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Kacey Musgraves is recuperating after sustaining an injury from a fall while in Mexico. In a post to Instagram Stories on Friday (June 20), Musgraves shared an image of an x-ray shot of her ribs. She wrote over the image, “Sooo I’m in Mexico with a f—in’ broken rib. Wednesday night it was raining and […]
Since blasting onto the scene with his breakthrough hit “Beautiful Things,” Benson Boone has become the internet’s favorite punching bag. But instead of trying to prove them wrong, the singer decided to lean in with his latest music video.
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On Friday (June 20), Boone dropped the tongue-in-cheek music video for his new song “Mr. Electric Blue,” off his just-released LP American Heart. From the start of the clip, Boone goes out of his way to play with all the worst things the internet has to say about him when he walks into “Industry Plant Records” wearing a t-shirt that simply says “one hit wonder” for a frank conversation with his sleazy agent (played by his frequent songwriting collaborator Jack LaFrantz).
“Have you not been on the internet? Everything is terrible, Benson! We put all of our money into ‘moonbeam ice cream’ and the backflip, and it’s done absolutely horrible,” LaFrantz’s character tells an exasperated Boone. He informs the singer that he owes his faux label $10 million, and suggests that he find “a new gimmick” like “good songwriting.” At the suggestion, Boone deflates: “You know I can’t do that.”
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What ensues is a madcap montage, where Boone takes as many odd jobs as he can to raise the money. He walks dogs (while wearing another T-shirt that says “”), mows lawns (for a company called “Auto-Tune Trimmers”), washes cars (with bumper stickers declaring “mustaches are lame”) sells his sparkly jumpsuits and even opens a moonbeam ice cream truck. Of course, that still doesn’t stop the criticism from coming — when he’s recognized by a little girl as “the guy who sings ‘Beautiful Things,’” she quickly humbles him: “Your music is terrible.”
For his hustling and hard work, Boone makes a grand total of $168, but begs LaFrantz’s agent to give him another chance. But his agent assures him that he found a better solution, saying he “sold your entire catalog to retail chains, fast food chains and movie theaters,” promising that “you’ll be the most overplayed artist in the world, and I’ll be rich.” A dejected Boone sighs and smiles, saying “that’s all I’ve ever wanted,” before celebrating his ubiquity.
It’s far from the first time Boone has commented on the way people perceive him. The singer posted a TikTok back in April, explaining that he could understand people not liking him or his music if there were more people offering concrete reasons for their distaste. “I just read a comment that said ‘idek why I hate Benson Boone but it feels right,’” he wrote on the video. “Like WHAT!!? how am I supposed to improve after reading that? At least say something valid like ‘he low key just flips everywhere can he [do] anything else?’”
Watch the full video for Boone’s “Mr. Electric Blue” above.
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The WWE‘s reality competition series WWE LFG (Legends & Future Greats) premieres its second season on Sunday (June 22).
It features 16 contenders battling for a chance to make it to the big leagues of pro wrestling in the WWE. Season two also features five legendary coaches: Undertaker, Booker T, Michelle McCool, Bubba Ray Dudley and Shawn Michaels.
When Does ‘WWE LFG’ Start?
Season two of WWE LFG has a start time of 10 p.m. ET/PT.
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Where to Watch ‘WWE LFG’ Online
WWE LFG airs on A&E. The series is available to stream on Philo, DirecTV, Fubo and Hulu + Live TV. Keep reading for more details on how cord-cutters can watch the WWE reality series online.
How to Watch ‘WWE LFG’ with Philo
A subscription to Philo — which comes with A&E — gets you access to live TV from cable channels for just $28 per month.
In fact, you can watch more than 70 cable networks, such as AMC, BBC America, BET, Cartoon Network, CMT, Discovery Channel, Food Network, Hallmark Channel, HGTV, History Channel, IFC, Lifetime, Logo, MotorTrends, Nickelodeon, OWN, Paramount Network, Smithsonian Channel, Sundance TV, TLC, VH1, Vice and many others.
