Roy Woods is thriving.

“The energy’s high right now. I feel back in motion after a couple of years – it feels like I pressed the restart button,” he tells Billboard Canada.

The Toronto R&B singer and rapper released his new EP, Dark Nights, in April, and it showed off a new side of the OVO Sound-signed artist.

At nine tracks, Dark Nights is a bold and unfiltered reflection on betrayal, heartbreak and emotional survival. It debuts a more vulnerable side of the Toronto singer-songwriter, who opens up about some of the darkest moments he’s faced – and how he has learned to live through them.

With such complex emotions on the line, Woods took his aptly titled EP and created a short film based on the project’s major themes. The 20-minute short film premiered June 12 at NXNE, followed by a Q&A with Billboard Canada’s National Editor Richard Trapunski.

“My manager, Banks, and I wanted to show this type of pain in a different way than the traditional music videos,” Woods shares. “We wanted to showcase the art in a different light.”

Before the EP’s release, he recalled having initial conversations about the short film at the top of the year. Woods and his collaborators noted that the tracklist flows into one another, boldly telling a story from start to finish.

“There’s so much depth in the songs,” he explains.

While Woods had dabbled in acting as a child, making a short film was completely new territory. The project took four days to film and consisted of all-day shoots – not to mention managing a robust cast and crew. Yet, he fondly recalls the experience. “The energy was on 10. There was a lot of excitement, and everybody was ready to do the best job possible.”

With dreamy nighttime hues and dimly lit rooms, Dark Nights follows Woods through a relationship that transforms into a complicated dynamic that includes betrayal, unplanned pregnancy and big existential questions. Based on a true story, Woods channels somber energy and anguish in his first major acting role.

He cites the darker, moody era of late 2010s Toronto R&B music as inspiration. “We didn’t bring it back, but kind of reignited the flame. We stay true to its essence and bring it in a modern light,” he says. “We wanted to stay true to that Roy Woods aesthetic.”

He describes the aforementioned artistic vision as “late night driving R&B moody music, that’s balanced with songs that are good for parties and good vibes.” It’s an energy Woods has mastered in his almost-decade-long career.

In 2015, Woods signed with Drake’s OVO Sound record label and skyrocketed onto the scene mere months later when his track “Drama,” from his debut EP, Exis, was released in collaboration with the beloved Toronto rapper. The EP peaked at No. 27 on Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums, marking his first placement on the chart. Woods continued on an upward trajectory, as his following full-length efforts, Waking at Dawn and Say Less,also earned him spots on the Billboard 200 and Canadian Albums charts.

“I’m so grateful for my music to reach those heights. When it happened, it made me realize that I was an artist of this calibre,” Woods explains. But it doesn’t change how he approaches his current work. “Because if I did, then I’m chasing something that doesn’t feel true to me. Those songs were created by me expressing, writing and feeling good about making music, with no pressure to make it.”

Woods cites Drake and PartyNextDoor as two of his biggest influences, so he feels lucky to be their label-mate. Of his relationship with OVO, Woods praises the record label for their mentorship and guidance, which has kept him away from the shifting, often pressured expectations of emerging in the music industry.

“I didn’t want to change who I was in the music that I make. At OVO, we’re keen on making music that is true to ourselves and the people around us,” he shares.

Now, 10 years on, the concept of embarking on a creative project with no expectations became a mainstay for Dark Nights — the EP and the short film. “This music that I’ve been making lately, and now the short film feels so good because I’ve been in the moment. I’m creating to create, [and] I’m loving it. I’m having fun with it again.”

He credits this flexibility to his “very personal” relationship with fans. “I’m so grateful to [them] because they stand by me, learning, growing and loving myself now compared to the person and the artist that I was earlier in my career,” Woods says.

Although he’s Brampton-born, Woods’ love extends to Toronto, the city he came up in. “I receive a lot of respect when I’m in my city. The love is always different than any other place,” he explains. “I’m learning that I’m an important figure to not only the area I grew up in, but the entire city of Toronto.”

Now that Woods has pressed the restart button, he assures listeners that he isn’t going anywhere. With aspirations to stay in his acting bag, he’s going to continue exploring creative projects outside of music. “We’re flooding the gates. You’re gonna get annoyed with Roy Woods, and that’s what I want right now. I’m going all the way, you know? Godspeed.”

This article was originally published by Billboard Canada.

