News

07 Mar 2023

Weezer to Headline New Cave Mountain Catskills Music Festival

A new music festival is coming to the Catskills this fall in New York state.

Cave Mountain Catskills Music Festival will take place on Sept. 15-16 at the Windham Mountain ski area with a lineup that includes Weezer, Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, Dinosaur Jr., Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Albert Hammond Jr., Lee Fields, Courtney Marie Andrews, Sheer Mag, and more. The festival is organized by the team behind Brooklyn Made Presents and Crush Music.

“When Bob McLynn of Crush Music came to me with this idea, it was a no-brainer to jump in and partner on this amazing event.,” says Brooklyn Made president and CEO Anthony Makes. “We can’t wait to present this festival to all of New York’s incredible music fans this fall.”

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Tickets for the festival go on sale Friday, March 10th and are expected to sell out quickly. Fans can purchase general admission and VIP tickets at the festival’s website or through Ticketmaster.

The festival offers a wide range of food and beverage options, local craft vendors, as well as the opportunity to experience the beautiful setting of Windham Mountain in the Catskills.

“We want to create an experience that is about more than just the music,” adds Makes and McLynn. “We want to create a community where people can come together and have a great time.”

For those who want to experience the festival in style, there is a VIP ticket option available. VIP ticket holders will receive a dedicated entrance, exclusive prime viewing locations, special access to private lounge areas, commemorative festival poster, and other exclusive amenities. 

VIP ticket holders will also have access to The Club, Windham Mountain’s exclusive private lounge with expansive mountain views. The Club provides a luxurious setting for guests to relax, unwind, and enjoy the best of what Windham Mountain has to offer.

For more information about the festival, visit the festival’s website.

07 Mar 2023

Florence Welch Teases Cover of No Doubt’s ‘Just a Girl’ For ‘Yellowjackets’ Season 2

Florence Welch is ready to join team Yellowjackets by diving into a portal back to 1995. The + the Machine singer teased her contribution to the upcoming second season of the Showtime drama about a girls’ soccer team stranded in the wilderness — and the inescapable echo of the horrifying things that happened there that haunts their adult lives — with a short Instagram teaser on Monday (March 6).

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In the clip, Welch is backstage flipping through a wardrobe featuring the expected array of pastel-colored, gauzy dresses as a spooky piano theme plays in the background before she gets to a Team Yellowjackets varsity jacket. “So happy I got picked for the team this year,” reads the caption to the post.

Most crucially, as Welch gets ready to join the squad, her band’s frantic cover of No Doubt’s iconic breakthrough ’95 hit, “Just a Girl,” bubbles up. Whereas the original Gwen Stefani-led track was a bouncy, ska-tinged pop smash about female empowerment, in Welch’s hands the tune takes on a sinister, roiling edge in keeping with the show’s midnight black undercurrent.

The teen footballers are happy to have her, though, with the Yellowjackets account responding, “We make one hell of a team.” The choice of the No Doubt ditty from the group’s breakthrough third album, Tragic Kingdom, is fitting given the song choices in the first season, which leaned into an angsty mid-1990s alt rock playlist as the soundtrack to the increasingly desperate vibe among the teens starving in the woods.

Among the songs sprinkled throughout the first season were tracks by Alanis Morissette (“Uninvited”), Smashing Pumpkins (“Today”), Hole (“Miss World”), Ultravox (“Vienna”), Montell Jordan (“This Is How We Do It”), Prodigy (“Firestarter”) and Mazzy Star (“Fade Into You”). The show’s packed cast for round two includes the adult versions of the players, Christina Ricci, Lynskey, Tawny Cypress and Juliette Lewis, as well as detective Elijah Wood, Lauren Ambrose, Simone Kessell, Sophie Nélisse, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Sophie Thatcher, Samantha Hanratty, Courtney Eaton, Liv Hewson and more.

Season two premieres on Showtime on March 24 on streaming and on demand for subscribers and on linear outlets on March 26 at 9 p.m. ET.

