Louis Tomlinson is looking to develop some new musical talent.

The 29-year-old singer took to social media on Saturday (March 6) to announce his plans to launch a new artist management company.

“I always dreamed of having my own label, having an imprint never really worked for me because I still had to have someone else’s blessing to sign people,” Tomlinson began his series of tweets. “People I believed in massively but unfortunately didn’t fit the traditional pop role hence never doing the deals….”

The former One Direction member continued, “So I’ve decided to put it out there in the world today. I’m going to start my own music management company to help develop new artists. Watch this space.”

Tomlinson pointed out that the management company announcement is “the first step of actualising the idea but at this stage that’s all this is. An idea!” He also clarified in another tweet that his plans do not included forming a record label.

In July 2020, Tomlinson announced that he had parted ways with Simon Cowell’s Syco. The artist had signed a solo recording contract with the label in 2017.

“Hope everyone is doing ok! Just wanted to let you know that Syco Music and I have agreed to part ways,” Tomlinson tweeted at the time. I’m really excited for the future and to be back in the studio writing the next album. Can’t wait to finally see you all on tour!!”

One Direction’s five studio albums were released through Syco/Columbia Records.

In early 2019, Tomlinson joined Arista Records within the Sony Music family, where he signed to Epic under Syco in 2017. As part of the deal, the singer’s solo music was distributed through Syco/Arista in the United States.

Tomlinson has released four solo singles since One Direction announced its hiatus in 2015. His latest album, Walls, was released in 2020 and debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, giving the relaunched Arista Records its first top 10 on the chart in years.

View Tomlinson’s tweets about launching his own management company below.

Andra Day accepted the On Her Shoulders Preservation Award during the Black Women Film Network 2021 Summit on Saturday (March 6), thanking the non-profit organization for honoring her work in The United States Vs. Billie Holiday.

“Thank you for recognizing and honoring the work that we put into this, to continue to push Black women’s narratives forward, to continue to uncover Black women’s narratives,” Day said in a virtual acceptance speech.

“This award is more special to me because of our community, because of our family, because of who we are,” Day continued. “And to just know that I have the support and that Black women were moved by the film and felt they were represented, and felt that they were seen… I think that has everything to do with Billie Holiday’s legacy.”

The honor comes less than a week after Day won the Golden Globe best actress in a drama trophy for her performance in Hulu’s The United States vs. Billie Holiday, becoming the second-ever Black actress to win the category and the first to do so in 35 years.

Day was a first-time Globes winner. She was also nominated for best original song with Raphael Saadiq for “Tigress & Tweed” from the film, which is now streaming.

Her win marks the category’s first Black winner since Whoopi Goldberg, who became the first Black actress to do so in 1986. Halle Berry famously lost the category for Monster’s Ball but went on to win the Oscar in 2002. And Angela Bassett, who was a presenter on Sunday, was the last Black actress to win best actress in a comedy or musical, in 1994.

The Black Women Film Network is the oldest non-profit organization focused on preparing Black women in the film, television, and new media industries. On Saturday, it honored noteworthy names in the industry including Day, Debra L. Lee, Rikki Hughes, Mikki Turner, Courtney Neal and Denise Armstrong during its annual BWFN Summit.

The summit’s theme this year was “The Revolution Will Be Digitized: Black Women Leading in New Spaces as Multi-hyphenate Creators.” Presented by Cvent, the event celebrated Black women in the arts and entertainment industry and featured master classes, seminars and activities that helped connect key industry leaders with aspiring entertainment professionals. Featured speakers represented brands such as ColorCreative, BET, WME, NBCUniversal, WarnerMedia, Netflix, Tyler Perry Studios, CNN, and Starz.

This article originally appeared on The Hollywood Reporter.

Beyonce is honoring the memory of her young fan Lyric Chanel, who died Friday (March 5) after a two-year battle with brain cancer and anaplastic ependymoma.

The 13-year-old girl’s difficult illness was documented by her family on Instagram, which drew more than 600,000 followers and caught the attention of celebrities like Queen Bey and Cardi B.

Following Lyric’s death, Beyonce shared an emotional video montage on her website in celebration of the girl’s life. In the tribute, which features photos and videos of a smiling and dancing Lyric, Beyonce is heard singing a special medley of her hit songs “Brown Skin Girl,” “Halo” and “Love on Top.”

Toward the end of “Love on Top,” Bey changes the lyric “baby” to “Lyric” in remembrance of her late fan.

