Author: Rap Hooks

The parade of tributes to late country icon Dolly Parton will march on this weekend into movie theaters when AMC Theaters revives two of the Queen of Country’s most beloved big-screen appearances. AMC CEO Adam Aron announced that the chain will be screening the raunchy 1982 musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas as well as 1989 classic dramedy Steel Magnolias.

The nod to the life and legacy of Parton — who died on Tuesday (Aug. 25) at age 80 following a brief battle with cancer — will include showing the two classic films at discounted prices, with the movies slated to run from Friday through Wednesday (Sept. 2); click here to see where Whorehouse is screening near you and here for Steel Magnolias.

While Parton was a well-established, cross-genre music star by the 1980s, her appearance in Whorehouse — which was based on the 1978 stage musical — found her co-starring with then box office giant Burt Reynolds in a cast that also included The Andy Griffith Show star Jim Nabors, Golden Globe-winning Dog Day Afternoon actor Charles Durning and frequent Reynolds sidekick and comedy great Dom DeLuise.

The movie tells the story of Parton’s beloved Chicken Ranch madame Mona Stangely and the shake-up in her secret relationship with local sheriff Ed Earl Dodd (Reynolds) when TV reporter Melvin P. Thorpe (DeLuise) comes to town intending to do an exposé on the brothel. The film was a box office it and it was nominated for two Golden Globes, with Parton earning a nod for Best Actress in a Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy and Durning getting an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor for his role as Texas governor.

While the film featured some of the songs from Broadway score, along with two originals from Parton, the Parton-Reynolds duet “Sneakin’ Around” and a revamped version of her most iconic song, “I Will Always Love You,” that was released as a single in 1982 and hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart in October of that year, eight years after the original version had topped that same chart.

Steel Magnolias was also adapted from a play of the same name about the lives of a group of six women in a small Louisiana town, with Parton playing the role of a Truvy Jones, a hairdresser who works out of her home salon. The stacked cast included star Sally Field as Southern mother hen Mary Lynn “M’Lynn” Eatenton, as well as Shirley MacLaine, Daryl Hannah, Olympia Dukakis, Julia Roberts, Tom Skerritt, Sam Shepard and Dylan McDermott.

The movie as another box office success for Parton and it garnered a number of awards and nominations, including a Best Supporting Actress win for Roberts at the Golden Globes — she was nominated in the same category for that year’s Oscars — as well as a Best Supporting Actress Globe nomination for Field.

The pair were among the dozen films Parton appeared in over her career, a list that includes her 1980 break-out role in 9 to 5, as well as appearances in 1984’s Rhinestone with Sylvester Stallone and the 1992 talk radio comedy Straight Talk.

BMG said on Friday (Aug. 28) that its revenue for the first six months of the year rose 5% to 444 million euros ($518.7 million) due to growth in recorded music streaming subscriptions.

The German-owned music company said its earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) rose 4% to 127 million euros ($148.4 million), for a 29% EBITDA margin. Adjusted operating EBITDA also hit 127 million euros, having risen 42% since 2023, the company said.

BMG acquired some 14 publishing and recorded music assets in the first six months of the year, making this its biggest investment in music rights during the company’s history. BMG, which in April announced plans to acquire Concord in a deal that includes $1.16 billion in cash, said it has invested $1.8 billion in music rights catalogs since 2021 through parent company Bertelsmann’s Boost program.

“Our first-half results reflect the strength of the business we have built over the past several years,” BMG CEO Thomas Coesfeld said in a statement. “We have become a more focused, more profitable, digital-first business — one that is better able to invest in artists, songwriters, and music rights for the long term. Sustained organic growth, record profitability, and our highest-ever first half investment in music rights give us a strong foundation for the opportunities ahead.”

Acquisitions this year included rights from Jelly Roll, Fuji Music Group (which includes works associated with John Lee Hooker, Hal David, and Chess Records), Snap! co-founder Luca Anzilotti and Jet. 

Coesfeld said BMG is using artificial intelligence “at scale across BMG to better serve our clients and rights-holders by connecting music with the right audiences, deepening fan engagement, driving revenue opportunities, and improving productivity.”

BMG uses AI and data to sharpen its marketing, fan-focused strategies and to better monetize its catalog by identifying the best audiences to target. AI is also used to create and deliver “Motion Art for Apple Music.”

Across its recorded music, publishing and catalog, BMG represents more than three million songs and recordings including Tina Turner, Jason Aldean, Jelly Roll and Paul Simon. For the first six months of the year, catalog performance was led by “Blue” by young kai, “What Is Love” by Haddaway, and “Lost On You” by LP.

