OK Go interviews each other about their first Grammy nomination for best music video for “Love” since their win in 2006 for their viral video “Here It Goes Again,” how they feel about using AI in their music videos and more.
Damian Kulash Hey, Billboard, we’re OK Go and we are about to interview each other. Let’s see how this goes.
Tom Nordwind Okay. Damien, friend of mine, since we were 11 years old, let’s take a walk down memory lane. We’ve won our first Grammy for here it goes again. It’s a milestone for us. What do you remember most about that time in our lives? Where were we at?
Damian Kulash I remember we were ending an album cycle. Yes, we thought we were about to go write and record our next album. We were playing at a festival in Moscow. When it when it when it went online, we thought like maybe 50 of our fans were going to download it that day and pass it to some other fans, and that would kind of be it. The next week, the album was back to the top of the charts again, and we started touring all over again. It was a whole another 18 month album cycle.
Tom Nordwind I remember we were supposed to go home to Los Angeles after the festival in Moscow, we got redirected to New York, and then we didn’t go home for another year and a half.
Damian Kulash Yeah, it was intense. It was exciting. It really was like, it felt like the kind of anything can happen. Moment, you know, like one one weird thing connects, and all of a sudden your life is different.
Tom Nordwind Yeah, I remember also thinking, it’s pretty cool that that video, which is just like us, kind of doing what we do as friends normally dance on treadmills. Dance on treadmills, you know, but just make fun things together, like, resonated, yeah.
Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) has a new home after signing with Gamma., according to Rolling Stone. The rapper’s Bully album was rumored to arrive on Friday (Jan. 30), but the LP has seemingly been delayed, with a new release date set for March 20, according to RS.
Kanye has a relationship with Gamma. co-founder Larry Jackson, dating back to his time at Apple, so a partnership with the independent record label isn’t far-fetched. Yeezy joins a stacked roster that includes Mariah Carey, Sexyy Red and Usher.
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Previous editions and intentional leaks of Bully, which will be Ye’s 12th studio album, have surfaced throughout the last year. In March, Ye released a visual helmed by Hype Williams for Bully, starring his son, Saint West.
The Chicago native took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal on Monday (Jan. 26), in which he apologized to the Jewish and Black communities for his erratic behavior in the past. He pointed to an untreated brain injury suffered in a 2002 car accident, which he said led to his bipolar disorder diagnosis.
“Twenty-five years ago, I was in a car accident that broke my jaw and caused injury to the right frontal lobe of my brain,” he wrote. “At the time, the focus was on the visible damage — the fracture, the swelling and the immediate physical trauma. The deeper injury, the one inside my skull, went unnoticed.”
Ye continued: “I said and did things I deeply regret. Some of the people I love the most, I treated the worst. You endured fear, confusion, humiliation and the exhaustion of trying to love someone who was, at times, unrecognizable. Looking back, I became detached from my true self.”
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West apologized for his use of the swastika and emphatically stated that he loves Jewish people and is “not a Nazi.”
“In that fractured state, I gravitated toward the most destructive symbol I could find, the swastika, and even sold T-shirts bearing it,” he wrote. “One of the difficult aspects of having bipolar type-1 are the disconnected moments — many of which I still cannot recall — that led to poor judgment and reckless behavior that oftentimes feels like an out-of-body-experience. I regret and am deeply mortified by my actions in that state, and am committed to accountability, treatment and meaningful change. It does not excuse what I did, though. I am not a Nazi or an antisemite. I love Jewish people.”
Ye added he has continued to work on himself as he discovers a “newfound clarity” and says he hopes to earn fans’ forgiveness moving forward, noting a new regimen of medication mixed with therapy and exercise to help him make strides in his battle. He closed with an ask — not for sympathy, but for patience.
The rapper had been signed to Def Jam/UMG until 2022, when the label dropped him — along with companies like Gap, Adidas and Balenciaga — after he made a series of antisemitic remarks.
Looking to turn to a new chapter of his decorated yet turbulent career, Ye will return to the stage in Mexico City this weekend for a pair of shows on Friday (Jan. 30) and Saturday (Jan. 31).
On the music side, Ye’s last solo album, Donda, came out in 2021, when it topped the Billboard 200. He released a sequel, Donda 2, the following year, but the project was only available on the Stem Player. Ye subsequently teamed with Ty Dolla $ign for a pair of VULTURES projects, the first of which went No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in February 2024.
