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The Weeknd‘s massive After Hours Til Dawn tour has racked up yet another huge record thanks to worldwide grosses topping $1 billion. According to a statement from Abel Tesfaye’s team, the grosses make the AHTD outing the top-earning tour by a male solo artist in history.
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The billion mark was crossed following the recent onsale dates for upcoming spring and summer 2026 dates in Mexico, Brazil, Europe and the U.K., which bumped the tour’s total ticket sales to more than 7.5 million to date across 153 shows since its July 14, 2022 kick-off at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia.
In mid-August, Billboard Boxscore reported that at that point the tour had grossed $635.5 million and sold 5.1 million tickets since launching, making it the biggest R&B tour in history. That meant that AHTD easily overtook Beyoncé’s 2023 Renaissance World Tour, which took in $579.8 million over 56 shows. The Weeknd lapped Queen Bey when it crossed the $600 million mark following two return performances at Philly’s Lincoln Financial Field on July 30-31.
The gaudy numbers for AHTD made it the ninth tour to hit the $600 million and above mark, with the Weeknd the only R&B and Black artist on a list that features pop and rock acts including Elton John and Harry Styles. The Weeknd’s attendance at the shows is also a record-setter according to Billboard Boxscore, making him the only genre act and only Black artist to sell more than five million tickets on a single tour, as well as just one of eight to sell more than five million tickets and gross more than $600 million.
In addition to the record-setting box office figures, the singer’s team said to date the Weeknd has donated more than $8.5 million to his XO Humanitarian Fund as well as to Global Citizen, with additional proceeds from the 2026 dates set to continue supporting World Food Program Global Citizen.
After the 2025 North American stadium leg featuring 40+ sold out shows set highest attendance records by a Black male artist at venues in New York, Denver, Santa Clara, Seattle, Edmonton, Montreal, Orlando, Arlington and Houston, as well as breaking the all-time record for the most shows by a male solo artist on a single tour with six performances at Toronto’s Rogers Centre, the trek will continue next year with 40 more dates in Mexico, Brazil, Europe and the U.K. The next leg kicks off on April 20 with the first of three stop at Estadio GNP Seguros in Mexico City.
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A week ago, an incident involving a man charging at Ariana Grande on the Wicked red carpet in Singapore made headlines — not just because of how terrifying it was, but also due to the heroic way Cynthia Erivo immediately stepped in to protect her costar.
Viral videos from the premiere show how the culprit — later identified as 26-year-old Johnson Wen, who was arrested for his actions — jumped over the barricade and barreled straight toward the pop superstar on the red carpet, putting an arm around her neck and grabbing onto her shoulder as Erivo pried him off and yelled at him not to touch Grande. Many were quick to praise the Tony winner for her quick thinking, but in an interview with Today Thursday (Nov. 20), she explained that it was all “instinct.”
“I wasn’t really thinking,” Erivo told host Savannah Guthrie. “I just wanted to make sure my friend was safe.”
“I wanted to make sure that she was OK,” she continued, shrugging. “That was my first instinct, yeah.”
Erivo’s instincts served her and Grande well. By the time security personnel jumped in to haul Wen away from the scene, the Pinocchio star had already mostly torn him away from the R.E.M. Beauty founder, whom Erivo further guarded by putting a protective arm around until Wen was a comfortable distance away.
“I’m sure he didn’t mean us harm, but you never know with those things,” she said, adding of Grande, “We’ve really looked after each other in this.”
Regardless of Wen’s intentions, the Australian man was placed under arrest by Singapore police and sentenced to nine days in jail for the charge of being a “public nuisance.” It’s not the first time he’s faced legal repercussions for his behavior, previously getting arrested for stage-crashing one of Katy Perry’s concerts over the summer and touching her without consent.
The Wicked premiere at which Wen charged at Grande marked the last stop on the film’s international press tour leading up to the Friday (Nov. 21) theatrical release of Wicked: For Good. The long-awaited film comes almost exactly one year after the first installment came out, shattering box-office records and earning Oscars for best costume design and best production design.