Listen to the preview of Welch’s “Just a Girl” below.

07 Mar 2023

Chance the Rapper Wants Black Star Line Festival to Visit Jamaica

Chance the Rapper did a late-night triplet when he visited The Tonight Show on Monday (March 6), by participating in an interview, playing a daft game, and performing a new number.

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First up, the Chicago hip-hop star (real name: Chancelor Johnathan Bennett) sat for a chat with the NBC program’s host Jimmy Fallon, and cleared up any questions about whether Martin Short really is such a good guy.

Well, yes, apparently. Chance regaled with a tale of a flight from Los Angeles to Chicago, in which he was separated from his eldest daughter, Kensli. That was until a “kind older gentleman gets up” and offered his seat to the girl. It was indeed the Martin Short. “I super freaked out,” Chance admits. “He was really, really nice and I don’t think he knows who I am. So I think he just did it…that’s a really kind gesture.”

Conversation moved on to Chance’s Black Star Line Festival in Ghana. “It was very successful,” he says of the event, held earlier this year with a lineup featuring Erykah Badu, Dave Chappelle, T-Pain, Jeremih, Sarkodie, Tobe Nwigwe, Asakaa Boys and M.anifest.

“It was magical. 52,000 people, the largest concert in the history of Ghana”. With the dust barely settled, Chance and Vic Mensa are plotting the next round for the festival in January 2024. And perhaps, this time visiting the West Indies.

“We’re actually thinking about hosting the next one in Kingston, Jamaica,” he explains. “We’re still working it out in our heads. And we love the city of Accra and Ghana and West Africa as a whole. We just want to continue to, like, create community in other spaces.”

The Grammy Award-winning songwriter and producer also squeezed in some promo for season 23 of The Voice, for which he’s the newest coach. Would he have auditioned for the show if the whole Chance The Rapper thing never happened?

Sure, he would have done just fine, Chance admits confidently.

And which song would he hit, given the chance? “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going Song,” the Jennifer Hudson piece from Dreamgirls.

Chance stuck around and showed he’s a good sport by playing a round of “Peanut Butter That’s My Jam Tic-Tac-Toe,” a sticky new spot and a real mouthful.

The Coloring Book star closed it out with a solo-performance of “YAH Know”. The recording, which features King Promise, will appear on his upcoming album Star Line Gallery, expected for release later this year.

Watch the performance below.

07 Mar 2023

Ed Sheeran Breaks Multiple Australian Records With MCG Concerts

Ed Sheeran completed a hattrick of attendance records last week when his – = ÷ x Tour (pronounced The Mathematics Tour) swung into the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the largest stadium in Australia.

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The English pop superstar broke the national record for attendance at a ticketed concert on Thursday (March 2) with upwards of 105,000 tickets sold.

He was just warming up.

The imposing venue was the host for another record-breaking effort last Friday (March 3), when more than 109,500 Sheerios packed the house — setting a new mark for the second consecutive night.

The combined attendance across those two shows, at almost 215,000, will take some beating.

The MCG, or simply the G, as locals call it, is a sporting and concerts caldron which has hosted countless events since it was constructed on its current site in 1853.

The opening and closing ceremonies for the 1956 Olympic Games where held at the MCG, it’s the spiritual home of AFL, the world’s largest Test cricket ground, and it has provided the backdrop for concerts by the biggest names in music, from David Bowie to U2, Paul McCartney, Billy Joel, the Rolling Stones, Madonna and many others.

With those two massive shows, Sheeran has a special footnote in the history of the MCG and Australia’s touring market — and not for the first time.

When the “Shape Of You” singer last toured Australia with Frontier Touring, in 2018, more than 1 million tickets were sold, a feat that wiped Dire Straits’ record for a single trek (950,000) that had stood for more than 30 years. Sheeran’s Divide tour that year also set a new mark of 18 stadium dates across Australia and New Zealand, beating AC/DC’s old record (14).

Sheeran has a deep friendship with Australia and the Gudinskis, the family behind Frontier Touring, the touring company which produced the current recent trek, the 2018 Divide run and others.

