off. “I personally feel moved, excited, thrilled and I think it will be a great project.”
The judges will be meticulous about who they choose as finalists. They must have “discipline and respect for the audience and us as judges, all of those are ingredients that for me are very, very important,” Palencia says. “In fact, I tell the new generation that, for me, discipline is actually even more important than talent, because sometimes it doesn’t matter to have talent if you don’t have discipline.”
So, what were the main qualities the judges looked for?
“It’s a band and, at the end of the day, I believe that there are many components that contribute to what brings success to a career,” Palencia adds. “The [right] attitude, preparation and how they accept more than just criticism, but the constructive advice we give them,” Palencia adds. “I believe that the winning band will genuinely work towards achieving all of those characteristics.”
The show is set to premiere at a time when some música mexicana artists are facing bans in Mexico (if they sing narcocorridos in certain public settings) or visa delays and revocations in the United States. “I had no idea that all of this could happen, which is both delicate and strong, yet sensitive, and definitely very sad,” Ana Bárbara says. “Because it affects all of us in some way, it has an impact. We all admire the music of someone who is having problems for various reasons, beyond whatever the reason may be. This show will provide [Mexican] music with a different level of visibility.”
The judges will also focus on emphasizing “clean song lyrics and about love stories,” Favela says. “It is nice to realize that music is giving us a chance to go beyond the musical aspect. To see our individual values, to see young people singing themes that, nowadays, I dare to say, are being lost, perhaps more and more. And that there is validity in rescuing all of this, which at the end of the day is the pure root of our Mexican essence.”
It was previously announced that Lupillo Rivera, Fuerza Regida’s JOP and Gabito Ballestero’s will join the show as mentors. The first episode of Pase a la Fama will premiere Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on Telemundo.
The Funeral Portrait goes 2-for-2 atop Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart, lifting to No. 1 on the June 14-dated survey with “Holy Water.”
The track, which features Five Finger Death Punch vocalist Ivan Moody, is the band’s second Mainstream Rock Airplay ruler in as many entries, following the one-week reign of “Suffocate City,” featuring Ice Nine Kills’ Spencer Charnas, last November.
This time around, The Funeral Portrait’s trip to No. 1 is one week quicker; “Holy Water” rules in its 18th frame on the chart.
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Moody reaches No. 1 on Mainstream Rock Airplay as a solo act for the first time, having exceeded his No. 10 peak as a featured vocalist on Cory Marks’ “Outlaws & Outsiders,” alongside Travis Tritt and Mick Mars, in 2020. Five Finger Death Punch, with him as frontman, boasts 15 leaders, third-most dating to the ranking’s March 1981 inception.
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Concurrently, “Holy Water” places at No. 11 on the all-rock-format, audience-based Rock & Alternative Airplay chart with 2.5 million audience impressions, up 8%, in the week ending June 5, according to Luminate. The song reached a No. 8 high a week earlier and marks The Funeral Portrait’s first top 10 on the tally, having passed the No. 11 best of “Suffocate City.”
“Holy Water” is the second single from The Funeral Portrait’s 2024 album Greetings From Suffocate City. Released in September, the set has earned 25,000 equivalent album units to date. The collection is the second full-length from the group, which formed in Atlanta more than a decade ago.
All Billboard charts dated June 14 will update Tuesday, June 10.
Eric Church looked back on his unexpected involvement in the lawsuit over Taylor Swift‘s hit single “Shake It Off” in a new interview.
Back in 2017, the superstar got hit with allegations of copyright infringement by Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, the songwriters behind 3LW’s 2001 single “Playas Gon’ Play.”
“In her deposition, when [talking about the line] ‘players gonna play, haters gonna hate,’ she says, ‘The first time I heard that phrase was in Eric Church’s song ‘The Outsiders,’” the country singer explained in a sit-down with Rolling Stone published Friday (June 6). “She was saying she never heard it on [the 3LW song], which is what they were suing her for. And two weeks later, I got served by the people that were suing her!”
According to Church, getting slapped with his own legal papers prompted him to reach out to Swift via text. “I was like, ‘Hey, thanks. Next time, let’s just skip that part?’” he said. “And she sent me a text: ‘I’m sorry. It’s the truth, though. That’s when I heard that phrase.’”
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“It’s since been settled,” Church added of his own involvement. However, the “Hands of Time” singer concluded in the interview that the whole experience still had him wondering, “‘How did this even happen?’”
Since an agreement to drop the “Shake It Off” lawsuit was reached between Swift, Hall and Butler in late 2022, Church has released his eighth studio album, 2025’s Evangeline vs. the Machine, which he’ll be promoting this fall with his upcoming Free the Machine Tour.