“Lyric it’s you/ You’re the one I love/ And you’re the one I need,” she sings. “You’re the only thing I see/ Come on Lyric it’s you/ You’re the one that gives your all/ You’re the one I can always call/ When I need you baby everything stops/ You put my love on top.”

Beyonce concludes the tribute with a heartfelt, “I love you with all my heart.”

In September, Lyric received a beautiful bouquet of white flowers from the 39-year-old mother of three after posting an adorable throwback video of herself singing the star’s 2011 hit “Love on Top.”

“When the Queen Bey sends you flowers,” Lyric’s family captioned a video of the girl alongside the flowers. “Thank you so much @beyonce Lyric was so shock to get mail from you and she said Beyonce is the Best!!! We love you so much and she hopes to one day meet you.”

Watch Beyonce’s beautiful tribute to Lyric Chanel below.

Roc Nation has won a $12 million lawsuit against Texas-based insurance provider Houston Casualty Company (HCC) for failing to pay out a “key man insurance policy” on Maroon 5’s late manager Jordan Feldstein.

Feldstein, older brother of actors Jonah Hill and Beanie Feldstein, was the co-founder and CEO of Career Artist Management (CAM) where he principally managed Maroon 5 and Adam Levine, his childhood friend. He died unexpectedly of natural causes at the age of 40 on Dec. 22, 2017, a day after Roc Nation paid the premium on his insurance policy with HCC.

Roc Nation obtained the policy on Feldstein as part of its 2016 purchase of a 49% ownership interest in CAM. Because of Feldstein’s importance to CAM, he and Roc Nation agreed in their purchase contract to obtain insurance protecting Roc Nation’s investment should Feldstein die or become disabled, according to court papers. Roc Nation purchased the “key man insurance policy” from HCC in 2016 and renewed the policy on Dec. 21, 2017, making it effective from Dec. 15, 2017, onward.

Feldstein died suddenly from a pulmonary embolism, with the Los Angeles Medical Examiner declaring his cause of death as natural. But HCC denied paying out Roc Nation’s claim and Roc Nation responded by suing in U.S. District Court Southern District of New York on Jan. 18, 2019, for wrongfully denying insurance coverage.

HCC argued in court papers that Roc Nation was precluded from any recovery because the company failed to cooperate with HCC’s investigation of the claim — a contention that Roc Nation denied. HCC also argued that the policy language required the insurance payment be reduced by all future profits that could have been traceable to Feldstein’s services. To this, Roc Nation’s legal team argued that the policy’s plain language outlines that it was entitled to recoup from HCC its full investment in CAM, minus any dividends it had received from CAM by the time Feldstein died.

Both sides debated over whether the meaning of “and/or,” writing “insured” rather than “insured person,” and whether misplaced words such as stating “Direct Ascertained Net Loss” rather than “Direct Net Ascertained loss” created other contractual meanings. HCC attorneys tried to convince the judge that term “generated” in the policy referred to revenue that Feldstein meant to set forth “to bring into existence.”

Ultimately, in a 52-page ruling issued Wednesday in U.S. District Court Southern District of New York, Judge Paul Engelmayer sided with Roc Nation finding it “complied with the overwhelming majority of HCC’s requests, and offered reasonable justifications when it failed to do so.” Engelmayer said he found Roc Nation submitted extensive information in response to HCC’s “unreasonably broad” requests and had “only drawn the line when the requests [were] overtly irrelevant or not reasonably-tailored. He also said that term “generated” referred to revenue that was generated and was not a “forward looking” meaning.

Engelmayer ruled that HCC must pay Roc Nation a $12,529,222 policy amount, minus any money generated by Feldstein while he was alive and performing services through December 22, 2017. Engelmayer, however, denied that any post-death revenue from artists formerly associated with Feldstein or CAM needed to taken into account.

“Cases against insurance companies are complex and fact intensive,” says Scott Zolke, a partner at Loeb & Loeb, not affiliated with the case. “It is incumbent upon the insurance company to say precisely what they’re covering, as opposed to using terms that can be interpreted a couple of different ways. And this was an instance where when you look at these terms that I want to say were conflicting, it clearly created an ambiguity, and that ambiguity is going to every time be interpreted against the insurance company and in favor of the insured.”