Watch Erivo’s full interview with Today above.
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At the 2025 Latin Grammys, Paloma Morphy won the coveted best new artist award, where she was up against promising newcomers such as Alleh of Alleh y Yorghaki fame; Isadora, Chayanne’s talented daughter; and flamenco guitarist Yerai Cortés.
“I feel like the new girl in the classroom,” she told Billboard during Latin Grammys week in Las Vegas. “Seeing all these artists for the first time off-screen was quite shocking, but I’m so happy, excited, and nervous. It’s truly a dream come true. I was scared before coming, thinking it would be full of competition … but I realized we’re all in the same boat. We’re happy to meet each other and support one another.”
Hailing from Mexico City, Morphy discovered her passion for music at a very young age when she joined chorus and talent shows. Aware of her super power, there came a point in her life where she felt spiritless and did not see a career in music viable. So, instead, she pursued a career in law. Her love for music, however, was always present, and after uploading her songs on social media—just as a hobby—Morphy officially stepped into the music realm in 2022 with her debut single “La Idiota Soy Yo.”
“I quit my job as a criminal lawyer to pursue my childhood dream of making music,” she noted. “I said I’d give it two years to see what happens.”
And in those two years, Morphy has not only captivated with her indie-pop sound, charming vocals, and bubbly personality, but she also released her debut studio album, Au, under Sony Music México this year, and was a two-time nominee at the Latin Grammys, ultimately winning the 2025 best new artist trophy.
Paloma Morphy accepts the Best New Artist award onstage at the 26th Annual Latin GRAMMY Awards held at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on November 13, 2025 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Christopher Polk
“I was very sad and unmotivated, and I don’t know where I got the strength to move forward, but I connected with my dream since I was little that I never thought could be real,” she expressed in the media center backstage on the evening she won.
Moreover, she reflected on her time as a lawyer, admitting to Billboard: “There’s a reason I endured five years of that incredibly boring career, but yes, it gives me a different perspective, and all my songs are based on that experience. So far, I haven’t been able to write about things I don’t feel deeply about.”
Below, learn more about this month’s Billboard Latin Artist on the Rise.
Name: Andrea Paloma Barrios Gomez Álvarez Morphy
Age: 25
Recommended Song: “la mexicana”
“I wrote this song because, during my time working at the prosecutor’s office, I realized how many reports of gender-based violence never even reached the investigation stage. From that perspective, I wrote a song to Mexico as if it were a person I love, because I love my country; it’s beautiful in so many ways, but in this song, I ask Mexico: Why don’t you love me the way I love you? It’s truly my way of raising my voice, and it’s made me reflect on how we can truly make a difference.”
Major Accomplishment: Winning best new artist at the 2025 Latin Grammys, and her debut album, Au, garnering over 28 million streams on Spotify since its release this March.
What’s Next: A new collaboration with Neto Péña and Robot95 releases on Thursday (Nov. 20), in addition to working on new music that she will release in 2026 leading up to her sophomore studio album
Tate McRae wrapped the Miss Possessive Tour in Los Angeles on Nov. 8. Since kicking off in March, the tour grossed $110.8 million and sold 1 million tickets over 77 shows, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore. It’s easily the biggest of McRae’s fast-growing career, quintupling the earnings of her previous tour, just one year ago.
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It’s another year in a successive growth pattern for McRae. She’s toured for the last four years, building upon each in every metric. She averaged 1,084 tickets per show in clubs on her reported dates from 2022, before scaling to 2,607 in 2023. Last year, she stretched to 5,999, before elevating to sold-out arenas, with an average of 13,480 tickets in 2025. This is the third consecutive year that she doubled her nightly ticket sales.
