Amid the chart-topping success of “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” Shaboozey is now suing music publisher Warner Chappell — claiming the company is stonewalling his efforts to exercise a contractual provision that would give him an early exit from his deal.

In a case filed Wednesday (Aug. 21) in Los Angeles, the country star (born Collins Obinna Chibueze) claims his publishing administration deal with Warner-Tamerlane (a unit of Warner Chappell) contained an acceleration clause — meaning he could repay 110% of advances to speed up the expiration of the deal.

Shaboozey’s lawyers say he invoked that clause last month — perhaps unsurprisingly, given the massive success of “Bar Song.” But they claim Warner has, thus far, declined to even tell him how much is owed.

“To date, Warner has refused to disclose to plaintiff the total amount of the unrecouped balance of prior advances it made,” writes Todd Bonder, the star’s attorney. “Warner’s conduct violates the administration agreement signed between the parties.”

The lawsuit comes amid a breakout year for Shaboozey. “A Bar Song,” a genre-blending hit that interpolates J-KWON‘s 2004 rap hit “Tipsy” into a bouncy pop country track, has spent six weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, tying the longest chart-topping stint for a song in 2024.

In his complaint, Shaboozey also names his former record label, Kreshendo Entertainment, as a defendant. He claims the company — which he left in 2019 before signing a new record deal with Empire — is the reason Warner is refusing to turn over the crucial information.

“Kreshendo and [others] have instructed Warner not to provide plaintiff the total unrecouped balance related to advances made with respect to the compositions or has refused to authorize Warner to provide such information,” his lawyers write.

The dispute appears to turn on Shaboozey’s argument that he personally took over Kreshendo’s role in the contract with Warner after he terminated his label. In his legal filings, he says that Warner “has not agreed” with such an interpretation.

The lawsuit also claims that Kreshendo released three separate Shaboozey songs in 2019 after he had already terminated the deal — “More,” “Joan Jett” and “Prosperity” — without his permission.

A spokesman for Warner Music Group did not immediately return a request for comment. A spokesperson for Kreshendo could not immediately be located for comment. A publicist for Shaboozey did not return a request for comment.

Jenny From the Block wants to go back to one. In a copy of her divorce filing from Ben Affleck filed on Tuesday (August 20) obtained by Billboard, Jennifer Lopez requested that her former name be restored. So, after two years as Jennifer Lynn Affleck, JLo asked the court to revert her name back to Jennifer Lynn Lopez.

Additionally, the This Is Me… Now singer asked the state of California to deny her and Affleck the chance to collect spousal support. While neither Lopez nor Affleck have made public statements on their split — which came precisely two years after their lavish wedding in Georgia — NBC News cited an unnamed source close to Lopez saying that the couple did not have a prenuptial agreement.

The dissolution of Lopez’s fourth marriage came after she and Affleck reunited and got engaged in 2022. Their unexpected get-back took place more than 20 years after they first got engaged following their meeting on the set of the widely panned film Gigli; the couple split two years later without marrying. Lopez was married to Ojani Noa from 1997-1998 and then to dancer Cris Judd from 2001-2003. She married singer Marc Anthony in 2004 and they were together for a decade, during which she gave birth to twins Emme and Max.

In addition, Lopez was engaged to Yankees player Alex Rodriguez for three years (2019-2021) before she rekindled her romance with Affleck; the couple was commonly referred to by their celeb portmanteau: “Bennifer.” The story of their rebooted romance was chronicled in a pair of projects this year, one telling the story of her most recent album, the cameo-packed fictional retelling of their romance, This Is Me… Now: A Love Story, as well as the accompanying documentary, The Greatest Love Story Never Told.

In addition to taking fans behind the scenes of the making of the This Is Me… Now album — which featured several homages to her second Affleck love affair and served as a sequel to 2002’s Affleck-dedicated This Is Me… Then — the doc featured scenes of a taciturn-looking Affleck seemingly cringing at the sharing of his personal love notes to her.