BMG reiterated that its acquisition of Concord is on track pending regulatory approval. The ultimate combined company would be 67% owned by Bertelsmann, BMG’s parent company, and 33% owned by affiliates of Great Mountain Partners, a private markets investment firm that has long invested in Concord through a fund that manages money from Michigan Retirement Systems and Great Mountain’s management team

“Together with Concord, we will have greater scale, broader capabilities, and increased capacity to invest in artists and songwriters, strengthen the support we provide creators and partners and create greater long-term value from music rights,” Coesfeld said.

Billboard used an average six-month U.S. dollar to Euro conversion rate of 1.1682224299.

Debut albums, they don’t just fall from trees. With tattoos used to come off in the pool, Jem Cassar-Daley took time to find her voice, and the confidence that comes with life lived, experience. Maturity.

Tattoos (via Sony Music Australia) is the proud Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung singer-songwriter’s long-awaited first full-length album. Cassar-Daley might be branded a newcomer, but that’s not the full picture. She’s already a multiple award-winner, with a growing, national fanbase, and several songs that are part of Australia’s rich cultural tapestry.  

Earlier this year, she won two categories at the 2026 Queensland Music Awards for “Kiss Me Like You’re Leaving,” including song of the year. With that honor, she secured a piece of real estate on Brisbane’s Brunswick Street Mall, with a plaque on the Valley’s Walk of Fame. She already has one, for having scooped song of the year in 2024 with “King of Disappointment.” Her treasure chest includes AIR and National Indigenous Music Awards.

Under its skin, tattoos is a tale of growth, the bumpy path into adulthood, and relationships that come and go.  A song, she explains, can be like a tattoo. “A few years ago I don’t think I had the confidence to tell a producer how I felt and what I wanted,” she tells Billboard. “But now I’m so invested in each of these songs and each story, and I had a say in every decision made. I feel totally connected to this album.”

The new effort arrived today (Aug. 28) and houses previous releases “Clichés,” “Speak Now,” “Cool Girl,” and her most recent single “All I’m Thinking About,” all of them wrapped in personal, relatable stories, and baked with indie-pop seasoning. Plus a dash of country.

The majority of tattoo’s nine songs were lifted from their original demos. Sometimes you can’t beat the originals. “Behind all the production, at the end of the day each song is just a story in different outfits,” she explains. “Whether there’s an 808 on the track or it’s totally stripped back, it all starts on either piano or guitar. The common thread through it all is stories I’ve connected and resonated with and then brought to life.”

Cassar-Daley is a chip off the old block. Like her dad, Troy Cassar-Daley, a national treasure, she writes from the heart, plays multiple instruments and comes alive on the stage.  

Next week, she will support the new record with appearances at BIGSOUND 2026, a warmup for her national headline tour this September, stopping in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. Cassar-Daley has already sold-out headlining tours in 2023, 2024 and 2025, and performed to the music industry at the U.K.’s The Great Escape in 2023, and SXSW Sydney in the same year. She’s currently opening for Vera Blue on the fellow Aussie artist’s Modern Rituals National Tour.

“I feel totally connected to this album,” Cassar-Daley enthuses. “That was really important leading into a debut album, knowing that this is going to be a body of work that is me. If I reflect in 15, 20 years’ time, I’ll just know that that was from this time of my life. And I had total control over it.” 

Stream tattoos used to come off in the pool in full below.

Though he was a world-renowned heavy metal icon and rock god, Ozzy Osbourne was also a man of the people. Yes, he lived in a lavish mansion and reaped riches during his life, but Ozzy never forgot his hardscrabble, working-class roots and maintained a cheeky, self-deprecating sense of humor until his death at age 76 in July 2025.

So it makes sense that in a new interview with E! News, son Jack Osbourne promised that the in-the-works Ozzy biopic will preserve his dad’s straight-shooting demeanor. “I have this mantra, and I always say it, when in meetings with my mom or doing anything with the family business. It’s, ‘give the fans what they want,’” said Jack. “That’s our people, that’s who we’re catering for, that’s what my dad wrote music for, that’s what he toured for, it’s why we did the shows we did. It’s been a big theme.”

In an effort to provide that fan service, Jack said his feeling about the film is, “‘We gotta give the fans what they want’ … we can’t make this artsy, kind of esoteric biopic. No, we’re not doing that.”

