Sharon Osbourne has spoken on social media after Ozzy Osbourne‘s death.  

The British TV personality commented on a tribute to her late husband — who died at the age of 76 on Tuesday (July 22) — written by Gavin Rossdale, the lead singer of Bush. His was one of countless messages of grief that flooded social media in the wake of Ozzy’s passing, but it does appear to be the first one Sharon has responded to. 

On Instagram, Rossdale wrote that he’d met the Black Sabbath frontman “just a few times, but he was so warm and kind and funny, and I love that memory.”

“Sending much love to his family at this difficult time,” he added, captioning a photo of himself and Ozzy. “Rest in power.”

In the replies, Sharon — who was also Ozzy’s manager — simply wrote, “Bless you.” 

Her individual comment follows a joint statement from Ozzy’s family announcing his death on Tuesday. “It is with more sadness than mere words can convey that we have to report that our beloved Ozzy Osbourne has passed away this morning,” it read. “He was with his family and surrounded by love. We ask everyone to respect our family privacy at this time.”

In addition to Sharon, the Prince of Darkness is survived by their children Aimee, Kelly and Jack, as well as ex-wife Thelma Riley and their kids, Jessica, Lewis and Eliot. Much of his family was present at Ozzy’s final concert with bandmates Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward, who played their Black Sabbath farewell show in Birmingham, England, just three weeks before their frontman’s death. 

Sharon and Ozzy wed in 1982 after meeting through the former’s father, Don Arden, who was Black Sabbath’s manager. Together, the quirky married duo led one of the first-ever family-centered reality shows, MTV’s The Osbournes, on which they quickly became one of TV’s most lovable couples.

Despite some rough patches in their relationship caused by Ozzy’s struggles with alcohol , infidelity and health issues later on, Sharon and Ozzy stuck by one another for more than four decades despite a brief split in 2016. On their 40th wedding anniversary in 2022, Sharon wrote on Instagram, “We first met when I was 18, over 52 years we have been friends, lovers, husband & wife, grandparents and soulmates. Always at each other’s side. I love you Ozzy.” 

On Wednesday (July 23), Billboard announced the return of the 2025 Billboard Live Music Summit and Awards, taking place Monday, Nov. 3, at 1 Hotel West Hollywood.

Billboard will bring together the live music industry’s biggest names, emerging talent and key innovators for a day of insight and connection, followed by the Billboard Live Music Awards. Both the summit and awards will be programmed by Billboard senior editor Eric Renner Brown.

This year’s event is sponsored by VENU, AEG Presents, Live Nation, Allegiant Stadium, AXS, Moody Center and Tacoma Dome.

Additional information on programming, honorees and ticketing will be shared in the coming weeks. For more information on this year’s Billboard Live Music Summit and Awards, visit BillboardLiveMusicSummit.com.

Last fall, the Billboard Live Music Summit returned after a four-year hiatus, taking over the 1 Hotel in West Hollywood, Calif., on Nov. 15. The day was capped by a Superstar Q&A with Billboard cover star Olivia Rodrigo, who was crowned Touring Artist of the Year for her Guts World Tour, which sold over 1.4 million tickets and brought in $184.6 million – making it one of the biggest pop tours of the decade. In her conversation, she spoke about how she made her second album GUTS with a live show in mind, saying she knew she wanted to deliver rock-inflected songs prime for screaming along to. Because of that, a favorite of hers to perform on the tour has been “All-American Bitch,” which famously includes a mid-song howl that Rodrigo described as “cathartic.”

Other 2024 Billboard Live Music Summit highlights included: Inside the Rise of John Summit, a discussion with the fast-rising DJ and his manager, Holt Harmon; a conversation between Live Nation’s Arthur Fogel and Lady Gaga’s manager Bobby Campbell titled Inside Global Touring Today; and The Power Players conversation with Executive of the Year Louis Messina.

Each summer, a small army of volunteers, residents and music professionals welcomes dozens of world-class artists to Quebec City, Canada, for Festival d’été de Quebec (a.k.a. FEQ), one of the largest and most diverse music festivals in North America. While residents of Quebec’s French-speaking capital city are known for their congenial hospitality and embrace of the dozens of acts that will perform on Plaines de Abraham, residents will admit, when asked by outsiders, that there is one act playing this year’s festival that they appreciate more than all the others.

And that act is the California thrash metal band Slayer.

“Yeah, Quebec is a big heavy metal town,” says Samantha McKinley, communications director for the long-running 11-night music festival. While the annual event has remained relatively unknown in live music circles for years, its impressive attendance figures and love for heavy metal acts like Slayer and Metallica are starting to be noticed by top-tier acts, booking agents and an increasing number of orbiter festivals that book their events based on Festival d’été’s headliners. (“Festival d’été” is French for “Summer Festival.”)

