Singer-songwriter Cody Simpson has signed with BMG following a six-year hiatus from music to focus on competitive swimming.

The first releases under the deal are the singles “Baby Blue” and “When It Comes to Loving You.” Both songs are co-written by Simpson and produced Harrison Borts. Both are accompanied by music videos, both directed by Antony Muse.

“Post-swimming career I’d been back experimenting in the studio for almost a year writing dozens of songs, when one day I went in really open-minded sensing something new and fresh wanted to come through,” said Simpson in a statement. “I’d been digging a lot of 80s sonics, along with finding synergy with a great new young producer Harrison Borts — and this is where the sound that birthed these songs was born.

“Coming back to music I decided I only wanted to do it if I could go in and have the best time ever everyday. I wanted to create expressions of joy, like bottling the coming of spring, or the sun rising. And I think that that joy is captured in the music. Signing with BMG feels like the perfect home for this next chapter in my career and I’m buzzing about sharing this first release.”

In 2020, Simpson stepped away from music to pursue his dream of becoming a competitive swimmer. After moving back to his native Australia, he earned a spot of the Australian National Team in 2022 and went on to compete for his country in the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games, where he reached the 100mm butterfly final and won gold and silver medals in the 4x100m men’s freestyle relay and 4×100 men’s medley relay, respectively. He also won multiple Australian Short Course Titles and a silver medal in the 100m butterfly at the 2023 World Cup in Athens. After narrowly missing the qualification for the Paris Olympic Team in 2024, he announced his retirement from competitive swimming.

Simpson launched his music career at 13 years old after performing covers that went viral on YouTube. Hs signed his first deal with Atlantic Records and later toured with Justin Bieber. His sophomore album, Sufers’ Paradise, lined in the top 10 of the Billboard 200. His collab with Bieber, “Home to Mama,” charted at No. 1 on the Billboard Social 50 and Trending 140 charts. As an actor, he made his Broadway debut in 2019 as the male lead in Anastasia. Most recently he starred at Sky Masters in Opera Australia’s 2025 production of Guys and Dolls.

Chuck Norris, the no-nonsense martial arts master and action hero who starred in the CBS prime time series Walker, Texas Ranger for nine seasons has died at 86. Norris’ family announced the news in an Instagram post on Friday morning (March 20), writing, “It is with heavy hearts that our family shares the sudden passing of our beloved Chuck Norris yesterday morning. While we would like to keep the circumstances private, please know that he was surrounded by his family and was at peace.”

Norris was reportedly hospitalized in Kauai, Hawaii earlier this week for undisclosed reasons, with TMZ reporting at the time that he had suffered a “medical emergency.”

The family’s post continued, “To the world, he was a martial artist, actor, and a symbol of strength. To us, he was a devoted husband, a loving father and grandfather, an incredible brother, and the heart of our family. He lived his life with faith, purpose, and an unwavering commitment to the people he loved. Through his work, discipline, and kindness, he inspired millions around the world and left a lasting impact on so many lives.”

Carlos Ray Norris was born on March 10, 1940 in Ryan, Oklahoma and began his martial arts training in 1958 after joining the Air Force and being stationed at Osan Air Base in South Korea. His training in the art of Tang Soo Do came in handy when Norris — by then going by the nickname “Chuck” — was discharged from the Air Force in 1962 and opened up his own martial arts studio in Torrance, California.

That dojo soon became a chain of karate schools where he trained in between participating in, and winning, a number of Karate competitions across the country, racking up several championships and world belts. It was during one of those competitions that he met fellow martial arts master and eventual movie star Bruce Lee, with whom he struck up a friendship that eventually resulted in Norris being cast as Lee’s rival in 1972’s Return of the Dragon.

That role led to several others in films such as 1974’s Slaughter in San Francisco, with Norris serving as star and co-star, as well as fight choreographer in a string of 1970s and ’80s action movies, including 1978’s hit Good Guys Wear Black, 1982’s Silent Rage and Forced Vengeance, as well as Lone Wolf McQuade (1983), a trio of Mission In Action Vietnam POW dramas and two Delta Force films.

While the steely-eyed, hard-kicking star was known for his punch first, ask questions never roles, he later leaned into his tough guy image playing himself in comedies such as Sidekicks (1992) and Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (2004).

Norris is best known for his role in the hit TV series Walker, Texas Ranger, a long-running CBS crime procedural inspired by his character in Lone Wolf McQuade, in which he played a member of the Texas Ranger Division. In addition starring in the series over eight seasons, Norris also performed its dusty trails theme song, “Eyes of the Ranger,” on which he sang “In the eyes of a ranger/ The unsuspecting stranger/ Had better know the truth of wrong from right/ ‘Cause the eyes of a ranger are upon you/ Any wrong you do, he’s gonna see.”

