Author: Rap Hooks

Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE) has announced a new round of speakers for its 2026 ADE Pro conference, with Josh Baker, Mochakk, Busy P, and Orbital‘s Paul Hartnoll among the latest additions to the event’s 30th anniversary edition.

The newly announced participants join previously revealed speakers including electronic music pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre, who will serve as ADE Pro’s Guest of Honor, along with Mosimann, Novah and LYZZA. The conference takes place Oct. 21 – 25 in the Dutch capital and is recognized as one of electronic music’s largest global industry gatherings.

This year’s conference program is curated around three central themes: market consolidation and the future of independence, rebuilding the music industry’s relationship with big tech and collective action. The event will also spotlight Brazil, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and sub-Saharan Africa as key growth regions for electronic music.

Brazilian artists Mochakk and Solarce Brothers join the program as part of ADE’s broader focus on the country’s expanding influence in the global electronic music market. Elsewhere, Manchester-based producer and label owner Josh Baker will discuss how artists are increasingly building businesses beyond music through labels, festivals and education platforms.

Ed Banger Records founder Pedro Winter, better known as Busy P, and Because Music founder Emmanuel de Buretel will unpack their long-running partnership and the future of independent music companies. Hartnoll will appear on a panel titled The Ethics of the Sample: Collaboration, Consent and Credit Across Cultures, coinciding with the 30th anniversary of Orbital’s seminal 1996 album In Sides.

Other newly-announced guests include SPFDJ, Pegassi, Mathame, Gideon Berger, Sarah Williams and Coldcut co-founder Matt Black. More speakers and sessions for ADE Pro 2026 will be announced in the coming months.

The 2025 edition of the conference featured appearances from British rapper Skepta, plus DJs Hannah Laing, Joris Voorn, Chris Stussy and Armin van Buuren. In an on-the-ground report, Billboard U.K. described ADE as “a diverse and fun-loving hub of creativity in Europe,” noting that Amsterdam was “totally taken over by the 600,000 fans and 10,000 music industry professionals who live and breathe electronic music.” 

Alison Wonderland has no shortage of tales to tell the grandkids. The Australian EDM star etched her name in the history books when, in 2018, she headlined Coachella, becoming the first female DJ to do so in what was her fourth performance in the California desert.

She’s prouder still of her seven-times headlining the “Temple of Wonderland” at Red Rocks Amphitheatre. And there’s been headline slots at Lollapalooza’s Perry’s Stage, and appearances at Tomorrowland, Electric Daisy Carnival, Ultra, Bonnaroo, Austin City Limits, and Life Is Beautiful. The Sydneysider has shifted more than 800,000 headline ticket sales across her U.S. tours alone. Global streams of her music top 1.1 billion.

On Thursday evening, June 25, perhaps a moment to stand among her finest; Wonderland has been invited to present the match ball for Australia’s final Group D round match with Paraguay in the FIFA World Cup Finals, which kicks off 10pm ET at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, CA.

“OH MY GDDD I just got asked by ADIDAS to BRING OUT THE MATCH BALL TO THE FIELD FOR THE AUSTRALIA VS PARAGUAY MATCH TOMORROW,” she writes on her socials. “I’ll wave to you all from the TV. WISH ME LUCK (have been in the studio all day so had to process haha ).”

An overjoyed Wonderland shared several snaps from the studio. In each shot, she’s wearing her Aussie green and gold Adidas track pants. One apparently captures the surreal moment she read the email with the once-in-a-lifetime request.

The Australian Socceroos will hope Wonderland (real name: Alexandra Sholler) is a good luck charm. To progress in the tournament, Australia must win or draw against the South American team. Losing isn’t an option.

The timing is perfect. Wonderland is currently on tour in the United States, the final date of which is set for this Saturday, June 27 at Foam Wonderland in Las Vegas, NV. Then, she takes her show on the road to for performances in the United Kingdom and Europe, getting underway July 10 with the Wonderland Warehouse Rave in London, all of it in support of her fourth studio album, Ghost World (via EMI). 

Speaking with Billboard ahead of her latest tour, Wonderland remarked: “I’m a perfectionist. Someone said something a long time ago, you can tell everyone you put everything into this body of work but at the end of the day the only person who will know if you really went there will be you. It sits with me and haunts me anytime I make anything. I think it’s why I push myself so hard. I think about it all the time to this day.”

Collaborators on her latest album, which dropped in December 2025, include Nina Wilson, better known as EDM producer and artist Ninajirachi, plus DJ Dave and Erick The Architect. Wonderland produced the collection with Dylan Ragland, MEMBA and QUIX. Ghost World was mixed by Tom Norris and Tristan Hoogland and mastered by Dale Becker.

Only two days before it was set to kick off, Country Thunder Alberta in Calgary has been cancelled.

Headliners for the June 26-28 festival were The Red Clay Strays, Kane Brown and Lainey Wilson, with the bill also including Cameron Whitcomb, Tyler Hubbard, Ian Munsick, Mark Chesnutt, Noeline Hofmann and Elizabeth Nichols, among others.

