Kings of Leon’s rock and roll journey has taken them from an NFT to the NFL.

The band visited Cleveland’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on Thursday (April 29) to see a new exhibit featuring their venture into cryptocurrency before they opened the NFL draft with their first live show in more than a year.

“I hope we don’t look too excited to be up there,” said lead singer Caleb Followill.

“I hope we don’t play a song a linebacker doesn’t like and he decides to come out and take us out,” joked drummer Nathan Followill.

(You can watch their performance of “Use Somebody” at the NFL draft on Thursday night below and judge for yourself.)

In March, Kings of Leon — brothers Caleb, Nathan and Jared Followill and their cousin, Matthew — made history by releasing their eighth studio album, When You See Yourself, as a non-fungible token or NFT, a digital form of currency that can only be used in its own ecosystem.

Sound confusing? Well, even the band wasn’t sure what it was getting into with its pioneering move.

“We had to study up a little bit, and it’s still a little beyond me,” Caleb said before the band toured the hall. “We didn’t know that much about it, but we were happy to be introduced to it.”

Nathan Followill had some familiarity with cryptocurrency, but wasn’t quite up to date on NFTs or all their possibilities.

“I think it’s the way of the future, not only for music but you’re seeing sport cards in the form of NFTs, artists putting their work through NFT,” he said. “So not just for music, but for art and I think it will definitely have a place.”

The band is giving a “significant” portion of proceeds from the NFTs to Live Nation’s Crew Nation fund, a charity that supports workers in the music industry hurt by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Greg Harris, the Rock Hall’s president and CEO, applauded the band’s willingness to try something new.

“Rock and Roll is always pushing the envelope and doing new things,” Harris said. “So when Les Paul invented the solid body electric guitar, he was pushing it. When Jimi Hendrix was playing, he was pushing the envelope. Now we’re pushing the envelope with technology and distribution.”

The band’s visit also coincided with a new football-themed exhibit at the hall, “The Biggest Show on Turf: 55 Years of Halftime Shows,” showcasing the evolution of Super Bowl halftimes.

Among the items on display is the outfit Prince wore in 2007, when his rain-soaked performance ended with a soul-stirring “Purple Rain,” to the jacket worn by U2′s Bono in 2002 in a show paying tribute to the victims of the 9/11 attacks.

Now that they’ve played the draft, would Kings of Leon ever consider playing a Super Bowl.

“I don’t think they would ever ask us,” Matthew said. “We’re not that kind of entertainer. We would do it, but we would start rehearsing now for 10 years from now.”

And since he was in Cleveland, Nathan Followill made sure to give some love to Browns quarterback Baker Mayfield. The Followills grew up in Oklahoma and have followed Mayfield, who won the Heisman Trophy in 2017 with the Sooners.

“I’ve got my Browns’ Baker jersey at home,” he said. “I follow all the Oklahoma guys on whatever team they go to, but I’m a big Baker fan.”

Chinese authorities are preparing to slap down Tencent Music Entertainment and its parent company, Tencent Holdings, for anti-competitive behavior, according to media reports. Those actions threaten to force the music giant to unload streaming apps Kuwo and Kugou, shed more exclusive artist and label deals and pay a hefty fine.

Tencent Holdings should expect to pay a penalty of at least 10 billion yuan ($1.54 billion) as part of a sweeping anti-trust clampdown by the State Administration of Market Regulation (SAMR), China’s competition regulator, Reuters reports, citing two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

The regulatory action could result in Tencent’s music arm, which has grown into a powerhouse since being spun off and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2018, becoming a smaller company once the dust settles. The Chinese regulator is looking to loosen the company’s stranglehold on the streaming market, which has tightened since Tencent Music acquired competitors Kuwo Music and Kugou Music in 2016.

Those acquisitions helped Tencent to pursue exclusive streaming rights with the major record labels, which have been eager to push deeper into China’s burgeoning streaming market. Streaming revenue in China, the world’s seventh largest music market, grew by 34% to $718.1 million in 2020, according to the IFPI.

Reports of looming regulatory action in China sent shares of Tencent Music (TME) down 5.4% to $17.80 on Thursday. The stock has fallen almost 17% over the past month.

The regulatory crackdown is part of a broader push by the government of China’s president Xi Jinping to clip the wings of the country’s internets giants, which grew rapidly under looser regulation earlier in his administration, which began in 2013. Under Jinping and former president Hu Jintao, the Chinese government adopted a somewhat hands-off approach toward the nascent e-commerce, internet and digital-finance areas of the economy.

But lately Xi Jinping’s government has been looking to limit the economic and social influence of China’s most powerful corporations and their billionaire founders like Jack Ma, founder of Ant Group Company.

Companies that concern the Communist Party include Tencent and Alibaba Group Holding, private internet firms that collect valuable data from hundreds of millions of consumers which the party can’t easily control. Tencent, Ant and Alibaba had a combined market capitalization of nearly $2 trillion in early November, according to Bloomberg, a sum that surpassed state-owned Bank of China as the country’s most valuable companies.

