Ariana Grande just made one fan’s day a bit brighter, with the pop star sending 9-year-old Brie — who is battling cancer — a care package full of Wicked merchandise and R.E.M. Beauty products.

The young listener shared the contents of the gift in a sweet video posted to Instagram on Wednesday (Aug. 6). In the clip, Brie starts off by saying, “Today’s package is the best one yet — it’s from my favorite person in the whole wide world, Ariana Grande.”

Brie goes on to show off the perfume, makeup products and Wicked plushies that the singer-actress wrapped up for her. “Thank you so, so much, Ariana Grande,” Brie says excitedly. “I love everything in the package, especially the Squishmallows!”

As it turns out, Grande’s favorite part of the gift was the same as Brie’s. “Hi, Brie! It’s Ariana,” she says in a clip she filmed just for the little girl, which plays at the end of Brie’s video. “A little birdie told me — your mom told me — that you are a fan of Wicked and of Glinda’s, so I was inspired to put together this little care package for you … My personal favorite part is the Squishmallows.”

“I hope it makes you smile,” the Grammy winner added. “I’ve seen your videos, and I think you are the most amazing and inspiring little light beam in this universe. You’re just so incredible, so thank you for being you. I’m sending you so much love and many, many virtual hugs.”

With help from her mom, Kendra, Brie — who has stage four neuroblastoma — has built a following sharing her journey with followers on social media. Just a few days prior to her post about Grande’s gift, Brie gushed about her love for the Wicked leading lady in an Instagram video, with Kendra writing in the caption, “[Grande’s mom] @joangrande called me yesterday and said that Ariana has seen Brielle’s story, and has put together a package for her.”

“She has such a beautiful heart,” Kendra added of the vocalist at the time. “Brielle was is shock! @arianagrande, Brielle thinks you are SO pretty, and extremely talented. Thank you for taking the time to send her a package, she is absolutely thrilled.”

The sweet gesture comes just a few months ahead of the long-awaited premiere of Wicked: For Good, which hits theaters in November. It will arrive almost exactly one year after the first Wicked came out. The first film earned two Oscars, a No. 2 soundtrack album on the Billboard 200 and upwards of $755 million in worldwide grosses — more than any other film based on a Broadway musical has ever earned before.

Grande is also fresh off of the release of Eternal Sunshine Deluxe: Brighter Days Ahead, the expanded version of her 2024 Billboard 200-topping LP Eternal Sunshine. All five of the added tracks on the deluxe charted on the Billboard Hot 100.

Reneé Rapp earned her first U.K. No. 1 LP with sophomore collection Bite Me on Friday (Aug. 8). 

The pop star and Mean Girl actress first hit the Official Albums Chart in 2023 with Snow Angel, which peaked at No. 7.

Later this year, she’ll embark on the Bite Me Tour with a European leg slated for 2026. Rapp will arrive in the U.K. for a pair of shows in March, headlining Manchester’s AO Arena on March 18, and London’s OVO Arena Wembley the following night.

As Oasis’ Live ‘25 reunion tour rolls into Edinburgh, Scotland, on Friday evening, the band occupies two spots in the top five, and three overall in the top 10. 2010’s singles compilation Time Flies… 1994-2009 finishes at No. 2, 1995’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? closes the week at No. 3 and 1994 debut Definitely Maybe lands at No. 6.

The band will play three shows at the Scottish capital’s Murrayfield Stadium in the coming days (Aug. 8, 9, 12). Earlier this week the man who died at one of the Wembley Stadium concerts was named, with fans raising money for his family in a GoFundMe appeal. The Gallagher brothers said in a statement they were “shocked and saddened” by the news.

Alex Warren’s You’ll Be Alright, Kid stays strong as a non-mover at No. 4. The California-born singer-songwriter had a record-breaking streak at the summit of the Official Singles Chart earlier this year, as hit single “Ordinary” ruled for 13 weeks. 

Fleetwood Mac’s 50 Years – Don’t Stop completes the top five (No. 5) and comes hot on the heels of the golden jubilee anniversary of the band’s 1975 self-titled LP, its first featuring vocalists Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks.

On July 23, the White House released “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” which combines the detail of government studies with the enthusiasm of this administration. It frames artificial intelligence technology as “an industrial revolution, an information revolution and a renaissance — all at once.”

But wait, there’s more — it could “usher in a new golden age of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people.” It’s unclear, both in the plan and in real life, if this is the kind of economic competitiveness that creates jobs or the kind that eliminates them — which matters because the latter could really put a damper on all that human flourishing.

For the music business, as well as the creative industries as a whole, human flourishing — as well as the flourishing of this columnist personally — depends on how artificial intelligence works from a regulatory perspective. Will AI-produced works compete with those of human creators? Will creators and rightsholders be paid fairly when AI is trained on their works? Most concerning of all, will today’s creators essentially be forced to train their replacements, without compensation? Legally, the issue at the center of this is whether AI companies need a license to use copyrighted works to train their algorithms, and it is already the subject of more than a dozen lawsuits. And the AI Action Plan doesn’t even mention it.

