Investor and entrepreneur Mark Cuban joined Billboard at South by Southwest (SXSW) on Friday (March 13) to talk about why he’s previously said in interviews, and on episodes of the hit TV show Shark Tank, that music — along with other products like liquor brands and clothing lines — is “the death” for investors. The conversation, hosted by Kristin Robinson, was released on Wednesday (March 18) as the first-ever live episode of On the Record, Billboard’s music business podcast.

“Yeah, I think it’s the worst industry ever,” Cuban says with a laugh. “No, it’s probably tied with clothing, branded clothing…that’s the worst, and music is right behind it.” Later, the investor clarified that he was specifically referring to new music and the record labels that release it. To Cuban, older music, also known as catalog, is in a different category entirely — as is music tech.

During the wide-ranging conversation, Cuban talked about how music has become an “asset class,” how his company Cost Plus Drugs can help alleviate financial challenges for artists, why AI agents will create more artist independence and why he thinks the music industry has a lot to learn from sports about integrating prediction markets and betting.

Watch or listen to the full episode of Billboard On the Record with Mark Cuban here, or read an excerpt of the conversation below.

You’ve said you don’t believe music is a great investment, but we are seeing a lot of players from the financial world, like KKR and Shamrock, now interested in buying catalogs, like Queen and Britney Spears. Why do you think that is?

To me, that’s not really music investing. It just happens to be music that is the vehicle for their investment. Licensing revenue for music is really consistent, but most artists really haven’t been able to get a big cash out yet, so someone like a KKR or another big investment company will just come in and say, “Okay, I’ll give you all this money [up front in exchange].” And they just see it as, you know, “Here’s my returns.” It’s almost like owning an apartment building for them.

Often, when I speak to investors who are weary about investing in new music tech companies, they say that the exception is that they wished they invested in Spotify. Spotify dominated the streaming era, and now you could argue we are moving into the AI era. Do you think that there’s going to be another opportunity for a Spotify-level AI music company to emerge?

It depends on how consumers take to AI-generated music, because if they see it as an equivalent to what an artist produces, then yes… We don’t know how people are going to respond to purely AI-generated music, but we’re seeing some of it roll up the [charts], so it isn’t that people are absolutely saying no, we just don’t know if they will truly say yes to it.

One thing that a lot of people in the music industry, especially investors in music catalogs, believe is that the music industry is recession-resistant. That music is not correlated to the overall market and will still thrive if the economy tanks. What do you think?

I think it holds up because the worse things are, the more people need music, you know? I’m a big believer that music soothes the soul and makes life livable. But at the same time, again, what is the source of that music? Is it AI or human? That’s what we don’t know.

Your career really took off during the dot-com bubble when you sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo. Do you think we are in an AI bubble right now?

I think for private companies, the economics may be a little bit rich right now, because, like back then, anybody with a website could go out there and raise a million dollars. Now, if you have any amount of decent AI technology, you could raise, in some cases, tens of millions of dollars, but back then, it was a public company bubble. Now, because it’s geared towards private companies, it’s not really a bubble by definition, because most people can’t participate.

Niall Horan hopes you’re hungry, because it’s time for a dinner party.

The former One Direction member announced via his Instagram on Wednesday (March 18) that he will be dropping his highly anticipated fourth studio album in less than three months.

“My brand new album ‘dinner party’ will be yours june 5th,” Horan said in his caption.

The two-slide post features the album cover as well as the tracklist for the forthcoming project. The Dinner Party artwork features Horan in the corner of a kitchen sipping from a mug, surrounded by an eclectic collection of ceramic plates, more cups and a tea set. According to the posted tracklist, the album will have 12 songs. No features are listed on the tracklist, though it’s unknown if some could be announced in the future.

Horan’s announcement comes a few weeks after he confirmed in a post to X that his “Album is DONE” on Feb. 24. In the post, he also shared photos from the recording studio and two short instrumental snippets of what we can assume are two of the songs on Dinner Party.

Soon after the singer began teasing the lead single and title track “Dinner Party” by replying to fans’ comments with snippets of the song. In a March 2 post to Instagram, the former boy band member shared the heartfelt story behind the upcoming single. While sitting at a piano, he explained that the song is about meeting his longtime girlfriend, Amelia Woolley, which happened at a dinner party. Finally, on March 4, Horan announced that the song will be released on Friday (March 20).

Dinner Party is the follow-up to Horan’s 2023 album The Show, which hit No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart. To date, Horan has had seven songs hit the Billboard Hot 100, including 2017’s “Slow Hands” (No. 11) off his debut solo album Flicker, which topped the Billboard 200. His other solo album, 2020’s Heartbreak Weather, hit No. 4 on the chart.

Fans can preorder Dinner Party from Horan’s official website. See the album announcement below.

More than 35 years after Juan Luis Guerra’s “Estrellitas y Duendes” earned the Dominican singer-songwriter his third top 10 on Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart, the reimagined version featuring Sting sets new marks for both artists.

The Spanish-language collaboration debuts at No. 24 on the Tropical Airplay chart (dated March 21), returning Guerra to the list after a two-year absence, and giving Sting his first appearance on the survey.

Both Sting and Guerra tell Billboard that their team-up represents yet another high in their decades-long discographies.

“I’m thrilled to be on the Billboard Latin charts with friends Juan Luis Guerra and Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso,” Sting says. “I’m also honored to have collaborated in the past with many amazing Latin American musicians, including Rubén Blades and Charly García. These particular shared musical and cultural experiences are some of the most cherished of my career.”

