U.S. authorities have accused a North Carolina man of conning Napster out of a massive ownership stake by falsely pledging $3.36 billion he never had.

An indictment by the Department of Justice (DOJ), unsealed on Thursday (June 11) and obtained by Billboard, charges 57-year-old Charles Cole with three criminal fraud and conspiracy counts. Cole also faces parallel civil fraud claims a Thursday complaint from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which also names his attorney, Torben Welch, as a defendant.

Over the course of 2024, Cole obtained 239 million shares of the digital media company Infinite Reality — roughly 25% of its total shares — by claiming he had access to $55 billion in cash, and promised to invest more than $3 billion in the company. Infinite Reality later rebranded to Napster after acquiring the streamer for $207 million in March 2025.

In the wake of the Napster acquisition, a Forbes investigation raised questions about the mysterious identity of the company’s $3 billion backer. The following November, Napster’s CEO reportedly told shareholders that the investment was not going to come through, saying the company had been the “victim of misconduct” and was cooperating with law enforcement to nail the fraudster.

Now, federal authorities claim that Cole never gave a penny to Napster and didn’t actually have the funds to do so. Cole allegedly duped Napster into believing he did have the money by creating a complex “fictitious paper trail” that included forged bank statements and a fake website, set up with offshore servers, to mirror a Malaysian bank’s real site.

“Cole, with Welch’s assistance, then used the fraudulently obtained shares in Infinite Reality to secure a $1 million loan from a private third-party lender that he never repaid,” reads the SEC complaint.

In a statement shared with Billboard, a Napster spokesperson said, “We have cooperated with law enforcement since the company initially reported it was the victim of misconduct. We are continuing to support this process. Questions about the proceedings should be directed to the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. We have no further comment on an active matter.”

Cole and Welch could not immediately be reached for comment on Thursday.

Napster’s origins infamously date back to 1999, when it shook the music industry by launching as a file-sharing site that allowed users to download tracks for free. The name later got recycled as a licensed streaming service that has changed hands a number of times over the years.

Napster was sold to the streamer Rhapsody in 2011, then to virtual reality concert app MelodyVR in 2020 and again to Hivemind Capital Partners and cryptocurrency company Algorand in 2022. This was followed in 2025 by the Infinite Reality acquisition, which promised to “transform Napster into a next-generation platform” using “immersive 3D technology.”

This story was updated at 10:18 p.m. ET to add a statement from Napster.

As the son of Sublime‘s late Bradley Nowell, and frontman for the genre-blending band himself since 2023, Jakob Nowell is something of a scholar when it comes to the group’s history and legacy. So he views this incarnation — which releases a new album, Until the Sun Explodes, on Friday (June 12) — as “the fourth era of Sublime.”

There is, Nowell tells Billboard via Zoom from his home in Long Beach, Calif., “Sublime classic,” the group his father, drummer Bud Gaugh and bassist Eric Wilson formed during 1988 and ran through the elder Nowell’s death in 1996 from a heroin overdose at the age of 28. The trio released three albums — including a five-times platinum self-titled effort in 1996, released two months after Nowell’s death — and scored enduring hits such as “What I Got,” “Santeria” and “Wrong Way.”

Gaugh and Wilson’s Long Beach Dub Allstars, launched in 1997, was Sublime’s second era according to Nowell, followed by Sublime With Rome from 2009-2024, fronted by Rome Ramirez and including Wilson for most of its run (with Gaugh on board for the first two years).

“So I consider us, like V4 of Sublime,” explains Nowell, 30, who was 11 months old when his father died. “I hope people consider it a renaissance. That’s definitely the goal with this record and all the sounds we’re trying to do and how we’re trying to perform up there. It’s just a fun, messy, chaotic punk band that your parents used to love and showed you, or that you just discovered two years ago and you love it for your own reasons now.”

Gaugh, 58, adds that, “It just seems like a natural progression — wouldn’t it be cool if we could bring something new to the fans who haven’t seen Sublime before and give them their Sublime, because everybody’s listening to what their parents were hearing 30 years ago. So we’re giving something to the new fans and the old fans alike, and giving (new fans) something for their very own — ‘This is my Sublime. This isn’t just my parents’, grandparents’, aunts’ and uncles’. This is my band, too.”

Doin’ Time

A new Sublime, and a new Sublime album, were not necessarily fixed on the Long Beach scene’s bingo card, however. Or on any of the band members’.