All five of his studio albums have led the ARIA Chart. He has a chance to hit the national survey for six when his next album, Subtract, drops May 5.

Sheeran’s hit “Shape Of You” is the leader on the ARIA Top 100 Singles chart of the 2010s.

The Brit’s 12-date The Mathematics Tour of Australasia continues tonight (March 7) at the Adelaide Oval and wraps up Sunday (March 12) at Perth’s Optus Stadium.

Tickets are available for both shows.

06 Mar 2023

Kakao Launches Tender Offer to Buy 35% of SM Entertainment

Korean tech company Kakao will launch a tender offer to acquire up to 35% of SM Entertainment’s outstanding shares. The move came a day after a court injunction forced Kakao to cancel its plan to acquire a 9.05% stake directly from SM, whose roster includes NCT 127 and Red Velvet; a court injunction scuttled SM’s plan to issue new shares and give Kakao the stake, according to reports by Bloomberg and Reuters.

Kakao and its subsidiary Kakao Entertainment are seeking to become SM’s largest shareholder and partner, to help rebuild the company after SM’s board of directors terminated a production contract with the company’s legendary founder, Lee Soo-man, on Dec. 31. Lee sold most of his SM shares to HYBE, the home of BTS, on Feb. 22 and won a court injunction Friday that prevented SM from issuing new shares to Kakao. As a result, Kakao has been forced to seek shares from existing SM shareholders instead.

HYBE had sought an additional 25% stake in SM through a tender offer but was able to purchase slightly less than 1% of outstanding shares, the company revealed in a regulatory filing Monday (March 6). That increased HYBE’s ownership stake in SM to 15.8%. With Lee’s 3.65% stake, HYBE has voting power of 19.4% of outstanding shares. The next-largest shareholder, Korea’s National Pension Service, owns 6.2% of SM’s shares.

Kakao and HYBE are locked in a battle for control of SM’s board of directors ahead of the company’s annual general meeting on March 31. “Kakao has strong trust in the excellent competitiveness of SM Entertainment’s current management, employees, and artists, and the current management’s efforts to resolve the factors that hinder SM Entertainment’s growth,” the company said in a statement.

HYBE sees itself as the more skilled, experienced company to guide SM’s global ambitions and has criticized its competitor’s “utterly irresponsible contract” with Kakao.

Kakao and its subsidiary Kakao Entertainment, which raised $966 million from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia and Singapore in January, will offer 150,000 won ($115.46) per share — a 25% premium over the 120,000 won ($92.36) per share HYBE offered.

SM’s share price rose 13.8% to 148,100 won ($114.09) on Tuesday morning in Seoul following news of Kakao’s tender offer.

Additional reporting by Jeyup S. Kwaak.

06 Mar 2023

De La Soul Charging to U.K. Chart High After Streaming Debut

De La Soul could cap an eventful stretch with a career-best U.K. chart position for the hip-hop legends’ 3 Feet High and Rising (via Chrysalis).

At the midweek point, De La Soul’s 1989 debut LP blasts to No. 5, well ahead of its No. 13 peak from January 1990 and a potential career high.

A top 5 appearance would cap a particularly eventful stretch for the Grammy Award-winning trio, which lost its founding member Trugoy the Dove (born David Jude Jolicoeur) last month, at the age of 54.

The rush for 3 Feet High and Rising is powered by streaming, and the long-overdue release of the New Yorkers’ catalog on digital streaming services last Friday (March 3) for the first time.

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That campaign followed months of work with the act and their record label, AOI, along with Reservoir, and includes De La Soul’s first six albums, 3 Feet High and Rising, De La Soul Is Dead (1991), Buhloone Mindstate (1993), Stakes Is High (1996), Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump (2000), and AOI: Bionix (2001). Just one of those LPs has cracked the U.K. top 10 — De La Soul Is Dead, which peaked at No. 7.

