Years before Eliseo Tapia founded Christian music company Heaven Music, Spanish-language Christian music stars Marcos Vidal and Marcos Witt sought his expertise. Tapia met both musicians in a small village in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, where Tapia was often singing and playing drums in the church where his father served as pastor.

Around 2009, “both asked for my help to join their team and organize concerts — initially in Mexico, and very quickly thereafter, throughout Latin America,” Tapia says.

He had already worked on two creative projects with Vidal: 2011’s Tu Nombre and 2013’s Sigo Esperándote, which landed the singer his first two Latin Grammy Award nominations. “When Marcos Vidal’s 25th-anniversary commemoration came around,” he says, “I selected the songs, chose the music producer and defined the overall sound [for his 25 Años album], which went on to win the Latin Grammy in 2016” for best Christian album (Spanish language), his first.

That same year, with his expertise of working with both Vidal and Witt, Tapia launched the label Heaven Music. Now, as it marks its 10th anniversary, Heaven Music is not only one of the most prominent labels in Spanish-­language Christian music but also plays a major role in artist development, production, distribution and more.

In 2019, Heaven Music — based in Houston with a strong presence throughout North America, Spain and several Latin American countries — formed a strategic partnership with Witt’s CanZion, then the largest Spanish-language Christian music label.

Their combined roster includes pivotal figures such as Vidal, Marco Barrientos and Alex Campos; established bands Rojo and Un Corazón; and contemporary voices including Sarai Rivera and Kike Pavón. While artists release music through their respective labels, the operational teams are fully integrated and both labels benefit from a variety of services including live entertainment.

The first year of their partnership, Heaven Music and CanZion staged a one-time festival at the Arena Ciudad de México in Mexico City called the Heaven Music Fest, which featured nearly 20 artists from both companies. They haven’t looked back. Now, the combined company promotes the majority of their artists’ live shows.

“When we started [CanZion] 40 years ago, there was very little infrastructure to support a Christian music industry. The little that did exist was highly regionalized and lacked commercial connections,” says Witt, who decided to take advantage of the fact that he was consistently traveling across the American continent. “During those trips, I made a concerted effort to learn everything I could about our musical genre, as well as its singers, songwriters and producers. Little by little, an international network began to take shape, strengthening our musical expression.”

By the time CanZion began working with Heaven Music, the company possessed a substantial catalog of Christian music, along with a solid track record within the industry. “We lacked presence and expertise in the realm of digital distribution,” Witt says, adding that Heaven Music was a pioneer in that space. “We transitioned from being two medium-­size music companies into a single large entity, which has enabled us to continue expanding and investing in new artists, musical projects, tours and concerts — allowing us to better fulfill our vision of sharing the love of God through the production and dissemination of excellent music.”

Tapia didn’t set out to become a music pioneer. His first foray into the music business was putting together a Christian music concert to support Casa Hogar CHIRIA, an organization in Oaxaca dedicated to the care of children in vulnerable situations. That experience, along with working at an audio company where he “gained a perfect understanding of how it all worked,” led Tapia to doing larger shows. By the time he conceived of Heaven Music, he knew enough about the business to include music recording and distribution, publishing, live-event production and audience growth strategies.

Heaven Music’s distribution model features direct agreements with leading digital platforms and functions without intermediaries. In publishing, it has established a direct rights management structure, backed by agreements with key local collecting societies across various territories — a model that Tapia says enables the maximization of international revenue collection and guarantees that creators receive the true value of their work in every market.

The company’s live division handles both booking and concert production for large-scale tours, producing more than 150 concerts across the Americas in the last year alone. Those shows gathered thousands of fans at iconic venues including Auditorio Nacional in Mexico City; Gran Rex in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Movistar Arena in Bogota, Colombia; and James L. Knight Center in Miami.

Concurrently, Heaven Music is investing in a new era for the label through emerging artists such as Dariana, Enoc Parra and Factor de Cambio, who are bringing creative momentum to the genre. The company has also launched a division specializing in music and content for children focused on education, values and family audiences called Heaven Kids.

The digital era has been a game-changer for Spanish-language Christian music, which has a rich history but did not reach prominence until the early 2000s, when it began to appear on the Billboard charts. The effects of the format have been exponential. According to Luminate’s 2025 reports, last year, Christian music in general experienced a significant growth, with an 18.5% increase in on-­demand audio streams compared with 2024.

“The shift to digital was the pivotal change, because Christian music used to operate in a very different way — through a highly informal, even underground, distribution network centered around Christian bookstores,” Tapia says. “Christian music was unavailable in any record stores back when those still existed. The shift to digital — which arrived very slowly within the Christian music sphere — opened tremendous opportunities.”