With Gaugh, Wilson and others from his father’s posse as designated godfathers, Jakob Nowell developed a natural interest in music early, teaching himself how to play guitar. Nevertheless, he says, “there were times I was running full-force to it and times I felt a total imposter syndrome — ‘What am I doing? This is not me!,’ just trying to figure out who I am. You definitely wrestle with it.” He struggled with drug use and alcoholism as a teen, becoming sober when he was 17 with the help drug interventionist Todd Zalkins, a childhood friend of his father’s. Nowell and other family members established the non-profit Nowell Family Foundation to provide addiction recovery support for musicians.

He went on to receive a degree in creative writing from Long Beach State College but gave himself over to music in bands such as LAW and Jakobs Castle, the latter of which released its debut album, Enter: The Castle in 2024 and is planning another for next year.

“I was super-stoked,” Gaugh says, “because (Nowell) was staying true to himself and he was doing his own thing. It was important for him to set himself aside from (Sublime). I truly respected that he wasn’t going the ‘nepo route’ and glom off our success. He really was a musician in his own right, so it was like, ‘OK, he’s into this kind of music and that’s just how it’s gonna be. No pressure from Uncle Bud or Uncle Eric.”

Nowell confirms that being part of the Sublime universe in any way, shape or form “didn’t seem like the right thing. It seemed inappropriate…and even if I did, would I even be good enough, or would I be capable? So I spent a good 10 years in my own projects, just trying to cut my teeth and play around the country, at first to empty rooms and then a modest following.”

Nowell did, however, agree to play with Gaugh and Wilson during a December 2023 benefit concert for Bad Brains’ Paul “H.R.” Hudson in Los Angeles. “I was 28, the age my father died,” Nowell recalls. “I’d taken this trip to the Phoenix Theater in Petaluma (Calif.), the last venue he played. And then I got the call to do (the benefit). There were just so many coinciding factors.” Gaugh, meanwhile, remembers that “when we were rehearsing for that first show, hearing his voice sounding identical to Brad’s, it gave me chills. I haven’t experienced that since Brad left, and feeling it once again was confirmation that we were doing the right thing.”

In the wake of that show, Nowell was open to Gaugh and Wilson’s overture “to play together again and use the name Sublime. I felt like I was capable of doing this now. I’ve built up my chops enough to do this part justice. It definitely came with a certain sense of paranoia and dread and uncertainty. But now, with two years under my best as the frontman for the project, I’m feeling pretty confident — obviously.”

How The Sun Exploded

Sublime moved forward with playing select shows and festivals, including Coachella during 2024, and teamed with the roots reggae group Stick Figure on a single, “Feel Like That,” shortly afterwards; it was the first new release under the Sublime name in 27 years and reached No. 7 on the Alternative Airplay chart. There was talk of making a full album with Travis Barker of Blink-182 and John Feldmann of Goldfinger, but Sublime ultimately decided to keep things closer to home, recording Until the Sun Explodes with Jakobs Castle producer Jon Joseph at Harbor Martyr Studios in San Pedro.

The 21-track set — including spoken-word skits — features an expanded version of Sublime, too, with guitarists Trey Pangborn and Zane “Zayno” Vandevort and DJ Product (nee Doug Boyce) in the mix. Joseph contributes some instrumentation as well, while Nowell’s grandfather Jim Nowell, who passed away earlier this year, pops up on “Maybe Partying Will Help…Pt. 2” There are also guest appearances by H.R. (“Trey’s Song”), Garrett “G. Love” Dutton (“Come Correct),” Fletcher Dragge from Pennywise (247-369) and the bands Fidlar (“Backwards”) and Skeggs (“Favorite Song”).

Nowell acknowledges that while a new Sublime album “was another big never-will” for him, performing with the band made the prospect more agreeable. “Truth be told, we just kept playing together at rehearsals and soundchecks,” he explains. “We’re all very jam-oriented musicians, so we’d have these little parts we’d return to that started to sound like they could be (new songs), and it seemed natural to move forward with that.”

And his almost scholarly knowledge of all things Sublime also gave Nowell a sharp perspective on exactly what Until the Sun Explodes should encompass, sonically and stylistically.

“I think Sublime, at its core, is a California punk rock band that experimented with many different genres,” Nowell explains. “They revered thee classic reggae and dub records from Jamaica — Johnny Osbourne, King Tubby, Jacob Miller. They were also listening to a lot of rad hip-hop and stuff that was happening concurrently in the ’90s, in Long Beach and L.A. They just had to try their hand at it all, how a punk band would do it. It’s just messy and frenetic…and that’s how you get that classic sound.