President Trump did, though. On July 23, at the “Winning the AI Race” summit, Trump said that “you can’t be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book or anything else that you’ve read or studied, you’re supposed to pay for.” Coincidentally or not, this is a talking point used by some technology companies: Licensing at this scale is so complicated that it’s almost impossible, and that doing it would put the U.S. at a disadvantage compared to other countries. After all, “China’s not doing it,” Trump said. “You need to be able to play by the same set of rules.”

Trump’s phrasing here suggests that he may have been riffing on prepared remarks, as he often does. And he seemed to go back on some of what he said, saying that “you can’t copy or plagiarize from it.” This doesn’t make sense legally — it’s impossible to train an algorithm on a work without having a computer copy it. But Trump’s comments suggest that the White House may want to loosen copyright in order to ease the development of AI technology — while the fact that this isn’t in the formal plan suggests that this idea needs some selling.

The idea that copyright would inhibit the development of AI may not hold up. Collecting societies have enabled copyright licensing on a mass scale for more than 100 years, which is why almost any bar in the world can play any song ever written. (This system isn’t perfect, and it would be difficult to adapt this to AI, but it’s certainly do-able, and it’s actually pretty simple compared to, say, going to Mars.

Trump may not know this — it’s hard to know what he does know. But his worldview is based on winning — ideally in a way that someone else loses. So his attitude toward AI is going to be shaped by “Winning the AI Race,” and he’s not going to be ashamed to work the refs. If he sees copyright as an ankle weight in a road race, he’s going to want to remove it. Except that there’s only so much he can do. He already hired former PayPal executive David Sacks as an “AI and crypto czar,” and he fired Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, although it’s still not clear why. In the end, copyright is an issue for Congress.

A music policy executive suggested to me that Trump’s speech was a way to signal Congress that he may be interested in changing copyright law in a way that helps AI companies. This is certainly possible — it would just be hard, since the media business would oppose it. Right now, technology companies have far more power than the media business, but it’s also always easier to block a law than to pass one. This year and next year represent a good opportunity, though. Midterm elections generally favor the party that’s not in the White House, so Trump may never again have such a majority — or so much power to pressure Republican legislators. If he — and, let’s be honest, his advisors — think the same way, that gives him until the end of 2026.

If you buy into this line of reasoning — which obviously involves a fair amount of educated guesswork — plenty will happen before then. Technology companies will need to come up with an outline of a bill, legislators will need to put it forward, and it will be debated, negotiated and debated again. By that time, court decisions will give one side or the other more of an advantage. Much of that will not go according to plan — either that of the White House or of anyone else. But it offers some interesting hints about where all of this could go.

Gracie Abrams performed a song that wasn’t hers at her Los Angeles concert Thursday night (Aug. 7), but her fans still knew every word all too well.

During the B-stage portion of her Secret of Us Tour set at the Kia Forum, the singer-songwriter surprised her audience by covering Taylor Swift‘s “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)” in full — but not before giving her close friend and former tourmate a sweet shout-out. “I was talking to her earlier today,” Abrams said of the pop superstar.

“It just is not lost on me that the reason that a lot of us know each other is because I got to meet many of you through doing the Eras Tour with Taylor,” she continued. “I just feel like I’m forever missing what that experience was. I know we all feel that way … I wanted to sing a song for you that I’ll forever wish I wrote, if you’ve got 10 minutes.”

The California native went on to perform the entirety of the lengthy record-setting Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit with the audience scream-singing each word of Swift’s nostalgic verses, fiery bridge and haunting outro from start to finish. “Maybe we got lost in translation, maybe I asked for too much/ But maybe this thing was a masterpiece, ’til you tore it all up,” Abrams sang over the noise of the crowd, accompanying herself on a small red keyboard in the center of the arena.

The performance comes about eight months after Swift’s global Eras trek wrapped after two years in December, with Abrams serving as the opener on the final North American leg. She’d also supported the 14-time Grammy winner at multiple shows when the tour first kicked off in 2023.

While traveling the world together, Abrams and Swift developed a friendship that eventually sparked a collaboration: “Us,” which appears on the former’s breakout The Secret of Us album.

In her Billboard cover story published in April, Abrams told staff writer Hannah Dailey that having Swift in her life has helped her stay grounded as her own star has risen over the past year. “It’s like, I really don’t have it that bad in terms of invasion of privacy, you know what I mean?” she said at the time. “I feel like I learned a lot from her, obviously, but one of the things that I’ve felt lucky to observe is how extreme it can be [for her]. It helps right-size my own s–t.”

Abrams is now closing in on the end of her own headlining tour, with the star having just five more dates on her show calendar before the Secret of Us trek concludes Aug. 27 in Mexico City.

Watch Abrams cover “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)” below.