He adds, “Part of the reason Heaven Music exists is that, as of 2016, a great deal of [Spanish-language Christian] music had not yet been digitized. Several other artists whom we don’t currently have signed, but to whom we provided distribution services at the time, saw their exposure grow by at least twentyfold.”

Tapia also recognizes the role that Grammy and Latin Grammy winner Juan Luis Guerra has played in the genre’s success. In 2004, Guerra released Para Ti, his first full album of Christian music following his conversion in the mid-1990s. “It led people in general to view Christian music as regular music, not pigeonholing it strictly within the religion of Christians, Catholics or Evangelicals, but rather seeing it as something rooted in faith,” Tapia says.

The set debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Tropical Albums chart (where it stayed for seven weeks) and peaked at No. 2 on Top Latin Albums. Para Ti also allowed for more Latin artists to release faith-based music, including Ricardo Montaner (2021’s Fe), Farruko (2024’s CVRBON VRMOR, which debuted at No. 28 on Top Christian Albums) and Daddy Yankee (2025’s Lamento En Baile, which reached No. 15 on Top Christian Albums).

Looking ahead, Tapia is working with three genre icons — Vidal, Barrientos and Marcos Witt — on an album that will feature a mix of hymns and original songs. The future of Heaven Music also lies in keeping the past alive and helping established artists like Witt connect with a new generation.

“Our strength at this moment lies in creating, in being able to understand the creative process, understand Christian music, understand why it’s made and what people are looking for,” Tapia says.

There is still a long way to go for Christian music to be treated equal to secular music, Tapia believes. “The idea is for Christian music to be able to reach whatever platforms it needs to reach without running into that mindset of, ‘OK, since you don’t feature alcohol, none of the brands are going to get involved,’ ” he says, noting that it is rare for brands to collaborate with the genre. “It’s true that there are different markets where ‘this fits here, but that doesn’t fit there.’ Everyone who consumes Christian music — or almost everyone — drinks coffee.”

The goal, Tapia says, is to become the first Christian music major label by 2030. The “objective is for Christian music to be completely on equal footing, to achieve the same level of listenership as any other genre.”

This story appears in the May 9, 2026, issue of Billboard.

Niall Horan is setting the table for his 2027 Dinner Party live tour. The former One Direction member and solo star will hit arenas in North America in support of his upcoming fourth solo album, Dinner Party (June 5), with dates slated to kick off on March 17 at Grand Casino Arena in St. Paul. Minn.

The Live Nation-produced tour will hit 26 arenas across North America over the two-month run, including gigs in Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Toronto, Brooklyn, Boston, Orlando, Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston, Austin, Denver, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Seattle before winding down on May 29 at Rogers Arena in Vancouver.

Tickets for the tour will go on sale beginning with a Citi presale beginning on Tuesday (May 12) at 10 a.m. local time, followed by an artist presale on Wednesday (May 13) at 10 a.m. local time. There will be more presales throughout the week ahead of the general onsale kicking off at 10 a.m. local time on Friday (May 15) here.

Horan is slated to perform on the plaza at New York’s Rockefeller Center on June 12 as part of the Citi Concert Series on The Today Show. He’s also slated to play two co-headlining stadium shows with his friend Thomas Rhett in Nashville (July 9) and Hershey, Pa. (July 18). The U.K./EU leg of the Dinner Party Live on tour will kick off on Sept. 22 in Birmingham, England.

So far, Horan has released the title track and the second single, “Little More Time.”

Check out the dates for Horan’s Dinner Party Live on Tour 2027 North American shows:

Dua Lipa is suing Samsung over accusations that the electronics giant used her image without permission on the packaging for televisions – and has ignored her “repeated demands” to remove it.

In a lawsuit filed Friday (May 8) in Los Angeles federal court, attorneys for the “Levitating” superstar said a photo of her face has been plastered on cardboard boxes for Samsung TVs, violating both the copyrights to the image and her likeness rights.

Despite multiple cease-and-desist letters, Lipa says the Korean company hasn’t done anything at all about the problem, forcing her to go to court to address it.

“Samsung’s response has been dismissive and callous, and the infringing products remain on the market to this day,” her lawyers write in the lawsuit, obtained by Billboard. “Samsung’s infringing conduct — using Ms. Lipa’s assets for zero consideration — makes a mockery of her hard work.”

And Lipa’s lawyers say it was no small misprint. They claim her face appeared on a “significant portion of the televisions sold by Samsung in the United States” during all of 2025 and 2026. They’re not only seeking at least $15 million in damages for infringement, but also a portion of the “immense” profits the company made on all those TVs.

A spokesman for Samsung did not immediately return a request for comment on Monday.

