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Charli XCX is bringing her Party Girl series to London next summer with a huge outdoor show. Charli will curate a day at LIDO Festival in east London’s Victoria Park on June 14, 2025, as well as put on a headline performance – marking her first U.K. festival topline slot. Explore Explore See latest videos, […]

Taylor Swift‘s “Cassandra” was the only song from The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology that had never been performed live, until Friday night (Nov. 22) in Toronto, where it stole the show in a three-song piano medley brimming with rage.
“Cassandra,” “Mad Woman” and “I Did Something Bad” suddenly existed together in a fine fury, ascending above the concept of ordering the tour’s main setlist by “eras.” (Tortured Poets, Folklore and Reputation were represented here, in one performance.)

Watch a fan-filmed video of Swift’s full performance of the mashup here.

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The live premiere of “Cassandra,” a song titled after the Cassandra of Greek mythology who received the gift of prophecy along with the curse to never be believed, came during the the acoustic section of Swift’s Friday show, the fifth of six dates total in Toronto this month. The Eras Tour acoustic set is known as the part of the concert where what she performs each night is meant to be a surprise to the audience.

“When the first stone’s thrown, there’s screaming/ In the streets, there’s a raging riot/ When it’s ‘burn the b—-,’ they’re shrieking/ When the truth comes out, it’s quiet,” Swift sang from “Cassandra” at Toronto’s Rogers Centre, sitting at her piano painted with flowers.

She continued on with the ballad’s chorus, singing, “So they killed Cassandra first ’cause she feared the worst/ And tried to tell the town/ So they filled my cell with snakes, I regret to say/ Do you believe me now? Do you believe me now?”

Swift surprised everyone further with a sudden shift to “Mad Woman”: “What did you think I’d say to that?/ Does a scorpion sting when fighting back?/ They strike to kill and you know I will/ You know I will.”

In the moving chorus of “Mad Woman,” she sings, “Every time you call me crazy/ I get more crazy/ What about that?/ And when you say I seem angry/ I get more angry/ And there’s nothin’ like a mad woman/ What a shame she went mad/ No one likes a mad woman/ You made her like that.”

While it feels melodramatic to type this out, the moment that Swift took a sharp turn to Reputation — with “I Did Something Bad” — actually elicited gasps heard round the stadium and the internet, where fans who weren’t at the concert searched for streams of Swift’s set.

“What a shame she went mad,” Swift sang from “Mad Woman,” casually calling back to Reputation with “They say I did something bad.”

Toward the end of the performance, that couplet became “Do you believe me now? What a shame she went mad/ Do you believe me now? They say I did something bad” in a clever rewrite that linked “Cassandra” with both “Mad Woman” and “I Did Something Bad” in the same chorus.

The mad mashup went on for a solid seven minutes, as captured on video by concertgoers.

It followed a lighter performance from Swift on acoustic guitar, “Ours” (Speak Now) mixed with “The Last Great American Dynasty” (Folklore).

Swift plays in Toronto once more Saturday night (Nov. 23). The Eras Tour, which launched in March 2023, has a break for the U.S.’s Thanksgiving week before taking its final bow in Vancouver from Dec. 6-8, 2024.

Justin Trudeau showed off his dance moves at Taylor Swift‘s Eras Tour concert in Toronto.
On Friday (Nov. 22), the Canadian prime minister and his family attended the pop superstar’s second-to-last show at the Rogers Centre. In a fan-captured video from the sold-out event, Trudeau is seen busting a move to “You Don’t Own Me” during the pre-show countdown, just before Swift took the stage.

Another fan video showed Trudeau exchanging friendship bracelets with Swifties ahead of the concert.

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This marked Swift’s fifth show at the Rogers Centre, where she’ll perform one final concert on Saturday (Nov. 23) before heading to Vancouver’s BC Place to close out The Eras Tour with a three-night run from Dec. 6-8.

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Saturday’s show also featured a long-awaited mashup of Swift’s songs “Cassandra,” “Mad Woman,” and “I Did Something Bad” during the surprise songs portion of her set.

Earlier in the Toronto run, Swift reflected on her six nominations for the 2025 Grammy Awards, including album of the year for The Tortured Poets Department.

“You guys did something so amazing over the course of the last few months,” she told the Rogers Centre crowd. “I just mean what you did with embracing The Tortured Poets Department, the album. It’s truly blown my mind because its really emotional for me that this album, I wrote it during The Eras Tour.”

“I wrote that album, made that album, all [while] trying to keep it a secret from you guys,” she continued. “And then [we] announced the album, and then we basically were, like, working really hard to secretly put together a new chapter in the Eras Tour of The Tortured Poets Department and we wanted to surprise you with it, and we did.”

Swift also reflected on the album’s success on the Billboard charts, adding, “And the most recent thing that you did, because everything that happens is a direct reflection of the passion that you show, is you guys got this album nominated for six Grammys. It’s so unbelievable, so thank you.”