“It is of paramount importance to specifically and clearly say what you’re insuring…. It underscores the importance of actually reading what you’re signing. A typo leaves us with ambiguity and ambiguity leads to litigation…. If you don’t define precisely what you are insuring, then you’re leaving yourself subject to a differing view.”

Attorneys for Roc Nation and HCC did not respond to request for comment.

Bhaskar Menon, the founding chairman and CEO at EMI Music Worldwide who is widely credited for breaking Pink Floyd in the U.S. and presiding over one of Capitol Records’ most successful eras, died on Mar. 4, 2021, at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 86.

“Determined to achieve excellence, Bhaskar Menon built EMI into a music powerhouse and one of our most iconic, global institutions,” said Universal Music Group chairman and CEO Lucian Grainge in a statement. “Music and the world have lost a special one. Our hearts go out to his loved ones.”

Over the course of a 34-year tenure at EMI, Menon would work with a slew of boldfaced artists — the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Queen, David Bowie and Tina Turner among them — but it would be his time as president and CEO of Capitol Records that would bring him his greatest renown. Asked in 1971 to lead the Los Angeles-based label, in which EMI held a majority interest, Menon would go on to orchestrate a massive, company-wide campaign around the release of Pink Floyd’s 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon despite the band’s failure to break through to U.S. audiences over the preceding years. The gambit paid off: The Dark Side of the Moon soon rocketed to No. 1 on the Billboard 200, minted the band as major stars in America and has since been certified 15-times platinum by the RIAA. In the process, he reversed the fortunes of the label — which had experienced a major hit to its bottom line after the breakup of its top act the Beatles in 1970 — virtually overnight.

In the 2003 documentary The Making of the Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason acknowledged Menon’s outsized influence on the album’s success. “The story in America was a disaster, in that we really hadn’t sold records,” he said at the time. “And so they brought in a man called Bhaskar Menon who was absolutely terrific. He decided he was going to make this work, and make the American company sell [Dark Side of the Moon]. And he did.”

Born Vijaya Bhaskar Menon in Thiruvanthapuram, India, on May 29, 1934, to father KRK — a notable civil servant who would go on to serve as India’s first Finance Minister — and mother Saraswathi, Menon would form a love of music via the Indian ragas his mother played in their home growing up.

After earning his master’s degree from Christ Church, Oxford, Menon kicked off what would become a 34-year run at EMI in 1956 after being recruited to the company directly from the university. In 1957, he moved to EMI’s Indian subsidiary, Gramophone Company of India, where he rose through the ranks before eventually being elevated to chairman in 1969. One notable example of Menon’s zeal for his work came in 1968, when he hand-delivered a recording device to the Bombay studio where George Harrison was recording his debut solo album Wonderwall. “Mr. Bhaskar Menon brought a two-track machine all the way from Calcutta on the train for me,” Harrison recalled later, “because all they had in Bombay at the time was a mono machine, the same kind we used in Abbey Road to do the ‘Paperback writer writer’ echo.”

Later in 1969, Menon’s career received another boost when the 35-year-old executive was named managing director of EMI International, holding direct operating responsibility for companies in 25 countries.

The most notable chapter in Menon’s career began in 1971, when he relocated to Los Angeles in 1971 to take the helm at Capitol, where he allegedly laid down the following motto for employees: “’Uncompromising excellence in what you do goes without saying. We expect more than that.”

Menon would live up to his own words by helping successfully steer the company  into the new decade. In addition to the monster success of The Dark Side of the Moon, which would remain on the Billboard 200 for 14 years, Menon would preside over successful releases from acts including Grand Funk Railroad, Linda Ronstadt, Helen Reddy, Wings, Natalie Cole, Bob Seger and The Steve Miller Band.

Menon’s tenure at Capitol came to an end in 1978, when he was named chairman and CEO of EMI Music Worldwide, a position he held for the next 12 years (along with the dual role of chairman of EMI Films & TV for North America). In 1990, he would be awarded the IFPI Medal of Honour for services to the global music industry after serving for many years as IFPI’s chairman and president. That same year, he was appointed to the rank of Chevalier De L’Ordre Des Arts et Des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture for his service to the music and film industries.

After leaving the music business in the early 1990s, Menon remained in Los Angeles and founded the company International Media Investments in 1995, through which he invested in and provided consultation services for a variety of entertainment and media businesses, including Indian broadcaster NDTV, where he held a seat on the board.

Menon is survived by Sumitra, his wife of 49 years, sons Siddhartha and Vishnu and sister Vasantha Menon.