Adds Guerra, “Working with Sting has been an immense honor. His artistry and sensitivity brought a new light to ‘Estrellitas y Duendes.’ Hearing him sing one of my songs in Spanish is a great gift and privilege.”

The original solo “Estrellitas y Duendes” was released as the fifth single from Guerra’s fifth studio album, Bachata Rosa, which earned him his first No. 1 on Top Tropical Albums and dominated for 12 weeks in 1991, the chart’s longest reign that year. The track hit No. 3 on Hot Latin Songs that March, marking his third of 20 top 10s.

The new collaborative “Estrellitas y Duendes” was released on Rimas Entertainment in November and debuted and peaked No. 9 that month on Latin Digital Song Sales. With its Tropical Airplay debut, Guerra revisits the chart after achieving his 24th top 10 with “La Noviecita” in March 2024.

Although Sting has been a chart staple dating to 1979, as frontman of The Police before going solo in 1985, “Estrellitas y Duendes,” on which he sings entirely in Spanish, marks the English singer-songwriter’s first appearance on a Latin radio chart. It also follows his collab with Argentinian duo Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso, “Hasta Jesús Tuvo Un Mal Día,” which hit No. 23 on Hot Latin Pop Songs (Feb. 28).

Among Sting’s prior collaborations that expanded his musical and lyrical palette, “Desert Rose” features Algerian artist Cheb Mami singing in Arabic. The hit reached the Billboard Hot 100’s top 20 in 2000. Meanwhile, Sting’s Billboard chart history also stretches across adult, alternative, classical, dance, holiday, R&B/hip-hop, reggae, rock and world music rankings.

She is man’s best friend — just not this particular one’s. On Tuesday (March 17), Sabrina Carpenter replied to an X user who was not pleased with the lyrics to her Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit “Manchild.”

“Women are always like ‘men are useless’ but sabrina carpenter is like 4 foot 11, she can even climb into a mid size SUV without help,” reads the post by @uncledoomer. Doomer’s sentiment comes in response to a now viral video of Carpenter performing the single at Lollapalooza Argentina on Sunday (March 15).

In the clip, Carpenter and the audience participate in a call-and-response to the song’s pre-chorus. “What do you call it?” she sings. “Stupid!” the crowd replies.

“Or it is it?” asks the pop star.

“Slow!” the crowd responds.

“Well maybe it’s …” she considers.

“Useless!” the audiences yells.

The video was shared to X with the caption, “Sabrina Carpenter at Lollapalloza having over 100K people call men ‘USELESS!’” has more than 200,000 likes as of press times.

Rather than allowing someone to speculate on her ability to get into a car on her own, Carpenter decided to end the conversation with three simple words.

“Yes i can ?” she wrote in a response to @uncledoomer that has gained more than 735,000 likes and 7,000 replies in less than 24 hours.

Fans were also quick to defend Carpenter against the hater.

“She didn’t [say] men are useless, she’s talking about the ‘manchild’ in the song being useless. But if you got identified … Oh well,” one response to the post reads.

“How does it feel to be ended by the queen herself,” a fan account for the pop star replied.

This is not the first time Carpenter has used X to stand up for herself or her music. In December, the “Espresso” singer took to the platform to slam the White House for using her Hot 100 track “Juno” in a video of ICE raids. In her post, she calls the video “evil and disgusting” and tells the White House to never uses her music to “benefit [their] inhumane agenda.” Carpenter’s reply has since garnered nearly 2 million likes, and the White House has since deleted the video from its account.

If anyone can relate to the challenges that come along with being a child star, it’s Miley Cyrus. But one thing she had that many of her peers didn’t was a famous parent on set with her at all times — something she says likely protected her from any potential for abuse in the industry while she was filming Hannah Montana.

In a Wednesday (March 18) cover story interview for Variety, the pop star reflected on how acting alongside her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, on the iconic Disney Channel series — which will celebrate its 20th anniversary with a Disney+ special starring Miley on March 24 — may have shielded her from the mistreatment some former child stars allege they faced when they were younger. The country singer played the dad of his real-life daughter’s titular character on Hannah Montana.

“My dad was on set every single day, so there was nothing that could happen that he wouldn’t know about,” Miley told the publication, which noted that her dressing area back in the day was connected to her dad’s room on set. “There was never a time where I was going to be alone in that dressing room.”

The Grammy winner also recalled how her mother, Tish Cyrus, pushed for Billy Ray to be cast as Robby Ray Stewart on the children’s series so that the Cyrus clan could all be together in Los Angeles while Miley — who was the first in the family to nab a part on the show — was filming. It helped, too, that her dad had a successful music and acting career long before Hannah Montana was created, Miley said.

“My parents didn’t need me to be famous to survive or to be stable,” she told Variety. “What happens to a lot of these kids is their parents want it more than they do, or the kids become responsible for the entire income of the family. That was never my job. Every penny I ever made went into my bank account because my parents were good.” 

Contextualizing Miley’s conversation about child-star abuse are the allegations made against Dan Schneider and Nickelodeon in 2024 documentary Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV. The series explored claims accusing Schneider of fostering an environment of inappropriate/predatory behavior on the set of shows starring underage actors such as Drake & Josh and Victorious, which the producer has denied; he sued Warner Bros. and others behind the program for defamation after the documentary’s release on the Investigation Discovery network.

“I think that the environment needs to be made safer if kids are going to be acting,” Ariana Grande, a Victorious alum, said in a Podcrushed interview after Quiet on Set premiered. “I think there should be therapists. I think there should be parents allowed to be wherever they wanna be.”

See Miley on the cover of Variety below.