From career milestones to new music releases to major announcements and those little important moments, Billboard editors highlight uplifting moments in Latin music. Here’s what happened in the Latin music world this week.

Maestro Cares Names J Balvin Honoree at 12th Annual Gala

Maestro Cares Foundation will honor Colombian superstar J Balvin at its 12th Annual “Changing Lives, Building Dreams” Gala on Nov. 5 at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. He will be recognized for his philanthropic impact and receive the Trailblazer of Cultural Empowerment Award for his contributions to Latin culture and mental health advocacy.

“We are thrilled to honor J Balvin, a true trailblazer whose artistic and philanthropic leadership inspires positive change in communities worldwide,” said Henry Cárdenas, co-founder of Maestro CaresFoundation, in a press release. “He truly reflects our commitment to transforming lives through opportunity and hope.” Additional honorees will be announced soon.

Karol G Surprises Fans at Immersive Spotify Event in Times Square

Karol G and Spotify teamed up on Monday (July 21) to celebrate her new album, Tropicoqueta, with a special immersive event at Paradise Club in Times Square, New York. The Colombian powerhouse surprised over 200 fans with her appearance for an evening that “fused music, culture, and the bold energy of Karol’s new era,” says the press release.

Ricardo Arjona Sells Out Residency in Guatemala

Ricardo Arjona achieves a big milestone, selling out all 15 dates of his residency, Lo Que El Seco No Dijo, in his native Guatemala in less than two hours. The shows will run from Oct. 31 to Nov. 23 at the Teatro Nacional Miguel Ángel Asturias and will coincide with the release of an upcoming album, following his latest LP, SECO, released earlier this year.

In addition to his record-breaking residency, Arjona has announced a one-night-only concert at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Feb. 11, 2026. This special performance marks his return to one of the world’s most iconic stages.

Ana Mena, First Latin Act to Perform in Japanese Festival, A-Nation

Ana Mena is set to make history as the first female Latin artist to perform the A-Nation Festival in Tokyo, Japan, on Aug. 30. The event, held at the Ajinomoto Stadium, will welcome a sold-out crowd of 60,000 attendees. This groundbreaking moment marks a big moment for Latin music in Asia and underscores the Spanish singer’s growing global influence.

The festival lineup will be officially announced on Tuesday at 5 p.m. JST (10 a.m. in Spain, 5 a.m. in Miami). As part of this historic occasion, Ana Mena’s team will document her journey in Japan with a filmmaker and photographer, capturing the essence of this pivotal moment.

Yahritza y Su Esencia Surprises a Fan

Yahritza y Su Esencia created a heartwarming moment by surprising one of their biggest fans, Dalia, during a special meeting. “I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time. I’m going to meet one of my biggest fans,” the lead singer shared on TikTok ahead of the encounter. Dalia, who has cerebral palsy, also seemed eagerly waiting for this day.

During the visit, the group performed their song “Frágil,” originally recorded with Grupo Frontera, for Dalia and her family. Reflecting on the day, Yahritza wrote in the caption, “One of the best days of my life. We were delighted to meet Dania and her family.” The touching gesture underscores Yahritza y Su Esencia’s deep connection with their fans and their ability to bring joy through their music.

Alanis Morissette Invites Laura Pausini On Stage

During her European tour, Alanis Morissette invited Italian superstar Laura Pausini on stage during her European tour stop in Rome, Italy, at the Cavea Auditorium on July 24. The special collaboration was filled with emotion and mutual admiration, as Pausini expressed on Instagram: “This work is full of unexpected emotions, like being on a roller coaster. It has ups and downs, and the high moments are unforgettable, especially because they come from artists and friends that I respect and love. Like you, Alanis.” Fans were treated to a memorable evening that showcased the power of connection between two iconic voices.

While the S&P 500 reached a new record close every day this week, music stocks had more middling performances and K-pop companies extended their losses. 

HYBE, home to BTS, fell 4.3% this week as the company faces problems on multiple fronts ahead of its Aug. 6 earnings call. According to reports out of South Korea, HYBE’s headquarters in Seoul were raided on Thursday (July 24) as part of the government’s ongoing investigation into alleged stock fraud by the company’s founder and chairman, Bang Si-hyuk. On Tuesday, three HYBE employees were convicted of insider trading and given jail time. 

