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Sure, Lionel Messi is a soccer superstar, but he’s also a mainstay in the music world, often getting shout-outs in lyrics from artists across the globe.
In fact, Apple Music has a whole playlist of songs that mention him, separated by continent and featuring songs by Justin Bieber, Travis Scott, Future, Lil Uzi Vert, Bad Bunny, Stormzy, Burna Boy and many more.
In new clips from his sit-down interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, shared exclusively via Billboard, the Argentine athlete revealed that he’s “flattered” to be mentioned so often in song lyrics. “My sons also enjoy it and they are surprised to hear my name in a song,” he added of 12-year-old Thiago, 9-year-old Mateo and 6-year-old Ciro. “It’s actually really nice to be part of music from that angle.”
Messi continued, “For me, that is very moving and I am grateful to those who did it because I know that in all the lyrics, they mention me with lots of affection, flattering me for some reason.”
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However, it’s not the music that makes him a “cool dad”; it’s his athletic achievements, from leading Argentina to the World Cup in 2022 to his Inter Miami squad winning the 2023 Leagues Cup after his MLS debut. “My thing is the field,” he says. “When things work out well, and we have a chance to celebrate a title as a group or individually and to be able to enjoy it with them is special for me. … To achieve in this sport and to enjoy it with them, for me, that is the best.”
Messi also discussed his general relationship with music and how much sports and music are intertwined. “We listen to music in our everyday lives or before the matches and after the matches as well. The football environment and the locker room has music constantly,” he shares. “Generally, music is present in everything we do.”
He continues, “I’ve always had that craze of listening to music going to games or listening to music before matches. During my whole career, it’s always been this way. Football and music coexist in a lot of these moments and places.”
Watch the exclusive clip below. Zane Lowe’s full interview with Lionel Messi will be available on Apple Music, YouTube and MLS Season Pass beginning Friday (Feb. 28). Fans can watch Inter Miami and all of Major League Soccer’s 2025 season exclusively on MLS Season Pass on Apple TV.
Breakaway, the company behind the touring dance event Breakaway Music Festival, is launching a label and management division focused on emerging artists called Breakaway Projects. The first wave of signees to the label, which is partnered with The Orchard for distribution, includes a fresh collection of electronic producers such as Surf Mesa, Jaded, Evan Giia, […]
In less than a month, BRIT Award-winning U.K. R&B girl group FLO will embark on its latest headlining tour in support of the group’s Billboard-charting debut studio album Access All Areas — and the trio stopped by Billboard News to talk about how they’ve been preparing.
“We’re getting going on the vocals, which are sounding [good],” teased Stella Quaresma. “The songs are super fun to sing. We’re working with Amari [Marshall], who’s brought something [new] out of us. She’s just sucked out what we need. We haven’t started [choreography] yet, so that’s gonna be when we see it come to life properly.”
Marshall served as co-dance captain on Beyoncé‘s record-breaking Renaissance World Tour, marking her return to Queen Bey’s kingdom after appearing in the dancer lineup for the icon’s 2018 Coachella headlining performance. More recently, Marshall has performed in Rihanna‘s Super Bowl Halftime Show set and Beyoncé’s Netflix-assisted NFL Christmas Day Cowboy Carter halftime show.
In addition to taking notes from Marshall, the ladies of FLO also drew inspiration from their supporting stint on Kehlani‘s recent Crash World Tour. The trio played to packed arenas nearly every night of the tour’s North American leg, which ran from Sept. 4 to Dec. 8, 2024. Launched in support of Kehlani’s two 2024 releases — Crash and While We Wait 2 — the tour also gave way to two collaborations between the acts. Late last year, FLO guested on a remix of Kehlani’s “8,” and the Oakland star returned the favor by reimagining the group’s “IWH2BMX.”
“After supporting Kehlani on her tour and watching her perform every night and reinvent the show, we all felt super inspired,” gushed Jorja Douglas. “It was amazing! It looked so natural [and] effortless, and that’s really what we want to tap into for this tour. Obviously, she rehearsed, but it [didn’t] look like she rehearsed! It just looked like everyone all of a sudden just knew how to do the same thing all at once!”
The Access All Areas Tour will visit the U.K. and Europe in March, before heading across the pond for 27 shows throughout the U.S. and Canada. Launching on March 5 and concluding on May 22, the trio’s trek will feature three opening acts; Lola Moxom will play the U.K./European leg, while Chxrry22 and Jae Stephens will grace the North American leg.
On the chart dated Nov. 30, 2024, Access All Areas debuted at No. 163 on the Billboard 200, becoming the group’s first project to appear on the ranking. The album — which also hit No. 3 in the U.K. — featured collaborations with Memphis rap star GloRilla and award-winning Wicked actress and singer Cynthia Erivo.