On Friday (June 20), French streaming service Deezer launched its latest tool to combat what it calls the “spamming of AI-generated songs.” Now, the service will tag every song it identifies as fully AI-generated so that users have transparency when they find the content on the service. 

The tagging tool is the latest in a series of announcements from Deezer about how AI-generated music is increasing rapidly on its service — and causing harm in the process. According to Deezer, up to 70% of the streams generated on fully AI-generated tracks are deemed fraudulent or artificial. 

Deezer began sounding the alarm in January, when it reported that its proprietary AI detection tool identified that 10% of songs uploaded to Deezer daily were fully AI-generated. While the company says it has no issue with human artists using AI as part of their creative process, the purely AI-generated songs tend to be used to spam the platform or siphon royalties away from human artists. To combat this, Deezer began removing fully AI songs from their recommendations. 

Then, in April, Deezer claimed the figure nearly doubled, reporting that 18% of daily uploads were fully AI-generated. In a new interview with Billboard, Deezer director of research Manuel Moussallam attributes that jump to two key reasons: the further adoption of AI music tools like Suno and Udio; and, simply, the fact that “our data got better.”

“Part of the stuff we were catching as AI-generated in January, we weren’t totally sure about, so we were very conservative in the numbers we reported. We didn’t want any false positives,” Moussallam explains. “I think the 18% [figure] is actually much more accurate and closer to what we actually saw from January, but still, that number is increasing.” 

While most of its competitors have not yet taken a public stance on AI-generated music or created any rules specifically to tackle issues it may present, Deezer believes there’s no way to ignore what is happening. In a new interview with Billboard, chief innovation officer Aurelien Herault, along with Moussallam, explains that the clock is ticking: “At some point, the industry will need to make a decision on this because AI music will exist forever now. There’s no going back.”

You’ve both said before that your team had a lot of conversations with the music business about the rules you were developing at Deezer before you launched them. Have you had those same conversations with AI companies, like Suno or Udio?

Herault: Not officially. We are in touch with some of the researchers who work there because we go to the same conferences, but no, we didn’t make contact. Actually, I don’t think they care a lot about us being able to detect their outputs because the issue is on our side, because people are using these tools massively to spam our catalog. 

Are you starting to see patterns of how people are using AI content for spam? For example, are most people creating multiple accounts and hopping between them to spread out their mass uploads? Are they artificially running up the streams?

Herault: What I can say is that they are creative.

Moussallam: Well, not creative on the music side, but on the spam side? Very creative.  

Herault: The reason why we got worried about AI-generated music in the first place is that it’s really close to the fraud behavior we were already seeing. You create a lot of accounts. You deliver a massive amount of albums every day. 

Moussallam: I think maybe the only new phenomenon we see from AI music is it can also be used for impersonation. You take one artist that streams a lot and then try to create stuff that resembles the style of that artist. That’s quite worrying on our side.

Herault: They even try to deliver these songs on official artist pages. That’s why it’s important to combine our AI efforts with our fraud detection system to avoid this kind of behavior.  

Take me back to when you first discovered how much AI-generated content was being uploaded to Deezer and why you decided to devote so much time and so many resources within the company to work on this issue.

Moussallam: I think it dates back to maybe 2022 when the first large open-source generative models were released within the scientific community. It was before you had commercial models available, and we had a chance to play with it ourselves. Over time, we started to see momentum with these models. Soon they could generate full songs, which was not possible a few years before. 

Obviously, when Suno launched, it was a huge moment. The first thing we did was to go on the platform and download a few songs that people were sharing over there, and then, using fingerprints, we were able to check whether people were also distributing these AI songs into our catalog. We soon found out that, yeah, they were. Back then, we had no idea of the amount, but we knew it was happening. It was really important for us to quantify this phenomenon, and this is what led us to actually researching it. 

It took us a few months, and we finally found a system to identify the scale. Eventually, we felt confident enough to share the number in January. We had to double-check a lot, and to make sure we didn’t have too many false positives. We knew that would be a huge problem. We only communicated to the general public once we were confident. 

Herault: Today, we are talking about AI detection, but we’ve seen the same spam and artificial streaming behavior with other kinds of content on Deezer, like public domain songs, noise and rain sounds. So we’ve been developing tools to understand what is on our platform before AI came along. It’s been 12 years now of research and development, so that’s why we can react pretty quickly when new developments occur. 

I often hear mixed reviews about the products that are on the market right now that claim they can detect AI-generated music — and, even more controversially, can attribute AI-generated music back to the songs that inspired it from the training data. I imagine you’ve had folks doubt how good your tools are. How do you assure them of their accuracy?