Compounded by surging demand and an ever-increasing ticketing market, McRae’s earnings grew even bigger. She’s up from a per-show average of $26,600 in 2022, to $96,800 in 2023, to $349,000 in 2024, and now to $1.4 million in 2025. She grew by 265%, then 261% and then again by 312%.
McRae’s busy touring schedule has complemented a nearly constant output of new music. I Used to Think I Could Fly was released in May 2022, followed by Think Later in December 2023 and So Close to What in February 2025.
McRae’s numbers have soared on a per-show basis, but she’s also added more dates to her schedule each year, creating exponential growth to her total figures. The Miss Possessive Tour is her first to sell more than a million tickets and gross more than $100 million, and she hadn’t come close before: The tour’s total attendance triples last year’s count of 336,000, and the total gross laps last year’s $19.6 million five times over.
The Miss Possessive Tour started on March 18 with one show in Mexico City before a string of Latin American festival slots. McRae played 26 shows in Europe ($27.9M; 359K tickets) and then 50 in the United States and Canada ($82.7M; 673K). Both regions were up, to say the least, from last year, with North America earning more than seven times its 2024 gross.
That global growth can be distilled to the local level. In New York, McRae has evolved from one show at Irving Plaza (1,200 capacity) in 2022, to two at The Rooftop at Pier 17 (7,494 tickets in 2023). She played her first solo headline show at Madison Square Garden in 2024 (12,458) and then played three in 2025 (41,503). She also had three arena shows in the Los Angeles area, selling 42,224 tickets at Kia Forum in Inglewood, Calif., up 612% from last year’s lone show at the Greek Theatre (5,930).
Over the course of three years, McRae has expanded her nightly reach by more than 5,300%. Fellow emerging pop stars have experienced similar growth in the last decade, but it hasn’t been quite as speedy. Both Billie Eilish and Dua Lipa kicked off their latest arena spectacles last fall, two years removed from the end of their previous tours. McRae, on the other hand, has fired off three tours in three years, with no more than six months in between any of them.
In the eight months since her latest album became her first No. 1 on the Billboard 200, she topped the Billboard Hot 100 alongside Morgan Wallen on “What I Want” and scored her first Grammy nomination with F1’s “Just Keep Watching.”
Now, McRae is preparing the deluxe release of So Close to What, set to drop on Friday (Nov. 21). It’s led by “Tit for Tat,” which debuted on the Hot 100 at No. 3 in October. In the year since the Miss Possessive Tour dates went on sale, she’s created enough new momentum to continue this growth into the latter part of the 2020s.
Trending on Billboard The first solo concert film from BTS‘ Jin, #RUNSEOKJIN_EP.TOUR THE MOVIE, is slated to hit theater screens worldwide on Dec. 27 and 28. Trafalgar Releasing will roll the film out in a variety of formats, including 2D, SCREENX, 4DX and ULTRA 4DX, in approximately 1,800 theaters in 70 countries. According to a […]
Trending on Billboard AI is reshaping the music industry, and Grammy-winning singer, songwriter and producer Imogen Heap breaks down what this moment really means for creators. She joins host Kristin Robinson to unpack how she’s blended technology with artistry for two decades, the rise of generative AI and why it’s becoming harder to tell where […]
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It was a match made in heaven. Or, if you buy into the whole Prince of Darkness thing, hell.
During an appearance on step brother Jack Osbourne’s Trying Not to Die podcast this week, metal legend Ozzy Osbourne‘s eldest son, Louis Osbourne, sat down to have a familial chat about their late dad and one of the topics that came up was an obscure song that Osbourne tracked during the height of his early 1980s fame that also featured a just-about-to-be-famous Madonna.
The sons were talking about the bands that Ozzy loved and Jack noted that the metal godfather “really loved female vocalists,” adding that in the final years of his life wife/manager Sharon Osbourne really wanted Ozzy to do a duets albums with all-female singers. That prompted Louis to note that he has a rare 12″ vinyl at home that will blow Ozzy fans’ minds.
