The U.K. festival circuit is set to welcome a new addition this summer with the arrival of Diaspora Calling!, headlined by the legendary Lauryn Hill.

The event will make its debut on British soil on Aug. 7, taking over the 65,000-capacity Milton Keynes National Bowl in England. Alongside a rare appearance from Hill, the inaugural U.K. edition of Diaspora Calling! will feature fellow Fugees founding member Wyclef Jean as well as YG Marley and Zion Marley. 

Additional acts across two stages are expected to be announced in the coming months. According to a press release, the event will also feature a street food village and other immersive art installations. 

Tickets will be available on Tuesday, March 31, at 9 a.m. GMT. Fans can sign up for event news and further ticketing information at the Diaspora Calling! U.K. website. 

Established by Hill in 2016, the first edition of the Diaspora Calling! took place at Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre in New York, with the intention of showcasing artists and musicians from Africa and the African diaspora. The performance series has since seen Hill platform Haitian art exhibitions, alongside artists including Nas, Kehlani, Noname and Little Simz.

Singer and rapper Hill first rose to prominence as a member of hip-hop group The Fugees before releasing her landmark solo album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, in 1998, which scooped five Grammys including album of the year, with the star becoming the first woman to win five or more awards in a single night. Most recently, she performed at the 2026 Grammys ceremony to pay tribute to the late D’Angelo and Roberta Flack.

Hill’s live performances have been relatively scarce in recent years, while her headline slot at Diaspora Calling! U.K. is her only confirmed British show for 2026. In summer 2024, Hill and The Fugees announced The Miseducation Anniversary Tour, a run celebrating The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill alongside the group’s 1996 LP The Score.

The U.S. leg of the tour was canceled three days before the first scheduled show in August, with Hill citing “media outlets’ penchant for sensationalism and clickbait headlines” for low ticket sales. The U.K. dates still went ahead as planned later that year, however, including a night at London’s O2 Arena.

In recent years, the Milton Keynes National Bowl has played host to Yungblud’s Bludfest all-dayer, alongside My Chemical Romance’s U.K. comeback gigs in summer 2022 and a sold-out show from drum ‘n’ bass duo Chase & Status two years later.

Jack Harlow is headed out on the road in support of his new R&B-leaning album Monica. The Louisville-bred rapper’s Live Nation-promoted North American Monica Tour is slated to kick off on August 4 at the Brooklyn Paramount in Brooklyn, N.Y. and hit Chicago, Detroit, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Toronto, Boston, Washington, D.C., Louisville, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco before winding down on Sept. 21 at the Fox Theater in Oakland.

Tickets for the shows will go on sale first through a CITI presale slated to open on Thursday (March 26) at 10 a.m. local time, with additional pre-sales running throughout the week ahead of the general on-sale beginning on Friday (March 27) at 10 a.m. local time; sign up for early access to presale tickets and other ticketing information here.

Harlow’s fourth studio album was recorded at New York’s legendary Electric Lady Studios and marks a pivot to a more R&B and jazz-inspired sound, with production from Aksel Arvid (PinkPantheress’s Fancy That), Jermaine Paul (Brandy, Alicia Keys), Clay Harlow, Angel “BabeTruth” Lopez (Mariah Carey, Coldplay, Justin Bieber) and Hollywood Cole (Lil Wayne, Drake, 21 Savage), as well as features from Robert Glasper, Ravyn Lenae, Omar Apollo, and rising R&B singer James Savage.

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Harlow, 28, said he scrapped his planned follow-up to 2023 Jackman album and started over with a more neo-soul-inspired sound harkening back to 1990s R&B. “I was getting to the point where I was dreading going to the studio. And I thought about, ‘what do I actually want to do? What would intrigue me?’,” Harlow told the paper. “It just struck me that I would want to do something a little more egoless. As I’m getting older, I’m having more trouble reconciling being braggadocious on record. And it’s a pillar of rap. Part of the reason I love rap music is the braggadocio of it. But I spent some time thinking, How can I lean away from that?”

The result, he said, was something more sonically softer and melodic, with no braggadocio and an attempt to be less self-indulgent and, shockingly, no rapping. “As long as it was melodic — everything had to have melody is, I guess, the best way to put it. But in shorthand, we were saying no rapping,” he explained.

Check out the dates for Jack Harlow’s Monica Tour below.

Megan Thee Stallion is now a Broadway hottie. On Tuesday (March 24), the rapper made her debut as Zidler in Moulin Rouge!, a feat she celebrated by sharing a video of her first-ever curtain call.