Interest in the latter doc — which, like the fictional extended music video short film, was widely panned upon initial release — skyrocketed in the 24 hours after the divorce news broke. According to Luminate, U.S. viewership of the Prime Video movie jumped from 10.7k minutes watched on Tuesday’s filing date to 354.1k minutes watched on Wednesday (Aug. 21), marking a 3,000% increase in just one day.

Universal Music Publishing Group earned the top spot on the Hot 100 Songs publishers ranking for 2024’s second quarter with 27.97% of the market, in large part thanks to Taylor Swift and the 19 songs she landed on the chart. It didn’t hurt that her writing partner Jack Antonoff is also on UMPG’s roster. (He moved there from Sony Music Publishing in August 2023.) Swift’s work accounted for a little over one-third of the 56 songs the publisher had on the Hot 100 during the quarter, up significantly from its 43-song count in the first quarter of the year.

Sony Music Publishing, which typically places first on the Hot 100 publishers ranking, finished a close second with a 27.13% market share and 57 tracks on the chart, including the No. 1 song for the second quarter, Tommy Richman‘s “Million Dollar Baby.” Warner Chappell Music finished third with a 19.87% market share. Its top second-quarter tune was “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” by Shaboozey, one of 47 that it landed on the chart.

Sony nevertheless remained at the peak of the Top Radio Airplay ranking for the 13th consecutive quarter, with a 27.64% market share and 66 songs. Its No. 1 track was “Lose Control” by Teddy Swims, a song in which Warner Chappell and UMPG also have stakes. Sony was also buoyed by the quarter’s biggest Radio Airplay hitmaker — Ashley Gorley, co-writer of “I Had Some Help” by Post Malone featuring Morgan Wallen — plus seven other songs on the chart.

Warner Chappell maintained its second-place ranking among Top Radio Airplay publishers for the third consecutive quarter with a 23.25% market share and 63 songs on the chart. UMPG came in third with 15.82% of the market and 43 songs.

Kobalt held its position as the fourth-largest  publisher on the Hot 100 and Top Radio Airplay charts with market shares of 10.74% and 9.44%, respectively, in part due to stakes in the No. 1 songs on both charts.

Despite a tumultuous first half of the year, Hipgnosis turned in a strong performance, finishing fifth on both rankings, with a 4.36% share on Top Radio Airplay and 2.73% on the Hot 100, also thanks to its piece of "Lose Control." Last quarter, Hipgnosis — whose founder and CEO, Merck Mercuriadis, stepped down in July after private equity firm Blackstone acquired its catalog — was No. 7 on Top Radio Airplay and No. 9 on the Hot 100.

BMG ranked No. 6 on both Top Radio  Airplay (3.36%) and the Hot 100 (1.47%), down  from the No. 5 ranking it had on both charts in  the first quarter.

Three independent publishers fill the entries at Nos. 7, 8 and 9 on the Hot 100 chart. Reservoir Music ranked seventh (1.34%) thanks to its share of "Espresso" by Sabrina Carpenter, Position Music (1.194%) was eighth due to its stake in "Beautiful Things" by Benson Boone, and Sentric Music Publishing was ninth (1.192%) with help from "End of Beginning" by Djo. The latter two publishers make their first appearances on the rankings.

Last Quarter: Jack Harlow Helped Sony Sweep (Again)

With the first quarter of the 21st century coming to an end, Billboard has been looking back on the 25 Greatest Pop Stars of the Past 25 Years. Below, we take a deeper look into the peak of our No. 24 pop star, Ed Sheeran, and how his writing style — while often critically derided — actually displays the efficiency, creativity and originality of a true songwriting savant.

Despite being one of this century’s most successful musicians by pretty much any statistic you could conjure, Ed Sheeran’s music has inspired well over a decade’s worth of eye rolls and turned-up noses – not necessarily because it’s bad, in the eyes of critics, but because it’s boring.

