San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie arrived in Seoul with a recovery argument: for a post-pandemic city working to bring people back downtown, music is not nightlife at the margins. It is civic infrastructure.

From April 21 to 23, Lurie spent three days in Seoul marking the 50th anniversary of the San Francisco–Seoul sister-city relationship, on what local coverage described as his first official overseas trip since taking office. Traveling with him was a delegation of arts, culture and business leaders, including EMPIRE founder and CEO Ghazi Shami, whose San Francisco-headquartered independent music company has been expanding its Asia strategy since appointing Jeffrey Yoo as senior vp of East Asia in October 2024.

For Lurie and Shami, Seoul functioned as more than a diplomatic stop. The visit clarified a broader alignment between culture, business and city-building: San Francisco is using live music and public programming as part of its recovery strategy, while EMPIRE is expanding Asia as a major axis of its global operation. Seoul offered a natural meeting point for both.

“Our philosophy at City Hall is to create the conditions so that culture leaders can do what they do best,” Lurie told Billboard Korea. “And that starts with public safety. You don’t get that right, nothing else works.”

Lurie, who founded the anti-poverty nonprofit Tipping Point Community before becoming San Francisco’s 46th mayor in January 2025, has built his administration around the visible repair of a city whose downtown struggled sharply through the pandemic years. In his telling, the work is not only about policing or office vacancy. It is about rebuilding the conditions that make people choose a city again.

That means public safety. It means permitting reform. And increasingly, it means programming the city through concerts, festivals and cultural events at a scale large enough to change behavior.

In summer 2025, during Lurie’s first year in office, San Francisco hosted a three-weekend run of major music events in Golden Gate Park: Dead & Company’s three-night stand marking the Grateful Dead’s 60th anniversary, the long-running Outside Lands festival, and a Zach Bryan concert at the Polo Field. According to the mayor’s office, the block was projected to generate $150 million in local economic activity and drew more than 450,000 attendees.

“We had three weekends of music that brought in close to half a million people,” Lurie said. “Music, arts, culture brings people together. It brings people to our city to come see shows.”

What turns that programming into policy is San Francisco’s entertainment-zone and permitting overhaul. In May 2025, Lurie signed legislation creating five new Entertainment Zones across the city — designated areas where, under California state legislation championed by State Sen. Scott Wiener, open-container alcohol consumption is permitted on closed streets during sanctioned events. With those additions, San Francisco had 21 entertainment zones adopted or pending, according to the mayor’s office.

The model is designed to reduce the cost and friction of outdoor events by making it easier for neighborhoods, restaurants, bars, artists and promoters to turn streets into programmed cultural space. For visiting artists, labels and cultural partners, the framework could offer a more flexible layer of activation beyond the traditional ticketed concert: outdoor showcases, fan-facing pop-ups and neighborhood-scale events that can sit alongside a larger tour or release campaign.

PermitSF, Lurie’s regulatory-reform package, is the other half of the strategy. The mayor described it as a broad attempt to make San Francisco easier to build in, operate in and reimagine.

“We have done 20 pieces of legislation to make it easier to have concerts, to build housing, to start a small business, or to take over a huge new building and reimagine it from the ground up,” he said. “Our job is to create the conditions for San Francisco’s comeback.”

Lurie returned often to the relationship between City Hall and small business, describing entrepreneurs and cultural businesses as partners in the city’s recovery.

“We look at our small-business community as a partner,” he said. “With Ghazi, it’s about creativity, but it’s also about the city — and how his company gives back to the community. I believe it has to be a partnership.”

Lurie also cited a shift in local sentiment, referencing San Francisco Chamber of Commerce CityBeat polling: two years ago, 22% of San Franciscans felt the city was heading in the right direction. Today, he said, that figure is about 65%.

“A new chapter of San Francisco is being written,” Lurie said.

Seoul offered a useful counterpoint. South Korea has increasingly turned music and popular culture into tourism experiences and cultural strategy, not only through concerts but through adjacent programming: dance classes, broadcast-studio tours, K-pop-themed experiences and festival-linked tourism programs.