In addition, AMC+ is available on Philo. The premium streaming service comes with Philo Core for free, so you can get even more movies and TV shows to watch with signup.
How to Watch ‘WWE LFG’ with DirecTV
A subscription to DirecTV — which comes with A&E for WWE LFG — gets you access to live TV, local and cable channels, starting at $59.99 for the first month of service ($89.99 per month afterwards) for the streamer’s signature packages.
You can watch local networks such as NBC, ABC, Fox, and PBS, while you can watch many cable networks, including ESPN, FS1, Lifetime, FX, AMC, Bravo, BET, MTV, Paramount Network, Cartoon Network, VH1, Fuse, CNN, Food Network, CNBC and others.
How to Watch ‘WWE LFG’ with Hulu + Live TV
WWE LFG on A&E is available to watch with Hulu + Live TV. Prices for the cable alternative start at $82.99 per month, while each plan comes with Hulu, Disney+ and ESPN+ at no additional cost.
Hulu + Live TV might be best for those who want all of these streaming services together in one bundle. It features many other networks, including ESPN, ABC, Hallmark Channel, BET, CMT, Disney Channel, NBC, Fox Sports and more.
How to Watch ‘WWE LFG’ with Fubo
To watch season two of WWE LFG on A&E, Fubo starts at $64.99 for the first month, $84.99 per month afterwards (the streamer’s current deal) with more than 225 channels — including local and cable — that are streamable on smart TVs, smartphones, tablets and on web browsers.
The service even gets you live access to local broadcast networks including NBC, Fox and ABC, while it has dozens of cable networks, such as ESPN, Bravo, CMT, ID, TV Land, VH1, TLC, E!, FS1, MTV, FX, Ion, OWN, Paramount Network and much more.
Starting at 10 p.m. ET/PT, WWE LFG (Legends & Future Greats) airs on A&E on Sunday (June 22). The series features the opening theme song “Take A Lesson” by def rebel (music producer Doug Davis), while it’s available to stream on Philo.
Want more? For more product recommendations, check out our roundups of the best Xbox deals, studio headphones and Nintendo Switch accessories.
Pop-rock artist Role Model has signed with Good World Management’s Brandon Creed and Dani Russin, Billboard can confirm.
Role Model joins a stacked roster of superstars at the firm, including Charli xcx, Troye Sivan, Ariana Grande and Demi Lovato.
In April, Role Model parted ways with his manager, Best Friends’ Danny Rukasin, who helped the artist become a breakout star. The singer-songwriter recently scored his first Hot 100 hit with “Sally, When the Wine Runs Out.” The song is off the deluxe edition of Role Model’s 2024 album, Kansas Anymore, which arrived in February.
Role Model signed to Interscope in 2018 and released his debut album, the more alternative-sounding Rx, in 2022. But last year’s Kansas Anymore — which featured a softer, more Americana-inspired sound — changed the course of his career and helped solidify him as one to watch.
Since the release of Kansas Anymore, Role Model has opened on tour for Gracie Abrams and, more recently, celebrated two sold-out shows in Los Angeles; at one of those shows, he welcomed Reneé Rapp on stage as a surprise guest during “Sally.” Attendees at the L.A. concerts included Laufey, The Kid Laroi, Shaboozey, Shaboozey and Jason Sudeikis.
In May, it was announced that Role Model will make his acting debut in the upcoming Lena Dunham-directed Netflix film, Good Sex, starring Mark Ruffalo and Natalie Portman. He will be credited under his born name of Tucker Pillsbury.
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Creed founded Good World in August 2023. At the top of 2025, he was named Billboard‘s Manager of the Year along with his tight-knit team. In the interview, he said of signing new talent: “We are extremely discerning,” before adding, “We have room, don’t get me wrong, for the right thing.”
A federal judge has rejected R. Kelly’s emergency request to be let out of prison due to an alleged jailhouse murder plot against the disgraced R&B star, who’s serving more than 30 years for multiple sex crime convictions.