Khalid is opening up about his sexuality — even if it’s not something he originally intended to talk about. In a series of posts to his X on Friday (Nov. 22), Khalid officially came out as gay, simply posting a rainbow flag emoji and asking his fans to move on to the “next topic please […]

11/22/2024

From K-pop gossip to the star-studded afterparty in West Hollywood, here’s what Billboard learned and overheard during the first-ever MAMA Awards ceremony in the States.

11/22/2024

Rosé and Bruno Mars brought the MAMA Awards over to their “APT.” on Thursday night (Nov. 21), performing their new collaboration live for the first time at the Los Angeles ceremony. The duo rocked matching oversized grey suits as they sang the high-energy track, backed by a band and supporting singers. The duo later accepted […]

When director Jon M. Chu shared that Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo had been cast as Galinda and Elphaba, respectively, in the long-awaited movie adaptation of Broadway’s smash musical Wicked back in Nov. 2021, reactions were mixed. No one doubted Erivo’s thespian credentials: She’d won a Tony (lead actress, musical) for The Color Purple in 2016 and been nominated for a best actress Oscar in 2019 for playing abolitionist Harriet Tubman in Harriet. But Grande? Well, Ari’s pop career was unimpugnable – she’d released the acclaimed, Billboard 200-topping Positions a year prior to the announcement and topped the Billboard Hot 100 just months earlier on a remix of The Weeknd’s “Save Your Tears” – but her acting credits were a different matter entirely.

It wasn’t that her résumé was slim. Between Victorious and Sam & Cat, Grande had been a consistent presence on Nickelodeon in the first half of the ‘10s. During the second half of that decade, Grande – who by then had earned her spot on pop music’s A-list – continued to flex her acting chops in small parts, getting killed in 2015’s Scream Queens, co-starring in Hairspray Live!, hosting Saturday Night Live and making a cameo in Zoolander 2 (all 2016).

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So it wasn’t that audiences hadn’t seen her act – it was that we hadn’t seen her act too far afield of the bubbly, ditzy Cat Valentine of her Nickelodeon days. A month after the Wicked casting was revealed, Grande showed a bit more range in the love-it-or-hate-it Netflix comedy Don’t Look Up, but considering that she was playing a pop star, it didn’t exactly assuage Wicked fan fears that Grande wasn’t qualified for one of the most beloved, sought-after roles in modern musical history.

Yes, Galinda/Glinda (the “Ga” is silent by the end of the musical) is both giddy and scatterbrained – two traits Grande excels at portraying – but Kristin Chenoweth’s iconic, Tony-nominated work in Wicked established that to play the role, you needed depth, layers and razor-sharp comedic timing. No one with ears could question Grande’s pipes, but based on her acting credits, we simply didn’t know if she was capable of filling Chenoweth’s small but mighty heels.

Well, having seen Wicked: Part 1 in theaters, I can say without exaggeration that Grande isn’t just a good witch – she’s sinceriously astonishing. From her first scene – when she descends from the sky to tell the overjoyed Munchkins that the Wicked Witch of the West is dead – it’s abundantly clear that Grande has figured out how to make the role her own.

This isn’t Grande the impressionist recreating Chenoweth’s Glinda for the big screen; this is a fresh interpretation delivered with nuance and pathos. As a traditionally beautiful pop star, it’s no surprise that Grande captures Glinda’s more-perfect-than-perfection aura; and as a Nickelodeon veteran, Grande can milk the humor of the Ozian mispronunciations (“confusifying,” etc.) without batting an eyelash. But when a Munchkin confrontationally inquiries about Glinda’s past friendship with the Wicked Witch, forcing the Good Witch to literally burst her own pink bubble, Grande is a revelation.

Caught off guard by the question, Grande’s Glinda falters, struggling to deliver a PR-acceptable reply without betraying a deeply felt kinship with the so-called Wicked Witch. Forcing a smile to cover up the pain and haunted loneliness in her eyes, Grande demonstrates from the go that she knows exactly what makes the Glinda character work: It’s not just about satirizing her superficiality — it’s conveying the sense that the experience of knowing Elphaba has fundamentally changed Glinda’s unthinking faith in institutions, public opinion and people in power. Glinda is a gently tragic figure in many ways, ultimately getting exactly what she wants while simultaneously realizing how hollow it all is.

As with the stage musical, the Wicked film plays out primarily as one lengthy flashback, which takes us back to a pre-epiphany Galinda: narcissistic, ambitious, a bit cruel, self-promoting and unhindered by one iota of self-awareness. Wicked touches on weighty themes, yes, but it’s not a Shakespearean tragedy, so all of that is naturally played for laughs, and Grande eats up every syllable, hair flip and vapid smile. She soars in the vocal showcase “Popular” – nailing some hair-raising high notes toward the end while putting her own stamp on Chenoweth’s best-known song – but more importantly, she delivers the laughs. Like a Golden Era Hollywood pro, Grande is luminous onscreen while balancing choreography and comedy, alternately subtle and silly in her performance of this winking celebration of conformity. When Wicked hits streamers, expect viewers to hit rewind more than once on this scene.