In the clip — filmed from the audience at Al Hirschfeld Theatre in New York City — Meg appears on stage in her embellished red jacket, glitzy boots and top hat. Seemingly closing out the show, she quotes one of her own Billboard Hot 100-topping hits by proclaiming into a microphone, “I’m a savage,” earning rapturous applause.

She then waves and twerks for the audience before lining herself back up with the rest of the cast for one last kick line. “MY BROADWAY DEBUT AS ZIDLER IN @moulinrougebway,” the Hot Girl Coach wrote in the caption. “So grateful for this incredible cast & crew & everyone who worked so hard to make opening night a success!! HOTTIES IM ON BROADWAY!!”

Meg will continue playing Zidler on Broadway through May 17, making her the latest star in a long history of musicians crossing over into theater. In recent years, Nicole Scherzinger has starred in Sunset Boulevard, and Michelle Williams is currently playing a lead role in Death Becomes Her on Broadway.

The Houston rapper — who has also acted in screen projects such as Reggie Dinkins and Dicks: The Musical — last dropped an album in 2024, with Megan reaching No. 3 on the Billboard 200 that year. In 2025, she dropped singles “Whenever” and “Lover Girl,” with the latter peaking in the top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100.

Check out Meg’s post celebrating her Broadway debut below.

Jesse Coren and Andrew Spelman, two of the co-founders of popular digital marketing company Chaotic Good, joined Billboard at South by Southwest (SXSW) on March 14 to talk about how songs go viral in 2026, and how online discourse around artists can be manipulated in their favor by companies like theirs. The conversation, hosted by Kristin Robinson, was released on Wednesday (March 25) as one of two live episodes of On the Record, Billboard’s music business podcast. The other episode, featuring Mark Cuban, can be found here.

Coren and Spelman first decided to start Chaotic Good in February 2025 after years of working as artist managers through their company Mutual Friends (Chelsea Cutler, Alexander 23, Quinn XCII). “There’s so much pressure on the artist,” Coren says. “How much are they posting? Have they posted today? Why haven’t they posted? As managers, our job is to support the artist. For a while, we were used to throwing our hands up and thinking, ‘Well, if they’re not driving it from their page, what can we do?’”

Then, after meeting digital marketing gurus Tim Weber and Adam Tarsia, the four decided to team up to create an agency that would take some of the marketing pressure off the artist. Instead of asking artists to post more self-promotional content, Chaotic Good builds a network of TikTok pages of all kinds — from fan pages, meme pages, sports clips and more — and plugs the artist’s song in the background to create a groundswell of support for the track.

Since its founding, Chaotic Good has become a go-to for labels and artists looking for this newer form of digital marketing, which Spelman calls “trend simulation.” The company has so far run successful campaigns for talents like Zara Larsson, Coldplay, Tame Impala, Mitski, Travis Scott, Childish Gambino and more.

Watch or listen to the full episode of On the Record with Chaotic Good below on YouTube, or check it out on other podcast platforms here.

Can you tell when the TikTok algorithm changes? Is there a moment where you’re like, wait — what was working yesterday is suddenly not happening today?

Spelman: TikTok is structured around trending audios, but the other side of that coin is that it’s also structured around trending formats. For a specific genre at a specific time, there will be a format that really works. What we’re paying attention to is when that starts to have diminishing returns — when we need to pack up camp and set it up somewhere else. Algorithm changes are more on the Instagram and Reels side as they figure things out. If you listen to Meta earnings reports, view time on Instagram Reels is up 30%, and that’s a real thing. They’re clearly perfecting the algorithm, and so we as a company have to pay more attention to it. We’ve been running a lot more experiments there. I think a year from now, if you ask me what’s changed, it’ll be that we’ve done a lot more on Instagram.

TikTok in the U.S. is now under new ownership, and I feel like, personally, as a TikTok user, I’ve noticed the algorithm is a little different. I’m wondering — has that impacted your business?

Coren: I think it’s more about being mindful of the macro scale of what this means. As Andrew said, paying attention to what competitors [like Reels] are doing and making sure we’re mindful that things may change at any time. We always reserve a percentage of our bandwidth to experiment and to make sure we’re building out emergency infrastructure in case something were to happen on any platform. I don’t think we’re seeing that much change right now, but it’s a signal that we should always be prepared for anything at any time.

Every genre of music caters to a different audience. Could you give me examples of different types of content that fare best for different genres?