Kelly’s attorney, Beau Brindley, has been petitioning a Chicago court for Kelly’s release since last week, saying prison guards are trying to have the singer (Robert Sylvester Kelly) killed to stop him from uncovering prosecutorial misconduct in his case. Brindley claims jail officials attempted to solicit a fellow inmate to carry out the hit, and that when that didn’t work, they fed Kelly an overdose quantity of sleeping pills and denied him medically-necessary surgery for blood clots.
Prosecutors have dismissed the allegations as a “fanciful conspiracy” and “deeply unserious.” Judge Martha M. Pacold denied the bid for release on Thursday (June 19) without addressing its merits, saying such a request must be brought as a civil rights lawsuit or habeas corpus petition in North Carolina, where Kelly is imprisoned.
“Jurisdictional limitations must be respected even where, as here, a litigant claims that the circumstances are extraordinary,” wrote the judge.
Judge Pacold issued her decision ahead of a hearing that had been set for Friday (June 20), canceling the court date after seemingly learning all she needed to know from voluminous court papers that have been filed on the issue.
In a statement shared with Billboard on Thursday, Brindley said his team is “not surprised by this ruling as we knew that technical jurisdiction would be a challenge under these circumstances.”
“However, we had no choice but to act immediately given explicit evidence of a threat to Robert Kelly’s life,” Brindley added.
On Friday (June 20), Brindley tried another avenue to convince the Chicago judge to release Kelly: filing a motion for a new trial and asking for emergency bail in the meantime.
The Friday motion reiterates Brindley’s previous allegations that prosecutors unlawfully pressured a witness to testify against Kelly and intercepted Kelly’s communications with his lawyers ahead of his federal trial in Chicago.
“If someone dies in prison, it seems commonplace,” writes Brindley. “With that in mind, it becomes easy to understand how the people who committed this corruption and those that helped cover it up would rather kill a disgraced inmate convicted of sex crimes than face consequences that could ruin their lives and careers.”
The motion repeatedly notes that President Donald Trump is prioritizing rooting out corruption in the justice system. Brindley has publicly asked Trump to pardon Kelly in conjunction with the jailhouse murder plot claims.
A spokesperson for prosecutors did not immediately return a request for comment on Friday.
Kelly was convicted in Chicago of child pornography and enticing minors for sex in 2022, one year after a separate federal jury in New York also found the singer guilty of racketeering and sex trafficking
The former R&B star was sentenced to 30 years in prison for the New York conviction and 20 years in the Chicago case, though all but one year of the second sentence will overlap with the first. Both convictions have been upheld on appeal.
There’s no question that Broadway‘s Hamilton was (and still is) one of the most engrossing musicals on the Great White Way, but according to an original cast member, Madonna herself had other things to focus on. Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news During his Thursday (June 19) appearance […]
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Simply the best new dance tracks of the week.
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Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill have been playing music together for some 48 years, most of them in Simple Minds. Kerr assures us that familiarity has bred fondness; he even says the “parallel story” in the band’s 2023 documentary Everything Is Possible is “the friendship of Charlie and I, which is quite remarkable because usually in long-working relationships in music people hate each other after 20 years. But Charlie and I still go on. There’s a great friendship there.”
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Despite that, Kerr tells Billboard that it’s not always a lovefest between frontman and guitarist, either, as Simple Minds is in the midst of its first full-scale North American tour in seven years. “We’re still able to have our rows and our fights. We’re not always on the same page,” Kerr acknowledges, adding with a laugh that, “We had a screaming match last week and everyone around us…. First of all they said, ‘I’ve never heard such a f–kin’ intense screaming match,’ so afterwards Charlie and I felt embarrassed. Y’know, usually it’s not even (about) a thing. You’re not on the same page, and it’s frustrating. Someone will just say the wrong word, and it triggers.