Tencent’s sprawling businesses include content steaming, video games, social media, advertising and cloud services. Its messaging app, WeChat, has over a billion users in China. Tencent Music’s three music services — QQ Music, Kugou and Kuwo — had 42.7 million paying users at the end of March, up 50% year-on-year, and 657 million monthly active users, the company reported in its latest quarterly results.

Like Spotify, which owns 8% of TME’s shares, Tencent Music is also expanding into non-music content. Tencent said last week that the number of users of long-form audio — which includes audiobooks, comedies and audio dramas — had surpassed 100 million, a jump of 230% year-on-year. The company said it was seeking to “expedite [its] evolution into a leading all-in-one music and audio entertainment platform in China.”

Against that backdrop, China’s government crackdown picked up steam in March when SAMR said it had fined 12 companies over 10 deals that violated anti-monopoly rules, including Tencent, SoftBank and a ByteDace-backed firm. Xi Jinping ordered regulators to target monopolies, boost their oversight of internet companies and foster fair competition, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported.

Then earlier this month regulators slapped a record $2.8 billion fine on Alibaba after an investigation concluded it had abused its market position for years. The fine amounted to about 4% of the company’s fiscal year 2020 revenue. The government also gave Tencent, Meituan and TikTok owner ByteDance one month to “heed Alibaba’s example” and cut back on anti-competitive practices such as exclusivity requirements.

Now Tencent appears to be in regulators’ crosshairs. Reuters reports the regulator has informed Tencent Music it should expect a fine, be prepared to give up exclusive streaming rights and possibly even be forced to sell Kuwo and Kuguo to other investors. (Tencent Music did not respond to Billboard’s requests for comment.)

Following the acquisition of the steaming apps, Tencent drew controversy for sublicensing some of its exclusive rights to competitors like NetEase Cloud Music, which accused Tencent of unfair terms and high pricing.

The competition regulator launched an earlier probe into Tencent in 2018, but ended it in 2019 after the company said it would stop renewing some of its exclusive rights, which normally expire after three years. But Tencent apparently held on to its exclusive rights to Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou, and leveraged the arrangement against competitors NetEase and Alibaba-backed Xiami Music, Reuters reported.

Selena Gomez launched a new Mental Health 101 educational campaign with her beauty brand Rare Beauty on Thursday (April 29).

The singer wrote in a note to her 222 million Instagram fans about how Mental Health 101 “is so close to my heart because of my own struggles with mental health.” She opened up about her bipolar diagnosis for the first time with Miley Cyrus on her Bright Minded Instagram Live series a year ago, in April 2020. In September 2019, Gomez won the 2019 McClean Award for her mental health advocacy and detailed her struggles with anxiety and depression during her acceptance speech.

“I know first hand how scary and lonely it can feel to face anxiety and depression by yourself at a young age. If I had learned about my mental health earlier on — been taught about my condition in school the way I was taught about other subjects — my journey could have looked very different,” she continues writing.

Mental Health 101 is the education Gomez wished she’d had in school but is now dedicated to providing for others. The initiative, which coincides with May being Mental Health Awareness Month, is “dedicated to supporting mental health education and encouraging financial support for more mental health services in educational services,” according to her follow-up Instagram post. The set of slides — which starts off by listing mental health as its own school subject next to math, science, history and P.E. — contain shocking statistics about mental health, a petition calling on the philanthropy community to support mental health services in schools, and a fundraiser for the Rare Impact Fund that she launched on her 28th birthday last July.

The original plan for the Rare Impact Fund is to raise $100 million over the next 10 years to provide mental health services to underserved communities, with 1% of annual sales on Rare Beauty products in addition to funds raised benefiting the fund. Once Gomez reaches this goal, the Rare Impact Fund will become one of the largest known funds supporting mental health from a corporate entity. Now she’s zeroed in on distributing the money to organizations that have “created evidence-based programs that address social and emotional learning in schools, strengthen youth support networks through mental health trainings, and provide more suicide prevention and crisis response in educational settings ranging from K-college,” according to the GoFundMe page. On her second IG post, Gomez wrote that Rare Beauty will be matching $200,000 of donations.

Last summer, Rare Beauty also created the Rare Beauty Mental Health Council, which brings mental health experts from universities, organizations and companies together to guide the company’s strategy. Members of the Rare Beauty Mental Health Council include Permission to Feel author Dr. Marc Brackett of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence; Dr. Scott L. Rauch of McLean Hospital; Dr. Jane Delgado of the National Alliance for Hispanic Health; Sad Girls Club CEO/founder Elyse Fox; NAMI National Director of Strategic Partnerships Katrina Gay; singer-songwriter Justin Tranter; The Cut Editor-in-Chief Lindsay Peoples Wagner; The Happiness Project author Gretchen Rubin; Sephora Vice President of Merchandising, Makeup Jennifer Cohen; and YouTube’s Global Social Impact Marketing Director Kit Hayes.

“For anyone who is hurting right now, I hope you know that you are not alone. I’m a believer in seeking help. Getting support and educating myself on mental health has changed my life, and it can change yours, too,” her note concludes. “I hope that Mental Health 101 will be the stepping stones for others that I wish I had… to get connected to the resources they need, and to empower young people in ways that may not have been possible before.”

Read Gomez’s note about launching Mental Health 101 below, and go to Rare Beauty’s website for more information.