“That’s what we went for on (Until the Sun Explodes), too, the same sensibility. it’s a paradox; we entirely revere the music, but the very nature of the music is (to be) super irreverent, right? It’s almost pure chaos and fun…and hopefully people get the same feeling here as they did on (1992’s) 40oz. to Freedom and the stuff they did back then.”

One And Done?

Until the Sun Explodes has received a warm welcome so far; both the title track and the album-opening “Ensenada” hit No. 1 on Alternative Airplay. The group has a number of shows lined up as well, starting June 13 at San Diego’s Petco Park and also including its own Sublime Festival on June 27 in Portland, Ore. Sublime will also be part of Vans Warped Tour stops in Montreal and Orlando, Fla., is on the bill of the Louder Than Life festival during September in Louisville, Ky. and the Aftershock Festival during October in Sacramento, and will host the Sublime Reef Madness Cruise during November.

“We’re looking into next year already, too,” Gaugh says. “I know that we are already looking to schedule some Australia/New Zealand dates next year. I can see a Pacific Rim tour happening. I can see another European vacation. We’re looking forward to doing some more laps around the good ol’ U.S. of A….The shows have been amazing. We’re selling out. And I think this album is going to blow the doors off people when they hear everything.”

It may well be the only time they hear this incarnation of Sublime on record, too.

Until the Sun Explodes has been positioned as the “last” Sublime album, and Nowell says that’s certainly how he’s viewing it. “Unless a child of mine wants to make another one one day, this is the last one I’m gonna make,” he confirms. “I think you have to know your goals, set out to achieve them, and if you do you must then create new goals. I love doing this and it’s truly healed me in many ways, and allowed me to grow as an entertainer and performer. But I wish to carry the flag forward in different ways now.”

Nowell says he’ll continue to “play a few Sublime shows every year and keep the faces smiling,” but his primary focus will be on Jakobs Castle as well as SVNBVRNT Records, the label he operates with Vandevort, working with other southern California artists he says “are making local kids really excited, just like when Sublime started. This is the real renaissance that I hope my time with Sublime can clue people into. These are the true people who have inherited the mantle.”

If Until the Sun Explodes does well, however, Nowell knows there will be requests for more, and he does allow that “my feeling could change in the future. But it would be enough into the future where it would be a moot point. I’ve done what I thought was impossible and I’m very proud with the results. I would want Until the Sun Explodes to feel like epilogue, the victory lap, a celebration of Sublime’s history and a love letter to my father and all of his friends and the scene that raised me and touched so many people’s lives. After this I’d really like to pass that along and help the kids who want to do something similar.”

From a Hollywood film premiere straight to Game 4 of the NBA Finals in New York City the next night, Taylor Swift is on a coast-to-coast adventure.

Swift was spotted courtside with two of the three Haim sisters — Alana and Este — at Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden to cheer on the Knicks, who lead the series 2-1 heading into Game 4. How do we know that the trio is rooting for the Knicks? Based on their hilarious homemade shirts.

Each of the shirts is a Knicks-based pun on a celebrity name, with Swift’s shirt reading “Stevie Knicks,” Alana Haim’s shirt saying “Knickleback,” and Este’s shirt reading “Knickole Kidman.”

Swift previously attended an NBA Eastern Conference Finals game between the Knicks and the Cavaliers last month with her fiancé, NFL star Travis Kelce, who is a lifelong Cleveland fan. But Swift has historically cheered for the New York squad after her time living in NYC.

The pop superstar is in town to attend the 2026 Songwriters Hall of Fame Induction & Awards ceremony on Thursday night, when Swift will be inducted into the hall after previously winning the Hal David Spotlight Award in 2010.

On Tuesday night, she was in Los Angeles to attend the Toy Story 5 world premiere and surprise-perform “I Knew It, I Knew You,” her song for the Disney Pixar film. She also joined forces with Toy Story music maestro Randy Newman to duet on “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.”

The Wu-Tang Clan is set to perform at halftime of Game 4, following a halftime set from Cardi B during Monday’s Game 3 at Madison Square Garden.

UPDATE (June 10): AMC Theatres announced that the Arena One screenings originally scheduled for June have been postponed to later this year.

“Week after week in 2026, the domestic box office performance has exceeded or met expectations,” said a statement from AMC Theatres sent to Billboard. “With a robust lineup of films and strong advance ticket sales in the weeks ahead, AMC is making some programming adjustments during the month of June.

“As part of those adjustments, the previously announced Arena One at AMC Girls Night Live concert series featuring Maren Morris, Paris Hilton, Kim Petras, and Bebe Rexha will move to later in 2026. Tickets purchased for the originally scheduled events have been automatically refunded.