Things were looking up for HYBE just last month. In early June, HYBE shares rose on news that six of seven BTS members had finished their military duty, marking a step in the group’s long-awaited return. But after reaching a high mark for 2025 of 316,000 KRW ($228.54) on June 24, HYBE shares have fallen 18.8%.  

K-pop stocks are in the midst of a summer slump. SM Entertainment dropped 4.6% this week and has fallen 11.6% over the last five weeks. YG Entertainment is down 12.7% over the last four weeks after slipping 2.1% this week. JYP Entertainment sank 6.1% this week, but its loss over the last six weeks is a more modest 7.2%. Despite the recent downturns, the four K-pop companies have had a strong 2025, posting an average year-to-date gain of 45.0%. 

The 20-company Billboard Global Music Index (BGMI) rose 0.2% to 2,988.97 for the week ended Friday (July 25), bringing its year-to-date gain to 40.7%. Only seven stocks finished the week in positive territory, while 11 stocks were in the red and 2 stocks were unchanged. Believe, which is implementing a mandatory squeeze-out to obtain the remaining 1.27% of outstanding shares that weren’t acquired during a tender offer, finished the week unchanged. Its shares ceased trading on Monday, and Believe will not publish its mid-year results. 

Led by Spotify on Tuesday (July 29), a number of music companies report earnings next week. Although Spotify’s share price has been in a slump, some analysts have upped their price targets ahead of the company’s quarterly earnings announcement. This week, Deutsche Bank upped its price target to $775 from $700 and maintained its “buy” rating. Oppenheimer raised its Spotify price target to $800 and upgraded the stock to “outperform” from “market perform.” 

Shares for Deezer, which reports on Wednesday (July 30), were up 5.8% to 1.27 euros ($1.49). Universal Music Group, which releases earnings on Thursday (July 31), rose 3.2% to 27.85 euros ($32.72). SiriusXM, which gained 0.1% to $23.58, also reports on Thursday. 

Meanwhile, Live Nation is slated to report earnings on Aug. 6. The concert promoter’s share price increased 1.6% to $152.98 this week, marking its highest closing price since Feb. 24. 

Netease Cloud Music, which had been on a hot streak over the previous eight weeks, was the biggest loser of the week after dropping 11.0% to 269.00 HKD ($34.27). Sphere Entertainment Co. also had a large decline, falling 5.6% to $43.59 as numerous reports this week highlighted a decline in tourist visits to Las Vegas. 

Justin Bieber‘s new album, Swag, is dominating the Billboard charts in Canada.

On the Billboard Canadian Albums chart, Swag debuts at No. 1 — knocking Morgan Wallen’s I’m The Problem down to No. 2, after it spent eight weeks at the top. Swag marks Bieber’s first full-length project since Justice in 2021, which also peaked at No. 1 on the Canadian Albums chart and notched five weeks in the top spot.

The second project from rapper Travis Scott‘s label showcase Jackboys, dubbed Jackboys 2, is at No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard 200 albums chart, but debuts at No. 2 in Canada behind Bieber.

Bieber’s surprise album, released July 11, also grabs 17 spots on the Billboard Canadian Hot 100, dated July 26, in its first week. Of the 21-song album, two tracks cracked the top 10 on the Canadian Hot 100: “Daisies” at No. 2 and “Yukon” at No. 8. In his home country, Bieber boasts 38 top 10 career hits — most recently “Stay” with The Kid LAROI, which spent 12 weeks at the top in 2021.

While Swag leans into Bieber’s pop and R&B roots, the project prioritizes experimental production and instrumentation. While he worked with longtime collaborator Harv, Swag includes influences from songwriters and producers Carter Lang, Dijon, mk.gee and Eddie Benjamin — to name a few. Canadian R&B star Daniel Caesar, who was featured on Bieber’s 2021 No. 1 hit “Peaches,” is credited as a writer and producer on “Devotion,” which debuts at No. 50 on the chart.