More recently, Church also collaborated with Morgan Wallen on I’m the Problem album cut “Number 3 and Number 7,” and in the same Rolling Stone interview, defended Bruce Springsteen after the namesake of his hit 2011 single “Springsteen” criticized President Trump and his administration during a concert.
This week in dance music: deadmau5 and Rezz graced the cover of Billboard Canada, talking about their longstanding collaboratove project, Rezzmau5. In the story deadmau5 also spoke about selling his catalog to Create Music Group earlier this year, saying that “it was time to just let it go.” Elsewhere, Italian techno producer Deborah de Luca […]
This week, Jon Bellion returned to center stage after years of remaining behind the scenes: the veteran songwriter-producer released Father Figure, his first album in seven years and a poignant reflection on fatherhood, including his relationship with his own father and his experiences as a dad of three. A deeply personal project that includes a picture of his parents on the album cover and a voicemail from his uncle on the track list, Father Figure also demonstrates Bellion’s status as a gifted collaborator, with Luke Combs, Pharrell Williams and Jon Batiste lending their voices to his story.
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Bellion — who has contributed to hits by Justin Bieber, Maroon 5 and Miley Cyrus, and recently co-helmed “Friend of Mine,” Rihanna’s first new single in three years — says that he’s not playing a “numbers game” with the album, and that the metric of success he’d like to reach with Father Figure is more abstract. “If my album can give you one more day, then I’m cool with that — that’s the goal,” he tells Billboard. “To give a listener another day of inspiration? I could live with that.”
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Yet along with its emotional power, Father Figure also offers a fresh industry blueprint, as the rare project in which its credited co-writers will receive a percentage of master royalties, or “points,” on the album. Bellion worked alongside the artists that comprise Beautiful Mind Projects — his management, publishing and label company — including studio whizzes Pete Nappi, Tenroc and Elkan, all of whom also contributed to Rihanna’s “Friend of Mine.”
Bellion says that the decision to provide points to his fellow songwriters was the result of his own “frustrations of being a songwriter and being paid dirt — morally paid dirt — for 10 years. I don’t want to hear people talking about, ‘Oh, he’s made money and he’s successful, so he can’t talk about how songwriters get paid dirt.’ … If you write an entire song with a group of people, and there’s $10 and they only pay you 25 cents, there’s moral injustice there.
“If it’s $10 million and they only pay you $250,000, there’s moral injustice there,” he continues. “It doesn’t matter the way you microscopically change that — it’s an insane thing to say. I’ve always been vocal about that, and I don’t care what people’s perception of that is, because songwriters get paid f—king dirt.”
After self-funding Father Figure, Bellion admits that he does have “a new perspective and a new appreciation for what the label is doing,” but still believes that there’s a way for record labels to allocate less money toward promotional efforts and more towards creative collaborators. To that end, Bellion says that he decided to focus his promotional campaign less on short-form content, and more on proper music videos for four songs from the album — including the title track, which received a moving visual on Friday (June 6).
Bellion says that the album rollout has been an invaluable learning process. “You’ve got to start somewhere,” he says. “I’m understanding the workings of the label, and stumbling through it. And even if I come out losing money — which I think I will on this album — but still getting the writers paid at least a point or two, and giving them the courage to go into the next meeting to say ‘Well, John did it!’ … Someone has to be the guy to be like, ‘I don’t really know how to make my money back while giving out a ton of points if I’m funding the thing myself, but I’m gonna have to jump into the world to put my money where my mouth is.’ I don’t know if this is gonna work out, but at least I tried to do the thing.”
As Bellion gears up to promote Father Figure from the stage — he’ll perform a sold-out intimate show at SOB’s in New York, and headline Forest Hills Stadium on Aug. 23 — he hopes that his unique standing in the industry will turn his gambit with the album into a successful model.
“I’ve been on both sides of the spectrum,” he says. “I’ve been on the label side, I’ve been on the publisher side, I’ve been on the writer side, and I’ve been on the artist side. So there’s more of a holistic angle, and I can try to bring everything in closer, to get to a better place, possibly.
“I’m not trailblazing,” Bellion continues. “I’m gonna go to Capitol Hill and dedicate my life to — I’m not saying that. But putting my money where my mouth is, where it actually counts? It’s a good place to start.”
Vans Warped Tour might be one of the best-selling festivals of 2025, but organizers say no one music act is responsible for moving the bulk of the 240,000 tickets sold so far across three U.S. cities. Indeed, the brand name alone seems to have been enough.
“We sold the vast majority of those tickets before we had a lineup,” says Kevin Lyman, founder and producer of the traveling punk show, which ran from 1995 to 2018 before returning this year for a limited 30th anniversary run. Lyman, who has partnered with Live Nation festival company Insomniac for this year’s Warped, is working from a makeshift office and headquarters after the Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year forced him to leave his Altadena home, which was damaged but largely spared from the blaze.