Organizers posted on social media on Wednesday (June 24), “Today, we have made the difficult decision to cancel Country Thunder Alberta 2026,” citing issues with the city of Calgary for the late cancellation. “Active construction, loss of critical infrastructure and a restrictive noise bylaw made safe and enjoyable execution of the festival impossible,” the post stated, noting that the festival had been in contact with the city to resolve the challenges, but have not been able to.

The festival was still touting its arrival on socials as recently as Tuesday (June 23), posting images of the main stage and trucks loading in equipment.

Organizers went into more detail on the festival website. “For several months, Country Thunder has been in direct communication with the City of Calgary in an effort to resolve a series of escalating infrastructure and regulatory challenges tied to the new arena development. Despite sustained advocacy, the following conditions remain unresolved,” the statement said, listing several impediments, including the installation of a water bypass pipe that made sections of the festival site unusable. Scotia Place, a $1.2 billion event center that will be the new home to the NHL’s Calgary Flames, is under construction and will open in fall, 2027.

“We do not take this decision lightly,” said Kim Blevins, Country Thunder’s executive director, in a statement on the site. “Our fans travel from across the country to be part of this experience and we owe them an event they can enjoy fully. The city-driven conditions in Calgary this year make that impossible. Proceeding would have meant compromising on not only safety but also the fan experience and that is not something we are willing to do. We want our fans to feel the music, lose themselves in it and leave having had the experience they paid for. The new sound limitations placed on this event would not have allowed us to deliver that experience.”

All fans will receive a full refund.

Country Thunder Alberta is one of five festivals under the Country Thunder banner. The other festivals take place in Florence, Arizona; Clearwater, Florida; Craven, Saskatchewan and Twin Lakes, Wisconsin.

At the heart of elite-level DJing is a mastery of music selection, reading the room, and beats. Always beats.

Anthony Pappa, the celebrated Australian DJ and producer, got an early advantage on those wheels of steel. “My father wanted me to become a professional drummer, and that was the kind of path that I was on,” Pappa tells Billboard. When the rest of his schoolmates were riding bikes or riding waves, Pappa attended one of Melbourne’s leading drum schools, Drumtek, and learned from one of the best to hit the skins, Virgil Donati, who, like Pappa, is an Australian musician of Italian descent. “Yeah, drumming was full-on for me, and so to make that step from drumming to DJ, it was just so easy.”

Those lessons paid off. Pappa made the transition to vinyl, and, at age 15, won Australia’s DMC DJ championship. The wizkid was the youngest to raise the trophy.

Since then, he’s gone on to fly the flag as one of Australia’s most in-demand, and versatile, DJs — a veteran who can effortlessly work vinyl on three decks, scratch, play trance, house, progressive house. Pappa appeared on DJ Mag‘s Top 100 DJs each year between 1997 and 2003, and was the magazine’s cover star in 2000. He has sold more than 500,000 records, including beat-mixed recordings for some of the most potent electronic music brands of the past 30-plus years, from Platipus Records, to Renaissance Recordings, Global Underground, NuBreed and more.

Billboard caught up with Pappa just days after he returned home from performing at Tokyo’s Womb, an “absolutely amazing” experience in one of the world’s most iconic clubs. “I’m still carrying that flag,” he explains. “I’ve come up to 40 years of DJing. I’m very happy, very grateful. It’s not an easy business to make a name in, but then it’s even harder once you’ve done that to try and stay there. So, to still be around doing what I do, what I love, I’m blessed. I’m very grateful.”

Backspin to a 13-year-old Pappa, who built his brand as a mobile DJ doing birthday parties for friends, mates. With his DMC win, Pappa never looked back. Then opportunities opened up for playing clubs in the early 1990s, when Pappa, now 18, was as experienced as the many of headliners. He would become a regular at Melbourne’s now-defunct Metro, one of the biggest clubs in Australia with a capacity of over 2,000; the historic Chevron; and Chasers.

Pappa hasn’t forgotten his roots. He’s known to incorporate drumming into his sets, which have included residencies with Renaissance (Nottingham U.K.), Twilo (New York) and Japan’s Womb, and spots on the bill for the best-known festivals on both sides of the Atlantic, including Glastonbury (U.K.), Creamfields (U.K.), ID&T (Holland), Extrema (Belgium), BPM (Mexico), Tomorrowland Belgium, SAMC Argentina, Ultra Miami (U.S.) and Exit (Serbia).

Is there any unfinished business for Anthony Pappa? An artist album, perhaps? “It’s not something I’ve got planned, but I wouldn’t say it’s off the cards. At the moment there’s that much material coming up. I’m doing collaborations with a lot of different people and they’re for all different labels,” he admits. At some point, who knows? “It would be a nice milestone to have that achievement for my career,” Pappa continues. “I’ve mixed a lot of compilations, DJ albums — I’ve probably done over about 20 of those. I’ve kind of done them all. So just my own album, of my own music. That would be a huge thing to do.”

In recent years, Pappa has dropped several tasty progressive house tunes, including “We Emerge,” a sneaking beast of a track created with Jamie Stevens, and the See Me EP, housing “Waterfall,” a teamup with Fauxplay and Leo Wood that just begs for a massive sound system.   