Any successful staging of Wicked needs a push-pull chemistry between the two leads, and Erivo’s Elphaba exudes a potent mixture of warmth, longing and self-loathing in the role. (It goes without saying that Erivo sings the absolute hell out of every song.) From bristling irritation to empathy and affection, her feelings toward Galinda evolve in a way that feels real and relatable — even in a musical with talking goats and Winkie princes.

When it’s time for Elphaba’s signature song, “Defying Gravity,” Erivo is stunning, overcoming disillusionment to find her self-confidence and purpose while giving the film it’s pounding, wounded heart. Grande provides deft, subtle support; these characters are on the same page morally but wired too differently to follow the same path, and that tension is magnificently acted. (Grande obviously knows “Yes, And?” as more than just a song title.)

Skeptics of Grande’s acting abilities might insist that while she soars in this role, it’s more a case of perfect casting than impressive acting. But from the opening scene to the climatic finale, Grande goes so much deeper than just playing a shallow, popular girl for laughs – she takes us on a journey that reveals the hopes, disappointments, compromises and realizations of a surprisingly three-dimensional character. Some pop stars turned actors acquit themselves competently on the big screen, but like Lady Gaga in A Star Is Born, this performance signals the arrival of a formidable cinematic talent with a lot more to show us.

Taylor Swift is perfectly fine with subtly teasing her ex-boyfriend, Joe Jonas. Swift dated Jonas between July and October of 2008, and the relationship infamously ended when he broke up with the “Anti-Hero” star through a very quick phone call — a move Swift publicly shaded during a 2008 appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. A […]

Maroon 5’s “Memories” tops the second Top Movie Songs chart, powered by Tunefind (a Songtradr company), following its synch in the latest installment in the Venom film series, Venom: The Last Dance.

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Rankings for the Top Movie Songs chart are based on song and film data provided by Tunefind and ranked using a formula blending that data with sales and streaming information tracked by Luminate during the corresponding period of October 2024. The ranking includes newly released films from the preceding three months.

“Memories” leads a sweep of the top two spots on Top Movie Songs for Venom: The Last Dance, which was released Oct. 25 and is the first film in the series since 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage. The song earned 8.8 million official on-demand U.S. streams in October 2024, plus 1,000 downloads sold, according to Luminate.

Trending on Billboard

Released in 2019, “Memories” is Maroon 5’s most recent top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at No. 2 in January 2020.

It’s followed by Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now,” from 1978’s Jazz, allowing Venom: The Last Dance to become the first film to occupy the top two of the chart, coming in its second month of existence. Bee Gees’ “Tragedy” from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice led the inaugural ranking, followed by Taylor Swift’s “My Tears Ricochet” from It Ends With Us.

Speaking of It Ends With Us, Post Malone’s “White Iverson” (13.3 million streams) ranks at No. 3. It’s followed by Jungle’s “Back on 74” at No. 4. “Back on 74,” with 8.1 million streams and 1,000 downloads, was featured in Netflix’s Lonely Planet, released Oct. 11. It’s the first time a movie that premiered on a streaming service reaches the chart, as the films represented on the September 2024 tally all had theatrical releases.

A pair of songs from Maren Morris released as part of Dreamworks’ The Wild Robot also make the chart, with “Kiss the Sky” (No. 6; 1.4 million streams, 1,000 downloads) and “Even When I’m Not” (No. 9; 790,000 streams, 1,000 downloads) representing the second and third chart appearances for animated films, after Transformers One made the September 2024 list with Quavo, Ty Dolla $ign and ARE WE DREAMING’s “If I Fall.”

See the full top 10 below.

Rank, Song, Artist, Film1. “Memories,” Maroon 5, Venom: The Last Dance2. “Don’t Stop Me Now,” Queen, Venom: The Last Dance3. “White Iverson,” Post Malone, It Ends With Us4. “Back on 74,” Jungle, Lonely Planet5. “Tragedy,” Bee Gees, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice6. “Kiss the Sky,” Maren Morris, The Wild Robot7. “Right Here Waiting,” Richard Marx, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice8. “Margaritaville,” Jimmy Buffett, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice9. “Even When I’m Not,” Maren Morris, The Wild Robot10. “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You Baby,” Cigarettes After Sex, It Ends With Us

November is coming to an end, but things are just starting to heat up in the music world with the slew of new drops this week. To kick things off, Kendrick Lamar unveiled his sixth studio album, GNX, without any warning on Friday (Nov. 22). The 12-track project features contributions from SZA — who appears on […]