Spelman: This is a really core principle of the company: We can drive impressions on anything at this point — we know how to go viral, we have thousands of pages. But making sure those impressions aren’t empty calories, that they actually find your audience, is the hard part. For a lot of underground rap songs, stretched-out clips of video games are really popular right now. For singer-songwriter stuff, I’m sure a lot of people have seen the yellow text quotes — we call that Pastel Tok. We think we were kind of the first people to do that, and now there are a lot of copycats, so you have to pivot to the next thing. When we spoke a few months ago about country, it was a lot of trucks and cowboy hats and things like that.

You guys feel very confident that you can make a song go viral online, but does that actually translate to streams? And do you still consider a campaign a success if there’s virality on TikTok but maybe not a huge conversion to streams on Spotify?

Spelman: That’s a great question. If there’s a ton of virality but we aren’t seeing conversion to streaming, there are kind of two options: there’s something irreducible about the song that people just don’t want to listen to, which we can’t fully control. But the first thing we check is whether we’re targeting the right people where the audience actually is. We may be driving a ton of views, there may be a trend happening, but it may not be connected to the song or finding the right audience for that artist. I still think a viral trend can be a really successful campaign even without huge stream numbers.

What would you say to someone who’s freaked out by these ideas that we are talking about — who feels like they’re being manipulated by artists and marketers online?

Coren: Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation. Andrew would always say everything on the internet is fake. All opinions are formed in the TikTok comments — which is a reminder to us of what we can help with. I don’t know if this will make anyone feel better, but a lot of what we do on the narrative side is controlling the discourse. Most people see a video or something about an album that came out, and that first comment they see becomes their opinion, even when they haven’t heard the whole album. It’s really important for us to make sure we’re ahead of it and controlling that narrative in the direction we want.

Spelman: In the past, a label and management team would do a great job getting their artist on SNL or Tiny Desk or Triple J, post it, and then kind of wait — and the comments would come in: terrible cover choice, voice sounds terrible, all that. What we do at Chaotic Good with our management clients is: The second the SNL performance drops at midnight, you should post 100 times saying that was the best performance of the year. The question is how you do that at scale. It takes a lot of work and infrastructure, but controlling the narrative is really, really important.

Eric Benét has a message for celebrities — particularly Chappell Roan — whom he thinks treat fans with disrespect.

In a video posted Tuesday (March 24), the R&B musician filmed himself outside as he vented about how one of his “biggest pet peeves” is “public figures or celebrities who lack the grace to just take a picture with your fan or say hello or just acknowledge them if they see you on the street.”

“If you are so inconvenienced by somebody acknowledging you, somebody who adores you … I can’t stand y’all motherf–kers that do that, that shame people who adore you,” Benét continued. “They’ve allowed you to have this wealth, this incomparable [life] that less than half a percent of the world is allowed to experience. All they want is for you to see them for two seconds, you piece of s–t.”

The singer went on to acknowledge that “of course, there are times” when it’s not “appropriate” for fans to approach, such as when a celebrity is with their children or in the middle of eating dinner. But, he continued, “some of you celebrities are notorious for this piece-of-s–t behavior — [cough] Chappell Roan.”

“If you are a repeat offender of this particular offense, this is what I think,” he added, suggesting that people should stop consuming music and buying products from the artists in question. “I think all of the fans of said celebrity, you should collectively decide that you will relieve this celebrity of the struggles and the pain of being rich and famous.”

Billboard has reached out to Roan’s rep for comment.

Benét’s post comes as the Gen Z pop star has been thrust in the center of discourse surrounding an alleged incident in which a security guard yelled at 11-year-old Ada Law — the daughter of Jude Law and Catherine Harding — for simply walking past Roan and smiling at the star while at a hotel in São Paulo. After Harding’s husband, soccer star Jorginho, made a post claiming the exchange had left his stepdaughter “in tears,” Roan shared a video explaining that the bodyguard in question wasn’t her “personal security,” and that she hadn’t even been aware of a little girl walking by her.

Roan’s rep also previously told Billboard that the singer didn’t instruct the “third-party security officer” to take any action. “She did not direct her personal security or anyone on her team to interact with them,” the rep said. “Chappell holds her own teams to the highest standards and has zero tolerance for any kind of aggressive behavior towards her or her fans.”

Even so, Harding followed up with her own video saying that the hitmaker should take “responsibility” for the way people who work for her treat others, fueling more discourse about Roan’s relationship with her fans, a topic that has surged in and out of public interest since the Grammy winner first called out “toxic” fan behavior and asked strangers to stop touching her or demanding she give them attention in public spaces.

See Benet’s video below.