Katy Perry will perform a free concert in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí on Aug. 25 as part of the lineup for the annual state fair, Feria Nacional Potosina, or FENAPO. The pop superstar made the surprise announcement in a video posted to her Instagram on Tuesday night (May 26).

“I’m really excited about this announcement. I told you I’d be coming back, and now I am. Aug. 25, FENAPO,” Perry said in the clip. “Free show for all of my Mexican KatyGatos! Let’s go!”

With an excited shout, the performer expresses her excitement about returning to the country. “You’re gonna love this show. It’s a new show. Super fun. Lots of joymaxxing. And really just for you, the fan, because I’m a fan of you. You know I love you, you know I keep my promises. I’ll see you Aug. 25 in FENAPO — for free.”

The “I Kissed a Girl” and “Roar” singer kicked off her previous tour, The Lifetimes Tour, on April 23, 2025, at Arena CDMX, where she wowed audiences with spectacular moments during the show, thanks to its innovative futuristic concept.

The trek wrapped up in December with a total gross of over $134 million in ticket sales, according to data provided to Billboard by her management.

In 2025, FENAPO sparked controversy after Marilyn Manson was announced as the headlining artist, leading to protests from religious and conservative groups who deemed his performance “inappropriate” for a family-oriented festival. Earlier that year, the Los Angeles district attorney had announced Manson would not face charges over allegations of sexual assault made against the artist due to the expiration on the statute of limitations and because they could not prove a charge of sexual assault in court. The accusations against the rocker took off in 2021, when Manson’s ex-fiancée Evan Rachel Wood named him as her alleged abuser in an Instagram post, which led to multiple women coming forward with allegations that the musician sexually abused them, with some filing lawsuits. Manson denied all the allegations.

The shock rocker’s free show at FENAPO drew 205,000 people — according to official data — on Aug. 10, an event that the state governor, Ricardo Gallardo Cardona, described as a legitimate “defense of freedom of expression,” as he stated in an interview with Billboard.

In addition to Perry, this year’s FENAPO lineup includes veteran glam rock band Mötley Crüe, Puerto Rican reggaetón star Yandel, as well as Mexican artists Kenia Os and Santa Fe Klan, and Argentine DJ Bizarrap.

See Katy Perry’s video announcement below:

A paper airplane flying, flying over a neighbor’s fence made for an adorable moment that enamored millions of TikTok viewers — including Taylor Swift.

As reported by People on Tuesday (May 26), the pop star recently sent an autographed guitar and handwritten note to 8-year-old Madeline, a girl who lives in Ohio and went viral in April after sending a song request to her musician neighbor. As captured in a TikTok posted by her mom, Madeline had heard Ethan Hayes singing and strumming guitar next door and decided to ask him to play a song by Swift in note, which she folded into the shape of a plane and threw it into his yard.

At the time, Hayes obliged and performed “Love Story” for the little girl. Now, she has her very own guitar to play any Taylor Swift song she wants, courtesy of the 14-time Grammy winner.

“I just wanted to let you know that it made me so happy that you asked your neighbor to play my song for you,” Swift wrote in her note to Madeline, which arrived alongside a signed acoustic guitar with a photo of the singer printed on the body. “You brought the biggest smile to my face. I’m sending you your own guitar in case you ever want to learn too!”

Billboard has reached out to Swift’s rep for comment.

Hayes also apparently received a guitar from the hitmaker, whose team reached out to him via TikTok. “They’re like, ‘Hey, Taylor saw your video. We want to send you something. Don’t tell anyone until it gets there,’” he told People. “I was expecting maybe a signed poster or something. And then she sent us guitars, which is insane.”

Madeline’s mom, Natalie Hulec, told the publication that her daughter decided on the paper plane idea because she was too shy to approach Hayes in person. After she tossed the note over the fence, the aspiring musician didn’t notice the note at first, but retrieved it after Madeline’s stepfather, Russell, called out to him through the window of the family’s house.

“I’m a musician, so I get requests all the time,” Hayes told the publication. “That’s one [‘Love Story’] I always usually keep in my back pocket.”