Osbourne revealed that the script for the film being developed by Sony Pictures and Polygram Entertainment in conjunction with the family is already finished and that the call is out for directors now for the project that has not yet announced a shooting schedule or potential release date. The good news is that the family already has someone in mind for the title role, but it’s too early to reveal who that is. “I’m not allowed to say, but conversations have been had, and if it all works out, it’s gonna be awesome,” Jack said.

Back in 2021, Sharon Osbourne, Ozzy’s widow and longtime manager, said that a movie chronicling her 45-year love affair was in the works with Sony Pictures and Polygram Entertainment, with Oscar-nominee Lee Hall (Rocketman) on board to write the script. “Our relationship at times was often wild, insane and dangerous but it was our undying love that kept us together,” Sharon Osbourne told the magazine at the time.

Get ready to celebrate Beyoncé‘s B’Day all over again. The singer unveiled the expansive tracklist for the upcoming 20th anniversary reissue of her sophomore solo album, which will balloon to 27 tracks and include B-sides, Spanish-language versions of her songs and a 60-page commemorative booklet.

The deluxe editions will come in two vinyl formats, as well as a CD package, with the deluxe, 4LP version pressed on 180G bayou blue vinyl and featuring the recent one-off single “Morning Dew (Donk),” as well as an extended mix version of “Get Me Bodied,” a Spanish-language “Irreplaceable” titled “Irreemplazable,” as well as “Amor Gitano,” “Listen (Oye),” “Beautiful Liar (Bello Embustero)” and “Get Me Bodied (Mueve el Cuerpo).”

In addition, the $149.98 package will include a 60-page commemorative booklet and two collectible prints. A limited-edition 180G 2LP version featuring “Morning Dew (Donk)” and a 16-page collectible booklet with never-before-seen snaps is also available for $44.98 and a limited-edition CD with “Morning Dew” and the 16-page booklet will run you $14.98; check out the details here for the sets slated to ship on Sept. 4.

The original, Grammy-winning 13-track B’Day was released in September 2006 and debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and featured songs co-produced by the singer and producers including Ne-Yo, the Neptunes, Stargate, Swizz Beatz, Darkchild, Nellee Hooper. It spawned the Billboard Hot 100 No. 4 Jay-Z-featuring hit “Déjà Vu,” the No. 11-charting “Ring the Alarm” and No. 3 hit “Beautiful Liar.”

B’Day has already had a number of versions, including an expanded, two-disc deluxe reissue that was released less than eight months after the original dropped, including a duet with Shakira on “Beautiful Liar,” as well as a duet with Alejandro Fernandez on “Amor Gitano,” along with the Spanish-language takes on “Listen,” “Irreplaceable” and “Beautiful Liar.” That deluxe take was accompanied by the B’Day Anthology Video Album, which contained 13 videos directed by such lauded music video mavens as Jake Nava, Sophie Muller, Diane Martel, Melina Matsoukas, Anthony Mandler and Bey herself.

Earlier this month, Bey surprise-released the four-song “Morning Dew (Donk) Remix Pack,” featuring new bars from husband Jay-Z, as well as an acoustic version and a remix also featuring Jay.

Check out the announcement of the 20th anniversary edition and the deluxe edition tracklist below.

B’Day 20th anniversary deluxe edition tracklist:

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Ms. Rachel and Mr. Aron are seeing rainbows in a brand new light these days.

For Rachel and Aron Accurso, the married co-creators behind the global children’s phenomenon Ms. Rachel, the colorful subject of their new single “I Love a Rainbow” became an opportunity to go bigger, musically and visually. The playful bossa nova track is the first preview of their debut album, I’m So Happy, due Sept. 25, and its new music video — premiering exclusively on Billboard — finds the pair surrounded by Colorado mountains, polychromatic scarves, chalk-covered sidewalks and plenty of play.

But let’s not mistake all of that joy for simplicity.

The music video features an extended version of “I Love a Rainbow,” complete with a new bridge, a sweeping string section and additional live musicians. For the Accursos, expanding a song already familiar to Ms. Rachel families meant finding a way to make its world feel even bigger.

“We wanted to expand it,” Aron tells Billboard. “We wrote a new bridge and we added a big string section and more live musicians, which feels expansive.”

So, too, did filming among the Colorado mountains. But at its heart, Rachel says, the video is about “joy and connection and play.”

That philosophy sculpted the day the pair spent filming with 11 children from Colorado families. The couple took a lovely approach in having the children involved in the creative process. They didn’t direct the kids through predetermined actions, and instead allowed them to feel immersed in the music.