Outside of acting, Norris also created his own martial arts discipline, Chun Kuk Do, wrote a New York Times best-selling 1987 memoir detailing his personal philosophy of positive force and the psychology of self-improvement (The Secret of My Inner Strength: My Story) and appeared in a series of cable TV ads alongside model Christie Brinkley promoting Total Gym home fitness equipment. He published his autobiography, Against All Odds: My Story, in 2004 and formed the World Combat League martial arts competition the following year.

Younger fans likely learned of Norris tough guy persona via the popular internet meme Chuck Norris Facts, a series of ridiculously inflated false factoids about the actor such as: “When Chuck Norris does push-ups, he doesn’t push himself up, he pushes the Earth down,” “When Chuck Norris goes swimming, he doesn’t get wet – the water gets Chuck Norris” and “Chuck Norris knows where Carmen Sandiego is.”

In their remembrance, the family added, “While our hearts are broken, we are deeply grateful for the life he lived and for the unforgettable moments we were blessed to share with him. The love and support he received from fans around the world meant so much to him, and our family is truly thankful for it. To him, you were not just fans, you were his friends.”

See the tribute below.

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Shakira will take her historic world tour this fall to Madrid, and she will do so in a special way. The Spanish superstar will offer a three-night residency at the Shakira Stadium, a temporary 4.2-acre (185,000-square-meter) venue that will integrate cinema, gastronomy, literature and exhibitions curated by the artist herself under the title Es Latina.

The event is scheduled to take place Sept. 25-27 at the Iberdrola Music space in the Villaverde district, south of the city, Live Nation announced on Friday (March 20). Designed as an immersive experience, this temporary venue model aligns with recent formats in Europe, such as the one presented by Adele in Munich (2024), which allow for greater control over the audience experience and production scale.

The announcement comes just days after Shakira revealed her plans to take her Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran World Tour to Spain with a production specifically designed for the occasion. “I’m going to go all out because Live Nation is preparing a stadium for these concerts. It will be called Estadio Shakira,” the artist revealed in a preview of an interview with the RTVE’s show Al Cielo Con Ella published March 15. “It’s going to be something out of this world, a production that I don’t think has been seen before in Spain.”

It also follows her recent nomination to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

The Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran World Tour, which began on Feb. 11, 2025, and continues throughout this year, set a Guinness World Record as the highest grossing tour of all time by a Hispanic artist. The historic tour grossed $421.6 million and sold 3.3 million tickets across 86 shows, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore.

That momentum was recently reflected in Mexico City, where Shakira broke attendance records at the GNP Seguros Stadium with 13 sold-out dates, surpassing 800,000 tickets sold, before culminating her trek in the Latin American country with a historic free show at the Zócalo square before 400,000 people on March 1. Tickets for the Madrid residency go on sale on March 27.

Before her arrival in Spain, the artist will perform on May 2 at another of the world’s most iconic and massive venues: the legendary Brazilian beach of Copacabana, where organizers expect an audience of at least one million people — just as was the case with Madonna in 2024 and Lady Gaga in 2025.

The tour behind Rüfüs Du Sol‘s 2024 album Inhale/Exhale was already big, with the 46-show 2025 worldwide trek selling 727,000 tickets and earning $64 million, numbers that made it the highest-grossing electronic tour of all time.

This summer it gets even bigger, with a swirl of 31 North American headlining performances, including five shows at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles; four shows at Madison Square Garden in New York; headlining shows at Chicago’s Wrigley Stadium, San Diego’s Petco Park, Toronto’s Rogers Centre and The Gorge in Washington; and headlining festival slots at Bonnaroo at Outside Lands. According to CAA, many of these shows are already sold out.

“From the very first chords I ever heard Rüfüs Du Sol play, I thought this was possible,” says the group’s longtime agent at CAA Alex Becket, who first heard the Australian live electronic trio play at the 350-capacity San Francisco club Popscene in 2013, the same year the group released its first album, Atlas. “That’s a true story. You have those existential moments in life where you’re struck by a feeling and a belief, and you can see years into the future.”

Thirteen years after that fateful performance, CAA — which books the group worldwide except for Europe and the United Kingdom, where they’re represented by The Team — reports that over 550,000 tickets have already been sold across this North American run, which begins on June 5 and wraps in early September. And that helps Becket earn the title of Billboard‘s Executive of the Week.

Here, Becket, talks about how the group built their live business to this point, and how he helped make this historic tour a reality. “That band has checked all the boxes from playing in small clubs all the way up to this current stadium level,” he says.

When Inhale/Exhale came out, did you immediately see an opportunity to tour on this scale? When did it click into place for you that this was possible?

I’ve had the great fortune of working with the band since 2013, and from the first moment I heard them, I heard and felt something different, and I felt the sky was the limit. Our whole team here always saw the potential for these guys to become a stadium band.

Having that vision, how did you build to this point?