“I think there’s nostalgia in the market, but it’s not just for the music — people are longing for events that are affordable and give them a chance to discover something,” says Lyman. Prices for this year’s Warped Tour are $149 for a two-day pass, and the tour is much shorter, with just three stops this year instead of the typical 36 markets. Two of the three markets piggyback off events organized by Insomniac: Warped’s Washington, D.C. stop, from June 14-15, comes two weeks after Insomniac’s Project Glow EDM fest; while the Orlando stop, Nov. 15-16, takes place one week after EDC Orlando at Camping World Stadium. Warped Tour is also coming to Long Beach, Calif., from July 26-27 at Shoreline Waterfront Park.
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Each of the three two-day stops on the tour accounts for nearly 80,000 tickets sold. When combined, the fans attending all six days of the Warped Tour this summer will have purchased 240,000 tickets. That’s likely more tickets than were sold at Coachella this year, which took place over two consecutive three-day weekends, sources tell Billboard. It also likely surpasses the number of tickets sold at the three-day Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas.
Billboard recently caught up with Lyman to discuss the 30th anniversary tour, including how he pitched it to Steven Van Doren, son of Vans founder Paul Van Doren; his expectations from the fans; and whether the 2025 outing is a one-and-done or has the potential to return in 2026 and beyond.
What made you decide to bring Warped Tour back?
People don’t miss something until it’s taken away. I had a fantastic crew; we did a lot of marketing for bands and helped a lot of younger artists. And then, when we took it away, people realized that there was a place for something like Warped Tour. But by then I was busy doing other things — traveling, teaching my class at USC and working on other projects. And then the pandemic hit, and being on a college campus and being around young people, I could see a new need for Warped Tour arise.
What kind of reception have you received so far?
I think it’s been exciting because the bands that remember Warped Tour remember how important it was to their careers, and the younger bands now are super excited to be able to have that experience and be part of it.
Why did you bring in Insomniac for this year’s Warped Tour?
There’s a lot of people over there that grew up around Warped Tour, attended in the past and even worked on Warped Tour. Maureen Valker-Barlow, who works as a senior vp at Insomniac and landed her first job at Warped Tour, approached me, and it was easy for us to figure out how to work together. And then it was like the green light came on, and we just ran with it. They have great people over there like Amanda Phelan, who is a great booker, and Maureen, who I previously mentioned, handling sponsorship, as well as Chris Barlow and Nathan Armstrong in production. I’ve always operated as very small and independent, working in a garage, and they’re a big company, and they know how to run festivals. They handle a lot of the day-to-day stuff, absorbing a significant part of the logistics. And marketing. They’ve given me a little bit more of that structure. What was it like approaching Vans to do another tour? That was easy, because Steve Van Doren and myself go back — we’re talking 25 years of Warped Tour and years before that. It was easy to go over there and say, “Hey, here’s the idea, let’s bring it back with these people. I have faith in them.” Sure, there was a lot of paperwork, but it only took ten minutes of conversation to get this thing going.
Was it difficult to come up with a budget around a $149 ticket price?
Not at all, because I knew from the beginning that Warped would only work if we kept the ticket price fair. I feel strongly that a $149, two-day ticket is affordable to our fans. I think 90% of the reason that people are getting turned off by festivals is because they’re too expensive. Warped was always the show for people that maybe didn’t have that money for some of the other festivals. Both myself and Insomniac felt $149 was the right price, and a lot of people have responded to that price. It also helps that we delivered the lineup. It’s an eclectic lineup that touches on our history and past, but it also looks forward to the future. I’m excited to see which of the younger bands we’ve booked get the biggest reaction from the fans.
You’ve got some big names on the lineup this year like Avril Lavigne, Fishbone, Less Than Jake, Dropkick Murphys, Pennywise and Sublime. You’ve also got dozens of baby bands and newcomers scheduled to play. How do you strike the right balance between old and new?
Well, it’s partially an economic exercise. Every band you book, no matter how big, makes up part of your ticket price, and you always have a few that are reliable and a few that are more of a gamble. We’re booking some of these bands in January, wondering how big they will be in August? Are they going to be bigger than what we paid them? Can the $5,000 band generate $25,000 in value from fans who are excited to see them? If you look at our social media right now, we really don’t need to push Sublime or Rise Against. They’re already known. People are going to enjoy them, and they’re going to have a big, big crowd. We want to grab onto those younger acts like LØLØ or Honey Revenge and really boost them on our social media so they have a big audience at Warped Tour. A lot of what we focus on is leveraging the Warped brand and the larger bands to help raise the profile of the smaller acts.