That model is visible in both public policy and visitor behavior. In 2026, South Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism said it would intensively foster “Global Festivals” as part of a broader goal to attract 30 million inbound tourists, while recent local coverage has pointed to K-pop and K-culture experiences as a growing part of foreign visitors’ itineraries. BTS-related tourism has also shown how a major music event can move fans through multiple districts and cultural sites, but the broader point is not limited to one act: in Korea, music increasingly operates beyond the venue, as a route into tourism, local business, public space and city identity.

EMPIRE is a visible music-industry example in San Francisco’s version of that chapter. Founded in San Francisco in 2010 by Shami, the independent label, distributor and publisher has built its reputation on artist-friendly, non-exclusive structures and a technology-driven back end outside the major-label system. Its roster includes Shaboozey, whose country-pop breakout “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” spent 19 non-consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, tying the all-time record set by Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” in 2019.

In January 2025, EMPIRE acquired the historic One Montgomery Street building in San Francisco’s Financial District as its new global headquarters, with a planned rooftop concert venue later submitted for city review. The move anchored Shami’s company more visibly in downtown San Francisco at a moment when the city was looking to reconnect business, culture and public life.

For Lurie, that matters.

“Entrepreneurs and business leaders like Ghazi, who have gone through the ups and downs of our city, born and raised in our city — it means everything,” Lurie said. “The global nature of his work is synonymous with what San Francisco is: a global city.”

For Shami, EMPIRE’s San Francisco identity is not a branding layer. It is part of the company’s operating system.

“EMPIRE is really a reflection of what San Francisco is,” Shami told Billboard Korea. “Incredibly like-minded people. Independent entrepreneurship.”

That operating system is now extending further into Asia. In October 2024, EMPIRE appointed Jeffrey Yoo — the executive who previously worked with Korean R&B artist DEAN and helped develop Jackson Wang’s international career — as senior vp of East Asia. The first signing under Yoo was G-Dragon, in partnership with the artist’s Korean agency Galaxy Corporation.

G-Dragon’s third studio album, Übermensch, was released February 25, 2025 via Galaxy Corporation and EMPIRE. The album ranked No. 10 on IFPI’s Global Album Sales Chart for 2025, while its title track, “TOO BAD,” featured Anderson .Paak.

EMPIRE has since signed a deal with Cambodian music company Baramey Production and, in April 2026 — the same month as Lurie’s Seoul visit — announced a strategic global partnership with Bollywood powerhouse Zee Music Company.

Asked what EMPIRE offers in 2026 that the major-label system does not, Shami pointed less to genre or geography than to internal architecture.

“In San Francisco, my CFO is Korean. My head of FP&A is Korean. I have Koreans in marketing and royalty processing, in many departments,” he said. “Because if we’re going to build a footprint here in Seoul and in greater Korea, you have to have that triangulation — where you’re triangulating culture but also business.”

That idea — triangulating culture and business — also described Lurie’s Seoul delegation. Lurie said the broader group included leaders from San Francisco’s arts and cultural institutions, including SFMOMA, the San Francisco Ballet, San Francisco Opera, the California Academy of Sciences and the Exploratorium. He also pointed to Korean-rooted leadership inside San Francisco’s cultural establishment, including San Francisco Opera music director Eun Sun Kim and Asian Art Museum director Dr. Soyoung Lee, as evidence that the connection between the two cities is already embedded inside institutional life.

“We have leaders of many of our arts and cultural institutions traveling with us,” Lurie said. “Those two leaders are representative of the Korean leadership in our city.”

The three-day itinerary included a stone-donation ceremony at the Garden of Gratitude memorial site at Gwanghwamun Square, a ceremonial first pitch at Gocheok Sky Dome, a Myeong-dong walk-through and meetings with Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon.

The trip ultimately positioned the San Francisco–Seoul relationship as more than a ceremonial anniversary. San Francisco is using cultural activity as part of its recovery strategy. EMPIRE is expanding Asia as a major axis of its global operation. Seoul, with its concentration of music, technology, fandom and cultural-export infrastructure, showed where those two movements could overlap.