The festival’s strength comes from its ability to regularly draw audiences of 90,000 or more per night for artists like Rod Stewart, Avril Lavigne and Benson Boone, a figure that puts it in the top echelon of North American festivals. Coachella maxes out at about 125,000 people per day and runs for six days total (over two three-day weekends), equaling about 750,000 fans total. Realistically, however, 750,000 individual people don’t descend on Indio, Calif.; rather, the same 125,000 fans attend the festival over three days, each weekend, putting the number closer to 250,000.

But unlike Coachella, where the same fans attend each day of the festival, Quebec’s FEQ has a culture of wristband sharing, explains executive director Nick Racine, who also serves as CEO and president for festival organizer BLEUFEU. He estimates that all 140,000 tickets for the festival are bought in a single day, with some blocks of tickets selling out in seconds.

The vast majority of those tickets — about 125,000 — are sold as GA tickets that retail for $165 CAD ($121 USD), while the rest are more expensive VIP tickets bundled with food & beverage. GA tickets include access to 11 nights of music, including the festival’s main stage featuring Shania Twain, Slayer, Hozier, Kygo, Def Leppard, Boone, Stewart, Lavigne and more. The main stage, called the Bell Stage, sits on a portion of the Plains of Abraham, a historic area within Battlefields Park where British forces defeated the French in 1759. The Bell Stage is just one of multiple stages scattered throughout the city for FEQ; the Quebec Lottery and SiriusXM Canada host the festival’s other two paid stages, accessible only to ticketholders, while a few free stages dot the perimeter of Quebec’s historic district.

Fans are encouraged to share wristbands with friends and loan them out to family members in order to keep the Bell Stage full each night and create huge audiences and memorable moments for the artists that play. The goal is to keep the wristbands in the community and off secondary market sites like StubHub, where speculators often drive up the price of tickets and frustrate fans. In recent years, festival organizers have begun monitoring secondary market sites and even canceling orders if they suspect ticket scalping. Wristband sharing is a kind of compromise that keeps the tickets in the community and pushes the number of people who attend the festival to somewhere between 300,000 to 400,000 individual people each year.

That large of an audience, coupled with the tens of millions of dollars the festival makes from ticket sales and the revenue it generates from sponsorships and government grants, makes FEQ a music industry powerhouse, explains Louis Bellavance, programming director for the festival since 2011. Bellavance tells Billboard that a number of major East Coast and Canadian festivals — from Milwaukee Summerfest to Ottawa Bluesfest — look to book acts that play Quebec, hoping to pick up dates for artists coming and going from the festival. Sometimes the festival will submit joint bids with other major events to book acts  — FEQ’s radius clause only covers the province of Quebec — while other times it will make exclusive bids for artists on its own to create scarcity for the big headliners it brings to Quebec City.

That includes The Rolling Stones in 2015 — a booking that led to a $2 million loss for the year for FEQ, but helped solidify its dominant place in the festival space. When it comes to audience size, ticket sales and economic power, FEQ easily lands within the top 10 when it comes to the largest and most financially successful festivals in North America.

But organizers say its strength goes beyond economics and comes from what fans say is FEQ’s long-term unofficial headliner: Quebec City itself. With its cobblestone streets and picturesque boulevards, architectural beauty, expansive public park system and bustling culinary scene, the city is a popular destination in its own right.

“Where else can you watch Rod Stewart play on a classic battlefield or see a new band perform just meters away from the steps of Parliament?” says Racine. “We’re an urban festival, and the restaurants and the hotels here do a large part of their annual business during the festival. It works because fans love coming to Quebec, they love our presentation and they love the artists we bring each year.”  

Zack Borer and Chayim Newman, who’d been in the music business for years before forming Amber Health, a company of therapists and clinicians, came up with a simple idea: to provide mental health support for struggling crew members on stadium and arena tours — with the headliners paying for it out of their own budgets.

But in 2021, when the pair landed a Zoom meeting with Marty Hom, Olivia Rodrigo’s tour director, Hom shot them down.

“This is never going to work,” Hom told them. “I’m not going to hire you, and nobody else is going to hire you. What you’re going to charge is too expensive.”

Borer and Newman were undeterred. During the pandemic, the two had conducted a survey of 1,100 touring pros and found that 34% suffered from depression, 70% had trouble sleeping, 45% regularly consumed alcohol and 26% reported “serious suicidal ideation.” The result was clear: crews needed therapy on the road. So the clinicians reworked their finances and asked for five minutes with Hom, in person, months later at the headquarters of live event production company Rock Lititz in Pennsylvania. 

After re-pitching Hom, the 40-year industry vet — who has worked with Beyoncé, The Rolling Stones and Barbra Streisand — finally came around. “All right,” he responded. “Now I get it.”

