The JACKBOYS 2 rollout is in motion. Travis Scott kicked off JB2 with the release of a cinematic visual for the compilation project’s first single “2000 Excursion” (previously titled “B&B”) on Tuesday (July 8), which is currently only available on YouTube as of press time.

La Flame reunites with a pair of his Cactus Jack running mates for the Cardo-produced banger, which features a sample of Ye’s “Power” and appearances from Sheck Wes and Don Toliver.

“He sleep with a Spanish bi— in the club/ Bro knowin’ Spanglish, that’s good enough/ Wе took an hour out of the after-hours just to f— up all the ones/ I got a bunch, you ain’t doin’ brunch,” Scott raps.

The second part of the woozy bar could be a reference to a strip club-fueled night out or La Flame invading The Weeknd and Playboi Carti’s After Hours Til Dawn Tour stop in Los Angeles.

As for the colorful visual, Scott and the crew head down to Texas while burning rubber and spinning out in exotic sports cars and supercharged Ford trucks. They even hit an F1 race to take in some professional action.

This is only a taste of what’s to come with JB2. Scott has been sending out custom JACKBOYS Lamborghinis to artists’ driveways who are slated to appear on the album. The list includes GloRilla, Tyla, Vybz Kartel, 21 Savage, Kodak Black, SahBabii and Waka Flocka Flame.

Travis Scott has also released a limited-edition JACKBOYS 2 merchandise collection, along with various CD and vinyl bundles featuring alternate covers for the project. According to the Cactus Jack honcho’s website, JB2 will boast seven tracks and is slated to arrive later in July.

Gear up, and watch the “2000 Excursion” video below.

At the end of June, Lorde returned after four years with Virgin, an LP full of some of the most intense, vulnerable songs she’s ever written. But not too long ago, she worried she’d never be able to make music again.

In an interview with BBC Radio 1 posted Tuesday (July 8), the pop star shared how her creative abilities were previously stifled by an unrelenting eating disorder — something she’s been open about overcoming throughout the Virgin rollout process. According to Lorde, her mind was once so consumed with being thin, she didn’t have any capacity left over for writing songs.

“At the beginning of 2023, I was just, like, not in a great way on a lot of levels,” she told host Jack Saunders. “I never felt more disconnected from my creativity. I hadn’t had an idea in a long time.”

“This was a period where all I was thinking about was trying to weigh as little as possible, and going to sleep thinking about food, and waking up thinking about food and exercise,” she continued. “That was my creative pursuit; that’s where it was all going. At the time I was like, ‘I need to stop doing this, because it’s blocking all of my artistry.’ Once that went away, it all started coming back.”

After taking time to focus on her well-being, Lorde was finally able to get back in the studio and produce Virgin, which dropped June 27 and debuts this week at No. 2 on the Billboard 200. On one of the album’s songs, “Broken Glass,” she dives into her struggles with body image, singing, “I spent my summer getting lost in math/ Making weight took all I had.”

The track has already become a notable fan favorite on the LP. But one song listeners have been loving in particular is album-closer “David,” which Lorde told Saunders she named in part after Michelangelo’s famous statue of the same name.

“I also thought a lot about David and Goliath and this story of power,” she explained. “Part of making this album was definitely coming to terms with the fact that there have been a lot of power dynamics in my life, and they’re not romantic most of the time. I’ve been working for a long time, and I’ve looked up at some man over and over and over. And I was just like, ‘You know what? I’m just going to let it rip here and say it all.’”

The Grammy winner was previously in a relationship with music executive Justin Warren, who is about 17 years her senior and works for Universal Music Group, the parent company of Lorde’s label, Republic Records. After about eight years together, Lorde revealed in a 2023 letter to fans that she was “living with heartbreak again.”

On “David,” she sings to an ex-partner, “I made you God ’cause it was all/ That I knew how to do/ But I don’t belong to anyone.”

And on BBC Radio 1, she added of the song, “It just felt like a really important bit of just being super real that needed to happen for me. I was like, ‘When I say this, then I’m free.’”

Watch Lorde’s full interview above.

THE BIG STORY: Sean “Diddy” Combs was convicted on Wednesday (July 2) of illegal prostitution but acquitted of more severe sex-trafficking and racketeering charges, a significant legal victory for the disgraced rap mogul who faced up to life in prison if found guilty on all counts.

The jury deliberated for two days before finding Combs guilty of transporting girlfriends and male escorts across state lines for drug-fueled sex marathons called “freak-offs.” But they were not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that this conduct occurred as part of a criminal enterprise or that Combs’ alleged victims – singer Cassie Ventura and an anonymous woman known as “Jane” – were coerced into the sex parties.