“My first time to Seoul,” Lurie said. “It’s lived up to the reputation of being the center of arts, culture, K-pop and some incredible food. We look forward to deepening the connections between our two cities.”

Asked about the next phase, he framed the visit as groundwork for a relationship that is already moving beyond ceremony.

“Obviously, we have 50 years of sister-city relations,” Lurie said. “But what’s really exciting is how we can connect our cities even more deeply.”

Mayor Daniel Lurie and EMPIRE founder and CEO Ghazi Shami were interviewed by Jae Kim of Billboard Korea during Lurie’s April 2026 visit to Seoul.

After more than 15 years of appearances on Billboard’s Alternative Airplay chart, Young the Giant has its first No. 1, topping the May 23-dated tally with “Different Kind of Love.”

The song, the week’s Greatest Gainer in plays, leaps three spots to the top.

Formed in California in 2004, Young the Giant first reached Alternative Airplay in 2011 with its breakout single, “My Body,” which peaked at No. 5 that April, becoming the group’s first of six top 10s to date.

Prior to “Different Kind of Love,” the band’s top Alternative Airplay rank was No. 2, achieved with “It’s About Time” in 2014 and “Superposition” in 2019. In between those songs, the act notched three entries, paced by the No. 16-peaking “The Walk Home” in 2023.

Young the Giant is the fifth act to lead Alternative Airplay for the first time in 2026. That’s on pace with the 10 acts that did so in all of 2025.

Concurrently, “Different Kind of Love” ranks at No. 29 on Adult Alternative Airplay, after reaching No. 24. On the all-rock-format, audience-based Rock & Alternative Airplay chart, the tune rises 24-22 with 2.1 million audience impressions in the week ending May 14, up 10%, according to Luminate.

“Different Kind of Love” is the lead single from Victory Garden, Young the Giant’s sixth studio album, released May 1 on the band’s own label, Jungle Youth Music, via a licensing deal with Fearless and distribution through Concord. The set has earned 11,000 equivalent album units.

All Billboard charts dated May 23 will update Tuesday, May 19, on Billboard.com.

Zoe Wrenn, a musician, software engineer and founder of new music-making platform Tamber, is creating a future where musicians are able to make synthesizers sound like chocolate or snares that feel like the color blue. “If I were to describe this platform, I’d say I want it to make writing music feel magical. Inspiring. That’s my goal,” she says.

Tamber, which Wrenn has described previously as an “Adobe Creative Suite for music,” uses artificial intelligence to transform feelings, colors, sounds and other descriptive text into musical ideas, and Wrenn believes it could be the antidote to the rise of generative AI tools that are training on “stolen data” and dominating the market right now. 

“I’m seeing a lot of new AI music companies, and there are two questions I ask immediately: Where did their training data come from, and are they being sued by the musicians they’re claiming to help? If they don’t have good answers to that, I am not interested,” she says. “I believe there has to be another option.”

Tamber, which launches Monday (May 18), features a number of playful, hi-tech tools to jumpstart songwriting, including Gestures, which lets musicians shape the effects and tone music by recording via hand movements; Librarian, which allows users to scan their own sample library and transform them into something new; and City Packs, which offers sample libraries collected from cities around the world. 

To make the service more approachable, Tamber is centered around Tamby, the company’s animated mascot, designed to work alongside a user and to help automate parameters, build chains, swap out instruments and more. Over time, Tamby remembers the user’s preferences and customizes itself to become an increasingly specialized production partner.

To date, Tamber has been backed, as part of a recent $5 million funding round, by Adobe Ventures, M13, Rackhouse Venture Capital and a number of undisclosed artist investors — but the toolkit wasn’t always intended to be a company.

Wrenn first developed Tamber during the pandemic, when tours were grounded, for her own personal use. But after “Hailey,” a song of hers created with Tamber, began to take off, Wrenn started sharing the tool with musicmaking friends and found it was a boon for burned-out creatives, prompting her to turn it from a personal project into a full fledged start-up. 