Swift last dropped music in October, spending 12 weeks atop the Billboard 200 with The Life of a Showgirl. The album spawned two Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hits: 10-week chart-topper “The Fate of Ophelia” and “Opalite.”

Madonna is bringing it all back home to celebrate the upcoming release of her Confessions II album. The anticipated sequel to her 2005 Confessions on a Dance Floor LP is due out on July 3 and as part of the promotional push for the collection, the singer has teamed up with financial services company Bilt — which offers a points-based reward system on rent/mortgage payments and other purchases — on a special offer for up-and-coming musicians.

According to a release, Bilt will cover one month of studio rent for every musician currently leasing space at The Music Building, the midtown Manhattan rehearsal space where Madonna once lived and hatched the beginnings of her musical career. The Building, which was founded in 1979, has been a “working home for generations of New York artists — a place where musicians at every stage of their careers have come to rehearse, write, and find their footing in one of the world’s most demanding creative cities.”

“Artists arrive every day to New York, with a dream and more often than not with little else,” Madonna said in a statement. “As much as I struggled when I showed up here with nothing, I look back very fondly on this time in my life. The creativity, diversity and community of artists all supporting each other while having the freedom to experiment is something I would.”

In addition to the rent, there will be a Bilt-exclusive limited-edition vinyl version of Confessions II with custom artwork and exclusive photos by Raphael Pavarotti shot for Bilt members. There will also be member-exclusive release night parties in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, as well as a special edition of Bilt’s monthly game show, Rent Free, which will feature Madonna as a contestant handing members from around the country a chance to win free rent payments up to $2,500.

“There are so few artists who have shaped New York the way Madonna has,” said Ankur Jain, Founder and CEO of Bilt in the release. “She came to this city with next to nothing, and in building something extraordinary, she became part of its DNA. When we had the chance to work with her, we knew we had to honor that story — not just by celebrating the album, but by giving back to the building where she first found her sound. The Music Building has been a home to generations of artists who arrived in New York the same way she did: with big dreams and little else. We couldn’t think of a more fitting way to mark this moment than making sure the artists in that building today don’t have to choose between their rent and their art.”

The album’s single, “I Feel So Free,” jumped from No. 8 to No. 1 on Billboard’s Dance/Mix Show Airplay chart dated May 30, giving the singer her eighth career leader on the tally and her first overall radio chart-topper in nearly 18 years. Confessions II is Madonna’s 15th studio album and her first LP in seven years. It marks a reunion with frequent collaborator Stuart Price, as well as her return to Warner Records after two decades away.

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At midyear, business is good.

According to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore, the 50 biggest tours of the first half of the chart year collectively earned more than $2.7 billion and sold 20.7 million tickets. Compared to last year’s first half, those figures are up — not with the velocity of the supercharged, early post-pandemic standard, but with single-digit percentage gains that show promise as the business heads into the prime of stadium season.

Billboard’s midyear Boxscore charts are based on reported shows between Oct. 1, 2025, and March 31, and ranked by cumulative gross. International grosses are converted to USD.

Lady Gaga and Bad Bunny top the midyear listing — with the former securing the top spot in a photo finish. Gaga leads Bunny by a margin of less than 3%, and only overtook him in the final week of the tracking period. Both acts posted stunning grosses for such a short span of time.

Gaga’s The Mayhem Ball is the highest-grossing tour at midyear, with $236.2 million grossed — the highest midyear gross in Boxscore history (dating to 1991), outpacing U2’s Sphere stint ($231.6 million) from two years ago. U2 got there by brute force, charging an average of $368 per ticket for the venue’s inaugural residency. Gaga had a still-high-but-earthbound ticket price of $203.98 but won by persistence. She played 52 shows in six months, roughly double Bad Bunny’s count and more than any act in the top 50 other than Trans-Siberian Orchestra, with its dual ensembles touring the country at once, and comedian Nate Bargatze. That show count exceeds all the acts on last year’s midyear ranking too, again with the asterisk of TSO and stand-up comics.

With Bad Bunny’s DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS World Tour at $230 million, this is the first time that two acts grossed more than $200 million in the same midyear period. Last year, no artist even cracked $150 million in that period.