The verdict came as a shock to many who’ve been following Combs’ stunning fall from grace that began when Ventura brought a bombshell civil lawsuit against him in 2023. Combs quickly settled with Ventura for $20 million, but a deluge of similar lawsuits followed. The civil litigation onslaught then turned into a criminal investigation, and Combs was indicted and arrested last year.

We at Billboard have been all over the story, covering everything from how Combs nabbed this partial victory to what comes next.

You’re reading The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between. To get the newsletter in your inbox every Tuesday, go subscribe here.

Other top stories this week…

CAR SEX CLAIMS – A federal judge denied a motion by Megan Thee Stallion and her management company Roc Nation to dismiss claims that the rapper forced cameraman Emilio Garcia to watch her have sex in a moving car while on tour in Ibiza, Spain. The judge said Garcia, who is gay, sufficiently alleged that Megan wouldn’t have subjected a straight employee to the same treatment. Megan and Roc Nation, who’ve vehemently denied the claims and called Garcia a “con artist,” did get a small win in trimming some ancillary claims from the lawsuit.

DOLL DO-OVER – A federal judge reduced T.I. and Tameka “Tiny” Harris’ $71 million jury verdict over claims that toymaker MGA’s line of “O.M.G.” dolls copied their real-life teen pop group OMG Girlz, saying the rapper and his wife didn’t prove they deserve $53 million in punitive damages. The judge said that while a jury correctly found that MGA’s dolls stepped on protected properties of the OMG Girlz, there was no evidence that the infringement was deliberate. The long-running dispute is now on track for a retrial — the whopping fourth time the case will go before a jury.

BIG TIME BRAWL – Sony Music Entertainment was hit with a lawsuit from Scott Fellows, creator of the Nickelodeon series Big Time Rush. The complaint alleged that when the TV show’s eponymous boy band, Big Time Rush, reunited four years ago and struck a deal to go independent from Nickelodeon and Sony, the label deliberately structured the agreement so that Fellows would not receive a 3.75% cut of touring profits he’d gotten in the band’s original heyday.

TAX TRIUMPH – The Help Independent Tracks Succeed (HITS) Act, the long-in-the-works legislation that would allow musicians to deduct 100% of their production expenses in the year they’re incurred, was finally passed by Congress and signed into law as part of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The milestone was quickly celebrated by longtime bill supporters, including Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason jr., A2IM president/CEO Dr. Richard James Burgess and NITO president Wayne Forte.

Two Saturdays ago, three of Jim Roppo’s kids fired up KPop Demon Hunters during its opening weekend on Netflix, unaware that their dad, the President/COO of Republic Corps., had anything to do with the movie or its soundtrack. Then, they watched it again. And again.

“My kids watched this movie three-and-a-half times in 24 hours,” Roppo tells Billboard of his 12-year-old, 13-year-old and 15-year-old children. And the next day, they started blasting the songs from the soundtrack. 

Roppo noted this behavior from “my own little home test-market group,” he says with a laugh, while also seeing how well KPop Demon Hunters was performing on Netflix, and the eyebrow-raising early streaming numbers from the soundtrack. Before the end of the weekend, “I started ringing all the alarms across the company, with all of our partners and teams,” recalls Roppo — what once had piqued the interest of his family was quickly becoming a global smash.

Since that opening weekend, millions of new viewers have watched KPop Demon Hunters, an animated musical about a fictional K-pop girl group, HUNTR/X, who secretly slay demon spirits when they’re not dazzling arena audiences. Two and a half weeks after the film was released on June 20, KPop Demon Hunters remains atop Netflix’s global top 10 movies list. And its soundtrack, which was released simultaneously, has surged higher on the Billboard 200, debuting at No. 8 and moving up to No. 3 in its second week, with 62,000 equivalent album units — a 97% increase from Week 1 to Week 2, according to Luminate.

When a soundtrack to an animated musical displays that type of growth, the culprit is usually a standout song or two — think “Let It Go” from Frozen. But KPop Demon Hunters is a phenomenon more reminiscent of 2021’s Hot 100-blanketing Encanto soundtrack, with seven songs from the soundtrack appearing on this week’s chart, led by the HUNTR/X anthem “Golden” at No. 23 and “Your Idol,” from their villainous boy band counterpart Saja Boys, at No. 31. Both songs have hovered near the top of daily U.S. and global streaming listings for days, but so have HUNTR/X’s hammering opener “How It’s Done,” the sticky-sweet boy band song “Soda Pop” and the pivotal ballad “What It Sounds Like,” all of which are currently in the top 11 of Spotify’s Daily Top Songs USA chart.