“They knew the song, and [we were] like, ‘What do you imagine? What do you think would be good for this next part?” Rachel says. “Just creating it with the kids and making sure they had a really special day.”

The resulting video captures children dancing with rainbow scarves and helping create a giant chalk rainbow, with those outdoor scenes interwoven with footage of musicians performing the song in New York City. For Rachel, a former music educator, putting the instruments onscreen was part of the point.

“When they hear that riff, if they see Aron’s playing it on piano or they see [someone] playing the percussion, I think it’s cool to think, ‘Maybe I could play that,’” she says. “Maybe they get an interest in guitar from seeing the instruments.”

Aron proudly directed the video himself, continuing the hands-on approach that has defined the couple’s work since the early days of their YouTube channel.

“It goes back to just us, the way we started the channel, and that it was very homegrown and creator-led,” he says.

There may have been another influence in those superb mountain shots too: The couple’s 1-year-old daughter has recently been enjoying “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music, and Aron admits the classic musical was “definitely” on his mind while the team was developing the video.

“There are little hints of The Sound of Music [in the video]: the mountain vibes, and the singing around,” he says.

The visual ambition of “I Love a Rainbow” mirrors the strategy behind I’m So Happy as a whole. The 23-track collection transforms the songs that were first introduced on Ms. Rachel into more lively studio recordings. The album features original songs and children’s classics, with lush orchestration, new arrangements and contributions from 19 vocalists and 42 instrumentalists.

For Aron, who has a background in musical theater as a composer, conductor and Broadway music director, each song required its own approach.

“It was looking at each song individually and just imagining, ‘What is the most special version of that song?’” he says. “So it was unique to each one.”

Some songs called for restraint. “Walking to the Zoo,” for example, uses a smaller ensemble, while tracks including “Caterpillar” felt capable of supporting a full orchestra.

Meanwhile, “I Love a Rainbow” seemed to call out for strings. “I thought the string section would really add to the experience and the expansiveness of the idea,” Aron says.

Rachel has her own shorthand for her husband’s musical instincts: Aron owns a shirt that reads, “I hear things.”

And, she says, “I feel like he hears things that I don’t.”

That attention to detail is central to how the couple thinks about children’s music. Rachel, who holds a master’s degree in early childhood education and music education, says children shouldn’t be treated as though they need less sophisticated art.

“Children deserve detailed, rich music,” she says. “Not just deserve, but that they do enjoy it.”

That same care extended to I’m So Happy, as the Accursos worked with engineers, live musicians and other Broadway-trained collaborators to expand the songs beyond the versions created for the show, where deadlines often require the couple to move quickly from one episode to the next.

“With the album, we were able to do more of the details or go back and do some of the things that maybe I would have liked to have done the first time around,” Aron says. “It was just a desire to dig in more with more detailed arrangements, more professional engineers, live musicians.”

The duo wants listeners to understand that children’s music doesn’t require less craft than music made for any other audience.

“I think maybe the misconception is that it is somehow dumbed down or less effortful,” Rachel says. “Children really deserve that detailed music.”

Aron adds that the pair treated I’m So Happy “with as much care as if it were a Broadway cast album.”

That care — and the emotional weight children can find in music — perhaps comes through most clearly in “Caterpillar,” a song with a personal history for the couple.

Aron wrote the track while putting their now-7-year-old son to bed during a period when he was struggling with a speech delay. Their son didn’t begin speaking until he was 2 years and 9 months old, Rachel recalls, and the family watched as he worked to communicate.

“Aron wrote this beautiful song about a caterpillar that’s struggling but keeps going,” she says.

The song can still provoke an unexpectedly strong reaction from some of its youngest listeners.

“Babies have this phenomenon where they cry at it,” Rachel says, explaining that even children too young to fully understand the lyrics seem to respond to its emotion with a sorrowful pout.

“The kids feel deeply and they respond to music, even if they don’t understand the lyrics necessarily,” she says. “They feel what went into it.”

For Rachel and Aron, that’s fundamentally the point of I’m So Happy: Children are listening more closely — and feeling more deeply — than adults may sometimes realize.

“Kids are smarter and deeper and more amazing than we give them credit for sometimes,” Rachel says.

And with I’m So Happy, Ms. Rachel and Mr. Aron are making sure the music meets them there.

“I Love a Rainbow” is out now, while I’m So Happy arrives Sept. 25 via Magic Star, the children’s and family division of Sony Music Entertainment’s The Orchard.