Did you get the idea to list the bands on the lineup poster in alphabetical order from Insomniac?
No, that’s something I started doing in 1996 because I hate arguing over billing. I think we waste so much time arguing over font size on the poster when we should be marketing to fans and getting behind the show. People are smart. People will come and find the bands they want to see. If you could put Korn in the bottom corner of a festival lineup, people would find them and be excited about them.
What about scheduling? How do you keep egos in check with the schedule?
We don’t announce the set times until the day of the show. I do that because I want people to come early and enjoy all the young bands. I go to too many festivals where people come in at sunset and miss all the great young bands. And my thing is, Warped fans are diehard music fans. They’re not fashion fans, they’re there for the music. And they’re going to figure out the lineup. And I think everything we’re doing so far is working. Hopefully, we deliver the show that people will want to come see next year.
So Warped is not a one-and-done? This is a multi-year project?
I want to really go see what the first show is like in D.C. before we make any final decisions on that. I want to go see the audience and who’s coming. Is it people that want to be part of something moving forward, or people trying to capture a memory? My guess is that it will be a blend of both, but we’ll see.
Could it return as a true touring property, going from city to city, buses and all?
No. Definitely not. I can’t do that to myself, hitting the road for two months straight. I’ve had seven different surgeries because of the Warped Tour. I don’t need any more.
The Weeknd unveiled the eerie music video for Hurry Up Tomorrow album cut “Baptized in Fear” on Friday (June 6). In the cinematic clip, the R&B crooner sits alone in a desolate row of church pews as he sings, “I fell asleep in the tub, I was met with paralysis/ My foot hit the faucet, […]
In an alternate universe, Miley Cyrus‘ iconic Bangerz era would’ve been made complete with a wild music video starring Madonna, Nelly and more superstars popping wheelies and wrestling in the mud. Unfortunately, we do not live in that universe.
In an interview on the Every Single Album podcast posted Thursday (June 5), the “Flowers” singer revealed that she had been dead set on rounding up a star-studded group of friends to shoot a raucous visual for “4×4,” a song on her smash-hit 2013 album that ultimately never became a single. “I had everyone already lined up,” Cyrus said. “Nelly … Madonna was down to do the video, Miranda Cosgrove.”
“This was before Taylor [Swift] had a lot of famous people in her crew,” she continued, laughing. “I was friends with famous people first. I wanted to do that. I had a f–king squad, and my squad was very, very cool.”
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Cyrus claimed the idea was eventually shut down by RCA, her label at the time, whom she quipped didn’t want her “talking about a pit bull [and] piss” in a song they’d be promoting. “Madonna was down to mud wrestle with Miranda Kerr,” the Grammy winner reminisced wistfully. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna get all these girls, all these supermodels, all these Victoria’s Secret models and all of these pop icons to come to my dad’s farm, get in the back of 4x4s, and we’re gonna mud wrestle, and we’re gonna go out and do doughnuts.”
Despite the lack of a “4×4” visual, Bangerz remains one of Cyrus’ most successful albums to date. The LP debuted atop the Billboard 200 and spawned her first-ever No. 1 single on the Billboard Hot 100, “Wrecking Ball,” which was followed closely by “We Can’t Stop” at No. 2.
The “Party in the U.S.A.” artist was signed to RCA for a three-album run, later dropping Younger Now in 2017 and Plastic Hearts in 2020 under the Sony Music imprint. In 2021, she inked a new deal with Columbia Records, through which she just released new album Something Beautiful on May 30.
Later in the podcast episode, Cyrus recalled another time where she and her former label weren’t quite on the same page. According to her, she never would’ve put a certain fellow pop star on “Prisoner,” one of the singles on Plastic Hearts. “No shade to Dua Lipa, it just isn’t cohesive with the album,” Cyrus said frankly.
“She would’ve been much better on something like [2023 LP] Endless Summer Vacation,” the singer continued of Dua Lipa. “She would’ve been great on ‘Wildcard,’ she would’ve been great on any of them — ‘River,’ can you imagine?”
Cyrus added that she thought her team at RCA wasn’t entirely confident in how Plastic Hearts would perform, so they brought in some “medicinal Dua” to give the LP some commercial oomph. “They basically were like, ‘Oh, great, here’s this piece of s–t album she gave us, let’s spray a little Dua Lipa on there,’” Cyrus said, laughing.
Listen to Cyrus’ full interview on Every Single Album below.
Alex Warren has reached new heights with a record-breaking moment for “Ordinary” as he secures a 12th consecutive week at the summit of the U.K. Singles Chart on Friday (June 6). He is now the U.S. male solo act with the longest-running continuous stay at No. 1, besting Slim Whitman, who lasted 11 consecutive weeks […]