Flying high at the top of the Official Chart Update is the Lathums’ From Nothing to a Little Bit More (Island). If it holds its position, the Wigan, England rock outfit will earn a second leader following their 2021 debut, How Beautiful Life Can Be.

Close behind is British rapper slowthai, who is chasing his third consecutive top 10 with UGLY (Method). It’s new at No. 3 on the chart blast. Raised in Northampton (and born Tyron Frampton), slowthai landed a No. 1 with his previous, sophomore effort, Tyron.

Completing the podium on the chart blast is Mimi Webb’s first full-length album Amelia (RCA), set for a No. 3 debut.

Also eyeing top 10 stars are Scottish folk band Tide Lines (An Ocean Full of Islands currently at No. 6 via Tide Lines Music); “Songbird” singer Eva Cassidy’s posthumous collection with the London Symphony Orchestra and Australian-British composer Christopher Willis (I Can Only Be Me at No. 7 via Blix Street) and prog-rock legends Genesis (BBC Broadcasts at No. 9 via UMR/Virgin).

U.S. country star Morgan Wallen will need to show a clean set of heels in the final stages of the chart race if he’s to nab his first U.K. top 40 appearance. Wallen’s 36-track third album One Thing At A Time (EMI) appears at No. 40 on the Official Chart Update.

All will be revealed when the weekly chart is published Friday.

06 Mar 2023

Oscars Watch Party Ideas: Get ‘Perfectly Crafted’ Drinks With This Cordless Cocktail Maker

All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes.

Planning an Oscars watch party? You can now make “perfectly crafted” cocktails in seconds with this cordless cocktail maker from Black + Decker.

If you love cocktails and entertaining guests, the bev by BLACK+DECKER Cordless Cocktail Maker might be right up your alley. This best-selling gadget creates “personalized” cocktails and mocktails in seconds thanks to an “easy-load” system and over 40 compatible Bartesian cocktail capsules.

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The bev is an “amazing” edition to any kitchen and allows you to make “perfectly crafted cocktails at home,” according to one of dozens of positive reviews.

And it’s easy to use. Simply load the machine with the liquor or non-alcoholic spirits and the cocktail capsule of your choice, choose how strong you want the drink, press the “mix” button and enjoy.

bev by BLACK+DECKER Cocktail Maker Machine and Drink Maker for Bartesian capsules

$260.50 $299.99 13% OFF

The bev dispenses perfectly measured amounts of each ingredient for a perfectly mixed drink. It’s also equipped with LED lights at the base and a Party Mode button that makes the bottles light up.

Available at Amazon and BlackandDecker.com, the bev usually retails for $299.99, but it’s currently on sale at Amazon. Prime members get free delivery on millions of items, which means that if you order the bev today, you won’t have to pay extra to have it delivered by Oscar Sunday.

Black + Decker debuted its latest and soon-to-be-launched products — including the bev, the expansion of the kitchen wand family of attachments and the POWERSERIES Extreme MAX Cordless the SUMMITSERIES Select — during the Inspired Home Show, which kicked off in Chicago over the weekend and ends on Tuesday (March 7).

“Making life easier so you can enjoy more is what drives BLACK+DECKER’s product portfolio,” said Kendall Nohe, Global Director of Product Marketing at BLACK+DECKER. “We are focused on expanding and innovating our cleaning products as well as bringing cordless to other entertainment areas of your home. We’re excited to display how infusing BLACK+DECKER into your household can help make life easier and more joyful.”

The 95th annual Academy Awards return to ABC on Sunday, March 12 at 8 p.m. ET. If you’re in need of more watch-party essentials, the official Oscar Viewing Part Kit ($45) is available at the Academy Museum Store  – but it might not arrive in time for the Oscars. Luckily, Amazon and Walmart offer a huge selection of beverages, snacks and other party essentials like new TVs — if you need to upgrade your home theater — and same-day delivery on most items.

From food and drinks to Oscar-themed party decorations, if you’re a Prime, you’ll get free shipping. And in case you don’t have anything to wear to your party, Amazon has a mega-selection of formal outfits, casual clothes, shoes, beauty products and more.