“AMC is very excited about its partnership with Arena One, and we look forward to announcing updated dates and additional artists in the weeks and months ahead.”

PREVIOUSLY:

Your favorite performer is coming to a movie cinema near you.  

Bebe Rexha, Paris Hilton, Maren Morris and Kim Petras are among the first wave of artists participating in new, interactive concert experience that will beam the show into hundreds of theaters across the United States.

Arena One, the new live entertainment company, and AMC Theatres, the giant theatrical exhibitor, join forces for Arena One at AMC, a real-time, interactive concert format that will be pumped into 300 AMC locations in 89 markets from June.

The concerts are an upgrade from the cinecast experience that found traction with some a-list artists and their fans in the late 2000s, when a slew of live concerts and exclusive events were fed into participating cinemas.

Through this new concept, announced this week, the artist will perform on Arena One’s purpose-built stage, while “seeing and responding to fans at AMC locations through innovative interactive technology,” reads a statement from organizers.

The advantages are obvious. For the artist, the initiative enables them to reach more fans, in more places, without hitting the road. And for those fans who can’t physical get to see their hero, due to cost, distance or other reasons, they now have a virtual front-row seat.

“The next chapter of live shows isn’t about proximity to big venues, it’s about creating visceral, intimate, affordable live connection between artists and fans no matter where they are,” explains Rohit Kapoor, founder and chief creative officer of Arena One. “Arena One gives artists a new cinema-native canvas to create live performances, while amplifying the raw energy and shared fandom that makes live shows unforgettable.”

First up, Bebe Rexha will perform an Arena One at AMC concert June 17, followed by Paris Hilton (June 18), Kim Petras (June 19) and Maren Morris (June 20).

Ticketholders will soak up an atmosphere that’s “designed to feel immediate and electric, featuring powerful sound, massive screens,” comfortable seats, and more, reads a statement.

“We consider this to be a major announcement,” explains Adam Aron, chairman and CEO of AMC Entertainment, and an “innovative step forward” for the business.

Additional artists and dates will be announced in the coming weeks, with ticket prices varying by market.

“We built a cinematic stage optimized to translate seamlessly to cinemas, but artists are defining what it becomes,” adds Peter Hamilton, CEO of Arena One. “They’re not adapting tours; they’re building something new. That’s when a medium sparks reinvention.”

Showtimes are available on AMCTheatres.com, the AMC Mobile App, and at arenaonelive.com/shows.

When Mouse On Mars were preparing to welcome Lee “Scratch” Perry to their Berlin studio in December of 2019, the occasion came with parameters.

“We were told like, ‘Three hours a day is the maximum Lee can do,’” says the duo’s Jan St. Werner, “and take care of his health, and no drugs or alcohol.”

The longstanding electronic act — St. Werner and Andi Toma — were prepared to abide by these outlines. Perry, then 83 years old, was not. “[The first day] he worked from 10 in the morning until two or three in the morning, and he was super happy about it,” says St. Werner. “Then he was like, ‘When do we start tomorrow,’ and we were like, ‘Whenever you want?’ and he said to pick him up at 10 a.m. He was just constantly going… The vibe after was like, ‘What did you do to Lee? He’s so happy,’ and we did exactly the opposite of what we were supposed to do.”

Mouse On Mars ultimately spent four long and happy days in the studio with the dub icon, who lived up to his reputation as a far-out musical genius. “I thought he was going to live for another 10 or 20 years, because he was very energetic, super concentrated and he didn’t seem to be old,” says St. Werner. But as it will for all of us, death caught up with Perry on August 29, 2021, when the artist died at the age of 85 in his native Jamaica.

The men of Mouse on Mars, who’ve released 12 studio albums since 1994, had a lot of unfinished Perry music on their hands, and — having thought they’d get together with him again to complete it — weren’t sure what to do. “We didn’t know if we wanted to finish without him,” says St. Werner. “When Lee passed away, we were like, ‘We’re so glad we got to meet him and share this beautiful time.’ That already was a huge gift, so we were kind of like, ‘Maybe that’s it.”

But it would not go down like that, with the duo ultimately finishing and releasing the music seven years after it was recorded as Spatial, No Problem. Heady, stylish and deep the eight-track collaborative album from Mouse On Mars and Lee “Scratch” Perry was released last week on Domino Records.

The most forceful cajoling to make it happen came from Mouse on Mars’ friend and frequent collaborator Louis Chude-Sokei, who over the years kept on them about finishing the project. “Louis was like, ‘Guys, you cannot sit on this material,’ recalls St. Werner. “He heard a few of the sketches and kept bothering us, like “You have to get your s–t together.”