“We’re all the way from London and you never know how well your music is going to be seen and taken in other markets,” says Renée Downer. “To come to New York and have two shows that are at 6,000-capacity venues is something we don’t take lightly.”
Watch FLO’s full interview with Billboard staff writer Kyle Denis above.
Nikki Glaser is constantly meeting celebrities, but there’s one person she says she’ll never approach: Taylor Swift, who also happens to be one of the comedian’s biggest idols.
While on Armchair Expert With Dax Shepard for an episode of the podcast posted Monday (Feb. 24), Glaser said that she didn’t say hi to the “Karma” singer at the 2025 Grammys — which both women attended earlier this year — and explained why she doesn’t plan on breaking that pattern at future events. “Taylor, she’s just — everyone wants a piece,” Glaser began.
“I will never be the one to be like, ‘Excuse me!’” she continued. “There’s no way that she’s dying for that on a night like this where everyone’s doing it. And of course, she would be so nice. I know exactly how it would go down, but I don’t wanna take someone’s energy away that I require their energy to be put into making great music.”
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“It’s almost rude what I do, when I’m in the same room as Taylor Swift, because I won’t even look her way,” Glaser added.
Neither star took home gold at this year’s Grammys Feb. 2. Glaser lost best comedy album to Dave Chappelle, while Swift was passed up for song, record and album of the year.
About a month prior, Glaser hosted the 2025 Golden Globes — which the “Fortnight” musician did not attend this year, despite being present the year prior when her Eras Tour concert film was up for cinematic and box office achievement (but lost to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie). After helming this year’s ceremony, Glaser joked with a fan on X who asked if she was “pissed” about missing Swift by a year, replying, “Oh you know I was!”
The Someday You’ll Die stand-up’s commitment to giving the pop star wide berth comes at the expense of her own fandom. Glaser has gushed about her love for Swift multiple times and revealed in December that she spent nearly $100,000 to see the musician on 22 Eras Tour shows in 2023 and 2024.
“She has no idea who I am, but I’m just the biggest fan,” she said on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in July of being “addicted” to the Eras trek. “I want to just see it as much as possible, it’s the thing that makes me happiest in the world.”
Watch Glaser’s full interview on Armchair Expert below.
After a five-year break, Adam Levine is back on The Voice and it feels good. The singer said he’s “ready” and “rested” after stepping away from the show for a bit, telling Jennifer Hudson on Tuesday’s (Feb. 25) Jennifer Hudson Show that getting a chance to take a break and hang with wife Behati Prinsloo and the couple’s three young children has been good for him.
“Stepping back into it when I was really ready and comfortable it kind of felt like natural timing for everything,” said Levine, 45, who logged 16 seasons on The Voice before splitting in 2019. Levine was there in the show’s debut season in 2011, slipping into the iconic red chair next to Christina Aguilera, CeeLo Green and his best frenemy, Blake Shelton.
Hudson, who overlapped with Levine during seasons 13 and 15, asked if Levine has changed his strategy at all on he show, noting that he was “not easy to deal with” when she was going up against him. “I’m a pain in the butt,” Levine admitted, revealing that there was no official strategy when the first crew started the reality series that his team won three times.
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“So you just think to yourself, ‘Okay, I’ll just see how this goes,’” he said. More importantly, Hudson noted that Levine is now sitting in Shelton’s old chair after the nine-time champ country singer departed his long-time gig in May 2023 after 12 years.
“Doesn’t smell great,” Levine laughed. “Smells kind of off… weathered. Worn in, the seat’s a little more sunken in cuz he’s big… he’s a tall drink of water that guy. Nah, I think they washed it. It feels good.” He also described being on the “other side” of the stage this time, with John Legend book-ending the panel, a set-up the self-proclaimed “end-seat kind of guy” loves.
In the chat, Levine described taking his whole family on tour with Maroon 5 on the band’s recent run of shows in Asia, as well as being a “heated” basketball coach for his kids and the group’s upcoming “M5LV” Las Vegas residency at the Dolby Live at Park MGM theater in March.
And though he didn’t reveal many details, Levine also promised that M5 has some new music coming “soon,” and though he admitted he always says it, he’s “the most excited” about the upcoming LP, their follow-up to 2021’s Jordi. “We scaled it back a little bit and I did some writing on my own.. I kept it tighter,” he said of writing some of the songs by himself, saying they “harken back to the older stuff.”
Watch Levine on The Jennifer Hudson Show below.
Los Angeles rapper Lefty Gunplay (born Franklin Holladay) was arrested on controlled and prohibited substance charges in El Paso, Texas, over the weekend.
Per jail records viewed by Billboard, the alleged offense happened on Sunday (Feb. 23) and he was booked into El Paso’s Downtown Jail the following day on charges of possession of a controlled substance, possession of a prohibited substance in a correctional or civil facility and not wearing a seatbelt.