That’s not an oversimplification. In 2011, The Guardian’s Peter Robinson literally made the English singer-songwriter the face of “The New Boring,” calling his debut album + “a 12-bore s–tgun” and likening him to “a combination of every friend-of-a-friend’s band whose pub gig you have ever witnessed.” Six years later, Pitchfork’s Laura Snapes described Sheeran as “trite,” “bland” and “unimaginative,” all within the sub-headline of a review about his third album ÷ (it scored a 2.8). For the duration of his career, the musician has been especially critiqued for his approach to genre, cherry-picking features of hip-hop, R&B and rock and distilling them into compressed, radio-friendly pop earworms which inevitably become lodged for years at a time on the charts and on grocery store speakers — writer Rachel Aroesti recently described the end result as a “sludgy, vague, inoffensive post-genre sound that has served to homogenise music in general.”

It’s understandable why people might be so tempted to explain away Sheeran’s success. Homely, scruffy and pointedly underdressed, he soared into the general public’s consciousness as the total antithesis to the polished male pop stars who were big before him — Justins Timberlake and Bieber, One Direction, Bruno Mars – prompting confusion as to how exactly he was able to infiltrate their sleek ranks. But as the essays have piled up over the last 15 years dismissing his scrappy image and mass-appeal music as calculated ploys to maximize profit by appearing as relatable to consumers as possible, one salient quality of Sheeran’s superstardom seems to have fallen out of focus. His seamlessly packaging together the shiniest parts of different genres and presenting them in a way that’s almost universally palatable is a skill in and of itself, and one with which Sheeran is singularly gifted.

It takes an intriguing musical vocabulary, for instance, to infuse a romantic folk ballad such as “Lego House,” one of Sheeran’s earliest hits, with mile-a-minute rap bars — “And it’s dark in a cold December/ But I’ve got you to keep me warm…” in the pre-chorus, without interrupting its cozy pacing. The same can be said of his 2014 smash “Sing,” which somehow has all the body and elasticity of a FutureSex/LoveSounds banger – producer Pharell Williams once told Billboard the Timberlake album was a key inspiration — while staying simultaneously grounded in acoustic instruments and Sheeran’s rapid-fire rhyming. Other hits like 2014’s R&B-rap-pop-dance number “Don’t” and 2017’s tropical 12-week Billboard Hot 100-topper “Shape of You” show off his proclivity for complementing catchy sung melodic hooks with percussive rap-based verses, which he can confidently weave in and out of without ever disrupting the overall feel of a song.

Though he’s never been the most prosaic writer, the words he does choose instead serve to fit snugly in rhyme pockets or push the momentum of a section forward. While certainly cheesy and not particularly clever, the lyrical and melodic simplicity of “I’m in love with the shape of you/ We push and pull like a magnet do/ Every day discovering something brand new” enables it to wedge instantly into listeners’ memories. On the verses, he creates pleasing, percussive toplines that aren’t weighed down by needless syllables, but still manage to propel the narrative forward by quickly summarizing storylines (“One week in, we let the story begin/ We’re goin’ out on our first date”) or tapping into multiple layers of meaning (“We talk for hours and hours about the sweet and the sour…”)

There have been some clunkers in his catalog, for sure: references to Shrek and a—hole bleaching have provided certain songs with needless blemishes, yes. But through all his genre-hopping and unorthodox wordplay, at the very least he can say he’s forged a style that’s entirely his own. His mass appeal may make him “generic” by definition, but his sound is his: Even the successors to his guy-with-a-guitar pop-rock mantle – Shawn Mendes, Lewis Capaldi, Noah Kahan — haven’t once gone near the playful experimentation Sheeran cut his teeth on, instead favoring safer, more traditional songwriting structures.

It’s also notable that Sheeran has never been dishonest about where his scattered musical influences came from, nor has he ever lazily copied anyone else. He’s always stated his love for figures like Damien Rice, Eminem and Eric Clapton, and he worked exclusively with grime artists on the self-released 2011 EP No. 5 Collaborations Project. And at a time where any male artist with his tastes would’ve earned far more cool points by positioning himself as an aloof rock star in the vein of Oasis or Arctic Monkeys, he instead fully, authentically embraced the world of pop and its leaders, teaming up with Taylor Swift on “Everything Has Changed” in 2013 and penning hits for Biebs and 1D’s (2012’s “Little Things” and 2015’s “Love Yourself,” respectively.)