This summer, Rodrigo is one of 16 major artists — including Ed Sheeran, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar and Green Day — who’ve paid Amber Health to supply free mental health benefits to all of their crews. (The company worked on four tours in 2024.)

“I never had anything like that,” Daisy Spencer, a guitarist on Rodrigo’s Guts tour in 2024 and 2025, told Billboard. “I had this free resource of incredible therapists, and I utilized the crap out of that.” 

Borer had decided to become a therapist after years of trying to make it as a New York artist and songwriter, bartending all night while struggling with anxiety and depression. After making the pivot, he hooked up with a colleague, concert producer-turned-clinical psychologist Newman, to form Amber Health in 2020.

At first, Amber Health held traditional sessions with individual clients, focusing on artists and the music industry. Through that, they learned that artists and crew miss their families and friends and are disconnected from their support systems while on the road for months; contend with complicated group dynamics, working at impersonal venues and living on cramped tour buses with not-always-like-minded co-workers; and deal with injuries amid difficult physical work. 

“We started to think about the scale, and how we could make a systemic impact, and help thousands and thousands of people,” Newman says.

In 2021, a forklift crashed into a Green Day photographer at the Philadelphia Phillies’ Citizens Bank Park, breaking his pelvis, femur and back and lacerating an artery, nearly killing him. He recovered, then sued Live Nation, the Phillies and others, settling last year for $18 million. Last August, Green Day returned to the stadium for the first time since the accident, which was “something all of us were dreading,” according to Zito, Green Day’s longtime production manager. Luckily, Amber Health was on hand to provide on-site sessions. “It was really good to know they were there,” Zito adds.

Amber Health received a similar call during Beyoncé’s Renaissance Tour in 2023, after a cameraperson fell off a nine-foot-tall scaffolding and suffered an injury so severe that it traumatized fellow crew members. “How soon can you be out here?” Hom, the tour’s director, asked Newman and Borer. Within a day, the pair met the tour in Chicago and counseled some of its 500 employees. “It was a very high-pressure, high-stress tour,” Hom says. “People talk about being under-appreciated and not being taken care of on tour. This was a way we could take care of people.”

On a typical tour, Borer, Newman and other Amber Health therapists are on hand at various dates, scheduling private, confidential hour-long sessions throughout non-travel days. For the Rodrigo tour, which travels with 120 crew members, Amber Health provides a clinical team of four to six people, “taking into account age, demographics, race — culturally appropriate, so everybody on the tour will feel like there’s somebody on our clinical team they can go to,” according to Borer. The company also provides a crisis helpline and virtual sessions, and often meets with crew during pre-tour rehearsals. “We’ll sit down with the tour and map their whole routing,” Newman says. “We’ve got people traveling in and out. Then it’s like, ‘OK, cool, see you soon, book something virtually if you need to next week — otherwise, we’ll see you somewhere in Minneapolis.”

Neither Amber Health nor tour contacts would give details about costs, but Hom says the finances boil down to tours paying for individual therapy sessions, which are comparable to traditional office visits. Tours also cover travel and lodging for the clinicians. 

“It’s a decimal point in a big tour’s budget, and one that shows a lot of value to the team,” Zito adds. “When you’re looking at budgets that are $20-$30-$50 million, and you’re talking $100,000 for something like this, is it worth it? Should it bring value for the team? I think it does.”

The multibillion-dollar touring industry — last year, according to Billboard Boxscore, the top 100 tours earned $15.7 billion — has until recently mostly ignored mental health services. But since the pandemic, in addition to Amber Health, the Recording Academy’s health-focused charity MusiCares and companies such as Denver-based nonprofit Backline Care and Athens, Ga.-based Nuci’s Space have provided similar services.

“There was a lot of stigma around mental welfare before. I don’t know if it’s because it was a male-dominated environment, or it’s just, ‘The show must go on,’” says Helen Himmons, production manager for Sheeran, whose 150-person team started working with Amber Health in early 2023. “COVID definitely broke down some of those barriers. Now, there’s an awareness that if you want the show to go on, you’ve got to support the people who are integral to making that happen. If you don’t look after people, you’re going to end up paying for it, one way or another.” 

Adds Shaun Clair, executive vp of business development for Clair Global, which provides staff for concert tours and employs Amber Health for a range of tours: “We know at any moment if we’re in crisis, we have access to world-class services that allow us to address that crisis quickly and correctly.”

Pivotal to the success of Amber Health, which supported 4,000 concert workers in 2024 and recently partnered with the Country Music Awards, is Borer and Newman’s understanding that they must work within the concert business system. 

“We don’t walk into a tour and say, ‘We have to change this,’” Borer says. “We understand the industry runs at this clip, at this level, that creates magical moments and experiences. What we do is try to support people when things get hard.”