Though he said he was coming for No. 1, Drake‘s “What Did I Miss?” moves down from No. 2 to No. 7, while “Nokia” sits at No. 39. Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” remains at No. 1 for its 15th week.

Read more on the Canadian charts here. 

SOCAN Sues Festival d’été de Québec (FEQ) Over Licensing Fees: Report

Festival d’été de Québec (FEQ) is being sued by the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) for copyright infringement and failure to pay royalties for approximately three years.

SOCAN, which is responsible for granting licences and collecting royalties on licensed music in Canada, claims in the lawsuit filed in federal court that since at least July 2022, the festival’s organizers “have failed to obtain a license from SOCAN and have not paid any royalties or submitted any report forms to SOCAN.”

The court claim for copyright infringement, which was filed July 3 (the same day the festival began), cites The Festival international d’été de Québec Inc. and BLEUFEU as defendants in the case.

“Bleufeu and Festival d’été de Québec operate FEQ, one of Canada’s largest music festivals, drawing a total attendance of 1.4 million over 11 days and generating tens of millions in revenue each year,” SOCAN writes in a statement on their website. “While Festival d’été de Québec is a registered charity, the performances it presents are virtually indistinguishable from those of its for-profit competitors, and Canadian law still requires it to pay licensing fees for those performances.”

On Saturday (July 12), FEQ released a statement to Canadian Press that “fair remuneration, in accordance with the highest industry standards,” is one of the festival’s core values.

The organizers questioned SOCAN’s motives for “filing legal proceedings in the middle of the festival, despite discussions that had been ongoing until very recently” and that “proceeding in English, in the context of a Quebec cultural event, seems inappropriate and disconnected from the reality of the community.” FEQ said it had a different interpretation of the law from SOCAN and that other comparable organizations shared the same interpretation.

On Tuesday (July 22), SOCAN released another statement on its website, “On Fair Compensation for Music Creators from Canadian Festivals.” In it, the organization said the timing was driven by legal constraints, and that the claim had to be filed by July 6 in order to include all performances from the 2022 festival.

The page includes a Q&A about SOCAN license fees, along with how and to whom they are distributed. Festivals are required by the Copyright Board of Canada to pay license fees to SOCAN in the amount of 3% of ticket sales and the equivalent of 3% of the amount paid to performers for free concerts, the organization wrote.

“All entities, regardless of tax status, must pay license fees for commercial live performances in public of musical works. The Copyright Act provides a limited exception in some cases for charitable organizations — but this doesn’t apply when admission is charged or when the performers, technicians, producers, vendors, or others working at the concert are paid.”

Aside from FEQ, SOCAN confirms in the statement that they are also pursuing other proceedings “infringing festival performances.”

One of Canada’s biggest music festivals, FEQ, concluded on Sunday, July 13, after 11 days of programming. This year’s iteration boasted popular artists from across the genre spectrum, including Avril Lavigne, Simple Plan, Shania Twain, Def Leppard, Slayer and Benson Boone. 

Canadian Woman Dies at Weekend 1 of Belgium’s Tomorrowland Music Festival

A Canadian woman has reportedly died after attending the Tomorrowland music festival on Friday (July 18).

The unnamed 35-year-old “became unwell on the festival grounds” at the event’s opening night in Boom, Belgium, a small city outside of Antwerp, according to a statement from Tomorrowland spokeswoman Debby Wilmsen to the Canadian Press.

She “received first aid on site,” and was taken to the University Hospital of Antwerp, where she later died on Saturday morning (July 19).

“This morning, we were saddened to learn of her death. Our thoughts are with her family, friends, and loved ones,” said Wilmsen.

Currently, Belgian authorities are investigating the woman’s death at one of the world’s largest electronic music festivals.

Global Affairs Canada said it is aware of reports that a Canadian woman had died in Belgium, but would not release information due to privacy considerations.

The news comes after Tomorrowland’s main stage was destroyed by fire on July 16, casting doubt on whether the festival would go on. The following day, the festival opened as scheduled with an alternative stage still under construction.

Tomorrowland draws electronic music enthusiasts from all over the world. This year’s event features DJs including David Guetta, Martin Garrix, Eric Prydz, Sofi Tukker, Lost Frequencies and Charlotte de Witte.