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“Was (Not Was) did a duet with Madonna and my dad,” he said of the truly bizarre song “Shake Your Head” from the Detroit duo’s 1983 album Born to Laugh at Tornadoes. When Jack interrupted to remind him that the song actually featured Ozzy and actress Kim Basinger, Louis corrected him and said it “was Madonna originally… It was written for Madonna and Was (Not Was) and it was when dad was poppin’ in the early ’80s and so was she, but then she kind of like really f–kin’ popped and then didn’t give approval on the record.”
Louis said after Madonna, or her team, allegedly blocked approvals, Basinger — then just at the beginning of a decade-long big screen hot streak — hopped on the song as her team were trying to “make her a pop star as well.” Louis said the track, a banger with a perfectly perfect early 1980s Madonna dance floor vibe overlaid with Ozzy’s yearning vocals (“You can’t feed the hungry/ Can’t talk Shakespeare to a monkey”) is “somewhere out there.”
Last month, Don Was told Rolling Stone that Madonna “did a great job” on the song, but it didn’t “sound like Was (Not Was) to me anymore,” so they brought in Ozzy to pseudo rap over the electro pop tune. “We realized about eight years later that we had Ozzy and Madonna on parallel tracks,” Was said. “So we gave it to a remixer… and he turned it into a Ozzy/Madonna duet.” The remix by Steve “Silk” Hurley ended up on the Now Dance ’92 compilation after Was accidentally on purpose sent him the original Madonna vocal track along with Ozzy’s, with Louis noting that the original, never-released version, went top 10 on the U.K. dance charts, topping out at No. 4 in 1992.
Watch the conversation below.
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If you managed to snag tickets to see Oasis on their triumphant Live ’25 tour this year, congratulations. If you didn’t and had your hopes raised last week when singer Liam Gallagher appeared to (once again) tease the possibility of additional shows next year, well, keep that bucket hat on the shelf for now because it sounds like it’s not at all a done deal.
As the group geared up for the launch of the final push of gigs in South America this weekend, Liam, as he does, hopped into the comments on an X user’s post last Wednesday (Nov. 12) after they asked if he was sad to see the tour end, saying “I’m not actually as I know things you don’t,” after earlier suggesting that his unexpected rapprochement with older brother songwriter Noel Gallagher was “only starting.”
Well, Liam was back in the comments on Wednesday (Nov. 19) when asked by a fan if anyone had “scolded you for saying ‘see u next year’?,” he replied, “there was a few tuts and raised eyebrows.” Another fan lamented that with just a few shows left they didn’t get to see a single gig and feared not surviving 2026 if there isn’t another tour next year. “WE NEED MORE,” they pleaded. Liam rubbished that anxiety talk and said, “stop being dramatic.”
Then, he threw yet another spanner in the works when asked to “just reply with one word is there gonna be a 2026 tour.” His answer, sorry to say, was “NO.” With the muddying of the water complete, another devastated superfan yelled, “ARE YOU F–KING SERIOUS,” to which Gallagher replied, “YES IM F–KING SERIOUS.”
It was all a bit soul-crushing, though Gallagher once again eased the door open a tiny crack in a lengthier response in which he said he will definitely be around next year, but, like, maybe not Oasis? “You will see me next year and the year after and so on just not sure yet if it’ll be with oasis we need to sit down and discuss these things,” he wrote. “If it was all up to me then you know we’d be touring till the day we die as it’s the best thing in the world but UNFORTUNATELY it’s not.”
If you simply cannot stand the suspense, get yourself down to São Paulo, Brazil’s MOrumBIS stadium on Saturday (Nov. 22) or Sunday (Nov. 23) for what sounds like the final shows by the reunited Britpop legends… for now, anyway.
See Gallagher’s comments below.