Herault: We made a lot of presentations to the music industry, showing our results. And we also published a paper in the scientific community, so it’s accessible to everyone. 

Moussallam: In the first paper we published, we stated that this problem cannot totally be solved by our tool. If anything, we are the most in doubt about our own technology because we did the work — we know exactly how limited it is. This is still an open problem, and it is still easy to bypass our detector. 

Herault: That’s why we share data. We want to open the discussion. We explained to the industry that we cannot solve everything, but we can solve part of the problem with these tools. 

How feasible is AI music attribution right now? 

Moussallam: It’s impossible to know if we’re going to be able to do it. It’s a really fast-moving and exciting field, so we want to dive into that. But this is going to take years, probably. The only thing I’m sure of is that there is nothing on the shelf right now that’s able to do this in a satisfactory manner.

One debate I hear in the music tech world is whether or not this flood of AI-generated music is going to be a serious burden for streaming services, in terms of servers and storage space. Someone at a rival music streamer told me they don’t think this is a real concern. Others believe it is. What is your take? 

Herault: This is a serious topic for us, and we already removed some content that was using too much space — because it’s not only an economic issue, it’s also an ecological one. Do we need to store all this content so we all have the same catalog and all have a copy of the same things? It’s really a question worth thinking about, and we already have had some discussion to remove some content, especially because a lot of content is not listened to at all. 

That sounds like an issue that streaming services are going to have to face, then.

Herault: Not only music streaming, I mean, there’s all kinds of AI-generated content — images, audio, video. It’s everything. 

Moussallam: Audio is actually not such a big file to store when you compare it to movies or some images. 

I always wonder whether younger generations will care whether or not their music came from an AI model or a person. It’s hard for us to wrap our heads around, but if these kids are raised on AI content, maybe their listening habits are different from ours. Have you taken this into account when deciding how you want to treat AI music on Deezer?

Moussallam: It’s an amazing research question, but it’s one which doesn’t have an answer yet. I think a lot of people are wondering if we are seeing a shift in terms of the relationship that people have to music. It also raises the question of, why do people love music in the first place? Do you need to have a human relationship, either directly or indirectly, to music to attach meaning to it? I believe a lot of people need that. But I am not sure what people are going to do in the future.

Daniel Stevens, artist manager at First & Last Music and prior to that manager and publicist at Darling Department, has died unexpectedly at age 50. Stevens died on May 29; a cause of death has not been shared at this time.

The U.K.-based music executive worked with a string of big name acts during his career, including Fatboy Slim, The Killers, Justice and more.

Following university, Stevens first worked for Heavyweight Management and Deconstruction Records, and joined Darling Department as a publicist in 1996. Three years later, he took over as director of the company alongside Ed Cartwright. The PR agency was paramount in launching and managing the careers of a number of rising names, including Tame Impala, Royksopp, Florence & The Machine, Underworld, So Solid Crew, Mylo, Magnetic Man, Little Boots and Alphabeat.

With the addition of David Laub as a director of Darling in 2007, the company expanded its services to include an artist management and brand consultancy. Darling managed PR on a number of music projects for brands such as Diesel, Cadbury, The British Council, Film Four, Vauxhall, Top Man, English National Opera, Motorola and Somerset House.

A number of the staff that worked with Stevens at Darling went on to become influential music executives. They include, but are not limited to, Capitol Music Group chairman/CEO Tom March; XL Recordings director of global publicity Jon Wilkinson; Naomi Williams, senior marketing manager at Polydor Records; Sam Willis (former head of press at Rough Trade Records); founder of inside out agency Adrian Read; and Briana Dougherty Chester, who left Darling to become head of press at Atlantic Records and is now executive vp at MATTIO Communications in Los Angeles.

Darling closed in 2012 after two decades, and the trio moved their management and music consultancy clients to two new ventures. Stevens and Laub continued to work together under the newly formed First & Last Music, whilst Cartwright set up Tusk Management.

First & Last Music managed artists, producers and songwriters including Fyfe, Natty, Foxes, Sam Frank, Fickle Friends and GIRLI. After Laub left to set up Halftime Music in 2017, Stevens continued running First & Last Music. One of his clients, Litany, released her debut LP, Sadgirl, in April 2025.

Stevens is survived by his wife Annabelle and his sons Finlay and Joe. His funeral will take place on Thursday (June 26).