“These days, there’s this overwhelming psychological pressure to keep up with the speed at which music is being discovered and created,” Wrenn says. “There was a turning point where all musicians were suddenly expected to create more music at an unnatural speed and to also become content creators. When I looked for tools to help me keep up with that, I found the tools were either blatantly robbing us or just weren’t particularly useful. I believe Tamber is the right solution.” 

Tamber has a number of different tools to choose from. What is one tool you’re particularly excited about? 

I’m really excited about our Librarian product. Basically, you can scan your entire computer and identify any piece of audio you have, and then index it with our models on top of it. So you can then search through your computer and be like, “I want a guitar that feels like blue,” or “tastes like chocolate,” etc. — but through your own samples. So they don’t have to be labeled. They can be labeled [with] a whole bunch of numbers or just nothing, and it will still be able to find them. And then you have this cool thing where you can press play and it pulls that sample up, and you can just kind of start stumbling through all of your samples. That was a need that a lot of musicians were asking for — to make their existing sample libraries and their computers much more intelligent, with our synesthetic data on top.

Do you see Tamber as a competitor of Splice, Suno or none of the above?

I think Tamber does a lot of things, so we feel we are defining a category as a sandbox for all kinds of music-making tools. I do think we are unique. In terms of comparing us to Splice — I know they’re trying to dive into some AI tools right now. I guess that would be somewhat similar. They’re doing a little bit more generative stuff, which we’re not really interested in touching right now.

With Suno, they’re doing the generative thing and now kind of backpedaling to be like, “Well, we’re all for artists, we’re just for artists,” because they realized artists are who they need. I have yet to see anything from them that I would want to use as an artist.

Tamber is powered by artificial intelligence, but you’re outspoken against companies like Suno. How do you see Tamber as leveraging this new tech in a positive way?

I mean, right off the bat, we don’t train on any third-party audio at all. A lot of the other music technology and AI companies have, as everyone knows, scraped a whole bunch of stuff and stolen the majority of their training data. We don’t do anything like that. We’re also not giving you a generative output — there’s no “press a button and a song spits out.” I’ve talked to a lot of musicians, and that’s not something people are interested in. We’re really not trying to flood the market with a whole bunch of slop. The main goal is to create something that helps people do things faster and better.

One of the key components of Tamber is Tamby, a character, which kind of reminds me of what Clippy was like for Microsoft Word, that guides you through the service. How did you develop this character, and why do you think it works as a way to help users explore the product?

I want the user to be able to actually identify with something, instead of it being some kind of sterile thing with no face to it. I had just started reading this book called ‘Mascot,’ which identified some really amazing mascots in public media that are maybe a little less known. I was inspired from that and from a lot of kawaii emoticons as well. That is why it looks kind of early 2000s. I wanted to build something very cute, very futuristic and simple too. 

There are a lot of AI music companies right now with different visions of the future. You have some pursuing AI-powered remixing for fans, high-tech DAWs, commercial music library creation or the “push a button and a song pops out” idea. How would you like to see the future play out for AI in music?

In terms of what I would want in the future, I want it to feel magical and not replicative, and I would want it to be things that artists actually want. I think it’s really insane that the first thing the space did was create a whole bunch of fully output songs built on stolen audio. It just feels like — what are we doing? It’s silly. And I do really think there’s going to be a future where the ones like Tamber succeed, where we’re not stealing from artists, where we genuinely care. Everyone here is an actual musician who has toured and done this thing.

Musicians Chappell Roan, Orville Peck and Melissa Etheridge; actors Jonathan Bailey and Laverne Cox; and tennis legend Billie Jean King are the six LGBTQ+ icons who are set to be honored at the 2026 Elton John Impact Awards, which will launch June 1 as a podcast series on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere podcasts are heard and as an audio special airing across iHeartRadio PRIDE stations.

Created by iHeartMedia and Procter & Gamble, and hosted by Billy Porter and iHeartRadio’s Elvis Duran, the Elton John Impact Awards celebrate trailblazing LGBTQ+ community members and prominent allies, while also giving back to LGBTQ+ organizations. The special will feature candid conversations with Elton John; his husband, David Furnish, chair of the Elton John AIDS Foundation; and this year’s honorees. Dove Cameron will perform John’s 1970 breakthrough hit “Your Song.”