Tomorrowland runs across two weekends, July 18-20 and July 25-27, and is expecting about 400,000 attendees this year.

Black Sabbath was scary from the start. The first song on its debut album — both called “Black Sabbath” — opens with the sounds of a rainstorm and church bells, then a wicked guitar riff. Then Ozzy Osbourne howls a question: “What is this that stands before me?” When the album came out, in early 1970, it was, pardon the pun, a hell of a question. Led Zeppelin had released its first album a year before, but Sabbath was darker, sludgier, laden with doom. The band’s psychedelic visions were dark and haunted, as far from the colorful optimism of flower power as its native Birmingham, U.K., was from San Francisco.  

The first four Sabbath albums — the debut, followed by Paranoid, Master of Reality and Vol. 4 — laid out the blueprint for the entire genre of heavy metal. Osbourne’s success with Sabbath would propel him into a successful solo career as a recording artist and a top touring act. What’s harder to figure out — the light mystery at the heart of the Prince of Darkness — is how he became a sitcom dad in The Osbournes, remained popular enough until this summer to headline the “Back to the Beginning” concert in Birmingham on July 5 and loomed large enough as an icon to receive a tequila-poured tribute from Drake that made it into the paper of record. In the end, even the Gray Lady bowed.  

His secret, I suspect, was not taking himself too seriously.  

This might sound bonkers considering just how serious Sabbath sounded — not to mention how genuinely frightening Osbourne seemed in the eighties. As a pre-teen early in that decade, I heard rumors that Osbourne bit the head off a live bat (true, but he thought it was fake), did the same to a dove (apparently true) and sacrificed live chickens onstage during his show (I can find no evidence of this, although he apparently once put a chicken full of antifreeze on a fence to scare away coyotes). This sounded dangerous — but, since parents hated it, possibly also fun.  

Two decades later, he was a befuddled sitcom dad, struggling to figure out how to work the remote control on The Osbournes. He didn’t seem frightening at all — just slightly confused, dedicated to his family, knowing about his flaws, and much more plainly decent than anyone would have suspected. This figure who once menaced parents was a parent himself — one who just happened to have a job as a rock star.  

The reason this worked was that Osbourne was in on the joke. It didn’t always seem that way — mostly because he mumbled. But he knew that the idea that the Prince of Darkness couldn’t housetrain his dogs was comedy gold. And, like few other rock stars, he wasn’t afraid to laugh at himself.  

This might seem like slight praise, but how many aging pop stars, especially in rock, realize that, on some level, they are professional entertainers doing a young person’s job? (They can also be serious artists! This isn’t mutually exclusive.) This also changed with the times. In the ’70s and ’80s, a little mystique went a long way — Led Zeppelin hardly ever appeared on television, and it probably helped. By the end of the nineties, maintaining an image seemed tired — the radical move was to embrace exposure, deflate the myth, offer a view backstage, or at least a limited view of it.  

Osbourne became bigger than ever. The Osbournes boosted Osbourne’s albums and Ozzfest, and he was on the cover of Rolling Stone in May 2002 and then again in July. In 2004, MTV created “Battle for Ozzfest,” a contest to win a spot on the tour — booking as a revenue stream. His wife, Sharon Osbourne, became a celebrity in her own right, the wickedly funny host of a UK talk show, judge on the UK X-Factor and co-host of The Talk. Sometimes, she was the truly scary one, extreme and even vindictive in the defense of her client and husband. Every artist should be so lucky.  

Osbourne slowed down after his 2018 “No More Tours II” concerts — they took place a full quarter decade after his “No More Tours” shows — and his music, at least before his death, didn’t stream in a way that reflected his fame and his appeal as a touring act. He took quite a final bow, however, at “Back to the Beginning,” an all-star metal show that raised £140 million ($188.4 million) for Acorns Children’s Hospice, Birmingham Children’s Hospital and Cure Parkinson’s. It seems like quite a charitable move for a guy who started his career singing about Satan. But the truth is that Osbourne was both more complicated than he appeared — and at the same time not so complicated at all.