At a time when music stars are facing a complex array of deepfake videos and voice cloning from bad actors on the internet, Lipa’s dispute with Samsung is almost confusingly simple. She claims one of the world’s most valuable companies overtly used a huge celebrity to sell televisions, without any sort of licensing deal or even outreach.

“Ms. Lipa’s face was prominently used for a mass marketing campaign for a consumer product without her knowledge, without consideration, and as to which she had no say, control, or input whatsoever,” her lawyers write. “Ms. Lipa did not allow and would not have allowed this use.”

Making the matter all the more straightforward is that Samsung allegedly used an image actually owned by Lipa, which was snapped backstage at Austin City Limits in 2024. Lipa would still have been able to sue if the photo was taken by a third-party photographer, but her ownership of the copyright gives her another powerful weapon to use in the lawsuit.

She says the use of her image has been effective – falsely suggesting to consumers that she had endorsed Samsung’s TVs. “I wasn’t even planning on buying a tv but I saw the box so I decided to get it,” one fan alleged wrote on social media. “If you need anything selling just put a picture of Dua Lipa on it,” another allegedly wrote.

Lipa’s lawyers say she first became aware of the problem in June 2025 and immediately demanded that Samsung remove her from the packaging. But almost a year later, she says there’s been no progress.

“Samsung’s arrogance in refusing to stop its infringement confirms its conscious disregard of Ms. Lipa’s intellectual property and personal identity rights,” her attorneys say.

The Weeknd‘s After Hours til Dawn tour will keep things moving this fall with an 11-show Asian run on the outing that originally launched in July 2022. According to a press release announcing the latest shows, the Live Nation-produced tour will kick off an Asian run on Sept. 20 at Tokyo’s Belluna Dome and make stops in Jakarta, Singapore, Seoul, Bangkok and Hong Kong before winding down on Nov. 4 at TM Stadium National in Kuala Lumpur.

The shows will feature support from Japanese hip-hop duo Creepy Nuts and Japanese DJ ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U.

They will also mark the final leg of the global stadium outing that passed the $1 billion in global grosses last year following the addition of its upcoming 2026 dates in Europe and the U.K. this summer, in addition to recently wrapped shows in Mexico City, Rio e Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil. To date, according to the release, the tour has sold 7.5 million tickets to date across 153 shows, making it the highest-grossing tour ever by a male solo artist.

Last year’s North American leg included more than 40 sold-out stadium shows, with the Weeknd becoming the top-grossing Black male artist in history at venues in New York, Denver, Santa Clara, Seattle, Edmonton, Montreal, Orlando, Arlington an Houston.

Tickets for the final run of shows will be available starting with an artist presale on Monday (May 18) — except for the Seoul dates — with fans now able to register through Friday (May 15) at 8 p.m. ET here. A Visa presale will follow on Tuesday (May 19) in select markets, with additional presales throughout the week ahead of the general onsale on May 21. Presale and onsale timing will vary by market, with general onsale timing for the Japan show to be announced at a later date.

Check out the fall 2026 Asian dates for the Weeknd’s After Hours Til Dawn stadium tour:

Blondie singer Debbie Harry is headed back to the big screen. The legendary punk/new wave singer who has dozens of acting credits to her name will play Pamela Anderson’s mother in the comedy Maitreya.

According to Deadline, the film that is launching in the Cannes market will follow, “Maitreya (Anderson), a rising star in the New Age Healing community who is about to head off to a conference in India when she receives a call from her estranged sister, Monica: their father is dying. Rather than stay home with him, Maitreya decides to bring her entire family – including her mother Barbara (Harry) – to the conference and put her New Age healing theories to the test (all while surreptitiously gathering material for her next book).”

The movie will be directed by Emmy-nominee and Portlandia co-creator Jonathan Krisel, with a script by BAFTA nominee Samuel D. Hunter (The Whale) and shooting scheduled to begin at the end of this year.

Rock n’ Roll Hall of Famer Harry has long had a parallel career in movies, from her cameo in the iconic 1982 hip-hop film Wild Style, to a role in director David Cronenberg’s sci-fi horror classic Videodrome (1983), as well as acting gigs in John Waters’ Hairspray (1988), Cop Land (1997), Deuces Wild (2002) and Elegy (2008), among many others. She recently made a cameo on SNL, where she introduced host/musical guest Olivia Rodrigo’s “drop dead” performance.

Anderson is in the midst of a late career glow-up, including SAG and Golden Globe nominations for her role in director Gia Coppola’s drama The Last Showgirl, with a number of upcoming films on tap, including Rosebush Pruning (with Riley Keough, Callum Turner, Elle Fanning), Somedays (with Billy Bob Thornton) and actor Michael Cera’s upcoming directorial debut, Love Is Not the Answer, alongside Steve Coogan, Jamie Dornan and Lucas Hedges.