Hung Up on a Dream: The Zombies Documentary has had an onscreen life since its premiere at the 2023 South By Southwest Film Festival — including its official release to theaters this past May. But director-producer Robert Schwartzman and the Zombies frontman Colin Blunstone will be putting the hard press on in the coming weeks in person.

The two will be joined by surviving Zombies members Rod Argent, Chris White and Hugh Grundy for screenings and Q&A sessions on June 24 and 26 and July 5 in England; the former, in London on Blunstone’s 80th birthday, will be hosted by EGOT winner Tim Rice. After that, Blunstone and Schwartzman come across the pond for seven more screenings — starting July 9 in New York City — that, in addition to the Q&As, will also feature performances of Zombies songs by Blunstone backed by Schwartzman’s band Rooney, which has opened for the Zombies in the past.

“I’m a big believer in trying to create events so that people feel excited to be part of it and leave their homes and go see a film,” Schwartzman tells Billboard from Los Angeles during a joint Zoom call with Blunstone, who is in England. “People are used to, culturally, waiting for movies to hit their doorstep or come to their TV without lifting a finger. I think it’s important that we emphasize the importance of seeing movies within a community. Colin was really gracious with his time and supportive of this idea of screening the film on the road, and I think for any fans out there it’s a great way to see the film in an environment that’s unconventional.”

Blunstone predicts that the shows “will be really exciting,” and Schwartzman says that while some song choices seem obvious — particularly hits such as “She’s Not There,” “Tell Her No” and “Time of the Season” — a great deal of care will be taken in curating the performances.

“We’ve been just shouting out the songs, the crowd pleasers, the ones that everyone wants to hear and make sure we support the evening, musically, in a way that’s good for everybody,” Schwartzman explains. “Doing a set every night as a singer, I’m sensitive to that. I want to make sure we do our part in laying out the foundation of songs that Colin feels really good about.”

Hung Up On a Dream — titled after a track on the Zombies’ revered 1968 album Odessey and Oracle — offers a comprehensive and authorized telling of the Zombies’ story. Loaded with vintage footage, home movies, photographs and contemporary interviews, it tracks from the group’s 1961 formation in St. Albans to its early successes in Great Britain and in the U.S., through its initial break-up in 1968 (before Odessey and Oracle’s release) and subsequent reunions as the group’s reputation grew in its absence, leading up to a 2019 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction.

“Odessey and Oracle is one of the slowest burners there ever was,” Blunstone notes. “It took about 30 years for it to start getting some kind of acknowledgement, but it got there in the end. I’d rather get a late acknowledgement than none at all — but sometimes I think what would have happened if we’d got that acknowledgement when we were younger. One of the main disappointments is we never got to know what we could’ve done next. That’s our main regret, I think.”

The Zombies did get that opportunity, much later. After Argent went on to form the band that bore his name, hitting big with “Hold Your Head Up,” and Blunstone pursued a solo career, the Zombies got back together in 1989 and recorded five more studio albums up to Different Game in 2023, along with Blunstone and Argent’s Out of the Shadows in 2001. The group is currently dormant after Argent suffered a stroke last year that forced him to retire from touring, while White and Grundy have appeared only as special guests since 1997. (Guitarist Paul Atkinson passed away during 2004 after, like White and Grundy, a career on the executive side of the music industry, signing acts such as ABBA, Elton John, Bruce Hornsby, Mr. Mister and more.)

While Blunstone is “trying to put a solo album together very much at the moment,” he’s not ruling out the possibility of some additional Zombies music. “Rod has just started writing,” he reports, “and I’m due to go down there. I’m not sure I can get there before I got to the States to promote the film in America with Robert, but Rod and I definitely will be working on tracks.”

Schwartzman, meanwhile, has worked on Hung Up on a Dream during the past couple of years, cutting out about 20 minutes from the initial version for a tidy 98-minute edition. “I think it runs a lot better now,” Blunstone says, while Schwartzman says the changes became evident once the film — which features guest appearances by Dave Grohl, Paul Weller, Hayley Williams of Paramore and Finneas — was being screened for audiences.

“Editing is like being a sculptor; you have a big piece of rock and you have to create an image in it and you sit there every day chipping away, a little bit at a time,” he explains. “So when you look at the movie, I’m chipping away at a big piece of stone, and after South By there were pieces of stone I still needed to (remove) to help the image come into focus a little better, so that’s what we did.”