There was a few tuts and raised eyebrows— Liam Gallagher (@liamgallagher) November 19, 2025
has anyone already scolded you for saying the ‘see u next year’ ? is that why you tell us this?— andy saw oasis (@liampurrs) November 19, 2025
Trending on Billboard End of The Road festival in Dorset, England announced the first list of acts on tap to celebrate its 20th anniversary edition in 2026 on Thursday (Nov. 20), with Pulp, CMAT and Mac DeMarco set to headline. The festival will take place at Lamar Tree Garden on Sep. 3-6 and feature a […]
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Just when it seemed that Lily Allen’s West End Girl campaign couldn’t get any bigger, the singer has added a run of arena shows to her 2026 U.K. tour.
The new dates, which include a night at London’s 20,000-capacity O2 Arena, will join Allen’s previously announced shows, which take place in theaters across the country throughout March.
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The arena leg of the tour will kick off at Newcastle’s Utilita Arena on June 2. She’ll head to Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds, Nottingham, Cardiff, Birmingham and London before traveling to Ireland for a night at Dublin’s 3Arena on June 30. It will mark the biggest headline tour of Allen’s career.
Tickets go on sale on Nov. 27 at 10 a.m. GMT. Fans can find further ticketing information on Allen’s website.
The show – Lily Allen Performs West End Girl – will see the British star perform her new album front to back. Released Oct. 24, the LP hit a peak of No. 2 on the Official U.K. Albums Chart, marking her highest placement on the list since 2014’s Sheezus. Prior to the arena gigs, Allen will also perform West End Girl for a headline slot at Mighty Hoopla festival in London’s Brockwell Park on May 30.
West End Girl has repeatedly hit the headlines in recent weeks. The album appears to tell the story of the dissolution of Allen’s marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour in chronological order, traversing the start of an open relationship, scenes of alleged infidelity and a subsequent breakdown of trust.
Speaking to British Vogue prior to its release, Allen likened the album to a work of autofiction. She told the publication that its lyrical content was inspired by her marriage, but “that’s not to say it’s all gospel.” Allen and Harbour tied the knot in Las Vegas in 2020 after meeting on dating app Raya the year prior.
West End Girl is Allen’s first album since 2018’s No Shame and her fifth full-length release overall. Allen’s debut LP, Alright, Still hit No. 2 on the U.K. charts in 2006, while its predecessor, It’s Not Me, It’s You (2009) reached the summit.
Allen will return to Saturday Night Live on Dec. 13, appearing on the show as a musical guest for the first time since 2007. Actor Josh O’Connor is set to make his debut as host that night.
Check out the updated list of Lily Allen Performs West End Girl tour dates below:
March 2: Glasgow, Scotland @ Royal Concert Hall
March 3: Liverpool, England @ Philharmonic Hall
March 5: Birmingham, England @ Birmingham Symphony Hall
March 7: Sheffield, England @ Sheffield City Hall
March 8: Newcastle, England @ Newcastle City Hall
March 10: Manchester, England @ Aviva Studios, The Hall
March 11: Manchester, England @ Aviva Studios, The Hall
March 14: Nottingham, England @ Nottingham Royal Concert Hall
March 15: Cambridge, England @ Corn Exchange
March 17: Bristol, England @ Bristol Beacon
March 18: Cardiff, Wales @ Cardiff New Theatre
March 20: London, England @ London Palladium
March 21: London, England @ London Palladium
May 30: London, England @ Mighty Hoopla Festival
June 16: Newcastle, England @ Utilita Arena (new date)
June 17: Glasgow, Scotland @ OVO Hydro (new date)
June 19: Manchester, England @ AO Arena (new date)
June 21: Leeds, England @ First Direct Arena (new date)
June 23: Nottingham, England @ Motorpoint Arena (new date)
June 24: Cardiff, Wales @ Utilita Arena (new date)
June 26: Birmingham, England @ BP Pulse Live (new date)
June 27: London, England @ The O2 (new date)
June 30: Dublin, Ireland @ 3Arena (new date)