Billboard has reached out to reps for Ye and Gamma. for comment.
Universal Music Group (UMG) has filed another sweeping copyright lawsuit against artificial intelligence firm Anthropic, this time potentially seeking more than $3 billion in damages by focusing on accusations that the Claude creator used “pirate libraries” of music to build its models.
Six months after a judge ruled in a separate case that AI companies could face huge damages for training models on illegally-acquired datasets, UMG says in a Wednesday (Jan. 28) lawsuit that that’s exactly what Anthropic did to teach Claude to spit out new song lyrics.
The new case, which comes as UMG and other majors have begun striking huge settlements with other AI firms, claims that Anthropic’s “multibillion-dollar business empire” was “built on piracy.”
“Publishers recognize the great potential of ethical AI as a powerful tool for the future,” write lawyers for UMG and numerous other publishers in the lawsuit, obtained by Billboard. “However, it remains crucial that AI technology be developed and employed ethically and responsibly, in a manner that protects the rights of publishers and songwriters, their livelihoods, and the creative ecosystem as a whole. Doing so will ensure that AI enhances — rather than imperils — human creativity.”
The lawsuit claims Anthropic illegally acquired sheet music to “hundreds or thousands” of songs owned UMG and the other publishers, including iconic tunes like The Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses,” Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline,” Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets,” Creedance Clearwater Revival’s “Have You Ever Seen The Rain,” Maroon Five’s “She Will Be Loved,” and Katy Perry’s “California Gurls.”
The new case adds to an earlier lawsuit filed against Anthropic in 2023 by UMG, Concord Music Group, ABKCO and a slew of other music publishers, claiming the AI firm was violating copyrights en masse by using songs without authorization to teach its Claude models how to create new lyrics. Like other AI companies facing a flood of such litigation over the past three years, Anthropic strongly denies those allegations, arguing that the training is instead a so-called “fair use” of copyrighted materials.
In a ruling last year in a separate case filed against Anthropic by book authors, a federal judge ruled that AI training itself is covered by fair use — a major legal win for the AI industry. But the ruling came with a huge catch: the judge ruled that tech companies must legally acquire the training materials in the first place and would likely be on the hook for enormous infringement damages if they didn’t.
In the wake of that ruling, UMG and the music publishers moved to update their lawsuit with new allegations that Anthropic had relied on millions of books containing sheet music it illegally downloaded from file-sharing sites. But that bid to amend the case was denied by the judge as procedurally improper.
The result of that decision is Wednesday’s new lawsuit, in which UMG and the other publishers expressly cite that procedural backstory and say they were forced to file a new case that is “distinct and separate” to attack Anthropic’s alleged piracy.
“Publishers recently discovered that defendants downloaded by torrenting an enormous number of unauthorized copies of publishers’ works from illegal shadow libraries to avoid paying for those works,” the publishers write. “To the extent defendants now try to absolve themselves of liability for this blatant theft by claiming that Anthropic later used some subset of these stolen works for AI training, any such claimed use is irrelevant.”
A spokesperson for Anthropic did not immediately return a request for comment on Wednesday.
In a statement to Billboard, the music companies said they were forced to file the second case because of Anthropic’s “persistent and brazen infringement” in using illegally acquired works: “In total, we are suing for infringement of more than 20,000 songs, with potential statutory damages of more than $3 billion. We believe this will be one of the largest (if not the single-largest) non-class action copyright cases filed in the U.S.”
Chase B is set to open the first night of THE STAGE at SXSW in Austin, TX on Friday, March 13 as part of a new partnership between Billboard and Intuit TurboTax. The Houston native first took to the decks, learning to DJ as a student at Howard University. Since then, his talents caught the attention of Travis Scott who signed him to his label, Cactus Jack.
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA – SEPTEMBER 23: DJ Chase B performs with Travis Scott onstage during the 2023 iHeartRadio Music Festival at T-Mobile Arena on September 23, 2023 in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)
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As part of the partnership, Chase B will give a taste of what to expect at SXSW when he takes over Club Billboard, a livestreamed DJ set presented by Intuit TurboTax. You can see him spin some of his favorite tracks on YouTube and Billboard.com, live from Billboard’s Los Angeles office on February 2nd. Fans will see why Chase has served as tour DJ for labelmates like Travis Scott, Sheck Wes, and this year’s The STAGE headliner, Don Toliver. He’s sure to weave in some of his collaborations with artists like Scott, Toliver, Young Thug, Gunna and Quavo.