Want more options? Target, Kroger, Sam’s Club and other retailers offer same-day delivery as well, and if you truly need something in a hurry, there’s always deliveries apps such as Uber One, Door Dash, Instacart and Grub Hub (free for Prime members).

Click here for ways to watch and stream the 2023 Oscars and here for details on how to watch this year’s nominated films.

See a roundup of Oscar party decorations below.

Amazon

Hicarer 32 Pieces Party Decorations Set

$7.99

For movie night or Oscar-watch parties, this 32-piece set includes red carpet cutouts, movie party cards and table toppers.

Amazon

Red Carpet Runner for Halloween Party Red Party Runner

$19.99

Ready to walk the red carpet? This set includes a VIP door cover and red carpet runner rug that measures approximately 4.5 feet long.

Amazon

gisgfim 96 Pcs Vip Paper Plate and Napkins Supplies Tableware Disposable Dessert Plates

$18.99

VIP only! Serve up appetizers, desserts and other small bites on these VIP plates with matching napkins.

Amazon

Bedwina 6″ Gold Award Trophies – Pack of 12 Bulk Golden Statues

$14.89 $18.89 21% OFF

“And the award goes to!” These six-inch trophies will make a great party favor or a prize for whoever gets the most Oscar predictions right. Click here for a printable Oscars trivia game.

06 Mar 2023

Karol G’s Historic No.1, The Weeknd & Ariana Grande Top Hot 100, Jisoo’s Solo Music & More I Billboard News

Karol G’s ‘Mañana Será Bonito’ becomes a historic No.1 for both Karol G and the Billboard 200 chart, Ariana Grande and The Weeknd top the Hot 100 with the remix of The Weeknd’s 2016 hit ‘Die For You’, it becomes each of their seventh No.1s and their second No.1 together doing a remix. They previously hit No.1 on the Hot 100 with the remix of ‘Save Your Tears’. Harry Styles throws back to his One Direction days. BLACKPINK’s Jisoo teases her upcoming solo music. Quinta Brunson tells us five things you don’t know about her, we tell you about everything that went down at Rolling Loud LA and more!

06 Mar 2023

Cravity Get ‘Groovy’ With Feel-Good New Single: Watch the Rising K-Pop Boy Band Take the Spotlight

After 2022 marked career milestones for Cravity with their first English single, touring the U.S., and releasing their New Wave album, which saw them “take charge” with their musical direction, the K-pop boy band returns with a “Groovy” direction for 2023.

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The nonet released their new EP MASTER : PIECE on Monday (March 6), boasting six new tracks alongside the single “Groovy.” While New Wave saw Cravity embodying a cheery and breezy sound, the new single “Groovy” continues the bright, feel-good energy with additional sparkle and shimmer. Funky rhythmic guitars back some of the guys’ smoothest and coolest hooks to date before the chorus bursts into an explosion of synthesizers and brass as Cravity declare: “You make you feel so groovy!”

Just like how the production in “Groovy” balances the sleek verses and vibrant choruses, the accompanying music video shows both sides of Cravity as the guys go from suit-and-tie office workers to colorfully dressed pop stars onstage and at press conferences that the paparazzi are fighting to film. The different worlds continuously mix throughout the visual until the final chorus, when the boys dance in vibrant, chic, contemporary suits.

“Groovy” includes songwriting contributions from Cravity members Serim and Allen, who also co-wrote on the new MASTER : PIECE tracks “Fly,” “Get Lifted” and Baddie.” Meanwhile, Cravity’s vocal powerhouse Woobin also wrote on “Baddie” while co-producing the track “Light the Way.” As the youngest male artist under Starship Entertainment (which is home to K-pop acts including chart-toppers Monsta X and IVE), Cravity’s new EP even includes credits from one of their seniors as Exy, leader of Starship girl group WJSN, also contributed lyrics for the track “A to Z.”

Watch Cravity’s new “Groovy” video below and stream MASTER : PIECE here.