For now, Pappa has his hands full. He heads overseas in August for another world tour, taking in Europe, North America, South America, South Africa. Before that, he’ll play the Godskitchen The Resurrection Tour event at Melbourne Pavilion Melbourne on July 4, joining a bill that features Aly & Fila, Binary Finary, Gabriel & Dresden and Solarstone.

“I’m just constantly on the road, pushing music, doing what I love, and very happy at grateful to still be a DJ at my age, entertaining people,” he enthuses. “It’s something that I love to do as a living.”

Follow Pappa’s tour dates on Resident Advisor and godskitchenau.com.

PJ Harvey is sending a message from deep space. The British singer-songwriter has unveiled “Voyager,” a sweeping new track inspired by NASA’s legendary Voyager probes, which were launched in 1977 and continue their journeys nearly five decades later.

Originally conceived during sessions for Harvey’s next album – details of which have yet to be announced – “Voyager” took on a new life after physicist Professor Brian Cox invited the musician to contribute a song to his live Emergence stage show, which hits the U.K. later this year. The track was later recorded with a full orchestra at Miraval Studios in Provence, France.

Lyrically, the track also references the late astronomer Carl Sagan, whose 1994 book Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image of Earth taken from the edge of the solar system, by NASA’s Voyager 1. In it, Sagan described the planet as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

Harvey shared in a statement: “I was excited for the challenge to compose a song in the ‘voice’ of Voyager 2. I have long been fascinated by the spacecraft and its journey, and asked myself, ‘What it might say to us if it could?’ This was an inspiring route to take to develop the song.

“The song had already started life as part of the ongoing work towards my new album, so when Professor Brian Cox invited me to write a piece for his new show, I sent him the voice memo of this song to see if it resonated,” she continued. “It immediately made him think of the Voyager craft and the sound of its signal being sent back to Earth. With these ideas as my starting point I let the song develop, and discussed an orchestral accompaniment with Dario Marianelli.

“I’m very happy with the end result, and it’s wonderful to hear the orchestral score bring such expansiveness to my music. I thoroughly enjoyed researching the history and journey of Voyager 1 & 2, and was glad to be able to quote the great Carl Sagan within the song, and his famous description of our fragile and beautiful ‘pale blue dot’.”

Harvey’s most recent studio album arrived in the form of 2023’s I Inside the Old Year Dying, her tenth full-length effort to date. It marked her first release with independent label Partisan Records after three decades with Island Records and followed 2016’s Grammy-nominated The Hope Six Demolition Project.

The record also earned a nomination for the Mercury Prize, adding to her long history with the award; the Dorset musician has been nominated several times overall and has won twice, for Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2001) and Let England Shake (2011). She remains the only artist to have received the award on two separate occasions.

Nerves are underestimated, and misunderstood. For a performing artist, harnessing that chaotic nervous energy can create pure dynamite. Brook Lynn did that during the Auditions of America’s Got Talent 2026.

The 23-year-old hopeful stepped onto the AGT stage on Tuesday night (June 23) with a bundle of nerves, a dream and a stack of talent. Several minutes later, she had converted the room — and millions more watching on at home — into supporters, and believers.  

Hailing from the Netherlands, Lynn addressed her anxiety from the very start. “I’m a little nervous but so excited,” she explained, doing so to “the biggest crowd I’ve ever stood before.”

She continued, “I always loved singing but I didn’t think it was something I could pursue because I deal with a lot of anxiety through my life. My parents didn’t even know that I could sing. And one day, my dad just heard me sing from another room. And when I came out he just sat in his chair with tears, and was, like, so proud. He really encouraged me to pursue singing.”

Her dad sure could spot talent.

When it was time to roll, Lynn shut her eyes and converted those nerves into the right stuff, hitting a powerful rendition of Billie Eilish’s “The Greatest.” It was a performance that was touching and tender, strong and subtle. The Dutchwoman turned anxiety into a singing superpower.

“I loved it. I love you. I love your song. I love your feeling that you were putting into it. You have a beautiful voice,” enthused Sofía Vergara. “You have it all.”

Mel B remarked that Lynn’s vocals “sounded like you were in your happy place. And you sounded so, so beautiful.”

The performance was “haunting,” noted Howie Mandel. “You’ve travelled all this way to a whole other country and to be open about your mental health…it’s tough enough even if you haven’t had those issues, just to walk out on that stage. When you start singing, you’re like a flower. You bloom. And it was just open, and warm and beautiful. Good job.”

As he so often does, Simon Cowell spoke last: “I really hope this boosts your confidence because you really have great range, fantastic presence on stage,” the Brit commented.

Then, the bombshell. Lynn revealed her father passed away some years ago, an emotional detail that audibly swept through the crowd.

“Your father, he would have been very proud of you I think tonight,” Cowell explained. “It was a great audition.”

Each of the four judges gave an enthusiastic “yes,” which sees Lynn progress in this 21st series of NBC’s AGT. Watch the performance below.