But while the rest of the top 10, and entire top 50, is strong, the top two’s groundbreaking performance doesn’t extend further: Paul McCartney and Shakira are next, each with less than half of Gaga and Bad Bunny’s earnings. There are fewer $100 million tours than in previous years (five, compared to six in 2025 and eight in 2024), and $50 million tours (16, compared to 19 and 20, respectively). By the bottom of the top 50, 2026 regains a lead, as Rüfüs Du Sol rounds out the chart with $23.7 million, up from $21.6 million for Dead & Company at No. 50 last year and $22.1 million for Peso Pluma in 2024.

Overall, this year’s $2.7 billion is up 8.4% over last year’s $2.5 billion, but still down 16% from 2024’s $3.2 billion. That year included not just U2 at Sphere, but P!nk, Madonna and Luis Miguel all over $150 million, plus Coldplay, RBD, Depeche Mode and Eagles each with nine-figure grosses.

But while last year’s midyear Top Tours chart took a 22% slide year-over-year after 2024’s enormous growth, the results at the end of the year were almost exactly even. At year-end, 2025 was down just 0.3% from 2024, marking the first annual decline, small as it may have been, since 2015 (excluding COVID years). Last year’s leveling off is lightly offset by 2026’s 8% midyear uptick, but perhaps confirms that the era of explosive post-pandemic growth is over.

2025’s midyear report also showed a drop-off in ticket prices, down 5.5% among the top 50 tours from $147.17 to $139.09. That slide has continued this year, off another 6.3% from one midyear to another, to $130.36. “Buyers are getting more educated,” Tixr’s Sara Mertz told Billboard in May. “Artists are impacted by high touring costs, and buyers are also dealing with high gas prices. And 100%, I do think a correction is coming.”

Then again, the midyear period — spanning the fourth quarter of the preceding year and the first quarter of the current one — has never been a perfect indicator of where a year is headed, as demonstrated by last year’s second-half catch-up. Since the midyear tracking period closed at the end of March, Bruno Mars and BTS kicked off stadium tours in early April, and Harry Styles began his 10-date Amsterdam residency in mid-May (by the end of the chart year, he’ll also stage a 12-date residency in London and the first half of his 30-date run at New York’s Madison Square Garden, in addition to multi-night stands in São Paulo and Mexico City). This mirrors last year’s spring stadium launches for Kendrick Lamar & SZA, Post Malone and Beyoncé, all three of which finished among the year’s top 10 tours.

Plus, using the midyear Top Tours chart as a north star regarding the health of the touring industry only tells part of the story. Growth among the biggest tours is mirrored by increases in grosses and attendance overall for the biggest of Billboard’s six capacity-defined venue rankings. In stadiums, arenas and amphitheaters worldwide, earnings are up more than 20% across the board, padded by platinum tickets and VIP packages. But for rooms smaller than 10,000 seats, numbers are more even compared with last year.

The 20 highest grossing venues with a capacity of 5,001-10,000 (large theaters and boutique arenas) are up 7.3%, collectively, from last year. Among venues with cap of 2,500 or less (small theaters and clubs), grosses are down by almost 9% and attendance is off by 6%. As top-tier ticket prices and show grosses have skyrocketed in the 2020s, there has been parallel discourse about how touring has become increasingly difficult and expensive for mid-level and small acts.

The race among the highest-grossing venues at midyear was as tight as the margin on Top Tours, spread across three different capacity-based charts. Las Vegas’ Sphere is top dog again (No. 1 on Top Venues, 15,001+ capacity), up 12% from last year with $185.2 million and 819,000 tickets sold from residencies by Eagles, Zac Brown Band, Backstreet Boys and Illenium, as well as the Unity: Insomniac x Tomorrowland EDM show.

Mexico City’s Estadio GNP Seguros was the most-attended venue of the tracking period with 1.7 million tickets, and it nearly reached Sphere’s earnings, with $182.6 million (No. 1, Top Stadiums). And New York’s Radio City Music Hall leads Top Venues, 5,001-10k cap with $180 million and 1.4 million tickets, largely powered by more than 200 shows of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular between November 6 and January 15. All three venues fall within less than 3% of one another in gross, and are set to maintain a top five position by year-end.