Billboard will then sit down with Chase to take a look back at where he started and reflect on all of the hard work it took for him to reach this moment. From his earliest gigs to the biggest stages he’s played, there have been many challenges he’s faced. This includes adapting his tax filing system to meet the needs of a multi-hyphenate in the music industry. Every step of the way, Intuit TurboTax offers a product to meet those tax needs. Chase will break down the biggest differences in his life from his earliest days in music to contributing to Billboard 200 chart-topping albums and where he hopes to see his career go from here.
The partnership between Billboard and Intuit TurboTax will reach its peak when Chase B gets the crowd hyped at THE STAGE at SXSW when this year’s concert series kicks off on Friday, March 13. The evening, presented by Intuit TurboTax, will be headlined by Chase’s labelmate, Don Toliver. You can get tickets to see Chase B and Don Toliver at the Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park here or stream it live on Billboard.com.
You know you’ve made it when you’re a clue on Jeopardy! — and that’s especially true for Pusha T, who shared a sweet message on Tuesday (Jan. 27) about growing up watching the classic game show with his late grandma.
On Tuesday’s Tournament of Champions episode, a clue about Clipse — Pusha’s rap duo with brother Malice — came up in the category “It Happened in 2025.”
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“In 2025, Clipse gave the first-ever rap performance in this city-state during the ‘Grace for the World’ concert,” host Ken Jennings read, with two wrong answers (Monaco and San Marino) came before Scott answered correctly. “What is the Vatican?” “Even less rapping the Vatican,” Jennings quipped.
Pusha celebrated the mention by sharing a message to his Jeopardy!-watching late grandmother.
“Hey Shank (my grandmother in heaven) we made it!!!” he wrote on Instagram alongside the Jeopardy! clip. “Watching @jeopardy was what we would do every night…I was too young to know the answers but turning the tv wasn’t an option. I caught on quick and it became ‘our’ thing…look at your grandsons.
“Hope you were watching and playing along tonight,” he sweetly capped the message.
To add to the sentimentality of the moment, when the Thornton brothers took part in the Grace for the World concert at the Vatican back in September, they gave a poignant performance of the Let God Sort Em Out album opener “The Birds Don’t Sing,” which is an emotional tribute to their late parents.
“I’ve been here for a long time with hip-hop, and I remember it not being seen as an art, and it not being televised,” Pusha said in an interview with VIBE. ” … Now being at the Vatican — we do this so everyone can see how far it can go.”
Clipse are up for five awards at Sunday’s 2026 Grammy Awards, including album of the year for their acclaimed 2025 project Let God Sort Em Out, and they’ll also perform with Pharrell at the show. As the Billboard staff rolls out our list of the Greatest Pop Stars of 2025, we just named Clipse the Comeback of the Year for their valiant return with the Billboard 200 top five album.
Watch the Jeopardy! moment and see Pusha’s sweet message below.
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In the tracking week ending Jan. 22, Locket earned 43,000 equivalent album units (Beer’s best week by units earned) in the United States according to Luminate. Of that sum, album sales comprise 24,000 (her biggest sales week ever) with 15,000 of that in vinyl purchases (her best week on vinyl); streaming-equivalent album units comprise 18,000 (equaling 18.89 million on-demand official streams of the set’s tracks — her best streaming week ever); and track-equivalent album units comprise a negligible sum.
Locket is among the six albums that either debut or reenter the top 10 of the Top Album Sales chart, where ENHYPEN notches its fourth No. 1 with the arrival of THE SIN : VANISH. Bad Bunny’s former No. 1 DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS reenters at No. 2 after a new Amazon-exclusive vinyl variant was released, A$AP Rocky’s Don’t Be Dumb debuts at No. 3 and Stray Kids’ chart-topping DO IT falls 2-5. DxS’ DxS 1 st Mini Album ‘Serenade’ starts at No. 6, the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack slips 6-7, Olivia Dean’s The Art of Loving falls 5-8, The Protomen’s Act III: This City Made Us launches at No. 9 and KATSEYE’s Beautiful Chaos is a non-mover at No. 10.