“I’ve always believed in the power of storytelling to connect us and challenge us,” John said in a statement. “These conversations bring together the people who have shaped LGBTQ+ culture and fought for dignity at a time when the world too often looked away. Some are friends who stood beside me through the AIDS crisis, others are carrying the torch forward with the new generation. Hearing their stories and reflecting on how far we’ve come, and how far we still have to go, is deeply humbling. This is history that cannot be forgotten and these are voices that must be heard.”

The Elton John Impact Award was first introduced in 2022 at “Can’t Cancel Pride,” a virtual benefit concert launched by iHeartMedia and Procter & Gamble. John was its inaugural recipient in recognition of his decades-long advocacy for LGBTQ+ rights and the fight to end AIDS. Since then, the award has honored trailblazers including Brandi Carlile and Porter, evolving into the Elton John Impact Awards podcast series. Over the course of five years, Can’t Cancel Pride raised over $17 million for LGBTQ+ nonprofits.

The Elton John Impact Awards, which bills itself as the first-podcast awards ceremony, recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the LGBTQ+ community. This year’s honorees are:

Jonathan Bailey, 38: Film, television and stage actor who launched The Shameless Fund to support LGBTQ+ charities. Bailey received a Primetime Emmy nomination for his performance in Showtime’s Fellow Travelers and a total of four Actor Award nods for Bridgeton and Wicked. Bailey is People’s reigning Sexiest Man Alive – a huge step forward for representation.

Laverne Cox, 53: A four-time Primetime Emmy nominee for outstanding guess actress in a drama series for Orange Is the New Black, and a two-time Actor Award winner for that same series. Cox has elevated transgender visibility in mainstream media and remains a powerful voice for equality and inclusion.

Melissa Etheridge, 64: Two-time Grammy winner for best female rock vocal performance (“Ain’t It Heavy” and “Come to My Window”) and an Oscar-winning songwriter (“I Need to Wake Up” from An Inconvenient Truth). Etheridge has used her platform to champion LGBTQ+ rights for decades through personal storytelling within her music and cultural advocacy.

Billie Jean King, 82:  Sports and women’s rights icon and humanitarian who has spent her life advocating for gender and LGBTQ+ equality in and out of sports.

Orville Peck, 38: Trailblazing country performer who uses his artistic persona to blend traditional country aesthetics with queer themes and uses his platforms to create visibility and advocate for the LGBTQ+ community.

Chappell Roan, 28: The 2025 Grammy winner for best new artist, who advocates for LGBTQ+ rights with her unapologetic artistry and founding of The Midwest Princess Project to support trans youth.

The program will help drive visibility and funding for a range of frontline organizations working to support the LGBTQ+ community including the Elton John AIDS Foundation. In partnership with Carlile’s Looking Out Foundation, additional funds will be granted to CenterLink, GLAAD, the National Black Justice Collective, Outright International, SAGE and the Trevor Project. Each organization addresses various critical needs across the LGBTQ+ community, such as supporting and advocating for LGBTQ+ elder care, increasing access to preventative health services and treatment, and providing mental health support for young people.

“The Elton John Impact Awards spotlight the vital work of organizations protecting LGBTQ+ communities and advancing health equity around the world,” Furnish said in a statement. “At a time when LGBTQ+ rights and health equity remain under threat globally, investing in organizations on the frontlines has never been more urgent.”

A panel of leaders worked closely with John to select this year’s honorees. Advisory Council members include Furnish; Porter; Carlile; Elton John AIDS Foundation CEO Anne Aslett; P&G’s Brent Miller and iHeartMedia’s John Sykes.

Charitable foundation partners of this year’s event include the Elton John AIDS Foundation and The Looking Out Foundation.

Since it was founded in 1992, the Elton John AIDS Foundation has provided support and care for the LGBTQ+ community and tackled the stigma that stands in the way of ending AIDS. Since 2020, the Foundation has awarded more than 55 grants and invested over $23 million in programs across 47 countries. The Looking Out Foundation is a nonprofit organization which has supported humanitarian causes for over two decades. For more information visit