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The rapper, who collaborated on Kendrick Lamar’s “TV Off,” was released Monday after posting a $35,000 bond and paying the $184 fee in cash for the seatbelt violation.
According to local news affiliate CBS 4, Holladay was in El Paso for an appearance at the Chuco Brunch event, which he never made it to. The outlet also shared video footage of what appears to be the artist in handcuffs while being escorted around a medical facility by a police officer.
Billboard has reached out to the El Paso Police Department and reps for Lefty Gunplay for comment.
Holladay apologized to his fans during an interview with Power 102.1 FM’s Patti Diaz, and promised to make it up to those he disappointed.
“Later on, I’ll get into further details of what really happened. If you know, you know, but I feel like I got to make it up to my El Paso fans. You know I got a lot of fans in Texas and things didn’t work out the way they were supposed to,” he said during the chat.
Holladay continued: “At the end of the day, everything happens for a reason and I love Texas. They gotta come see me in California if they really wanna see me. Things ain’t matching up right when I make an attempt.”
Lefty Gunplay emerged onto the mainstream rap scene in November with his guest appearance on Lamar’s GNX standout “TV Off.” The Mustard-produced hit sits at No. 4 on this week’s Billboard Hot 100.
Listen to a clip of Lefty Gunplay on Power 102.1 FM below:
Not unlike the voting body for the Screen Actors Guild Awards, Kate Eberstadt has had Timothée Chalamet on the brain lately. On Tuesday (Feb. 25) morning, she’s sharing an evocative music video for a sly indie-pop song titled “Timmy Chalamet.”
“I want to drink champagne with Timmy Chalamet / Alone in the church in the middle of the day / Go to confession tell him what I want to say,” sings the New York City-based artist over slinky cello strings and a laid-back, irresistible rhythm.
While we have five days to go to see if the Oscar-nominated 29-year-old pulls off a best actor win for his portrayal of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, the video for “Timmy Chalamet” harks back to the actor’s breakout role in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name. Directors Maud Oswald & Robin Giles shot “Timmy Chalamet” on film, which gives this clip the sun-soaked, idyllic look of that 2017 masterpiece, even if the imagery here is a bit more fatalistic: the infamous peach is presented here rotting with mold, while in another shot, Eberstadt immerses herself in a river, evoking John Everett Millais’ classic painting Ophelia.
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“This song came out of a pretty lonely and unprecedented period of my life,” explains Eberstadt. She’d been working on an album in a cabin in Michigan when her partner, whom she lived with, broke up with her over the phone.
“I was spiraling,” she admits. “I went on a walk in the snowy woods, processing it all. My producer Jake Crocker had sent me some beats to write to. I came across this one that was a little strange, with a cowbell in it. It felt dystopian in a way that resonated with the state of my world,” she explains.
“I had recently rewatched Call Me By Your Name and was struck by Timothée Chalamet’s incredibly vulnerable and generous performance – in particular, the final scene where he’s crying by the fireplace. His heartbreak was so real, raw, palpable. I just felt like he would understand what I was going through.”
The song came to her in “a tiny little church in the woods,” and she recorded a demo back at the cabin. A few months down the road, Eberstadt and Crocker recorded “Timmy Chalamet” in person, after which composer Phillip Peterson (Lana Del Rey, Haim, St. Vincent, P!nk) “added strings to the track that really made it sparkle,” she says.
Check out the video for Kate Eberstadt’s “Timmy Chalamet” here.
K-pop star G-DRAGON dropped his first full-length album in more than a decade on Tuesday (Feb. 25), Übermensch. The eight-song collection released through Galaxy Corporation as part of their deal with indie label EMPIRE kicks off with the rock-adjacent banger “Home Sweet Home” featuring fellow former BigBang members TAEYANG & DAESUNG.
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The LP features DRAGON’S patented mix of singing and swaggering rhymes over big beats and air-tight pop productions on tracks such as the funky Anderson .Paak collab “Too Bad,” as well as “Drama,” “Ibelongiiu,” “Take Me,” “Bonamana” and “Gyro Drop.”
Describing the album’s title — an allusion to philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of a future human ideal of the “overman” or “superman” — G-DRAGON said in a statement, “Übermensch means ‘Beyond-Man,’ representing an individual who transcends themselves. This album embodies the idea of presenting a stronger and more resilient version of oneself to the public. I hope this strength resonates with my fans through my music.”
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Übermensch is the long-awaited follow-up to DRAGON’s sophomore solo effort, 2013’s Coup D’Etat, which also mixed rock, pop, hip-hop and electro on songs featuring collabs with Missy Elliott, Sky Ferreira, BLACKIPINK’S JENNIE, Diplo, Baauer and Boys Noize, among others.