It’ll be a minute before another Rüfüs Du Sol comes along, because dance music has become so big globally as an industry that now, the pattern is that artists build into these big, sort of spectacular one-off events or one-off weekends. They go to a market, play two or three nights, get the fan base to travel and make it more of a destination, build a big production locally and the expense is passed on to the promoter. There’s not as much appetite for an artist to go out and hit the road five days a week like a rock band.

So it’s made a difference that they’re really an album cycle band, which is not typically the case in the electronic scene?

It’s counter to the general trend in music. Years ago, I heard [Spotify founder] Daniel Ek talk about the attention economy, how albums seem to be a relic from the past and how if you want to be on top of the charts, it’s more about catering to the attention economy and constantly engaging with your fans. So people release albums in this waterfall style, where it’s just a single every six weeks for six months, and then you have a finished album at the end, but you’ve really just been doing this series of releases.

I like to compare the global dance music touring pattern to global bird migrations, in terms of where you need to be at what time of year. For the normal DJ, if you miss a summer in Ibiza, or a winter in Tulum, or a March in Miami, whatever it might be, you risk losing a step. Rüfüs is quite to the contrary. Being a live band first is the biggest distinction, and they’ve toured in a more traditional rock and roll way, where they take a year or two to write a record, come back, hit the road nonstop for two years and then let the cycle repeat. That’s more traditional logic, to starve the market a bit, to increase demand, and then every time we’ve come back, it’s just kind of compounded and come back bigger.

Is that compounding how you knew you could put on a tour of this scale in 2025 and 2026?

The 2025 tour, which ended up being the highest-grossing electronic music tour of all time, was highly ambitious out of the gate. We announced 48 or 50 shows at one time. I don’t think anyone in dance music had really done that, save for maybe some domestic U.S. dubstep acts that hit the road for six weeks and play five nights a week.

Short of somebody like that, the scale of doing a global tour on four continents and announcing an entire year’s worth of shows at one time, I think was unprecedented. The sheer scale of it set us up for becoming an industry leader in terms of the size of that tour and how the sales ended up. It wasn’t done in a vacuum, though. That band has checked all the boxes from playing in small clubs all the way up to this current stadium level.

This summer, Rüfüs is playing four shows at Madison Square Garden and a night at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Did the success of the 2025 leg, which included a stadium show at the Rose Bowl, make this level of touring in 2026 possible?

Wrigley we knew about once we knew we were headlining Lollapalooza 2025. Chicago was being left out of the headline touring in 2025, and we felt like Wrigley is such an iconic venue and a cool, iconic follow-up. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I didn’t realize that an electronic artist had never played Wrigley before.

We’ve been growing into stadiums since our return from the pandemic. For a lot of people, some of the most iconic Rüfüs shows and most iconic post-pandemic shows were when we did three nights at BMO Stadium in L.A. [in November of 2021]. That was our first foray into a soccer stadium venue size. We weren’t the first concerts there, but it felt like we broke the seal off that building, and we’ve been able to duplicate that in other markets. Now we’ve taken this next step with baseball and football stadiums. The Rose Bowl was of course a crowning achievement last year, and this summer we’re also going to Folsom Field in Boulder.

When you’re able to toggle back and forth between headlining festival plays and massive hard ticket shows, how do you make the decisions of where and what to play?

Speaking to the U.S., historically the way we’ve toured is releasing a new record, coming to a territory and playing the A markets, establishing a headline history and then using that success to go to festival buyers and solicit festival offers. Like, “We just sold out The Fonda or The Wiltern, bring us back for a festival on the following play.” Then we come back on the same cycle for a second show and use the festivals as anchors to headline B markets and bring the show to more markets. This is also how we’ve been able to build a headline business in 40 markets nationally, as opposed to just sticking to the top 10 or 15, which is so easy to do.

It’s in a place now where everybody wants them, so we’re able to be strategic and choose the ones that make the most sense. It’s worked out really nicely on this cycle, where we’ve been able to fit festivals in perfectly with the broader tour.

What, if anything, does it mean for electronic music at large to have the highest-grossing electronic tour of all time not be 20 years ago, but happening currently?

I just think it’s so cool. A high tide lifts all the boats. It seems like every other day there’s some new amazing accomplishment or accolade happening for a dance artist, and it just seems like the whole genre has never been hotter.

When we were vetting that accomplishment of best-selling electronic music tour of all time,
we pretty much knew we had it as soon as the 2025 tour went on sale. But we spent the better part of the year doing our research and asking around and making sure it was indeed the case before making a statement like that. People would be like, “Oh come on, what about Daft Punk?” It’s like, Daft Punk are the kings, but they last toured in 2007 and they were playing 5,000 capacity venues. Daft Punk could come back today and do a stadium tour, but when you look at a comparison like that, it’s such an indicator of the growth of the whole genre.