While the duo reasonably had reservations about finishing the work without input from Perry, Chude-Sokei emphasized they had an obligation and responsibility to Lee, to his fans and to music history at large. “He was like ‘It’s not just about you or whoever thinks they have claims on this [music] or ideas about what this session was supposed to be,’” says St. Werner. “This just has to happen, because it’s precious.”

He was right. As Chude-Sokei’s liner notes to the album explains, after Perry’s passing, “a deluge of recordings appeared claiming to be the ‘last’ or ‘final’ project of the Jamaican icon. These came from musicians and producers from an incredible range of genres — trip hop, dub, ambient, rock, reggae. This range represented Perry’s hunger for new sounds and ideas. However, his last official album project took him to Berlin, Germany where he landed on the doorstop of electronic pioneers Mouse on Mars. He was looking for something that remained unclear. The only thing clear was that it should not be reggae.” 

As such, Spatial, No Problem. is the final transmission of a career that began in the 1960s in Jamaica, where Lee first released music with The Upsetters, then under his own name, over the years working with and helping expand the sounds of artists including Bob Marley and King Tubby while pioneering the practice of sampling and creating the dub genre, innovations that would inform the sound and trajectory of electronic music. The way Mouse On Mars came to see it, their time with him represented a special chapter of Lee’s art, not only because it came so close to the end, but for how it functions as a confluence of styles, ideas and musical traditions.

“The material is great, and Lee loved the stuff he had recorded, but besides that, this is a particular chapter in his history and in what you could call Black Technopoetics or Afrofuturism,” says St. Werner. “It was a also moment where we were not just Mouse On Mars; we were also representing a maybe more Western or Central European idea of improvised or free music. At the same time, it was this whole history of electro-acoustic and electronic music and all this stuff coming together so casually.”

Lee’s legendary status preceded him before he arrived in Berlin, and when Mars On Mars friends and associates heard Lee would be around (arriving to town from Switzerland, where he then lived with his wife Mireille) people just started showing up. “It was like a community, because people were telling friends who were telling friends like, ‘Lee Scratch Perry is coming if you want to come by and maybe contribute something.’”

As such, the workspace got so cramped with singers, harpists, brass players, drummers and other hopeful contributors that at one point. St. Werner was in the recording booth looking out through the glass and wondering who everyone was. This freewheeling vibe suited the freewheeling Perry, who seemed to be enjoying this looseness and the possibilities therein.

“Lee was basically walking through rooms in a kind of dream state,” St. Werner continues, “sometimes sitting there listening, sometimes firing up the situation, sometimes just moving along, asking for a pen or writing something down, putting a sticker somewhere very intentionally.” Despite the untraditional nature of the sessions, the resulting recordings were rich, interesting, ready. Says St. Werner: “Everything was first take, as if the planets were working for us.”

Amalgamating dub, free jazz, electronic elements and a melting pot of other sounds, Spatial, No Problem. is, quite appropriately, a sort of retrospective of Lee’s life. Each song tells a story, with “Fire Dali” referencing the famous 1979 destruction of his Black Ark Studios in Kingston, Jamaica (with Lee often claiming that he burned down the space himself due to the negative energy that had settled there). The crackling of fire is heard of the end of the track, before it fades to nature sounds. In the eight-minute closer “State of Emergency,” Lee recounts stories of Bob Marley and other deceased reggae artists over the sounds of a New Orleans-style funeral jazz band.

“It was like he was talking about his past,” says Toma. “Then right in the end he also said, ‘This is the end, and he was laughing.”

Having performed their sacred obligation to finish the project, the pair now think of it as, St. Werner says, “a meeting of timelines, histories, genres, styles and technologies. It’s tape and digital, electronic acoustic instruments and recording techniques, and then AI.” To wit, when the duo asked Perry’s widow if it would be okay to use AI to render elements of his voice, she told them, St. Werner recalls, to “‘Go for it. Lee would have loved this, he was super into that kind of stuff.’”

As an explorer of music, art, philosophy and the nature of time itself, Perry’s work across mediums melded sounds and styles, bending things and transforming them into something different while infusing logic both scientific and spiritual. Spatial, No Problem. manages to capture that wizardry, presenting Perry’s work while functioning as a retrospective and celebration of his life.

“This record kind of predicts like, what could it be if all the knowledge you have at hand could just merge and fertilize and create something again?” says St. Werner. “It’s like you’re on a spaceship and all the nations of the world try to find other forms of life and engage in dialog, and it’s like a time capsule that travels backwards as much as it travels forward. I think that’s what that record is.”