“It’s seven or eight songs deep — not just in America, and not just on one platform,” Roppo says of the set’s bench depth, also nodding to the strength of the two songs from K-pop superstars TWICE that appear on the soundtrack. “There’s no one who could tell you they predicted this.” 

That includes Ian Eisendrath, the film’s executive music producer. “I’ve always believed in the songs, and thought they would pop,” Eisendrath says, “but not like this.”

Eisendrath says that the music for the Sony Pictures Animation and Netflix film was developed over a three-year period, after being approached by Sony Motion Pictures Group’s music president Spring Aspers for the project. A veteran music director for film, TV and theater — with credits ranging from Disney’s recent Snow White remake to Broadway’s Come From Away — Eisendrath says that he was already a big K-pop fan, and felt like the “high-drama” music would naturally translate to an animated musical.

“It just felt so cinematic, so big,” he says. “The production is immense, intense and multi-layered, and that’s the kind of sound you want in a film.”

He worked closely with film co-directors Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans — and several K-pop songwriters and musicians — to capture that gravity in the film’s various songs. Instead of functioning as the vision of a lone creative steward a la Alan Menken or Lin-Manuel Miranda, the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack was assembled by a sprawling team of pop and K-pop studio experts — including The Black Label’s Teddy Park, 24, IDO, Jenna Andrews and Stephen Kirk — and vocal talents behind HUNTR/X (EJAE, Audrey Nuna, REI AMI) and Saja Boys (Andrew Choi, Danny Chung, Kevin Woo, samUIL Lee and Neckwav).

Across all of the musical players, the goal was the same: create K-pop songs that could work within the Demon Hunters narrative, and stand on their own outside of the story. “The songs were always functioning in both aspects,” Eisendrath explains, “as truly relevant K-pop songs, created by K-pop makers, that add to the overall narrative within the film, and as singles that are just universal pop songs.”

As the film and its music were being finalized, Republic Records was made aware of the project roughly a year ago, according to Roppo, thanks to Savan Kotecha, the veteran pop producer-songwriter (One Direction, Ariana Grande) now serving as the head of the newly formed label Visva Records. Sony Pictures’ Aspers originally brought KPop Demon Hunters to Visva, and Kotecha looped in Republic to partner on the soundtrack. “The vision behind the film and the uniqueness of the music felt electric from day one,” Kotecha says in a statement.

Meanwhile, TWICE was looped into the project thanks to Republic’s partnership with JYP Entertainment Corporation on the best-selling K-pop girl group’s studio output. In addition to TWICE’s previously released song “Strategy” appearing on the soundtrack, the group recorded their own version of the HUNTR/X diss song “Takedown,” and their group moniker appears in the film multiple times. “It meant a lot to all of us, says Eisendrath, “when they were willing to sign on and sing one of these songs — that felt like such an authentication of what we were doing.”

Upon the film’s June 20 release, Roppo says that the soundtrack’s cross-platform activity reminded him of Encanto becoming a home-video sensation during the pandemic. As such, the entire Republic promotional apparatus sprang into action. “We’ve built a machine to not only detect these early signals, but maximize opportunities very, very quickly,” he says.

Following the soundtrack’s second-week streaming explosion, Republic hustled to have “Golden” impact top 40 radio stations on Tuesday (July 8), as the song “that we feel has the most mainstream pop opportunity and appeal,” says Roppo. Multiple physical versions of the soundtrack are now available for pre-order, as is a 7-inch single featuring both versions of “Takedown” that ships later this week. And Roppo says that the team is discussing potential remixes of “Golden,” with some “A-list remixers” in play for a new version of the soundtrack’s biggest hit so far.

The summer of KPop Demon Hunters is just getting started, considering the global enormity of Netflix — which has an estimated 300 million viewers — and the fact that, unlike viral synchs from Stranger Things and Wednesday in recent years, the music appears throughout a 100-minute family film instead of showing up multiple episodes into an adult-leaning series. Yet Roppo says that some of the most encouraging internal data points he’s seen about the film is its viewership in the 18-to-44 demographic — as well as its appeal with viewers who did not previously watch any K-pop content on the platform.

“It has crossed the rubicon globally,” says Roppo. “This is not a K-pop phenomenon. Now, it’s a pop culture phenomenon.”