To celebrate the album’s release, G-DRAGON released the colorful video for “Too Bad,” spotlighting the singer’s signature eclectic, oddball fashion sense and playful, Michael Jackson-inspired choreography in a clip in which he models a series of street couture looks and neon hair styles. The visual also features a surprise cameo from aespa’s Karina.
DRAGON also shared the more sedate video for the sedate ballad “Drama,” in which he plays a giant wind-up dancer — with a big metal crank in his back — who does an emotion-filled routine with a a ballerina whose face is obscured by a white mask.
“You never like it when it’s nice/ Drama queen got it from her mama/ Rather hang up to pick a fight/ What goes around here comes the karma,” he sings over a moody piano.
G-DRAGON will play his first solo concert in eight years when he kicks off a global tour on March 29 at Goyang Stadium in Seoul; a pre-sale will open on Wednesday (Feb. 26) here. The singer will continue the first outing since his 2017 Act III, M.O.T.T.E. world tour with a second Seoul show on March 30, followed by a headlining set at the Head in the Clouds Festival at the Rose Bowl in Los Angeles in May and a performance at the F1 Singapore Grand Prix race in October, where he will co-headline with Elton John. More details about the tour will be released soon.
Watch the “Too Bad” and “Drama” videos below.
Drake and PartyNextDoor blast onto the latest Billboard Hot 100 chart (dated March 1), thanks to the pair’s new collaborative album, $ome $exy $ongs 4 U.
The set debuts at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 246,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in its opening week (Feb. 14-20), according to Luminate. PartyNextDoor earns his first leader, while Drake adds his 14th, tying Jay-Z for the most among rappers. He also joins Jay-Z and Taylor Swift for the most No. 1s among soloists; among all acts, only the Beatles have more, with 19.
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All 21 songs from the project debut on the Hot 100, including two solo-billed Drake tracks in the top 10: “Gimme a Hug” (No. 6) and “Nokia” (No. 10). Below is a recap.
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Rank, Artist Billing, Title:
No. 6, Drake, “Gimme a Hug”
No. 10, Drake, “Nokia”
No. 18, PartyNextDoor & Drake, “CN Tower”
No. 21, PartyNextDoor, Drake & Yebba, “Die Trying”
No. 26, PartyNextDoor & Drake, “Something About You”
No. 29, PartyNextDoor & Drake, “Moth Balls”
No. 30, PartyNextDoor & Drake, “Somebody Loves Me”
No. 31, PartyNextDoor, “Deeper”
No. 35, PartyNextDoor & Drake, “Spider-Man Superman”
No. 37, Drake, “Crying in Chanel”
No. 40, Drake, “Small Town Fame”
No. 43, Drake, “Raining in Houston”
No. 45, Pimmie, PartyNextDoor & Drake, “Pimmie’s Dilemma”
No. 47, Drake, “Brian Steel”
No. 60, PartyNextDoor & Drake, “Lasers”
No. 63, PartyNextDoor, Drake & Chino Pacas, “Meet Your Padre”
No. 66, PartyNextDoor & Drake, “Celibacy”
No. 70, PartyNextDoor & Drake, “Greedy”
No. 73, PartyNextDoor & Drake, “When He’s Gone”
No. 74, PartyNextDoor & Drake, “OMW”
No. 83, PartyNextDoor & Drake, “Glorious”
Thanks to 20 new entries on the chart (one song, “Deeper,” is credited solely to PartyNextDoor), Drake extends several of his historic records on the Hot 100, spanning the chart’s 66-year history:
Most Hot 100 Hits: 358Most Top 10 Hits: 80Most Top 20 Hits: 139Most Top 40 Hits: 216Most Top 10 Debuts: 64Most Top 20 Debuts: 115Most Top 40 Debuts: 182Most Cumulative Weeks Spent in the Top 10 (all titles combined): 389
Meanwhile, thanks to her appearance on “Pimmie’s Dilemma,” Pimmie earns her first career entry on Billboard’s charts. Pimmie is, notably, the only vocalist on the cut. The unsigned Houston singer-songwriter has released 10 solo songs, including her debut six-track EP, Bittersweet, in February 2024.
Plus, Yebba scores her third Hot 100 hit via her billing on “Die Trying.” She previously charted with another Drake collab, “Yebba’s Heartbreak” (No. 24 peak in 2021), and as featured on Ed Sheeran’s “Best Part of Me” (No. 99, 2019).
Released Feb. 14 on the deluxe version of Sabrina Carpenter’s album Short n’ Sweet, the remix of her originally solo smash “Please Please Please” — adding Dolly Parton in a featured role — debuts on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart (dated March 1). The remix opens at No. 17 on the survey after it drew […]