All of this to say, maybe Sheeran’s songs aren’t just soulless composites of popular genres designed to be as widely played as possible, but the natural blended output of a guy with a genuine love and appreciation for all the styles he employs. He also happens to be very strategic when assembling those puzzle pieces in a song, preternaturally sensitive to which elements are most likely to make for a successful hit – a personal goal he’s long been transparent about chasing. (“I have a data sheet emailed to me every week,” he told GQ in 2017. “My benchmark for the second album was Coldplay. This album it’s Springsteen.”)

The spectrum of his sound runs parallel to how much he does or doesn’t tailor songs for commercial success. On one end there’s the smoke-blowing songs like 2011’s “You Need Me, I Don’t Need You” and 2017’s “New Man” where he fully indulges his love for loose, slightly silly rapping. Though they might become fan classics, they’re the least programmed to become global hits — he’s just having some fun. On the other end are his sweeping romantic ballads like “Thinking Out Loud,” “Photograph” and “Perfect,” which are maniacally constructed for decades of play at weddings and high school dances. But of these, ask yourself: if not Sheeran, who else is up to the task of pumping out this generation’s deck of timeless sappy slow-dance songs?

In the middle is everything else, the so-called homogenized, post-genre songs that have a little something for everybody. There are several different outcomes songwriters pursue when writing music, and consequently, there are just as many measures of that music’s quality. None are necessarily right or wrong. Swift’s goal is to tell personal stories through her songs. Pitbull wants people to dance. Adele aims to pack an emotional punch. And each of these objectives requires a great deal of craftsmanship when putting pen to paper. Even if Sheeran’s desire has been to write songs surgically stitched together for easy listening, does he really forfeit any recognition for being one of his generation’s most innovative songwriters just because his music is created with algorithmic precision?

When one of his songs ultimately gets stuck in your head for weeks, you might curse his formula as being that of an evil genius. But the key word here is still “genius.”

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Billy Joel fans will get another chance to watch the Piano Man’s Madison Square Garden special, which will air on CBS on Friday (Aug. 23).

The special first aired in April 14 and re-aired on April 19 after a “network programming timing error” ended the initial broadcast early. CBS apologized for cutting the concert special short during its first airing, and announced that the special would re-air later that week.

“A network programming timing error ended last night’s Billy Joel special approximately two minutes early in the eastern and central time zones,” read the statement, which Joel posted on X at the time. “We apologize to Mr. Joel, his fans, our affiliated stations, and our audience whose viewing experience was interrupted during the last song. Due to the overwhelming demand from his legion of fans, BILLY JOEL: THE 100TH – LIVE AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN will be rebroadcast in its entirety on CBS on April 19th at 9 p.m. ET/PT.”

More than 24 million viewers watched Joel’s Madison Square Garden special in April.

Read on for ways to watch and stream the concert special.

How to Watch Billy Joel’s Madison Square Garden Special

CBS will air an encore presentation of Billy Joel: The 100th — Live at Madison Square Garden on Friday at 9 p.m. ET/PT. The two-hour special, celebrating Joel’s 100th show at the famed venue, will also stream live on Paramount+ with Showtime.

No cable? You can watch CBS and other networks on DirecTV, Sling TV, and Fubo TV. Additionally, Paramount+ with Showtime includes live access to CBS.

DirecTV and Fubo offer free trials – a nice option if you don’t want to pay out of pocket. Plans start at $49.99 (regularly $79.99) for DirecTV Stream and $79.99 for Fubo. Both platforms include DVR recording and over 90 live channels, including sports and entertainment channels.

Sling TV’s streaming plans start at $20 for the first month to stream over 30 channels. Sling TV offers CBS in select regions.

Another free option: Paramount+ with Showtime is free for the first month and $12.99 per month, after the trial period ends. The platform combines Paramount+ and Showtime – which means double the streaming possibilities — and you have the option of streaming Paramount+ on Prime Video.

Joel closed out his Madison Square Garden residency in July. The “Piano Man” will perform in Cleveland on Sept. 13. Get tickets here.