Author: Arabian Media staff
Consultant and veteran music executive Mark Dinerstein has joined forces with investors JPB Partners to purchase Nashville music venue Marathon Live from founder Josh Billue. Dinerstein will serve as chief executive for the new organization while Billue has announce plans to remain at the company and serve as Chief Development Officer. Marathon Live will include six venues in total — besides Nashville’s Marathon Music Works, Marathon also owns The Truman in Kansas City, The Signal in Chattanooga, Tennessee; The Hall in Little Rock, Arkansas; The Hawthorn in St. Louis and FIVE in Jacksonville, Florida. The Five is the newest venue…
The Billboard Fan Army Face-Off 2025 has begun! On Monday, July 14, Billboard’s annual Fan Army Face-Off opened up for Round 1 voting, with 64 different artists’ fan armies facing off to determine: which artist’s fan army is the strongest? Fan armies for the following artists are in competition for this year’s crown: Addison Rae, aespa, Ángela Aguilar, Ariana Grande, ATEEZ, Bad Bunny, Bailey Zimmerman, BE:FIRST, Benson Boone, Beyoncé, BigXthaPlug, Billie Eilish, BINI, BLACKPINK, BTS, Cardi B, Chappell Roan, Charli xcx, Chris Brown, Doechii, Drake, Dua Lipa, Ed Sheeran, ENHYPEN, GloRilla, Gracie Abrams, Hozier, Jelly Roll, JO1, John Summit, Justin…
This time, ROSÉ and Bruno Mars met up somewhere much bigger than an “APT.,” joining forces at SoFi Stadium for a surprise performance of their hit single during BLACKPINK‘s run of DEADLINE World Tour shows in Los Angeles. In clips captured at the Sunday (July 13) show, the crowd of BLINKs goes absolutely wild when the Silk Sonic star appears and joins his duet partner on stage. Wearing matching jackets, Mars and the New Zealand-born K-pop star jump up and down while singing the lyrics to their smash hit “APT.,” accompanied by a fleet of backup dancers. At one point,…
In the latest chapter in Meta’s AI buying and hiring spree, Meta has acquired AI voice cloning startup PlayAI.Meta confirmed the acquisition to Bloomberg, but didn’t state the deal’s value. According to an internal memo leaked to Bloomberg, the “entire PlayAI team,” around 35 people, will join Meta this week. They will report to Johan Schalkwyk, a former speech AI researcher at Google who recently joined Meta from another AI voice startup called Sesame AI.PlayAI’s core product is a voice cloning tool that can generate human-sounding voices. The startup has partnered with companies like Walgreens and Salesforce to create voice…
Crafting a debut album is already a daunting task, one that gets more difficult when you enter the entertainment world as a child star whose successes never quite culminated in an indisputable mainstream breakthrough. For Josh Levi, a 26-year-old Houstonian looking to be R&B’s next song-and-dance heartthrob, that journey is intimately familiar, which only makes him more excited to unleash Hydraulic, his debut studio album, upon the world. “I was watching a TikTok the other day, and someone called me an underground artist. I guess I am that, but I definitely have been working for a long time — since…
If you are one of Velvet Sundown’s adoring fans, seeing them perform in a city near you is going to be problematic.After releasing two albums, Floating On Echoes and Dust And Silence, that have earned the group 1.2 million listeners on Spotify, the folk-country music “band” revealed itself to be an AI creation — everything from their music to their images and backstory.In a post on X from Velvet Sundown’s official account, the poster wrote, “The Velvet Sundown is a synthetic music project guided by human creative direction, and composed, voiced, and visualized with the support of artificial intelligence. This…
Getting up to do morning TV is always a struggle for rock stars who are used to late nights and mid-day wake-ups. But you’d expect that the TV professionals who are used to the routine of going into work when it’s still dark out would have it down. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news At least that’s what “Jessie’s Girl” singer Rick Springfield seemed to think when he dropped by the third hour of the Today show on Friday (July 11) to chat up hosts Al Roker, Craig Melvin and Jill Martin…
When Andy Hunter, founder and CEO of Bookshop.org, followed his lifelong passion for books into the publishing industry in 2009, he noticed an unsettling shift: The bookstores that had defined his childhood and communities were going out of business — rapidly losing market share to Amazon.Image Credit: Courtesy of Bookshop.org. Andy Hunter.The number of U.S. bookstores decreased more than 50% in the span of about two decades, falling from 12,151 in 1998 to 6,045 in 2019, according to data from the Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, which initially focused on selling books online, in July 1995.…
This week’s crop of new music features a disco-dipped, R&B-leaning collab from Miranda Lambert and Chris Stapleton, a freewheeling collab from Marcus King Band with Jamey Johnson and Kaitlin Butts, and a slate of musical anthems from Greylan James, Sunny Sweeney, Ashby Frank and 2 Lane Summer. Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news Check out all of these and more in Billboard‘s roundup of some of the best country, bluegrass and/or Americana songs of the week below. Chris Stapleton & Miranda Lambert, “A Song to Sing” Two of country music’s most distinct voices entwine…
Forty years ago, at the Live Aid festival in Philadelphia on July 13, 1985, it took Bob Dylan just a few moments to set in motion the music industry’s longest-running concert for a cause — Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid. Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news Dylan took the stage at JFK Stadium late in the day, just past 10:30 p.m., accompanied by Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones, each with acoustic guitars. (They were preceded by Mick Jagger and Tina Turner’s incendiary duet.) Opening with two seldom-performed songs from 1964,…