Hung Up on a Dream nevertheless retains the heart of the Zombies’ story — which, beyond the factual narrative, is a sweetness best exhibited in the band members’ continuing friendships, caught in scenes of the four remaining Zombies gathering together at Abbey Road Studios, where they made Odessey and Oracle, and in Argent’s childhood home. Schwartzman even encouraged Argent and Blunstone to start a friendly thumb war while sitting on a couch together during the end credits.

“I guess it’s just our nature to be relatively easygoing — I haven’t really known anything else,” Blunstone says. “I know those blokes really well. I met them when I was 15. I knew their parents, their girlfriends before they got married. I don’t think there are any secrets. As a band we just try to get on with it…I don’t know what the politics of other bands are, but people do remark on the difference between our band and other bands.”

Schwartzman agrees that the friendship gives the film a palpable warmth. “They feel hopeful,” he says. “They feel lifted. They see the road ahead as shiny and bright. I think that’s a wonderful thing. It’s them. The guys are that. We were just there to help capture that. You can’t fake the emotion. It’s there. It’s authentic, and I’m happy it translated to the screen.

Schwartzman says the U.S. screenings will be followed by a digital, on-demand rollout and then a subscription streaming deal, along with a Blu-ray release later in the year. “We’re still talking to partners to find the right one for the film,” he says. A livestream may take place from one of the events, and his film crew will also be capturing footage from the shows.

“We’re still in the theatrical cycle right now,” Schwartzman says. “I’m still always encouraging people, ‘Don’t order in. Let’s put our shoes on and let’s go over to the music venue.’ I don’t want anyone to wait for a movie to hit Netflix or assume it’s going to hit one of these streaming platforms. There won’t be another night like this, so I feel like it’s not something to be missed.”

Events for Hung Up on a Dream: The Zombies Documentary (which you can find out more about here) include:

June 24 — Picturehouse London, Finsbury Park

June 26 — Picturehouse London, Hackney

July 5 — Odyssey Cinema, St. Albans, England

July 9 — Grammercy Theatre, New York City

July 11 — Crystal Ballroom at Somerville Theatre, Somerville, Mass.

July 13 — State Theatre, Falls Church, Va.

July 15 — Thalia Hall, Chicago

July 16 — Majestic Theatre, Detroit

July 18 — Great American Music Hall, San Francisco

July 19 — The Bellwether, Los Angeles

DDG is asking a judge for permission to visit the son he shares with Halle Bailey in Rome, where the 25-year-old singer and actress is filming a movie and has sole custody of the child amid domestic violence claims against her rapper ex-boyfriend.

A lawyer for DDG (Darryl Dwayne Granberry Jr.) made the request during a Tuesday (June 24) hearing in Los Angeles court, where Bailey won temporary sole custody of their 18-month-old son, Halo, last month after accusing the 27-year-old Twitch rapper of physically attacking her multiple times in the child’s presence.

Bailey now has Halo with her in Rome for two months while she films a movie. DDG’s attorney, Larry Bakman, told Judge Latrice A.G. Byrdsong on Tuesday that the rapper wants to go to Italy and see Halo at the end of this month, with his mother supervising the visits.

A lawyer for Bailey, Jeremy Lane, responded that he’s fine with DDG seeing Halo but wants the visits to be supervised by a professional monitor rather than the rapper’s mother. Lane said DDG’s mom has a history of “enabling” his alleged abusive behavior, including incessant posting on social media about Bailey and Halo.

The judge said she thinks it’s “reasonable” for DDG to visit Halo in Italy, but that she’d require an independent monitor due to Bailey’s concerns. The judge also said that if these visits are permitted, she’ll put in place an order barring DDG from posting about the child on social media during that timeframe.

The lawyers are now looking into the availability of professional monitors in Rome, and they’re set to return to court for further discussion of the matter on Thursday (June 26).

DDG denies Bailey’s domestic violence claims and has filed a competing custody case of his own, claiming Bailey is actually the abuser in their relationship and has repeatedly threatened self-harm as a means of emotional manipulation.

Bailey says DDG is exaggerating and that while she has struggled with thoughts of self-harm in the past, her mental health is completely under control.

Bailey has been awarded sole custody of Halo while the case plays out. A final custody arrangement for the child will be determined after a full hearing on the matter, which is currently on track to take place in late July in Los Angeles family court.

Reps for Bailey and DDG did not immediately return requests for comment on Tuesday.