“But here’s the good news; at the end of the day there’s no scars, no wounds. We get up the next day and everything is fine. How amazing that we’re still so passionate about it. How amazing that we still care. How amazing we’re in the rehearsal room, trying to make it as great as it can be for our audience, and how amazing the next day we go to breakfast with each other.”
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During its current trek, whose U.S. leg wraps up Saturday (June 22 in Noblesville, Ind.), Kerr, Churchill and the latest incarnation of Simple Minds have been supporting their new concert album — Live in the City of Diamonds, which came out in April — and the 40th anniversary of an eventful 1985 that included: the Billboard Hot 100-topping single “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” from the hit film The Breakfast Club; a performance at Live Aid that summer; and the band’s best-selling studio album, Once Upon a Time, which came out that fall.
“It was beautiful,” Kerr recalls. “It was so unexpected in a sense. You had the movie, you had the song, Live Aid, MTV, ‘Alive & Kicking’ [a No. 3 Hot 100 hit], the Once Upon a Time album itself…and lo and behold, 40 years later we’re still here talking about it. That’s what 1985 felt like to us.”
Simple Minds was famously ambivalent about recording “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” which was written by producer Keith Forsey and Steve Schiff for the John Hughes-directed film. The group had already planned to make an aggressive assault on the U.S. market in the wake of its 1984 album Sparkle in the Rain and was confident “we had songs up our sleeve” for what would become Once Upon a Time.
“Then out of nowhere these phone calls start to come in about this movie, and the record company thinks it would be a good thing to bridge to the next album,” Kerr recalls. “We were like, ‘Yeah, we want to do it,’ then ‘Oh, hang on a minute. They want us to record someone else’s song? That’s not what we do; we’re credible artists. We write our own songs, and we’ve got some good ones in the pipeline, so we’re not sure about that.’ But after meeting the people involved we decided to do it.”
The key, Kerr adds, was that his band found a way to make the song its own. “I’m not taking anything away from the song and Keith and the guys who came up with the music. You can find the demo of the song online; it’s a good little song. But Simple Minds, what we brought to it was 10 years of playing live, and we put our heart and soul into it and we put our lifeblood into the record. It would’ve been a different song if OMD did it, or the Psychedelic Furs — it would’ve been a different record, rather. So it’s not our song, but it is our record.”
Simple Minds will follow the North American tour with a jaunt through Europe, starting June 27 at home in Glasgow, where the band plans to play Once Upon a Time in its entirety. That trek wraps up July 27 in Italy, after which Simple Minds plans to return to working on a new studio album — the follow-up to 2022’s Direction of the Heart — which Kerr, Burchill and company began working on before hitting the road.
“We’ve got a whole bunch of songs up our sleeves,” Kerr says. “They’re not finished yet, but the backing tracks are down, the rough mixes. So we’re excited. People might say, ‘What’s the impetus?’ because obviously records don’t sell like they used to and there’s a limited appeal for new stuff no matter whether you’re Bruce Springsteen or whoever you are. But this is who we are. This is what we do. It just goes on. It’s all about creativity and you have it in you and you’ve got to get it out. That’s the same now as it’s ever been, and for us every time you do something new you’re still using those muscles. It’s like a chapter to a book; it seems to refresh the rest of the story and stops you from calcifying.”
Erykah Badu and The Alchemist are really making an album together, and their first single is finally here. Badu and the West Coast producer dropped their new song “Next to You” at midnight after she performed Badu Presents: Echos 19 in her hometown of Dallas as part of Forever in Rotation, Amazon Music’s Juneteenth celebration. […]
This week, Billboard’s New Music Latin roundup and playlist — curated by Billboard Latin and Billboard Español editors — features fresh new music, including Karol G’s Tropicoqueta, Xavi’s “El Malo” and Yami Safdie and Emilia’s “+ Te Vale.” In their strikingly vulnerable ballad, Safdie and Emilia narrate the POV of a heartbroken woman who is watching her ex move on, and she […]
